The Deaf Extra

What function do extras serve in musicals? Singin in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952) has attained the status of classic in part for the way its stars (Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds) monopolize screen movement and subsequently our attention. In many musical sequences in the movie, only the stars seen to hear the music that makes them dance. The hierarchy of star and extra performs the same function as an Ipod, isolating and privatizing sound. In the following scene, for example, Cosmo (O'Connor) sings to Don (Kelly) about the overriding imperative of the entertainment industry: make them laugh.

                                            
The division of labor in the classic musical resembles the one instituted by Odysseus on his boat: desiring to hear the song of the Sirens (who traditionally lured sailors to crash their boats on the rocks), Odysseus plugged his rowers' ears with wax and tied himself to the mast. While the master listened and emoted to song, the rowers had to keep their heads down and could not even tap their feet. In Singin' in the Rain, the extras exist in a similarly noiseless space. Each extra seems imprisoned in a separate chore, subordinated to cadence of broom, dust brush, and carrying of props rather to the rhythm of song.The deftness of O'Connor is offset by the deafness of these stagehands.

What's the effect of this juxtaposition? Do extras resist performance entirely, even if they seem to be doing assigned tasks that reflect no cognizance of the action at hand? What's interesting is how unresponsive they seem to the musical that is happening around them. This unresponsiveness to the effort at humor (or making others laugh) never achieves deadpan status (a badge reserved for the unsmiling co-star listening to the jokester) and is held one notch below decisive inexpression. The film's myth rests on the illusion crafted between working and expressing: just think of how much mileage Gene Kelly gets out of an umbrella by not using it to keep himself dry. In 'Make Them Laugh," sweeping the floor is pointedly contrasted with the way Cosmo dances and, on his knees, walks in place on it. At one point however the belabored extras seem to cross the line, or attempt to do both: they throw Cosmo off the board they are carrying in beat to his song. My grandpa said go out and tell them a joke...(workers tilt the board). Does it reflect their proletarian annoyance at this fop making their task heavier? Do this gesture merely shore up the lead (does Cosmo become funnier?) or to send Cosmo a message (do they become more serious?) Do they dispatch of Cosmo in order to make the joke at his expense (constituting a temporary strike against the production we are seeing) or to his profit (to throw the dancer off balance and thereby reaffirm his grace)? The film makes it difficult to decide on the upshot of the extras' motion to throw the actor aside: it is not even clear whether this constitutes a rare instance of workers showing good timing or whether it is yet another testament to life forced to live by the clock.

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.

I Coulda Been...an Extrah

Tonight I sat down and watched the long-awaited DVD release of That's My Boy. A few summers back, I showed up at a casting call for extras for this movie (I wrote about it here: http://extrasextras.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-first-casting-call.html ). Consequently, my eyes were riveted not on Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg (the starring actors) but on the human background to this movie, which I studied as if I were trying to get a splinter out of it.

As I watched the film, the words "Sandler Vehicle" kept murmuring through my mind. When does a film actually become a vehicle for its star? Could we classify the effect of That's My Boy as a kind of vehicular homicide? I kept thinking that the title of the film would be best uttered by someone pointing, identifying a body in a morgue. I stared at everything going on behind the actors, the way one looks at one's shoes when you are embarrassed. What place, or what seat, would I have had on this Sandler vehicle?

The vehicle seems to have no room for passengers: neither for the extras in the movie nor the spectators in the theater. The operators of the vehicle take joy in insulting pedestrians and driving over animals. It inflicted a strange feeling of captivity upon me: it is the first film to successfully make me feel like I was actually watching it on an airplane.

The odd thing was, in being jilted for a non-speaking role in this film, I felt like something less than a "wanna-be." I looked at the trees and shrubs in the Cape Code landscape that serves as the backdrop to the movie and thought I could have been them. What is one notch below screen being? What do you call the person who wants to not be (in the sense of star) on screen? Who aspires to exist like a spider accidentally caught in a diorama?

The strange condition of the extra in this film became clearer to me in the scene where the characters run drunk down a bowling alley. Sandler gets the alley leading directly into our line of vision:

Could I have been a bowler? Maybe that strange figure standing against the pillar behind the disconsolate woman who just had her spare ruined by Sandler? If I had a red shirt, could I have played that figure standing behind the counter in the far distance? (In his miniscule features I read only indifference for the action he is watching, that same indifference displayed by the guy you give your shoes back to when you tell him your bowling score.) There is so little prestige to the celebrities of Sandler and Samberg that in fact they just seem like extras, only nearer to us, further down the alley, so to speak. In stills from the movie, the leads are hard to distinguish from the people who got 70.00 for their day's work. Sandler and Samberg offer a refrigerator bulb in the place of the galactic light promised by the metaphor of a star.The telltale instance, the iconic image, from this film is immortalized on the DVD cover from the movie. It shows us Sandler knocking over pins in great glee:

This is the Sandler Vehicle in a nutshell (and shaped accordingly): he has become a bowling ball. What is the semiotic role of an extra to such a cinematic figure? Had I been chosen to just be or stand or pretend to do something next to the Sandler, my screen existence would have amounted to being little more than alley wax.

The Baseball Extra

The greatest difference between baseball and sports such as football, hockey, or basketball is not to be found in the game itself, on the field so to speak, but rather in the stands, in the unique disposition and status of the baseball audience. The fans at other sports remain spectators.  At a ballgame, however, they become extras.  How does this transpire?

I've always been struck at how fans at ballgames let their attention roam. The game doesn't seem to preoccupy anyone, and much of the time is spent looking at the park, at the other fans, and at the immobile majesty of the players located furthest from the action. Where fans at a football game rivet their attention to the pigskin with the same rabid intensity as stock investors watching the market index, spectators at a ball game seem strangely bereft of focus. Having arrived at the enormous stadium, it is as if each fan began to actively wonder what happened to his television set that so ably mediated the game for him in his living room. Images of baseball stands crammed with people are fascinating because they provide a glimpse into a photographic paradox: a particular collective whose individuals are nevertheless not yoked to the same moment. They do not share the unified concentration we see in people gathered for graduation or wedding pictures: each fan remains occupied with a separate inner plane, hooked by a idiosyncratic point of focus, adrift in a temporality different from the one secured by the photograph. This picture from the bleachers, circa 1975, perfectly renders the way Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, invites skewed perspectives:

The unfixed presence of the baseball spectator became apparent this past summer when a media backlash arose over a particular fan behind home plate at a Royals game. Still frames from the baseball telecast were cropped and enlarged to highlight this background figure:

Many bloggers said that this was the ultimate commentary on the 0 and 9 stretch with which the Royals began their season. The Kansas City Chiefs football team has had similar dry patches, yet why is it impossible to imagine someone avidly reading Steve Baldacci's Zero Day at Arrowhead Stadium? It's because only baseball permits a relative autonomy to its fans.One can attend a game merely to tend to one's hobby. The spectators at a football game delight only in subjecting themselves to the movement of the ball. Their subordination to the celebrity of the ball indicates how football sustains a different sort of spectatorial politics. Strict focus on the pigskin is all one can do in the football stands: the more you are deprived
of action or intervention in the sport, the less you have to do while watching the game.

Baseball, by contrast, has always thrived on the potential of each fan gathering the spotlight to him- or her-self. Even the man reading behind home plate seems to be awaiting some moment when he might become involved in the game. Steve Bartman is one of the most infamous baseball spectators ever. During the playoffs during the 2003 season, Bartman successfully moved from being a mere extra to something closer to a 10th player. Perched in the first row of the stands along the left field line and wearing headphones, Bartman lunged for a fly ball and in the process prevented Cubs outfielder Moises Alou from getting the team out of the inning (and possibly to the World Series):

As extra, the baseball fan treads that line between obscurity and potential celebrity. He occupies the Zero Day of spectatorship. Bartman later would "star" in a film, titled Catching Hell, about his role in prolonging the curse of failure overhanging the Chicago Cubs. Quite symbolically, Bartman refused to have any part in this film in which he is the main subject.

Because the baseball can catapult the spectator into a suddenly individuated (and scapegoated) extra, it is an object of both dread and desire, a souvenir that can knock out your teeth. This photo of a homerun landing in the Green Monster Seats at Fenway Park encapsulates the curious valence of the baseball:

Once it enters the seats, the ball precipitates a set of classical gestures we might more readily find in a Caravaggio painting. The above photo is layed out like a Last Supper reenactment dispersed across three tiers. The fans extend in shock away from the center seat at the table, occupied by the baseball which has just declared that one of the the fans will betray it three times before the cock crows. The faces of the fans are no less aghast than Peter's. Some seem to dismiss the ball as a hoax. One man in the lower right waves his hand to stop this nonsense. Another, in a blue hat and shirt, begins to hector his two young children for abandoning such a valuable souvenir. Nobody knows whether to run toward or run away from the ball. In this undirected and unsupervised moment, the ball fan grasps what it must feel like when the actor moves across one's space.