1917 - Aesthetic & Drama
Thoughts On: 1917 (2019)
Two soldiers must reach a battalion about to run into an ambush.
I have seen 1917 twice in the cinema now, and it has only become more abundantly clear that this is a truly special work of such incredible technical brilliance. What I did not anticipate from 1917 was its poetic expression and magisterial ability to articulate concisely and directly thematic and aesthetic points of interest. If we look to 'one-shot' films such as Rope, Birdman and Russian Ark, we find examples of visual and technical spectacle concerned with form's ability to capture material diegesis. That is to say that the spectacle of these respective films stems from the impressive presentation of what is within the frame. For example, Birdman is filled with shots, moments and performances that are designed so that the audience questions - how did they capture that? Russian Ark and Rope, too, centralise choreography - both that of the camera and performers: blocking. Russian Ark does so to access an ethereal tone, Rope to generate tension. All of these attributes emerge from a set, however: and so we feel like we are watching something quasi-theatrical. It then is no surprise that Birdman concerns itself with the theatre. After all, that appears to be one of the ontological crises on the periphery of this kind of film: the age-old tension between theatre and cinema. That said, whilst 1917 advertises itself as having similar concerns, it does not. 1917 subverts this developing convention of the oner and the one-shot film, focusing not only on what is material and real within the frame, but cinematic spacetime's relationship with the abstractions of the medium: those magical elements of music and theme specifically.
If Mendes showcases a mastery of anything in 1917, it is a mastery of directional cinematic language. With cutting extracted from this film's lexicon, its ability to manage the spectator's eye is found in the movement between varying focal lengths and shot types: wide to close, long to short. It is the movement from wide to close framing or a long to short depth of field that not only transforms the way the spectator may see subtly, slowly progressing drama, but provides and emphasises the logic or knowledge of certain sequences. Take for example a simple moment in which our main character must cross a broken bridge. Here there is a transition from a near-POV look at the bridge to a tracking shot behind the solider to a close-up of his feet, to a mechanical crane wide that tracks and pushes in on his hurried movement across to the other bank when he comes under fire. This analysis is dependent entirely on my memory of this scene and so my description may not be entirely accurate, but what is presented in this moment is dense and layered. Through these transitions, not only is tension and panic built and expressed, but attention is called to texture, to the slippery mud on the soldier's boots; he is isolated, moved by pure, automatic desperation and overcome by an unrelenting and fearless confrontation of possible death. How this over-tonal thematic discourse shifts through the film is dependent on scenes like this. The mere push-in on boots (which is a recurring shot that tracks the hell that this solider has trudged through) pulls us back to a recognition of his suffering and will. Our migration between near and far perspectives of such pathos and triumph then not only serves as a temporal transformer, but adds density to a brutal and immersive lyrosophic experience.
Let us try to unpack this further. We will start with how the cinematic language becomes a temporal transformer. The difficulty of a long-shot film concerns the fact that all the 'boring bits' of life that film often cuts out, must be masked and managed. Our characters in this film then must travel approximately 6 miles (if I remember correctly). This is the source of all drama - an adventure of sorts. However, this journey should, in reality, have many quiet (boring, stale, meaningless) moments of inaction. Whilst editing would usually cut these moments away, the script and blocking in 1917 must work together to invigorate all moments with either aesthetic or dramatic substance. This is where we see cinematic language become a transformer of time. It speeds and slows it down, orchestrating a visual narrative that sustains the spectator's interest by constantly providing nuanced perspectives of drama. As a result, though there are numerous images of 'walking', all of these images are differentiated and layered with new logic. Some shots of walking generate tension, fear and anticipation, others evoke reflection, others call attention to details, such as how soaked a solider's boots are. It is because the frame is managed in such a way that it constantly makes new articulations of familiar drama. This technicality is extremely impressive and, as said, one of the key innovations that 1917 makes as a one-shot film. But, adding to this, the entire technique is further compounded in complexity by the fact that it is only one half of tremendous sound-montage. That is to say that, a much as differing shot types alter the meaning and density of drama, so does the music. The score of 1917 is incredibly rousing and subtle; it works also to slow down and speed up time, to layer on top of drama aesthetic wonder. And so whilst it seems that technical visuals are what make 1917 special, close attention will make obvious the fact that it is the interplay between sight and sound that are so impressive in this feature.
With that discussed briefly, let us consider 1917's lyrosophy. Lyrosophy is an old French film theory term that alludes to moments in which meaning is experienced or evidence is felt. It is watching 1917 that I began to realise how significant this term may be. Whilst the cinematic language of this film is rather structured and technical, the most expressive moments of the film are not grounded in drama, per se, rather aesthetic. However, immediately after having this thought, I questioned the very definition of the aesthetic and dramatic. I have worked for quite some time on trying to understand the term 'drama'. I have come to see it as action and conflict that is mimetically associated with an expression of universal immanent logic through the collective unconscious and then conscious cognition surrounding and pervading a cinematic space. 'Aesthetic' on the other hand, is a term I haven't given significant thought. In the works of Kant, Bergson, Schiller, Hegel and
Dufrenne, the aesthetic binds art to an existential ontological aporia: a question of an immanent or transcendent 'beyond' from which meaning or experience is derived or travels back to. My knowledge of these philosophers, you'll have to forgive me, is not too deep; but it is apparent that the aesthetic is in some capacity an evocation of nature, spirit, the transcendental and humanity to them. And so following this back to Epstein, I began to see through 1917 what aesthetic could really add to the structure of the cinematic space. Where drama is subsumed in the logos or logic of a narrative, aesthetic is bound to a pneumatic spatio-temporal aspect of narrative centred on experience. In short, drama and aesthetic formulate lyrosophy with drama providing knowledge and aesthetic feeling. It is then when drama and aesthetic dance together that knowledge can be experienced or evidence felt. Aesthetic is, in this regard, at once haptic and epistemological; it reaches out to the spectator and pulls them down a road of inquiry. Drama plays a very similar role, and, in truth, aesthetic and drama are very hard to separate. Aesthetic concerns the experience of material objects; it facilitates an experience of their significance via sight, sound and more. Drama is concerned with actions. Alas, actions, and those who act, can be objectified and can contribute to or exist within an aesthetic. How then is the aesthetic and dramatic object differentiated?
It is not clear to me that the two phenomena are separate or can be distinguished definitively. Drama, action, however, focuses on discourse: the accumulation of actions formulate a line of articulation that is quasi-linguistic. Aesthetic, too, communicates, but not through discourse. Aesthetic does not have the ability to transform action into language. It presents materiality as a statement in and of itself. Aesthetic and drama evoke notions and characteristics of Tao, but their mechanism of communication is possibly what separates them: aesthetic primarily evokes, drama discourses. That is not to say that aesthetic cannot formulate discourse; aesthetic has its logic and thus presents ideas. Consider the way in which light and colour say something. Alas, let us recognise that colour and light cannot articulate like action and speech do. Drama travels higher up the annals of the mind, up from the unconscious to consciousness. Aesthetic dwells lower down. Together, however, drama and aesthetic generate lyrosophy. They situate the spectator in a space and time of meaning. Aesthetic enhances the experience of spacetime, drama gives space and time motion and logic that rationalises and layers the experience provided by aesthetic. Let us consider here an example in 1917.
Coming back to consciousness after tumbling down a flight of stairs, our main character enters a town lit intermittently by flares. The strobes of light cast deep shadows and harsh glare over a crumbling, broken town; it becomes a surreal place rife with enemies but also depths to hide in. It is aesthetic that allows us to experience such a place as such. It is difficult to articulate fully what this aesthetic experience is composed of and evokes, but such is the nature of the aesthetic. So much of this experience, it must be emphasised, emerges from the sound track; it situates us within an alien wonder and sublime ambiguity that is at once fearsome and dangerous and unbelievably tangible; a reprieve and a new part of a journey. It is as our character begins to act that drama imbues an experience of this town with a knowledge of its place. It is as our solider then runs from enemies and gun fire, and eventually comes upon a young French woman in hiding with a baby, that we begin to formulate a consciousness of this town as an in-between place. It is somewhere that the journey may be stopped, a place of light and darkness where the solider could either be shot and killed for lack of sight, or where he may hide out within the realm of two anima figures. This place is a significant one in his venture as it returns us to a question of duty. On the one hand, our solider has his aim, and it is imbued with layers of existential substance: he not only means to save thousands of lives, but fulfil the will of another fallen soldier. But, what is forgotten in this journey is what resides beyond war for our solider. This town and its harbouring of the anima (young woman and baby girl) returns us to a vision of the soldier's spirit; his aching desperation and reluctance to return to his own family having completed his duties in a war he does not understand.
So much could emerge from a close analysis of 1917: it is a genuinely brilliant film that beautifully explores the notion of self-sacrifice. But, what I mean to bring to light here is how dependent this film's success is on a coherent expression of aesthetic and drama. It is then with a superior and precise management of cinematic language that 1917 cultivates powerful lyrosophy by intricately presenting the depths of experience facilitated by aesthetic and the knowledge provided by drama.
Two soldiers must reach a battalion about to run into an ambush.
I have seen 1917 twice in the cinema now, and it has only become more abundantly clear that this is a truly special work of such incredible technical brilliance. What I did not anticipate from 1917 was its poetic expression and magisterial ability to articulate concisely and directly thematic and aesthetic points of interest. If we look to 'one-shot' films such as Rope, Birdman and Russian Ark, we find examples of visual and technical spectacle concerned with form's ability to capture material diegesis. That is to say that the spectacle of these respective films stems from the impressive presentation of what is within the frame. For example, Birdman is filled with shots, moments and performances that are designed so that the audience questions - how did they capture that? Russian Ark and Rope, too, centralise choreography - both that of the camera and performers: blocking. Russian Ark does so to access an ethereal tone, Rope to generate tension. All of these attributes emerge from a set, however: and so we feel like we are watching something quasi-theatrical. It then is no surprise that Birdman concerns itself with the theatre. After all, that appears to be one of the ontological crises on the periphery of this kind of film: the age-old tension between theatre and cinema. That said, whilst 1917 advertises itself as having similar concerns, it does not. 1917 subverts this developing convention of the oner and the one-shot film, focusing not only on what is material and real within the frame, but cinematic spacetime's relationship with the abstractions of the medium: those magical elements of music and theme specifically.
If Mendes showcases a mastery of anything in 1917, it is a mastery of directional cinematic language. With cutting extracted from this film's lexicon, its ability to manage the spectator's eye is found in the movement between varying focal lengths and shot types: wide to close, long to short. It is the movement from wide to close framing or a long to short depth of field that not only transforms the way the spectator may see subtly, slowly progressing drama, but provides and emphasises the logic or knowledge of certain sequences. Take for example a simple moment in which our main character must cross a broken bridge. Here there is a transition from a near-POV look at the bridge to a tracking shot behind the solider to a close-up of his feet, to a mechanical crane wide that tracks and pushes in on his hurried movement across to the other bank when he comes under fire. This analysis is dependent entirely on my memory of this scene and so my description may not be entirely accurate, but what is presented in this moment is dense and layered. Through these transitions, not only is tension and panic built and expressed, but attention is called to texture, to the slippery mud on the soldier's boots; he is isolated, moved by pure, automatic desperation and overcome by an unrelenting and fearless confrontation of possible death. How this over-tonal thematic discourse shifts through the film is dependent on scenes like this. The mere push-in on boots (which is a recurring shot that tracks the hell that this solider has trudged through) pulls us back to a recognition of his suffering and will. Our migration between near and far perspectives of such pathos and triumph then not only serves as a temporal transformer, but adds density to a brutal and immersive lyrosophic experience.
Let us try to unpack this further. We will start with how the cinematic language becomes a temporal transformer. The difficulty of a long-shot film concerns the fact that all the 'boring bits' of life that film often cuts out, must be masked and managed. Our characters in this film then must travel approximately 6 miles (if I remember correctly). This is the source of all drama - an adventure of sorts. However, this journey should, in reality, have many quiet (boring, stale, meaningless) moments of inaction. Whilst editing would usually cut these moments away, the script and blocking in 1917 must work together to invigorate all moments with either aesthetic or dramatic substance. This is where we see cinematic language become a transformer of time. It speeds and slows it down, orchestrating a visual narrative that sustains the spectator's interest by constantly providing nuanced perspectives of drama. As a result, though there are numerous images of 'walking', all of these images are differentiated and layered with new logic. Some shots of walking generate tension, fear and anticipation, others evoke reflection, others call attention to details, such as how soaked a solider's boots are. It is because the frame is managed in such a way that it constantly makes new articulations of familiar drama. This technicality is extremely impressive and, as said, one of the key innovations that 1917 makes as a one-shot film. But, adding to this, the entire technique is further compounded in complexity by the fact that it is only one half of tremendous sound-montage. That is to say that, a much as differing shot types alter the meaning and density of drama, so does the music. The score of 1917 is incredibly rousing and subtle; it works also to slow down and speed up time, to layer on top of drama aesthetic wonder. And so whilst it seems that technical visuals are what make 1917 special, close attention will make obvious the fact that it is the interplay between sight and sound that are so impressive in this feature.
With that discussed briefly, let us consider 1917's lyrosophy. Lyrosophy is an old French film theory term that alludes to moments in which meaning is experienced or evidence is felt. It is watching 1917 that I began to realise how significant this term may be. Whilst the cinematic language of this film is rather structured and technical, the most expressive moments of the film are not grounded in drama, per se, rather aesthetic. However, immediately after having this thought, I questioned the very definition of the aesthetic and dramatic. I have worked for quite some time on trying to understand the term 'drama'. I have come to see it as action and conflict that is mimetically associated with an expression of universal immanent logic through the collective unconscious and then conscious cognition surrounding and pervading a cinematic space. 'Aesthetic' on the other hand, is a term I haven't given significant thought. In the works of Kant, Bergson, Schiller, Hegel and
Dufrenne, the aesthetic binds art to an existential ontological aporia: a question of an immanent or transcendent 'beyond' from which meaning or experience is derived or travels back to. My knowledge of these philosophers, you'll have to forgive me, is not too deep; but it is apparent that the aesthetic is in some capacity an evocation of nature, spirit, the transcendental and humanity to them. And so following this back to Epstein, I began to see through 1917 what aesthetic could really add to the structure of the cinematic space. Where drama is subsumed in the logos or logic of a narrative, aesthetic is bound to a pneumatic spatio-temporal aspect of narrative centred on experience. In short, drama and aesthetic formulate lyrosophy with drama providing knowledge and aesthetic feeling. It is then when drama and aesthetic dance together that knowledge can be experienced or evidence felt. Aesthetic is, in this regard, at once haptic and epistemological; it reaches out to the spectator and pulls them down a road of inquiry. Drama plays a very similar role, and, in truth, aesthetic and drama are very hard to separate. Aesthetic concerns the experience of material objects; it facilitates an experience of their significance via sight, sound and more. Drama is concerned with actions. Alas, actions, and those who act, can be objectified and can contribute to or exist within an aesthetic. How then is the aesthetic and dramatic object differentiated?
It is not clear to me that the two phenomena are separate or can be distinguished definitively. Drama, action, however, focuses on discourse: the accumulation of actions formulate a line of articulation that is quasi-linguistic. Aesthetic, too, communicates, but not through discourse. Aesthetic does not have the ability to transform action into language. It presents materiality as a statement in and of itself. Aesthetic and drama evoke notions and characteristics of Tao, but their mechanism of communication is possibly what separates them: aesthetic primarily evokes, drama discourses. That is not to say that aesthetic cannot formulate discourse; aesthetic has its logic and thus presents ideas. Consider the way in which light and colour say something. Alas, let us recognise that colour and light cannot articulate like action and speech do. Drama travels higher up the annals of the mind, up from the unconscious to consciousness. Aesthetic dwells lower down. Together, however, drama and aesthetic generate lyrosophy. They situate the spectator in a space and time of meaning. Aesthetic enhances the experience of spacetime, drama gives space and time motion and logic that rationalises and layers the experience provided by aesthetic. Let us consider here an example in 1917.
Coming back to consciousness after tumbling down a flight of stairs, our main character enters a town lit intermittently by flares. The strobes of light cast deep shadows and harsh glare over a crumbling, broken town; it becomes a surreal place rife with enemies but also depths to hide in. It is aesthetic that allows us to experience such a place as such. It is difficult to articulate fully what this aesthetic experience is composed of and evokes, but such is the nature of the aesthetic. So much of this experience, it must be emphasised, emerges from the sound track; it situates us within an alien wonder and sublime ambiguity that is at once fearsome and dangerous and unbelievably tangible; a reprieve and a new part of a journey. It is as our character begins to act that drama imbues an experience of this town with a knowledge of its place. It is as our solider then runs from enemies and gun fire, and eventually comes upon a young French woman in hiding with a baby, that we begin to formulate a consciousness of this town as an in-between place. It is somewhere that the journey may be stopped, a place of light and darkness where the solider could either be shot and killed for lack of sight, or where he may hide out within the realm of two anima figures. This place is a significant one in his venture as it returns us to a question of duty. On the one hand, our solider has his aim, and it is imbued with layers of existential substance: he not only means to save thousands of lives, but fulfil the will of another fallen soldier. But, what is forgotten in this journey is what resides beyond war for our solider. This town and its harbouring of the anima (young woman and baby girl) returns us to a vision of the soldier's spirit; his aching desperation and reluctance to return to his own family having completed his duties in a war he does not understand.
So much could emerge from a close analysis of 1917: it is a genuinely brilliant film that beautifully explores the notion of self-sacrifice. But, what I mean to bring to light here is how dependent this film's success is on a coherent expression of aesthetic and drama. It is then with a superior and precise management of cinematic language that 1917 cultivates powerful lyrosophy by intricately presenting the depths of experience facilitated by aesthetic and the knowledge provided by drama.
