Abigail Alvarez

Just like any other sub movements , they always emerged in a time of political  or financial turning points moments,the idea of New objectivity as a artistic trend emerged in Germany in the early 1920s.This new tendency sought to oppose to the aesthetic ,emotional and fantastic devices of Expressionism. During the 1920s ,Germany had witnessed various socio-political changes such as; the advent of modernity , the shift in gender roles , industrialisation , the introduction of Americanism and the origins of what it is known now as consumerism and mass culture. These aspects became motifs for artists of the era ,who searched to portray “the spirit of the age”by using a sense of objective realism.

circumstances that allowed and influenced the characteristics of the new sobriety such as ; a transitional society's need to reject the recent past and to incorporate new devices of modernization into a postwar defeated state . This process of modernization paved the way for industrialisation ,urban culture and the rise of the “New Woman”. In reference to these elements, I intend to explore the spirit of the age , a façade culture and how this notion is reflected in aspects of culture like ,the movement in the arts, and their relation to films of the era .It is from this respect , that I argue to what extent the influence of new objectivity can be seen in such films like: Metropolis(lang,1927), Diary of a lost girl (Pabst, 1929)and The Blue Angel(Sternbeg,1930 ).

The sense of social realism displayed in ,Diary of a Lost Girl , seems to contrast the fantastic ideals in which        Expressionism was based. This assumption appears to follow a common trend in the 1920s, when German bourgeois liberals stated ,that it was essential to leave behind utopian and messianic excesses in order to enable a radical shift in a contemporary society. Derived from this statement, many artists took on new forms and became objective in order to get a grip on reality,leaving aside any type of sentimentalism¹ . It is for this reason , the rejection of emotionalism and the clear contrast to spiritual themes revolve around themes of this new tendency in such way that the focus on physical objects and rationality rather than the Expressionist feature of the inner life seem to achieve greater prominence.

Moreover, drawing from these circumstances, artists developed new principles of art , reflecting the spirit of the period. The term new objectivity was not used until a a journalist briefly referred to the emergent direction as the "new naturalism," and in 1923, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, Director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, began to solicit contributions for a "Neue Sachlichkeit" exhibition. It was this exhibition , which finally took place in 1925,that gave the style its name². In order to identify the aesthetics of the new movement, based partly on the features presented in this exhibition , Franz Roh tried to establish the differences between Expressionism and new objectivity by highlighting the differences between both tendencies . He noted ; the distinction of representation of plain objects ,rectangular in frame , engrossing ,and static , as opposed to the ecstatic , rich in diagonals , and deformation of objects in Expressionism.

It is in this sense ,that the tendency to anything vague and dreamy took shape in an intention to separate the utopianism and visual idiosyncrasies of previous years and replace it with images of social criticism , a recurrent theme in works of Dix and Grosz .These artists cultivated a new constructivist element present as a self reflexive gap between art and its subject matter attacking and unmasking those who were responsible for social injustice and war.

Similarly,social critique is part of the evident features of new objectivity existent in films. In Diary of a lost girl , the images of social critique concerns those of violence and expulsion from a community. These actions are enhanced by violence and crime , caused by urbanization. In addition, the space , where these images of violence take action is the city. For West , the weimar city " is a mythical site for this culture of violence , we are able to see how the pre-war ambivalence about urban life resolves into a universal condensation of the anonymity, soullessness and capitalist money culture of the metropolis”³It is in this sense , that the city is understood as the urban metropolis that works as a location for cultural investigation in the impact of modernism.

Moreover , the emergence of modernity and technology into a society brings along the desire to abandon a painful past behind,such as it is in the case of Weimar Germany . Additionally, the emergence of modernization brought alongside the Americanisation of industries and the notion of urbanization and city. Subsequently ,this led to the result of more monopolies as well as the introduction of the idea of mass appeal and culture, partly constituted by an upcoming film culture. Yet,these notions generated discussions about values implicit in new uses of technology propagating new standards such as the challenge of mass culture ,a response from not only a technological innovation but also the embracing of a new political system with changes in economic conditions and living standards.

 June 2009

Images: Louise Brooks in The diary of a lost girl

            Lovesick by George Grozs 

 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder , considered by Elsaesser as the most representative director of New German Cinema , He is often presented as an experimental , avant garde film-maker , which is not far from the truth , However his work went beyond that simple statement above mentioned , He was interested in commenting in the well known structures of popular cinema to create politicized films . Fassbinder was highly concerned in Hollywood forms , because they were the only ones that could really attract audiences . The Hollywood genre that most draw attention to Fassbinder was Melodrama , specially those films made by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s which were critical of the materialistic middle class American society . Most of Fassbinder films were efforts to create analytical and politicized cinema , which is not always the classical structure of popular films . The biggest example of this is Ali : fear eats the soul (1974) , a “remake” of Sirk's All that heaven allows (1955) .

Fassbinder met Douglas Sirk in 1971 , after having watched a retrospective screening of the Hollywood melodramas made by the German-American Director . Fassbinder characterized Sirk , as a cultured person who loved and didn't despise people as well as also being a film maker that liked to demonstrate feelings through the mise- en-scene of a film . He admired Sirk , because the director had the ability to deal with interpersonal politics of melodrama . In reference to this , Fassbinder said that Sirk understood the essential nature of the medium , films were made for people (1) . All that heaven allows was released in America in 1950s revolving around the class conflict and sexism of the era in the American society , portraying the bourgeoisie as hypocritical and vicious to maintain their social elitism . Similarly in , Ali:fear is the soul , which is partly an adaptation of two of Sirk 's masterpieces ; all that heaven allows and imitation of life (1959) , Fassbinder criticizes postwar Germany by representing the moral bankruptcy of his country's culture . Additionally , Sirk perceived films as emotions that spectators are able to feel and He believed films should function for society in other words , melodrama played the audience . This is what attracted Fassbinder . He used the schemes of popular cinema out of love for their form and critique of content (2).

During the 1960s , He had experienced with a variety of genres , in film and theatre , but it was the melodrama genre that he chose to criticize because it attracted people because it's a genre animated by personal crisis in a social context , as this was the case of the portrayed society in Ali : fear eats the soul ; the postwar German society , a society ironically dominated by America and the denial of their own past .

Similarly to Sirk 's characters , in Ali : fear eats the soul , characters are ostracised by people , However , the way He does it differs from the normal conventions of the 1950 stylized American movie , he treats the case in a more extreme way , he depicts a world with no mercy , a glossy and apathetic atmosphere giving priority to the social classification of the characters , mise-en-scene captures the sense of two lonely souls coming together (closed frames, frames within frames , cross hatching that gives the sense of prison bars and indicates the distance of characters from one another) and simultaneously takes the viewer apart by framing through doorways and in long shot . Although these elements are represented in a theatrical form derived from Fassbinder 's brecthian techniques of distanciation , He had learned working in theatre ; Avant garde forms which were typical in new German films. New German cinema was influenced by the French new wave and was an artistic reaction to the inactivity of German cinema after the war . Despite these films attracted audiences around Europe and USA they were only known among a certain kind of intellectual group .

Furthermore, given to these unconventional techniques that all New German films have , Fassbinder transforms melodrama , in Ali: fear eats the soul , and at the same time creates an anti form to cause criticism and disgust in his audience , he introduces to the genre everything that Hollywood had underestimated and applies it to a cold aesthetic , following a stereotype about German culture .One of Fassbinder's ambitions was to play with audiences in reference to this , He identifies the possibility to inscribe the viewer into an interconnection of meta-diegetic subjectivity, achieved by constantly changing between the modes of self reflexive modernist formalism and conventional dramatic narrative collected from Hollywood style melodrama. This struggle is evident in how the spectator is constantly repositioned during the film , sometimes we are highly emotive empathised with characters and at the next second we feel distant , Savage (2001) (3). For instance in the scene when the Yugoslavian worker is being ostracised by emmi co-workers and she is being part of their group , the worker can seen through a banister , just the way we had seen Emmi framed earlier in the film , we realise that Emmi has to redefine herself and this is when audience comes to play wondering and reflecting about their own disposition on being convinced by social agreement . This is a perfect example of what Fassbinder wanted to make out of his audience , now the question is , was this analytical and critical audience a popular one ?.

As we have seen popular audiences are moved by mainly Hollywood films that try to portray an stylized reality in , most likely , unusual situations with stories that are repetition of genres portrayed with conventional methods. Although it was fassbinder 's wish to create a German film as beautiful as a Hollywood one ,He was highly interested in attracting popular spectators as he himself mentioned once “that he could only take American cinema seriously because it was the only one that had reached an audience “ He didn't managed to do this in Ali: fear eats the soul therefore He wasn't able to attract that popular audience He wanted . Likewise , what Fassbinder learned from Sirk films was , how a popular form can be reconstructed to attract audience while simultaneously destroying that form (4) .He intended to challenge viewers to reflect critically about themselves and their surroundings through artistic conventions that would have never been received by a popular audience , because it doesn't follow the normal structures of what a common audience is used to watch , which is the case in Ali fear eats the soul Nevertheless , Fassbinder achieved great success internationally through his career as a film maker , and probably his films would have extended to regular cinema audiences , nowadays like some contemporary films that have had success in popular cinema such as Chinatown (1974) or Mullholland Drive (2001) . Finally I like to conclude this paragraph by saying that despite the international acclaim of Ali: fear eats the soul , the film is not addressed to a regular cinema spectator because of his anti melodrama , theatrical-like form that it can only be understood by a audience that has a clear understanding of what they're watching . Fassbinder 's desire is to engender in the spectator along with the possibility of reflecting and analysing . This is the reason that make me think that He is not directly addressing to a popular cinema audience rather to an ideal audience that He creates to change his/her own reality .

To sum up , I believe the understanding of melodrama and the relation between Sirk's work and Fassbinder as well as mentioning the unconventional techniques that New German films are made of , are crucial to argue that Fassbinder wasn't directing to a regular film audience

January 2009

I'm probably a very boring person writing about this film and russian filmakers, whom I admire  a lot

Study of the nurse of battleship potemkin , Francis Bacon..

IDuring my course , I've come across things that I've never heard before, considering I never really intended to study film.I've always wanted to be an art historian ,I thought working in galleries and study art tendencies throughout the centuries was a very exciting job to do  . Nevertheless ,I happened to meet some people who were really interested in Film and change my mind based on the simple notion "Oh well I like Cinema anyway ".Well i dont regret that desicion now.

Furthermore, What those people never told me was that I had to come aacross LauraMulvey's theories, which until this point I havent quite managed to understand.

but here I go , trying to explain what Metz said about the cinema apparatus applying this to Hitchcock's masterpiece "Psycho".

and here's my innocent statement: 

During the 1970 ‘s decade , film theorists started to approach films with psychoanalysis , developing what we call today , psychoanalytic film theory. This concept was expanded by applying Lacan ’s concepts on psychoanalysis to the act of watching a film . These ideas refer to the nature of the screen-spectator relation . Specially in the relation between viewers and their own positions as spectators considering gender and sexual desire (1) . Hitchcock’s Films , contained material of interest for film theorists because many of his films deal with psychoanalysis issues , gender spectators positions towards female and male characters.Psycho deals with Freud's psychoanalytical theories that have been used in film theory such as the unconscious , hysteria , the return of the repressed and Oedipal drama . 

In psychoanalytic film theory, viewers are seen as the ones who watch , in other words as a type of a desiring producer of the cinematic fiction . There is a process of identification between spectators and what we see on the screen . This process is interpreted through Lacan ’ s theory of “the mirror stage” , which happens when an infant recognizes itself in the mirror , and sees an unrealistic perfect image , instead of the real fragmented image of itself , creating an illusory unit , Ego. For Metz and Bauldry , the spectator see the screen as the mirror , in which the moviegoer can recognize himself or herself as an articulated ego . The camera is one of the first vehicles of identification for the audience, and this identification provides the spectator with an unconscious power , Camera would go everywhere , it knows no limits , the camera itself begins a system of visibility from which nothing escapes, and this whole visibility allows audiences to think they're powerful (2). This concepts functions to some extent because it remains unconscious to us , until the camera itself becomes evident for the spectator. Along with the camera , audience and camera both become part of the cinematic event , as a consequence the audience realise that film is a product , not a reality . In order to avoid this discovering , classical narrative create reality effects . For instance , from the opening of Psycho , in which we see an urban landscape , many buildings first , then one , followed by various windows and audience hesitate on where to watch for a moment , until through a window , we are introduced to Sam and Marion, viewers are the camera , audience is the one following , given to the case that we believe the reality placed before our eyes

Moreover, in reference to the film , in the opening scene , we get a sense of reality and identification with the city ; the window and the intuition that the characters' lives could be applied to our own lives along with the thought that something unforeseen is about to happen . Apparatus theory comes to play , in this scene , it emphasized in the way cinema gives to the viewer the imaginary unit he or she lacks . However as some film theorists argued that this theory expressing the relation enclosed by spectator and screen , exclude gender perceptions towards what is on the screen (3). According to Mulvey , the cinema's ideological purpose is to persuade spectators in taking pleasure in the process that defeat them . She argues that the process of spectator identification is strongly related to sexual identification . Mulvey mentions that a secondary identification with character accompanies the viewer 's primary identification with the camera, and this identification with a filmic character is most often , an identification with a male spectator . In psycho, the opening scene is followed by shots of a couple half stripped off , Marion comes to scene and she is seen as the object of gaze for Sam , the male character , who posses her and this possession is passed onto the male audience through identification with characters . The shots of Marion' s semi naked body functions as the spectacle for the male gaze . Curiously , this happens in psycho , in an unconventional way , Hitchcock plays with the audience and he constantly changes our own positions throughout the film . Also , in this scene , Marion is conveyed in terms of sexual difference , and this difference is moved out by the male power that Sam has : the male gaze is active whereas female gaze is passive in this case. The desire to establish a family ; the patriarchal orders (Marion's aspiration for marriage ,which is the motif of the theft. ). Additionally, In this sequence Hitchcock drives the audience into a speculation and awareness , but simultaneously allows viewers to sympathise with Marion to justify what she is about to encounter . Cassidy is introduced making ironic comments to Marion , in other words we can argue that Cassidy was the one who gives Marion the hint to commit the crime and given to Cassidy' s behaviour , we justify the theft of forty thousand dollars . As Marion starts her long journey to death , audiences are drawn by Marion's abnormal behaviour , at this moment is when the conscious and preconscious come into play .

Furthermore , Hitchcock not only uses Marion's character to introduce female sexuality but the notion of split personality too , in order to explain what it will be later displayed in the film . We have seen shots of her reflected on mirrors and windows , this might indicate the isolated state she is in , while creating a voyeuristic consciousness within the spectator as we are able to see consequences caused by Marion's action .The split personality is predominantly evident , when she takes on an endless journey , as Marion keeps driving forward , her mind is constantly recalling the past events as well as struggling with the voices of her conscious that suggest that her crime has affected people , as we know , by moral ethic , that all crimes must be punished , these deviations drive her to Bates motel . Until this point , audience and identification has been a relevant part to the story, we shared the same sense of suspicion fear when Marion waits angrily for Norman bates to arrive at the motel . Marion is the connection between audience and plot , when Norman Bates is introduced into the sequence , We identify with his empathy whose devotion to his great mother had made him sacrifice his own self . During the parlour scene , male audiences become active viewers again with Norman's gaze because He feels strongly attracted to Marion , but this attraction is the one that destroys Marion and eventually destroys Norman too. On the other hand, in this sequence we shared Marion's sympathy for Norman and we have become aware of Marion's decision of returning the money and assume the consequences .

With the appearance of Norman , audience is able to see the parallel between Marion and Norman , As Klinger (1986) quotes Bellour , Neurosis versus Psychosis . Marion' s neurosis would be absorbed by Norman . A confrontation of man and woman , the latter destined to become the prayer of the former (4).

As Marion gets into the shower , we get the sense of cleanliness , her face shows the relief of washing away her guilt , Hitchcock restores confidence into the audience with Marion's trustworthiness , but now this security has been subverted after Norman has transformed into a whole new character after Marion dies . Moreover , this moment is crucial in psychoanalytical film terms , due to the perception of Marion as the female erotic object , since the beginning of the film , this spectacle finds its logical outcome in the shower murder scene , which is the termination of male gaze (5) . Now sexuality has been imposed by Mrs bates in a fragmented way through Norman .

As Wood (1989) states that at this point the audience needs to centre onto a character and the only one we have is Norman(6). Subsequently , the film takes a different aim , audience is now left with with no options but use other characters , Sam , Lila and Arbogast, in the film to solve Marion's mystery . Hitchcock managed to maintain the sympathy between Norman and audience . Arbogast is used to rise suspicion among the audience and his murder does not feel as intense as Marion's because we didn't develop any form of identification of subjective adherence. In Freudian terms , we can also say that Arbogast acts like the intruder stepfather and that is why He gets murdered by Norman .

Hitchcock continues giving more character parallels to the audience , when Sam and Lila motivated by suspicion drive to the Bates motel , Lila is an intruder to the Bates house and she might resemble Mrs bates both have tall stilt figures , in some ways it seems like Lila confronts her own unconscious , Similarly Sam's strong look gives a similarity to Norman while they talk in the parlour , Where Norman and Marion had eaten before Marion was murdered . Sam , in contrast to Norman possessed Marion , something Norman couldn't have given to his lack of self assurance and sexual repression , which come apparent to us once Lila enters into his room ; his mind . Lila is a case of voyeurism when she inspects Mrs Bates room and consequently the cellar.

Psycho comes to an end with the Doctor's explanation , implying that the audience gaze is motivated by the desire of having a subject to look at , after Marion has vanished , we are driven by the disclosure of both of their bodies , first with Marion's and then by the visual absence of the mother that we want to see. Hitchcock superimposes the mother's death 's head grin over Norman's own . Sexuality in the film is hard to be defined by the audience, because it is fractured . Additionally , Norman is a case of the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex , He wanted to posses his mother that he poisoned her lover and her , therefore his psychotic love for her made him become Mrs bates.

To conclude I'd like to say that psychoanalytic film theory is used to recognize spectator position, in reference to identify themselves with their gaze objects . The horror that audience feels, in Psycho , derives from subconscious identification we get from the characters. The functions of psychoanalysis is to give us an understanding of the process we take part when we watch a film. One of the most interesting things about psycho is how , we , as viewers ,are constantly changing positions and how the object of gaze is subverted in the film , which normally does not happen in classical forms.