Reflections on Isle of Dogs

A week or so ago, I went and saw Wes Anderson’s new animated movie Isle of Dogs at the Conway Cinemark one lazy Sunday morning—the perfect time to take advantage of the cheap early bird ticket prices and lack of crowds. It was a beautiful day, the ground damp from light showers earlier in the morning, the sky bright blue except for a line of gray clouds gathering in the distance—the Weather Channel app predicted storms around three, though I hoped to be back home by the time they hit. I settled into my seat in the back right of the theater just as the lights dimmed and the commercials began. I was excited. Call me basic, but I’ve always loved the strange literary-ness and composed mise-en-scene of Anderson’s films—and I’m always rooting for a native Texan—but Isle of Dogs would be the first of his movies for me to see on the big screen.

Plus, who doesn’t like dogs?

The story is set in a near-future fictionalized Japanese city called Megasaki. The mayor, Mayor Kobayashi, is determined the get rid of all dogs by sending them to Trash Island off the coast of Megasaki. Kobayashi’s ward, a young boy named Atari, flies to the island in search of his lost dog Spots. The rest of the movie is the search for Spots, with plenty of subplots and complications involving the mayor’s crooked politics and a gang of five other dogs trying to survive on the island.

If you’re a Wes Anderson fan, you won’t be disappointed by this movie. The stop-motion animation is visually interesting, and the story is imaginative yet deeply human, brimming with throwaway quirks—such as the haikus and the symptoms of “dog flu”. The movie is literate and engaging. Despite the boy Atari not being to speak English, I found myself emotionally drawn to his story.

The deepest character and protagonist was the dog Chief, voiced by Bryan Cranston. A lifelong stray, he is struggling to preserve his freedom while at the same time hoping to find a place where he belongs. Chief’s struggle is one that many of Anderson’s characters grapple with, from Royal Tenenbaum to Steve Zissou to Mr. Fox to Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Chief’s struggle isn’t all that unique from those other characters. In fact, one of the main drawbacks to Isle of Dogs is that there simply aren’t that many interesting characters that take risks as far as characterization goes.

Or, rather, there are too many interesting characters, and not enough time spent with any of them. They are glossed over, left looking interesting but lacking real human depth. The gang of dogs captured my attention—and then their storyline gets forgotten as we focus on Chief growing attached to Akira. There’s a suspenseful subplot of government conspiracy (that could have gone into being social commentary, but this is a Wes Anderson movie, so nah), but the mayor and his entourage aren’t fleshed out enough for us the audience to understand their motives. Why would anyone want to persecute dogs? It feels like there has to be an easier get-rich-quick scheme than the elimination of an entire beloved species…

The biggest character disappointment was the girl Tracy Walker, voiced by Greta Gerwig. Issues of “the white savior” character notwithstanding, I found her character interesting. But I have always found it annoying that Anderson creates such tantalizingly complex and strong female characters, only to have them exist on the periphery of a male character’s story. In The Royal Tenenbaums, I wanted to know more about Margot.  In Life Aquatic, I wanted to know more about Jane and Eleanor. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, I wanted to know more about Agatha. These are not the empty-headed females of many male screenwriters—they are great characters with engaging stories in their own right.

As a Wes Anderson fan, I hope one day to see a Wes Anderson movie with one of these spirited females in the lead.

And I hope that he takes more risks in his next picture, continuing his experimenting with the film form instead of falling into the trap of simply cranking out movies that match his already established style.

All in all, Isle of Dogs is a Wes Anderson movie. It’s visually beautiful, quirky, and imaginative. It’s also neglectful of good female characters and in denial about cultural issues. But every film does not exist only to make a statement. Isle of Dogs is for people who enjoy Wes Anderson’s style—and it ignores pretty much everyone else.

I myself enjoyed it, as I always enjoy the strange yet relatable worlds Anderson creates.

—CFH

Summary of “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)”

About the essay & author: Seymour Chatman (August 30, 1928-November 4, 2015) was an American film and literary critic, a giant figure in the study of narratives and Structuralism (see last summary on Screened for more info about Structuralism), and he was a professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley. “What Novels Can Do” was published in Critical Inquiry in Autumn 1980.

Summary of the essay: The essay begins with a brief discussion of narratives and narratology. “Narratology” comes from the French term la narratologie and means the study of narratives. Narratology has taught us that narrative has its own independent structure no matter what medium is being used to convey the narrative. Chatman describes narrative as “a kind of text organization.”

“… narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its medium.”

Narratives have a “double time structuring.” That means that narratives always operate with and in two times—the time sequence of the plot (“story-time”) and the time when in the text those plot events are presented (“discourse-time”). No matter the medium, these two different times are independent in the text. (And “text” throughout the essay could mean written language, films, comics, etc.) The essay then goes into how narratives are adaptable—they can be translated into different mediums. For example, Cinderella has been used and reused in ballet, opera, film, comics, and so on. Although so far most narratology has focused on how narratives are the same despite the medium in which they are presented, this essay begins to discuss how each medium—especially the written word versus film—works differently when presenting the same narrative.

“… any narrative can be actualized by any medium which can communicate the two time orders.”

Chatman brings up description in novels and short stories—big chunks of written text in which “the time line of the story is interrupted and frozen.” He gives an example of Maupassant’s story “Une partie de campagne” and contrasts the written description with the same setting as presented in Renoir’s 1936 adaptation. In the written text, the number of details are limited, and the reader expands on these details through imagination. In the visual text, there are many more details—but the details are not asserted by a narrator. Since the details are not brought, in a limited way, to our attention, we only focus on them if they relate obviously to the plot and what might happen next. Chatman anticipates some counterpoints to his argument, such as the “camera eye style” of writing and close-ups and establishing shots in film, but says that the difference is still that in movies the sense of continuing action doesn’t stop. He also claims that in establishing shots story-time is not suspended like in written description, but rather that the story has not yet begun.

“… narrative films do not usually allow us time to dwell on plenteous details.”

Chatman returns to another Maupassant descriptive passage and brings up the point that written words can be evaluative as well as descriptive, such as with the adjective “pretty.” With these words, readers will bring their own notions to the written text, but will know that whatever is being presented is “pretty.” However, in film, the audience has to be in agreement with the filmmaker to reach the same evaluation. Everyone has different notions of what “pretty” means, and when asked to describe with words something or someone presented in a film, we might not all come up with the word “pretty” even if that was what the filmmaker intended.

“… film does not describe at all but merely presents.”

Another difference between the two mediums is how a narrator or speaker in a written text can reveal a lot about him or herself and larger society and setting by what he or she is saying. Chatman claims that the camera cannot invoke tone in the same way. In film, the visual point of view cannot be escaped, while in a written text the author has more freedom and flexibility. The filmmaker can invoke emotions and subtleties in the narrative visually, such as through camera placement—creating stagelike “planes of action” and giving us the emotional point of view of characters, making us identify with them—and “reaction editing” that can, without speaking or asserting, give us light commentary on what’s happening in the society onscreen.

“Once that illusory story-time is established in a film, even dead moments, moments when nothing moves, will be felt to be part of the temporal whole…”

Although film and written texts can convey the same narratives, with film the narrative’s underlying messages are more abstract while the plot is emphasized, and with written texts the plot can be paused and de-emphasized while things are described and commentary is asserted.

“So writer, filmmaker, comic strip artist, choreographer—each finds his or her own ways to evoke the sense of what the objects of the narrative look like.”

Why read this essay? I picked this essay to summarize because we have some big adaptations coming out right now in the movie world—A Wrinkle in Time and the soon to be released Ready Player One, for instance. Since movies began, filmmakers have been making films out of “proven” narratives that had previously been bestselling or classic novels or short stories. But despite how proven the narrative, some adaptations are better than others. This essay helps to understand some of the reasons why—and it makes you think about how narratives and different artistic mediums function.

Want to read this essay for yourself? Go here.

—CFH

Mudbound

“Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” —William Faulkner, following the Emmett Till murder

It’s a hard week to write some lousy blog post, not only because of the tragedies going on nationwide and worldwide but also (and more self-centeredly, as is my nature) I’m swamped with work and school, struggling to stay afloat during a rewrite of a novel and weary of having to look at people and occasionally talk to them. Still, I found time to watch Mudbound on Netflix, a movie set in Mississippi during and around WW2. It’s a story about friendship and family, the South and racism, but above all about human striving—how we want to be accepted and how we dream of better days, and how our dreaming gets us through the darkness, those long and dangerous nights that surround us.

I always wonder how a reading of a film is affected by the circumstances around the viewing—that’s one of the points of this entire blog. So I will give you a bit more details about my viewing experience. I will set the scene: I was in Conway, Arkansas, in my apartment, and outside the atmosphere was rumbling with the beginnings of a terrific and terrible thunderstorm that had been projected all week and was said to probably cause flash flooding throughout town. Luckily, my apartment sits on a piece of high ground, so as the waters rise they don’t flood me out (knock on wood) but flow by like a river through the street. Lightning was flashing, thunder was roaring, and I was wrapped up like a burrito in bed, watching Netflix, as is my wont.

Mudbound begins with an impending thunderstorm, two brothers digging a grave for their father while checking the horizon for the line of dark clouds forming there. The younger brother worries that there’s no time for them dig the grave—certainly no time to change the location of the grave after they discover the remains of a slave there—but the older brother says, “We will. We have to.” The impending storm quickly becomes less than impending and more than present—rain pouring blindingly as the brothers race to dig the grave despite the mud and despite the water rising around them. The movie quickly moves on from this scene and allows for several voiceover monologues as the story unfolds. The older brother Henry McAllen wants to be a successful landowner and farmer. The younger brother Jamie McAllen goes off to fly fighter planes in the war and then returns, haunted by his experience. Henry’s wife is a thoughtful woman stuck out in a ramshackle house on a muddy plot of land, raising kids and struggling to be a good wife and woman. The Jackson family is black tenants who rent some of the McAllen land, the father Hap dreaming of one day saving enough to own land for himself. The oldest Jackson son, Ronsel, goes off to fight in the war, his mother Florence wanting and praying for him to return home safely. The final major character is the McAllen boys’ father, Pappy, played wonderfully by Jonathan Banks (probably most famous for his role of Mike in Breaking Bad), a sickeningly racist elderly man who believes in and enforces white supremacy and pressures his sons to do so as well.

I’ve been impressed by Netflix originals before. The first three seasons of House of Cards do things with characterization and depth that I had before only really seen in novels. The first two seasons of Stranger Things are stunning in their ability to bend genre and introduce captivating and fun characters. Both those shows and others I have watched on Netflix (although they did not originate on or for the site) such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad use the bingeable streaming format to explore complicated characters and plot that simply weren’t possible in the glory days of network television. But I was extremely impressed with Mudbound, a single two-hour or so movie that I thought showed just as much ambition and deep characterization as any of the aforementioned series.

I was especially impressed with the use of voiceover narration. When done poorly, voiceovers are painfully cheap—they seem to rely too much on words and audio when film is supposed to be a visual medium. But in Mudbound the voiceovers are used to tell the stories of characters who live in an environment where they are unable or unwilling to express themselves. The voiceovers capture character complexities that inform rather than falsely guide the visual action. They are done well, in my opinion, and they add power to a story that could have seemed hackneyed—a story of racial tensions in the South.

The voiceovers did what I think is super important when dealing with (and trying to deconstruct) ideologies such as the many dangerous ones of the South—they built sympathy for white characters visually depicted as cold-hearted and racist and for black characters visually depicted as subservient and submissive or (in Ronsel’s case) overly proud. The voiceovers bridged the gap between these characters—they are all human, and in a lot of cases struggling for the same things. Many of the voiceovers kind of work in pairs. For instance, Henry McAllen wants a farm, his own land. Then Hap Jackson says via voiceover that he wants a farm, his own land. You as a viewer begin to feel frustration at white supremacy and societal norms that blinds characters from their own humanity and the humanity of the people around them. You begin to see how people stay silent about their own true human feelings while only voicing the stuff that will be societally accepted. And you begin to see how that silence contributes to inequality, prejudice, and in the worst case horrible violence.

There were so many amazing movies that came out in 2017, and so much going on in Hollywood and in larger culture, that Mudbound sort of got covered up. But don’t sleep on it. It’s a great movie that will leave you thinking about yourself and the world around you, the bad (the evilness of some ideologies and prejudice) but also the good—how we just keep striving, keep fighting for humanity and love despite the odds, despite how long it may take, despite the storms that come in the night and threaten to drown us. Still we fight. We will. We have to.

—CFH

Summary of “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”

About the essay & author: “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” is a classic essay of film criticism by French film theorist André Bazin (April 18, 1918-November 11, 1958). Bazin started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. He believed that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator. This particular essay was first published in the early 1950s, and then was included in Bazin’s multi-volumed book What is Cinema?, or Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?

Mini history lesson: In the 1950s when this essay was published the Korean War (1950-1953) was the hot topic—France sent military volunteers to help with the war. In America, McCarthyism was beginning, and the “Iron Curtain” descended upon Europe, deepening the Cold War. More hopeful news from the time, Mother Teresa opened the Home for the Dying Destitutes in Calcutta, India.

Summary of the essay: The essay advocates for realism in film by saying that film can not only add to reality, but can also, more importantly, further reveal reality—shaping the spectators’ worldview.

Bazin starts with discussing the end of silent film, which, he asks might have been “the birth of a new cinema”. In cinema between 1920 and 1940, he sees two trends:

• Directors who put their faith in the image.
• Directors who put their faith in reality.

(“Image”=”everything that the representation on the screen adds to the object there represented.”)

“The meaning is not in the image, it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage onto the field of consciousness of the spectator.”

He first discusses what was believed to make up the language of cinema—image and montage. He goes into detail with three types of montage:

• parallel montage
  • “two actions taking place at a geographical distance by means of alternating shots from each”
• accelerated montage
  • illusion of increasing speed of something by using “a multiplicity of shots of ever-decreasing length”
• montage by attraction
  • creation of S. M. Eisenstein
  • “the reenforcing of the meaning of one image by association with another image not necessarily part of the same episode”

(“Montage”=”the creation of a sense of meaning not proper to the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition.”)

“The camera cannot see everything at once but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see.”

Silent film was though of as an art of its own, argues Bazin, that relied more on the image than reality, therefore didn’t need sound. However, directors like F. W. Murnau, Erick von Stroheim, and Robert Flaherty put more emphasis on reality—the reality of time and space. With these directors, silent film was limiting because it deprived their films of the reality of sound.

From 1930 to 1940, “a common form of cinematic language” evolved. Hollywood-type films and the “stark, somber realism, or poetic realism” of filmmakers like Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, etc.

• the content was varied with clearly defined rules that pleased worldwide public and the cultured elite (evolution of genres such as the American comedy, the burlesque film, the dance and vaudeville film, the crime and gangster film, psychological and social dramas, horror and fantasy films, and the western, as well as those more poetic realism films).
• the form harmonized image and sound.

“… the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality, but what it reveals of it.”

Speaking of form, Bazin claims that “one can really say that since 1930 all the technical requirements for the art of cinema have been available.” I’m not sure how true this statement is—what about digital technologies? After all, despite the silliness of some of the recent superhero movies, movies such as the celebrated The Shape of Water are doing stuff with digital technology that opens the doors to what worlds film can create and convey… but that’s a whole different blog post, for another time.

“… a new subject matter demands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it.”

Bazin then goes into how film editing has evolved—he discusses in length about deep focus and shots in depth, especially bringing up that much-lauded almost mystical name “Orson Welles.” Bazin writes that deep focus:

• converts the screen into a “dramatic checkerboard.”
• utilizes a unity of image in space and time.
• allows the spectator to be more actively engaged with the film
  • “brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he [or she] enjoys with reality.”
  • grants “a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his [or her] part to the action in progress.”
  • reintroduces ambiguity—which allows for the spectator to bring his/her interpretation both intellectual and emotional to the film

“In addition to affecting the structure of film language, it also affects the relationships of the minds of the spectators to the image, and in consequence it influences the interpretation of the spectacle.”

That ambiguity that Bazin claims that depth of focus reintroduces is key. It preserves the mystery and, as perhaps Welles did best, creates a sort of magic in the performance of cinema—revealing the magic and drama of reality itself, the dramatic potential of conflict between people. Of course, this magic is the spell of art itself, and, Bazin argues, the evolved language of cinema has elevated film as an artform equal to paintings and novels.

Why read this essay?: Bazin’s essay is good for not only those interested in film and how films say what they are trying to say, but also anyone interested in art and media in general. Although this essay is from the 1950s, some of these same ideas can be applied to today’s gifs and memes, as well as “higher art” such as written literature like poems and short stories. This essay, as most criticism does, makes you think more analytically about the stories and information you are given. It leads you into seeing stories not as gifts or burdens to be passively taken, but conversations to be actively engaged with.

Thanks for reading my summary! I read the essay in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, but you can see a .pdf of the essay here: The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.

—CFH