Can a camera do more than capture reality?
Can it see beyond the surface of how things look, to how they feel?
We're taking a look at some of cinema's best distortions to see how movies can
exceed visual stenography.
These are our picks for the top ten best examples of subjectivity on film.
(Music)
What is subjectivity in cinema?
We're not just talking about a POV shot here.
This wouldn't be a very interesting list if we just focus on what it
looked like to see from the point of view of a character's eyes.
No, subjectivity is more about creating the experience of what it's like to think
out of a character's mind.
How do filmmakers render an experience through a distorted human lens?
How can they use clever camera and effects and CGI and lighting and editing and
sound to film something more akin to the mental representation of event
rather than the physical one?
Let's kick it off with a simple example so we can find our footing.
(Sound) First up, we're looking at films that present
a cinematic version of an altered state of awareness.
Maybe a normal day, in a normal state of mind gets a normal scene, but
something has happened to make a character experience the world abnormally, and
we're along for the ride.
Maybe it's a sense of expanded brain power, as in 'Limitless',
or the heightened cognition of genius as in 'Sherlock Holmes'.
Maybe it's going deaf as in 'The Life and Loves of Beethoven' or
just a heightened fixation on the word knife as in 'Blackmail'.
It can be the ability to see ghosts, Matrix vision or
one ring based invisibility.
However, for our number ten pick,
we've got to give it to Spielberg's take on shell shock from 'Saving Private Ryan'.
(Sound)
- What the hell do we do now, sir?
- 'Saving Private Ryan' is known for its uber real aesthetic.
Legend has it that veterans walked out of the theater in mass for fear of setting
off their PTSD with its realistic portrayal of the Normandy landing.
But is that word, real, really the right one?
This right here, this is what World War II really looked like.
This is an actual documenting of reality.
But it's a far cry from 'Saving Private Ryan' and it's so
real you can almost taste it feeling.
And that's because when these veterans say real they're not talking about accurate,
about documentary level veracity.
They're talking about capturing the real essence of it, the real emotion,
the real feelings and senses and
overall impressions that come from living a moment.
And those don't come from capturing an objective reality.
They come from capturing a human experience.
It takes an obsessive dedication to cataloguing the emotional experience and
then translating it to film and techniques on a micro and a macro scale.
(Sound) Now if you're not getting the whole subjective versus
objective thing yet, no worries.
We're about to look at some of the clearest examples possible in our number
nine with hallucinations.
Is that person, that thing,
that terrifying beast really there in the film's version of the real world?
No, but we're seeing it as if it were,
because that's what the character's brain is doing to them.
Think 'The Shining', or 'Throne of Blood', or 'Swiss Army Man', or 'Altered States',
or pretty much anything made by Kronenberg.
We love 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and 'Odd Man Out' but for
our number nine pick, we've got to give it to 'Fight Club'.
- Tyler's not here.
Tyler went away.
Tyler's gone.
- What? - This is impossible.
- No.
- This is crazy.
- People do it every day.
They talk to themselves, they see themselves as they'd like to be.
They don't have the courage you have, to just run with it.
- Yeah, we know, we know.
This pick is about as basic as a pumpkin kale spice American Apparel scoop
neck latte, but who are we kidding?
It's one of the best ongoing hallucinations ever committed to film,
it poses subjectivity as reality.
The camera tricking the audience like the narrator's eyes trick him.
There's no tilt shift lens or crazy colors, just a man who isn't really
there and the brilliant writing, blocking and staging necessary to persuade.
Throw in some bonus points for some super heavy foreshadowing with these single
frame flashes and "Tyler" as the narrator revealed (Bleep) at the end and
you've got yourself one hell of a trip.
For our number eight we're looking at different films' representations of
the experience of mental illness, not just what someone looks like when they've got
one but what it feels like to be inside.
And a lot of times this means hallucinations too,
from 'A Beautiful Mind' to 'The Machinist'.
To 'Shutter Island', to 'The Tenant', to 'Kotoko', but
there's more to mental illness on screen than just seeing things that don't exist.
'Black Swan's' also got a great take on obsession and compulsion.
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' at madness, 'Spider' at psychosis,
'Martha May Marcy Marlene' at PTSD and paranoia, and 'Synecdoche,
New York' at hypochondria.
And for our number eight pick, we love 'Clean Shaven' for
it's licit at schizophrenia.
- (Inaudible)
(Noise)
- 'Clean Shaven' is one of
the most incredible uses of subjective sound ever put to images.
Their contrast is brilliant, their lack of grounding often terrifying.
The rift between what we hear and
what we see is a constant reminder that something is all in our head.
Although this makes the experience no more comforting.
Director Carrigan set out to show the audience the sounds, the feelings,
the paranoia, the anxiety of real schizophrenia.
More than just a plot device or cool third act twist,
he uses his film making for empathy, for insight and
for a chance to experience something most people never will.
Along the same lines another incredibly common use of the subjective lens is for
character intoxication.
Cinema's got a long history of showing what it's like
to get (Bleep) with occasionally suspicious accuracy.
They could be drunk as in 'Lock Stock' or 'Mean Streets'.
On ecstasy as in 'Black Swan', 'The 25th Hour', 'Human Traffic' or 'Garden State'.
Heroin as in 'Killing Them Softly' and 'Drug Store Cowboy'.
Cocaine as in 'Chopper'.
LSD as in 'Easy Rider'.
DMT as in 'Enter the Void'.
Or even some made up craziness as in 'Dredd', 'Batman Begins' and
'Young Sherlock Holmes'.
For our number seven pick we don't think anyone's done piss out of their mind like
'Apocalypse Now'.
(Music)
Here, Coppola and his team used dissolves, fades, super positions, morphing sights
and sounds and disorientation to create a sense of being out of your mind drunk.
It presents a man with fractured thoughts on a screen with fractured images.
It has all the continuity of a blackout, all the visual stability of the spins.
And we havent had much of an opportunity yet to talk about music.
But this is as good a chance as we'll ever get.
Music in the score and in the soundtrack is one of the most ubiquitous examples of
subjectivity in film.
Obviously the score isn't reality, most often it's used to steer how we feel at
any given moment, and when that steering is used to nudge us closer to
the experience of a character, well, you get something like this.
(Music)
Next up in number six we're looking at how characters imaginations can alter
the world around them.
How the stories they tell can seep into their realities until
they're living in them.
Think 'Atonement', 'The Fall', 'Finding Neverland', 'Amelie', 'Pen's Labyrinth',
'The Usual Suspects' and 'A Monster Calls'.
They're beautiful,
colorful, larger than life constructions of pure "Willy Wonka" madness,
but if there's a film that exemplifies all that and more, it's got to be 'Big Fish'.
- In telling the story of my father's life,
it's impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth.
(Music)
The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me.
(Music)
It doesn't always make sense, and most of it never happened.
(Music)
- Big Fish is an exploration of the fissures between what we believe,
what we say, and what really is or was.
Alternating between the neutral colored world of reality, and the soft,
vibrant glow of myth, 'Big Fish' sees a relationship repaired through stories.
Sees imagination shift and revise with new detail.
Explores its roots in truth.
It is a love letter to the imagination, to the power and advantage of exaggeration,
to the intimacy of shared myth, and for that we love it.
(Sound) Take imagination, add in a dash of wish fulfilment and
you've got our next slot, fantasy.
Characters envision a world in the shape of their hidden desires and
then the film allows them to physically dwell in it as they do.
Think 'Brazil' or 'Toto le Heros' or 'The Basketball Diaries'.
Think 'One Hour Photo', or 'Unfaithfully Yours', or 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High'.
It happens in 'American Beauty', 'La La Land', and beautifully in '8 1/2'.
But for our number five pick, were giving it to 'The Last Temptation Of Christ'.
(Noise)
- Why have you forsaken me?
(Sound) - Here
again we have subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.
Scorsese playing with what is and is not real with both his characters and us.
But the justification and execution here are absolutely perfect.
it's an opportunity for "Jesus" to grapple with his desires, his doubts.
It moves through time in a heightened too good to be true manner.
The camera floats, the angel coos, the wedding he is looking onto is his own.
Wedding becomes love making, becomes pregnancy, becomes old age, becomes death.
With a chronological approach, more akin to a daydream then a day today.
>From a start to finish it is one of the most ambitious, misleading and
controversial examples of fantasy that cinema has ever envisioned.
(Music)
Next up at number four, we've got a blockbusting category that hardly needs
explanation, the dream sequence.
And there's more of these than you can shake an imaginary stick at.
But our favorites include 'Gold Rush', 'Sherlock Jr',
'Waltz with Bashir', obviously 'Inception', 'Kagemusha', and 'Vertigo'.
'Spellbound' is an incredible collabo between Hitchcock and Dahli.
But for our dream pick, we don't even have a choice.
That's right mother (Bleep), we're going with 'The Mirror.'
(Music)
- Mama.
- A chance to talk about Tarkovsky, you say?
Well I don't mind if we do.
Pretty much every film he's ever shot has a world-class dream sequence.
>From 'The Mirror' to 'Solaris' to 'Stalker' to 'Nostalgia' and on and on.
Space and time and sense are all fractured, but subtly and
in ways that are difficult to pinpoint.
Such that it seems real and
it almost feels real in a misleading way that dreams often do.
Weaving together bits of memories, and visuals, and
emotions into a tapestry of the subconscious, of childhood, and mother,
and home, and future, and death, and now.
(Noise) Of course, where there are dreams there are nightmares.
Well, we could pick an artsy-fartsy existential nightmare to follow up our
dream pic, like 'Wild Strawberries' or 'A Serious Man' or maybe a David Lynch flick.
We're just gonna go ahead and pick something that's scary as (Bleep).
And that puts us in the realm of 'Aliens' and 'Trainspotting' and
'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Carrie' and 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and like
the entirety of 'Jacob's Ladder', although I guess that's more of a hallucination.
But who's counting?
'The Fly' is creepy as hell.
But for our number three pick, the nightmare that really made us have to
change our pants was in 'An American Werewolf in London'.
(Sound)
- Ladies and gentleman.
- That's right folks, only here at Cinifix can you get a black and
white Russian art flick followed by a Nazi werewolf rampage, but we're no elitist.
Just like 'The Mirror' is brilliantly emotional and
beautiful, this nightmare is crazy and terrifying and fun all at once.
With some solid jump scares and an excellent dream within a dream fake out,
this sequence is great for the exact same reasons as Tarkovsy's.
It slightly blurs the line between dreaming and waking.
Rendering impossible to tell the difference between fantasy and
reality placing us in a space of reality questioning that any good nightmare can
cause before collapsing us into the terror our minds can create.
Closing in at number two, we wanna take a quick stop off at the the premonition,
a flash-forward that occurs not just to the audience, but
to the characters as well.
You can find them in 'Lord of the Rings,' 'Donnie Darko,' 'Arrival,' 'Mr.
Nobody,' every single silly-ass 'Final Destination,' 'Minority Report,' 'The
Shining,' 'Don't Look Now,' and our favorite, 'Take Shelter.'
(Music)
(Sound) Of course people who've seen this film might disagree with our
categorization here.
Does it belong in premonition or dreams?
Maybe hallucination?
Maybe mental illness?
Is this what the doubt and dread and alienation of craziness feels like or
a realistic take on prophecy in the modern age?
'Take Shelter' comes with no clear answers, but
that's kind of the point isn't it?
Much like "Curtis's" inability to differentiate between what might happen,
what is happening and what he's imagining.
The images on screen can't tell either.
And finally at number one,
we're finishing out our list of mental objects made visible with memory.
Far more than a simple flash back, cinematic memories can twist,
turn, fold back on themselves, select, omit, enhance and
distort much like those of the human mind.
Culminating in a look at not just how things were, but
at how they feel like they were.
Memories on screen run the gamut from 'The Bourne Identity' to 'Tree of Life',
from 'The Manchurian Candidate' to 'Citizen Kane'.
'Memento' to 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' to 'The Deathly Hallows' to
'Casablanca' to 'The Pawn Broker'.
'The Sweet Hereafter', 'Silence of the Lambs', 'American Beauty',
and god 'Rashomon'.
We've already hit our daily Tchaikovsky quota, so for
our top slot we're going to turn to one of our other favorite directors of memory.
Allen Renee, with 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour'.
- (Foreign)
(Music)
(Foreign)
(Music)
(Foreign) - It
is a beautiful act of remembering, of memory itself, of its details.
Its flaws and more than just memory it is a look at trauma, both personal trauma and
the global shared trauma of the masses in the wake of horrific events.
"Hiroshima's" memories are silent.
They slip into frame seamlessly and without sound.
In this way, they feel woven into the present, hardly separate.
It is nostalgic, pensive, revolutionary.
It invites you into memory and guides you to reminiscence.
It is an entire meditation on what it means to remember and
a beautiful letter to our past, which is why it's our pick for
the best use of subjectivity of all time.
(Music)
So what do you think?
Do you disagree with any of our picks?
Any other subjective moments you think are worth a mention?
Ideas for our next ep?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.
(Music)