On documentary effects & pageant films

[anne mcknight]

Hi,

I think it's time the subject/line were changed here--the current one, while
mechanically efficient, is kind of Michener-era, no? Anyway, I keep looking
for his byline...:)

I've been interested in how the threads of 1) how the marketing department's
probably scenarios inform how film-makers inhabit genre; 2) how the "period
piece" details allow a nice segue from believing a factoid-based reality
effect, to some kind of narrative real ("R").

Some people read the laboriously researched detail--how did gladiators
bleed, did Mussolini put a blotter on his desk, etc.--as a technic of the
Hollywood studio system--I'm thinking here of Philip Rosen's work on "the
rationalization of the detail" (in Change Mummified). The detail is thus the
symptom of the rationalization of production, the drive toward vertical
integration in the H-studios, and the first step in the slippery slope to a
rationalized narrative, in the teleology from an actualité-dominated to a
narrative-dominated cinema. It's about how film manages the real ("R"), or
more precisely manages indexicality--no one really believes at a manifest
level that Elizabeth Taylor was an oriental(ist) but the fact that she wears
the "right" wig and eyeliner along with the 'fifties curves takes us, as
Barthes might say, from verisimilitude to realism. Isn't this a tactic also
pursued by many of the highbrow TV productions of the 70s+, particularly
those with post-colonial contexts, like Master...piece Theatre? While I see
how TLS does tap into feelgood nationalism, as earlier commentators have
argued, I am also curious how the "rationalization of the detail" has been
part of bona fide shifts in trans-national production. Because the collected
work I have been reading comes from the British context (there's BFI/Sight &
Sound anthology out on the heritage film), I thought of Orlando as an
interesting exercise in contrast. What others might there be? What sorts of
new networked regions and affinities are being mapped out by shifts in such
"detail," and the transformation from detail to Realism, what Rosen calls
document to diegesis?

It would be interesting to think about how "research" is incorporated or
outsourced in more recent productions--like the upcoming Memoirs. Sure,
research is probably not done "in-house" contributing to the rationalization
of production, the studio system, narrative, spectatorship, all the etc. of
the Frankfurt School critique; it's susceptible to all the vagaries of
information culture & trans-national productions, about networks just as
much as territories. As I recall, the J-translation is Memoirs was kind of a
dud--not excoriated, just kind of sunk to the bottom of the shelves, as its
ideal audience of young women (as I recall from the forensics of the news
reports) was kind of indifferent to the breathy liberationist narrative of
the novel (check out the reading club guides, if you need a refresher on the
east-west ideologies of liberation from all manners of decadence and
corruption at work here. Another conversation, but I think this book can't
be read outside of general gendered & territorialized stereotypes about
sexuality and human rights in play globally in the 90s...).

So I wonder what kind of social formations that Rob Marshall's polite
"rationalization of the detail" actually depends on--how the detail provides
an alibi or justification for some overdetermined kind of ideology...and
what that might be. I guess Spielberg is a complicated case--Schindler's
List & memory (I think Alex mentioned this?). The fangless trailers I see
for The Terminal certainly take a polemically trans-national premise (Pico
Iyer's new journalistic account of life in LAX) and gump it up with Tom
Hanks' super-nationalised persona, despite the fact that he is 'actually'
stateless...And the "rationalization of the detail" in terms of product
placement seems to be quite the dramatic gamble, in market terms, for
United, etc. Fox liked it, anyway.

amck