Reflexive Elements in

Reflexive elements in films do not escape the binary dialectics of aesthetic and ideological concepts embedded in them. This rule applies in the four films discussed in this short paper: “The Man with a Movie Camera;” “Rock Hudson’s Home Video;” “Blow Up;” and “All About My Mother.” This dialectical presence has been debated extensively in the history of Arts. Theorists, artists, over time, have favored either one or the other. Yet, in reflexivity, this binary concept boils down to a question of awareness. Logically, understanding reflexive elements in films depends also on consciousness. This consciousness, nonetheless, is solicited at various degrees. In some instances, in complete illusionistic films, consciousness is invited to efface itself; in anti-illusionistic settings, it remains active and aware of its own presence. Understanding how consciousness functions, in relation to reflexive elements, becomes a fundamental priority. Because once awakened and educated, it resists illusionistic devices, consciousness is capable to infer a broader range of reflexive elements. Indeed, my past filmic knowledge aggregates and associates new meanings in relation to fresh evidences. The fusion generates new information. This newly found knowledge enhances a new reflexive awareness. Virtually all elements composed on the screen, the acting, the mise-en-scène (the lighting, décor, costume), the camera movements, the potential stilted lines that the writer wrote, the emphasis of the actor’s lines, and all the other filmic “tricks” the director has organized, call attention to themselves by becoming visible and thus expose their artificiality. Reflexive consciousness is illusion striped of artifice. Hence, consciousness of filmic techniques destroys any likely illusionistic involvement with the film. The film’s fictionality reveals itself entirely. From this point on, the film’s construct must become the subject of scrutiny. Indeed, aesthetic and ideological concepts become the first part of a dual analysis occurring as well at the level of the form and content. Both esthetics and ideologies are contained in films’ form and content. In other words, inferring reflexive elements in films and understanding their aesthetic and ideological natures is directly proportional to the viewer’s awareness in relation to their form and content.

Perhaps the best place to start this paper is to talk about Vertov’s film “The Man with a Movie Camera.” The film offers a remarkable example of the duality existing between an aesthetic approach, contingent to artistic concepts, and an ideological one, contingent to socio-economical circumstances. This duality is best expressed through the reflexivity of the film’s form and content. The film is unique to forward the cause of an illusionistic form through an anti-illusionistic content. Indeed, in the first place, the abstract style prevents the viewers from being swayed, from penetrating the documentary. Because the film is based entirely on footage compilation, (the shots are juxtaposed, and meanings only then gain coherence), the content undergoes an initial anti-illusionistic disruption. Disruption awakens awareness. The resistance induced through the disruption of the content suggests a strong ideological impulse aiming at creating a new aesthetic. Then, in the second place, the capitalization on anti-illusionistic depictions of reality, the new aesthetic, creates its own dilemma: an illusionistic recuperation. The film’s message turns against itself. The form is nothing else than an ideological reflexivity calling attention to its own artificial making.

This complex reflexivity is best expressed with the presence of the tramps sleeping in the street[1], and the cameraman’s ubiquitous presence on the screen. Through the exposition of the tramps, Vertov creates the anti-illusionistic illusionistic representation of reality. Seeing the tramps only is watching precisely the content. The tramps are often associated with feelings of sorrow, etc. and, consequently, invite participation in shared “sympathy.” The coaxing of emotions is where consciousness disappears. Approaching the content, without changing the film formal fictional realm would not “prevent the viewer from identifying with the diegetic world on the screen,” (Petric p7) [2]. The tramps’ presence alone does not suffice to disrupt an illusionistic representation. Because Vertov wanted people to learn a new consciousness through films, a collective consciousness, which he believed will improve their lives, he sought to unveil a new way to make and tell films. Futurist and Constructivist methods (Constructivists sought to create an art in which the form would be as important as the content, if not more) came to the rescue. Vertov’s conceptual aim got achieved through the montage. The diegetic content of shots could therefore be dismissed; the shots of tramps were showed isolated from each other. And this isolation rejects emotional complicity.

The montage’s ideological importance comes to life with the homage to Gorky paid with the huge banner hanging across a street (we see the sequences repeated four times). Gorky, one of the greatest dinosaurs of Russian literature, which means “bitter,” was a name reflecting Gorky’s own perception on life. Gorky lived most of his life in Crimea, in the southern part of Ukraine. In his autobiography, “My University,” Gorky confessed having led an extremely difficult youth and adolescence. His first stories and novels in fact deal with characters who roamed and wandered through Russia, mostly vagrants and tramps. This phase of Gorky’s life came to be known as his “Tramp Period,” which made him the father of Social Realism, in Russian. Social Realism predicated on the absolute subordination of form to content. The world of representation in art had to be mimetic. The coincidence, therefore, between the omnipresence of tramps and the images of the banner has to be excluded. Montage performed the anti-illusionistic trick through disjointed associations. Vertov seemed to fabricate a literary trope through his editing technique by correlating the shots of tramps with images hinting to a literary tradition. By de-emphasizing the shots’ content, which is by not juxtaposing the shots of the tramps and the banner, Vertov reemphasizes instead the importance of the form, and, at the same time, discards any possible illusionistic involvement. By juxtaposing the two shots, the content would have been emphasized.

The ideological reflexive montage betrays the artifice of its own presence at this point. Since the documentary refers to world of fiction, the verisimilitude of a world of realistic literature, the reflexive montage disseminates an anti-illusionistic portrayal while using the literary filmic language that it condemns. Social Realism invests in the content, estheticizes the content. Vertov, on the other hand, uses the content of his shots to condemn the content of the associative shots he has created. By deconstructing Social Realism, he deconstructs straight linear narrative. Being kept at an aesthetical distance, the viewers are forced to observe the film’s artifice. Thus the dialectics of Vertov’s method is clear: filmmakers must not interfere with reality, while presenting it on the screen in a highly aesthetic and ideological manner. As Petric observes, about MMC, “the form comes to function as the content, without disturbing the ontological authenticity of the shots,” (Petric p15). The shots of the tramps are not altered esthetically, only ideologically through associations with shots of banner.

Yet, can we claim that the film anti-illusionistic does not turn against itself, implying that it is also illusionistic? The non-involvement with the ontological aspect of the shot must be questioned since the cameraman’s presence on the screen suggests an involvement with it. By applying Bretch’s strategy of Arts, we could state that Vertov demonstrates the compatibility of reflexivity as an esthetic strategy, and realism as an aspiration (Stam p 214)[3]. The presence of the cameraman on the screen leads to this ambiguous conceptual reversal. Representation of reality, the fiction of realism, remains invalid. Instead the fiction of a Constructivist representation of reality is favored. Through his montage experimentation, Vertov wanted to show a new reality, far from Social Realism’s mimetic methods. This new reality paved the way to show the camera’s possibilities. The camera is the magician’s magical instrument with which the cameraman performs filmic tricks under the viewers’ intrigued and mesmerized eyes. Michelson talks precisely about the “philosophical phantasm of the reflexive consciousness, the eye seeing,” (Michelson p 98)[4]. “We shall meet with the magician once again in the paradigmatically reflexive film in which the process of filmmaking, editing, and projection will be revealed and assimilated, through constant and elaborate parallel montage, to the processes and functions of labor,” (Michelson p104). The cameraman is the magician revealing the tricks. The magician is a manufacturer of illusion; he can in the interest of instruction in order to heighten consciousness destroy the illusion of the mimetic world. The camera exposes the cameraman in subsequent shots. Complexity arises since the film is abstract, and the cameraman portrays the medium’s magical power. Interplay of magic devices is epistemological. “Only consciousness can fight to the sway of magic,” (Michelson p105). Thus the consciousness of the filmmaker finds an abstract way to awaken the viewers’ lack of consciousness. Consciousness is carried out with reflexive consciousness to disrupt unconsciousness. Vertov do want to disturb the epistemological image, he wants to retain, like a magician the ontological belief the film denounces by advocating and promoting the magicality of filmmaking. And Petric unveils the trick. For him a paradox sees the light “from the merger of his epistemological attitudes towards the medium and his aesthetic view of film structure,” (Petric p14), which explains why MMC retains an illusionistic aura. The film’s structure proves that the inner realm of reality can be reached only through the aesthetic use of film language, in both fiction and documentary film, which consists not in developing the consciousness of the viewers but rather a consciousness, Vertov’s own. Vertov imposes an illusionistic view of reality. In other words, the film anti-illusionistic ideological form cannot be separated from its aesthetic illusionistic resolution to promote its own cause.

“Rock Hudson‘s Home Movie” offers a classical example of the legitimacy of truth, narrated through the re-interpretation of the past. The film’s reflexive thematic conveys this complex question. Precisely, because of its obvious deformation of facts, the film relies heavily on its aesthetic form. Although to be immersed within the film’s story, the re-writing of the legend of Rock Hudson’s true life, at first viewing is easy, the film’s aesthetic form reveals the reflexive artifice of its own fabrication and disrupts this possibility.

Right from the beginning of the film, Mark Rapapport behaves, talks, as if he was really R.H., who we know has died. The film is based on repetition of divers scenes, sequences, taken from virtually all the films R.H. has performed in. On the surface, the content carries the narrative subjugation. Indeed, the content’s very plasticity, conveyed through the humoristic style, suppresses initial surprise and invites instead to unconscious participation. Reflexivity can only arise from a distanciation with illusionistic involvement. Danger remains as long as the viewer opts to delve into the film’s humorous story. The film’s first level of structural reflexivity comes from the disruption of belief, established when we understand that the speaker who pretends to be R.H. is not R.H. The question of truth, as perceived visually, becomes challenged. Thus by announcing the libidinous, homosexual character of R.H., the speaker puts a slant on the past sequences. Who really was R.H.? The film’s irony is generated from this new scripting process. But since R.H. has been lying to us, and the narrator is not R.H., is he lying as well? The film would appear to be just another fabrication.

And the film reveals this aesthetic artifice through the form. Focusing solely on the amusing content would not allow to perceive the latent reflexive elements. Consciousness must find a ground of interest to retain a separation with the soporific power of the story. There is, indeed, an assumption on the speaker’s part that becomes transparent as he keeps on talking: the speaker understands the past. In the light of hindsight, knowing about the tragedy of the real R.H.'s death, truth is assumed self-evident. The film fails to question the present historical revisionism. Clearly the narrator claiming to be R. H. is not Rock Hudson, does not even have the same voice (although at times Rock’s voice and the speaker’s alternate over the sequences to the point of being confounded) but, yet, speaks for him. The nature of the narrative-revisionism reflects the film’s very subject: the representation of reality and its fabrication. The film is a fabrication of sequences—a montage. The very nature of the montage shows explicitly the aleatory nature of story narration. Same syntagmatic sequences juxtaposed, superposed to different contexts alter and redefine the images’ signifying contents. Why should an actor, R.H., who performs no real-life scenes on sets, have to display publicly his real identity, his own sexual preferences, while acting? We, of course, normally behave in every aspect of our life the way we behave in our bedroom. . . . This assumption on the speaker’s part destroys the viewer’s possible immersion into the illusionistic homosexual recollection and, consequently, reveals the film’s conceptual problematic. True, Rock Hudson was gay, but his gayness does not have to be carried out through his acting performances with other actors. Since these acted scenes are not real, they only represent the working phases of his life, why should R.H. behave with his “real and open” gay self in films? All is lies. All truth lies beneath appearances. And appearances do not necessarily reflect the truth; they are subject to interpretations. Likewise, Rapapport’s fabrication of Hudson’s life seems highly hypothetical. Fabrication of one’s own present personality is also a montage of interpreted facts about past events.

Perhaps we should see a strong condemnation of Hollywood is known for presenting images of reality that often bear no correlations with “real” life events. The ideal image of malehood is such an example. The myth of the beautiful American male with a perfect body is glorified, idealized, and perennial. Rapapport’s fabrication reveals its own fakeness, the invisible cracks in the varnish. For example, the film betrays the aging process often concealed in the illusionistic nature of film stars. A quick montage showing Hudson’s beauty fading, reveals the passage of time, and awakens consciousness to the danger of easily adopted illusion. The aesthetical disclosure could only be achieved with a careful montage.

Hence, truth is questioned through the form. How R.H. managed to conceal the truth of his own sexuality from the viewers for so long is now revealed. The viewing of the film invites an aesthetic reflexivity. Indeed, the film claiming to restore the truth defeats itself; it reflects another fabrication. Only the consciousness of the falsification of data, the revisionism of Hudson’s past, allows to maintain the necessary distance to infer the reflexive form in order not succumb to the unawareness. Through this reasoning, the film loses completely its illusionary potential. Consciousness becomes aware of the artifice of the content, and its credibility can only function with the form aesthetical cooperation. The critical viewer may approach the film with a slanted eye, a curious stance questioning why this man on the screen even tries to claim to be R.H., when he does not even remotely resemble him. Are we dealing with a sort of a glamour-starved artist? A narcissistic director who wishes to portray his own secret desires, indulging in an sexual aesthetics betraying a narcissistic ideology: one uses already existing films, adds a personal touch to it, and claim ownership and artistic creativity? Are we watching a neurotic man who has difficulties in expressing his own potential homosexuality and does so by exposing others’ in a way to legitimize his own (he lives his own inclinations through a mighty icon and gets a sense of identity through some else's “fake” filmic testimonies). Speculations are easy. Yet, the film could also simply be a statement about the hypocrisy of Western societies forcing homosexuals to perform parts that do not correspond to their psychological make-up. Gay people become likewise an aesthetic montage of roles, aiming at substituting, hiding, their true gay nature in order to remain unnoticeable. Denied a voice in the present, Rapapport’s recycling of old materials becomes his voice of assertion. Like Hudson, gays are dead, or considered non-existent, and yet like the director, they are very much alive. And the film aesthetic form, conveyed through the montage, reflects this artificial dissimulation.

The film becomes interesting at this point because the concept of unveiled gayness reflects current preoccupation with queer studies. The film’s content can only but falls flats on its head. Once again consciousness of cultural, sociological circumstances thwarts the viewers’ adhesion to the illusionary effacement. The mechanisms of filmmaking are not exposed directly; they become apparent, visible through the form’s aesthetic artifice. Or else, they are betrayed by the ideological awareness that stripped the film’s aesthetic values from its aims.

“Blow up” is a good example of a film that exposes the filmic mechanism used for its own making, without ambiguity. Yet, unlike the two previous films, its reflexivity is exposed through the content. But since the medium’s “formal” aspect is questioned through the content, the film’s reflexivity is therefore based on an ideological content.

Antonioni’s film does not convey an anti-illusionistic representation of reality, unlike MMC. The film’s very subject, the nature of the use of the medium, on the contrary, tackles thoroughly the nature of reality and its representation in an illusionistic fashion. At first, it is misleading. In exposing the countless photographic apparatus and the steps involved in the process of making of photograph, the film’s reinforces an aesthetic questioning, without suppressing the aesthetic distance and preventing the viewers’ consciousness from slipping away completely from the story/plot being told. The nameless photograph sees the world through the distorted lenses of his camera. He accidentally attends to a crime, which had completely escaped his attention and which is only revealed through the process of blowing up a photograph. The human eye, very much like in Vertov’s claim, does not seem to be able to see what the machine can. The eye may see but does not necessarily register. The photograph, (D. Hemming), curiously, appears to be baffled by the discovery of the assassination. He begins to investigate the crime. Paradoxically, unlike the mechanical process of glamour photography, the modeling of young women, which is overly exhibited, the pictures of the assassination are genuine and cannot be reproduced. This parallel of the real and the fake goes at the core of the nature of the perception of reality. Real physical violence had taken place in the park under the photographer’s eyes, and he has failed to perceive it. This violent reality is cleverly portrayed also with a contrast between the models, the falsification of a reality, and the unrehearsed smuggled pictures of workers in factories, standing both respectively for glamour and social violence. Indeed, the way the photographer treats the models is never included in the final products, the photographs making the covers of magazines. His cruelty, humiliation, anger, violence, and condescension, while asking them to smile, are left out of the fabrication process. Likewise, the photograph does not seem to be interested in the workers. What interests him are the photographs of the workers, whose coarse realism he beautifies through “photographic subversion.” He looks at them with aesthetic pleasure, not with ideological concerns. The social violence, the harshness of working conditions and their consequences on the workers, is entirely removed. But because the film exposes overly this aesthetical pleasure by contrasting it with the assassination, the ideological appreciation of reality becomes the reflexive element. The photographer shows how all aspects of the representation of reality whether fabricated, the models, or not, the workers, can become the product of an illusionistic process of corruption. This representation is best expressed while he investigates the murder with the tools and machines used to represent this reality.

The short sequence, perhaps, juxtaposing these photographs with canvasses of the painter-friend explicitly introduces the aleatory artistic nature of representation. The photographer stares at the painting for a while; they have an abstract quality. The artist’s vision, we can assume, parallels the photographer’s. The paintings just like the pictures are artifacts of reality, whose purpose is entirely devoted to the aesthetic pleasure. In both instances, the representation of reality corresponds to the artists’ vision, not to the mimetic perception of reality. Content prevails over the form.

The voyeuristic nature of the criminal investigation, on the other hand, creates a break with this aesthetic pleasure. The aim becomes ideological since the photographer wants to reconstruct the true event. Reality can no longer be blurred, fabricated, falsified; the photographer wishes to recapture it. Reality is violence. The photograph’s voyeuristic investigation echoes the violent pictures’ taken in the park where the crime took place. Voyeurism perhaps is aesthetic violence. This dichotomy of perception and appearance of reality, nonetheless, echoes ours while we observe the film. Blowing the pictures up one after the other is a way to discard any possible aesthetic corruption, to retrieve a pure sense of reality. Are there different realities: one aesthetic and ideological? In “Blow up” one sees reality, seeks truth, with ideological eyes, not with an aesthetic one, perhaps because the film makes us aware that the unconscious knowledge of the world’s brutal reality makes us escape into pure illusion.

The film makes a remarkable turn-around from the aesthetic to the ideological nature of reality, following the photographs’ disappearance from the studio. This disappearance signals the questionable impressions reality leaves upon us. After the photographer returned to double-check that the dead body is still in the park, he comes to distrust his own belief about the actual crime. This doubt about perception is reinforced, exposed, with the group of mimes and clown, at the end of the film, faking a game of tennis, without rackets and ball. The gestures are so accurately recaptured that the public of clowns and the photograph end up partaking in an imaginary game. The ball flies over the net and lands in the grass. The woman mime beckons the photographer to fetch the ball. He hesitates for a second but then submits to the command, thus acknowledging his complicity with the making of an illusory reality. A strong message is implied through his collusion: the illusionistic construction of reality is not exclusively a personal matter. Often, to perform well in society, one must accept, conform to the rules of the game. The fictional nature of the representation of reality is not always an isolated process; it is also collectively maintained and generated. The pictures of models are fashioned in a similar vein: we end up believing in their artifice. If we fail to pay attention we fall prey to them. The aesthetic pleasure involved in voyeurism maintains the wall of illusion, of wish fulfillments, and of escapatory desires. Artifice is generated with the help of one another.

The film is remarkable to expose this tendency with the ability not to severe completely the trajectory of the thematic exposition from the viewer’s attention, while, at the same time, using the very theme about the nature of reality as the subject of investigation, to reinforce their awareness on the ideological level. The film portrays how we participate while watching the film in this self-dupliciting representation. This distanciation without the distancing allows Antonioni to reestablish the deficient balance of ideology. Consciousness is aroused, educated, without risk of pleasurable pacification, which is, nonetheless, in itself a pleasurable feeling.

The case for Almodovar’s film, “All About my Mother,” complicates the debate of reflexive inferences. For a start the film is made to be completely illusionistic at the level of content. The reflexive elements in relation to consciousness require tremendous work on the part of the viewers in order to be discerned. Of the film’s content, we could say, therefore, that consciousness is driven by an enormous reflexive aesthetic.

Unlike in Godard’s films, for example, where cinematic references are inserted within the film and often act as suspensory devices, the story during the “quote” ceases to progress. In Almodovar’s, this aesthetic content does not apply. Indeed, the reflexive elements are part of the story. They are used as props for the story where they are completely integrated. The sequence with Eve, in “All about Eve,” entering Bette Davies’s dressing room is inscribed within the context of the film’s story. Even tough the characters, Manuela and Her son, are watching the film, talk about it, references to Eve act a prologue for things to come. Furthermore, this reflexive insert in “All About my Mother” is more complex than Altman’s “Player,” which merely limits itself to dialogued-based “quotes,” as well as some intertextual hints, such as the posters on the wall whose presence is rendered obvious with the camera’s shift of focus. In Almodovar’s, such directness does not exist either. The reflexivity is subtle: the interpenetration of the film’s artifice with reality is completely fused. Reality depicted in the content is artifice only because this artifice is the reality.

This aesthetic reflexivity is also portrayed in the characters. Indeed, the reflexive characters only come to life in mimetic parallel. Eve, the fictional character of “All about Eve,” with her machiavelic approach to life, her ruthless manipulations, is Manuela’s antithesis. Eve does not carry any reflexive weight in isolation, her character only acquires aesthetic dimension when contrasted to Manuela: one is fictional, the other is supposedly real. Yet they mirror each other. Manuela is Eve. Scenes between the two films intermingle. Manuela’s arrival at the theater equals Eve’s. Both are strong-willed, endowed with unbending spirited to achieve their goals, with the difference that Manuela’s aims are saintly governed, Eve’s are evil. Manuela forces the other characters, Huma, Rosa, Rosa’s Mother, and Estevan into awareness through her good will, unlike Eve who is driven to acknowledge her mistakes by G. Sanders. This reversal is precisely the consciousness the film forces upon us. Manuela is our reflexive consciousness; great characters are not only on the screen but also in life (even if life is still the screen). Along with Williams’s play, since the film goes back and forth between the stage and the dressing room, from rehearsals to live performances, and sometimes the street, we are reminded that life is not only on the stage but also outside of it. And indeed the fiction of drama is extended to the outside as if an extension of the play. Dialogues on stage continue without a break outside the stage. She plays the fake wife for the medical institute’s commercial, and then become the real mother signing her son’s organs off, repeating words and gestures recorded for the commercial. Likewise, Agrado confesses the real traumas of his miraculous sex transformation—up on a stage. The fake and real discourses constantly intermingle. Art and drama are not longer distinguishable. Perhaps not knowing on which side we stand make us appear like little kids, like the “diapers” commercial implicitly suggests. Almodovar perhaps wants to warn us of the danger of the artistic creation, the film, preventing us from grasping a genuine sense of reality, because we find easy to believe the fiction of films, while drama remains overwhelming present all around us, ignored.

This interpenetration of art and reality is especially noticeable with the use of colors. Manuela’s house is divided in two colors, yellow and red; the stage of “Streetcar” is blue. Rosa’s mother represents best the fusion of art with reality since she is a painter, with the particularity to be devoid of any imagination. She spends her time reproducing Chagal’s colorful paintings, whose backgrounds are often rich with strong primary colours, deep blue, bright red, pure yellow. These paintings are noticeable behind the speaking characters as if to enlighten the viewers about the characters’ moods. Almodovar shows us his characters as if they were living models in paintings. The choice of location as Barcelona also reinforces this point, since the town is known for its extreme beauty. People live tragic lives among genuine artistic treasures; Gaudy is famous for his colorful mosaics found all over Barcelona. They give the town its perfect imprint of artistic integration, showing that drama is not limited to the screen. The columns appearing outside Agrado’s apartment provides a good example of the fusion. Both characters and décor live the art. “All about my Mother” represents a gigantic canvass, made out of a single composition.

The film is the vision of an artist, not only mastering his craft, but also having a clear understanding of the aesthetical effect the work carries. This mastery on both planes surrenders the film’s true reflexive quality, represented by the stylistic rendition. Noticing this quality does not break the aesthetic distance. The film, nonetheless, does not remain completely illusionistic, because the fusion of both worlds places the film on the perfect middle point between illusion and anti-illusion. Indeed, the viewer, without disappearing in the expected dreamland, is too mesmerized by the film’s finely chiseled dramatic beauty.

[1] The film’s first sequence.

[2] Petric, Vlada. “Vertov, Lenin, and Perestroika: The Cinematic Transposition of Reality.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. 15 (1995) : 3-17

[3] Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature. New York: Columbia Univ Press, 1995.

[4] Michelson, Annette. “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera. : 95-111.