Another Brecht in the (Fourth) Wall

My favorite section from Baudry piece: "Fabricated by the model of the camera obscura, it permits the construction of an image analogous to the perspective projections developed during the Italian Renaissance." We're not just attempting to recreate reality with cinema--we're attempting to recreate Renaissance art which was attempting to recreate reality. So behind the times...

Cinema is deceit. I think that is what bothers the theorists so much. Why is it so darn popular when we all know what we're watching is make-believe? The absence of truth in what is otherwise a compelling medium creates a dichotomy that is unanswerable. Metz and Baudry's approaches ignore the agency of the viewer. We make the decision to suspend disbelief. Even with a horror film that creates a chemical reaction in our bodies anyone with an ounce of concentration can remove themselves from the experience and wake up to reality. If this is all happening completely automatically either by the film's correlation to our dreams or the specific image-processing parts of our brain (the "machine") then I am absolutely certain that breaking the fourth wall would lead to disastrous consequences for the viewer. 

Woody Allen in Annie Hall breaking the fourth wall (around the 2:00 mark)

Annie Hall won Best Picture (a very rare event for a comedy) for 1977. 

Whenever Brecht comes up, I always think back to my Senior year in undergrad here at Georgetown when I took a class with Derek Goldman called "Adaptation and Performance of Literature" while also acting his his play about the Anne Frank story "Right as Rain." I was uninitiated in Brechtian thoughts on performance and the relationship between an audience and a play (which I also believe is applicable to cinema). Derek created a non-linear story about Anne Frank and her family and friends. All the actors spoke directly to the audience throughout (even during dialogue). Cameras were used along with projectors to display dream-like images on screens behind the action and to re-project what was happening onstage. And during all this, audience members would comment during "talk-backs" that "the story felt so real. It was like I was living through this nightmare alongside these people." 

Continuing on my tangent, while reading I kept thinking back on the film "The Visitor" (Richard Jenkins was nominated for a best actor award for that film this year). The film is one of the most realistic films I have ever seen. There is very little music, the dialogue is all exhaustingly natural (and not "natural" like some writers have used to describe their very unnatural dialogue) and the camera sort of sits around like you are just another person in the room or on the street.

How can we compare the psychological processes we are using for one performance versus the other? One is clearly working from the perspective of a dream, hoping to tap into the visual and trance-like world we experience in our sleep. The other believes that by replicating scenes we might see in the most naturalistic setting (not in a classic neo-realism manner, however) we might be fooled into feeling like we've entered a familiar place, our day-to-day reality.

And it wouldn't be a blog post if I didn't bring in some Kubrick. What about combining these approaches? A dream-like real world. "Eyes Wide Shut"

I guess I continue to be frustrated by where theory has taken us. We have completely left the film and remain with the viewer. I want to go back and forget the greater psychological and philosophical problems for awhile. Isn't that the point of film? A little escapism from our minds? Can we make "Watchmen" the unofficial homework for our non-existent class next week?