Face Transplant Cinema: Time (2006) & Vertigo (1958)

Face Transplant films are few in number, but a steady trickle of these films from wide range of cinematic periods, styles and cultures.  Films frequently deal with themes of identity and escaping one’s own inner demons through a vain (failed) attempt at an assumed identity.  These films are also typically moral tales in which our protagonists are punished for their attempt at escape from their own past, and speak volumes about populist notions of identity and beauty.  Unsurprisingly, one of the most recent of these films, Kim Ki-Duk’s Time, hails from South Korea.  Famous not only for its cinema, which often blends and combines genres and styles in interesting ways well-suited to the genre, South Korea is famous also for its plastic surgery obsessed youth culture (Suissa). 
Here, we will examine Time in conjunction with Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo through the lens of face transplant cinema.  Vertigo deals with issues common to many face transplant and extreme plastic surgery genre pieces.  Though not a face transplant or plastic surgery film proper, its relationship to Time renders Vertigo even more important in regard to the genre, as a kind of inverted prototype for Kim’s [fascinating, albeit lesser] film, and as a reference point, which Kim seems to have used it as, for plastic surgery films and other films which deal with identity themes.  Both of the films discussed here deal with failed attempts at reasserting masculinity by our male protagonists.  Their literal (or symbolized in the case of Hitchcock) impotence must be overcome by subduing independent female characters with identity crises.  There are many inversions between the plots of the two films, an alternative narrative structure provided by Kim, and many similarities in regard to the two directors’ technical approach.

            The respective plot of each film unfolds largely through extensive use dialogue to explain the diegesis and provide insight into the characters’ personalities and motivations.  The only action sequences in Vertigo are the 3 instances of people falling to their death (at the beginning, middle, and end of the film).  Time also has little in the way of action, aside from a rock thrown through a window and the traffic fatality at the end of the film.  Scottie’s (James Stewart) emasculation is explored through conversation "Midge, do you suppose many men wear corsets?"  Moments later, after a failed attempt at self-therapy using a stepping-stool, he falls limply into the arms of his female friend.  Midge is an independent woman who fraternizes freely with men like Scottie, alone in apartments, and represents a threat to his masculinity in the light of his frailty, his vertigo, while also playing the role of the doting mother. 

With respect to Scottie’s investigation of Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) at the behest of a “concerned” husband, Hitchcock frequently uses dialogue to misdirect and further confound his viewers throughout the film’s first hour.  The constructed mystery surrounding the “possessed” Madeleine seems more and more like a case of spirit possession, as every expert Scottie speaks with, as well as what he is told by Madeleine, seem to uniformly confirm this.  The viewers are deceived along with Scottie, when Madeleine recounts her “dream,” leading them to the mission’s bell tower, a place where his inadequacies are bound to prevent him from rescuing her.  These inadequacies and Scottie’s “weakness” are referred to repeatedly in the dialog during the inquest into her death.  Further muddying the water, are statements by characters which are truthful.  Midge expresses her distaste and jealousy when she sees Judy running out on Scottie, shortly after he has rescued her from her dip in the bay.

            In Time, Characters’ feelings spill out during arguments, propelling the events of the plot forward.  In her first interaction with her boyfriend Ji-Woo (Ha Jung-Woo), Seh-Hee (Park Ji-Yeon) jumps to conclusions, scolding Ji-Woo for looking at the attractive young waitress, “After two years, you’re sick of me, huh?”  Her insecurities resurface later that night in a bedroom scene.  Ji Woo’s impotence is presented more bluntly to the audience by Kim, when he apologizes to the pre-plastic surgery/identity change Seh-Hee, after he fails to respond to her advances, “I’m sorry, I’ve been tired lately.”  “Tired of seeing my same body every day,” counters Seh-Hee, readdressing her insecurities which inspire her decision to seek dramatic plastic surgery.

            Both films use mise-en-scène in important ways.  The Spanish mission, the Bay Bridge, the Bay, the club room with fabulous red wallpaper all provide backdrops for Vertigo’s dialogue to unfold.  There is also important symbolism in the mise by use of the lighting, location and props.  Scottie’s idealized, pure Madeleine Elster is betrayed to be a common harlot, Judy Barton, living in a cheap hotel.  The light from the green neon sign spills through her window onto Judy and Scottie’s faces, and when she first emerges as Scottie’s reconstruction of Madeleine, it is from this green light she emerges in the shot.  This is echoed in reverse in Kim’s film, as the bright lights used by the plastic surgeon shine into the camera, and the shot dissolves to white.  This is repeated, as eventually both characters undergo operations. 

In Vertigo, Hitchcock makes use of a massive department store mirror, when Scottie takes Judy shopping to begin amassing a wardrobe to mold Judy into Madeleine.  Again the dialogue gives us cues, as Scottie tries to reassert his masculine dominance over his unwilling female, "Scotty what are you doing?" and then later "No! No I won't do it!"  Judy cries as she pulls away and Scottie encroaches on her crowding her against the wall of mirrors, forced to face herself and confront the actions that got her into this entanglement.

The mirror is, as it is in any identity-themed film, important to Kim as well.  After Seh-Hee has assumed the new identity of See-Hee (Seong Hyeon-a), and reinserted herself in Ji-Woo’s life, we have a montage sequence in which she spends time in front of her mirror changing clothes and putting on make-up, causing us to suspect her identity change has done little to affect actual change within Seh-Hee/See-Hee.  Another shot in See-Hee’s apartment parallels Hitchcock’s composition.  In it Ji-Woo chases after See-Hee, who has just recovered a photo from him.  He crowds her against the wall trying to see the picture while she slyly tucks it under the mattress, a mirror in the lefthand quarter of the frame sharing the shot.

In Vertigo, the bell tower at the Spanish mission stands as a towering phallus, mocking Scottie and his inadequacy, a symbol that he must overcome in order to reassert himself.  It is also, along with Judy (reconstructed by Scottie as Madeleine), the means through which he does finally assert his dominance, forcing her to the pinnacle with him, as if what he needs to make himself a man is to overtake her free will.  When finally Scottie reaches the top of the tower with Judy/Madeleine, he conquers his fear, and in so doing reasserts his masculine identity.  They embrace, only for Judy to fall ironically to her own death, startled by a curious nun who emerges from the shadows.

The entire narrative arc of Vertigo is a thinly veiled chauvinist fantasy by which a man conquers his impotence only by overpowering women and thusly reasserting himself, strong and manly as opposed to the flaccid, corset-bound Scottie we got to know after his accident.   Female characters in both films are portrayed as petty, needy and weak.  Time, however, is not so much the male domination fantasy that Vertigo is.  In fact, it Ji-Woo who is killed at the end of the film, hit by a car while crossing in traffic, fleeing See-Hee, after himself having dramatic plastic surgery and creating a new identity for himself, rather than forcing See-Hee to fit her former mold as would Vertigo’s Scottie.  While neither film is sympathetic to its female characters, Ji-Woo’s actions are more emotionally driven, and decidedly more effeminate based on our understanding of Seh-Hee’s actions as being driven by her sense of inadequacy, a byproduct .

Aside from the death of the male protagonist at the end of the film, there are several other interesting inversions in Kim’s film.  Time transposes the role of Scottie’s role as aggressor, onto Seh-Hee/See-Hee, which ultimately causes Ji-Woo’s death, whereas in Vertigo, it is through Scottie’s aggression (in pursuit of reconstructing past traumas) that he ultimately reasserts his masculinity, ignoring any potential negative repercussions for Judy/Madeleine.

Both films differ from the typical narrative structure we think of when we talk about a Hollywood film, in which there is an initial calm, followed by an inciting incident or dilemma, rising action, climax, resolution, and return to (relative) normalcy.  Instead, in Vertigo, we begin immediately with the inciting incident, the trauma which has caused Scottie’s mental instability, an instability which denies us a genuine understanding of who this character is, something we understand less with the further trauma of Madeleine’s death and the onset of his obsession with Madeleine, her death, and reconstructing her through the woman he sees as her doppelganger.   The film ends with a resolution of conflict, when Scottie overcomes his fear and reclaims his masculine identity.  This is followed immediately by a further trauma Judy’s death (as reconstructed Madeleine), an ironic twist of fate, paralleling her (as Madeleine) “possession” by Carlotta Valdes.  While we have seen Scottie reclaim his masculinity, we are not told how he copes with this third and final death.

Kim chooses to create a narrative loop.  At the beginning of the film, Seh-Hee bumps into a woman who drops a “before” portrait of herself.  At the end of the film, this event repeats, and we realize that the woman she bumped into was See-Hee, emerging from the plastic surgery clinic for a third time, with yet another new identity, after contributing to Ji-Woo’s accidental death.  Kim rejects the finite, if somewhat inconclusive, plot structure of Hitchcock in favor of the circular plot structure of Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932).  Kim’s film is, after all, a commentary on the plastic surgery obsessed culture of South Korea, where according to The Financial Times 50% of women in their 20s have undergone cosmetic surgery, so the eternal return of Boudu seems an appropriate means of presenting the culture as an addiction, and to show that the goal (of filling internal voids) is left ultimately unfulfilled by cosmetic alterations.

Though the existence of the plastic surgery/face transplant genre seems to have gone largely unnoticed, these films are of great cultural significance and social relevance.  We occupy the same world as Hungary’s Miss Plastic, a plastic-surgery-recipient-only beauty contest that promotes vanity and artifice, symptomatic of virtue misplaced by popular culture on outer beauty rather than on the unadulterated beauty of what is real.  Lindsay Lohan just arrived on the cover of my wife’s Us Weekly looking like a bloated Goldie Hawn, the headline under her photo proclaiming in bold pink letters “Destroyed by Plastic Surgery.” (Abrahamson)  The institution of the movies itself stands as a monument to man’s inherent desire to escape his mundane daily existence in favor of another, if only for a brief while.  “Reality” television programming that promotes unrealistic body images, and even programs that revolve around and promote the idea of plastic surgery, televisions shows with names like Extreme Makeover and The Swan.  A 2007 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery supports the idea that media is a major influencing factor in people’s willingness to go under the knife. (Crockett)  These films strive to examine our relationship to our identities, and our eagerness to cast them aside in favor of a better, more glamorous, or more beautiful one.  In the movies, we frequently encounter characters who seek to run away from their troubles.  Invariably, their efforts to escape from their own troubles only result in greater and greater troubles.  Both of these films present female characters which become trapped by the situations that they have created for themselves by treating, in a cavalier fashion, such a precious and personal thing as their identity and are punished for willfully trading theirs (even temporarily) for such shallow pursuits as money and vanity.  Hitchcock’s film is overtly chauvinist by comparison; while Kim’s film fears the reversed power structure in which the woman is controlling her identity through surgery, Hitchcock’s film is about maintaining masculinity through domination and control.

Red Desert (1964)

Here's a more recent one.  Went down to the Wexner Center and checked out Red Desert.  I have been getting into Antonioni a bit more lately, and had to write a paper two papers about something I saw at the Wex, so Antonioni seemed like a good choice:

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert tells the story of Giuliana (Monica Vitti), and her emotional struggles as she readjusts from time spent in the hospital resulting from a suicide attempt.  Longing for people and relationships but trapped in a decaying mechanical landscape, Giuliana longs to fill the void left by her cold and distant husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), and hopes to find solace in the arms of his coworker Corrado (Richard Harris).  Antonioni’s film is a meditation on alienation and loneliness in [by] industrial society.  He explores these ideas with the viewer through a variety of stylistic choices, most notably his use of mise-en-scène, sound, and his use of shot.  I would also like to touch on important thematic and technical similarities between Antonioni’s film and the works of Jacques Tati, so let’s get started!

The omnipresent fog and oppressive nuclear cooling tower are the first of many elements of the mise-en-scène Antonioni uses to communicate to the viewer about industrial society.  The fog lingers in every outdoor scene.  The nuclear cooling tower dominates nearly half the frame it occupies in an early shot in the film.  Titanic industrial machinery that spews forth steam and noise at Ugo and Corrado’s job, and a robot teddy bear further exemplify man’s loss of connection to the natural world.  The human figures in the industrial workplace are puny and insignificant in contrast to the enormous machines, machines which seem to have replaced many of the workers, seen few and far between, whose sole job seems to be maintenance of the machines.  Even in nature, industrial machinery bursts forth from the landscape.  When Giuliana escapes to the woods to eat her sandwich, flames from some horrible tower are visible through the canopy of dead twigs.  The only moments of escape from this industrial nightmare are also provided by the mise-en-scène in the form of the decaying shack and the calm and quiet sea, which stand in opposition of pretty much everything else about the mise-en-scène.

            In his use of sound techniques, Antonioni again uses his approach to highlight man’s alienation in/by technological society.  Human sounds are lost in the noise and steam blasted by the various industrial machines that fill this film.  Early in the film, sounds from the industrial landscape drown out a conversation between Ugo and Corrado, their words lost in the cacophony.  The nondiegetic musique-concrète score in Giuliana’s apartment is harsh, disconcerting, and alienating, indistinguishable from the harsh noises that suppress the dialog of the two men in the factory scene earlier in the film.  At points during the viewing I felt as though even I needed a break from all the noise, such is the sonic landscape occupied by our protagonists.  We do receive a break towards the end of the film, in a sequence where Giuliana and Corrado talk on the deck of the boat, accompanied by precious silence with the “natural” backdrop of the sea.  “I can’t look at the sea for too long, or else I lose interest in what happens on land,” says Giuliana, it seems to herself.

            Antonioni continues his line of logic, highlighting man’s separation from nature in his use of shot.  In the factory scene, not only is the dialogue overtaken by industrial noise, but our view of speakers in the factory is repeatedly intentionally obstructed by pipes and machinery.  Antonioni wants us to see that he is intentionally moving the camera to achieve this effect.  He favors this technique in this application over the typical shot/counter-shot because it establishes early on for us very clearly what he is getting at in regard to the aforementioned themes.  He also chooses to shoot characters in these industrial landscapes at a further distance than would be typical, highlighting the machines which are already titanic in proportion to the tiny/insignificant humans whose sole occupation it seems is to monitor and repair them.

In many ways, Red Desert is, though different in tone, similar in message and scope to the films of Jacques Tati, particularly Playtime and Mon Oncle, fanciful meditations on the [lack of] place for man in industrialized society.  Both directors go to painstaking lengths to explore many similar themes about technological “advancements” which overcomplicate the characters’ world and push humanity further apart from nature and from each other.  The two seem to focus on the same issues with a different sense of scale.  Where Tati prefers to focus his presentation and view on a grander scale, Antonioni prefers to focus in on a macro level.  Antonioni’s film focuses on the humans which occupy an increasingly bleak, separate existence, while Tati’s films focus more on the world that is occupied by these characters.  In Playtime, we see a parade of “faux-Hulots” before the real M. Hulot finally makes the scene, and we eventually lose track of him as the film careens out of control towards its finale.  Meanwhile Antonioni focuses on the personal dramas of a single character occupying and trying to cope with this world.  While Antonioni’s film is definitely less fun or whimsical than Tati, it is certainly just as intricate and rich as the worlds created by the latter.  It was probably more successful as well, as (I assume) no cities were built in order to film it.

I really enjoyed the film, having noticed intertextuality with things that I am already interested in (the general theme, Jacques Tati), and was a little bit different from the roving lens I have come to expect from Antonioni.  The lens wanders, but is far more purposeful in its wandering, than in, say, The Passenger.  

Social Context and Stylistic Significance of Ozu Yasujiro’s Banshun

Here's a paper I did for a class on Japanese culture a couple terms back:

          Late Spring (晩春 Banshun) was my personal introduction to the understated yet mesmerizing cinema of Yasujiro Ozu.  It stood out to me as a beautiful and tender family melodrama on the one hand, presenting an interesting intellectual alternative to Hollywood’s stylistic standards on the other, while somehow giving us a straightforward narrative.  It was my introduction to the Japanese shomin-geki (middle class family drama).  Feeling a particularly attachment to the main character in her transitional dilemma (my wife and I had just returned from our honeymoon), I related strongly to Late Spring’s overt themes.

The film is a picture of postwar reconstruction Japan and the social changes that were taking place at the time.  Ozu’s editing and composition are also of great relevance to us, as his approach is so distinctly Japanese, giving the viewer a traditionalist perspective to the actions which unfold before us on the screen.  I will attempt to briefly examine and contextualize both the narrative themes, as well as the cultural significance of Ozu’s editing choices.

            Ozu uses the film’s narrative to examine ongoing changes in societal values 4 years after the end of the war, giving us a snapshot of the postwar reconstruction from the perspective of a typical middle class family.  Noriko lives with her father, an aging professor, who wishes that she will soon marry.  Her friends and meddling aunt are of no help and Noriko finally relents to this inevitability and marries, leaving her father alone.  The final shot of the film is one of waves on a beach, evoking again the sense of eternal transition.  The exploration of this theme would be of particular interest to a Japanese audience in 1949, whose society was undergoing a major transitional period following the end of World War II, the reconstruction marking the beginning of a new way of life for the Japanese.

         Noriko’s dilemma, of being a young person caught between encroaching western ideals, the traditional and familial expectations of a Japanese daughter, and her own desires.  As the film’s themes were so clearly relatable to many Japanese during the reconstruction, the film won the prestigious Kinema Junpo award for the best Japanese film of the year in 1949.  Further development of feminist ideals and the natural corresponding conflict aroused by traditional Japanese values were ongoing social issues.  The place of women in society has been a recurring issue in Japan since the advent of the Yuzu Nembutsu school of Pure Land Buddhism brought into question the role of women in religion.  This trend would continue thanks to newly emergent secular values (commercialism, liberation) brought on by the occupation. 

           Notably, in spite of his traditionalism, Ozu portrays Noriko’s decision as hers to make, though heart-wrought, and his film welcomes these new influences (a joke about Noriko’s suitor looking like Gary Cooper- groan).  Ozu remains very Japanese though, and when Noriko is to meet Satake, it is at a traditional Noh performance, serving as a nod to Japanese cinema’s strong influence from traditional theatre.

            The film is also of great stylistic significance to us, particularly Ozu’s use of shot and editing technique evoke the wabi aesthetic; order, quiet and calm are all highly valued here and the transient nature of life is a major focus.  In line with this, Ozu’s visual style and composition are highly contrived to evoke a natural aesthetic.  Ozu uses unusually long establishing shots, with a focus on the natural, which slows the pace of the film and dilutes the drama of the unfolding events, giving the film a stronger structural significance.  What results is like a series of snapshots from an ephemeral world, bits and pieces of Noriko’s life. 

            This is clearly an intentional effort on Ozu’s part, as he goes to great lengths to provide the viewer with a series of strictly static shots, all from a very low angle, mimicking the point of view as if seated on a tatami mat.  Even the shot in which Noriko is taking a bike ride with Hatori (Prof. Sumiya’s assistant), while the camera is moving with the riders, it is kept equidistant and at a low angle relative to its subjects throughout the scene.  They are kept center frame, barely moving,  giving the viewer, again, the impression of a still photograph.

The long establishing shots play a further role, in interrupting the narrative continuity, subverting our expectations as viewers; where a Hollywood melodrama from this period would highlight Noriko’s wedding as the climax of the film, in Ozu it’s completely consumed by a narrative ellipse.  We are given establishing shots for an art exhibit that we know occurred in the film’s plot, but is completely ignored in the diegesis, we never see the marriage, their first meeting, or even the (allegedly) handsome Satake.  This focus on the all of life’s little dramas makes Noriko’s predicament all the more personal and real, and I think is the whole point of Late Spring.  That this impermanence of life and time makes all of these little dramas just as important as the Hollywood climaxes.  In fact, these little dramas are really what give life its meaning, a profound statement, which Ozu makes reliant largely on a traditional Japanese perspective.

Limitless: New Alternatives to Face Transplant Cinema

I decided to take another trip down to the dollar theatre to see Neil Burger's new(ish) psychodrama Limitless.  All I knew going in was that the film was directed by this Burger guy (who I would later find out also directed the pedestrian-but-acceptable The Illusionist), and that the film is part of a new wave of convoluted identity-themed psychodramas (Inception [bleghh], The Adjustment Bureau, Source Code, Unknown).  Identity themes became of great interest to me when, while exploring 40s film noir I happened upon a film with a face transplant theme, Dark Passage, which I realized had been echoed over and over throughout cinema (Face of Another, Face/Off, Time, Seconds), and is actually a much older theme if you consider a broader definition and earlier cinematic works such as Robert Wiene’s 1924 film Hands of Orlac, which itself was remade several times. 

Upon purchasing my ticket and lumbering past the ticket taker, I was greeted by the familiar dimly lit purple and green hallways, stinking of stale popcorn, but quiet and air conditioned.  These hallways are lined with photos of Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and various 20s and 30s stars whose names likely mean little to the endless stream of families, dates and young students who pass through them.  My lush cinema paradise, my seat a private throne, complete with my own (painfully overpriced) concession stand and tacky black/white/pink/green restroom.  I exhaled deeply in secret thanks to the recession, for its breathing new life into the once forgotten industry of the discount cinema, and settled into my seat as the lights dimmed.  This temple has been my haven, literally for decades, my fortress of solitude where I retreat to watch second run garbage I would never dare to spend decent money on in the regular theatres.  My patronage of this establishment has allowed for me to discover hidden gems over the years which I certainly would have overlooked otherwise, as my purchases and library acquisitions are generally more focused on serious watching.  While Limitless is certainly not a cinematic treasure to which I will return over and over, Limitless was a pleasant pedestrian affair.

The film tells us the story of Eddie, a depressed writer in a stagnant period of his life, who finds himself in the possession of a large quantity of a drug that allows him access to the eighty percent of the human brain that humans are supposedly unable to use.  This situation results in his entanglements with women, fast cars, a Russian loan shark, a powerful businessman performed by Robert DeNiro, a shady man in a khaki overcoat who follows him.  Meanwhile, Eddie discovers that withdrawal from the drug can be fatal, and he finds himself suffering from adverse effects of the drug in which he blacks out and jumps forward in time. 

What we are given for our $1.50 is an endlessly convoluted plot, and an ambiguous ending where it is unclear if Eddie is still using the drug or not.  What is clear is future in political leadership (at the end of film he is running for Senate –and we presume that this is the first step towards his becoming president, which is also alluded to by DeNiro).  DeNiro’s businessman character, now owner of the company that manufactures the drug, pressures Eddie with the threat of revealing the truth behind his seeming genius, but Eddie counters that he had actually engineered new version of the drug which he has used as a means of safely getting off of the old drug, and that he is now completely clean.  The last shot of the film is a knowing wink from Eddie to the audience, which leaves us unclear as to whether or not Eddie has duped DeNiro into thinking he is off the drug, or if he has duped us into thinking he is still on it.

The film is slick and stylish, impressing us with cool visual techniques in which the camera moves forward, quickly, through the illusion created by two mirrors facing each other. Loud pop music bursts forth from the theatre’s sound system.  Eddie’s life before the drug is dull and depressing, indicated to us by muted gray colors of Eddie’s world before he discovers the drug.  After, the world we inhabit is filled with bright, fun, slightly oversaturated colors.  

The film’s identity politics were immediately of interest to me.  The film itself is perhaps symptomatic of a societal assumption that if we as individuals find ourselves unhappy, there must be something wrong with us internally, rather than our surroundings or the way that we are living life.  We have become so unhappy with the environment that we have engineered for ourselves that we seek to alter ourselves chemically to better interact with our environment.  It would seem that if 1 in 10 Americans were prescribed antidepressants in 2005 (according to a 2009 USA Today article), that perhaps the problem is actually one with our society.  The notion that 10% of the public has brain chemistry preventing them from leading a happy and productive life is absurd, but this is of course a political trajectory that is better continued elsewhere.

Limitless is entertaining, but its premise asks of its viewer a tremendous degree of willful suspension of disbelief.  A core element of the plot requires us to forget that we actually use close to 100% of our brain, close to all of the time.  Additionally, we are asked to believe that somebody who HAS somehow been chemically altered to unlock all of this unseen potential, and is now infinitely more intelligent, would improve himself, only to  achieve incredible yet bland narcissistic material success.  

We see Eddie driving wrecklessly in fast cars, engaging in risky sexual encounters with strange women, and diving off of dangerously high cliffs into water of unknown depth below.  Eddie at one point claims of the drug’s effect, “I knew what I needed to do, and I knew how to do it,” but this would not allow him to dodge unseen oncoming traffic, or to avoid diving into rocks several feet below the surface, and his purported increase in intelligence would surely grant him awareness of the rashness of these decisions.

In spite of my gripes with this movie as bending to Hollywood stylistic conventions, I did rather enjoy it, the theme was of interest to me due to my interest in the face transplant micro-genre I became interested in, and the intertextuality with the identity politics with the face transplant sub-genre.  Limitless is essentially an inversion, of the theme of the face transplant film, in which characters give up their exterior identity, through which they have previously interacted with their world.  In Limitless, Eddie sheds his internal lens through which he views the world, in favor of a version of himself with superhuman intellect.  

Upon rekindling his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, and after she finds out about the drug, his again-girlfriend tells him that she doesn’t like that he is on it, and that it makes him act like a different person.  He refutes this, claiming “I’m still the same person,” but earlier in the film Eddie himself makes a distinction between Eddie and “Enhanced Eddie.”  Whether or not he wants to accept it, this dichotomy exists, and his choices pertaining to the drug may have far reaching consequences.

Are we so unsatisfied with ourselves that our protagonist's behavior is acceptable?  The open ended last moments of the film, allow us to make our own conclusions about Eddie's decision, and serve as an insight into our individual values and what we would do in Eddie's shoes.  We are not supplied any answers, and this is left for us to chew on, but the film’s presentation is so slick and stylish that the question is nearly drowned out by the catchy, lurching music that blares as the end credits begin to roll.  

Though flawed, Limitless was a good use of my spare change, and resulted in another nostalgic trip to the dollar theatre, where I have crouched silently in the darkness, watching, for countless hours of my life.  As I initially stated, I won’t be revisiting this particular film again any time soon, but I did find the film’s politics interesting, and there is some degree of depth to the film, in spite of its vain posturing, should the viewer choose to seek it out. 

           

Steal Your Face

It would appear that a bizarre cinema pertaining to face transplants and extreme plastic surgery has developed in international film community over the last fifty years. For the most part they are an unlikely amalgamation of cinematic styles as seemingly disparate as suburban psychodrama, science fiction art house cinema, midlife crisis film, etc. It is a small but persistent genre consisting of relatively few films. A list of the more archetypal/obvious films follows. Unsurprisingly, the most recent film in this list hails from South Korea, famous cinematically for mixed genres and abrupt changes in tone from scene to scene, as well as for its plastic surgery obsessed youth culture.

· Dark Passage (dir. Delmer Daves, 1947, USA)
· Eyes Without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1960, France)
· Seconds (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1966, USA)
· The Face of Another (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966, Japan)
· Face/Off (dir. John Woo, 1997, USA)
· Time (dir. Kim-Ki Duk, 2007, S. Korea)


Seconds was my introduction to the genre, so I will discuss that briefly, and then discuss the implications of the genre's persistence in the international film community. The first act of the film is primarily concerned with establishing Arthur’s suffocating, claustrophobic existence, emphasized through the technique of upward angles upon upward angles, and close ups that put us in such proximity to our subjects’ faces that we are made uneasy. Arthur is contacted by a mysterious company and given the chance at a new life with a new face. Although he is initially apprehensive at the moral consequences of abandoning his family and other obligations, Arthur is ultimately willing to do this for the opportunity of a new identity.


At the end of the second act of the film, Arthur (now Tony) finds himself at a harvest festival. He finds himself unwillingly stripped and dumped into a grape-crushing vat filled with beatniks. Here, we see Arthur transcend his identity expressed in the form of increasingly ecstatic editing of writhing bodies, stomping feet, faces, bodies, and light peeking through the branches and vines until we the viewer become entangled in the seething mass. Arthur has finally let go of himself, losing himself in the crowd.


Transcendence of ego serves as a goal for many religious/spiritual/occult practices. It is widely acknowledged that transcendental meditation becomes increasingly effective in large groups, where people can feed off of one another’s energy. Arthur gets a brief glimpse of this pure consciousness, as a part of the seething mass of hippies, but after the moment, it is gone, and Arthur finds himself trapped again, by the cage of his new created identity.


It seems that this willingness, or even eagerness, to shed one’s identity ties in with one of the most common clichés in cinema, which is the idea of “Let’s run away and start all over again.” This is ultimately what our protagonist’s decision amounts to: escaping from himself in hopes that the new beginning will provide a fresh start with no burdens of past guilt or obligation. As viewers, we see that this is naïve, as obviously this decision is what ultimately seals these characters’ respective fates. This is interesting, because it holds up a mirror to the audience, who are also attempting an escape from reality, if only for the short duration of the film. It would seem that there are parallels to this act in the act of losing connection with one’s appearance through plastic surgery (one’s face is intimately connected to identity).


Surges in popularity of cinema at times of financial instability are a testament to cinema’s great potential as a means of escaping the drudgery of day-to-day existence. Bertrand Russell suggests that as a society, we have tried to divorce ourselves from our animal instincts, and thusly we have a spiritual void that we hopelessly try to fill with pale mimicries of primitive human behavior. Perhaps some or all of this factors in to the existence and persistence of this cinema across genre and cultural boundaries.


The face transplant theme, which pops up over and over again, albeit rarely, reflects all of this. This theme became of particular interest to me after watching Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage in close succession with Seconds. In Daves’ film, Bogart makes a statement (after his own dramatic plastic surgery, and a whole new set of problems), that he just wants to get away “To somewhere nobody knows my face.” This captures, in essence, the nature of this strange cinema. We want to run away, and in so doing, just create new things for ourselves to run away from. After all, it would appear that we, and all of these characters, are really just trying to escape from ourselves.

The Dark Heart of the Cinema Update

Face/Off
Greetings fellow travelers, I hope your respective cinematic journeys have been dark and strange in the days since we last spoke.  Allow me to apologize for the lapse in posts, but I assure you there is a pot of gold at the end of this Blackest Rainbow.  I followed a film tangent from the noir films that I had been immersing myself in, propelled by Dark Passage into rewatching John Frankenheimer's Seconds, to the strange and small world of face-transplant/plastic-surgery films.  This lead to the idea of a series of posts analyzing these films, and looking at them within the context of a genre cinema, in an attempt to establish some of the underlying cultural subtexts of the face transplant film, and perhaps the significance of their existence as a subgenre/pastiche of various seemingly unrelated types of cinema.

The List
This is the list of films that I came up with that were of potential interest.  This is more or less the complete list of films that I could find pertaining to face transplants and extreme plastic surgery.  There are obvious omissions which warrant further investigation (Face/Off, The Hands of Orlac), and perhaps I will exmine those further, but these are the films I watched and rewatched in my examination of this theme. 

• Eyes Without A Face (1960) Georges Franju
• The Face of Another (1966) Hiroshi Teshigahara
• Dark Passage (1947) Delmer Daves
• Time (2007) Kim Ki-Duk
• Seconds (1966) John Frankenheimer

Conveniently, I managed to incorporate this topic of interest into a [relatively long] research paper.  The whole thing came together as an analysis of Seconds, but examines the face-transplant theme within the greater context of film, citing many of these other films, and some literature pertaining to plastic surgery in South Korea as a means of making connections to the world outside of cinema.  Not sure on whether I want to post the entire piece, or perhaps just a shortened streamlined version to fit the blog, but my next post will [hopefully] shed some light on this overlooked area of cinema.

 Recent Viewing:

• Father Ted episodes
• Winter's Bone
• Black Swan
• The King's Speech
• Red Riding Trilogy
• Grindhouse blu-ray
• Logan's Run
• Sin City
• Machete
• all sorts of other great genre stuff...

Perhaps after the face transplant post, I will feature a post discussing some of the academy award nominees, and my thoughts regarding them.  Salud!

Ossessione

 

This review comes in lieu of my originally scheduled Sudden Fear review.  I watched this film a second time for my Italian class, so I figured I would post some brief thoughts of the film on here.  Perhaps I will at some point review some of the other adaptations of the source material, though the story is, I suppose, an archetype.

Luchino Visconti's first film as a director was 1943's Ossessione, an adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.  The film was deemed too controversial, and was destroyed by Italy's fascist government after just a handful of showings.  Fortunately, Visconti managed to hold onto a copy of the film's negative, from which all currently existing copies of the film were made.  This film is a real cinematic treasure, and we are fortunate that it was not lost to censorship. 

The plot is simple enough:  Gino is a drifter who winds up in an affair with Giovanna, the wife of a country innkeeper, Bregana.  Gino is a rolling stone, and he develops a case of wander-foot, convincing Giovanna to come and hop a train with him.  Giovanna gives up quickly, and returns home, while Gino continues on to another town alone.  Gino takes up with another vagobondo, Spagnolo, who encourages Gino to live his life freely, and to forget Giovanna.  Spagnolo serves as metaphor for the freedom of the open road, contrary to the metaphorical cage Gino finds himself in after breaking with the Spaniard and falling back in with Giovanna after a chance encounter.  With the exception of Spagnolo, all of these characters are doomed and all are fools. 

Ossessione is a dark and moody early noir.  It is easily one of my favorite in the genre.  Required viewing for fans of Italian cinema, film noir, 40s melodrama, and by people who love cinema.

Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on this film, which I highly recommend checking out (wait until after you view the film).  Particularly this section on "cinematic technique" which consists of excellent technical insight, as well as deeper general insight into the film.