Visual Communication Blog: Entry 9

 The short film ‘Der Spiegel (2011)’, is a five-minute-long video shot in one continuous take. It takes place in a sparsely furnished apartment and follows a naked lady, surrounded by scantily-clad young women. The script presents text as a higher form of cultural literature and flows like Shakespearean prose through modern subtitles. Most dialogue is spoken in German and the film’s title translates to ‘The Mirror’, referencing both a popular weekly news magazine, and the only piece of furniture. The lady stands in front of this mirror and laments her age, “At the age of forty-two I feel like a sixteen-year-old girl – white and solid”, but the other women attack her appearance and viciously retort “Like pork in white wine”. Their degrading analogy likening her to a piece of meat shows how women are seen as objects for consumption, only serving to gratify men. She then hopes to impress her suitor, “Oh, he is here. I need to prepare. Stretch my skin like a lampshade”. This directly references post-war claims that Nazis had flayed Jewish prisoners and fashioned their skin into leather. Therefore, assuming the lady is a Jew explains why those narrating women described her as pork and wine, since Hitler who allegedly followed a vegetarian diet and abstained from alcohol, would have no interest in her courtship. When an English-speaking man arrives later, claiming to be her husband, he seems to confirm their religious faith, “So you want to kill me? Yes, wear your uniform. Kill the ugly, save the beauty, and call it justice.” Nevertheless, she rejects him and loses her sense of judgement, instead pandering towards an abusive German-speaking man.

 With a running time of 27 minutes, ‘Object (2016)’ is a much longer film and presented like a television episode. Featuring a Russian cast of hedonistic young adults, the story quickly establishes that a lone female is subservient to her patriarchal master and faces sexual abuse within moments of entering the room, “She is not a card. She means nothing in this game. Don’t try to use her against me.” When the girl responds with a surprisingly nonchalant attitude of applying lipstick whilst enduring this obscene treatment, we learn that their abusive behaviour is considered normal and they actively encourage further debasement, “I’ve got a present for you. Put it in your mouth. You can do whatever you want with her. I don’t care.” From these actions, we soon realise the video’s title is exploring traditional gender roles and playing with the various definitions of ‘object’, since this girl is completely ‘objectified’ by these men but incapable of ‘objecting’ to their misconduct, “Can you do me a favour?”, “Whatever you want…You are my natural owner. I live for you”, “You are mentally ill. Even better.” They further emphasise this by tying the girl up with a tray on her head, quite literally transformed into an object of furniture, and declaring her worthless, “The tray can stand without you.” The German filmmaker, Hito Steyerl (1966-) wrote about digital production in her essay ‘Too Much World (2013)’, and predicted that internet culture would continue eroding reality until they become indistinguishable from each other:

'Reality itself is postproduced and scripted, affect rendered as after-effect. Far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are in many cases just versions of each other. They are not equivalents however, but deficient, excessive, and uneven in relation to each other. And the gap between them gives way to speculation and intense anxiety.'

The cheaply improvised set, tacky music, and hollow characters turn this film into a slightly exaggerated but entirely stereotypical soap opera format. However, it heavily criticises modern television programmes that exploit people for views, “Pain is just another form of entertainment.” Despite her lamentable predicament, the girl knows that fighting against a historical status quo is futile since people are aware of injustice but prefer passive consumption over righteous action, “You can take it all from the TV guide, you don’t really need to watch it.” After leaving her to die, the men act like everything is normal and casually bathe together as the episode’s outro music rolls, “I know it doesn’t matter. It’s all just entertainment. You see nothing you hear nothing.”

 Based on a story by Julio Cortazar, ‘Les Ruissellements du Diable (2016)’ is a 10-minute film that translates from ‘The Devil’s Streams’ in French. The first scene opens with a solitary man watching television and apparently fantasising about the female reporter as atmospheric Japanese music, similar to an Akira Kurosawa soundtrack from ‘Seven Samurai (1954)’, lightly drifts in the background. We’re forced to watch a close-up shot of the man masturbating but it lacks any sexual sentimentality, instead feeling mechanical with a detached sense of melancholy. He develops photographs of a nearby park and catches details in enlarged negatives, directly referencing the plot of Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie, ‘Blow Up (1966)’. Another cultural nod occurs later when he sits in a dark lonely bar that looks highly reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s oil painting, ‘Nighthawks (1942)’. The surreal narrative intentionally plays with the viewer’s expectations by destabilising the traditional use of editing techniques until we become lost in a sophisticated loop of interpretation. The man’s identity is first questioned when he lifts a cigarette but sets it down with red lipstick marking the filter, and again with a shot of him lifting a coffee mug (decorated with Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Almond Blossoms (1890)’ print) before revealing the woman taking a sip. These clues suggest that we’re actually perceiving the man as a mere figment of the woman’s imagination. The two characters take turns narrating over each other and whilst discussing translation the film’s subtitles switch between English and French languages, thus breaking the fourth wall separating photography and television from reality. The visual technique of cyclical editing makes it difficult to tell what significance the woman’s wedding ring holds. However, the park photograph serves as a portal showing their happiness together, sitting on a bench and acting intimately, until a wine bottle spills over and smoothly leads us back into the apartment by using Foley sound effects to link the pouring liquid with a flowing kitchen tap. These post-modern themes of fragile memories and gendered identity are most apparent during a living room scene, carefully furnished with three key objects as metaphor: the television, the photograph, and a fish-tank contained inside a larger transparent glass box. We’re shown the man’s genitals as he masturbates before cutting straight to the woman, implying that she’s actually the one masturbating but, in a subversion of the usual ‘male gaze’, this act is not shown directly and only implied through visual cues from over her shoulder. Nevertheless, it’s purposefully left unclear which character is real and imagining the other, or whether they’re potentially both just two sides of an emotional past memory that’s being presented to us by a shared narrative device.

Reference List

Steyerl, H. (2013). Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead. [online] e-flux. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/ [Accessed 05 Jan. 2020].