In Review

A collection of notes from my notebook about films I saw once.

World's Greatest Dad (2009)

Bobcat Goldthwait is a filmmaker interested in asking questions both consequential and otherwise. 2006's Sleeping Dog's Lie asks the latter. World's Greatest Dad however tackles something very large and universal. The idea of creating histories, which suggests, more importantly the existence of multiple histories. Goldthwait acknowledges that history belongs to time not simply to a finite space; that it is ever evolving; that our histories belong to a larger social discourse.

From there he goes on to discuss the ways in which society will ultimately fetishize that history, which delivers it all the more to discourse, all the more to time, because we attach ourselves to objects from that history based on an arbitrary worth tied to nothing more than a sense of belonging. A moment is finite, a moment remembered, or more specifically a moment tied to an object is infinite.

Where Mr. Bobcat fails is in his attempt to fit his grand ideas into a plausible narrative language. So much in the film happens simply because it has to. The words in 'Kyle's' 'diary' effect society so deeply, not because they are beautiful, but rather because they need to in order for the plot to continue. Lance's confession occurs because the film needs to come in at ninety minutes, not because what we have seen up to that point had been building (psychologically or otherwise) to necessary catharsis. Goldthwait know his cinema history. He knows that films in which a character holds a deep dark secret must ultimately end in a confession, and so he ends him film as such, but does so without emotional context.

What ultimately ends up on screen are many thoughtful ideas, but ideas in the hands of a filmmaker not yet capable of adequately translating them.

Setups and Payoffs

Cease to look for payoffs and you free yourself from the language of traditional cinema and open your film to multiplicity and plurality. 

Pierrot le fou (1965)

Leprechaun (1993)

In 1993's Leprechaun directed by Mark Jones, mentally handicapped Ozzie inadvertently has his face painted blue, in what is surely the setup for some ensuing hilarity (not that the moment in and of itself isn't 'gaggy'). However as the film progresses that payoff never materializes. Thus, in retrospect, nor did a setup. No cause without effect. 

This as a result brings to mind a question of authorial intent, and without much delving into the visual history of the cinema it is clear that the physicality and combination of colors are a direct intertextual reference to Jean-luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. This recontextualization of image ironically (or perhaps not so) evokes the notion of juste une image/ une image juste, a concept coined by Godard. 

Seemingly every other image in Jones' film could be describes as juste une image, simply an image in a long 'image stream' meant only to give way to new images. All fitting neatly into a coherent cinematic language. A language that presents itself as a realistic continuation of time and space, but is in fact a fallacy.   

With une image juste an image is, in addition serving a function within a film, an allusion to a larger context; what Michel Foucault described as "a node within a network." This particular image in Jones' film exists both within the film, but also within a larger social and cinematic discourse, and as a result opens itself up to a plurality. It contains narrative meaning in Leprechaun, but also pulls into itself all meaning derived from Godard's image as well as any emotions and personal history the audience has with said image. It renders the cinematic image into a photographic one. An image unto itself, removed from time, or perhaps more specifically the rapid succession of images.   

Mark Jones deserves credit for creating an image that not only gives way to more images, but also allows us to project our own subjective meaning onto the projected image. The significance of this scene therefore exists more in the space between the projector and the screen. The space occupied by a beam of light, dust and a multitude of personal narratives. 

Pierrot le fou is the set up to Leprechaun's payoff within the context of Leprechaun's image stream.