[in]Transition

I know the author and highly value his scholarship – on embodied cognition, image schemas, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory in film –, therefore, to avoid any suspicion of a biased review, I won’t comment on the content of this publication, and, instead, devote my observations to assess the qualities of the submission as a videographic endeavor. This might be more useful, because, as far as I know, this is the first video Coëgnarts has ever ambitioned to publish.

The primary yardstick to my assessment (of any kind of videographic work) is to consider the value of the audiovisual treatment over the traditional textual conduct, that is, to gauge whether an audiovisually augmented communication of someone’s research findings adds to the point in the make. Assuming the research itself wasn’t conducted audiovisually by design, I see the videographic rendition fully justified. Imagine how difficult it would be to describe what’s presented here; how challenging it would be to argue for the functioning of abstract dynamic patterns as fundamentals for representing a variety of cinematic drama (something, in fact, Coëgnarts frequently attempts in his written work).

While I feel some bits could be shorter (like the Godard scenes between 10:51 and 12:31) or perhaps faster (although these remarks might be misguided by my repeated viewing), I love the smoothly changing presentation style, also for the sake of maintaining audience attention during a relatively long video. Through either putting side-by-side (as in the treatment of Dhont’s Close at 10:14) or even mixing the abstract visualizations with the actual film illustrations – resulting in dots representing characters moving in and out of moving rectangles filled with film scenes that occasionally also move within the videoessay’s own frame, representing camera movements (like in the analysis of Renoir’s Nana at 04:37 or Wong’s In the Mood for Love at 5:00) –, the video remains engaging. Of course, such stripping down of film scenes to their very essential abstractions makes truly sense only to those who know the cited films and the actual dramaturgic contexts within which these scenes operate and actors co-operate: for example, the abstraction of a dot entering and insistently re-entering a gradually shrinking frame (at from 01:35) can easily be seen as a primary ‘dynamic moving image schema’ for an abusive ‘daddy’ (in Dominik’s Blonde) who is gradually breaking into Monroe’s more and more intimate spaces (at from 02:04). The occasional quotes, the ‘interpretive’ recaps and the visual glossary at the end of the video, all bring a welcome clarity on this respect.

Knowing the creator’s earlier written work, especially his meticulous efforts of visualizations as illustrations of his unfolding theories (tailor made charts and flow diagrams, series of screenshots breaking down complex scenes, etc.), his transition to videographic scholarship is a natural move. It certainly is a logical one for a conscientiously rigorous scholar so closely reading film texts and so richly illustrating theories by a wide variety of film examples. That laconic Rohmer-quote at the beginning is a wonderful choice as it, perhaps unintentionally but for this viewer rather effectively, both refers to Rohmer’s filmmaking and Coëgnarts’ own ambition and method to illustrate such filmmaking at the same time.
 

I would only consider myself as having dipped about two toes into the pool of videographic essays, mostly through this journal and the work of some of my colleagues and students. I am a huge fan of the work of Philip Józef Brubaker and Catherine Grant, both of whom fully display the deep love of movies and for close analysis of visual style which I find most inviting in videographic essays, and whose technical skills display a maturity to the form they have helped to pioneer.

This videographic essay is an important contribution to the field, especially for its animated representations of camera and character movement, particularly as they relate to off-screen space. Coëgnarts has clearly thought about this problem of how to represent space and movement a lot, and his diagrams have evolved since the sometimes harder to follow versions in his Kubrick book. Here, the drawings are elegantly simple but quite meaningful, something along the lines of Edward Tufte's aesthetic. Coëgnarts also presents them with the film scenes he is charting, so the value of these representations becomes immediately evident. (And it doesn't hurt that the movements in his diagrams are accompanied by an extremely deep Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois track which fits quite nicely).

There's a whole seminar or two that could be found in going through the examples here and their representations. After a couple of viewings, I felt that Coëgnarts was actually doing a bit of experimenting, both in terms of how to combine the diagrams with the shots they represent, and in the choices of film-makers. Mostly we get the masters, which is fine by me, along with certain quirky choices (Blonde, Close, Birth) that I think are admirable to include as well. I'd say no one should have a complaint about shots from Renoir, Ophuls, Kubrick (three), Antonioni (two), Godard (two), Rohmer (two), Scorsese, Sirk, and Bresson. Great films are rich with significant movements of the camera and use of off-screen space, and exploring these rather than charting a taxonomy of typical examples seems much the way to go. While occasionally he'll show more than one film employing a similar strategy, most of his choices are more daringly original and very rarely seen in the work of other film-makers. Famous examples like Barbara Bel Geddes walking back and forth between James Mason and Robert Ryan in Ophuls' Caught, or Scorsese moving away from DeNiro on the phone in Taxi Driver to an empty hallway are very much worth exploring in their own right, and not as part of an argument about typical film grammar.

Coëgnarts dresses up his approach by saying it's about embodiment and aligning with certain authors outside of film studies, but I don't think what he's doing needs to be posed that way. He does bring up Bordwell and Burch enough to suggest that he's interested mostly in traditional issues like camera movement and off-screen space. What's interesting about his approach is that animated graphic representations could be in service of a range of arguments. While he presents a couple of screens of drawings at the end and labels them a glossary, I think his approach is best looked at as a first set of possibilities that are far from complete. Pick your film and you could come up with some variation of the options he presents, and you could give a try to following his lead, in service of any number of issues.

So compelling is his approach that I felt each time like I wanted to converse about this specific choice and how it's represented. Mostly, it made me hungry for more examples along the same lines. When he shows one great shot from Nana and then a quote from Theory of Film Practice about it, I could envision a whole video essay devoted to Burch's six zones of off-screen space, something that Coëgnarts began to lay out in the Kubrick book. (Incidentally, the book is available online). This video essay is a very nice step for him from the printed page (besides Kubrick, he's written about Rohmer too) to the comforts of showing actual examples. The Kubrick book sometimes has as many as 24 still frames on one page from a single sequence (Paths of Glory is the prizewinner), when an actual video excerpt does the job so much better.

I would view as experimental as well his laying out the final sequence of Mouchette as his last example, which requires seven rectangles, and quarter screen images which move around, and the rectangles repeated again after the sequence. It's a well chosen and challenging example, and it's followed by a general comment about transcendental style from Paul Schrader's book. He could as well have chosen Pickpocket or just about any Bresson, but to me it then felt, if you're really going after this, why not Ozu and Dreyer too. Again, there's another whole essay in pursuing this single example, and I suspect Coëgnarts is quite aware that his one here opens the door to an inviting line of inquiry.

While his drawings are basic and quite effective, interesting options pop up, such as whether different characters require distinctive shadings, and how to represent movements of the camera by moving the rectangles and also by altered distances. (Sometimes the circles get smaller to indicate they are moving away from the camera). He is still tempted occasionally to add text to the drawings, which he did even more extensively on the printed page, and which I think is a mistake. The elegance of purely visual representation which he brings to most of his drawings is a welcome constraint. These are of course issues of infographics, and Coëgnarts here certainly sets a high and imaginative standard.