Counter cinema: aesthetics and alternative film practice

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 offers even more of a refutation of Baudry's arguments on narrative cinema. Here, I draw upon the feminist and race film theories of Teresa de Lauretis and Jane Gaines. De Lauretis argues that modern aesthetic theory requires a feminist point-of-view, that necessitates thinking beyond identification with traditional feminine characters. She writes: "The questions of identification, self-definition, the modus or the very possibility of envisaging oneself as subject -- which the male avant-garde artists and theorists have also been asking, on their part…even as they work to subvert the dominant representations or to challenge their hegemony are fundamental questions for feminism...Which is not to say that we should dispense with rigorous analysis and experimentation on the formal processes of meaning production, including the production of narrative, visual pleasure, and subject positions, but rather that feminist theory should now engage precisely in the redefinition of aesthetic and formal knowledge, much as women's cinema has engaged in the transformation of vision (De Lauretis 144).

The radio disc jockey scene in Born in Flames subverts the ideological indoctrination Baudry discusses. The women are portrayed realistically, not as objects for visual pleasure. The disc jockey asserts herself as powerful and with agency, as a liberator not only of women but of society. Patriarchal, bourgeois culture is critiqued; thus ideology is in fact subverted rather than upheld. Ideological indoctrination is not imposed upon the subject, and the projective capabilities of the camera are effected to critique society, rather than uphold its norms. As de Lauretis writes of Born in Flames: "For one thing, the film assumes that the female spectator may be black, white, "red," middle class or not middle class, and wants to have her place within the film, some measure of identification…In sum the spectator is addressed as female in gender and multiple or heterogeneous in race and class, which is to say, here too all points of identification are female or feminist, but rather than the "two logics" of character and filmmaker…Born in Flames foregrounds their different discourses" (de Lauretis 157). Jane Gaines discusses, in this context, that as subjects we are not positioned in ideology and language and Born in Flames confirms this.