Weekend (1967) contains one of the best and most
conceptual long tracking shots in film history
This week I was lecturing in my film studies class about the use of long tracking shots in the work of many French New Wave filmmakers. A tracking shot is essentially any take where a camera moves alongside as if trailing or pursuing its subject, and the longer the shot is, the more it demands a kind of attention from the audience. Jean-Luc Godard's famous and unrelenting eight minute long tracking shot in Weekend (1967) of a surreal and horrifying traffic jam in the French countryside demonstrates perfectly how the means of filmic representation can impart a specific point of view and attitude of what is being shown. The slow-moving and methodical tracking of the trail of cars to the final accident unfolds with a kind of flatness and inevitability. The notion of not being able to look away at an accident takes on a new charge as the entire scene is brought to a kind of crawl. In Brian Henderson's classic essay on Godard's technique, "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style," he argues that Godard's use of his signature lateral tracking shot (with no forward camera movement at all and an exactly straight base line parallel to the scene) is "an admittedly synthetic single layered construct, which the viewer must examine critically, accept or reject. The viewer is not drawn into the image, nor does he make choices within in; he stands outside the image and judges it as a whole." In other words, the director is able to establish a kind of critical distance within an accident scene that would usually be presented as emotionally wrenching in other films. As Godard has famously stated, adding to the reading of the scene, "Tracking shots are a question of morality."
Together with the Godard sequence, I have collected three other famous long tracking shots for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure as Godard would have it) and embedded them in chronological order. Each of course is engaged with a different reason for utilizing the long tracking shot and to very different ends. The first is taken from Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958); the second from Mikhail Kalatozov's I am Cuba (1964); and the last is the opening shot from Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) where the scene is accompanied by Anderson's own discussion of how he conceptualized the camera work (notice how he mentions French filmmaker Francois Truffaut among others in his discussion). I would love to have included the well known Martin Scorsese sequence from Goodfellas (1990), but every last clip is disabled from embedding in YouTube, so you can go to see it directly here. Enjoy and compare!
One of the most frequent questions I am asked by students relates to defining a thesis statement for a research paper. Simply put, a thesis statement establishes your argument for your overall essay. The statement can be brief or several sentences long and appears in the introduction (i.e. opening paragraph of the essay).
Staring at the blank page doesn't help materialize a thesis statement
Critically, what distinguishes a thesis statement from a regular statement is that it is OPINIONATED and ARGUMENTATIVE. I often tell students that they have to imagine that while they are researching and writing their paper that they are like lawyers developing a "case" for what they are ultimately saying. Imagine as you are researching and writing that someone (like your professor) is asking you the following questions: "What are you arguing in this paper?" "How do you know that to be true?" "Where and from whom did you get your evidence?" "Show me examples to prove your point." "Describe how you arrived at that argument." "Prove it."
In a previous Focus on Research post regarding how to identify and refine a research topic, I discussed the usefulness of developing a topic question to help guide the process of locating and assessing sources. I also emphasized the point that the answer to your topic question will often help create your thesis statement. This is important in order to avoid ending up with a vague and non-specific research paper.
Sample topic question: Why is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) important to the Dada movement?
Sample thesis statement: “Marcel Duchamp’s work Fountain (1917) is a pivotal work of the Dada movement and establishes many of the important features associated with Dada art.”
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
In other words, do not make the deadly mistake of researching a topic and merely describing it (or stating the obvious) without stating an argument of some kind. Also avoid the mistake students often make of simply restating someone else's ideas and viewpoints without mapping out in the introduction what direction your paper will take through a thesis statement. Make sure that you establish what you will be arguing or setting out to show in your essay and use your sources to prove your points. Next week, I will be posting on the importance of outlining your paper before beginning the writing process to help map your argument. In the case of fine and performing art papers, you will also have the chance to add your own personal reading of the images/films/performances (in addition to the sources you find on the topic) to help prove your thesis through visual evidence.
You must state an argument about your topic in order to have a good thesis statement such as:
"Duchamp's Fountain (1917) is a pivotal work of the Dada movement and establishes many of its important features".
Is this a thesis statement?:
“Marcel Duchamp is associated with the Dada movement and created Fountain (1917)”
NO, it is simply a statement and not opinionated in any way
Is this a thesis statement?:
“Marcel Duchamp’s work Fountain (1917) is a pivotal work of the Dada movement and establishes many of the important features associated with Dada art.”
YES, it is a statement that is opinionated and sets forth an argument
When I heard that Godard wasn't going to be picking up his honorary Oscar at a special ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood next month, I smiled to myself and thanked goodness that some things never change. Yes, it is a terribly French thing to do, and yes, Godard seems too old to be keeping up with such an attitude of resistance (I mean even Charlie Chaplin finally made amends with the Academy in his old age), but his actions are consistent with the kind of avant-garde filmmaking and controversial attitudes that have punctuated his career. Just this past week I spoke with a number of students who saw the French New Wave master's Breathless(1960) for the first time at a special screening at Vancouver's Pacific Cinematheque, and I was reminded how powerfully relevant and contemporary Godard's films read to today's audiences. Ironically enough, the banter, tension and flirting between Belmondo and Seberg's characters (petty French thief meets aspiring American journalist) echoes themes of Godard's own love-hate relationship with American culture-- filmic and socio-political-- that relate to his decision to skip the awards. It is also a love-hate relationship that many of us as Canadians relate to well.
In this sense, I would argue that Godard has remained both loyal and consistent with his course of action, something that is highlighted in this brilliant 1960's interview clip embedded below (an interview in French with English subtitles-- I have also embedded the original French trailer for Breathless for those needing a quick Godard fix). Note how his opinions and casual indifference regarding film reviews and criticism are shaped by his own earlier career as a film critic and also note how all of his awards have come from European (and one Canadian!) film institution. Does anyone really blame him for keeping not attending? I just love Godard's wife's cutting response to it all: "He's getting old for that kind of thing. Would you go all that way just for a bit of metal?"
Grab your bowl of Halloween treats and check out the following links I favourited from the Twitterverse over the past week. For fun, check out the Global Zombie Invasion series featured on AMC's YouTube Channel. There you will find individual videos of zombie invasions staged in the cities of Munich, Madrid, London, Belgrade, Istanbul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Boston, San Francisco, Mexico City, Sofia, Lisbon, Rome, Taipei etc.. etc.. etc.. I have embedded the invasion from Rome set in front of the Colosseum below the tweets. Fantastic imagery. Wishing all of you a happy and safe Halloween night!
Alfred H. Barr, Development of Abstract Art (1935)
click on image to enlarge
Maps are political objects. To look at one is to look at an ideology and a visual representation of ideas organized in space, highlighting real and symbolic associations. Within the art world, mapping has served an important function in helping determine not only the contours of its history, but also the topography (or the configuration of many features) of its producers and institutions. This past week in a class discussing interwar North American modern art, I introduced Alfred H. Barr’s map of the development of abstract art, a highly influential document that attempted to visually represent and chart the various “isms” of art which contributed to its constructed linear chronology. As the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Barr created the map in 1935 to help visually ground the trajectory of modern art developments as they moved from the cubism of Europe to the abstract expressionism emerging in New York. And even while the map did not point directly to any of the social or political history that framed the context of its “scientific” visual vocabulary, its creation was rooted in an attempt to relocate the center of the art world from the confines of European cities like Paris and Berlin to the emerging modern art center of New York. In this sense, the map served as powerful visual evidence of the inevitability of this progression. As art blogger Lauren Palmor usefully sums up in a close reading of the Barr map, “The chart itself is intellectually complicated and simultaneously over simplified. It appeals to an elite, formalist aesthetic while also functioning as an introduction to cubism and abstract art.” Earlier in Palmor’s assessment, another key aspect of this dynamic is explained related to the context audience’s bring to the map, “The imagery of the chart and the chart’s viewers engage in a process of reciprocal definition. The viewers assign imagery to the un-illustrated terms of the chart, while the chart offers equally abstract connections and definitions.”
George Maciunas, Expanded Arts Diagram (1966)
click on image to enlarge
Fast forward three decades later to the moment of modern art’s critical reassessment and critique by a new generation of artists. Barr’s vertically organized and scientific map is transformed by Fluxus co-founder George Maciunas into a more fluid and deconstructed flow chart, redistributed along a horizontal plane. The dates still exist as markers on the far left of both maps, but the possibilities for art’s development are extended beyond the restraints and institutionally defined parameters of abstract expressionism. We are also presented with a map that begins to incorporate the relationships between cultural history and art with acknowledgement of the church, world’s fair, and spectacles associated with royal courts as key examples. As Tatianna Bazzichelli suggests in her fascinating discussion of Maciunas’s links to the networked culture we live in today, the Fluxus diagrams emerge as “hyper-textual maps” that manifest in an attitude of open thought, freedom, and democratic values. It is a represented field that flows easily between art and life, presenting a myriad of possibilities for how and what art is.
William Powhida, A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System (2010)
click on image to enlarge
Today, the utopic notion of Maciunas’s expanded arts diagram has undergone yet another kind of mapping in the work of New York artist and critic William Powhida. Last month, I blogged about his controversial diagram The Game,a drawing that traces the dynamics of power based upon the career choices artists make moving from an MFA program towards celebrated art career. In his latest work, A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System, Powhida maps the contemporary networks of power in the art world through an updated and, many would agree, painfully accurate representation of today’s topography. With this and his other diagrams, Powhida has sought to unmask the hidden political dynamics of the art world so carefully effaced in the Barr map while also debunking the myth of democratic access (a discourse that is also applied to the mechanisms of the World Wide Web) and the expanded field of art and possibilities for artists presented in the Maciunas diagram. Unlike the Barr and Maciunas maps, it is presented as a snapshot in present time without a clear temporal progression from past to future. Instead, the inclusion of the mechanisms of market economics together with the impact of social networking are added features which both invigorate and deepen the contours of the real spaces of the art world as one that operates more like a pyramid scheme of its own insular making. In a complete inversion of the Barr map, Powhida’s diagram does not include mention of actual art objects or “isms” at all, punctuating the development of contemporary art as exclusively discourse and power driven, but still emanating from the institutions of art that a person like Barr (with the help of his map) helped foster. Note that in Powhida’s diagram, the art museum sits just beneath the “art stars” they select and validate. Looking at all three maps therefore tells us a great deal about the times they were conceived and created in--picturing the world of art in all of its complexity.
