I dont know — it raises the question of what a “performance” actually does….what is it? The audience knows its not watching *real life*, so you arent really trying to duplicate reality, but rather an actor is performing and doing so in a very particular context….theatre or film….and they are different I think.

So this brings up back to narrative. The sense in which they are props is the result, partly, of a truncated narrative…..and of a highly reductive created world.

Ok, ii guess i gotta go look at that previous post

Oh, and the adorno is form Aesthetic Theory.

what you say here makes me think of noir and its nouvelle vague antecedents, where there is what one might call a dramatization of blankness, sometimes played with in manipulative ways with nonprofessionals (like antonioni in zabriskie point). maybe the contemporary inheritor of this is ‘hipster’ stuff like wes anderson, or mumblecore, where the tone is self-conscious, light absurdity meant to be suggestive of the earlier types but ‘without making a big deal about it.’

but in the movies i’m talking about here the loss of compassion or loss of affect isn’t even an issue, the actors are just tools, props as chabert puts it in the comments to my last post.

Brando for example — and what he was doing was actually nothing at all like what most *method* actors do. The question is the form — is film form, in some sense anyway.

I agree that the new loss of affect (and here one should sample Songs From the Second Floor, by swedish director Roy Anderson)….is pure marketing, but then an Anderson was trained in TV commercials….and Chiatt Day perfected this style. When it reaches a Hartley (and more than a few others) we have a slightly different intent. Its simply now just a blankness…..meant to not fill anything. Buster Keaton’s blankness was melancholy……..but the new blankness (as it were) is about non-intention. Its not reaction, its nothing. Its loss of affect I guess, literally.

Again however, if you go back a ways and look at good film actors, Spencer Tracy for example. He *does* very little…..and in a sense Brando does very little too….but in a much more romantic and theatrical way. Tracey, or Robert Ryan, these guys were pure film actors. They didnt look to dissapear into their roles……(which Ledger does by the way) but they were playing themselves somehow. What happened though was the rise of a techological chauvenism — robo cop or terminator — but even dirty harry……where the intent was to be less than human, the loss of affect was loss of compassion.

Im rambling here……and I need to think on this…..

” Deep down and contrary to its better judgement, the bourgeois character tends to cling to what is inferior: it is fundamental to ideology that it is never fully believed and that it advances from self disdain to self destruction. The semi educated consciousness insists on the ‘I like that’ — laughing with cynical embarrasment at the fact that cultural trash is expressly made to dupe the consumer…
…the dominant consciousness is objectively led to this dank attitude because the adminsitered must renounce the possibility of maturity, including aesthetic maturity…

…the critical concept of society which inheres in authentic artworks without needing to be added to them, is incompatible with what society must think of itself if it is to continue as it is….the ruling consciousness cannot free itself from its own ideology without endangering society’s self preservation. This confers social relevance on apparently derivative aesthetic controversies.”

“In artworks, the forces of production are not in themselves different from social productive forces except by their by their constitutive absenting from real power. Scarcely anything is done or produced in artworks that does not have its model, however latent, in social production.”

you can see he’s all the bloggers as well as all the mainstream critics really want to talk about, what bothers me is when he’s used to make the film seem better than it is, when he’s just fed into the by-the-numbers fake-political readings or the psychoanalysis or whatever else, and the power of his performance is employed to legitimize all these creaky old constructs, whether academic or propagandistic. i would defend the performance but not the movie in any sense.

his ‘nihilism’ as i’m going to label it for now — and it has to be separated from the character of the joker — is interesting when it’s directed against legitimacy, or maybe cultural capital (describing this really badly) and boring when the badly written character takes over and it’s given the form of a general denial of everything, which serves as a transparent cover for the joker’s megalomania (a perverse sort of fake populism).

i have to say when watching i thought to myself, this performance is really something but trying to analytically extricate it from this terrible machine it’s attached to doesn’t seem worth the effort.

i want to think on this a bit. I agree both you and chabert have pointed up a contradiction of sorts in what Im trying to express. But maybe I can try to find another way to talk about it.

Lets take the Doomsday films….and there are a lot of them. If we say the older ones expressed this fear, this anxiety, that individuals had about the cold war, or whatever, this is something that the filmmakers and studios picked up on and sort of exploited. They , the films, were expressions of a general anxiety out there, as the studio saw it. But I think we have to look at the the entire mass culture now, and how it operates. The way that an audience in the 1970s and in 2008 differ.

Today the saturation of product is so total and so relentless, and we have a generation or two where such saturation has effected the very way people interpret narrative. Chabert and I touched on how truncated narrative has become. I see this all the time, and if you look at a film from 1947 you see a complexity in narrative, just to focus on that, that is by and large missing today. So, ok, this saturation of corporate media keeps repeating certain themes, and establishes certain frames for how to look at everything…..certainly the current Russian/Georgian conflict is being *spun* a certain way, and it establishes the base line — as chabert said on her blog, after only a week its now almost impossible for a journalist to deviate from the official story.

Well, these official stories exist in all kinds of ways. Im really interested in narrative; how we tell ourselves stories, how we narrative our lives to ourselves and others. And how society tells *us* stories. The master discourse as it were, but also the personal. So today, a filmmaker decides to write a Doomsday film — his frame, if he’s under 40, and maybe even if he’s older, has been established more rigidly than the director from 1970. He has been brought up with more corporate storytelling, and with less education of a type that would provide for the ability to develop more complext stories.

Now i see this in students at the film school constantly. A total lack of literay background, and hence a dependency on pop culture and it bromides and abbreviated stories. Anyway, this director writes a film, a Doomsday scenario, and it will be framed in some kind of manner that has been shaped by this corporate media world he has grown up in. But what really interests me is that even with that, (and again i see this with students) other things enter the narrative………expressions of a personal sexual pathology, or expressions of unconscious repressed matterial, etc. So that if we stick with dark knight….a really bad film….badly shot, badly written, and yet a heath ledger, playing a character badly written and badly conceived, still somehow invests it with a creepy personal quality of unhealth, of anal-sadistic pathology — something uncanny almost…..that is actually, to my mind, seperate from the textual *Joker*. So what is this? Well, lets just say its Ledger’s unconscious, or semi conscious personal interpretation of comic book figures, of authority, or of just his own unease with himself. Who knows. Im not his shrink. But this wierd peformance then tilts the meaning of the film, Nolan responds to it, Bale does, and the Dp does — all these tiny adjustments, and soon the film takes on something of an expression of the time in which its been made.

So, does it *reflect* the outside world? well, only in the way Im trying to describe, as it also adheres closely to the studio formula, and to the DC/Marvell world view.

But even the studio formula has a dialectical relationship with its product. The unease in some of its product will cause this or that to happen. All Im saying is that to say its *only* a dumb high school fantasy, and only Nolan talking to his class, rather simplifies the whole complex process of pop culture.

Let me add, i dont see why someone like Nolan couldnt, in theory, despite his background, speak to other issues. In his case, though, I dont think he does, nor can. He is a singularly limited filmmaker.

Ok, i want to think more on this. Adapting a cormac mccarthy novel…..my favorite in fact, by a pair of profoundly middle brow filmmakers, still somehow becomes something interesting……to me anyway. Notwithstanding its corporate financing.

Relations of production are crucially important, but they do not totally define the parameters of what a film is doing.

I want to touch on sentimentality too…………..an ever present trope for american art……….and something that only works in the most reductive narrative worlds. You almost cant have something be sentimental if the narrative becomes too complex….if characters becomes seperated from their formula even a tiny bit.

ok, but enough for me……..for now anyway. and patrick, hi, nice to run into you again.

It’s similar to what she does with the Zizek bashing. Who cares what he says, argues for, writes: he’s not like approved by Angela Davis style apparatchiks (that said LCC’s obviously has certain unique talents–sybilline one might say— far exceeding most of us).