Page 50 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

3

Michelangelo Antonioni

The Aestheticization of Time and Experience
in The Passenger

ALISON ROSS

Cinema and Technique

We can schematically characterize the use to which techniques of
cinema have been put by means of a three-way differentiation. First, there
is the use of cinema to stage human tales. In this vein we can cite the use of
cinematic techniques in the oeuvre of Jim Jarmusch, from the early Stranger
Than Paradise to Dead Man and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Second, there is the use of cinema to stage a confrontation with a
received pattern of meaning. Here the confrontation may have a compre-
hensive scope, as in Chaplin's The Modern World, or a restricted one, as in
Greenaway's rendition of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Prospero's Books or
Pasolinis treatment of the Oedipus myth in Oedipus the King
Despite their different emphases, in both of these processes cine-
matic techniques and elements are used to screen a pattern of meaning,
whether that meaning is presented as tragic or depicted in critical or rebel-
lious terms,
Finally, there is the use of traditional characters or plots as little more
than props or vehicles to stage aestheticized settings. Here the relationship
between meaning and cinematic elements in the first two cases is reversed.
In the most developed forms of this use of cinematic techniques, the story
line has a purely evocative form, and character is treated in the abbreviated
manner of a stereotype. David Lynch's films, for instance, stage an obsessive
preoccupation with certain techniques and motifs that exist solely as aes-
thetic forms: the dwarf figure, the phallic woman, and the popular song.

40