Simulacra of Humanity
Tarantino-Visual Language, Western: The Hateful Eight
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session H. Hale Künüçen
Quentin Tarantino's 2015 film The Hateful Eight is the second film directed by the director in Western style. Shortly after the end of the American civil war, the film tells the story of characters who take refuge in a hut while trying to survive a snow storm, and the conflict between them. What distinguishes this film in terms of visual language is that it exhibits narrative codes exclusive to the director, besides the typical Western film narrative codes. The Hateful Eight movie was selected for this study because of its visualization style and different image/visual language, which are different from the known features of the classical Western style. The aim of this study is to examine the different image/visual language used in The Hateful Eight, which is uncommon for the a typical Western movie, using cinematographic analysis. For this purpose, the narrative elements (lighting, camera angle, shooting scale, framing, composition, fiction, music, etc.) that make up the film language in The Hateful Eight will be examined.
Pale Fire: Image, Derivation, and Desire in Blade Runner 2049
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sharon Kim
This paper explores the work of the image in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), through its intertextual dialogue with the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. The book’s title alludes to Shakespeare’s lines on the moon, whose stolen light is a pale or diminished fire: a derivative beauty. The movie is full of such derivative fire. It is itself a derivative film, as a sequel, and portrays a world full of “replicants,” androids who are the pale fire of the human image. The remaining humans thus live enveloped in simulacra: artificial intelligence, online environments, simulated intimacies that may be the sole remainder of what they represent. The central character, police officer K., is a replicant with a holographic girlfriend. He discovers during a case that he may in fact be a human. The possibility awakens in him an intense desire to be human, which parallels his quest to find the lost blade runner, Rick Deckard, who may be one of the only human characters in the film. Significantly, K. keeps a copy of Pale Fire in his apartment. While the police use it to keep K. in subjection as a replicant, the novel provides a blueprint for the film’s representation of simulacra as the response to traumatic loss, and it also outlines the movie’s strategies for retrieving human meaning in the midst of replication and derivation. The derivative images of Blade Runner 2049 ultimately serve to incite desire for the human, through imagining its extinction in the pale fire of film.
The Home Movie as Occult Object: Critical Examinations of Amateur Films as Representations of the Real and Unreal in Everyday Life
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Neumann
Since the early decades of the 20th century, amateur filmmakers—those early adopters of 16mm and, later, 8mm cameras—have largely been dismissed for making films that recorded birthdays, vacations and other aspects of everyday life. Contrary to such views, amateur films are significant resources that document both the constraints and possibilities for understanding organic representations of social and cultural life, and the history of moving images. They also can reveal an amateur filmmaker’s flashes of imagination, creativity and a surplus of meanings that contain evidence of the mysterious relationships between camera and performance. This paper takes amateur films seriously. It focuses on practices for critically reading amateur films in a manner that probes for the potential plurality of latent meanings that dwell in the frames of home movies, and in those who watch and study them. Film scholar Robert Ray notes that movies are often experienced as “intermittent intensities…that break free from the sometimes indifferent narratives that contain them.” Home movies are instances where such “intensities” appear in loosely structured narratives and reveal symbolic excesses that are ripe for interpretation. Specifically, through brief excerpts of amateur films, I will examine how events and spontaneous performances captured by home movie cameras suggest clues and knowledge not only about the ambiguity of images, but also about the ineffable qualities of the lives that are “called forth” as they are recorded by the camera, revealing traces of people and their actions as performances that are representations of real and unreal life.
