Distanciation and Douglas Sirk

Willemen, Paul

doi:10.1093/screen/12.2.63

Cited by 50 publications

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“…Mulvey's approach evokes the readings that were made of the filmic system in the 1970s (Willemen, 1971) for the potential of abstract gestures to become a form of distanciation that distances the viewer from the process of reading (Mulvey, 2004, pp. 149-150) and yet indicates a new direction through an exploration of the intermediality of stills photography, performance and the cinematographic.…”

Section: Takedownmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Gesture in film

Chare¹,

Watkins²

2017

Gesture and Film

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In his classic study, Gesture, Adam Kendon describes the visible actions that comprise utterances (Kendon, 2004, pp. 1-2). These visible utterances can occur in conjunction with, or independently to, speech. Kendon's definition of gesture draws attention to it as a deed and a doing. Gesture is an activity, a product of energy and motion. Human gestures occur as a result of movements of the body, of the face (such as rolling the eyes, winking), the neck (nodding, shaking the head), the hands (the V sign, waving), the shoulders (shrugging), the knees (genuflecting), the torso (bowing, turning your back on someone), the buttocks (mooning, twerking) or combinations thereof. Many gestures form pictures through specific motions: outlining an absent object's dimensions or mimicking exploits. David McNeill distinguishes between imagistic and non-imagistic gestures. For him, as Kendon summarises, 'imagistic gestures are those in which movements are made that are interpreted as depicting the shape of an object, displaying an action of some kind, or representing some pattern of movement' (Kendon, 2004, pp. 99-100). These kinds of gestures are moving representations of acts or of artefacts: motion pictures of a kind. Given that gestures are often imagistic, connecting gesture and film, as this collection of essays proposes to do, is an evident, if not unproblematic, move to make. It is, of course, easy to examine gestures made by actors in films. Recently, André Habib has movingly explored his enduring memories of the gestural power and influence of the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud's left hand, particularly in Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin (Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966), but also in other films (Habib, 2015). Gesture forms a key means by which an actor can establish the personality of a character. In films such as Cruising Bar (Dir. Robert Ménard, Québec, 1989), in which one actor assumes multiple parts, gesture works alongside make-up and voice to establish character differentiation. The actor Michel Côté plays four different roles in Cruising Bar, four aspiring Lotharios whose temperaments are each associated with a specific animal. Côté is Jean-Jacques (the peacock), Gerard (the bull), Patrice (the lion) and Serge (the earthworm). Each possesses distinctive gestural traits: Jean-Jacques is upright, elegant and strutting, Gerard lumbers and ruts, Patrice is touchy feely and extravagant with his movements, while Serge is uptight, gesturally repressed, repeatedly baring his teeth in a nervous smile. Cruising Bar amplifies how gesture is used by an actor as a tool to create and detail a given demeanour. Gesture frequently forms an integral dimension to a film's mise en scène, a bodily contribution to mood. In 12 Angry Men (Dir. Sidney Lumet, USA, 1957), for example, the gestures of each of the jurors play a major role in establishing their personalities and their shifting positions within the evolving power dynamic in the jury room. The thoughtfulness

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Section: Takedownmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Gesture in film

Chare¹,

Watkins²

2017

Gesture and Film

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“…Rather than serving as cause for dismissal of Ford's style as mere flourish or inexperience, however, perhaps the film's hyperstylization might be understood as a tactic for offering cultural commentary. Akin to Paul Willemen's (1971)discussion of mise-en-scène in Douglas Sirk films, Ford's conspicuous stylization of his film invites attention to its constructedness, producing a distanciation effect. The film's attention to the painstaking labor that Charley puts into her appearance supports this reading.…”

Section: Kiss and Make Upmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Single Manand a Tragic Woman

King

2013

Feminist Media Studies

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“…As Barbara Klinger details, Marxist film critics reveled in a highly educated, European director, whom they saw as subverting Hollywood even as he worked inside of it (1994: 10-18). For instance, Willemen (1971) argues that Sirk's Universal films exemplified Comolli and Narboni's "category E," that is, a group of films that work on two levels: "Films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so in an ambiguous manner" ([1969] 2009: 690). Willemen claims, "By altering the rhetoric of bourgeois melodrama, through stylization and parody, Sirk's films distanciate themselves from the bourgeois ideology" (1971: 67).…”

Section: The Cinema Of Irony (The God Of Superiority)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement: Reevaluating the Politics of Film

Kozloff¹

2013

Projections

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This article seeks to prompt a reevaluation of the efficacy of mainstream fiction films to convey liberalism's political and ethical values. First, it challenges still-influential Marxist claims about counter-cinema and distanciation, then it deplores the influence of contemporary irony and postmodernism. The article proceeds to enumerate the characteristics of "a cinema of engagement"; for example, moving us to empathy-even empathetic anger-rather than distancing us or making us feel superiority; manifesting a level gaze; analyzing structures of power; basing scripts on real events; employing both the realist and melodramatic modes; and inspiring viewers to work against social injustice. It invokes the theories of liberal philosophers, literary scholars, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and draws supporting evidence from a close reading of The Insider (1999).

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Distanciation and Douglas Sirk

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

Introduction: Gesture in film

Introduction: Gesture in film

A Single Manand a Tragic Woman

Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement: Reevaluating the Politics of Film

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