- discourse and character in documentary film -


"Property is theft" says Proudhon, and "language is oppression" Foucault. The owners of means of media production produce their own discourse submitting the viewer to their own ideology.

Discourse is rhetorical dimension of the story, the way it is made to manipulate audience. Every story is manipulation and major motion pictures today are always test-marketed to see if they appeal to audiences, to see if they “work” with respect to the audience.

Michel Foucault focuses upon questions of how some discourses have shaped and created meaning systems that have gained the status and currency of 'truth', whilst other alternative discourses are marginalized and subjugated, yet potentially 'offer' sites where hegemonic practices can be contested, challenged and 'resisted'. As documentary filmmakers always think about themselves as seekers of truth, they use terms like "kino eye" (Vertov), "camera stylo" (Astruc), "kino fist" (Eisenstein), "cinema verite" (Rouch) etc, to explain their strategies, thus creating a truth-seeking film character, filmmaker/author with an extension, a tool, some kind of cyborg (man with a movie camera). 

However, in The Order of Discourse, Foucault argues that the 'will to truth' is the major system of exclusion that forges discourse and which 'tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses". Thus, there are both discourses that constrain the production of knowledge, dissent and difference and some that enable 'new' knowledges and difference(s). 

            Cinema is true. A story is a lie. (Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinema)

- animal character = metaphor = language -

1. In Essay on the Origins of Languages, Rousseau maintains that language itself began with metaphor. Citing Rousseau, John Berger claims that it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal... If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. 

Walter Benjamin attempts to resolve the rudiments of language with mankind‘s powerful drive to act mimetically, to make oneself similar and thus develop the gift to see and produce similarities. He insists on the importance of onomatopoeia as the imitative behaviour leading to the formation of language: every word and the whole of language... is onomatopoeic. From the Latin roots 'onoma' meaning 'to name' and 'poein' meaning 'to make', onomatopoeia sounds copy and imitate but at the same time signify and codify.

In order to become human, men act like animals, eat what animals eat, and say what animals say only now with words. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

2. Darwinian theory of evolution is also nothing more than a metaphor - animal metaphor, the projection of economic theories onto the animals. "It is remarkable... how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his own English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian struggle for existence. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes." (Karl Marx)

3. "Language is a virus" is a strange metaphor (is it really a metaphor?), introduced by William Burroughs, that ventures into biochemistry and lies outside the stock of common conceptual metaphors that speakers of English are expected to know. It is odd to think of language as a communicable disease, yet we have no difficulty doing so because we possess a conceptual instrument that provides us with the requisite imaginative capacity.

What is shocking here is not unconventionality of this metaphor, but the task put in front of the reader: to make equation between the simplest organism and most advanced cultural achievement. 

Metaphoric relation of man towards animals is less offensive than other hegemonic human activities pointed at them. However, if all the things, concepts and living beings are equal, we must fight against any metaphor. This means also, that in order to fight for equality of all things, we must fight against the language itself.

- character, image, mimesis -

image (n.) - from Old French image "image, likeness"; from imitari "to copy, imitate". 

Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. It is usually said the contest was held in Monte Carlo or Switzerland, and that he came in second or third. Chaplin did indeed fare poorly in a Chaplin look-alike contest, but the competition took place in a San Francisco theater. His final standing is not recorded, although it was noted that he "failed even to make the finals." 

"Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things. Well known fact." (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)

According to Benjamin, the fundamental mode of mimesis is nothing other than the compulsion to become Other. It results from the magical effect of merging copy and contact with imitation and performance, combining the urge to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction with the compulsion to become and behave like something else. 

"Mimesis - a separation of the self from itself - is effective only by concealing the split by its product - a mask. One can act only by stepping into the light, into language; and it is there that appearance - the self as other, as sign - is forced into being." (Lacan)

"I would have made IMITATION OF LIFE, any case, for the title"
(Douglas Sirk)

- character of melancholia and herbal symbolism - Lars von Trier film 'Melancholia' begins with a sunny day in spring, when everything seems to start all over again in lush green. »If everything has to go to hell, it needs to start off well.« (Lars von Trier) A famous allegorical engraving by Albrecht Dürer, entitled Melencolia I. portrays melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction. Reproduction of this engraving usually makes the image seem darker than it is in an original impression (copy) of the engraving, and in particular affe cts the facial expression of the female figure, which is rather more cheerful than in most reproductions. »My analyst told me that melancholiacs will usually be more level-headed than ordinary people in a disastrous situation, partly because they can say: 'What did I tell you? But also because they have nothing to lose.« (Lars von Trier) herbal symbolism Weber identifies the flowers in the garland encircling the head of ‘Melancolia’ as a type of nightshade, which, according to the conception of the Late Middle Ages, symbolized a propensity to solitude. Instead of the plants, traditionally attributed to melancholy on classical paintings, a monk's rhubarb, a thistle, a columbine and a willow, most of them related to theme of St. Jerome in wilderness, Lars von Trier's heroine Justine is holding Lily of the Valley. This poisonous plant has negative connotations in the Christian tradition—it’s also known as Mary’s Tears (since it sprung from where the Virgin Mary’s tears fell) or Eve’s Tears (coming from her tears after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden). Despite its negative, or, at least ambivalent connotation, Lilly of the Valley is more and more used in luxurious wedding ceremonies in Europe and U.S. In arts, plants are often interposed to evoke the qualities of austerity and learning associated with melancholia. These are not the carefully cultivated tulips and roses, prized by gardeners and connoisseurs, which claim pride of place in the Dutch still-life tradition. They are rugged, wild, weeds which, despite the hardships of drought and frost, flourish untended in the countryside.

- native americans characters and otherness -

"Livin’ with Comanches ain’t being alive." (John Wayne - The searchers)

"In order to become Comanches you first have to die." (Herbert Achternbusch - Der Comantsche) 

In early Hollywood Westerns, most of the background Indians were real Navajo people. There was a colony of Navajo Indians living traditionally in a camp in Malibu who were on studio pay. When Indians of any tribe were needed for a western, a bus would pull up and load up for their background work. That is why in all those films, most of the time the language you hear spoken is "Dine," one of the Athapascan dialects of the Navajo and Apache people. The major speaking roles for American Indians would still go to non-Native actors like Burt Lancaster and Charles Bronson. Explaining why Will Sampson from One Flew Over Cuckoo's was overlooked for an Academy Award nomination, one director was quoted as saying, "Why should an Indian receive an award for playing an Indian?"

- indians in spaghetti westerns -

The first Italian Western movie was La Vampira Indiana (1913) – a combination of Western and vamp film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother Bice Walerian in the title role as Indian princess fatale. The only fairly successful Spaghetti Western with an Indian main character (played by Burt Reynolds) is Sergio Corbucci's Navajo Joe, where the Indian village is wiped out by bandits during the first minutes, and the avenger hero spends the rest of the film dealing mostly with Anglos and Mexicans until the final showdown in an Indian burial ground.


- indians in german westerns -

Eastern-European-produced Westerns were popular in Communist Eastern European countries, and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin. "Red Western" or "Ostern" films usually portrayed the American Indians sympathetically, as oppressed people fighting for their rights. They frequently featured Gypsies or Turkish people in the role of the Indians, due to the shortage of authentic Indians in Eastern Europe. Yugoslavian born actor Gojko Mitić portrayed righteous, kind hearted and charming Indian chiefs.

- critical approach -

In film Der Comantsche by Herbert Achternbusch, (1980) Comanche is in coma. A famous writer is the last patient in a clinic about to close down. His dreams are transmitted to the television tube - instant literary adaptations for the livingroom cyclops! Achternbusch plays ‘a Comanche Indian’ and projects all kinds of weird, zany stories onto the screen. The howler is when he and his partner tie chickens to their scalps and go on a hunt in a Wiener Wald - restaurant, that is.”

Achternbusch's idiosyncratic performances of Native Americans criticize rather than endorse the contemporary fascination with all things Indian, they specifically link the German's eagerness to identify with the victim with a displacement of their historical responsibility for the Holocaust and its legacy.

Both traditional and critical representation of otherness through native american characters could be sublimed with etymology of one word: Comanche. Word comes probably from Spanish comanche, a corruption of Shoshonean language expression, kimánci meaning "enemy, foreigner." Other source says that the name Comanche is derived from a Ute word meaning "anyone who wants to fight me all the time". But the Comanche people call themselves Numunuh ("The People").