Anomaly1 wrote:Great films manipulate you in such a way you don't even realize it's happening. I can't account for anyone else's reviews, but when I use the word "manipulative" to describe a film, I'm describing where this process has fallen apart, where the actions of the filmmaker become obvious to my eyes.
The distinction being described here corresponds to the difference between analysis and synthesis, in the sense of analysis as what breaks things into their constituent parts so that they can be understood in terms of the mechanics of the operation, if I can put it like that, whereas synthesis is the perceptual operation through which these operational parts function as if they were a unified whole. When we speak in everyday conversation, our relationship to language is mostly, in these terms, synthetic, a continuous flow and exchange of meaning. When we learn grammar, we analyse language in terms of its constituent parts. Of course, in the complex reality of existence, the analytical knowledge we possess can always intrude into our synthetic approach to language-use.
The same distinction can be applied to all forms of perceptual apprehension: when we look at the world about us, for example, our stereoscopic vision puts together two separate images from two different perspectives and synthesises them into a single image, even though, "geometrically" speaking, this is strictly impossible. But if we look out of one eye and then the other, we can break this down into its constituent images, which enables us to think about, that is, analyse, the process involved in this synthetic composition. We can do so because the process falls apart.
This is equally true for aesthetic objects of all kinds, such as music, paintings, television and cinema. The composer who writes music relies on an analytical understanding of music to be able to construct pieces of music that we hear synthetically. But if we, the audience for that music, have an education in music, then we are able to bring to our synthetic apprehension of music an analytical appreciation of its composition. This is, precisely, a question of skills acquired in education. Similarly, when we read literature, we can always, to a greater or lesser degree, understand the novel not just synthetically as a narrative whole whose story we follow along line by line, but analytically, and the reason we can do so is that to be
able to read, we must also be able, in some way, to write. We must, in other words, have some analytical understanding of writing, without which we cannot read, and which always means that the writing itself can intrude into our perception as the subject of analytic judgments.
Writing, in other words, depends on a certain level of overlap between the producer of the writing and the consumer, an overlap in terms of the relationship between the analysis required to produce writing and the synthesis involved in consuming it. The invention of cinema and television does not involve this overlap in anything like the same way. It is possible to consume television and cinema synthetically with almost no analytical understanding of the operations required to produce the program or the movie. Most cinema is
premised on the idea that the intention should always be to have an audience synthetically "immersed" in the experience of consuming the film. An appreciation of cinema that involves analytic capabilities is possible only through an education that succeeds in drawing the viewer's attention to the analytical operations that lie behind the synthetic apprehension of the whole (but, as an aside, the much greater ease of use and ability to access film
making that has arisen with
digital video somewhat tends to, once again, make consumers more like producers, and so, at least a little, encourages the acquisition of analytical capacities).
In theatre, the systematic attempt to use theatre itself to conduct this education is what Brecht attempted to achieve through the utilisation of "alienation devices" that "distance" the audience from the play and hence make possible a kind of demystifying de-synthesisation. For Brecht, this aesthetic counter-effect was a political virtue that placed the audience into an active, that is, analytical, relation to the art object. It can be contrasted, for example, with Wagner's goal of creating an operatic
Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, that would overwhelm the viewer and induce complete synthetic immersion for the audience: absolute mystification (of course, this does not mean that the worshipful, cult-like audiences at Bayreuth are simply hypnotised fools, given that they may well possess, through dint of years of obsessional effort, analytical capacities in relation to music that most likely outstrip the equivalent capacities possessed by many cinephiles in relation to cinema).
Most cinema corresponds to the Wagnerian imperative rather than Brecht's, but not all, and perhaps no cinema can ever absolutely achieve Wagner's aim. Syberberg's
Hitler – A Film from Germany is an explicit attempt to create an impossible cinematic marriage between Wagner and Brecht that retains the virtues of both: to absolutely immerse the viewer in the affective power of synthetic apprehension, as a means of making the viewer "see" and "feel" the mystifying power and sweep of culture that led to the catastrophe that absolutely demands of us, those who come after this catastrophe, that we apply the sharpest analytical insights in order to take apart the mechanics of this affective power. The intention of the film, which is to explore, as deeply as possible, the sources and meaning of the Hitler phenomenon, is matched by an equally profound reflection on what it is to watch a movie, both analytically and synthetically. This is why, despite the artificial theatricality of the low-budget production, I said in my review of this film that it is "the most audacious cinematic experiment of all time", because it "attempts to do the most that can be done on celluloid".
For me, von Trier is also clearly trying to marry analytic and synthetic characteristics. He wants the audience to feel the power cinema has to draw the viewer into an affective universe: unlike Brecht, and more like Syberberg, he does not think that "alienation" is enough for the viewer to understand the world around them, because if the audience is left with only a sense of the "mechanics" of ideology, for example, then they will not understand how this
also applies to them. But at the same time, I do not at all think that von Trier simply wants to manipulate without any conscious awareness of the machinery he uses to achieve this manipulation: it is not accidental, not just a failure of synthesis, that means the audience becomes aware of being manipulated. If the "process has fallen apart", this is absolutely the filmmaker's intention.
A classical example is the final shot of
Breaking the Waves: many "rational" viewers find the shot of the bells to be the last straw in von Trier's religious manipulation of the audience. I believe such responses are totally off the mark, but also show what the filmmaker is doing: this utterly kitschy moment is there to produce a conflict in the audience, to draw them in at the same time as giving them a feeling of wanting to resist or break into a laugh (which is a form of resistance...to synthesis, precisely), not just, as in Brecht, so that they see the mechanics behind theologico-political ideology, but so that they may become unsure about the dogmatic certainties they hold about certain kinds of oppositions (between the secular and the religious, for example, or the clever and the stupid, or the body and the soul, or the rational and the irrational, or the mundane and the ultramundane).
For von Trier, as he has said, a good film should be like a stone in your shoe: this is an extremely mundane virtue, to disturb and disrupt your outlook, which means, your outlook upon the film itself, the way you come at the movie, but it is also ultramundane, an attempt to draw your attention to the inescapability of something more mysterious. This mysteriousness is not just something cosmological, not just the "oceanic" feeling Freud described when absorbing the awe-inspiring immensity of the cosmos, but a mysteriousness belonging to the mystagogical character of the work of art, and of the work done by the work of art. Because work, more than anything, means the use of energy to effect a transformation.
Of course, that doesn't mean you have to like von Trier.