A New Wave Cameo

So a friend of mine sent me this photo the other day: can you guess what it shows?

If you said, "The finest displays in the Fust Electronics store in Etoy, Switzerland" or even "the cashier in Fust electronics" you would not be wrong. But you also would not be right.

For that man in the deep recesses of Fust is none other than Jean-Luc Godard buying a printer cartridge on July 26, 2012, at 11:05am.The image captures something about which I previously had no curiosity: what does Jean-Luc Godard look like reaching? Godard is not a tall man. So he purchases batteries the way others might strain to pick an apple from a tree. This man who has done wonders to record the incidental gestures between people on film is here frozen in a bizarre moment of pricing. Cell phones do this to even the greatest figures, resizing them to fit our civic and commercial spaces, making everyone seem smaller and the atmosphere more attenuated. Cellphone photos make the world resemble the interior of an airplane: both spaces uglify people. Cellphone images scrunch everyone into the least glamorous corners of the visual field: it visualizes us (even great directors) as extras, supplements to the society of the spectacle.

That is why this photo is a bit ironic. Godard is the director who first welcomed the obscenity of the public into his films. He exorcised filmmaking from the studio system and allowed his actors to intermingle with passers-by in the street. In many scenes from A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), people on the sidewalk gawk at the camera. Such incidences would absolutely mar a standard Hollywood production by reminding us that we are watching a movie. Yet in Godard's film, these looks only help establish the indeterminate and elusive nature of what is unfolding. Like us, these extras seem to be asking what is going on between these two people? and why is the camera filming this? These questions are posed mutely, by the sidelong glance and over-the-shoulder profile of the extra:

Man passing by on left turns head toward  Belmondo/Seberg to ascertain what is happening...

...and the woman on left does the same.

Breathless constitutes a minor archive of such Epimethean looks. Pedestrians walking around the scene compulsively look back at it. This turning of the head suggests an undigested perception of events: "Am I missing something? What did I just see?" These are our questions too. We might say that the lightness of Godard's film is registered in the simple fact that no extra breaks her stride to stare at the production. Breathless doesn't impose on its spectators: peripheral figures are free to go.

Godard's film does away with the morality of Hollywood cinema and the hierarchy of its production. This is conveyed by comparing two images, First an image from the film of Belmondo and Seberg walking down the Champs-Elysees:

...and an image of cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Godard following the two with the camera hidden in mail cart:

This photo depicting the "making of" Breathless is indistinguishable from the first image, a still from the movie itself. That is, the director and cinematographer slip surreptitiously into their own film, posing as mail men. They look incidental, not essential. They capture these amazingly intimate and amorous images by inserting cinema's technology into the apparatus of the mail deliverer (and thereby presage the cellphone which can record and send images almost simultaneously). Alfred Hitchcock posits himself in his own movies as an extra who garners all our attention and lust for detection. By contrast, Godard (and Coutard) form an image that is consonant with the one they record. They do this by assuming the guise of the everyday (the mailman). The image they deliver to us (the film itself) has the initial look of something that deserves only negligible attention, like last week's food circular.

An interview about teaching cinema on Psychanalyse.lu

The website Psychanalyse.lu has an interview with me about teaching Bad Film in my classes at Purdue University.
The interview is conducted by Luc Kinsch, who has also written a prologue to our discussion.
Here's the link:
http://blog.psychanalyse.lu/teacher-of-bad-film-2-pedagogy/

When an Extra's Life is Short.....

The Wizard of Oz is the closest thing we have to a mythic movie. Like stories of Mount Olympus  passed on from teller to teller in ancient culture, this movie is the work of an amalgam of directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Richard Thorpe and King Vidor all had a hand in making the film. The mythic element pertains to the reception of the film as well: watching Oz has become an annual ritual and it is rumored that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is secretly synched with its images.

Among the myths attributed to The Wizard of Oz is the story that an extra committed suicide on the set: a Munchkin supposedly can be seen hanging from a tree in one of the scenes. Forced to live in the background (literally "overlooked" in life), act in the background, and frequently confused with the background, a Munchkin seems to have decided to take his or her life in the background. (Ironically, Munchkins die in the same place Elephants do.) If Pink Floyd's album hypothetically immerses us further in the Oz saga, this myth introduces a hiccup, a strange aftertaste, into our appreciation of the film. A Youtube video brings the hanging victim to our attention:

 

The Munchkins in Oz are quintessential extras: they appear only in large masses and much of their appeal derives from how they are marked as belonging to a group (the Munchkins speak exclusively through the "fashion statements" of their clothes, hair styles, and type of flowers growing from their shoes). The Munchkins lose their cuteness when they step out from the dwarf throng:

As they separate from the crowd, Munchkins look not like toys but like mere people with uncontrollable tics, the survivors of deep trauma, the adults who emerged scarred from their childhood within a Henry Darger drawing. Munchkins get more horrifying the more we see them alone. This dynamic fulfills itself in the single Munchkin, the solitary extra, who is elevated not into celebrity but on a gallows. From a distance we must imagine a most unsightly scene of a crime: the bulging eyes, the signature cowlick now drooping forward over a ravaged smile, cheeks the color of his ascot, the Munchkin erection, the body suspended from a branch on a fake tree. It is this hypothetical sight to which all the other Munchkin faces in fact seem to be reacting.

The Youtube clip shows us the focus and speed at which we need to see the film in order to perceive the single Munchkin. It is not coincidence that this speed also destroys the song and dance numbers of the film.

The fact that the Youtube video is a hoax does not lessen its relevance. Even as a trick it reflects our desire to see the solitary extra make a statement, and turn their life (and death) into the means by which they do so. Kept from the script, the extra instead just leaves a body, a corpse. Is a suicide marring the backdrop of this film the only means of protest available? Does this figure give vent to that unhappiness that only shows itself indirectly, in the twisted and frozen visages of the Lollipop Guild? This is the extra's revenge: to wander away from the set in which they function as plasticene ornaments and appear, unscripted, in another scene where they can finally dramatize their mortality.

This fabricated image of a Munchkin suicide is cinema's answer to the distorted shape that appears in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors:

When seen from a certain angle, that shape becomes a skull, a messenger of death into the worldly power of the men depicted in the portrait. The hanging Munchkin is no less a trick, and injects a new angle into the landscape of the Wizard of Oz. In cinema, death arrives not via the trompe l'oeil (a distorted icon of vanitas), but as a dead extra lodged in the background of a musical number, a background actor whose body swings from a branch like an offbeat pendulum.

Extra in the Flashlight: Jesse "The Body" Heiman

What do you see when you look at this still from Spider Man?

To you is this a poster of Kirsten Dunst? Or is it on your wall because of the figure behind her: Jesse Heiman?
Your next question should be....which background figure is Jesse Heiman? Will the real Jesse Heiman step forward?
The truth is extras never step forward. Like soldiers dying in the battlefield, they only fade away into the backdrop.If film is indeed a battleground (as Sam Fuller immortally proclaimed when he himself played an extra in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou) then the extra serves in the infantry of the image field, and every film retains the tombs of countless unknown extras.

Jesse Heiman looks a tiny bit like Jonah Hill:

It's hard to say what separates these two actors other than the gaping abyss of celebrity. In addition to identical initials, they clearly share a similar body type. Yet their faces seem at different stages of differentiation: Heiman's is, as it were, still downloading, looking somewhat blockier, pixellated, compared to his more celebrated counterpart. Having never been invited to stand apart from the crowd or smile at the camera, Heiman's features have not been chiselled by the spotlight and retain a generic and indistinct quality, laying claim only to an idiosyncratic blot of color on each cheek.

Some adoring fan of Jesse Heiman has compiled his greatest "work" in both television and film:

This brief film gives us a sense, no doubt, of how Mr. Heiman's parents watch his movies. The order of shots is completely indifferent to content, plot, and drama and radically decenters our attention. Notice, for example, how even the corpse in one of the clips is given more focus (a staggered zoom) than Heiman.

This "video c.v." of Mr. Heiman's work is itself a study in the peculiar way in which we speak of and designate extras. What is the funny white circle that helps us identify the Heiman? How is this different from the spotlight of celebrity? In some measure it seems closer to a digital flashlight directed rudely at the extra's face, marking him the way police might specially shade someone of interest but otherwise overlooked in a surveillance video. Yet the wholly unexpected and supernatural quality of this white light also gives Mr. Heiman a strange and temporary aura, one that extends no further than the width of his shoulders. In fact, this method of singling out Mr. Heiman echoes the halo by which medieval and early Renaissance painting distinguishes Christ from the crowds through which he frequently moved, as in this painting by El Duccio depicting the kiss of Judas:

The halo effect is no different in the video of Heiman. Both he and Jesus have been called forth by the voice and the light. Or, perhaps, kissed by the Judas of celebrity.