The authorship and the notion of the auteur

What is the status of the auteur in the context of postwar British cinema?

Essay and analysis about ‘The Other Side of Underneath’ (Jane Arden, 1972)

As a counterpoint to Hollywood assembly-line production of massive audience and commercial films where the director is just an employee, the independent and art cinema tried to reconceptualising the figure of the director as the author (Hall, 177: 2019). Steve Neale defines authorship in film “as an instance of self-expression” (37: 1981). For him, the independent filmmakers “engage the primary ideology of Art, in which the Romantic view of Art is a subjective expression and its functions are signs of expression and marks of art itself” (14: 1981). For this artists the visual style overtakes the commercial and entertaining processes as a suppression of the Hollywood action taken in the British cinema and trows itself into the construction and internalisation of the dramatic conflict of character rather than the plot. In the emerging and consolidation of alternatives to the classical and genre cinema the independent cinema stands out as a new avant-garde in the 70s. Jane Arden’s cinema could be catalogued as alternative, feminist cinema that explores the formal possibilities of filmic representation. John Hilton describes her methods as alternative as she took professional and untrained actors and combined it with the do-it-yourself tactics that defined mostly of the British experimental cinema, art and performance. In this essay we are going to focus in the construction of the narrative through the mes-en-scène in order to prove the belonging of ‘The Other Side of Underneath’ (1972) as part of the independent and art-cinema from British cinema of the 70s to denote Jane Arden’s authorship in this piece.

Sheldon Hall points out from Movie that in art how is what (2019 :188), this means that if you can tell what you wanted by how you picture the story, you won’t need anything else. The aesthetic should talk about the story just like it does on Arden’s film. The aspects of the mise-en-scène in this film look heavily important to me as it show us more about the narrative and the story than the own dialogs, just as in an asylum, the things that happen or are said are just something that has to be analysed in a deeper way in order to find meaning. About this, Steve Neale in ‘Art cinema as institution’ points “the use of the national language” (35 :1981) as a mark that determines the cultural status and origin of the film, but in ‘The Other Side of Underneath’, it seems to have a lack of prominence, as words are often stammering, whispers or screams and are un-understandable or without narrative context value. Mostly of the monologs are bastpoetry about her introspective journey from the past and have no connexion with each other. Here, the language only determines its British origin. The mes-en-scène shows a use of hard contrasted colour of the images during hallucinations and natural neutral colours during the documentarist parts. This makes us think about how the girl may feel better in her inner world than in the real one, because it hurts less. The naturalness of the naked body is shown as an expression of art and aesthetic but mostly as a political act of sin and crime, carnal lust, that is converged in the woman’s body, which represents the pain, the shame, why they seem to be a burden for the patriarchal society we live in. The presence of religious aesthetic shows the political transgression the independent cinema symbolised, as it’s shown from a pagan and feminist point of view: when the protagonist masturbates in the chapel or when she is crucified at the end as a punishment for her misbehaviour, which ends with some kind of hallucinated ritual, we see that she’s mocking, in some way, religion for its misogyny. She’s running away fromherself and the non-diegetic sound proves it. Finally, the plot culminates with the principal character shooting herself as an augury of what will happen to Arden herself.

For John Gibbs, there are two types of authorship, and Arden would fit in those whose films are grounded in mes-en-scène (Hall, 179 :2019). The director needs to be a fusion of capacities, not only a good script writer but a good director to have a good visual style on her own. This is the only film that Arden entirely wrote and directed herself and we clearly see her inside its narrative and aesthetics. For Hilton, “it offers a cinematic time capsule into a distinctive social and artistic atmosphere around her [Arden] in her search of new modes of living and different forms of expression” (4:2019). She’s the author of it, as she’s the one who controls everything that we see and feel. This film is part of her ouvre as we can associate to her the aesthetics, the camera movements and the storytelling. The only way she had for doing such an experimental film about schizophrenia was by using experimental methods of filmmaking. She mixes the storytelling of a fiction with the camera movements we associate to documentary films. This gives it a sense of reality, as she makes us experiment the realness of the dreamworlds and mental breakdowns. Leon Hilton points out that the theatrical images and the unhurried observational mode are made following the methods of cinéma verité and therefore, “she documents and makes us involuntary witnesses of searing moments of psychic collapse” (11: 2019). There are clear gestures to surrealism and avant-garde: it is her only way to describe the world of the inside, the subjectivity of a mental illness such as schizophrenia. I personally see a clearly base on this inner world in Luis Buñuel’s works: Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’Or (1930). We can perceive aesthetic references and plot parallels such as the madness of the self, the past that is still chasing the present, or in the inexplicable presence of animals in beds (Figures 1, 2), as the sense of time passing (memories or playing through cinematic time). Hence, the surrealist influences are clear. In fact, Arden and his partner, Bond, worked with Dalí for Dalí in New York (1965), the documentary about the painter.

From my point of view, this film represents a turning point in the New Wave towards the Hollywood-like cinema that was industrially in power in Britain during the 1960s. It has aesthetically aspects that reveal authorship, as we enquire into her biography, just as technical development that suggests experimental and avant-garde filmmaking. The pre-production and distribution, as well as the filmmaking process, were also experimental because, as Leon Hilton explains in his essay ‘The Real End of Nightmare’ (2019), Arden took her Holocaust Theatre group to an abandoned hospital to film the movie with realism, they filmed drunk and high, and the film was distributed as an experimental art cinema, in independent viewing groups. The narration is mostly improvised and the camera is usually observing, which feels more as a documentary piece than a fiction film. However, the narrative of the protagonist girl’s journey through her schizophrenic attacks builds a frame for fantasy that is resolved with an aesthetic preparation that transmits just beauty and a composition cinematographically perfect. The world Arden plays in is a dreamworld of unjustified and endless women’s pain but aesthetically pleasant. Her film is, as Hilton points out, “drew upon scenes from [her] play New Communion For Freaks, Prophets and Witches“ (2:2019), and her playing the role of the therapist in the group sessions makes her in the diegetic world as well the responsible of the pain and desperation in the plot. Hilton explains how we can notate the authorship in her embracement of the theatrical exuberant aspects of the moment and place she took from Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (another one of her theatre plays) (4:2019) that are dragged into some scenes of ‘The Other Side of Underneath’ and that denote her peculiar theatrical aesthetics. Her directing and actoral brief was the discovering of traumas and denials (5: 2019). This is something we clearly see in the scenes of the mental breakdowns and recovering of the protagonist brought to us by hallucinations where the red nosed woman haunts her and drags her though horrors from her head that, as we discover at the end, are the ones she keeps from her childhood’s memories (Figure 3). As Hilton says, “[that woman] is the one

dragging the protagonist to the underneath” (9:2019), which means the deeper part of herself and her traumas. The parallels between the little girl (herself) and the adult at the beginning are useful to make the connections between both worlds at the end. Hence, the documentary realism of the group sessions are contrasted with the artistically fantasised scenes of these breakdowns, all conducted by a major narrative fiction.

In ‘A diversity of film practices’ Andrew Higson describes Performance (1968) by Roeg and Cammell as one of the art-house model film. They used, just as Arden in her film, a held camera that gives the movie some kind of instability, zooms as it was filmed unprepared, shots that are out of focus, wide angle shots, unconventional camera angles, unfamiliar music and other sound effects that doesn’t match with the diegetic of the film and an obsessive use of mirrors (228: 1994). This also fits in with a general description of the technics used by Arden in her film and that would catalog it in the art cinema as well (Figure 4, 5).

The film is addressed to a high educated public as proletarian audience wouldn’t had liked or understand the goal of the experimental aesthetic, filmmaking and storytelling, as the film is not just entertainment as classical Hollywood but a self-expression method. Arden needs to make this film could have been more than just artistic and be also politic, as she had a growing concern about feminism and the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1960s, she was herself diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1979 and finally took her own life in 1982. Hilton says that “Arden’s film offers a poetic celebration of women’s pain” and that it fights back “against the controlling misogynies of psychiatry and cinema” (3:2019). This work represents, by the fictional narrative of the girl, the psychological effects of the mental illness in a very understandable and visual way for audiences to understand psychiatry in a new deeper way. Arden wanted to portray “the phantoms [of her] own paranoia” (6: 2019).

As we can see by this study, the author during the postwar in British cinema faced an economic troubled situation with the crisis of the 1970s and the politic changes that came within the Thatcherism movement. Paul Newland confirms that art cinema and avant-garde in the 70’s raised again as a counterpoint of the high budgets and the star system that Hollywood pushed British Cinema in the 60’s, when it tried to look alike in order to expand the market. Art cinema tried to get away from the mainstream and the mass and react against it, so it destroyed the linear narrative and the cause-effect logic that left a clear resolution. It as well helped to put the social realism with the cinéma verité as a political medium. Arden was one of those British authors who followed the British New Wave and converged the realism of the storytelling with the modernism of the filmmaking. She also based her stories in her own theatre, as the nouvelle vague did before her, in order to find influences from literature and aesthetic style. ‘The Other Side of Underneath’ is one clear example of how British art cinema is always impure, as Newland and Hoyle declare, “it shows an amalgamation of various styles, genres and voices that is always more artistically innovative and thematically serious than the mainstream counterparts” (11: 2019).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hall, Sheldon (2019): 'British Cinema and Authorship' in John Hill (ed.), A Companion to British and Irish Cinema (Wiley) (pp. 177–200)

Higson, Andrew (1994): ‘A Diversity of Film Practices: Renewing British Cinema in the 1970s’ in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), The Arts in The 1970s: Cultural Closure? (Routledge) (pp. 2016-239)

Hilton, Leon J. (2019): 'The Real End of a Nightmare: Amateurism, Feminism and the Politics of Therapy in Jane Arden’s 1970s', Third Text (pp. 1-12)

Murphy, Robert (2012): ‘Polanski and Skolimowski in ‘Swinging London’’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 9.2 (pp. 214-229)

Neale, Steve (1981): ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, in Screen 22:1 (pp. 11-40)

Newland, Paul; Hoyle, Brian (2019): 'Introduction' to Newland & Hoyle (eds.), ‘British Art Cinema: Creativity, Experimentation and Innovation’ (Manchester UP) ( pp.1-21)

Newland, Paul (2010): 'Introduction' to Newland (ed.), ‘Don't Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s’ (Intellect), pp. 10-19.

FILMOGRAPHY

Areden, Jane (1972): The Other Side of Underneath

Buñuel, Luis (1929): Un Chien Andalou

Bond, Jack & Arden, Jane (1965): Dalí in New York

Roeg & Commell (1968): Performance