Tag: cinema of France

Movies As Education: Books and Selves

La Notte (English: The Night) is a 1961 Italian drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Monica Vitti (with Umberto Eco, the novelist, appearing in a cameo).

Filmed on location in Milan, the film depicts a day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their deteriorating relationship.

In 1961, La Notte received the Golden Bear (at the Berlin International Film Festival, the first for an Italian film) and the David di Donatello Award for Best Director.

La Notte is the central film of a trilogy, beginning with L’Avventura (1960) and ending with L’Eclisse (1962).

The movie follows Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni), a distinguished writer, and his beautiful wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) as they visit their dying friend Tommaso Garani (Bernhard Wicki) who is hospitalized in Milan. Giovanni’s new book, La stagione (The Season), has just been published, and Tommaso praises his friend’s work.

La Notte reflects the director’s intuition that “you are what you read,” and books create a kind of thread through the story.

The dying, hospitalized patient has recently published an article on the famous philosophical writer Theodor Adorno. At the party the couple drifts into, the works of the Austrian–Jewish writer, Hermann Broch, are mentioned. Essentially, in a depressing glitzy world of lost and semi-lost souls, reading and books constitute a kind of emotional life raft or direction-finding compass, at least potentially. Antonioni frequently uses this motif.

We find this kind of reading and books-centered view of people interpreting their (bewildering) worlds in the works of the French thinker Charles Péguy (who died in battle during World War I in 1914):

“The Jew,” he declares in a passage that has become famous, “is a man who has always read, the Protestant has read for three hundred years, the Catholic for only two generations.”

(quoted in Consciousness and Society, H. Stuart Hughes, Vintage Books, paperback, 1958, page 355)

Charles Péguy is also central to Louis Malle’s classic French film Au revoir les enfants (English: “Goodbye, Children”).

If we “zoom out” and look for a meta-intelligent lesson, we can say that reading, writing, and arithmetic, the three basics mentioned in the phrase we all know, are very deeply entwined with who we are. Stories explain us to ourselves, and stories involve books and reading in our “Gutenberg world.”

The replacement of these by various (post-Gutenberg) screens and games may or may not be thought of as a variant since they constitute a kind of “pseudo-participation” and not participation based on perusal.

Essay 73: Signs and Meanings: Education and Semiotics

One learns to function in a world of posters, postings, signs, ads, ordinances, notices and indications of “material culture” (i.e. commerce expressed in designs and slogans on walls and buses, subway cars, etc.).

Think of the 1963 movie The Great Escape. There’s a scene where James Coburn’s Australian character is sitting in an outdoor cafe on the French/Spanish border and the waiter comes over to him and pulls him toward the counter and says, “Telephon, monsieur.”

The James Coburn character has no idea why this is happening but mimics the proprietor and son when they duck down. French Resistance fighters in a car gun down the Germans at the cafe and James Coburn’s character “gets it” and asks them for help to get into Spain. As he ducks down you see posted on the wall of the cafe several ad signs for drinks. One of them is “Byrrh”:

“Byrrh is an aromatised wine-based apéritif made of red wine, mistelle, and quinine. Created in 1866 and a trademark since 1873, it was popular as a French apéritif. With its marketing and reputation as a ‘hygienic drink,’ Byrrh sold well in the early 20th century.” (from Wikipedia)

In many French movies or movies set in France, such as Belle de Jour and The Legend of the Holy Drinker from 1988 (in which a drunken homeless man [played by Rutger Hauer] in Paris is lent 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repay it to a local church when he can afford to; the film depicts the man’s constant frustrations as he attempts to do so).

“Byrrh” appears routinely and a French child begins to ‘get the picture’ on what is being signified and how it differs from other notices, commercial or legal or municipal.

Set in Paris, the ad notice “Byrrh” appears in the same way you’d expect to see “Coca-Cola” and know what the sign signifies. “Coke” is a drink and not the fuel coke. How exactly you make these distinctions is unclear to linguists and other language-watchers. It’s a social phenomenon, partly, like mores and manners.

In the movie The Book Thief (a 2013 World War II war drama, starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, and Sophie Nélisse, based on the 2005 novel) there’s a moment when you see a sign advertising or reminding you of “Kolonialwaren” (i.e., colonial wares) which was the German way of pointing to a place or store that sold coffee, tea, cocoa, etc. Any German adult of the period would know what “Kolonialwaren” signifies without quite knowing how he or she knows.

A traffic sign (you have to of course realize it’s a traffic sign and not some commercial ad) tells you “Boston 20 m.” You realize or guess it means 20 miles and not 20 meters (since meters are not a typical American measure) nor would it be 20 minutes since that would assume everyone is driving at a speed that gives you 20 minutes, which is far-fetched.

How a person goes from birth to adulthood whereby they spontaneously navigate a welter of different signs and postings, ads and statutes is quite opaque.

Roland Barthes (died 1980) explored this domain of signs (not only physical signs but mythology as a system of signs) all his life:

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth.

Education should not ignore “material culture” (i.e., the history of things) and semiotics (i.e., the world “speaking” to you via designs and signs and words).