"Your interest in how Ozu would portray our modern times intrigued me, for I felt that the crux of Ozu’s statement on modernity is how there is little time left to look after tradition. I think the best starting point to your query may lie in whether or not you believe our modern-day Western society still concerns itself with tradition."
"Referring to how you say African Americans are painfully underrepresented in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, I am in complete agreement. It is disheartening to think of O’Connor’s attempt to project a semi-documentarian style of Gothic literature as excluding very present members of the society it portrays. I think there are very curious distinctions made by the author upon the types of people she wants represented - It seems Flannery O’Connor is happy to critique religion in a world fully entrenched in segregationism, which lays sadly untouched by her."
I’m going to base my analysis of the two books of this course in the order of which I read them, as I have begun to consider the idea that this seemingly superfluous order has influenced my enjoyment of each. So, I’ll begin with my thoughts on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
When I began reading Wise Blood, the book made me feel quite uneasy. I described the book to those who saw me reading it at first to be more or less repulsive, not in the way that it is written, but in the content it smears in the eyes and under the nose of its readers. The protagonist Hazel Motes, whose wartime experiences have left him more than a little disillusioned with the Christian morality by which he was raised, is a tremendously jaded, morbid, and waxy young man. To top off his desirability, he drives a beat-up “rat-colored” [sic] car. The number of times Haze’s “rat-colored car” is mentioned to exacerbate the sordid filthiness alluded to throughout the span of the novel gives one the feeling that the world that O’Connor creates is tantamount to walking out your door of a morning to see a potentially endearing child destroy all illusion by digging out the contents of their nose and rubbing it in their eye with relish. And yet, Hazel Motes can at times be not entirely unsympathetic. One gets the feeling in the text that Hazel might be one of the few with his eyes open, but too often they glaze over with decisions that boggle the mind, until he snuffs them out in an act of self-salvation. Fair enough – if I was a character in Wise Blood, I might consider doing the same. In short, the conglomeration of characters and their ideas and circumstances highlights the grotesque.
However, as O’Connor writes in the style of Southern Gothic, it would be amiss to suggest that the grotesque is not what she aims to create. I understand this outcome to be necessary to the purpose of the text, which is in part to show humanity’s losses in the transfiguration of society through the processes of modernity. It also comes to be an indictment of religion’ influence in a modern world,
It is evident that the town in which all the characters of Wise Blood is set is not yet up to speed either. The town of Taulkinham, which through its various descriptions of incongruous modernity and archaic sentiment, befits a welcome sign at its borders which could read “Welcome to the electrified dustbowl, where everything else is grease”. This inability to properly get with the times is possibly hinted at cryptically in the name Taulkinham, or ‘talkin’-ham’, perhaps suggesting a Ham Radio, a bridging technology in communication that connects separate and unknown participants by getting them on the same wavelength, much like function the town of Taulkinham in the text.
As the book ends with the anticlimactic death of the protagonist, one almost feels relieved for him to be released. That said, based on the initial descriptions of all characters, even before they have begun to make their morally questionable decisions, and the ends they meet, hope is certainly lost in Wise Blood.
This idea of new goals and new horizons is evident from the very first in Berlin, where, after the initial opening shot of water the viewer’s eyes are met with a non-descript pattern of static white and black horizontal lines. Imposed behind this is a light circular object, rising up over and over, as if presenting the rising of the sun through blinds day after day. This abstract, mechanical symbol of a certain, natural event anticipates the manner in which the rest of the film is to follow. The film shows juxtaposed images of like terms in sequence, as seen in Act I with the progression of shots of men’s feet in movement, to the feet of cattle being herded, to the feet of soldiers marching, all on the same street, and all within approximately 5 seconds.
Even considering these elements of the film alone, it seems obvious that Ruttmann was very much influenced in his direction by the ideas of organic montage developed by the Soviet school of thought. Unmistakable marks of this style of film-making include dialectical material opposition, such as can be seen in the converging of horse-drawn carriages and automobiles onto a shared space, the use of clocks, highlighting the temporality of the movement-image, and the focus upon horizontality.
The previously mentioned horizontal lines are somewhat of a motif in the film, tying the city together through the representation of a flat space – an equal, social space. The links flow through train tracks, arrows, power lines, grates, buildings, windows, blinds, etc.
Another motif of Soviet organic montage is the absence of camera movement, which is evident in Berlin. Through this form of shot, utilizing to their greatest the simplicity and sophistication of basic camera angles, the city of Berlin is allowed to speak for itself. On a final related note, in watching the film, also, I found great similarity between the film and the photographic works of Edward Steichen. Steichen, however, dates the photographs in question to the early 30s, meaning that there is little doubt he took great influence from Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großtadt, or films of a similar strain. So, here, for your viewing pleasure, is Steichen’s George Washington Bridge (1931), and The Maypole (1932):
