Brechtian Cinemas by Nenad Jovanovic
Author:Nenad Jovanovic [Jovanovic, Nenad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438463650
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2017-07-15T05:00:00+00:00
Figure 4.3. An image of death in Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, Chartwell Artists, 1970). Digital frame enlargement.
Watkins appears well aware of the particular relevance of death and violence for the dichotomy between cinematic reality and actuality when he mentions the two motifs in a self-interview on Punishment Park. He charges the Monoform for âconfusing and deadening our capacity to distinguish between the superficial and the serious, between (for example) actual death and staged violenceâ (âPeter Watkins Self-Interviewâ). At first visually manifesting itself in mere stillness, death is exceedingly easy to simulate, which seems the reason that representations of death in mondo often provoke the question of genuineness.9 Yet the difference between the states of life and death is absolute and comparable to few other subjects commonly represented in cinema. A shot in a documentary film that depicts, say, a lion walking can only be successfully used as a platform from which to communicate via the voiceover or caption inaccurate information about the animal on condition that the image passes the viewerâs test for accuracy (i.e., the lion looks and moves like the other examples of the species in the viewerâs visual experience). Representations of human death invite the same procedure, but also frustrate its execution, as death in many cases lacks a distinctive visual appearance. Even so, mondo films treat death as a spectacle too, while the TV genre often quoted as its successor, the reality show,10 often despectacularizes its material. For example, The Osbournes (2002â2005) depicts the rock singer Ozzy Osbourne and his family in mundane, everyday, and banal situations, which recommend themselves as worthy of the viewerâs attention solely on account of the main protagonistâs preexisting stardom.
Reality TV began before the letter with An American Family (1973), which comprises twelve one-hour episodes about seven months in the lives of the Louds, an upper-middle-class family from Santa Barbara. Jean Baudrillard uses the example of the show in his Simulacra and Simulation (1981) to illustrate the argument that the connection between the referent of the image and reality has been severed in the postmodernity of late capitalism. The image now âhas no relation to any reality whatsoever,â and is âits own simulacrumâ (6)ââtruth that hides the fact that there is noneâ (1). While Baudrillardâs overall argument is questionable, his observation that An American Family abolishes the spectacular appears apt and relevant to invoke in connection to Punishment Park, as a film that constructs its realism along the lines of the TV show. A case in point is the lawn party sequence, which shows the hosts and their guests laughing, drinking, and exchanging muffled and incomprehensible words. Watching the cuts that mark the sequenceâs ellipses, one has difficulties imagining how the deleted images and sounds could be less engaging than the ones that made it to the cut. If this is TV vérité, as Baudrillard calls it, evoking the strain of documentary filmmaking that inspired the show, and if An American Familyâcontrary to Baudrillardâs argumentâcan still successfully claim its ties to the real, then the real is disappointingly sparse.
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