Movie Notes

Victoria 2022-10-11 15:03:28

It's more like a visual film paper. If there are keywords, it will be: paternal authority, gaze, materialism... The directors that have been mentioned in it are also Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Lynch. I will always regret not getting my hands on Hollywood movies (and cartoons) at the right time. Whether it is Mulvey, Zizek or many film theorists who have been dazzled by the dream of Hollywood, they have a position to study or criticize, but I have not been immersed in it and am missing more than half of the world film map. The following are the note keywords:

1. Human voice: not a medium for expressing the depth of human subjectivity, but a foreign intruder.

2. Partial objects: death drive.

the only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object is to become this object.

3.fiction:

sth shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it . So reality is in illusion.

We are installed within the symbolic order, so disintegrated us from the reality.

desire is a wound of reality and the reality can hurt the reality vice versa.(love is always mortifying love.)

Precisely because I think it's only a game, it's only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self.

It's only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are not ready to confront in our reality.

Supplement: Intrusion of the Symbolic into the Imaginary

4. transfer the emotion

press different buttons there and the appropriate emotions will be awakened in our mind.

5. Form

It has a message of its own.

it is this background, this background of Porto-reality, a real which is more dense, more fundamental than the narrative reality, the story that we observe.

Supplement: Aristotle believed that the essence of things is that matter becomes something by means of form. Form gives substance to matter, and boundaries of things give them form.

Hegel's "Aesthetics": "The elements of beauty can be divided into two kinds: the inner, that is, the content;

6. I know very well, but…

fetishist

Finally, don't rely too much on psychoanalysis, let alone take the thinking of a certain theorist as a standard, and keep your own rational thinking.

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The Pervert's Guide to Cinema quotes

  • Slavoj Zizek: Joseph Stalin's favourite cinematic genre were musicals. Not only Hollywood musicals, but also Soviet musicals. There was a whole series of so-called kolkhoz musicals. Why? We should find this strange, Stalin who personifies communist austerity, terror and musicals. The answer again is the psychoanalytic notion of superego. Superego is not only excessive terror, unconditional injunction, demand of utter sacrifice, but at the same time, obscenity, laughter. And it is Sergei Eisenstein's genius to guess at this link. In his last film, which is a coded portrait of the Stalin era, Ivan the Terrible: Part 2, which because of all this was immediately prohibited. In the unique scene towards the end of the film, we see the Czar, Ivan, throwing a party, amusing himself, with his so-called Oprichniki, his private guards, who were used to torture and kill his enemies, his, if you want, KGB, secret police, are seen performing a musical. An obscene musical, which tells precisely the story about killing the rich boyars, Ivan's main enemies. So terror itself is staged as a musical. Now, what has all this to do with the reality of political terror? Isn't this just art, imagination? No. Not only were the political show trials in Moscow in the mid- and late-1930s theatrical performances, we should not forget this, they were well staged, rehearsed and so on. Even more, there is, horrible as it may sound, something comical about them. The horror was so ruthless that the victims, those who had to confess and demand death penalty for themselves and so on, were deprived of the minimum of their dignity, so that they behaved as puppets, they engaged in dialogues which really sound like out of Alice in Wonderland. They behaved as persons from a cartoon.

  • Slavoj Zizek: The problem is, "How do we know what we desire?" There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural, about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.