Dogville

Lars Von Trier’s avant-garde release Dogville (2003) deliberately ruptures the normal spatial conventions of contemporary feature film through its utilisation of an interior theatrical setting rather than a naturalistic, location-based one. Whilst the film is set in a small town in the United States, it was in actuality shot on a plain black soundstage in Switzerland, the actors walking around on a set that more than anything else resembles a giant version of the boardgame Cluedo. Each building of the eponymous town is represented by painted white lines on the stage, and even the resident dog is an outline set onto the ground until the final scene. Despite the theatrical set-up of the studio, the cinematography still remains resolutely cinematic, with crane shots and bird’s-eye-views of the territory mapping out the scene. While these shots normally work to create a touristic gaze, in this case they function as empty signifiers for there is no real object (i.e. no landscape) to justify the lushness of such a gaze.

Brechtian in style, Dogville was created to shock (employing spatializing language, in one interview Von Trier calls the movie a “moon landing” compared to the other more “filmic” movies released in recent years). Even more telling of the rupturing of the geographic reality effect has been the negative reception to the film from American critics on the grounds of authenticity. When it has been considered alongside Von Trier‘s previous film Dancer in the Dark (2001) – another film set in small town USA, but filmed on location in Europe – some critics have accused the director of not being able to depict thier nation accurately enough on film. In this reasoning we find the the concept that location shooting in the United States will lead Von Trier to some kind of increased authenticity in filmmaking. Responding to such criticism, Von Trier has pointed out that many films made in the United States have been set in other countries:

"I seemed to remember that they never went to Casablanca when they did Casablanca…so I thought that’s unfair, so I have to make more films taking place in America."

What Von Trier disregards by referring to the case of Casablanca (1943) is that the film-making conditions in vertically integrated Hollywood in 1943 were radically different to the conditions of horizontally integrated global Hollywood in 2003. As referred to in the narrative of Casablanca, the geographical “real” city was a strategic military position for the length of the second world war; in fact, a summit held by the allied forces ended up pushing forward the film’s release date so that it could maximise the free pre-publicity given by the real event. Whilst overseas location shooting had always remained a small part of the studio system for the occasional prestige picture, at this particular juncture in history, it was simply not financially feasibile or safe to film on location in North Africa. What is certain is that that the audience would not have expected location shooting to be a part of the film’s reality effect: this could be provided by such factors as the exterior sets, the performance of the actors, the dialogue and the world-weary narrative. In the current stage of late capitalism, where the emphasis lies firmly on consumption rather than production, international travel has become relatively affordible for many residents in developed countries: therefore for a contemporary film to achieve this reality effect, it will often need to be shot on location too, or else it must employ special effects that approximate to such a geographic reality.

Therefore, by changing the conditions of cinematic space, in Dogville Von Trier is throwing the gauntlet to a western cinema that has been organised around the cultural hegemony of global Hollywood.

A Virtual Claude Glass?

No, "Claude Glass" is not my new online pseudonym: the Claude glass was a type of viewfinder for the eighteenth-century Grand Tourist, a must-have travel accessory named after the reknowned Picturesque artist Claude Genee/Lorraine (1604-1682). Its function was to help the spectator frame the landscape so that the appropriate artistic perspective could be attained. It was like an ezy-shot camera before the ezy-shot camera existed, except the view was exclusive to the observer, only available on location and non-recordible. Often, it was tinted a brown colour so that the view would take on the burnished look of a scene from classical antiquity - the perfect accompaniment to an Arcadian-looking perspective and a way for the Grand Tourist to switch his or her view from an ordinary to an extraordinary one.

While a lot has been written about the Claude glass pre-empting photography and the tourist postcard, there is still always a danger in simply saying "and then this became this..", because there are always alternate genealogies that may be overlooked from such determinism. Perhaps a lineage can be drawn too between tinted Claude glasses and sunglasses. Both offer the spectator darkened, framed, fashionable perspectives, but of course the major difference is that the pragmatic view from a pair of sunglasses quickly lapses into the invisible technology of everyday life. During a harsh summer in Melbourne, seeing the naked midday view is a much stranger experience than seeing the shaded one. Still, the aura of my first time remains with me: I still remember my excitement at the age of four when I got my first junior red pair and repeatedly took them on and off - Light! Dark! Light! Dark! - enjoying the swinging perspectival shift to a degree that would have pleased Freud. Eventually, I think I was told off for looking at the sun. I had a tendency then for taking new concepts literally, and thought that that was what sunglasses were for.

Now, twenty years later, I'm a Cultural Studies PhD research student working at the University of Melbourne. My project is based upon finding intersections between cinema and travel, particularly in studying the recent phenomenon of location-based film tourism. You can probably work out why I've chosen the title Virtual Claude Glass for my blog's title now. It resonates well with the subject matter of my thesis (art/cinema/tourism), plus it's one of the first technologies of the touristic gaze. You could say that the virtual Claude glass is a metaphor for cinema itself. Like the glass held up to the countryside, the screen of the cinema provides a certain view that can transform the landscape into an artistic and ideal one, peopled with heroes and mythology. Then, the knowledge that I gather as a postgrad becomes my own private virtual Claude glass: it provides me a gaze, but a tinted gaze at that. The challenge remains to to keep my gaze fresh and not let it become an everyday, regular perspective that turns me blind.

On this blog page, I'll share my thoughts and notes on cinema, tourism, space, theory, etymology, urban studies, mass media, literature and whatever else is bothering, interesting or alarming me. Probably most of what I say here will be the written equivalent of ezy-shots: touristic vignettes taken from a package tour off the beaten track of my dissertation. What's a relief writing here - you can tell this already - is that I don't necessarily need to posit an argument, or I can contradict myself, or remain ambivalent about particular issues. This is a luxury that I can't have when I turn to writing my thesis.