Sunday, October 6, 2013

Rush 3

Repetition:
when analyzing Citizen Kane to The Bicycle Theives, one of the main images and concepts that strikes me the most, and I find most palpable, is the image of seeing the protagonist through the eyes of either the supporting role, secondary character or passerby.
For example, in Kane, right after his wife leaves him and he torments, destroys and sabotages her bedroom, he leaves the room saying the word Rosebud, while his ensemble, his clerks and servants, his friends, watch him. We see Kane, at that moment, through the eyes of the other characters and it gives us an unfathomable amount of information and insight to the character almost more-so than we could when watching him violently act out his inner monologue through destroying her room. This simple but yet complex moment reveals to us where he stands, where they stand with him and most of all, it gives us an opportunity to choose where We stand, the audience that is.
Moments like this do not always occur within cinema anymore because the plot, structure and concept is so geared towards one specific thing. Particularly in action films. The Bourne series for example, is highly focused on the action and intensity that Jason Bourne lives in, and we receive very little to few moments to establish ourselves with the character.
In The Bicylce Theives, the final moment when the father is plagued by his tormented reality and lack of his prospering life, trying to justify his act of stealing another bike to, quite literally "save his life" we see him, through his sons eyes.
This moment, relative to, and just like Kane, is exemplary and extremely significant because we are humbled by the reality of the situation and our relationship with all the characters becomes justified and allowed to be fully recognized.  

This simple act of repetition, in these final crucial moments of the film: looking at the protagonist through the eyes of their fellows, becomes almost the crux of the film rather than what the protagonist actually Does in the end. 

2 comments:

  1. Nice post--some really productive connections here. Like you say, the group of on-looking servants in Kane correlates structurally to the man's son in Bike Thieves. What's at stake in both films is the protagonist's fascination with the position or perspective from which his life would take on meaning. (In Bike Thieves the boy embodies this position pretty directly; in Kane, the mother's/parents' gaze becomes displaced onto a whole series of objects: first, of course, the sled Rosebud--but in turn, his friends and lovers--so the servants are perhaps a couple steps displaced, but definitely still functioning as surrogates for this enchanting/elusive perspective...

    100/100

    CS

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  2. And you're right: in films like the Bourne franchise it's much harder to discern any such function. In other contemporary films, though, it almost seems louder, more apparent than ever. In Looper, for instance, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character literally sees himself through his own (subsequent) perspective, through sci-fi time-travel plot structure resulting in his meeting his older self. (So in this case--and in fact in a lot of sci-fi film/TV--a character's double comes to embody the extrinsic perspective from which the character's life can be seen to make sense--as in Huck Finn's witnessing of his own funeral in the Twain novel.)

    CS

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