Poco Film Festival Talks 2024
Poco Film Festival
Industry Talks & Seminar:
The Impact of AI: A Humanist Perspective
Revelation Perth International Film Festival 2024
Academic Conference
SAE University College Perth
Conference Convenor | Organiser
PopCAANZ 2019
RMIT University
Conference Paper
Premature Burial: B-Movies, Hidden Treasures, and Corman’s Deviations
ASPERA 2019
AFTRS Sydney
LINK: Panel DiscussionTicking All the Boxes; Screen Production Research, Academic Rigor and Audience
w/ Dr Patrick Kelly, Prof. Marsha Berry (RMIT)
PopCAANZ 2018
Auckland University of Technology
Conference Paper
Who Is Madeline?: A Heuretic Theory of Film
SSAAANZ The Uses of Cinema 2018
Monash University
Conference Paper
The Cinema of Jean Epstein: Sensational, Transcendental, Material, Forceful
LECTURE NOTES (not for publication)
POPCAANZ 2019 RMIT University
Premature Burial: B-Movies, Hidden Treasures, and Corman’s Deviations
Summary:
Edgar Allan Poe’s literary aesthetic walks a line between the rational and the irrational, reason and superstition; between literary realism and the romantic. Adaptations of his literature have become a common recurrence in the cinema. In 1928 Jean Epstein produced the avant garde, incredibly Gothic, and historically seminal, La Chute de la Maison Usher. In the same year, James Watson and Melville Weber produced the American experimental classic of the same title, The Fall of the House of Usher. Dario Argento and George A. Romero’s 1990 blood-lade, slasher-thriller-double, Two Evil Eyes, signifies a more exploitational, trashy, and genre cinema trend. Poe’s legacy is an unusual mix of avant garde experimentalism and genre convention. Chronologically wedged in between the above mentioned are Roger Corman’s cycle of Vincent Price-led Poe titles produced for American International Pictures. Ten films produced between 1960 and 1969, known as Corman's Poe Cycle, were the focus this revision and reassessment.
Lecture Notes
NB: these are notes only and written for lecture purposes, not for publication.
Regarding The Terror (Corman; 1963):
“Notable mainly for being the film that was screened at the drive-in in Bogdanovich’s Targets, this is the real dud of Corman’s Poe cycle.”[i]
[i] Andrew, Geoff. 2007. “Terror, The.” In Time Out: Film Guide, edited by John Pym, Fifteenth Edition, Time Out Guides Limited, 2007.
The Poe cycle was a series of films produced for the most part by American International Pictures. AIP tasked Corman with creating a series of gothic, exploitative, b-horror genre films. They made ten films in total in this series, eight of which are official Poe adaptations, none of which resemble anything of Poe’s original plot structures. One of the remaining two is in fact an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1st published 1927 USA) and was an attempt by Corman to get away from Poe. AIP changed the title to that of an obscure Poe poem, The Haunted Palace (1st published 1839 USA), and marketed it as yet another movie in the series. The other remaining film was a curiosity made in the shadow of The Raven (1963) and developed in an ad-hoc fashion as an original Corman script. This film is The Terror (1963) and is a point of focus for this revision. Much liberty was taken with these adaptations, and we need to ask ourselves whether this liberty is appropriate and whether it does justice to Edgar Allan Poe’s legacy. Some of these films are not so well-realised and some are ok. The Raven, for instance, is transformed from gothic and provocative poetry into slapstick, farcical comedy. Each film has its moment of cinematic interest, and in the case of The Terror, Corman might have revealed himself as someone who understood exactly how to internalise, interpret, and adapt Poe. Going by Robert Stam’s terminology, drawing on studies in adaptation, we might classify The Terror as one of the more intriguing ‘transmutations’ in film history.
For the sake of clarity of the order of films produced, The House of Usher (1960) is the clear starting point for analysis. For the sake of brevity, The House of Usher will signify the best and worst of this series of films. This film sets a tone to which all that follow will adhere. Recurring motifs include the burning roof of the house and the special effects employed to visualise the ‘fall’ referenced in the title, and the cast that are repeated and recycled across the series. A special kind of intertextuality knits these films together; the intertextuality of the low budget, recycled set design and effects reel and the repetition of veteran performers like Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorry and the appearances of a young Jack Nicholson, Raymond Millard and …
The original Poe text The Fall of the House of Usher was first published in 1839 (USA), and has generated countless readings, debates and interpretations. It belongs to the American gothic literary tradition and involves a desolate, lonely and remote landscape, supernaturalism and resurrected life and evades any clear cut sequence of cause and effect or plot logic. It hints at a tendency towards obsession, the pathology of guilt and the legacy of Puritanism[1].
What we see is a struggle between the forces of irrationality (the supernatural) and reason: represented respectively by the mysterious principle character Roderick Usher and the sceptical unnamed narrator. Key elements and themes include moral and physical degeneracy, the resurrection of life from death, melancholy, family, incest, madness and isolation. The story takes place in an environment of decay and harsh weather that parallels the lives of the human inhabitants. The ‘house’ in the title refers both to the actual house and to the bloodline of the family. The physical structure has dictated the genetic patterns of the family and there are strong suggestions of incest woven through the narrative. The two characters at the centre of the tale, Roderick and his twin Madeline, are the last living of this family tree. A fissure down the middle splits the house: a chasm that becomes a metaphor for the emotional distance between the siblings, and perhaps even a split in personality and the presence of mental disorder. A kind of telepathic connection exists between the two and Madeline’s sickness and immanent death are of great concern to Roderick. The suggestion is that Roderick himself is close to death via his close affiliation with his sister. Roderick’s depressions and excitements are reflected in abrupt variations in the flow of narrative time. The characters are riddled with self-doubt and their motives are as ambiguous as the location in time and place.
If we turn to look at Corman’s realisation of this story we are left unfortunately wanting. The film is laden with plot, with narrative structures and exposition more concerned with the movie-going audiences’ expectation of story structure and coherence than that of Poe’s provocation and proposition for a world in which the senses are undermined by telepathic shifts in mood and transformative mental states of being. This literature is a fantastic offering for provocative and unique cinematic experiences, but Corman turns it down.
In his short story The Imp of the Perverse (Poe; 1st published 1850 [USA]) Poe writes:
The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs – to dictate purposes to God. [2]
There is a sense here that Poe wants to allude explanation, rationality and reason. He does not want to imagine designs, but rather pursue understanding of the human experience of Being (to borrow a Heideggerian term[3]) through observation. Observation in this sense is observation of oneself and one’s own subjective, mental experience of the world. This is a phenomenological approach to interpreting the world of subjective experience. The impression is that Poe’s ‘observant’ or ‘understanding’ man seeks to understand via the senses. The impression is given that such melancholic disorder leads to heightened sensory experiences and more lucid observations of reality.
In short there is a hallucinatory and concurrent phenomenological layer to Poe’s observation of life and this layer is the focus of The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe is speaking about a truth that regards the transience of things and the close relations and chasms between human beings: between each other, and the objects of the world in which they live. The exploration of this transience and this relation between people and their environments is suited to the cinema and in this way, Poe can be thought of as ‘proto-cinematic’. Poe invites a creative visualisation of the moods and mental landscapes he maps out on the page. One would hope that this sentiment at least might find its way into any authentic adaptation.
We can look to examples such as Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher or the James Watson / Melville Weber film of the same name and year as examples. These films work hard to embrace Poe’s literary aesthetic and to test new ground aesthetically for the moving image. These works we might consider on the higher end of a high art / low art divide at least in the cinema. Because these films and filmmakers are positioned firmly in the avant garde they wield a freedom through which they pursue Poe’s aesthetic gauntlet; namely that ambiguous shifting of narrative time, space and place. Corman however is wedded to convention in so much as he is wedded to the commercial destination of his film practice: the teen audience and the drive-in.
Whilst Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher might fall short in capturing the spirit of the literature, it must be acknowledged that it does have its evocative, sensational, moments. To reverse engineer Corman’s approach to The Fall of the House of Usher, it is clear that he chose to focus on Madeleine’s return from the family mausoleum as the climax of the narrative. Corman definitely recognised this return as the psychological pinnacle of the story’s potency. Madeleine’s return is a return of the oppressed.
This is an example of a cinema oriented toward spectacle. The film provides a payoff in the form of a coherent, exciting, dramatic image which will provide the audience with their takeaway thought/memory. This image is effectively the point of the film.
To compare Corman’s efforts with those of the earlier avant garde artists is not to compare like with like. However, both approaches, that of the experiment driven avant garde, and that of the exploitative B-film-maker, do relate directly back into Poe’s legacy. If on one hand there is a romantic literary aesthetic that embraces the poetic, the phenomenological, the explorative experimentalism that comes with an era on the verge of modernity, there is also a concurrent urge towards the carnivalesque, exploitative spectacle of the macabre. Poe did not write in long form. His short form suggests an accessibility and immediacy that aims at capturing a wide audience. Poe even engages in an essay style of writing, as in The Imp of the Perverse cited above, in which he speaks directly to his audience. Poe did not seek to position himself alongside the literary elite. There is a stark realism living between the lines on the page that suggests that Poe was at home when in direct contact with his reading public and lofty aspirations of dense literary and philosophical meaning making were not at the forefront of his agenda. It is Poe’s short form and personal tone that lends his words to Corman’s catch-all, entertainment-industry driven acumen. Poe wanted to provide spectacle as much as insight. Corman is master of the promised spectacle. As there is a tradition in the avant garde to adapt Poe, so to there is on this other side of exploitation. Asides from Corman, films such as The Black Cat (Edgar Ulmer 1934) and Maniac (Dwain Esper 1934) fit the bill.
[1] Punter, David. 2013. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions From 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 1; The Gothic Tradition. London and New York. Longman & The University of Michigan
[2] Poe; The Imp of the Perverse 1st published 1850 [USA]
[3] Heidegger is an important reference and backdrop to the overall approach to Poe’s literature being taken here, however I am not including any in-depth analysis at this stage. Reference is made from: Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2000. 192 – 222.
The Terror
This is the hidden treasure. Interestingly, The Terror is not in fact a Poe adaptation at all – even though it is considered part of the cycle. It is not a Poe adaptation, but it is a true realisation of the Poe aesthetic. Taking the previous breakdown of Poe as proto-cinematic, in The Terror we find Corman in his stride as he brings the gothic sensibility to the screen – the irrational and the superstitious dominates the narrative at the expense of plot logic. Plot logic only exists to provide a rhythm – it’s the constant repetition of looking, of doubting what one sees, of desire, of a desire to return to something past – it’s these propositions that dominate the narrative – that dominate every frame of this film.
So where did The Terror come from? The Terror started as a last minute narrative concept developed after shooting for The Raven wrapped in early 1963. Corman finished ahead of time and budget – unusual – and he had four days left on the time table with Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and the set construction all ready to go. In these three days they laid down a formula which would be added to, chopped, changed and built over time – 9 months to be exact. But, Boris Karloff’s scenes for instance were shot in this 4 day period. For one sequence Corman had the cast all walk down the staircase one after the other, and again with different expressions with the idea that these shots might come in handy for future use. So he was in fine form as the B-director making things work on a tight budget with a mind to quantity over quality – but he was also developing an affinity with the subject material.
So what is the outcome?
Corman places weather, landscape, mood, emotion and vagueness of emotions ahead of narrative markers of plot logic, place, and temporality. He centres his narrative on the interconnection of sight and knowledge, and its relation to power. And this is the fundamental theme that permeates Poe’s literature.
The Terror is a story about a young soldier returning from the Napoleonic wars, washed up on the shore, lost and in need of food and shelter. He eyes the castle, the mansion, and heads for his place of refuge. Along the way he encounters an apparition of a beautiful woman – she is silent, mysterious, she seems lost but also in no hurry, in no distress.
What ensues is a film in which the young soldier pursues his desire for this mysterious woman and she of course is the ghost of the deceased – perhaps murdered – wife of the baron who inhabits the castle. Jack Nicholson is the young soldier, Boris Karloff is the Barron, and Sandra Knight is Helene, the ghostly apparition.
This film shows us that even though Corman and co were creating these b-films with an agenda of scripts aimed at a teen audience, when left to his own devices, when left to develop a story on the run, Corman managed to articulate a core principle of Poe: sight, knowledge, and power.
This as a method is not that dissimilar from filmmakers like David Lynch, Nicolas Winding Refn, or Gaspar Noe in contemporary times. To start with a visual or narrative concept, an idea, and to build piece by piece a succession of thematic connections and motifs.
In relation to the film Boris Karloff later recalled:
Corman had the sketchiest outline of a story. I read it and begged him not to do it. He said "That's alright Boris, I know what I'm going to do. I want you for two days on this." I was in every shot, of course. Sometimes I was just walking through and then I would change my jacket and walk back. He nearly killed me on the last day. He had me in a tank of cold water for about two hours. After he got me in the can he suspended operations and went off and directed two or three operations to get the money, I suppose... [The sets] were so magnificent... As they were being pulled down around our ears, Roger was dashing around with me and a camera, two steps ahead of the wreckers. It was very funny.[4]
Subcultures and the High / Low Divide.
I would surmise here though that whilst these films belong to a certain class and culture of nostalgia – the 1960s, the genre, the filmmaker, the various celebrity and star connections – this film in particular also deserves a place in the story of the avant garde and particularly that of literary adaptation. Corman might have worked in the studio environment, worked in the B-movie economy, but like other figures such as Sam Fuller he did use this platform to develop original, new, unique takes on cinematic codes and language. There is a lot to learn from a movie like The Terror.
Typically when we think of the avant garde, things like formality, language, materiality come to mind. An artwork will somehow subvert, bring attention to, disrupt or develop something of the system of the cultures aesthetic character. Well, perhaps here in The Terror we are seeing something of that ilk. This is not a protest film, it’s not necessarily a political film though there are curious psychoanalytic underpinnings. The film does draw our attention to one of the more provocative themes of cinema and the cinematic apparatus itself – that of voyeurism and scopophilia. The Terror takes a place alongside the long line of films that have interrogated the intersection of sight and power and done so with appropriate reflexivity – a nod internally toward the cinematic experience itself.
When devising a synopsis for The Terror it is immediately clear that there is connection to Vertigo, to Psycho, to Rear Window – there is Hitchcockian influence at work here. Tyranny and love, power and beauty, the grasp we exert on reality vs artifice. These are no small themes and through the methodology as described in this instance in The Terror, Corman has wielded them well.
[4] Nasr, Constantine ed. 2011. Roger Corman: Interviews. Jackson, USA. University Press of Mississippi
POPCAANZ 2018 Auckland University of Technology
Who Is Madeline? A Heuretic Theory of Film
Summary:
This conference presentation was a kind of progress report relating to my PhD work as it was in 2018. The reason for presenting a 'work-in-progress' in the conference setting was to demonstrate the uses of what Robert B. Ray terms a 'heuretic' approach to film theory. I wanted to demonstrate this process of evolution and discovery to the conference so that I could tangebly argue for a reinvigoration of Jean Epstein's methods as developed in the 1920's under the banner of his main theoretical project for the cinema: photogénie. The presentation tracked my thinking as it followed research tangents including Jean Epstein's film practice, through an emphasis on the recurring motif of the character name 'Madeleine' in film and literature history.
Lecture Notes
NB: these are notes only and written for lecture purposes, not for publication.
Who is Madeline?
I.
1839: Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Fall of the House of Usher. The story details twin brother and sister Roderick and Madeline Usher. The only remaining members of the Usher family, the twins are afflicted with a mysterious illness and this illness is reflected in the overall state of the house and the threatening and decayed environment that surrounds them. Roderick believes the house to be alive. Madeline dies and is placed in the catacombs below the house. Roderick begins to suffer and become agitated for no apparent reason and one stormy night Madeline comes back from the dead. It is not clear whether these events are supernatural or whether Madeline was in fact in a coma. Her reappearance results in the death of Roderick and herself, and the house cracks in two and sinks into the tar.
The text presents a struggle between the forces of irrationality (the supernatural) and reason. It remains unresolved.
II.
1842: Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Oval Portrait.
A painter, who is obsessed with his work, marries one of his models and begins her portrait. The portrait becomes a signifier for a chasm that grows between the married couple, though only she seems to be aware or to pay any attention to it. As the painter becomes more and more engrossed, she becomes weaker and weaker. Visitor’s adore the artist’s work and claim it to be a sign of how much he must love his beautiful wife. Obsession turns to madness. As he finishes the image he exclaims ‘this is indeed life itself!’ and turning to regard his wife he discovers she has died.
You might recognise this as inspiration for elements of the novel The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, and later the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (to become the musical My Fair Lady).
III.
1929: Jean Epstein produces a seminal film adaption combining each short story. Epstein embeds The Oval Portrait into The Fall of the House of Usher. This choice reflects a concern for arts’ imitation of life, and subsequent destruction of life. The portrait becomes the conduit for the slow demise of Madeline. As the portrait increasingly embodies the ideal of beauty, life is taken away from Madeline. Roderick’s gaze is directed to the portrait and to the house and the objects within it. This central action, Roderick’s gaze, underpins the narrative structure. It is an investigation of how our imagined world influences and provides structure for our understanding of the ontological world.
Poe and Epstein both place weather, landscape, mood, emotion and vagueness of emotions ahead of narrative markers of plot logic, place, and temporality. Both center their narratives on the interconnection of sight and knowledge, and its relation to power.
IV.
1954. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac publish D’entre les morts, or The Living and the Dead, a crime novel about memory and obsession, set in Paris in 1940. It tells the story of Roger, a lawyer and former police officer hired as a private investigator to track a wealthy friend’s wife, Madeleine, who appears to believe she is possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother. Roger finds himself deeply fascinated by the enigmatic Madeleine. He follows her to an opera house, and later, to the Seine, where he saves her from drowning. When Madeleine falls from the top of a church tower, Roger is unable to save her due to a debilitating feeling of vertigo, and the guilt of this failure consumes him. Four years pass. In 1944, Roger discovers a doppelganger: he meets a woman named Renée who looks strikingly like Madeleine. His obsession reignites.
V.
1958. Alfred Hitchcock releases Vertigo, a film about memory and obsession, set in San Francisco. It tells the story of Scottie, a retired police officer hired as a private investigator to track a wealthy friend’s wife, Madeleine, who appears to believe she is possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother. Scottie finds himself deeply fascinated by the enigmatic Madeleine. He follows her to an art museum at the Legion of Honor and, later, to the point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, where he saves her from drowning. Later they travel together to the Muir Woods, where they observe the cross-section of a massive redwood, whose rings represent more than a century of growth. Madeleine points near the center: “Somewhere in here I was born”, she says, and, tracing her finger slightly outward, “and here I died.”
VI.
1983. Chris Marker releases Sans Soleil, or Sunless, an essay film about memory and obsession. In it, a nameless woman we never see narrates letters written by a travelling cameraman whose footage we see throughout, who writes of Vertigo that it is the only film “capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory.” The film is deeply fascinated by the enigmatic Vertigo. It follows a kind of pilgrimage to the film’s locations, including the art museum at the Legion of Honor and, later, up and down the hills of San Francisco. The film is reliving and interrogating Vertigo. Why this self reflexive obsession?
VII.
1983. Cinema’s desire to document is at once hopeful and cynical: the act of recording steels a moment against its passage into time, but it also confirms its death, for as soon as a moment is recorded it is gone forever. Sans Soleil reflects the obsession at the heart of Vertigo in form as much as in content: the struggle to return to an impossible past, or impossible memory, to relive history through replication and repetition, returning something lost to life by representation.
Madeleine is a recurring character whose appearance in these texts signifies a concern with sight, knowledge and power. All these stories speak to central questions of arts relation to life, arts representation of life and arts transformative powers.
What is Photogenie?
Epstein was a filmmaker and member of the French avant garde cinema movement. He published his first book on literary criticism in 1920 and made his first film in 1922. He has been described as an image-obsessed iconoclast and stridently modernist – which suggests a concern with technology and medium specificity and a rejection of realism as it was posited in the first part of the century (realism as it related to literary, psychological realism). He was one of the most important filmmakers and the most significant film theorist in France at this time.
The avant garde movement of which he was a part produced now famous non-narrative short films – in which stories and acting were abandoned in favour of forms based exclusively on rhythmic movement and abstract visual shapes. Some examples readily available online:
Henri Chomette - Reflets du Lumiere et de Vitesse (Games of Reflection and Speed) (1923)
Viking Eggeling - Symphonie Diagonale (1924)
Fernand Leger - Ballet Mechanique (1924)
Hans Richter - Rhythmus 21 (1923)
In reference to Ballet Mechanique, for instance, Leger remarked:
“I used the close-up, which is the only cinematographic invention […] A detail of an object transformed into an absolute whole is personified when projected in large dimensions […] Fragments of objects were also useful; by isolating a thing you give it a personality.”
Epstein was a champion of rapid montage and unusual camera movements. He was one of the first directors to recognize the expressive significance of using slow and rapid motion, and one of the first directors to theorise and exaggerate the use of the close-up and the use of superimposition.
These initiatives were celebrated and embraced by painters, poets and vanguard critics, and considered controversial by film industry representatives. Throughout the 1920s, and indeed up to the present day, opposing positions were defined and a dichotomy between modernists and classicists was established.
The modernists argued that an art form should not depend for its essential structure and effects on strategies derived from other arts. The classicists argued that narratives had to remain the basis for films.
Epstein finds himself poised between the two.
In a similar fashion to Leger, Epstein asserts:
‘a close up of a revolver is no longer a revolver, it is the revolver character, in other words, the impulse toward or remorse for crime, failure, suicide. It is as dark as the temptations of the night, bright as the gleam of gold lusted after, taciturn as passion, squat, brutal, heavy, cold, wary, menacing. It has a temperament, habit, memories, a will, a soul.”
He goes on…
‘Every art erects its forbidden city … its own exclusive, autonomous and specific domain hostile to all that is not its own. It is perhaps quite astonishing to say this, but literature should above all be literary; the theatre, theatrical; painting, painterly; and the cinema, cinematic.’
Essentially these two filmmaker artists, Leger and Epstein, are asserting that objects are granted an anthropomorphic personality; thus intensifying the perceptual and emotional impact on the spectator. Note as well that the close up is not just a close up, but an instance of the mobility of the camera and its ability to reframe and change perspective.
Although Epstein’s influence as critic and artist declined over the later decades of the 20C, it seems that he is making a comeback. To me his work is fresh and daring, and there is a correlation with the current, contemporary digital era that needs to be unpacked. That will be the subject of a later chapter and will be interwoven with discussions about other artists and filmmakers that have pushed the medium into different spaces with different technologies. Joining the argument of the modernists I tend to take the position that medium specificity is all important and through Photogenie as a method I seek to articulate what is specific to the cinema and to the cinema as installation – moving image installation.
It is also important to note that Epstein’s body of work, and this is similar with his contemporaries, contained films made in a wide variety of production modes – from popular entertainment to abstract avant-garde, and from bare-bones realism and documentary to musical shorts. It is safe to say that Epstein represents both formalist-experimental tendencies, and naturalism and classicist tendencies in equal measure. A dialectic. At the heart of both poles, this dichotomy between modernists and classicists, is the image. Epstein formulates his theory of the image through the concept of photogenie.
“I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings, or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. And any aspect not enhanced by filmic reproduction is not photogenic, plays no part in the art of cinema.” (Epstein 1923, p314)
The enhancement of ‘moral character’ I take to be a description of the viewer’s ability to perceive to a greater degree the character and nature of a thing in the ontological world. Therefore, the viewing experience is also an experience in which the viewer’s relation to the ontological world is affirmed. Anxieties around meaning, validity and purpose are exposed and confronted.
Photogenie can be used to describe methodology as it represents the attitude, aesthetic orientation and intention of the filmmaker artist. The filmmaker artist who pursues photogenie as an aesthetic guide seeks images and combinations of images that articulate transformation, expression, the close-up, movement, temporality, rhythm, and the augmentation of the senses (Farmer 2010). Through these tropes and techniques Epstein claims to produce cinematic works that provide a conduit for the audience to interpret, create and enhance perceptions of the world around them and their relationships to other beings and objects.
Part of the goal of photogenie as an aesthetic is to disrupt, or unnerve, the everyday habitual considerations and structures of the intellect.
It is here that we can make a connection back to the question of ‘who is Madeleine’. If we are to take Madeleine as a representative of the Pygmalion myth, as written by Ovid, the foundational theme is that of arts relation to life, arts representation of life and arts transformative powers. Taking The Fall of the House of Usher as the text for analysis you can see that for visual effect the actress sits behind the portrait’s adorned frame, posing as if the painted image (fig 5, 6). Epstein is substituting the real for the imagined. This is a visual cue to emphasize in the audiences mind the theme of Pygmalion, or The Oval Portrait; that is, not merely that art imitates life, but that art destroys and ultimately replaces life and that the need to look and the connection between looking, knowledge and power lie at the base of this need (O’Donoghue 2004).
With these themes and their visual articulation by Epstein, it becomes clear as to why Epstein found an affinity with Poe and chose to adapt these two short stories. Epstein presents throughout a series of essays on the nature and potential of the cinema concepts as to how composition, framing and montage could be combined and used as tools to reveal aesthetic truths (cited in Keller and Paul 2012). Epstein employed the term ‘photogenie’ to describe these qualities of the cinema (Epstein 1923).
According to Mikhail Iampolski in his essay The Logic of an Illusion, there is an assumption in the western empirical tradition, running from Descartes, through Kant, John Stuart Mill and through developments in psychology in the 19th century (Helmholtz thru Freud) that the perceiving of the world takes place through the mental realm of logic. Photogenie seeks to re-orientate the viewer to perceiving the world in the instant and present moment, through the realm of the senses. These developments that Iampolski outlines in 19th century psychology steer discourse in a direction that diminishes the sensational aspect of dreams and illusions and transforms these phenomena into products of the intellect. Photogenie is a method whereby the artist and the viewer step back from the logic of intellect and towards sensation.
In this way, photogenie is not distant from the contemporaneous philosophical practice of phenomenology.
Part of my scheduled reading for 2018 will be Deleuze and his writings on the cinema, theories of media archaeology and theories around sensationalism.
What is at stake?
I am seeking to escape the cumbersome production practices of industry through use of technology and alternative exhibition practices i.e. gallery spaces, avant garde presentations etc. I am stepping away from industrial modes of production methods but not stepping away from ‘traditional’ or on-going debates about the aesthetics of the cinema and the moving image. What can photogenie reveal to us about the presentation of images – primarily moving images – and how can I utilise this methodology to enhance and expand my practice, my cinematic voice. I am also seeking to make a connection between early cinema theory and the potential for contemporary technology. It appears evident to me that Epstein and his contemporaries were anticipating technology that would make filming and the art of filmmaking more free and less cumbersome.
When I created my film I Another, I was drawn to movement, emotion, and atmosphere: these were favored over linear story telling. At the time I didn’t have photogenie in mind but it later occurred to me that photogenie was exactly the type of thinking and aesthetic I was looking for. For this film I exaggerated 3 simple moments/images: A man having a drink in a bar, a girl walking through a park, and the wintery trees within the park. We created an accompanying phone call between two distant lovers.
Last year I wanted to explore and develop a narrative as ideas arose from the shooting of sequences and shots that are inspired by photogenie as a method.
For this current production I wanted to have the same freedom to capture a moment, explore and exaggerate it in editing, and then develop the next narrative or aesthetic step as a result of the experiment.
I also wanted to start playing with themes that seemed central to Edgar Allan Poe and Jean Epstein. These are themes that are found at the center of other filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Marker, and Lynch, and there is room to unpack these connections.
Themes: terror, voyeurism, suspense.
I started with simple visual/narrative concepts – a girl walks alone along a pier. Boy and girl meet and go on a date and fall in love. A maniac stalks his victims.
The resulting images are clashed together and worked and reworked. As a visual design starts to take shape, further scripting and shooting is planned.
I have been focusing on close-ups, perspectives and the montage. Essentially what takes place is that I create an image, and then through editing recycle it, searching for a transformative meaning, so as to reinvigorate the senses, and in turn perceive those meanings. This is a dry run, and a series of technical experiments that I can use in upcoming studio practice.
What is most interesting to me is that these early film theories have been muted over time. These early theories are methodological. They lay out blueprints for what the moving image might accomplish, and I believe that updating them into the digital era will be a worthwhile project. In a culture that now has a proliferation of screens, the cinema itself no longer is necessarily the central focus of attention. I will be interested in exploring how these early cinematic ideas might work in installation practice, using different mediums and different technologies.