Cover
Table of ContentsList
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Table 1 taxonomy of cinematic realism
Part I: Non-cinema
The State of Things
Figure 1.1 The film within the film in The State of Things: a real landscape is on the left-hand side of the frame, while the right-hand side is occupied by a large canvas containing a landscape painting like those that serve as false background in Hollyw
Figure 1.2 Kate, in The State of Things, weeps for being unable to reproduce the dramatic landscape before her eyes in her watercolour painting.
Figure 1.4 The State of Things: the swimming pool in the monumental hotel, half-sunk into the sea, is another kind of ‘frame’ destroyed by the force of the nature it attempts to contain.
This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, Taxi Tehran, Three Faces
Figures 2.1, 2.2 The bedroom scene, in This Is not a Film, is an automatically generated footage, after someone turned on a camera and left the premises.
Figures 2.3, 2.4 In Closed Curtain, Panahi finds the phone on the balcony with the images of the woman’s suicide and follows in her footsteps by walking into the sea himself.
Figure 2.5 In Closed Curtain, Partovi and his dog are forced spectators of a blind horizon.
The Act of Killing
Figure 3.1 The disconcerting opening of The Act of Killing.
Figure 3.3 The Act of Killing: Anwar is repeatedly captured in the act of removing his false teeth and then clicking them back in place.
Figure 3.4 Reenacting cannibalism in The Act of Killing.
Colonialism in Tabu
Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 Tabu: the characters’ identify images of their favourite pets in Africa in the clouds, but these refuse to fit entirely into the superimposed drawings, as much as Africa withdraws itself from the colonisers’ idea of it.
Part II: Intermedial Passages
5. The Geidōmono Genre and Intermedial Acting in Ozu and Mizoguchi
Figure 5.1 Floating Weeds: Ozu contravenes kabuki’s treasured tradition of male actors in female roles, as well as Japanese cinema’s female star system, by showing Machiko Kyō changing her femme-fatale persona for that of a male character.
Figure 5.2 The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums: rarely has the fair division of power as the basis for genuine love been so elegantly and powerfully displayed as in this scene, where kabuki explains the camera position below the pavement.
Figure 5.4 Floating Weeds gives abundant insight into the actors’ preparation for the stage, but precious little in terms of their actual acting.
Figure 5.6 Floating Weeds: the song-and-dance act is all about breaking the fourth wall and poking fun at the performance itself, with the child actor interrupting his performance to collect little packs of money thrown by the audience.
Mysteries of Lisbon
Figure 6.1 Mysteries of Lisbon: due to the plot’s complexity, art director Isabel Branco had to draw a map of the characters with a corresponding timeline to orient her.
Figure 6.2 Mysteries of Lisbon: a transparent glass floor still maintains the opacity of the message lying on it, illustrating the dialectics informing the film’s aesthetic organisation.
Figures 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 Animating the inanimate in Mysteries of Lisbon: a scene is first represented on a tile, then in a toy theatre and finally with live actors.
Figure 6.6 Mysteries of Lisbon: live characters are changed into cardboard cut-out miniatures whom Pedro flips down with mere finger flicks.
Figure 6.7 Mysteries of Lisbon: a character becomes alive by looking at his own picture.
The Case of Brazilian Cinema
Figures 7.1, 72 In The Mystery of Picasso, the naked artist paints a naked model from memory; in Delicate Crime painter and model are together in an actual embrace.
Figures 7.3, 7.4 The Capibaribe river in Rat Fever and in Passages.
Figure 7.5 Rat Fever: Zizo’s poetry is self-distributed and displayed.
Figure 7.6 Rat Fever: Eneida’s body becomes a poem.
Figures 7.7, 7.8, 7.9 Antônia: The characters’ dependence on their context is made clear from the opening images, as the singers emerge from between a hilly road and a favela community behind them.
Figure 7.10 In The Little Prince’s Rap Against the Wicked Souls, the long take of the favelas around Recife offers indexical evidence of the connection of all Brazilian regions through their underbelly of poverty.
Part III: Towards Total Cinema
Ossessione
Figure 8.1 Ossessione: Gino’s face is finally revealed to us.
Figure 8.2 Ossessione: Bragana sings his cherished Andante from La Traviata.
An Intermedial Reading of Heimat 2
Figure 9.1 Heimat 2: Hermann’s master is the film’s composer Mamangakis himself, in a cameo that allows him to pass the baton of his real-life musicianship to the hands of his fictitious alter-ego.
Figure 9.2 Heimat 2: Clarissa receives a cello lesson from her star Professor P.
Figure 9.3 Heimat 2: Hermann marks Clarissa’s absence in the orchestra with a live naked model, carrying the cello F-holes on her back, like in Man Ray’s photograph, ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’.
10. Total Cinema as Mode of Production
Figure 10.1 Leviathan: the small figure of Roma sits opposite the enormous whale carcass.
Figure 10.4 In Birds of Passage, the ancestral matriarch, raised from the dead, marches towards the infinite horizon.
Figure 10.5 Timbuktu: the orphaned adolescent Toya is a minute figure in the endless desert.
Figure 10.6 Timbuktu: Abdelkerim, in his unsatisfied lust for Satima, trims the bush between two dunes with gunshots, the dunes appearing to him as a naked female body.
Figure 10.7 Birds of Passage: Zaida performs the yonna courtship dance.
Figure 10.8 The Story of the Weeping Camel: the mother camel’s delivery of her colt is finally completed with the help of several members of the protagonist family.
Figure 10.9 The Story of the Weeping Camel: the undulating mountains in the horizon of the vast desert mirror the shape of the humps of camels in the foreground.
Figure 10.10 The Story of the Weeping Camel: Ingen Temee and Botok are presented at the end as members of the cast, in a hilarious frontal shot.
Bibliography
Index
