The gap between seeing and understanding: Studium and Punctum in Film Narrative
Punctum:
- Punctum is: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).
- A "detail," an addition.
- Power of Expansion: a connection to the referent, annihilation of self.
- no longer of form but of intensity , is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (" that-has-been"), the connection between past and future, live and death.
Photography is derived from the sense of realism. People obtain the desire to find this resemblance and realness in an image as the representation could indicate the referent itself: their perfect face and body, people that are still alive or just a contingent memorable event. As if this frame could be a mirror to identify the fact and reality. Photography thus keeps company with death. The noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: "that has been." (Barthes, 1980) Unlike paintings, photography is the index, the fingerprint or trace, of something that had existed, and this mechanical process in reproduction is taking greater immediacy and authority to be regarded as existence without reservation. The desire of objective authenticity is rooted in the very heart of photography and has been furthered in the production of film. “Cinema has not yet been invented” In the specific notion of total cinema, Bazin explains this illusion created in film production as a complete and perfect illusion of life. For both of them, photographic and cinematic image is the evidence of presence and a reference to the past reality.
However, this illusion of reality that photography created hinders us from identifying the living reality by producing a dominating ideology that conceals this subjectivity. In Marianne Hirsch’s Familial gaze, the perfect family frame is created and functioned as a symbolization for the dominant narrative of family image. The same arrangement of seats, the same clothes or the designed simile on face, all of these elements of perfect family is actually ignoring and invisibilizing the individual uniqueness and creating a spectacle of family. The myth of image is reversely dominating the living identity. Illusion of reality also works as a placebo that distracts one from what should be concerned. In Sontage’s book, regarding the pain of others, she is against Woolf’s notion that the picture of the war could speak for itself, instead, photographs are out of control from even photographers themselves. Photographs are both objective record and personal testimony, but their symbolization with the referent should not waive one’s recognition of what reality is. “The pity and disgust that pictures like Hicks's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown”. photographs of others’ suffering and violence are spectacularized as a challenge of whether to look at it or not, and this overexposure is wearing out people’s feeling and empathy toward the actual war itself. Spectators are distanced from caring about the suffering of others.
Punctum connect objective "that has been" with the subjective viewer through personal affection. In Barthes’s theory in Camera Lucida, The spectrum, which is the referent in the photograph, comprises two elements: studium, or the cultural knowledge that allows the spectator to understand what is captured in the photograph, and punctum, which in Latin means ‘a wound, a mark left by a pointed instrument’ and which ‘breaks the studium’. These ‘stings’, ‘specks’ or random details in a photograph cut through the homogeneity of the studium and ‘prick’ the spectator, This punctum is the additional details, the intensity of time, and the madness affection of pity. It could be a flaw on your dress, a wrinkle on your face, or the death that wounds you when you look at your mother’s image. What matters is that it needs to be personal, against the objective cultural illusion. It is different from surprise as it wounds you. Punctum is the element for an immobilized image to emerge, to dream beyond what could already be seen. A “Blind field” is created by the punctum which brings the image out of the stadium to create an emotional and personal meaning. (ch23)
For Barthes, the immobility is constructing the unique myth of photography: the presence of referent is strongly connected to the image itself. While characters of a film could continue its life outside the frame, the immobility of the photographed is freezed in this moment. In other words, cinema is creating a constitutive style of looking where you always look away, but in photography, death, the representation is foreclosed and finite: there has been, and nothing else. (ch37) However, this paper would like to discuss the possibility of adapting the theory of punctum to illustrate the disruption of constitutive narrative in film itself. In analyzing Anatomy of a Fall, from its adaptation of family pictures to its suspended narrative, I intend to answer these questions:
Could film disrupt its constitutive narrative? Could film force a kind of watching that “wounds” the audiences?
I am arguing that Barthes’s theory of studium and punctum could develop another perspective in film narrative which is multidimensional constructed and targeting on individual emotional reflection.
Anatomy of A fall
In the film the story begins when Samuel is found dead in the snow outside the isolated chalet where he lived with his wife Sandra, a German writer, and their partially-sighted 11-year-old son Daniel. An investigation leads to a conclusion of "suspicious death": it's impossible to know for sure whether he took his own life or was killed. Sandra is indicted, and Daniel is identified as the key witness to give evidence for his parents relationship and his father’s suicide inclination. Through the process of trial, recordings, blood spatter tests, witnesses, and all other evidence are gathered together to illustrate the “truth” that Sandra is guilty. But Daniel believe his mother's statement that his father tried to use Aspirin for suicide. In the end, Daniel talk to court about an conversation between him and his father who talks about death of Snoop, their dog, like his own death. Samuel's case is concluded as suicide, and Sandra rebuild trust relationship between her son. “ That recording, is not reality, It’s a part of it, maybe. If you have an extreme moment in life, an emotional peak you focus on, of course it crushes everything. It may seem like irrefutable proof, but actually wraps everything. It’s not reality, it is our voices, but not who we are.”This is beyond the anatomy of Samuel’s fall, but a dissection of the family to ask Sandra that How do you prove you love him? How do you prove your innocence when all evidence is in opposition with you?
“I don’t give a fuck about what is reality. You need to start seeing yourself the way others are going to perceive you. The trail is not about the truth.”
Family picture:
On the one hand, the Punctum disturbs the flat and immobile surface of the image, embedding it in an affective relationship of viewing and thus in a narrative; on the other, it arrests and interrupts the contextual and therefore narrative reading of the photograph that Barthes calls the studium.Familial gaze and alternative narrative:
The film credits at the beginning is constructed by a series of photographs from Samuel and Sandra, and the sequence of photos are in analogy with their life paths: separated in their own pictures at start, getting to know each other, and finally having a kid, Daniel. The completeness of family could only be perceived through images. This first present of their photographs embedded a studium: this is about an ordinary family, mother fell in love with father and they have a kid. This series of presentation of photographs is in consistency with what Barthes accuses cinema as different from photographs: there is no silence of contemplation, with a constitutive style of looking, this process is building singular photographs into a narrative whose function is to inform, to signify the concept we have toward family: complete and perfect.
However, this is a suspended film that is looking for murder. After a series of long and frustrating interrogation and questioning in court, these family pictures again are presented in Danile’s hand, when he find out that his father took aspirin before, a proof of his suicidal inclination. This time, we are forced to look really close and focused with Danile who is partially sighted. Instead of showing the whole picture, the screen focused on their faces in photos: happy and smiling faces, but we could inevitably feel depressed. While posting the audiences on the perspective of Daniel, the story structure derived the punctum that pricks us. The death corpus and alive faces construct the doubleness in a photograph which in consistence with how Barthes described the feeling on PORTRAIT OF LEWIS PAYNE (Alexander Gardner, 1865). “ By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future” (ch39). This sense of “that has been” is intensifying the pass of time and the powerlessness in doing anything. Forced close-up shots without music but Daniel’s breathing, we are forced to contemplate with him, to steer at his father’s death through his “has been”, to see the already broken marriage through their intimate and happy pose in photographs.
Between these two appearances of family pictures, it is the process from seeing to understanding. There is constantly a gap between the actual referent and the picture itself: Parents’ happy faces in picture, and the fact that one is dead and one is accused. Punctum is that bridge from seeing to understanding. By relating and experiencing present affection with certain pictures, punctum is reconnecting what has happened and what I personally feel about it in the present. Punctum is created by the intensity of time which tells the story that hides behind harmonized imagery.
Here we could identify a potential possibility for the theory of punctum that is established by film narrative. The first time we saw their family pictures, it did not mean anything to the audience except what we had already known. However, through a film narrative that is about one hour long, their second appearance becomes meaningful and connective. Film is obtaining the possibility to develop intimate connections between viewer and characters in a close and inclusive narration.
Pucntum in film: suspension of reality
Films are so generally viewed as a medium of entertainment, for satisfiction and fetishment. From the train coming into the station to nowadays Hollywood movies, its ultimate goal is to construct what Bazin would call “total cinema”, spectacles that look like reality and fantasies beyond reality. Cinema “is simply an illusion; its vision is oneiric, not ecmnesic.” (48) On the opposite, Barthes’s Punctum is constructed by authentic and emotional wounds and pathos. Thus, when we consider applying Punctum in the narrative of cinematic narrative, the paradox lies that it should both construct a fictional narrative but at the same time connect to authentic pathos. Cinema builds up punctum through the disruption of institutive narrative and the ambiguity for active searching.In the process of trial, with different witnesses presented, Danile and possibly everyone listening to it (including audiences) is constantly imagining what had happened to his father. Could it be his mother that pushed his father down? Could he fall down the window by himself ? Did they have a fight? All these are presented like it had happened before, the scene that perfectly fit the recording, the camera angle as peeking that potentially implying someone seeing Sandra pushed Samuel down. This is objective and perfect evidence that proves Sandra is guilty.
However, the punctum which is the seemingly imperfectness that disrupts the mainstream narrative and its effectiveness is Danile’s statement about his memory of a conversation that happened between him and his father. Different from all scenes that illustrate evidence before, it is a scene where voices impair the picture. This is a pure personal and subjective statement, yet it feels more authentic. How do you prove who he is? Answer to this question is not objective evidence or credentials from the therapist, but personal and seemingly unreliable testimonies from an 11 years old kid. The fetishistic searching for “truth” is actually just searching for dramatic climax: “I don’t think it matters how he died. The fact is, the idea of a writer killing her husband is far more compelling than a teacher killing himself”(2:08:42). Danile’s imperfect testimony is a subversion to all perfect evidence — personal experiences against objective evidence. And Punctum is caused by Danile’s subjectivity. It is him who hold the ability to decide what is true, and neither audiences nor those recordings obtain this ability. Spectator's dominance in controlling the gaze is disrupted.
After watching the film, many video analyses on youtube are showing the title like: details tell you who actually killed the husband or what is the truth. To the ending, one of the main characters said: “ Samuel killed himself, or any of this movie would make any sense.” Although the court had made judgment toward Sandra’s case, the ending of the movie did not give a straightforward answer to who killed Samuel, what had happened is still undercover. What she said is also truth as if Samule did not take suicide what I argued at the last paragraph would not making any sense. However, I believe that this ambiguity on what “that has been” is inspiringly creating another punctum on the spectator's need of control on truth. This ambiguity intrigue spectators to look deeper and search it further. Do not look away. This suspension is asking spectators to open the pandora box themselves, to make the decision like Daniel: do you believe or not.
Truth is suspended: it matters but also does not matter.
You need to be involved in the process of looking, not as mere receiver, but as an active researcher.
See it and Understand it.
