A Beautiful Mind follows the rise to fame of mathematician John Nash from his socially-awkward and secluded student lifestyle at Princeton to his romantic life with student and later wife Alicia Larde. The film tells Nash’s story inventively through his struggle with schizophrenia and how the illness affects all his relationships, both professionally and personally. The film is able to effectively tie Nash’s illness with his brilliance as well as follow the progress of his illness as it slowly consumes his life entirely. By embedding certain characters from its very beginning such as Nash’s roommate, Charles Herman, director Ron Howard builds trust with his audience, driving us into adrenaline-packed action and suspense as we follow voraciously Nash’s venture with the Pentagon and later his attempt to crack Soviet codes. Howard carries us on this journey, building empathy for a character so skillfully that the epiphany of the protagonist coincides with our epiphany as viewers. When Nash comes to the realization that Charles is a figure of his imagination, that the Soviet plot is his own fictional indulgence, we feel just as betrayed. When he is in denial, so are we, and when he recovers and reconciles reality with his illness, so we too come to terms with what we chose to believe and what we came to understand as story and fiction.
Author Archives: Pauline
Art and Empathy: Neruda
Films like Neruda (most notably those of the Coen brothers) in recent years have been emerging more and more frequently, taking on a style inspired by documentary that when placed in a formulaic approach to storytelling (inciting incident, rising action, climax, denouement), takes an interesting spin on the biopic. I find this mix to be an inventive method for story-telling that is somewhat semi-fantastical and rather imaginative, that really speaks to the power of art and how it is able to use experience as a form in which to fit itself within in order to transform and/or heighten our understanding of that experience (to create a sort of logic or reasoning for the things that we do experience, to give sense to life). Director Pablo Larraín is able to do so effortlessly by merging reality and fiction, art and politics. He illustrates the relationship between President Gonzalez Videla and Pablo Neruda as one that is subtle, playing the fine line between the co-existence of these two parallel sphere: how politics feeds into art and how art in turn has the agency to determine or sway the direction of politics to a certain extent, and if not on that grand scope, at least on the micro level of influencing individuals’ understanding of people and how a system of people work, in turn creating empathy. I think here is where Larraín is incredibly strong—in building that empathy not so much for Pablo Neruda as for his invented detective character, Oscar Peluchonneau, who is an Apollonian balance to the rather Dionysian lifestyle Neruda leads but also adds a complexity to the hackneyed dichotomy of good and evil. It is this ability for art or film to share experiences that are “other” or outside of ourselves that the power of art has in creating culture.
Thoughts on Rose House Events
The Rose Cafés are a key way to bring community on West together; however, I do feel that they are somewhat exclusive to Rose house members alone, which really limits our ability to engage with students from other houses. While I am a strong proponent for continuing Rose House events that draw from a pool of Rose residents, I would encourage planning an event once or twice in the semester that would include inter-residency mixing.
On another note, I would like either more Rose café events to be offered throughout the week or other events with that amount of time commitment. I usually find the café events most manageable. However, this semester was a struggle for me because I was able to attend café events only when my night class canceled (only three). The solution to this was to make as many of the Friday night film screenings as possible, which although I think are very convenient and which I really enjoy (given that I am a cinephile), I found to be quite exhausting having to balance them with my Cinematography and Screenwriting courses, which require me to attend a certain number of film screenings at the Cornell Cinema per semester. I think this amount of watching films becomes quite overwhelming, and I would encourage for the Rose house events to allow students in these situations to substitute (once or twice) the house requirement with fulfilling a course requirement especially when it seems to overlap to such an extent. In regards to the Friday film screenings, I also think they take away from attending screenings at the Cornell Cinema or even the live performance ones at Sage Chapel, which I find to be an incredibly important cinematic experience that should be encouraged above one in a dining hall room where the color calibration from projector to screen and the sound quality is not as immersive as in a dark theater space.
As a double major and a scholar, I am also committed to attending many extracurricular events (receptions and lectures–all of which I find to be immensely exciting and valuable), which often conflict with the Rose house events (ones that are oftentimes study breaks and bonding). I would suggest that perhaps going forward, the Rose house events can include more student input in the types of events that are held.
Untold Stories: Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures (2016) came out at a time that appeared to be a promising transition from the first African-American president to the first female president, when the political and social tensions in this country were rising heatedly but remained very much hopeful; that not being the case, the film, like many others from recent years—Dear White People (2014), Fences (2016), Moonlight (2016)—serves as a reminder of the perpetual systematic oppression that is the historical backbone this country continues to live on. It is very refreshing to watch empowered black women on the big screen in a Hollywood production, which is rarely the case (maybe Dear White People comes close to it, but even that was an independent film that did not engage with that dialogue specifically). Hidden Figures was both informative and entertaining; it was energizing to witness these women succeed in assisting the space race in the mid-1960s as human computers and somewhat shed a heroic light on stories that oftentimes remain unrecognized. Hidden Figures not only introduces an important conversation on race but also on women in STEM field research. It is interesting to take this in light of recent changes to the Barbie doll collection which now offer Barbie’s in different shapes and sizes (tall/petite/curvy) and advertisements for kids such as the “Princess Machine” or the Verizon video that promote the messy, lab-like, building-block child’s play catered for young girls.
La La Land: Film as Spectacle
There are certain types of movies that make you think and there are those that make the movie theater a place to escape the realities of today and allow you to daydream a little. La La Land belongs to the latter. It is not a film I am interested in having a conversation about, but rather the type I might watch on a Sunday afternoon to unwind from the chore of going about routine.
I have been taking a course on cinematography this semester, and I admit that I have a newfound appreciation for what it takes to achieve certain images (lighting design and camera movement) as the Director of Photography as well as how one’s role on set plays out with the dynamic between the entire cast and crew. The camera movement in La La Land achieves that state of dreaminess through swooping crane motions that add to the fluid transitions from one scene to another. From the opening scene, where a continuous take is interjected by dancing bodies and opening car doors to the pool party scene where the camera dives in with the actors, there is a constant sense of grandeur that renders characters always on a stage: life as a performance.
La La Land received so much acclaim because it revived a long history and tradition of American musicals on film. However, I find that it lacks the maturity and complexity of Damien Chazalle’s first film from two years ago, Whiplash. There is something funny in La La Land’s approach to diversity: the opening scene is the only one that includes people of color. It then narrows down to follow the whimsical struggles of two rising white LA artists whose dreams simultaneously bring them together and pull them apart. Overall, I found La La Land a poorly-performed musical (both the acting and the singing were lousy). The film is spectacle: it’s interested in itself and the constructed image. In that respect, it is very much like theater. It wants to be watched for the visuals and nothing more.
Fats and Economics
Professor Jonathan Robins provided a very insightful and knowledgeable study of the role of fat in the food industry with some rather comprehensive examples regarding how specific fats are made in certain parts of the world and comparing the different environmental conditions and social-political pressures that control the type of fat in the marketplace, expanding on the role of federal regulations as well. It was very interesting to learn the historical perspective on nutritional science through which Professor Robins was able to clarify and expand on certain key issues, such as the politics of fat substitutability, with concise examples (one of which was that whale oil was claimed extinct in 1920s but then revived in the 40s-50s and before it left the industry in the 60s due to the vegetable fat industry ambitiously attempting to put the animal fat industry out of business). The rather free-form Q&A session catered to a discussion on the types of fats we eat and whether they can be identified as good or bad. Of course, take everything in moderation was the final word on that matter. However, what intrigued me most was rather the economic depth to these choices and that the misconceptions that we have about fats where we so easily categorize them as good or bad are influenced by the government’s fluctuating role in which fats are made available on the market and which are not. Professor Robins really opened a new platform for discussion about food and our ways of consumption.
Urban Fabric in City of God
This was my third time watching the City of God, and with each viewing, I find that the film reveals a little more about itself; the dense, active, and chaotic space is somehow always punctuated with moments of clarity that interweave themselves in the urban fabric. De-centralized and continuously expanding, favelas are somewhat of an urban phenomenon. There is a self-organized spontaneity to them that inherently includes a logic of diversity. I was especially interested this time in following how the camera works with and/or against this urban fabric.
Within the film, architecture serves the purpose of facilitating fluid camera movement from one space into another, from one doorway through another, acting as stand-in facades that function not so much as set design as they do as tools to frame characters, as vignettes that introduce individual portraits of people in constant states of dislocation and relocation. The running camera immerses us into the layered dynamics of the neighborhood—the density as well as expanse of it. It follows one character and lands on another as the voiceover helps us transition between characters. We move quickly in and out of a lot of places, we witness many events, and as we remain confined on the microcosmic level of activity, we become even more aware of the macro systematic problems of gang violence and power vacuums.
Why are you Here?
Dr. Hill shared some of the hardships and lessons of life he has experienced, leaving us to reflect on our own lives and to draw connections and an understanding of why we are where we are currently. As a student studying art and who wants to pursue some form of fine arts professionally, I think this is a fundamental question that is inherent in the art practice—why do artists do what they do? I say inherent because art making challenges you to constantly create, but it is not so much out of the need for expression as it is for the form of communication. Art as expression vs. communication are different types of work that function in separate ways. The former is a self-centered, one-sided argument for making art that speaks at you, the viewer, the latter is an empathetic, open-ended, question-driven work that wants to open up a dialogue about itself as a form of mediation between maker and viewer; the former is work one makes for himself, the latter is work one makes for others. I think here is where art really exists in the public space—to create a form of empathy, but in that empathy there is also an innate form of humor that transcends pretentious artist statements/writings on the work (where words oftentimes attempt to substitute for the piece itself) and undermine the somewhat institutional seriousness of art, which Western art history so often perpetuates when it places masterworks on a pedestal, building a hierarchy where images are compared rather than in conversation with one another. Pop Art is brilliant in that way because it subverts that whole culture, poking fun at itself. The object in this case approximates an early comedy film from the 1930s. Take Charlie Chaplin for example. Baudrillard described two types of humor: one is based on inverting social/structural paradigms (Chaplin cross-dressing), and the other is defying the laws of physics (when Chaplin maintains stasis climbing down an upward-running escalator). When the art object becomes aware of what it is doing and how it goes about doing what it does; when it understands that it stands-in for a person as a form of empathy, there is something funny in that as well as something tragic. For art to belong in a space where it both interjects and remains self-contained is to realize that the artist is constantly in the pursuit to understand others out of an inability to fully understand him or herself.
Theater in Film: Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love takes a playful and delightful turn on the creation of Romeo and Juliet. A rather steamy, inventive, and somewhat parodic take on William Shakespeare’s approach to writing one of the greatest classics of all time, screenwriter Tom Stoppard energetically blends the drama and fiction of playwriting with the constructed fiction of the screen, doing so both through language (the whole film is written in iambic pentameter) and through parallel stories (the fictional biography of Shakespeare and the actual play). The fluidity between these parallel universes speaks to a larger conversation on the relationship between art and life. This is something Stoppard visually plays with during the brawl scene on stage when Lord Wessex challenges Shakespeare to a duel; during a suspenseful moment when Shakespeare is about to pierce Wessex through the heart, his choice of sword fails him and undermines his attack, bending as it humorously pokes at Wessex but also at us, the audience, and the spectacle of theater and of film-making. The film is able to so brilliantly convey a William Shakespeare as an everyday man that reminds us at most that he was a populist writer above all, something we oftentimes forget when we approach his work and place it on a pedestal.