New to the Kubrick Site - The Cinema of the Brain!
Rod Munday
Cinema's Los Angeles correspondent, Bill Krohn's, analysis of "Full
Metal Jacket," where he compares the workings of the trainee platoon
in the film to those of a human brain
"The best answer I have seen to the perennial critical quarrel about
whether Kubrick is a humanist is Gilles Deleuze's observation that all
of Kubrick's films portray the world as a brain, one fated to
malfunction from both internal and external causes. This surprising
insight will at least permit us to do justice to the strangeness of
Full Metal Jacket, where the little world of the training camp on
Parris Island is portrayed as a brain made up of human cells thinking
and feeling as one, until its functioning is wrecked first from
within, when a single cell, Pyle, begins ruthlessly carrying out the
directives of the death instinct that programs the organ as a whole,
and then from without by the Tet Offensive, the external
representation of the same force."
This is an observation that was echoed by Peter Tonguette in the
newsgroup discussion on FMJ on the Kubrick site (The Jungian Thing:
Duality in "Full Metal Jacket"), and by David Kirkpatrick in comparing
the paths of the maze in "The Shining" to the contours on the surface
of the human brain. Bill Krohn in making his brain comparison
references the observations of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in
his book "Cinema 2, The Time Image." I have included the relevant
except form this book, Deleuze extents the metaphor into an intriguing
argument that divides the work of prominent cinema directors into film
that are of the body and films that are of the brain. The best
introduction to Deleuze's ideas is again found in Krohn's essay:
"Deleuze discusses Kubrick in the second volume of Cinema, his
comprehensive classification of film images and signs, initially as
signing him to one of the two stylistic camps into which he divides
modern cinema, the cinema of the body (for example, Godard,
Cassavetes) and the cinema of the brain (for example, Resnals,
Kubrick). Deleuze's description of what is specifically modern in
Resnais and Kubrick – as opposed to Eisenstein, who uses a classical
model of the brain structured by processes of integration and
differentiation – is based on philosopher of Science Gilbert
Simondon's speculation that "the properties of living matter are
manifested as the maintenance ...of certain topological properties,
much more than of pure energetic or structural properties," which
leads Simondon to propose a non-Euclidian model of living organisms
where "the functions of integration and differentiation are a function
of a meta-stable asymmetry between an absolute interlority and
exteriorlty' […] So the cinema of the brain is not just one type of
film in Deleuze's taxonomy of modern cinema – it represents the whole
terrain to be mapped. This means that the films of Resnais and
Kubrick, which take this new organic model as their subject, are
exemplary. By dispersing its narrative and making classical narrative
one element in a structure that implements another logic, "Full Metal
Jacket," like any modern film, is exploring the cerebral processes
that found the new aesthetic of [the temporal image]; but by
portraying as parts of a brain the stock characters of a genre that
could stand for all of classical cinema, and having them act out the
breakdown of semimotor connections that give rise to "pure optical and
aural situations," Kubrick is staging, in a peculiarly literal way, an
allegory of modern cinema."
Regards, Rod Munday
David Kirkpatrick
Interesting. This makes the poster for Full Metal Jacket all the more
appropriate. The helmet is a full metal jacket for the brain. It also
sharpens the significance of the opening head shaving montage and
suggests a new interpretation of the Mickey Mouse song. Mickey is a lab
rat for a psychology experiment. (And that's just the frame!)
Imperialism is a war for hearts and minds -- and confirmed kills.
An implication that Krohn does not explore is the whole metaphor of "the
group mind" raises the theme of corporatism. Kubrick's realism is as
important as his symbolism because it reminds us that "an army of one"
is not just a fantasy, but a program. The very art of reducing
sociology down to psychology says something about the sociological
reality of the era.
I look forward to digesting the Deleuze when I have the time. Thanks
Rod for this addition to the site!
David
Matthew Kirkcaldie
Rod Munday
> Where are these essays on the site? Had a look, couldn't find 'em.
Sorry, I forgot to include the URL. But, hey, everyone here should
know the address of the Kubrick Site natch :-)
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/
the essays are in the "essays and articles" section and can be
identified by the "new" graphic next to them.
regards, Rod
Padraig L Henry
wrote:
Just some quick remarks about Krohn's article on FMJ.
The first point that might be tentatively suggested is that Deleuze,
writing back in the early-1980s, was metaphorically classifying
*modernist* cinema according to the complementary dualism of "brain"
cinema and "body" cinema (complementary because both classifications
are evident in the cinema of Antonioni, for instance). So, Deleuze
therefore goes on to contrast such a cinema with *classical* cinema
(eg Eisenstein, Griffith, Ford etc), the unambiguous cinema of
forward-thrusting linear and paternalist narratives. Of course, such a
modernist cinema is now largely past; since the early-1980s film has
largely moved - regressed or retrofutured - to a post-modernist cinema
(which is why Eyes Wide Shut met with such critical contempt at the
time of its release) --- there is today no major international
film-maker (apart from the few mentioned, like the aging Godard or
Antonioni or Rivette; but certainly no emerging ones) who could be
described as utterly modernist, at least of the non-linear "brain"
cinema variety ... all of Deleuze's cited film-makers were
progressively modernist eg. Kubrick, Antonioni, Cassavettes, along
with "the unevocable in Welles, the undecidable in Resnais, the
inexplicable in Robbe-Grillet, the incommensurable in Godard, the
unreconcilable in the Straubs, the impossible in Marguerite Duras, the
irrational in Syberberg."
Secondly, Krohn's otherwise excellent analysis of FMJ appears to be
mis-appropriating Deleuze's original intent in his classification:
Krohn takes Deleuze's "brain" cinema classification as a metaphor for
FMJ's military institution, for the group of marine recruits and
military hierarchy, each recruit serving essentially as a potentially
unstable neuron requiring integration. Unless I'm missing something,
does this seem misleading? Deleuze's classification refers -
literally - to the whole mise en scene of a film, a cerebral cinema
whose narrative structure is resolutely non-linear, and reflects a
view of the entire world as a brain, subject to explosive forces from
inside and from outside. For instance, Deleuze argued "If we look at
Kubrick’s work, we see the degree to which it is the brain which is
mise-en-scene. Attitudes of body achieve a maximum level of violence,
but they depend on the brain. For, in Kubrick, the world itself is a
brain, there is identity of brain and world, as in the great circular
and luminous table in Doctor Strangelove, the giant computer in 2001 A
Space Odyssey, the Overlook hotel in The Shining ... The identity of
world and brain, the automaton, does not form a whole, but rather a
limit, a membrane which puts an outside and an inside in contact,
makes them present to each other, confronts them or makes them clash."
Third, there are certainly both classical and modernist elements in
Kubrick's work, especially if we were to take Deleuze's distinctions
between the two into account. For example, his description of the
workings of classical cinema would apply to much of Kubrick's work up
to 2001: "In this respect, we can return to the great difference
between classical cinema and modern cinema. The so-called classical
cinema works above all through linkage of images, and subordinates
cuts to this linkage. On the mathematical analogy, the cuts which
divide up two series of images are rational, in the sense that they
constitute either the final image of the first series, or the first
image of the second. This is the case of the ‘dissolve’ in its various
forms. But even when there is a pure optical cut, and likewise when
there is false continuity, the optical cut and the false continuity
function as simple lacunae, that is, as voids which are still motor,
which the linked images must cross. In short, rational cuts always
determine commensurable relations between series of images, and
thereby constitute the whole rhythmic system and harmony of classical
cinema, at the same time as they integrate associated images in an
always open totality. Time here is, therefore, essentially the object
of an indirect representation ... "
On the other hand, such films as TS, FMJ, and EWS are clearly
distinguishable by Deleuze's characterisation of modernist cinema:
"Now, modern cinema can communicate with the old, and the distinction
between the two can be very relative. However, it will be defined
ideally by a reversal where the image is unlinked and the cut begins
to have an importance in itself. The cut, or interstice, between two
series of images no longer forms part of either of the two series: it
is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the non
commensurable relations between images. It is thus no longer a lacuna
that the associated images would be assumed to cross; the images are
certainly not abandoned to chance, but there are only re-linkages
subject to the cut, instead of cuts subject to the linkage. As in Je
t’aime je t’aime, there is return to the same image, but caught up in
a new series."
How, then, are we to characterise Kubrick's most famous cut of all,
the bone/spacecraft cut in 2001?
My own view is that this one - milestone - cut represented Kubrick's
dramatic departure from (cut with) classical cinema and his embrace of
modernist thinking. Here, the cut indeed "begins to have an importance
in itself" and, from the perspective of the classical narrative
paradigm, appeared in 1968 as "the equivalent of an irrational cut."
That such "mind-warping" conceptual cuts are nowhere seen in today's
mainstream cinema - except as smug homage or indifferently gratuitous
editing - - re-inforces the realisation that contemporary cinema is
retro-hopelessly post-modernist ... (Could you imagine if The Passion
had a non-linear conceptual cut? "Wha' da fuck!" roars the hostile
audience, etc, followed by the film dive-bombing at the box-office).
Padraig
Tobasco
is part of the body -- inseparable really.
insert Mary Shelley or Mel Brooks quote <here>.
ty Padraig.
Padraig L Henry
wrote:
>... and all this time, I've somehow been under the impression that the brain
>is part of the body -- inseparable really.
Modernist "Brain" Cinema
====Left Brian: Kubrick, Antonioni, Resnais, Greenaway, Haneke, etc
====Right Brain ("Community Film"): Robert Altman, John Sayles, Spike
Lee, some of Kieslowski. Fassbender, Wenders, Malle, Fellini, Egoyan,
and Lynch, etc
Modernist "Body" Cinema: Tarkovsky, Godard, Malick, Kierostami,
Herzog, some of Kieslowski, Wong-Kar-Wai, and Lynch, etc
"The distinction is thus not between the concrete and the abstract
(except in experimental cases and, even there, it is fairly
consistently confused). The intellectual cinema of the brain and the
physical cinema of the body will find the source of their distinction
elsewhere, a very variable source, whether with authors who are
attracted by one of the two poles, or with those who compose with both
of them. ... There is as much thought in the body as there is shock
and violence in the brain. There is an equal amount of feeling in both
of them. The brain gives orders to the body which is just an outgrowth
of it, but the body also gives orders to the brain which is just a
part of it: in both cases, these will not he the same bodily attitudes
nor the same cerebral gest. Hence the specificity of a cinema of the
brain, in relation to that of the cinema of bodies."=====Deleuze.