|
|
|
FOREIGN SEAT: Here’s looking at me, kid!
We are all film buffs now. That’s why, in the climax of Hot Shots! Part Deux, Martin and Charlie Sheen can pass each other in their speedboats and scream out: “Loved you in Wall Street!” Or, at the end of the sci-fi fantasy thriller Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes can battle it out in the Schwarzeneger Library. And it isn’t just films and their stars endlessly tipping their hats at each other: these days they are also inclined to wink at the audience. So we get the Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero, in which characters step up from the audience into the screen, or (the ultimate self-referentiality) the compilation of supposed out-takes from the computer-animated Toy Story or Monsters Inc — “No monsters were harmed in the making of this picture.”
So is Hollywood in danger of disappearing up its own backside? As pictures grow older and plots are retold, self-consciousness has given way to irony and parody. Certainly, the acutely self-aware, ironic asides that are sprinkled throughout Bond films, and most other action adventure pictures, are deliberately employed to puncture the violence and dispel any significance or serious meaning. The feeling that films are set in a self-reflecting hall of mirrors is further underlined by the kind of glib reply that Indiana Jones makes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He is asked by his sidekick how he’s going to find the Ark. “I don’t know,” he winks conspiratorially. “I’m making it up as I go along.” Yet the movies’ use of self-referencing is actually more long-standing, more widespread and more complex than most of us realise. Laura Mulvey of London University’s Birkbeck College believes that self-reflection in films comes in cycles and, indeed, that it is part and parcel of film’s very existence. “When cinema came into being it was one spectacle competing among many others, whether it was panoramas, dioramas or lantern shows,” she says. “So it had to announce itself and tell the world what it was. Therefore it was necessarily self-reflexive, because movie-makers wanted the audience to say, ‘Isn’t this amazing, this cinema? Look at what it can do.’” Cinema’s announcement of its arrival was partly accomplished by making films within films. Almost as soon as the medium was born, film cameras turned in on themselves. Films like The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures — which depicted a yokel running away in fright from the celluloid image of a moving train — became a staple of turn-of-the-century cinema. Then there were the innumerable phenomenological films, such as a man eating an approaching film camera in the 1901 movie A Big Swallow, or Georges Melies’s innovative use of time-lapse photography for his dream landscapes, which demonstrated that films were produced under a completely different set of rules from those of the theatre or even proto-movie media such as shadow plays or magic-lantern shows.
‘An important part of comedy is the breaking down of taboos,” says Mulvey. “And one of the strongest taboos of conventional cinema is that performers do not acknowledge the audience and break across the fourth wall that separates the stage or screen from the audience’
“As cinema became gradually more sophisticated and more subordinated to story-telling, that sense of wonder, as cinema explored itself, got lost under the ongoing psychological realism of characters,” says Mulvey. In other words, from being about spectacle, pictures became plot-driven. But there has always been one exception. One type of film has always tried to break out of the narrative straitjacket — a type of film that has always specialised in flouting the rules.
“An important part of comedy is the breaking down of taboos,” says Mulvey. “And one of the strongest taboos of conventional cinema is that performers do not acknowledge the audience and break across the fourth wall that separates the stage or screen from the audience.” But over the years that ‘fourth wall’ has been demolished by cinema’s great comics. From Buster Keaton — who begins Sherlock Jr by falling asleep in a projectionist’s booth and dreaming that he walks into the screen to become part of the film he’s projecting — to Woody Allen, 60 years later, who also took up the idea of becoming the film that you’re watching in his 1985 comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo, comedians have criss-crossed cinematic fantasy with audience reality.
Groucho Marx was also a dab hand at leapfrogging the fourth wall. In At the Circus his comic foil, Margaret Dumont, fends off his advances with the remark, “You must leave my room. We must have regard for certain conventions.” “One guy isn’t enough,” Groucho deadpans to camera. “She’s got to have a convention.” And in 1942, H C Potter’s wonderful Hellzapoppin’ also took a hatchet to the fourth wall along with almost every other screen convention: it barely begins before ‘the director’ walks on set to abort it. Then the performers stride off in a huff to make the film they want to make, and, as they walk through the various studio sets, so they change costume, from powdered ancien regime wigs through to Eskimo outfits.
Although few films have been as knowingly knowing as Hellzapoppin’, these days there seems to be no stopping the wave of cinematic self-regard. There are costly failures such as Last Action Hero, in which Schwarzenegger tells the dying villain “No sequel for you,” before falling back into the very sentimental cliches it ridicules for its own emotion-packed ending. Other directors, such as Wes Craven, are more ingenious. His New Nightmare is a word-for-word acting out of the screenplay that is being written simultaneously with the film being shown on screen. So, like the John Travolta thriller Get Shorty, New Nightmare is, as the critic Frank Pilipp put it, “the fiction is about the production which turns out to be a fiction.” And the same can be said for The Player, Hollywood’s most successful self-referencing film, which actually begins with its director Robert Altman’s clearly audible voice shouting “Action,” followed by a nine-minute tracking shot, which Altman described as “a long take satirising long takes.”
“There’s a lot of mirrors here,” says Altman. But aside from the 63 ‘real’ stars such as Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts playing themselves, The Player also plays with audience expectations. After an early screening of the film Altman recalls that “Paul Newman came up to me and said, ‘I know what this picture’s about. It’s about getting to see the tits of the girl whose tits you don’t care about seeing, and not getting to see the tits of the girl whose tits you want to see.’ And I said, you’re absolutely right.” Beneath the badinage and endless Hollywood in-jokes, however, lies the fundamental fact that Altman, like so many American directors, owes an incalculable debt to Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard famously said, “Films have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” Altman echoes that statement when he says that in The Player he includes all “the elements that have to be in a film — love, hope, sex, nudity — so they can sell it. But not necessarily where you figure they’ll be.” And it is this self-conscious influence of Godard that Laura Mulvey believes has “coincided with the Hollywood studios no longer thinking of film as their major product.” Cinema, she declares, now “has to take its place with video games, television and especially DVDs, which provide film buffs with inside information and background stories.” So once again films are having to draw attention to themselves and once again they are doing it through self-referencing.
Or, as Altman explains: “What we are saying is that the movie you saw is the movie you are about to see: the movie you saw is the movie we’re going to make.” Sit back and enjoy the show.—Dawn/Guardian News Service
|
|
|
|
