Symbolism in The Feature Film JOURNAL
Symbolism in The Feature Film JOURNAL
Symbolism in The Feature Film JOURNAL
ED 096 715
AUTHOR
TITLE
PUB DATE
NOTE
CS 500 843
Bakony, Edward
Symbolism in the Feature Film.
Aug 74
12p.; Paper presented at the University Film
Association Conference (Windsor, Ontario, August
1974)
EDRS PRICE
DESCRIPTORS
IDENTIFIERS
*Film Criticism
ABSTRACT
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Edward Bakony
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Since the topic - SYMBOLISM IN THE FEATURE FILM falls within the realm
of aesthetics, perhaps we can begin with a definition of aesthetics.
one I like is:
The
Aesthetics
The study of film aesthetics has been the beginning of the careers of very
talented film makers - Francois Truffaut and Peter Bogdanovitch both began
reveal how the symbolism employed by film makers can serve as a bridge
between feeling and thought,
Who can forget the second opening shot in Bergman's film, THE SEVENTH
SEAL showing a great bird of prey hovering over the landscape?
What a vivid
symbol for the "spiritual plague" of mankind with which the film is so
intimately concerned.
Just as, in the same vein, the nihilism and pessimism of many
Symbols, like
2
.
A crucifix that snaps into a spring knife and a child playing with a burning
crown of thorns in Bunuel's film, VIRIDIANA are two symbols of what he feels
is the failure of Christianity.
Symbolism is an
students.
Joseph Losey
had this experience in his film, EVA with a shot of gushing fountain.
The
shot was meant only as a transition shot from night to day following the scene
where the Welsh writer has gone to bed with a girl.
taken as a phallic symbol.
4
another man's ash can".
Art is experiential.
Juliette Ammar so beautifully put it: "We absorb what is in us from film".
Similarly,
what we read from and learn through a symbol varies with what we bring to it.
Consequently, the
At the same time, the symbolism in a film, while it can deeply move
an audience, can be so subtle that the audience may be virtually unaware
of its existence.
of the symbols in surrealistic films - a vivid example being Louis Bunuel's BELLE
DE JOUR.
doing so because each is held back by a thread tied to his body which disappears
out of the frame.
threads are held in the hands of a squalid little urchin squatting in the
midst of a desolate South American town.
By implication the human protagonists
What
Beetkven, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot have this universality
as does Ingmar Bergman, perhaps the most striking of current film directors
in his use of symbolism.
prolific use of symbols, Hermann Weinberg was prompted to describe his films
as "interesting rorschach tests.
115
Water is one of the many symbols that reccur throughout his films.
The rushing, sparkling, stream contrasting with the still body of the man
who has killed himself in WINTER LIGHT evokes the vitality of the life he has
abnegated.
eternity.
where the upsurge of the miraculous spring at the end of the film is the final
image of the father's regeneration, as he begins to rediscover his humanity.
In his first colour fih, CRIES AND WHISPERS Bergman employs the colour
red very effectively.
here are red draperies, red wine, red carpets and walls
r6
He added:
"Ever
mind yet the use of the colour red is integral to the vision or theme of
the film which is about the sick souls of the landed-gentry bourgeoizie.
It gives a feeling of being enclosed as in a womb.
and pain.
to be part of the art from the age of syphilis, when the erotic was charged
with peril - when pleasure was represented by an enticing woman who turned
grinning figure of death."8
Obviously, none of these details by themselves 11W.,-
great film.
The
to integrate
with his fellows in Jean Luc Godard's TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER.
The use of such expressive images is one reason why directors like
Bergman and Fellini are able to reach large foreign audiences who do not
speak their language.
Not so the
Swedish, Italian or French director; and to the giant American audience his
language is gibberish.
the girl (played by Hedy La Harr) first make love, the camera cuts to shots of
a statue of a rearing white stallion illuminated by flashes of lightning.
This would be somewhat obvious and clich(d today.
SEVEN SAMURII, Kurosawa vividly transposes the death of several swordsman into
another key of reality by filming their demise in slow motion.
Subsequently,
this device, beginning with BONNIE AND CLYDE, has been so overused as to become
a clich4f in itself.
4
By contrast, Billy Wilder's imaginative shot of the scuttling rats in
a long-empty swimming pool in SUNSET BOULEVARD, symbolizing the decay of past
opulence retains its freshness today. _Like verbal symbolism, the freshness and
vitality of visual symbolism is a measure of its impact.
The impact of a symbol will also depend upon its cultural context,
particularly if the film audience is of a different culture.
For example,
knight sits down with Jef and Mia to a feattbf wild strawberries and also the
scene in ELVIRA MADIGAN where the lovers partake of a meal of wild strawberries
both have associations stronger for Swedish than for North American audiences,
because of their particular Swedish cultural context.
first fine Japanese films reached us, Western audiences had some difficulty in
determining whatemotions the actors were expressing.
expressing agony or hatred or despair or desire was not instantly evident; for
even facial expressions are to some extent moulded by custom and culture".9
He cites anthropological opinion in quoting Ray L. Birdwhistell:
"Insofar
as I have been able to determine, just as there are no universal words, sound
complexes, which carry the same meaning the world over, there are no body
motions, facial expressions or gestures which provoke identical responses the
world over.
as 0ery powerful symbol in the 1936 Nazi propaganda film, THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.
By building and orchestrating the rhythm of form and sound of the more or less
prosatc.speecnes and marches of a convention at Nuremberg, she imparted to the
resulting film a feeling of invincible progresiion to a Nazi ideal embodied in
;.he person of Hitler.
These expressive
They
by a "symbol°.
How would you film Ophelia's soliloquy, rich in metaphor and symbol in which
she speaks of Hamlet's madness?
"0, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
0, woe is me,
Rather than film a scene which would look stagy and slightly
ridiculous showing Ophelia reciting these lines (or with her voice on the
sound track) this text was pared in Kozintsev's HAMLET.
but a necessary one.
A painful sacrifice
.
6
their hypocrisy.
where Torre, in preparation to kill the goatherds who have raped and murdered
his daughter, goes through the ritual of felling a birch for switches and of
taking a sauna bath
has been joined, all differences vanish between hunter and hunted.
In
the combat with the second goatherd both are seared by the same fire, underscoring
Torre's slipping from civility to barbarism.
in rage . "11
Concurrent with the advances in colour film emulsions has come an increasing
awareness of the symbolic properties of colour.
plastic decor of the Moloka Milk Bar in Stanley Kubrick's film, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
symbolizes the dehumanized environment from which Alex and his thugs have
sprung - as well as helped to shape.
A similar use of a
mordant blue cast to convey the inner mood of a scene is employed by Polanski
in his film of MACBETH where Macbeth sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo at
the banquet table.
Guiliana's illness
world she sees . a fruit vendor, the fruit, the street - is gray, a
monotonous, non - discriminative colour of indecision.
and Corrado gaze at is painted grey indicating their feelings as they look at
it.
term - possible for Antonioni because of his primary emphasis on the image in
12
This of course, follows Pudovkin's dictum that every element
all his films."
in the frame should re-enforce the actor.
7
is made by David Mowat in writing of THE CINEMA NEW LANGUAGE in April, 1970.
He writes "..the present tense is always in colour, the non-present in a
modified form of colour.
from (say) the restrained tones of Ektachrome as far back as black - and - white.
But no fUrther:
So it effectively depicts
13
This is one reason, perhaps, why flashbacks in a colour film are frequently
shot in black and white and why Bergman and Antonioni in their abstruse
philosophical
Quests have, until recently, leaned towards black and white.'
yet going
from mind's eye to realism, the director will sometimes lean to black and white.
The world is not black and white but a news photograph is", observes F.E.
Sparshott.
doing this does not depend on their being just like what they are photographs
of is Blear from Peter Ustinov's famous remark that he filmed BILLY BUDD in
black and white because it was more realistic than colour".
14
Theca observations reveal the various dynamics of the aestheticsof colour
and black-and-white and how the associations surrounding their use differ,
evolve and change.
been predominantly (almost exclusively until about 1963) associated with the
"think" film and colour with the "sit-back-and-enjoy" film (th film that ends
when you leave the cinema?)
related to his thought, his mind, his inner eye, only black-and-white can
approximate this on the screen:
clauses - (1)if film colour is severely modified, and deliberately distanced away
from technicolour, or (2) if colour (and its equivalent, living firmly, in the
present) is part of the character-picture.
has achieved the secret in LE BONHEUR(1965).
"16
8
Antonioni sees the association surrounding colour evolving in somewhat
the opposite vein.
"
The problem is
RED DESERT 'makes us see the world with ottar eyes, allows us to change our
Inky of thinking.
films.
When I first saw 811 I realized the limits of black and white
For instance, the scene shot in the grave of the father, the interior
of the hotel, the memories of childhood, all should have been in colour.
It
has a meaning and function in modern life that it never had in, the past.
Black
17
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, WALKABOUT, and LA NOTTE to name
The poignancy and wide attraction of Fellini's film, LA STRADA owes much to the
universal symbolic appeal of the three protagonists:
strong man, Giuletta Messina - the waif and Richard Basehart - the clown.
A vivid example of how a character can becoffe a symbol is found in
taxi driver is the living embodiment of the moral crisis in many people today
who, in their desire to get ahead, feel that they have to resort to any
means, even the most base and corrupt.
Whatever the form of. a symbol, the sensitivity and discrimination
with which it is selected and with which it is integrated with character and
predicament or theme is an essential artistic process in the creation of a
fine film.
19
"20
There
from the social contingencies which influence all individual growth"... "Bergman's
symbolism, like Kafka's, is not so much a.flight as a strategic retreat.
He
to the violent turbulence of experience, he has set himself at odds with the
One could walk in worse c'mpany than with Yeats and Pirandello."22
And yet other directors, like Satyajit Ray ev Me the sheerest virutosity
in integrating abstract, universally expressive details in the
context of films which are otherwise very realistic.
A lovely example is in
PATHER PANCHALI in the scene between the wife and the returning husband where
he asks to see their daughter who, unknown to him, has died.
of anguish comes from the shriek of the sitar musid on the sound track, not from
her voice.
you think you can't killmovies you underestimate the power of education.
Miss
Kael's continuing concern is that film study can become overly analytical, and
categorical with the result that an intrinsically fascinating subject is
This is a ha....rd which needs to be avoided in the study of symbols.
dessicated.
"Aesthetic education,
part of that ferment and catalyst that film helps impart to a liberal arts
education.
most
illuminating.
symbol varies with what we bring to it. Not onlydo we discover the wolld through
our symbols but we understand and reappraise our symbols progressively in
the light of our growing experience.
can serve as a bridge between thought and feeling, between aesthetics and
cognition.
And
It makes the
scientist more acute, the merchant more astute, and clears the streets of
juvenile delinquents.
This is a comforting view for those who must reconcile aesthetic inclinations
25
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
quoted in Kael, Pauline, "Flesh", THE NEW YORKER, Jan. 6, 1973, p.51.
7.
ibid.
8.
op. cit. p. 50
9.
10.
op. cit p. 49
11.
12.
13.
Mowat, David, "The Cinema's New Language", ENCOUNTER, April, 1970, p. 66.
14.
Sparshott, F.E., "Vision and Dream in the Cinema", PHILOSOPHIC EXCHANGE, Vol. 1
No. 2, 1971, p. 113.
15.
16.
ibid.
17.
18.
Scott, Jame:. C.
19.
ibid.
20.
ibid.
21.
22.
ibid.
23.
Selby, Stuart A., "The Screen and the Humanities in General Education",
JOURNAL OF AESTHETIC EDUCATION - Vol. 3, No. 2, April '699p. 121.
24.
25.
pp. 265-266.