Evaluation Of The Value Of The Film Seashells
Within this essay, the author will be discussing the value of the short film, Seashells (2014) by Natalie Neal. An American film about a young girl who reluctantly takes her first steps into adulthood; she receives her first bra. The author will explore theoretical frameworks such as of psychoanalytical theory of character identification within The Mirror Stage. The author will also discuss how the audience values a film based on whether they can project themselves onto the characters, in relation to Seashells the audience projects their own childhood trauma onto the protagonist. Furthermore, the author will study the Aesthetic and Formalist theory to discuss how the film’s use of cinema technique to influence how the audience discovers the meaning of the film and in turn, how they judge the quality of the piece. Within Seashells, the use of aesthetically pleasing visuals to convey nostalgia of a time cherished and lost for the audience. Finally discussing the New Sincerity, and how this concept values the use of sincerity and honesty within cinema to restore values to the audiences, the short Seashells it a truthful story about the tribulations of letting go of childhood, staying true to genre conventions and treating them seriously.
The viewer places more value upon a film when they can identify with the characters. When the viewer is able to empathise with a character or the situation they are in, it emotionally ties them with the film. When they see a character go through trials and tribulations that are similar to their own, they feel seen and heard.
Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory built off of what Freud already discussed; the components of the human psyche, the id, ego and superego. However, one unique and key element of Lacan’s theory is the mirror phase. Between 6 and 18 months a baby will see itself in a mirror and begin to identify that what they are seeing is themselves, that they are a whole and separate from the rest of the world. When experiencing the mirror stage. there is a sense of separation from the reflection, the image is perceived as the Other. The Other will appear more desirable and can form envy, tension and self-loathing in the Self. Film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry developed his theory from Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage. He found similarities between the physicality of a mirror and the screen, how both reflect a world contained within its flat, square boundaries. He argues that the cinema audience re-enacts the mirror stage when viewing a film, projecting their reflection onto the characters. “Film functions more as a meta physiological “mirror” that fulfils the spectator’s wish for fullness, transcendental unity, and meaning.” This theory discusses how humans are narcissistic, having an excessive interest in themselves. Baudry describes the difference between the mirror and the mirror-screen. He says, “The paradoxical nature of the cinematic mirror-screen is without a doubt that it reflects images but not ‘reality’”. He continues that the screen-mirror supplies an “impression of reality”, where the audience’s imaginary self is created within the film world. This generates a specific “ego” on which the audience relies for his or her sense of self in relation to the film.
Therefore, applying this to film when we look at a cinema screen it offers us that same identification. The characters become surrogates for the viewer, and seeing a reflection of themselves on screen feeds their ego and gives them joy and therefore they place higher value onto the film. To apply this theory onto Seashells, it is a film that conveys universal themes, the detachment one feels when in the limbo period for not either being a child nor a teenager. For most, this is a period of letting go and growing up. It tells the story of how a young girl reacts to having to wear her first bra. This is not the typical story told in mainstream cinema. It gives people in the audience an opportunity to feel seen, puberty is hard. The film says it is ok, we all go through it. Watching this short places the audience back in that stage of their lives, with an older pair of eyes. Viewers can look back to a simpler time, that turns out to be more complex than we remember. The audience is met with a sad nostalgia, but this can be content as they have lived through it. They know it will be okay in the end.
However, for Christian Metz, character identification is ‘insufficient firstly because it does not account for sequences in film in which no character or even human representation is present’. As well it is inadequate because, “identification with the human form appearing on the screen, even when it occurs, still tells us nothing about the place of the spectator’s ego in the inauguration of the signifier” Metz develops on the Mirror Stage theory, pointing out 3 components which allow us to consider cinema as an imaginary signifier in which the viewer is always reflected. The idea of voyeurism, characterised by not wanting to touch the object desired but wanting it to remain something distant. “At the cinema, it is always the other who is on the screen; as for me, I am there to look at him”. The audience member has found their own ego which could not be found within character identification. Due to this identification with looking, Metz states that the audience naturally identifies with the camera. Cinema keeps the audience from physically obtaining the desired object presented on screen. Just like humans reject their own reflection in the mirror, othering it, this argument states that they do this to the ‘others’ they see on the film screen. Metz believes that this is what gives people the joy of cinema, the pleasure of looking rather than identification or empathy.
There are various forms of the audience’s identification. Different people identify in different ways, and thus, no singular theory on identification is completely appropriate for every person. Identification, however, is necessary both for the audience to create meaning from the images, which is necessary for them to place their own value upon it. Although Metz’s perspective can be applied to other films, within Seashells it is an intimate film. Its universal themes have most likely affected everybody who watches. Therefore, this notion of passive viewing is unlikely. As said by Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, “whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours”. And within Seashells this experience of identification is more prevalent, you are up close and personal with the protagonist, what she feels you feel. The use of camera helps to convey this, to eye level camera shots with the protagonist, so the audience sees everything through the protagonist’s perspective, visually. With plenty of close ups so the audience can only can see in the frame is the emotions across the character’s face. When she grows so does the audience. There is a deep connection between character and viewer. And when the viewer feels this, that is why they place more value onto a film.
So, according to Metz and Baudry, the audience identifies less with the image than what makes the image itself. Baudry says that the mirror recognition of self and the importance of the camera work together to as the “giver of unifying meaning” and are thus both necessary in the audience’s identification. This leads to my next point on the importance of the aesthetics within the value of a film.
Films that are more aesthetically pleasing to the viewer hold more value to them. Aesthetics can be defined as a theory that has everything to do with beauty in all its stunning, picturesque and extremely impressive aspects. In simple terms, the pleasure experienced from the artistic sense, with the ‘beauty’ within a film. The aesthetic experience is obtained from understanding and admiration of the work.
Christopher Metz develops this in the Mirror Stage within a film, pointing out 3 components which allow us to consider cinema as an imaginary signifier in which the viewer is always reflected. One of these components he discusses fetishism as an admiration for the cinematic technique itself, such as an awareness of stunning tracking shots or use of lighting. If the viewer watches a film that is masterfully shot, these visual qualities signify to them the worth of the production. This worth to a viewer is subjective as well as individual tastes.
However, an individual's tastes are a product of their society. “As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” Those with taste recognize others like themselves by their agreement on judgments of quality, or at least by disagreements within an accepted range of preferences. In this way, judgments of taste produce social classifications. This is particularly true, Bourdieu argues, with respect to taste in art”. What Bourdieu is suggesting that when viewers find a piece of art they find fits their personal tastes, they agree with what the piece is saying and that's how they place the quality to the art.
Furthermore, Formalist film theory is focused on the technical, elements of a film, including the lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of colour, shot composition, and editing. Ideological Formalist theorists focus on how cultural or socioeconomic pressures create a particular style, an example of this came to be found in the Classical Hollywood cinema. With the distinct style of continuity editing, three-point lighting and mood music all designed to make the aesthetic experience as delightful. A cultural explanation for this could be for the mass public so they keep going to see these films that make the industry money. American mainstream cinema to this day has their own visual qualities, shooting with high quality offering higher resolution, and most cinematography using rules of thirds or the Golden Ratio to perfectly balance an image, inturn this creates a cinematic effect. As the human brain craves to see this balance and these other codes, this creates what is known to be ‘beautiful’. As said in Plato's account “We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought.”
When a viewer sees these visual cues that satisfy their personal tastes that they are used to, this is how they place the worth.
Theorist, Edward Bullough argues this aesthetic attitude by explaining that ‘by being too concerned with the technical aspects of the work of art, you over-distance yourself from the piece’. In the aesthetic attitude theoretical framework, ‘distance’ is a state of consciousness in which an agent is distracted from the object itself. When an audience only focuses on cinematic techniques the other elements of the film become unprioritized as it and therefore the production can become tunnel visioned. Meaning that every other aspect within the film is less focused on.
However, formalist film theorists believe that the filmmakers like sculptors mould their clay or a painter paints their canvas, the filmmaker crafts the images seen on screen. This theory’s approach to filmmaking is to emphasize their ability to create story and emotion through the manipulation of cinematic techniques.
When applying this to Seashells, the film's stylistic choices are used to highlight the film’s story rather than distract from it. Within Seashells, the cinematography can be considered aesthetically pleasing, through to the pastel colour palette including the use of baby pink, within the set design and colour grade.
The imagery of Spice Girls posters, videotapes of 90s teen comedies, lava lamps and stickers all conveys girly and nostalgic of western culture in the early 2000s. This aids to set the sentimental tone of the film. It takes the audiences back to a point in time in their lives, this imagery connotes to the audience to a time of youth and growth. Highlighting the core themes of the film. With this recognition of nostalgia, the viewers respond positively to these familiar aesthetics.
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the invisible,” said by Sontag. What is meant by this is that the quality of the film is not just based off of these artistic intentions of visual creativity, as they are used to extend the emotional journey of the viewer? To convey the onscreen emotions to the audience and artists who are able to comprehend that kind of emotional pressure can succeed in giving out the message to the viewers.
The aesthetic experience is achieved when work is viewed with an understanding and appreciation for it. An aspect of the work that stands out above others is recognised as something ‘beautiful’. The elegance and allure of an opus, are the key factors that inform the meaning of a work. The aesthetic experience is attained when the meaning of a work is encountered by the audience, and they recognise the importance of it and sympathise with it.
Leading on from the previous point, this emotional honesty in the film, one that heartfelt, conveys a ‘truth’ to a viewer making the experience more significant. The New Sincerity is an art movement that expands upon and breaks away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism. The artworks build upon these ideas of self-interest and scepticism by critiquing that irony. As said by David Foster Wallace, an author that popularised the term in the 1990s,in his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction (1993) “For irony - exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are - is the time-honoured way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy… But irony singularly useful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
He critiques the postmodern thought with its deconstruction of everything and its emphasis on individual interpretation leads us down a road of narcissism, cynicism and detachment. Instead, New Sincerity offers, not to revert back to modernism, but to offer something more anti-nihilistic, a non-ideological pursuit. Taking the characteristics of postmodernism, acknowledging how cynical the world is, and decides to stick to a particular value and make meaning out of it.
Within cinema, critic Jim Collins introduced the concept of 'new sincerity' to film criticism in his 1993 essay titled 'Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity'. In this essay, he explores both films that respond to genre conventions with irony and the opposing films that use these conventions earnestly. Collins describes “...the 'new sincerity' of films like Field of Dreams (1989), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Hook (1991), all of which depend not on hybridization, but on an 'ethnographic' rewriting of the classic genre film that serves as their inspiration, all attempting, using one strategy or another, to recover a lost 'purity', which apparently pre-existed even the Golden Age of film genre.”(ibid) He defines the New Sincerity as the ‘truth’ of the film being lost within the postmodern-era, with its irredeemable qualities, that irony is a cop-out from the real discourse.
However, within Postmodernism one of the questions it proposes asks about truth and society’s subjective approach to it. This is a useful framework to ask this question as it draws to the attention of truth in relation to individual beliefs, personal truths and how the construction of knowledge. As said by British postmodernist playwright Harold Pinter “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” This is a standpoint of most postmodernist take, that there is not one truth. That reality has multiple versions, each person has their own truth with their own interpretations.
In the Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Sontag argues that “In good film, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the inch to interpret.” Implying that when a film is crafted well then that individual interpretation is purposeless. Applying this to Seashells, this film is about acceptance and letting go and there is not much else to interpret the meaning, as most people have experienced this at some point in their lives.
The films Jim Collins mentioned earlier are considered to be romantic. Filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman’s films display these cinema theories “quirky” cinema, “smart” film or new sincerity. All conveying characteristics such as narratives include a preoccupation with personal history and memory; an undercurrent of deeply felt emotion. In terms of aesthetics, these films depend on the qualities of the beautiful, picturesque, and sublime to represent the complex emotional states of their characters and to elicit emotional responses in their audiences. One could argue that Seashells could be influenced by Romanticism, due to the short exhibiting both of all of the characteristics above. The narrative plays out as an exactly like most females personal history and memory, a young girl receiving her first bra, with the undercurrent of the struggles of letting go of their childhood. Within the aesthetics of Seashells being pleasing to the eye, whilst portraying the mental state, the protag of Seashells sees the world through rose tinted glasses as she desperately wants her life to be as if she lives in a Barbie movie. Just like films made within the New Sincerity or post-postmodern era Seashells conveyed their main concepts, its message looks back with naivety. A contrast from most of the popular culture that self-deprecates, but builds upon that by reflecting on this point in the viewer’s life with honest sincerity. Rather than just making fun of this point in time, it looks back with humour but also shows unapologetically how it feels to grow up.
To conclude, within this essay, have been discussed how the relevant theoretical frameworks of The Mirror Stage, Aesthetics and Formalist theory and The New Sincerity explore how and why the audience place value upon film and how this applies to the short film Seashells. In closing, the value of a film is derived from various coinciding factors. These all play into influencing the audience's reception, and opinion of the film. From the mirror stage theory, which allows the viewer to step inside the film and associate with the characters and themes from a personal, emotional standpoint. Aesthetics is also important to the value of a film, as it can both help to create the film world, but also add to an audience's perception of the themes and ideas within the film. And the aesthetics of the technical cinematography can show the actual financial value of the film. All of these points all add to the experience of the film, and what the audience draws from it, and how they value it.
