November 2005
Talking about the movies: Film theory applied: Junebug and The Passenger
With Frank Beaver
 This column concludes a three-part discussion of classic film-theory studies that began with Susan Sontag's essays on the aesthetics and social-cultural implications of still photography and continued last month with Rudolf Arnheim's empirical arguments for "film as art."
This month I'll talk about Siegfried Kracauer (1889—1966), a theorist I encountered in my first graduate film seminar in 1960. His book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality had just been published and was our assigned text. It was this work that convinced me that the motion picture was a serious subject for theoretical and philosophical consideration.
Kracauer's central thesis—shared by Arnheim and inherent in Sontag's essays on still photography—is that as mechanically reproductive visual media, photography and film share opportunities for recording and revealing "the real world" in uniquely expressive ways.
To Kracauer this mechanical reproduction allows the motion picture to produce stories that 1) appear to be unstaged, 2) possess a "flow-of-life" quality, 3) are so casual and "non-dramatic" as to seem to be simply "found" and 4) can employ with natural ease the street and the road as dynamic story locations. In a nutshell, these "affinity" arguments, as Kracauer calls them, reveal the means through which creators in the film medium can fulfill their art's potential.
Kracauer emphasizes that photographic images (of which film imagery is an extension) derive much of their power from the fact that they are records of real natural phenomena. The photograph (film) lifts visual material from "nature in the raw," without necessarily interpreting the recorded elements of nature.
Images presented seemingly without interpretation free viewers to respond to a film's ambiguous material—what Kracauer calls the "indeterminate"—by supplying their own meaning. Kracauer sees this as a major contribution of cinematic art.
As inflated and abstract as these ideas may seem, I find Kracauer's theoretical musings helpful in my own appraisal of films that use the medium in uniquely powerful ways. Take his idea of the "indeterminate" in screen experience and the fascinating example of the recent much-praised low-budget film Junebug (2005, directed by Phil Morrison). The plot is unabashedly thin: a sophisticated young Chicago art dealer travels with her new husband to North Carolina to meet a visionary artist whose work, she's been told, might be perfect for her gallery. Her husband's family happens to live in the vicinity, so the trip doubles as an opportunity to visit in-laws whom she's never met.
Junebug unfolds through a series of slice-of-life character encounters as a young woman walks into the on-going daily lives of a group of "new" relatives and is introduced to their issues, quirky personalities and culturally different ways. Junebug has the inconsequential casualness of a "found film," and yet in time it begins to resonate as a dramatic exposé of a world being viewed, uncomfortably but nonjudgmentally, by an outsider.
It isn't the film's scant plot or chatty dialogue that makes it a powerful screen experience; rather it's the clinically observant camera's perusal of the young wife's face as she absorbs what is happening around her. Kracauer wrote that "films may caress one single object long enough to make us imagine its unlimited aspects." This spectatorial experience is the source of Junebug's impact, at least for me. In caressing the sensitive face of a young woman caught up in an alien world, I came to imagine her inner, unspoken thoughts.
Others no doubt reached different conclusions about the young woman's character and experiences, because this is a film that leads viewers to collaborate with the images in their own ways and to discover many different meanings.
A second idea of Kracauer's that I am quite attached to is that motion pictures possess a special power to present stories set in the street or on the road. Many of film's greatest works have such settings: Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, La Strada, Weekend, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver and many more. In their use of open space, motion pictures can create mythic, archetypal drama through stories built around extended journeys. Stagecoach, Deliverance and Apocalypse Now come to mind, as does the recently re-released Michelangelo Antonioni film The Passenger (1975).
The Passenger is a little-known masterpiece, its mysterious story involving a lengthy journey by a film documentarist named David Locke (Jack Nicholson). The Passenger can be viewed as a symbolic exploration of the mysteries of human destiny. When a gun supplier dies in a North African hotel room next to his, Locke seizes the opportunity to escape the frustrations of his personal and professional life by assuming the dead man's identity. Using the gun-supplier's appointment book, Locke follows the dead man's itinerary. This intended journey to freedom ends with fateful consequence.
As in another Antonioni masterpiece, L'Avventura (1960), The Passenger is largely a visual experience in which much goes unexplained; the viewer is left to ponder the ambiguities of the plot in general and of episodes that may be shown or even, like the film's climactic event, not shown.
Kracauer maintained that the one task film must fulfill above all others is to create effective visual experiences. Without question, both Junebug and The Passenger satisfy that requirement. In this and in others ways, both films offer viewers interested in such exploration a better understanding of the theoretical matters unique to the cinema.
Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.
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