Counter Cinema Rejecting Ideological Indoctrination: Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Born in Flames as Forms of Counter Cinema

Jean Baudry in his analysis of narrative cinema argues that film ideologically indoctrinates the viewer. In his essay "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" he asks whether instruments (the technical base) produce specific ideological effects, and are these effects themselves determined by the dominant ideology? He continues, that in which case, concealment of the technical base will also bring about the inevitable ideological effect.

Baudry takes as his starting point that the camera is an invention of the Renaissance in which the Western tradition of the "eye of the subject" took into effect. He argues that the projection of the camera denies difference and leads to the emergence of the transcendental subject. He argues that these effects of the camera occur on a technical level: "The meaning effect produced does not depend only on the content of the images but also on the material procedures by which an illusion of continuity, dependent on persistence of vision, is restored from continuous elements. These separate frames have between them differences that are indispensible for the creation of an illusion of continuity, of continuous passage. But only one condition can these differences create this illusion: They must be effaced as differences.

Drawing upon the theories of Althusser and Lacan, Baudry argues that film achieves a kind of imaginary order in which specularization and double identification take place: "The reality mimed by the cinema is thus first of all that of a "self." But because the reflected image is not that of the body itself but that of a world already given us meaning, one can distinguish two levels of identification....

The first, attached to the image itself, derives from the character portrayed as a center of secondary identifications, carrying an identity which must be seized and reestablished." The second level of identification is the formation of the transcendental subject, "whose place is taken by the camera which constitutes and rules the objects in this "world."
Baudry sets up a compelling argument for the ideological indoctrination of narrative cinema. However, two films, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Born in Flames represent forms of counter-cinema that reject the ideological indoctrination that Baudry believes operates in all narrative cinema. Drawing upon feminist and race film studies, I will argue that these films subvert the very possibilities of film that Baudry believes emerge as a result of transcendental subjectification and double identification.

The coffee scene in Two or Three Things I Know About Her offers a montage of film footage that defies ideological indoctrination. The characters are focused from angles that that do not continuously efface difference. In fact the discontinuous footage of this scene illuminates difference and denies the emergence of the transcendental subject. The full frontal clip of the woman at the barstool mitigates the effect of double identification. Holding a cigarette firmly in her hands, she effectively asserts herself from the surroundings and avoids the specularization that Baudry claims is endemic to narrative cinema. The wide angle shot of the man with the coffee and the woman in the background also resists double identification since the characters are situated from an unreestablished perspective. Further, the narrator that speaks from an authorial voice in metaphysical notions resists the formation of the transcendental subject.

Born in Flames…