ARCH 542

The Beauty and Terror of Cidade de Deus

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 23:08:30 +0000

The Beauty and Terror of Cidade de Deus alexandre.nero�� Mon, 07/29/2024 - 19:08

Hong Kong Through the Lens of Chungking Express

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 22:56:53 +0000

Hong Kong Through the Lens of Chungking Express alexandre.nero�� Mon, 07/29/2024 - 18:56

From Banlieue to Screen : The Impact of Urban Design in La Haine

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 14:32:14 +0000

From Banlieue to Screen : The Impact of Urban Design in La Haine alexandre.nero�� Mon, 07/29/2024 - 10:32

La Haine: Your Right, Our City

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 20:03:59 +0000

La Haine: Your Right, Our City alexandre.nero�� Thu, 07/25/2024 - 16:03

Within a twenty-hour period, the characters of La Haine battle a private and a collective disruption. As day becomes night, three men��s desire to resist police control is crushed. An important aspect of this descent is the use of time, as characters Vinz, Hubert, and Said journey from a Parisien banlieue to Paris. Director Mathieu Kassovitz employs strategic mise en sc��ne to delineate between these realms.

The city, according to urban sociologist Robert Park is, ��man��s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart��s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live.��[1] This analysis includes context of why Kassovitz��s representation of the city and suburb is effective for discussing urban transformation. Following that, an explanation of two rooftop scenes during the day, then at night, is included to describe strategies that support or hinder the men��s development. Lastly, these scenes will be used to describe the discrepancy between a city��s relationship to self and its relationship to the shifting ��collective��.

Journey From Day to Night

After being repeatedly pushed out of public spaces in the Parisian banlieue, the characters travel for something beyond their estate��s condemnation. The trip��s motivation is described as monetary, but Vinz expresses delight in finding a place where the police do not know them by name. In Paris, the characters learn that the factors that hinder their ability to remain in shared space exist beyond the estate. The chaos that elicits police dominance and public disapproval follows them wherever they go, suggesting it may be a part of them. Like Park��s description of the city, the characters and their environment are reciprocal, even if also antagonistic.[2]

The set is based in a real place called La Noe, meaning ��New Town�� in Chateloup-les-Vignes, west of Paris.[3]This setting makes the audience feel greater stakes in the story, relating recent French news to the constructed plot. Kassovitz based the film on riots that took place in French suburbs. His intention was to draw awareness to the mistreatment of banlieue youth by police during a politically charged period, following the election of right-wing President Jacques Chirac.[4] The following strategies used by Kassovitz to tell the banlieue characters�� story were effective at instigating social discussion but were also highly criticized for aesthetic alignment with existing Hollywood cinema.[5]

Joe Hardwick describes Kassovitz��s ability to maintain ��narrative authority��, convincing the audience of an insider��s perspective on the differences between banlieue and Parisien culture by tessellating between two narrative devices: critical distance and ��loiterliness��.[6] The director maintains a sense of directionality throughout the film, by foreshadowing an impending tragedy. Simultaneously, the story digresses towards its ending, meandering onto rooftops to momentarily reassure viewers throughout the characters�� descent.

Two scenes take place on rooftops, initially above the estate in the afternoon, and then above Paris at night. Both rooftops are fruitful grounds for the analysis of city and character since they are platforms above and within each place. From rooftops, we may analyze whether the men from the estate have, by David Harvey��s definition ��the right to the city��, meaning ��the right to change ourselves by changing the city.��[7]

A Day in the Banlieue

In the day, the men venture to the roof of Hubert��s family building. The rooftop boundaries obstruct the viewer from seeing the streets, with only the tops of other buildings and hills in the distance visible. The setting is one of the most convincing social spaces in the estate. Fold-out chairs, old couches, and a makeshift barbeque momentarily convince the audience that the three main characters have a place to feel comfortable amongst peers.

Figure 1. ��Rooftop Social Space,�� Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine, 1995.

As described by Stafford, the three men serve distinct roles to progress scenes such as this. Hubert, older than the other two, provides experience and wisdom to the best of his ability. Vinz is the main source of danger and violence. Said, whose movement generates the camera path in this scene, is said to be ��our guide through the more mundane scenes��. [8] His youth and curiosity move the journey forward, but often towards arrest, such as at the conclusion of this rooftop gathering.

This scene confirms the trio��s unique attachment to the city in totality. Characters in the background are capable of reappropriating desolate or unexpected space as their own. The graffiti along the walls and the music playing out of speakers indicate these men harness the right to make the estate their space. Yet soon after Vinz, Hubert, and Said��s arrival, equilibrium is lost, and the streets are made visible. Looking down, the mayor stares up at the scene, soon followed by a swarm of uniformed and casual-clothed police officers busting into the party. The men��s presence is seen as an instigator of the gathering��s demise, and they are pushed out by a community member.

While the isolation of the estate could be the source of community niches, for people who like to cook food on a roof or dance in a subway, it instead serves to amplify the surveillance and discomfort of the trio. Later, resting on an abandoned play structure leaves the trio exposed to a reporter��s camera gaze. In the mouth of a hippopotamus slide, the three are filmed like zoo animals, incapable of controlling their surroundings or portrayal in media. While the boundaries of the roof maintain the anonymity of community members wishing to connect, the walls of the playground make a spectacle of the men.

The rooftop may appear even more tantalizing if Kassovitz had maintained the original use of colour stock, but decided in post-production that projecting the film in black and white would communicate the bleak aesthetic of the estate.[9] The scene was likely shot on a short-lensed, wide-angle camera, since this was Kassovitz��s intention for all the scenes shot in the banlieue. This strategy relays proximity between foreground and background, usually people and their surroundings. The wide-angle lens communicates the relation between the banlieue characters and the architecture, immersed in their context. The camera creates distortion when objects are especially near to the frame.[10] This phenomenon is evident in this scene during close-ups of Vinz and Hubert. As Said naively runs around the roof, stealing hot dogs like a kid, the duo is so integrated into the city context that their image is skewed. This difference may have been Kassovitz��s attempt to show Said��s unique hope for a ��normal�� life, one independent from the estate limits.

Part of this scene shows Kassovitz��s interest in single-long shots. Although this is a style employed by filmmakers to indicate documentary-like realism, critics Tobin and Bourguignon believe that the film��s camerawork is more conducive to a ��contemporary fairytale��.[11] While the camera pans around the roof, a helicopter noise is heard nearby. This inclusion foreshadows the upcoming police presence, indicating ongoing surveillance. Through sound, it also connects viewers to the most fantastical scene in the film, shot from above the banlieue.

Figure 2. ��Dream-like Banlieue,�� Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine, 1995.

Filmed using a remote-operated helicopter above the estate, the least human-scaled view of the buildings is constructed.[12] The technique illustrates a dream-like banlieue, worthy of music video footage. It also demonstrates the depth between the apartments and the pavement which the men often frequent. While this shot looks down at the space, the courtyard is also depicted from the ground upwards earlier in the film to demonstrate the panopticon-like effect of the neighbors�� vantage point over the main characters.

Descending from the estate, the characters journey to Paris by train, only a forty-minute ride. On the way, they see a billboard that reads, ��The World is Yours��. Even in this transition scene, the boundaries of the banlieue are not revealed, leaving their home in an ambiguously distant place.[13] Within this narrative, no physical boundary exists between estates and Paris, only the passage of time.

The placelessness of La Haine��s banlieue is congruent with Kassovitz��s representation of the main characters�� identities. The story describes the common experience of lower-class young men. They are held together by shared interests in music, drugs, anguish towards the police, and the ��fracture sociale��, meaning the ��increasing disparity between haves and have-nots in contemporary French society��.[14] Kassovitz fails to establish the multicultural differences between the three characters. Their token role in banlieue cinema as a Jewish man, a black man, and a beur (Maghrebi descent) are briefly mentioned but not contrasted with one another. Instead, like their estate, they are homogenized into an amorphous representation of multiculturalism. While the characters�� identity is dulled, other banlieue stories, like those of female or queer people are primarily excluded.

By excluding the spatial divide between the banlieue and the city center, Kassovitz destabilizes the identity of each place. As explained by Ackbar Abbas in ��Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City,�� dematerializing a city through cinematic representation can transform it from a distinct ��place�� into a less tangible ��space.[15] Without spatial boundaries, a new means of access emerges into and out of the city. In contemporary cities, new information technologies may be the entry point into dematerialized urban space. This currency is not easily accessed by the characters of La Haine, who are stuck in the tendencies of their youth. Rapid contemporary urban transformation erases historical and local references, typically memorialized through physical entities. The exclusion of a banlieue boundary supports one of the analogous functions of La Haine, which includes ��an allegory of the blindness of postcolonial Europe to read its present in light of its past.��[16]

Paris at Night

As evening approaches, time stamps across the screen indicate the day passing towards a nerve-wracking conclusion. The audience can surmise that this timeline leads to something detrimental for the characters thanks to the story told multiple times throughout the film of a man who falls off a skyscraper. Hubert says, ��On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far, so good�� so far, so good�� so far, so good. How you fall doesn��t matter. It��s how you land!�� Within this context, the timestamps make viewers believe that even if the characters are overcoming challenges throughout the film, it is only a matter of time before they face a painful fate.

Figure 3. ��Intimate Paris Overview,�� Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine, 1995.

At night, the three find a balcony again, this time all for themselves. From here they can look at Paris�� city center, symbolic of the wealth and resources that they as banlieue residents lack. As explained by Diamanti and Boudreault-Fournier, nighttime ��allows one to grasp sensibilities that inform the day and that would go unnoticed otherwise.��[17] Between the usual crude banter between the characters, they feel briefly comfortable here to be intimate with one another. Vinz expresses to Hubert that he feels ��like an ant lost in intergalactic space��. While it is left unstated, it is reasonable to believe that Vinz feels this at both the banlieue and in the city center. This conversation follows the arrest and abuse of Hubert and Said. Even here, the characters are not free from the control of the police. Violence follows them.

Figure 4. ��Shared Screen,�� Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine, 1995.

The screen is shared in this night scene between Vinz��s hands rolling a joint and the Eiffel Tower. The choice highlights the contrast between the lives of the characters and the prestigious context. When rolling, Vinz raps ��You��re down with OCB? Yeah you know me.�� This is a reference to OCB weed rollers as well as a 90��s American hip-hop song by Naughty by Nature. [18] Exemplified here, Kassovitz draws influence throughout the film from American culture and directors. He was reluctant to compare La Haine to other American ��hood�� films, likely because his work had a political purpose beyond the aesthetic value employed by directors like Quintin Tarantino. Kassovitz did succumb to the tendency of ��hood�� films to synthesize the experience of a youth culture, but instead of demonizing their actions, he clearly makes the police the antagonist.

Reminiscent of the previous roof scene, Said is wandering around the space unafraid to fall off the edge while Hubert and Vinz chat in the foreground. Instead of using the wide-angle lens with a deep depth of field, as was done in the estate scenes, Kassovitz uses much more conventional compositions in Paris scenes, including a shallower depth of field to focus on fewer details at once in each shot.[19] Even if the wide-angle lens had been used, shooting at night ensures the fading of background details as also exemplified in Hubert��s boxing scene. In either case, the darkness of the Parisian landscape is barely legible, with only the lights of buildings in the distance as a backdrop to the scene.

Like they do ��in the movies��, Said tries to turn off the Eiffel Tower by snapping his fingers. It is unsuccessful as long as the men are watching. It is not until the characters�� voices fade away from the rooftop that the lights go out. Their blindness to the moment speaks to their incapacity to see a shifting city, or to see themselves as a shifting force. The tower lights eventually turning off is comparable to the cow in the banlieues, both instances of unexpected surrealism. Both are deviations from the mundane expectations of the characters�� daily lives and yet neither have implications on how they see their surroundings.

Figure 5. ��Quand la Tour Eiffel s'��teint,�� ?ric Rochant, Un monde sans piti��, 1989.

Said��s attempt to turn off the tower is a reference to the French film, Un Monde sans Piti��. In the original scene, a couple leans over a balcony admiring the Eiffel Tower.[20] Much like Vinz��s hands at the beginning of the scene, the main character��s hand is seen in the foreground, beside the glimmering structure. With the snap of his fingers he is able to turn the lights off, to the delight of his companion. Within the context of romantic comedies, the man is expected capable of controlling his environment in pursuit of love. The banlieue men however are rarely seen having a civil or romantic conversation with a female character. Throughout their consistent displays of male bravado, they are incapable of female connection. Here, the rooftop becomes symbolic of not only their isolation in relation to the city, but also to women.

The City Collective

Upon exiting this scene, Said stops to vandalize the recurring poster that says, ��The world is yours��. Said changes the ��nous�� to ��vous��, proclaiming that the world is ours, not yours. This change could be interpreted in two ways. Either, it is a declaration of agency, Said stating that the world belongs to his friends and not to the industries that profit off of this campaign. Alternatively, the change could mean the opposite. Said could be expressing that the world does not belong to you/vous, it instead belongs to an all-encompassing ��us��. This interpretation would include the industry, police, and lawmakers that cause hardship to these men��s lives as rightful owners of their world.

Footage of the rooftop at night differs from the rest of the film in its calm, slow pace, in comparison to the quick MTV-editing, disarming camera angles, and lop-sided compositions of the remaining film.[21] It is a moment of reverence among the other night scenes, which tend to evoke fear or excitement in the viewer. In scenes like the car theft or the attempted club entry, Parisian nightfall is represented like most modern cities in nocturnal cinema, as grounds for the ��hyperstimulation of the senses��. [22] As cinema consumers, we associate nighttime scenes with an anxiety of the unknown, with darkness and urbanization both contributing to paranoia. On the roof, this fear only heightens our anxiety of the impending fate, drawing nearer as nighttime has arrived.

The spaces that these characters can access comfortably are limited. By the definition of ��The Care Manifesto��, they do not operate within many spaces of care.[23] A caring community would include mutual support, shared resources, and local democracy. It would include a variety of people, even people like Vinz, Hubert, and Said who are prone to the emergence of violence. Neoliberal markets and infrastructure, like that of Paris in the 90s, cannot value empathy, since it is difficult to commodify, whereas state violence, the division of labor, and racialized policies are highly lucrative.[24]

The two rooftop scenes, one in the day and one in the night, communicate the layers of isolation that the three young men face as individuals, friends, and banlieue inhabitants. The transition from the first scene to the latter is Kassovitz��s strategy to transport the characters from one spatial reality to another, without representing the physical implications of this voyage. Once transported through spatial ambiguity, the men are capable of seeing that the urban realities that torment them, like exclusion, classist division, and police brutality are not spatiality-fixed or site-specific. The use of nighttime, more than architectural devices, is effective at revealing the characters�� lack of agency. While it is evident to the viewer in earlier scenes, like the rooftop barbeque, that Vinz, Said, and Hubert lack the agency to enact change in their estate, it is not until they are framed by the lights or Parisien nightfall that they acknowledge how inconsequential they are in ��intergalactic space��, here, or in the banlieue.

[1] Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior : Selected Papers, ed. Ralph H. Turner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3.

[2] David Harvey, ��The Right to the City,�� New Left Review 53 (September/October 2008): 23.

[3] Roy Stafford, York Film Notes: ��La Haine�� (London : Pearson, 2000), 6.

[4] Stafford, 20.

[5] Ginette Vincendeau, ��Designs on the banlieue: Mathieu Kassovitz��s La Haine (1995),�� in French Film (London: Routledge, 2000), 317.

[6] Joe Hardwick, ��Reframing the Periphery: Narrative Authority and Self-Reflexivity in Mathieu Kassovitz��s La Haine,�� Australian Journal of French Studies 52, no. 2 (May 2015): 127.

[7] Harvey, 23.

[8] Stafford, 6.

[9] Stafford, 6.

[10] Stafford, 12.

[11] Stafford, 8.

[12] Vincendeau, 318.

[13] Stafford, 14.

[14] Carrie Tarr, Beur and Banlieue Cinema in 1995 (Manchester: Manchester University Press eBooks, 2019).

[15] Ackbar Abbas, ��Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City,�� Public Culture 6, no. 3 (September 1994), 441.

[16] Hardwick, 133.

[17] Eleonora Diamanti and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, ��The Aesthetics and Imaginaries of the Night in Cuba,�� Ethnologies 44, no.1 (2022), 297.

[18] Stafford, 15.

[19] Stafford, 11.

[20] Antoine Beck, ��Un Monde sans Piti��?: ��Quand La Tour Eifffel s��teint�� Dailymotion, April 16, 2011. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xi8xwg.

[21] Vincendeau, 317.

[22] Steven Jacobs, ��Panoptic Paranoia and Phantasmagoria: Fritz Lang��s Nocturnal City,�� in Spatial Turns, ed. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (New York: Radopi, 2010), 383.

[23] Andreas Chatzidakis et al., The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London: Verso, 2020), 53.

[24] Chatzidakis et al., 74.

Urban Alienation and the Night in Crash (1996)

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 20:30:17 +0000

Urban Alienation and the Night in Crash (1996) alexandre.nero�� Mon, 07/22/2024 - 16:30

Introduction

David Cronenberg��s 1996 film Crash follows a cast of characters who commune over their shared sexual fantasies surrounding car crashes. Based on J.G. Ballard��s 1973 novel of the same name, Crash is a notoriously explicit and visceral experience of cinema, described as a ��forbiddingly frigid piece of esoteric erotica�� by Variety��s Todd McCarthy.^[1] In fact, the film received a one-time Special Jury Prize at Cannes ��For Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity.��^[2] The film (and novel) have been theorized through methods of psychoanalysis focusing on characters�� internal paraphilic drives; but, as I suggest, the film offers an opportunity to understand the impact of the external on characters�� psychology through functions of urbanity and the night.

The main challenge of Crash is that extreme narrative ambiguity, lack of character expression, and dislocated settings make it difficult for the viewer to contextualize the plot. The film explores life on the outskirts of a North American city, and how proximity to an urban center has the affinity to alienate people from one another. In the film, a direct correlation is made between a lack of intimacy between the two protagonists, Ballard (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Unger), and their alienation from the urban environment. Through a series of increasingly intense interactions with a group of people who fixate and are sexually stimulated by the event of a car crash, Ballard and Catherine begin to remedy their intimacy issues. Their reconnection is prompted by the contrast of day and night; nighttime illumination and darkness enchant their experiences with each other and the members of their newfound community.

In this essay, I will explore how Ballard and Catherine��s landscape alienates them from one another via the presence of freeways. Then, I will look at how the car crash becomes a form of intimacy and connection in their environment. Finally, I will examine the nighttime as an enchanted space that ultimately changes Ballard and Catherine��s relationship for the better.

Chapter 1 : The Canadian Urban Context

While the novel Crash takes place in London, UK, the film was shot just outside of Toronto. Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America by population.^[3] As opposed to Montreal and Vancouver, whose city limits are more well defined by the fact that they are encapsulated (for the most part) by water, Toronto��s metropolitan region spreads northwards. The unbounded nature of Toronto��s urban limits has encouraged a large landscape of ��exurbs��, or extra-urban areas, that have little independent cultural significance besides their periphery to the city.^[4] Crash mainly occurs in one of these unnamed Toronto ��exurbs��; the landscape is really only visualized as made up of vast freeways. Thus, Ballard and Catherine exist in a liminal space that offers little stimulation besides the traffic outside.

A 2012 report titled ��The Life and Death of Urban Highways�� prepared by members of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy highlights the alienating nature of freeways in North America.^[5] The forward, written by former Milwaukee Urban City Planning Director Peter J. Park, is seminal to highlighting the divisiveness produced by urban freeways (also known as highways or expressways) that Cronenberg visualizes in the setting of Crash. Park notes that ��Massive public spending on freeways in the last century reduced the capacity of cities to connect people and support culture and commerce��.^[6] Hence, freeways have caused the ��demolition, dislocation, and disconnection of neighborhoods�� in cities, ��creat[ing] barriers that erode vitality��the very essence of cities��.^[7] Indeed, while freeways are at once routes that maximize flow and mobility, they are also physically divisive and disruptive to the urban environment, causing relative alienation and isolation for those outside of the city. In Crash, which was made two decades after the heaviest development of the Toronto freeway system, it is made obvious even Ballard and Catherine's relationship with one another has been eroded by their exurban environment.

Exurban Intimacy

Ballard and Catherine��s high-rise condo in exurban Toronto has a top-down view of the constantly flowing highway network outside (see fig. 1). The condo is the pinnacle of their alienation: Cronenberg uses flyover shots of the busy highways to imply Ballard and Catherine��s dislocation from the city and ground below. Their home is only ever depicted from the inside or the balcony, high in the sky. Rarely does a concrete image of the landscape appear on screen. The de-situated nature of their condo establishes the idea that they exist in between these freeway networks - which are also networks of people, information, and objects that they cannot fully grasp. Thus, Ballard and Catherine��s home is environmentally fragmented and isolated from their urban setting, which rears its head figuratively in their intimate relationship.

Figure 1. ��The view from Ballard and Catherine��s apartment,�� David Cronenberg, Crash, 1996.

In the opening sequence of the film, three vignettes occur in succession that hone in on the alienated intimacy that permeates Ballard and Catherine��s relationship. The sequence begins with Catherine in an enclosed airplane hangar in white lingerie. She holds her breast to the metal of a small plane; as she leans up against it, she arches her back, her eyes staring emptily into space. She is approached by a nondescript man who begins to perform oral sex on her from behind. No words are exchanged between the two. Then, there is a cut to Ballard giving a nondescript woman oral sex, also from behind, in his office at the film studio where he is a director. With little dialogue in each scene, the adulterous sexual acts both Ballard and Catherine perform are bereft of true intimacy. They are not shown engaging with their mystery partners emotionally, just sexually. In the next cut of the sequence, Catherine stands on the balcony of their high-rise condo, overlooking the highway in front of them. She raises her skirt and Ballard approaches her as they discuss in hushed tones the lack of pleasure they each experienced during their sexual escapades during the day. Ballard begins to have sex with Catherine from behind as they both look over the highway. The camera moves over their shoulders into a birds-eye view of the eight-lane highway, busy with cars heading home as dusk settles in (see fig. 2). ��Maybe the next one,�� Catherine whispers.

Figure 2. ��Catherine and Ballard on their balcony,�� David Cronenberg, Crash, 1996.

Cronenberg centralizes the highway as a character just as much as he does with both Ballard and Catherine. He intertwines the ideas of this transitory space with their issues of intimacy and alienation from one another; positing that the highway is at once a cause and metaphor of their disconnected relationship. He makes it evident that sex and intimacy are not conflateable in this cinematic world; also proposing that sex is not entirely satisfactory or pleasurable for Ballard and Catherine. The two may have sex, but they are not truly connecting; a sentiment pinnacled by the final cut of the sequence, where the highway becomes the backdrop, and then the figure, of their lovemaking. Like their bodies, the cars may be unified, moving together, but they do not connect until one of them crashes.

In this opening sequence, the stream of traffic is equated to the transitory, streaming, and hyper-informational psychological nature of the postmodern city that seeps into the exurban environment (with much less bravado). The highway is like an internet cable, a physical carrier of abstract information, incomprehensible to one person alone. It spreads out from the center into indiscernible horizons, carrying information in the form of people, objects, ideas, and intentions of being on the road. This postmodern quality exacerbates the sense of exurban alienation in the film; the highway is the detached spirit of the bustling city nearby, but nothing like the real thing. Ballard and Catherine's condo is alienating in the fact that they are confronted with city traffic while being completely disconnected from the source.

Likewise, the highway is like a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Both are routes that a diverse range of people must navigate in order to move from place to place, bodies decontextualized and flowing. On the Manhattan sidewalk, one confronts the colors, textures, smells, and sounds of other people as they move with the streams of bodies. These viscera permeate the experience of physically moving around a city; rapid rates of information are confronted by the body. On the highway, the viscera is stripped: one interacts solely with the colors, sounds, and smells of other cars, and not people. Although it is still a collective experience of movement, the speed and isolation of the car only grant the driver fleeting, surface-level information delivered at high speeds. Those driving cars on the highway still experience other people and information in a similar way as the city sidewalk (windows, billboards, buildings, the radio) but from a devisceralized, isolated bubble inside their car. Moreover, this information is witnessed through the window or screen. Thus, the highway as a stream of detached information and monotonous collective movement is a symptom of exurban alienation. As the landscape of Crash is primarily made up of these highway networks, Cronenberg��s emphasis on the aligned movement of bodies with no point of connection is made clear visually.

Chapter 2 : Car Crash Intimacy

Immediately following the opening sequence, Ballard is shown driving his car late at night. As he is driving, a shot from just outside his car��s rain-spotted windshield watches him drop a stack of papers on the floor. Leaning down to pick them up, Ballard loses sight of the road and control of the steering wheel. The camera shifts into a head-on profile of the car swerving off of the dark and rainy freeway, over the grass divider, and into an oncoming lane. Ballard��s car immediately collides nose-to-nose with another car. Like a passionate kiss, the cars enmesh in the moment of impact.

Ballard, in a daze, opens his eyes to see a man��s bloodied body catapulted through the windshield into his passenger seat. Looking through his eviscerated windshield, Ballard faces the woman in the passenger seat of the car opposite (who we later discover is Dr. Helen Remmington (Holly Hunter)). She has survived by her seatbelt, which, in an attempt to rip it off, exposes her bare breast to Ballard as she makes eye contact with him through the shattered windshield. This pivotal scene is the conclusion of the opening sequence that establishes the relations of intimacy and environment in the film; when Dr. Remington and Ballard crash, they are brought together intimately by chance. ��The car crash is a fertilizing rather than destructive event�� describes the car crash sex cult messiah Vaughn (Elias Koteas) later to Ballard. The crash reinserts a vitality to an ever-flowing network of mundanity. It pinpoints a random, visceral moment of connection between two people, two objects that would otherwise never meet.

Thus, as Ballard recovers at home and passes his time overlooking the highway through binoculars from his balcony, his fascination and fixation derive from finally capturing a piece of information in the network in the form of a crash. He is shown staring at passing traffic entrancingly, his mouth slightly agape and eyes moving back and forth rapidly. Traffic is no longer a mundane flow of uncapturable information, but a territory of opportunity for enlightenment. Here, the ��highway is transformed from an everyday landscape into a purgatorial space in which the boundaries between life and death are blurred��.^[8] Ballard��s understanding of the environment, his relationships, and himself are transformed by his near-death experience, feigning his perverse curiosity with car crashes. His conceptions of the world are not quite uprooted and flipped around, but inserted with a newfound adrenaline that de-alienates him from the environment; especially when he connects with the pseudo-sex cult led by Vaughn, who also experiences fascination with car crashes.

Chapter 3 : The Day and Night

Another function that the opening sequence serves is to establish the distinction between day and night. The three-scene vignette of Ballard and Catherine��s sexual escapades occurs during the daytime. Catherine and Ballard��s first two individual experiences play out in closed, indoor spaces with little natural light; the third cut on the balcony is taken with low light, but still during the day (assuming they have both just returned from work, around 5:30 or 6:00 PM). As I have argued, this three-scene vignette is when Cronenberg most aptly establishes a feeling of disconnection and alienation between the two characters, especially juxtaposed by the stark nighttime crash scene that occurs directly after.

As the emerging field of night studies suggests, the night is a territory that is navigated differently depending on place, identity, and intention.^[9] The night can shroud or expose the activities of people and circumstances of events. Darkness and illumination are actors in distinguishing the nighttime territory and dictating how people interact with it. The night figures most prominently in urban city settings, because of the common conception that through the prominence of subcultures, nightlife, and criminal activity ��a city turns inside out at night��.^[10] City lights, shadowy corners, and dim clubs are images of the city night. But, the nighttime in Crash departs from this principle slightly because of its exurban setting; with no real ��city�� for nighttime activity to take place in, the film recalculates what the nighttime means via the group of car-crash paraphilics. The highway and cars become a space for nightlife through these nocturnal principles: mysticism, illumination, darkness, sexuality, voyeurism, and intimacy. In Crash, the night brings lucidity, spectacle, and playfulness to characters whereas the day is a time of haziness, stagnation, and disconnection. As such, the nighttime is essential in two pivotal scenes of the film: one, in mediating the intimacy of the crash between Ballard and Dr. Remington, and two, when Vaughn, Catherine, and Ballard witness a devastatingly large and fateful crash late at night.

Darkness most often procures a sense of enchanted mystery and sensuality in Crash, as the senses are heightened and made more erogenous. Parts of the landscape are made invisible, engulfed by darkness, distributing focus to other realms: objects, people, and events. Thus, when Dr. Remington and Ballard face each other through broken windshields after they have crashed, Dr. Remington��s bare breast is exposed, and the sense of environment is annulled by the heightening of the object. Furthermore, the dark of night makes the crash private, unseen to many witnesses. The meeting of Ballard and Dr. Remington is something intimate and devastating, made sexual by her exposed breast. Ballard thus psychologically conflates the crash with a spotlighted sense of intimacy and sensuality. Here, intimacy is mediated by the intersection of the highway and the nighttime, unlocked at this moment and entirely juxtaposed to the scenes of empty intimacy between Catherine and Ballard.

Further on in the film, Vaughn, Catherine, and Ballard cruise around the exurbs in Vaughn��s Lincoln convertible at night. As they drive down the highway, they approach a large car crash disrupting the flow of traffic. Vaughn gasps with excitement, pulling out his camera and breathily exclaiming ��This is a work of art.�� Their car approaches the scene, where firefighters use the jaws of life to break open car windows, and smoke forms silhouettes of the dazed victims wandering around. The flashing lights of traffic illuminate the nighttime; ambulances, stopped cars, and hazard lights fill the night with blues and reds in between the smoke. Vaughn paces the scene, taking photos of the victims and freshly colliding steel with his Polaroid camera. He notices that one of the victims is his friend Seagrave, who had caused the crash in an attempt to recreate Jayne Mansfield��s death. A bloodied blonde wig and dead chihuahua lie near Seagraves' lifeless body suspended upside down from his vehicle. Vaughn is moved by the scene, gasping and scolding the dead Seagrave: ��You did the crash without me?��

After investigating the scene of the crash, the three get back into Vaughn��s convertible and drive off onto the highway. Noticing that the car had driven through some fresh blood on the way through the crash scene, the three go to a hands-free car wash. As the car is enveloped in soap and whirling brushes, Ballard sits in the driver's seat, peering through the rearview mirror at Catherine and Vaughn, who have sex in the backseat. Despite his recent confrontation with Seagraves�� gruesome death, Vaughn violently makes love to Catherine while Ballard gazes idly into the mirror. The two later investigate the cuts and bruises in the shapes of Vaughn��s hands and teeth on Catherine��s body back in their condo. Ballard caresses Catherine��s freshly beaten body as they lie in bed together, lightly kissing, grazing her skin and mouth with his. The nighttime skyline of the distant city is made clear through the window of their bedroom (see fig. 3).

Figure 3. ��The city emerges,�� David Cronenberg, Crash, 2015.

Here, the nighttime is the ultimate catalyst for the rearing of intense desire and intimacy between characters. As Will Straw notes, ��lighting nourishes the fetishes of night�� night enchants through practices of illumination��.^[11] The scene of the multi-car crash is made sensual and enchanted via the contrast of illuminated red and blue light amongst the darkness. In a similar nature to the crash between Ballard and Dr. Remington, just enough of the crash scene is made visible to the characters by the low illumination, forcing their eyes to focus on the most intense details. Vaughn��s exclamations that the crash is a ��work of art�� underline the way that the event appears as enchanted via the contrast of darkness with smoke and illumination. As Ballard, Catherine, and Vaughn experience the scene of the crash, they are confronted with the adrenaline of a true disaster, yet the nocturnal mysticism allows them to experience these effects as sensual and not traumatic.

Vaughn��s ensuing violent encounter with Catherine in the backseat is thus equated to a kind of traumatic car crash. Vaughn��s fixation on the scene of the crash is translated to Catherine��s body. His body crashes violently into hers. Consequently, this sequence most aptly depicts the visceral reconnection of intimacy that occurs between Catherine and Ballard during the nighttime ignited by the traumatic event. Their physical connection in the scene differs from their empty sexual encounters preceding; as Catherine��s eyes well with tears, Ballard is gentle with her naked body.

Conclusion

It is but one minute detail of the previously described scene that truly forms the apex of this essay. The appearance of the city skyline in the film occurs in the scene where Ballard and Catherine lie in bed. In their darkened bedroom, the illuminated city emerges through a large window as yellowy-green rectangles on the horizon. Here, as Catherine and Ballard share their first truly intimate moment in light of a traumatic event, the city appears; they are fleetingly de-alienated from the city and one another. In the shadowy, seductive night, the distance of the landscape is contextualized and closed in, just as the distance between Catherine and Ballard��s relationship closes in.

Despite the entirety of the film existing in an environment plagued with networks of highways that confuse and dislocate characters from their environment and each other, this scene takes hold of the center. Just as Ballard watches cars streaming past his apartment, waiting for a crash, a solid piece of information, the viewer watches the film, trying to decipher relationships, distances, emotions, and context. The exurbs are depicted, but never really contextualized; viewers Barely receive information about where characters truly are, what they are truly feeling, and what drives them. Thus, the emergence of the cityscape shows us the center, the pulse, that weakens as it spreads out through veins of highways. Illuminated and sparkling, the environment reconnects us to a space, as Ballard and Catherine reconnect. Vagueness permeates Crash, but in the presentation of the city on screen, clarity emerges as the intersections of urbanity, nighttime, and intimacy are located.

^[1] Todd McCarthy, ��Crash,�� Review of Crash, by David Cronenberg, Variety, May 17, 1996.

^[2] Terry Harpold, ��Dry Leatherette: Cronenberg��s Crash,�� Postmodern Culture 7, no. 3 (May 1997): 0.

^[3] James Maurice Stockford Careless, ��Toronto,�� in Canadian Encyclopedia, March 11, 2022.

^[4] Alex Teranu, ��A Challenge for Today and Tomorrow?: Urbanizing Suburbia - the Canadian Way,�� CanU, February 14, 2022. https://www.canu.ca/post/a-challenge-for-today-and-tomorrow-urbanizing-��.

^[5] Freeways and highways are used interchangeably in this essay.

^[6]Anthony Perl, Matt Hern, and Jeffrey Kenworthy, ��Streets Paved with Gold Urban Expressway Building and Global City Formation in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver,�� Canadian Journal of Urban Research 24, no. 2 (2015): 92.

^[7]Perl, ��Streets Paved with Gold Urban Expressway Building and Global City Formation in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver,�� 92-93.

^[8] Bernice M. Murphy, The Highway Horror Film, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85.

^[9] Will Straw, ��The Urban Night,�� in Cartographies of Place : Navigating the Urban, ed. Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault (Montreal : ɬ�﷬-Queens University Press, 2014), 190.

^[10] Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted with the Night : Excursions through the World after Dark. (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004), 89.

^[11] Straw, ��The Urban Night,�� 190.

Getting Out, Getting Lost A Formal Analysis of Lost in Translation (2003)

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 19:39:43 +0000

Getting Out, Getting Lost A Formal Analysis of Lost in Translation (2003) alexandre.nero�� Mon, 07/15/2024 - 15:39

Introduction

The notion of ��getting lost�� is the occurrence of an individual losing their spatial reference, which consists of two elements: the feeling of disorientation and a spatial environment. The feeling of getting lost constitutes part of the human experience of day-to-day life. In A Field Guide of Getting Lost, Solnit thinks the meaning of getting lost extends into the realm of emotions, identity, and existential discovery.[1] This sudden sense of uncertainty, disconnection, and alienation shapes our individual consciousness and perception of the physical environment and mental state. This deconstruction and pursuit of identity is familiar to what travelers feel about being out of place in a foreign locale, bustled by disorientation in geography and the strangeness of cultural perceptions.

In the nocturnal domain of urban landscapes, ��getting lost�� takes on new dimensions as cities are covered in darkness, and conventional way-finding ways, both physically and mentally, are blurred or erased. This intersection of nighttime urban environments and the tourist experience of disorientation forms the essential storytelling in Sofia Coppola��s Lost in Translation (2003), with the two juxtaposing characters ��lost�� as drifting in a foreign land and needing ��translation�� to seek meanings and make sense not only of language but also of their individualities. Through how the characters and plot are built up and sophisticated cinematography techniques, Coppola establishes a unique language that translates the complexities of urban night and its impact on the cinematic experience of getting lost.

In this essay, a formal analysis of the film is conducted from three major perspectives. First, the interior spaces where the majority of scenes are placed, the hotel, collectively draws a picture of the city��s nighttime urban landscape for sleeplessness and insomnia. Secondly, how the night Tokyo becomes a third role that contributes to the film��s overall atmospheric ambiance, which exists not just in the temporal night but also protrudes into the daytime. Lastly, the cultural representation of Japan and how the cross-cultural encounters become drivers for deconstructing the nighttime aesthetics of the film.

Hotel, Lost in Insomnia

In Lost in Translation, the film deliberately pivots from this concept by setting two characters who are American tourists in Japan, totally ignorant about Japanese culture. Meanwhile, Tokyo, the foreign city they abruptly arrive at, becomes a blurry puzzle they need to gather together rapidly in their short stay. The passage of time is a symbol that can be traced throughout the storytelling of the film, and the sense of temporality is encapsulated since the start of Bob and Charlotte��s relationship. However, the audience is often left with the confusion of the pace of time passing, as there is a prominent sense of blurred boundaries between day and night throughout their brief encounter. In Coppola��s lens, the first image of Tokyo as a city of insomnia is illustrated as the protagonists lose the conventional sense of time in the space they inhabit, the hotel.

The film opens with Bob, a middle-aged famous American actor and celebrity, arriving in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial. While in the hotel where he was accommodated, he meets Charlotte, a young recent graduate student, accompanying her husband to stay in Tokyo for a week for his photo shooting projects. With the majority of their encounters happening in the hotel, interior spaces in Park Hyatt Tokyo shape our initial understanding of the experience of landing in foreign Japan. The homogenous and standardized space of the hotel, which is muted with minimum symbols of individuality, establishes a claustrophobic experience where the characters are stuck in the hotel time instead of in real-time. Sensations of enclosure and airlessness are realized by situating the characters in oppressive interior space. On the first night when Bob arrives in Tokyo, he separates from his colleagues and is finally alone by himself, the camera draws attention to him standing in the elevator going up to his suite. With exhaustion from jetlag and efforts to maintain his public persona, in the elevator, a shot shows him surrounded by Asian men wearing the same business suits with similar expressions on their faces (see fig.1). The stereotypical Asian working-class appearance is absurdly exaggerated in this scene, and the contrast of Bob as the tall white male standing in the middle suddenly speaks about his aloneness and disconnection with his physical context. The appearance of the crowd wearing business suits in this late night challenges the visual image of the Western meaning of hotels representing after-hour leisure and entertainment, which as a result challenges both the character and audience��s perception of time.

Figure 1. ��Bob Standing Alone in Hotel Elevator,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 2. ��Charlotte in her Hotel Room,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 3. ��Charlotte Sitting by the Hotel Window,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

The familiar physical setting and the interior finishes of the hotel also deceive the passage of time. Even if the audience has not stayed at the Park Hyatt, they can recognize the typical components �C lobby, bar, pool, rooms. Here, Coppola chooses to depict different yet juxtaposing experiences of Bob and Charlotte through visual images. As a young female left alone by her husband during the day, Charlotte autonomously scatters her personal traces across her room (see fig.2); she immediately starts building a chaotic and disorderly identity in her intimate space. The camera is frequently towards the hotel window, with the cityscape of Tokyo always as a backdrop of Charlotte��s daily wandering in her room, and her room is filled with randomness and boredom, in contrast with the vast yet distant vision of Tokyo cityscape. Charlotte��s time is frozen, and we see it more prominently through the reappearing shots of her sitting alone by the hotel window looking down into the city (see fig. 3), which is always gloomy and dark with no suggestion of time in a day. Meanwhile, Bob��s space has an altered visual expression. Bob is provided with a vast amount of space as a celebrity being accommodated in this hotel. His room is even too big to be filled with, and Bob keeps his distance to start occupying this room. What fills his room are luxury interior decorations and heavily used textures and materials (see fig. 4), which create a private luxurious experience yet also enclose the guests into an illusional bubble. Bob��s time is unseen. He is stuck in the dark yet excessive indoor labyrinth of the hotel, and the camera tends to capture his figure in a perspective configuration suggesting the endlessness of the physical space. In the hotel lounge bar (see fig. 5) and the hallway (see fig. 6), Bob seems stuck in the repetition of hotel interiors and cannot find a way out.

Figure 4. ��Bob in his President��s Suite,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 5. ��Bob in the Hotel Lounge,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 6. ��Bob in his President��s Suite,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Ultimately, the interior space of the hotel blurs the sense of time and situates the characters in jet-lagged insomnia, where the characters are both physically and emotionally unable to find rest. The hotel interiors are a symbolized context of disorientation and alienation felt by the protagonists, with the film's portrayal of the hotel as a claustrophobic and timeless environment reflecting the characters' struggles to connect with their surroundings and find a sense of belonging, which serves as a metaphor for the broader themes of lost and existential uncertainty explored throughout the film.

Nights that Invade Days

As the film is clearly paced with a chronological order alongside Bob and Charlotte spending every single day and each day passing marks them getting closer to the day of separation, the audience is well aware that they are meant to separate eventually. However, the ambiguity of the passage of time creates an everlasting sensation that the night never passes. In Lost in Translation, the notion of night goes beyond the temporal definition, rather, night becomes a mood or a thematic character that expands into the entire film. One of the techniques to achieve this effect is using the atmospheric ambiance that resembles night also for the day scenes, which essentially makes the days become nights.

After establishing the perpetual sensation of night, the film employs lighting as one of the crucial elements to further enhance this thematic portrayal. According to Geoff and Botta?, the night is an ��additive to the engine of production��[2], and only with the invention of electricity and illumination can a city in the night become an inhabitable space that does not shut down after conventional off hours. Among the cities notable for its night scenes, Tokyo is famous for its bustling nightlife with colorful lighting, glaring signage, and superficial pop culture. In Cities of Light (2015), the illumination design in Tokyo, using Skytree as an example, is described as ��announcing and imparting a message, a new network, and pathway for the interaction between time, place and viewer[3]��. Similar motifs are explored in Lost in Translation, as lighting is strategically utilized to immerse the audience in an emotional journey through the urban landscape of Tokyo. Minimum artificial lighting is used in the night scenes and the background is always lit with environmental lights out of focus. When Charlotte first reaches out to start a conversation with Bob in the hotel lounge (see fig. 7), the long-lens camera captures an angle as the viewers are on the other side of their bar table, observing them at eye-level perspective. Charlotte and Bob are located on two sides of the frame in a symmetrical configuration, and with the close focus on their upper bodies, there is the city at night out of focus with lens flares of red and blue neon blobs in the background. In the next sequence when they have a night out, Charlotte and Bob get on the street to escape into a cab (see fig. 8). Here, the director switches back to the favored shallow planes and long lenses, with the two��s surrounding context blurred out. The distinct visual style and color schemes of night Tokyo resonate with the framing of the hotel lounge scene (see fig. 7), while the red is exaggerated by the car lights, and cold blue occupies the streetscape. The choice of color temperature in these night scenes, with cool tones dominating the visual palette and warm spots shining, is a consistent visual language that is seen in day scenes. In the key ending scene when Bob and Charlotte are saying goodbye on a Shibuya street (see fig. 9), the street is cast in cool shadows that exaggerate the vivid red lighting on street banners; A similar color scheme is also employed in a seemingly random shot of the city by the highway (see fig. 10), on the way Bob is leaving Tokyo for the airport. The flashing-neon/light quality figures consistently throughout the film become one of the signifiers of ��Tokyo-ness��[4], which gives a muted quality that reduces the flashiness of the visuals and adds an extra layer of nocturnal aesthetic to the film.

Figure 7. ��Charlotte and Bob in Hotel Lounge,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 8. ��Charlotte and Bob��s Escape into a Cab,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 9. ��Ending Scene on Shibuya Street,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 10. ��Ending Scene on Highway,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Night scenes in films are intentionally made blurry at times to evoke a sense of realism and atmosphere. This blurriness mimics the natural effect of low light conditions, where details become less defined and shapes blend into the surroundings. By adding this blur, filmmakers create a mood of mystery and tension, enhancing the viewer's immersion in the scene. Additionally, blurriness can also be used stylistically to convey a character's state of mind or emotions. A distinct blurring effect achieved by the handheld camera constitutes another aesthetics of Lost in Translation, particularly when the characters are in moments of greater freedom, both separately and when shared, while the city at night provides them a hope to flee from domestic responsibilities and personas. In the scene when Charlotte and Bob��s group of friends get in trouble and start a BB-gun fight on the street, Charlotte guides Bob fleeing into the labyrinth of Japanese arcade halls (see fig. 11); the hand-held camera shoots the two at their backs while Charlotte dominates Bob past along the endless aisle of gaming machines, getting lost into the unknown domain of the city. Hand-held camerawork evokes a greater sense of freedom and an urge to escape, which is a consistent visual style used in this sequence (see fig. 12). The impression created here is of a certain kind of objectivity, an objective form of verisimilitude inherited in the distance created between the character and the camera.[5] The distinct style of the hand-held camera creates the ��wipe�� effect when the camera is obscured between the discrepancy of camera movement and the character��s movement. At Bob��s ��arch�� moment when he for the first time gets out on Tokyo��s street (see fig. 13), the same effect is employed again in this day scene. Handhold camera is not merely an aesthetic choice during production, according to Coppola, the crew had to overcome difficulties such as location shooting without permits and low budgeting, which led to the improvised freeform manner of shooting Tokyo with spontaneous informality.[6] Tokyo is shot with a spontaneous informality, where King commented that the lightweight and flexible ��guerrilla style�� that combines the practical limitations with creative expressions is well suited to the storytelling of this film.[7]

Figure 11. ��Charlotte and Bob��s Escape from Group of Friends, ��Wipe�� Effect Created by Hand-held Camera,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 12. ��Charlotte and Bob��s Escape from Group of Friends, ��Wipe�� Effect Created by Hand-held Camera,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 13. ��Bob Running on the Street,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Is This Tokyo Real?

If you ask whether the characters in Lost in Translation have revealed authentic Japanese people and culture, the answer is probably in denial. The role of Tokyo, Japan, and the Japanese largely serves as a backdrop against which to set the situations and the developing relationship between the two central characters. There is a certain kind of objectivity that also sets the distance between the characters and the real Tokyo, achieved by both the visual style as discussed above and the embedded Western ideology as part of the Orientalist discourses. The key to understanding an Orientalist discourse of this kind is that it tells us more about its source than it does about the overseas territories to which it is meant to refer.[8] As Littlewood stated, the Western stereotyping of Japanese culture is about the notion of paradox and contradiction, the ��inherent peculiarity�� is a product of ��our own angle of vision��.[9] Lost in Translation, hereby, is particularly complicit in this notion as it intentionally sets the characters in ignorance of their physical surroundings and shows them with a shallow understanding in perceiving Tokyo. The city is structurally located as ��other�� to them.[10] Throughout the film, the distance between the characters and their context is captured in numerous formats and settings. For example, it shows several scenes of Charlotte traveling alone with multiple symbols of isolation, such as headphones and train windows that separate her from the outer world (see fig. 14). In another scene of her aimless wandering in the city, she observes the ��absurd�� Japanese youth playing gaming machines in the arcade hall (see fig. 15). In Bob��s side of the story, he spent an unsettling night being unwillingly required by his agent to attend a Japanese late-night TV show, being forced to act in his celebrity persona, and feeling uncomfortable in this encounter (see fig. 16).

Figure 14. ��Charlotte in Train,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 15. ��Charlotte Observing Japanese Youth in an Arcade Hall,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Figure 16. ��Bill Unwillingly Showed up in a Japanese TV Show,�� Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.

Among these scenes, the real Tokyo is either far away or depicted as an uncomfortable or strange place to experience. Thus, Tokyo is not a city that the film intends to depict, rather, it is the ��Tokyo-ness�� that is deployed as a tool to push the characters inwardly in their deeply rooted Western ideologies. Tokyo is not a destination that is unique to a story like this, rather, an identical story can happen in any place in the world as long as the domestic culture falls in the Western stereotyping scope. In other words, the characters feel lost as they choose to immerse themselves in this mood of ��lost��, which successfully aligns with the nighttime aesthetic that is discussed above. Together, the depiction of Tokyo in the narrative of Lost in Translation does not intend to construct the real city but rather a fragmented image of a reel city.[11] Tokyo becomes a mental city made by the medium of cinema.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Lost in Translation explicitly engages the most apparent themes of loneliness, disconnection, and isolation, and numerous references to its cinematic techniques have been made in this essay. The lack of a narrative ��action�� in its loose plot and the ��loss�� or aimlessness experienced by watching this film, is signified in the visual image of Charlotte sitting by the hotel window or her undirected scrolling on the street, with the jet-lagged Tokyo experiences of Bob and her together, out of time and out of place, creates a heightened expression of dislocation and disorientation, which is a frequent subject of art cinema situated within the modernist or postmodernist tradition.[12] The notion of nighttime cinema in this film can be interpreted as night can go beyond a temporal definition. Rather, it can become a unique aesthetic that can be deployed as a particular style, achieved by visual images and storytelling. The quality of Lost in Translation is self-defined and designed not for the mass market but a specific sector of the audience - those, in particular, looking for certain types of aesthetics and moods that respond to their own identities or ideologies in the medium of cinema.

[1] Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Viking, 2005), Chap. 1.

[2] Giacomo Botta? and Geoff Stahl, eds. Nocturnes?: Popular Music and the Night (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3.

[3] Miya Elise Mizuta. ��Tokyo: Lightscapes: Cherry Blossoms at Night and the Illumination of Cultural Properties�� in Cities of Light, ed. Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty and Dietrich Neumann (New York: Rootledge, 2015), 113.

[4] Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 100.

[5] King, 93-94.

[6] Suzanne Ferriss, Lost in Translations (London: British Film Institute, 2023), 33.

[7] King, 99.

[8] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

[9] Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan : Western Images, Western Myths (London: Secker & Warburg, 1996), 7.

[10] King, 131.

[11] Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism?: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2-18.

[12] King, 126.

Cityscape of Trash : The Nocturnal Tokyo of Tokyo Godfathers (2003) by Satoshi Kon

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:11:41 +0000

Cityscape of Trash : The Nocturnal Tokyo of Tokyo Godfathers (2003) by Satoshi Kon alexandre.nero�� Mon, 07/15/2024 - 10:11

Introduction

Tokyo Godfathers is a film about waste, human resolution, and the night. Directed by Satoshi Kon and released in 2004, it is a Christmas film and Kon's least-known work, sitting behind the more widespread influences of Perfect Blue (1997), Millenium Actress (2001), and Paprika (2006). As an illustrator and filmmaker, Kon sits within a lexicon of artists who have historically straddled both roles in the Japanese animation industry, where animated works are often adaptations of graphic novels. The industry experienced a boom in the post-war period when successful adaptations of popular series such as Astro Boy gave studios the funding to expand. In the following decades, Japanese animation came to be known for its exploration of science fiction and technological themes, shown in the successes of the Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (1995) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) series.

However, as the turn of the millennium arrived, the industry saw the entrance of artists who sought to explore the blending of real and fantasy, a theme that runs throughout the body of Kon's work. Tokyo Godfathers is unique in that it is the only Kon film that explores this theme while also sitting in a category of Japanese animated films that examines the nature of urbanity, specifically the identity of the Japanese megacity. While previous films in this category use the strengths of animation to imagine the metropolis through a science fiction lens, Tokyo Godfathers is unique in exploring the animated city with a faithfulness to realism. In harnessing the strengths of animation to circumvent the limits of traditional filmmaking, Satoshi Kon depicts a type of urban night that had thus far evaded capture. By focusing the setting of the urban night at the center of his narrative, Kon is then able to explore and make visible the hidden nocturnal Tokyo, and more importantly, the people that shape its understanding.

Thus, this paper will begin with an outline of the history of Tokyo's urban night and the development of its hidden nature. Then, I will describe how the hidden Tokyo night shapes urban waste, and how animation as a medium can be instrumental in showing these landscapes. Finally, I will show how Satoshi Kon, through his directorial choices that give visibility to these hidden landscapes, allows Tokyo Godfathers to contribute to a culture of material and social resistance.

1. Tokyo Night

Modern Nocturnal Tokyo

Although the nightscape of Tokyo today feels unmistakably modern, the formation of a nighttime economy in the metropolis began before the formation of modernism as a global culture. Due to Japan's rapid expansion of colonial powers in the Pacific Ocean, increased exposure and adoption of Western industry, and a subsequent boom in population, urban life developed rapidly in Japan, leading to the emergence of new types of middle-class consumerism. These new modes of consumption "drove the emerging night-time economy, including cinemas, dancehalls, and jazz venues, as well as bars, cabaret spots, and nightclubs"[1]. During the 1920s, night culture in Japan echoes that of the swinging 20s in America. Boosted by the growing popularity of Western media, music, and dance, Tokyo witnessed a boom in dance halls and music venues. However, this growth was not met without opposition from the local government, as the night-time economy became increasingly associated with the "underbelly" of Tokyo, i.e. illegal operations and sex work. A restrictive policy was introduced in 1928, which required all dance halls to operate with a license and be controlled by the police.[2]

Tokyo's night economies, and by extension the night itself, were further restricted in World War Two, during which Japan's cultural industries came under political control for propaganda purposes. This forced the night into social niches and the hidden spaces of the city. In subsequent years after the war, Japan's reluctance to associate its image with its cultural industries caused "the Japanese government to refrain from introducing any comprehensive administrative structure or policy to regulate the cultural economy".[3] On one hand, this allowed night economies to develop and flourish by occupying hidden space within the city. On the other hand, the government's use of law enforcement as the only regulatory force within night economies persisted, resulting in a truce between the two parties requiring that "the alternative subculture of the night-time economy remained untouched as long as they did not interfere with the wider social world".[4]

By the 1960s, urban centers such as Tokyo's Shinjuku district had become hubs for the city's nighttime economies. As a major commuting hub, Shinjuku station was historically the major landing point for migrant workers traveling into Tokyo. However, as Tokyo rapidly de-industrialized in the '70s and '80s, following the emergence of globalized corporations and subsequent liquidation of wealth, Shinjuku station and its surrounding area became a hub of night-time economies for a white-collar population, many of whom need to commute back to the suburbs before the rail system closes after midnight. As a major urban hub that continues to shape the global image of Tokyo, Shinjuku is "well known for its gaudy neon sign, advertising Golden Gai bars, nightclubs, restaurants, karaoke venues, theatre and 'love hotels' to entertain Japan's rising middle class".[5]

Shinjuku in Tokyo Godfathers

Shinjuku is also one of the main settings of Tokyo Godfathers. The film opens with the characters in a church in the area, where they are lining up for the Christmas day meal service. Before transiting to the next scene, Kon inserts two establishing shots that show central Shinjuku at night. The shots recall stereotypical imagery of Tokyo's urban night, characterized by colorful lit-up semiotics lining the facades of buildings, busy sidewalks, and the streaking lights of traffic. Bright reds, oranges, and yellows that contrast with the blue of the night are emphasized by the background artists in these shots to heighten their aestheticized look (fig. 1, 2). Here, the urban night is a pastiche that sits among countless other images of "oriental" urbanity. Tokyo is reduced to a certain "feel", and the setting itself is decontextualized from a real location. The urban night here is commercial, recognizable, and accessible to the average viewer.

Figure 1. ��Shinjuku,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

Figure 2. ��Shinjuku,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

In the next scene, however, Kon cuts to a sequence showing Miyuki on a Shinjuku rooftop. Waiting for Gin and Hana to return, she kills the time by sending spitballs to unsuspecting civilians below. When the spitball reaches its target, the civilian cranes his head to look for the culprit, but cannot see anything other than the giant illuminated billboard, with the text "tears of an angel" advertising jewelry, obscuring Miyuki's figure from their view (see fig. 3). From the very beginning of the movie, Kon is using elements of the nocturnal city to show how its commercialization and aestheticization hides our marginalized protagonists, traversing the urban night, from public view. From there on out, Shinjuku transforms from a pastiche into a real location, exposed and formed by the experiences of the protagonists.

Figure 3. ��Tears of an Angel Billboard,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

2. Tokyo Waste

Waste and Urbanity

As home to one of Tokyo's busiest commercial centers, Shinjuku has also become a site where the urban condition of the metropolis can be most readily observed; namely, the waste generated by human excess. These landscapes of urban waste are the principal setting of Tokyo Godfathers, where our main trio not only depend on them to survive but are shown to navigate them familiarly in their ecosystems of mutual care.

The image of the city as one that is associated with waste has a longstanding history. From the beginning of "urbanity", cities have garnered a reputation as a ��dirty�� environment rampant with overcrowding and disease. This reputation was exacerbated during the Industrial Revolution; the onset of industry drew people towards urban centers in search of work, and what came to be known as "slums" formed in the process as a particularly urban condition. The association of cities with waste was a factor that drove the conception and formation of suburbs, a form of urban design that was successfully exported worldwide. In the present day, advancements in waste management facilities and the onset of neoliberal "urban renewal" efforts, most of which were designed to displace the poor, have turned cities back into attractive places of residence. Nevertheless, the nature of modern urbanism continues to describe humanity's complicated relationship with the presence of waste.

As a megacity, Tokyo is not exempt from this relationship. Waste management in Japan, particularly in its urban centers, has a turbulent past. Tokyo was largely destroyed in the August 1945 firebombing by the US Air Force. The city's vernacular, built almost completely of wood, was lost in the process and replaced by the material of choice for modern construction: concrete.[6] At the same time, Japan's post-war economic growth meant the country was accumulating new types and quantities of construction and consumer waste at exponential speeds. As local governments were incapable of predicting these rapid changes, urban centers lacked sufficient treatment facilities for these newly generated wastes.[7] Furthermore, an increase in Japan's middle class in the 1980s led once again to major changes in lifestyle, leading to an increased demand for daily products, which "was especially true for small plastic containers and wrapping materials".[8] The increase in single-use product waste coincided with the growth of urban nighttime economies, of which a large percentage is comprised of fast-paced food service businesses that may depend on take-out orders to turn a profit.

Nocturnal Waste and the Tools of Animation

It is here that we can see the relationship between waste and the night, in which waste is the way by which night remembers the day. All bars, restaurants, and even grocery and convenience stores throw out their garbage at closing during the dead of night, usually into back alleys, where it will sit until garbage collection comes at the crack of dawn. The night is thus the time when waste accumulates and is then removed from the city. The treatment of what collective society has become averse to is delineated by the cover of darkness. In the mountains of trash bags left in back alleys and outside apartment buildings, the night is forced to remember the day. After the garbage trucks come along at the rising of the sun, the day need not remember the night. Tokyo Godfathers, however, is a film that reverses this narrative to remember succinctly not just the physical landscapes of the night (defined by waste), but also the community that calls this landscape home and depends on it to survive.

At this point, it is important to discuss why animation is an important medium for the depiction of real urban night landscapes of waste. Kon's choice to animate a city in the style of realism presents a whole new understanding of the strengths of animation in city building. In science fiction, city building can be a creative and aesthetic exercise. In realism, city building must be a selective exercise. Because the filmmakers have full reign over the film's environments, the new task is to filter and select the parts of the city that are shown and how they are framed, lit, and interacted with. Yet the removal of this limitation presents to the director the novel challenge of intentionality. If curated well, only in animation can a city be portrayed in forms and ways unknowable with a physical camera, and by staying loyal to the physicality of the city, animation allows the city and built environment to express itself in new, unorthodox ways not previously found in the realm of cinema.

One of the greatest examples of this in the film is the number of scenes that prominently feature trash in its background art. As seen in fig. 4, Kon and his team of background production artists took great care in composing and rendering the elements of garbage in these environments. In extant journal articles where he documents the process of creating the film, Kon directly states the importance of trash as a subject in the film, and thus must be beautifully and carefully depicted: "It may seem a bit contradictory to say that trash is beautiful, but trash must leave a lasting impression."[9] Using a 2D animation software that allows up to 24 layers in a frame, Kon superimposed multiple images until the desired effect was achieved. Rather than simplify the process by making the trash bags opaque, Kon chooses to stay faithful to reality by accurately depicting the garbage bags as the translucent, calcium carbonate bags distributed by the Tokyo municipal government. By taking the time and effort to undertake this extensive process, Kon and his animation team imbue these landscapes of urban waste with a certain sense of dignity and make sure that these environments come to the forefront of discussions of the film.

Figure 4. ��Animation process for garbage bags surrounding Kiyoko's basket,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

In addition to using animation as a tool to formalize hidden environments, Kon also uses animation to make the night visible. Night shooting is a long-standing obstacle in the history of filmmaking, with the biggest contest being that of sufficient scene lighting. In traditional filmmaking, lighting in night scenes is heavily controlled, and in many cases supplemented to ensure the resulting image is clear. Scenes that call for no lighting are the most difficult. Although becoming less common, these scenes were often shot day for night, in which shooting takes place during the day and then altered in postproduction to appear as night. Darkly lit night scenes in urban cinema are mostly used to emphasize the nature of darkness and the terror of the city at night, and details are purposefully thrown into shadow to enunciate mystique.

Animation can overcome this limitation in traditional filmmaking as a medium that allows the filmmaker to control the brightness, contrast, and level of detail in a frame. An example of this in Tokyo Godfathers is shown in fig. 5, which shows Gin as he collapses in a dark alley in Shinjuku after being beaten by a gang. The composition and contents of the alley were planned from the conception of the storyboard, with the Tokyo Tower shining brightly beyond. With a traditional camera, the unevenness in scene lighting would have either left the Tokyo Tower overexposed or thrown the dark foreground into total darkness. However, using animation to compile layers of nuanced color and shading, Kon can insert deliberate and explicit detail into the clutter of trash that resides in these dark Shinjuku alleys without sacrificing realistic lighting, allowing these environments to be seen with clarity despite the darkness of the night.

Figure 5. �� Layers of Animating a Dark Alley,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

3. Tokyo Resistance

Urban Homelessness

As home to one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods and one of the city's busiest commercial centers, Shinjuku has also become a site where income disparity in Tokyo can be most readily observed. Tokyo's elite mixes with white-collar workers next to the city's largest homeless encampment in Shinjuku Park, which is also the home of Godfathers' homeless protagonists and features prominently in the second act of the movie. Kon introduces the camp with a downward tilting shot, which establishes the trio's blue tarp-covered home sitting directly at the base of the towering, Kenzo Tange designed Tokyo Metropolitan Government building.

Kon��s choice to feature homeless protagonists is radical, but not out of nowhere. As Hayashi observes in Opening Up the Welfare State: ��Homelessness in and after the 1990s radically challenged Japan��s well-organized construction of urban public space as well as the nations homogenous self-portrait of domestic society as ��all-one-hundred-million middle class��.[10] This challenge to homogeneity was both fed into and fueled by films such a Tokyo Godfathers, an effect noted by Thornbury: ��The huge size of Tokyo��is manifested in the cartographic reality of a city that does much to obscure its population of outsiders. Fiction and film, however, give visibility and voice to that population.��[11] Thus, by centering the humanity of his homeless characters, Kon gives voice to another Tokyo that "lives on the leftover of frenetic consumption."[12]

Waste as a Culture of Resistance

Indeed, the urban environment represented in Godfathers sheds light on a culture of resistance born out of the discarded. This culture of resistance is poignantly described by Maria dos Santos in Design, Waste, and Homelessness:Today, the downtown areas of large cities have become receptacles of discarded products, industrially produced under the reign of new technologies. Here, the homeless and the collectors of recyclables are important agents of waste reutilization, creating a parallel, informal economy. But more significantly, the dispossessed, the homeless, are creating another material culture based on the transformation of refuse. Their actions promote a metamorphosis of products and materials, constituting the base of a culture of resistance, defining their place in the world and history.[13]

As previously established, Kon uses the tools of animation to depict the urban night with clarity, thus making visible this culture of material resistance. At the first critical turning point in the plot, the trio is rooting through a local apartment��s outdoor trash room (see fig. 6) in search of a Christmas gift that Hana had found for Miyuki. The urban night plays an important role here, as a setting that allows the trio to search with less worry of being interrupted. While Hana��s present is now gone, they find the most precious gift: Kiyoko, who upon reveal glows impossibly, illuminating the shocked faces of the trio (see fig. 7).

Figure 6. ��Outdoor Trash Room,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

Figure 7. ��Glowing Kiyoko,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

This subversion of sociocultural spaces of waste continues as we follow the trio to their makeshift shelter in Shinjuku Park. The direct contrast between the city hall, one of many towers in West Shinjuku that ��exude power and wealth��[14] (fig. 9) and the row of homeless shelters is intentional, both in scale and color as the blue of the tarp pops against a palette of greys (fig. 8). The shot also juxtaposes ��formal��, or acceptable enclosures, with the ��informal��, or socially unaccepted forms of shelter that the trio depend on for sleep security at night. Kon��s choice to show the trio sheltering in Shinjuku Park, which is home to a homeless encampment in real life (fig. 10), is also significant when contextualized in a country that at first glance seems to not have a significant homeless population.

Figure 8. ��Greys Palette,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

Figure 9. ��Wealth Materiality Contrasts,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

Figure 10. ��Shinjuku Park Homeless Real-life Encampment,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003. (Photograph by Cory Doctorow, Tents, Homeless Camp, Shinjuku Park, October 10, 2008, https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2929117132).

The shelter itself is a form of ��spontaneous design and informal recycling��, and are ��powerful elements that materialize an alternative, radical practice of design and cultural resistance.�� This is shown when the scene cuts to the interior of their shelter, rendered in detail with a warm and rich color palette (see figs. 11, 12). A closer look shows that the shelter is equipped with living necessities and personalized with various objects and images. Thus, Kon almost insists on the validity of the shelter as a home; indeed, Thomas Haven observed of Japan��s homeless population that many who lived ��beneath blue tarps denied their marginality and believed they were contributing to family and nation by living on their own��[15].

Figure 11. ��Shelter��s Warm Color Palette,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

Figure 12. ��Club��s Warm Color Palette,�� Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfather, 2003.

The characters themselves are Kon��s way of insisting on the validity of their humanity. All three characters represent the symptoms of a society trying to hide its social precarity; where ��saving face�� and fitting in with societal norms, even at one��s expense, is integral to its cultural values. However, Hana, as a transgender woman, exists at the forefront of Kon��s resistance against Japan��s strict idea of social acceptability. In a country where same-sex marriage remains illegal and the LGBT community truly exists as a subculture, the depth of Hana��s character development and her role in the story as the glue that holds her found family together grounds Kon��s stance of resistance against societal values that include people in its definition of waste. His choice to show Hana��s old drag bar as the only space of commercial night economy in the film once again makes visible the hidden and underrepresented spaces of Tokyo��s urban night.

Conclusion

As noted by Lucy Andrew, ��Capital Cities are representative of national identity��[that] can be threatened by those considered ��other�� within their midst.�� Although not a capital city, Tokyo is arguably the most prominent urban center of Japan, and thus global perception of it greatly informs our consciousness of the country at large. The need to shape this consciousness is part of the project of neoliberalism, where the marketability and profitability of the city are the main goals of the entrepreneurial municipal government. Thus, this paper seeks to sit in a wider conversation about how capitalism in the postmodern age attempts to construct the image of the ��clean city��, and how a closer study of the urban night can play a role in subverting this goal.

Tokyo, like other metropolises, has evolved into a city that seeks to obscure the physical and social waste it produces under the parameters of the night. However, in his film Tokyo Godfathers, Satoshi Kon uses the strengths of animation to give visibility and voice to the spaces of nocturnal urban waste. Finally, in placing his protagonists within these spaces and rendering their experiences in the city with faithfulness and love, Kon defines their place within the world and a culture of material and social resistance.

[1] Christian Morgner, ��Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,�� in ICNS Proceedings, ed. Manuel Garcia-Ruiz and Jordi Nofre (Lisboa : ISCTE, 2020), 105.

[2] Morgner, ��Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,�� 105.

[3] Morgner, ��Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,�� 115.

[4] Morgner, ��Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,�� 115.

[5] Morgner, ��Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,�� 108.

[6] Jordan Sand, Tokyo Vernacular Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (Los Angeles: London University of California Press, 2013), 1.

[7] Keishiro Hara, ��Historical Evolution and Development of Waste Management and Recycling Systems �C Analysis of Japan��s Experiences,�� in Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences no. 2 (2012), 297.

[8] Hara, ��Historical Evolution and Development of Waste Management and Recycling Systems �C Analysis of Japan��s Experiences,�� 298.

[9] Satoshi Kon, ���|��åɥե��`��`��j�� -�Q��2002��- 05��, (2003).

[10] Mahito Hayashi, ��Opening up the Welfare State to ��Outsiders�� Pro-Homeless Activism and Neoliberal Backlashes in Japan,�� in Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia, ed. David Chiavacci (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 270.

[11] Barbara E. Thornbury, ��Locating the Outsider within Tokyo,�� in Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 151.

[12] Maria Cecilia Loschiavo Dos Santos, ��Design, Waste and Homelessness,�� in Design Philosophy Papers, no. 3 (2015), 157.

[13] Dos Santos, ��Design, Waste and Homelessness,�� 159.

[14] Thornbury, ��Locating the Outsider within Tokyo,�� 150.

[15] Thornbury, ��Locating the Outsider within Tokyo,�� 165.

Staging Utopia: Queer Performance in Tangerine

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 14:04:57 +0000

Staging Utopia: Queer Performance in Tangerine alexandre.nero�� Fri, 07/12/2024 - 10:04

Toyland, toyland / Little girl and boy land

While you dwell within it / You are ever happy there

Childhood's joy land / Mystic merry toyland

Once you pass its borders / You can ne'er return again

- Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough, Toyland, (Chicago : M. Witmark and Sons, 1903), 3.

Introduction

Sean Baker��s Tangerine (2015) set in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, is a film about thresholds. The narrative, which follows a day�Cand night�Cin the life of two black transgender sex workers named Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), ushers the viewer along the wide boulevards and hidden niches of the neighborhood. Throughout their journey, Baker offers a cinematic framing of Hollywood that challenges its assumed associations with American cinema and celebrity culture to depict a much more brutal reality on the ground. However, Tangerine remains a lighthearted film despite the adversity that Sin-Dee and Alexandra face in their day-to-day.[1] The reality of the two characters�� experiences is presented alongside moments of fantasy that show the love, care, and hopes that they share and hold close. Using Jos�� Estaban Mu?oz��s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), I focus on Alexandra��s performance of ��Toyland�� to demonstrate how the gay bar as a typology of urban queer nightlife has fostered, to a degree, a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community. Furthermore, the framing and scale of the stage, performer, and audience are compared with scenes from two other films which borrow from the same classic Hollywood stage aesthetic to highlight the particularities of Alexandra��s rendition as an act of queer place-making in a rigidly defined city. Lastly, I explore the effect of overlaying text from Cruising Utopia onto the same ��Toyland�� scene to illustrate how the characters in Tangerine fail or succeed in reaching into the fantasy world(s) that they dream of.

Locating Tangerine

Like Baker��s The Florida Project (2017) set in Kissimmee, Florida, Tangerine is very much grounded in the place is it set and filmed. The film begins on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue in an area known as an unofficial red-light district. In an interview, Baker speaks to how this exact location which was just half a mile away from where he was living when he first moved to LA was shocking in that it demonstrated a completely different version of the city than he initially would have expected; he goes on to say that much of city, in actuality, is a departure from what is constructed on the big screen.[2]

Sin-Dee and Alexandra��s experience of this environment is supported by Mike Davis�� City of Quartz (1990) which provides a framework of urban analysis in LA that situates the various locations pictured in the film as hostile zones of confinement. In the text, Davis affirms Baker��s intuition and explores the cityscape as an omni-oppressive matrix of security that has largely destroyed public spaces to shield so-called ��respectable people�� from other ��unsavory groups�� (such as our main characters).[3] The lack of public space in Tangerine is perhaps not so evident at first. Initially, Sin-Dee and Alexandra seem to make their way around Hollywood with a certain degree of agency and confidence. However, as the film progresses, the locations visited by the characters paint a different picture�Cespecially as they begin to return to the same key locations�Crevealing the spatial networks that they have become familiar with due to the top-down limits placed on them by the city. Furthermore, the pseudo-public spaces that exist in between private spatial networks remain unwelcoming environments that thrust the two protagonists into constant mobility. Davis concludes that the ��crusade to secure the city�� has rendered the limited public spaces that border the boulevards in LA largely uninhabitable to pedestrians.[4] Throughout the film, Sin-Dee and Alexandra spend much of their time moving from place to place either on foot or by riding on public transport (without paid tickets). The two never stick around in any one place for too long though, a subtle hint that there might not be anywhere for them to stick around. When Sin-Dee has a moment of pause on a bench in front of a bus stop in the blazing hot sun, her impatience and anxiety mount as more and more people flood into the space around her. Even when returning to familiar places like Donut Time, their stay is limited by the function of the shop as a commercial/private space. In these examples, Sin-Dee and Alexandra are pushed to leave both public and private spaces due to a lacking sense of security in the former and the disruption they cause (during the climax of the film) in the latter.

Toyland & Queer Futurity

As mentioned before, Tangerine manages to balance the crudeness of Hollywood with moments of joy and beauty. One of these moments is Alexandra��s performance of ��Toyland,�� a vintage Christmas song originally written by Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough for the operetta Babes in Toyland (1903). Up until this point, the characters and thus narrative of the film have moved at a quick pace�Cfrom donut shops to boulevards to restaurants to motels to buses and now, a bar. The remarkable stillness of this scene is a moment of pause that explores the stage as a site of queer placemaking through performance and demonstrates how it is utilized to cope with and reject the urban systems outlined in Davis�� text. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), Jos�� Estaban Mu?oz positions queerness in a speculated futurity, a then and a there, and analyses the role and function that performance stages in particular play in the queer imagination. He writes the following:

Capitalism, for instance, would have us think that it is a natural order, an inevitability, the way things would be. The ��should be�� of utopia, its indeterminacy, and its deployment of hope, stand against capitalism��s ever-expanding and exhausting force field of how things ��are and will be.��[5]

LA��s urban planning insists that those at the margins accept a perceived notion of reality as fixed, and unchangeable. At the start of the film, when the two friends meet at Donut Time following Sin-Dee��s release from prison, Alexandra exclaims, ��Out here it is all about our hustle, and that��s it.�� Their hustle is the here and now, the how things are and will [always] be. Despite Alexandra being the one to utter these words, she contradicts herself during her rendition of ��Toyland.�� The ��Toyland�� scene takes place in Hamburger Mary��s located on Santa Monica Boulevard and Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood. In real life, Mary��s is a popular queer-friendly space that regularly hosts drag shows and other events catered to the LGBTQ+ community.[6] In Tangerine, Mary��s stage is activated by Alexandra not only to reject and cope with her current reality but to imagine a fantastical version of herself.

Figure 1a. Real Front face of Hamburger Mary��s on Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. (Photograph by Cal Carpentier, Hamburger Mary��s, August 24, 2016, https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/restaurants/hamburger-marys).

Figure 1b. Reel Front face of Hamburger Mary��s on Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. (��Alexandra Waiting at Mary��s,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine 2015).

Scene and Stage Analysis

The scene opens with an establishing medium shot of Alexandra seated on a stool on the stage. Alexandra, wearing a red dress with silver accents on the straps, is placed in front of a microphone stand decorated with silver tinsel and behind red velvet curtains which encompass most of the frame, giving the impression that the stage extends beyond our narrowed view. Warm stage lighting illuminates downward from the ceiling onto Alexandra��s figure, casting a shadow of her silhouette on the stage curtains. As Alexandra sings, the frame shifts momentarily to Sin-Dee and Dinah who are seated in a booth a couple of meters away from the stage. Sin-Dee, who appears transfixed by the performance, is bathed in a warm light emitting from the stage on the left. Behind her is a blue light that covers most of the booth seating as well as Dinah. Other close-up and extreme close-up shots of Alexandra are sprinkled throughout her performance.

Figure 2: ��Establishing shot of Alexandra on stage,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

The mise en sc��ne instantly recalls a classic old Hollywood stage performance aesthetic referenced in movies like Bradley Cooper��s A Star Is Born (2019) and David Lynch��s Blue Velvet (1986). The story told on Tangerine��s stage is much different, however, to those in the aforementioned films. In ASIB, the main character of Ally (Lady Gaga) covers ��La vie en rose,�� a song originally sung by ?dith Piaf. While the shots in Ally��s sequence from ASIB might resemble Alexandra��s in Tangerine, there are many key differences. In ASIB, Ally��s face is washed in a green light and is in deep contrast to the red stage curtains behind her. Unlike Alexandra, whose red dress establishes a continuity with the backdrop, Ally stands out from her environment. This frames Alexandra��s performance as much more timid than Ally��s. Additionally, we are rarely shown Ally singing on the stage itself. While performing, she maneuvers her way through the crowded bar (which also so happens to be set in LA just east of Hollywood) as the stage lingers behind her. In a sense, the film attempts to communicate that Ally is destined for something bigger and better, that she can permeate the barrier between the present (real) and the potentiality of the future (fantasy). Alexandra on the other hand is confined to the parameter of the stage and thus the extent to which that fantasy she imagines can be sustained beyond the performance.

Scale also has an impact on the framing of a scene as seen in the ��Blue Velvet�� performance from the film of the same name. The ��Blue Velvet�� sequence is shot at a greater distance from the stage than the two other films. Lynch focuses on presenting the audience (both seated in theatres and the world of the film) with an impressive show featuring a dramatic introduction, dynamic stage lighting, and a live band. The camera does approach the singer quite closely towards the end of the sequence, but it never quite reaches the same intimacy that ASIB and Tangerine do. Furthermore, Lynch isolates the stage from the audience. The performance in Blue Velvet is interrupted frequently by medium shots of the film��s protagonist accompanied by his love interest who are never framed with the stage, further isolating the two dimensions of real and fantasy from each other. In Tangerine, many frames in the sequence include, or rather expose the space surrounding the stage, constantly shifting the position of the viewer in and out again of the portrayed fantasy. The choice to shoot the entirety of the film using an iPhone 5S permits this compositional framing. The film was shot using three different iPhones but only two were ever used at the same time. As elaborated in many interviews with Baker, shooting on an iPhone meant that they could more easily maneuver into

Figure 3a. ��Alexandra��s performance of ��Toyland��,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Figure. 3b. ��Ally��s performance of ��La Vie En Rose��,�� Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born, 2019.

Figure 3c. ��The Blue Lady��s performance of ��Blue Velvet��,�� David Lynch, Blue Velvet, 1986.

tight spaces and crowded places without having too much of a physical footprint.[7] The wide lens of the iPhone camera has no problem in approaching Alexandra��s figure during her performance. However, perhaps a unique element of shooting on the iPhone is its field of depth. Unlike the two other performance sequences where the professional cameras feature a shorter depth of field, bringing a greater focus to the subject on the screen and cropping the visibility of the background, the performance sequence in Tangerine can reveal much of the space surrounding the stage while still in proximity to Alexandra.

The recurring use of a compositional split screen further imparts the idea that Alexandra and Sin-Dee are caught between the real and the reel as Baker positions the characters in a space between the world of reality and that of fantasy by dividing the composition of the frame in two (as seen in Fig. 3a, right image). Eventually, the final shots of the ��Toyland�� sequence bring attention to the return to reality.

Figure 4. ��Concluding shots following Alexandra��s performance and signaling the end of her fantasy,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Alexandra��s performance ends with a shot almost identical to the opening shot of her on stage, except now the lighting and colors are made muddier�Ca departure from the rest of the scene and the entirety of the film�Cdemonstrating a break in the psyche of Alexandra that signifies the interruption of her escape. This effect continues into a shot of Alexandra as she receives sporadic claps from the audience. Her figure, as well as the glimpse of the stage curtains that we get, are condemned to the very right of the frame as the almost empty bar swallows and overwhelms the rest of the frame.

Visual-textual Exercise

I continued to explore queer futurity in the ��Toyland�� scene through the task of juxtaposing a selected text within a 3-minute continuous clip from my chosen film. The key feature of this exercise, which resulted from the imposed time constraint, was that I could include more than just the ��Toyland�� performance (the full performance of ��Toyland�� sits at about 2 minutes and 30 seconds). This led me to also include the scene with Razmik at home in his bathroom which I argue is presented as a foil to Alexandra at the bar on stage. Throughout the clip, the excerpt from Mu?oz reinterprets and reaffirms the narratives of Razmik, Alexandra, and Sin-Dee relevant to the interiors that they inhabit:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality [��] The future is queerness��s domain. (Razmik) Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. (Sin-Dee) We must strive, in the face of the here and now��s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. (Alexandra) [8]

Queerness, according to Mu?oz, is not so much defined by an identity as it is a mode of seeing, experiencing, and navigating the world outside the current status quo. In both scenes (Razmik in the bathroom and ��Toyland��), the characters are confronted by the contradiction of the present and the future as they struggle or succeed in reaching that future that they envision. Starting with the first scene, Razmik exemplifies a character teetering the line that crosses into the future but never fully reaches it. The cab driver is shown to live in a humble residence: the ceiling is quite low, the kitchen is placed directly in front of the entrance, and the couches and coffee table in the living room doubly serve as dining room furnishings. A brief glimpse towards the hallway leading into the child��s bedroom, primary bedroom, and bathroom is also shown.

Figure 5. ��Razmik framed within his home in LA,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Although the position of the bathroom relative to the other living spaces is not made entirely clear, audio cues suggest that it is not too far from the living room. Still, the space of the bathroom provides Razmik with privacy that is otherwise not afforded in the rest of his family��s residence. The bathroom, like the rest of the house, is a small, confined space, made evident by the consistent proximity of the subject to the camera throughout the scene. While mirrors can and are often used in cinema to extend space, here the mirror is used to reflect reality back at the subject that stands in front of it, denying other potential possibilities. In the case of Razmik, his reflection in the mirror is a reinforcement of his internal conflict with his own life, including his vices, relationships, employment, etc. When Razmik enters the bathroom to refresh himself, the mirror takes up a considerable portion of the frame right up until he dries his face using a towel, and then returns as he pulls and opens a folded invitation to Alexandra��s performance from his back pocket, taking up a majority of the frame. Razmik, as a closeted character, is caught in a struggle between reality and that ��warm illumination of a horizon��. Contrastingly, the following ��Toyland�� scene highlights how Alexandra and Sin-Dee utilize (queer) performance to project themselves into new self-imaginings beyond their current reality. While Razmik's desires are whispered quietly in the privacy of the bathroom, Alexandra loudly declares a vision of herself to the public audience. ��Look at me! I am here, and don��t I look fabulous,�� she might say.

Throughout this exercise, text is used to emphasize actions or emotions in the given mise en sc��ne. For example, the text, ��Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer�� appears in the frame just as Razmik looks into the mirror after rinsing his face and disappears after he dries his face in his towel and looks back into the mirror as if he could briefly imagine himself in another existence, another house, another family, another place. Other techniques are also used to bring more emphasis to specific phrases. The clip opens and closes with sound only, bringing attention to the text more directly without completely removing it from the context of the film. Additionally, text only appears over the shots with Sin-Dee during the ��Toyland scene��, connecting the textual narrative to her character while also framing Alexandra��s performance indirectly.

Figure 6. ��Stills from ��Tangerine�� superimposed with lines from ��Cruising Utopia��,�� John Vaccaro, Staging Utopia, 2024.

One exception is made towards the end of the song. The words ��is a prison house�� appear in a shot of Alexandra and continue onto the following shot of Sin-Dee, emphasizing that both characters are trapped by their circumstance and relate to each other in that way.

Conclusion

To be queer is to reject the here and now and insist on the potentiality, or possibility, of another world. It is through this insistence that Sin-Dee and Alexandra are able to cope with their present reality, as demonstrated in the first half of the film as they wander, sometimes with agency, often aimlessly, along the unwelcoming streetscapes in Hollywood. The ��Toyland�� scene, borrowing from the same Hollywood aesthetic explored in other contemporary films like A Star Is Born and Blue Velvet simultaneously demonstrates the potential of Alexandra��s performance in realizing her own self-image as a grande chanteuse as well as the limits of the exercise. In a world that constantly reinforces itself, projects onto you and your body tells you what you can and cannot be and where you can and cannot exist, Sin-Dee still finds Alexandra despite being in the middle of a chaotic adventure at Mary��s on Santa Monica to share a moment of mutual catharsis. The stage, lighting, framing, and scale all work to keep Alexandra within a liminality wedged between the present and the future.

Tangerine makes the argument that the existence of places like Hamburger Mary��s can foster and provide space for queer and trans people to present themselves as who they want to be, not necessarily as the people they might be right now. The queer nightlife scene is also revealed to be a crucial element in the lives of both characters. The performance is perhaps the only piece of the film that we as viewers could expect to happen from the first few moments in the film; Alexandra does not miss a chance to remind others in the community of her one-woman show as she spontaneously encounters them throughout Hollywood. Of all the locations shown in the film, the bar might be the most important in that it shows us a glimpse into what life could look like for these characters�Cthe moment when the then and there meets the here and now.

[1] Mya Taylor reveals in an interview with BUILD in 2015 that she joined the cast of Tangerine on two conditions: that it be ��real and raw,�� and funny.

[2] Film at Lincoln Center, ��Tangerine Q&A | Sean Baker,�� YouTube Video, 23:26, November 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36QG5M5UOkg&ab_channel=FilmatLincolnCen��.

[3] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 2006), 224, 231-232.

[4] Davis, 226.

[5] Jos�� Estaban Mu?oz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 99.

[6] ��Hamburger Mary��s �C West Hollywood,�� https://www.hamburgermarys.com/weho/.

[7] DP/30: The Oral History of Hollywood, ��DP/30: Tangerine, Sean Baker, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor,�� YouTube Video, 33:49, July 7, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl35nOvAmjw&t=1169s.

[8] Jos�� Estaban Mu?oz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 24.

Surviving Los Angeles by Exercising Privacy

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:16:19 +0000

Surviving Los Angeles by Exercising Privacy alexandre.nero�� Mon, 06/03/2024 - 11:16

In queer film and television, the urban context often serves as a backdrop for portraying LGBTQ+ culture. In Sean Baker��s 2015 film ��Tangerine��, set in the unofficial red-light district of Los Angeles, the urban setting plays a crucial role in depicting marginalized queer communities. The film��s raw aesthetic lays bare LA��s hostile environment and shows the challenges of inhabiting a city that is actively rejecting its vulnerable populations.

The film follows a day in the lives of Sin-Dee and Alexandra, two trans women of colour, as they traverse the streets of Los Angeles on Christmas Eve seeking revenge after Sin-Dee discovers her pimp boyfriend��s infidelity. The plot is driven forward by the protagonists�� constant movement from one location to another and their interactions with acquaintances and strangers they meet along the way. Catapulted in a single day in their life, the viewer is tasked with keeping up with their fast-paced movements across the city while also being afforded glimpses into the characters�� intimacy.

Mike Davis�� depiction of Los Angeles in the chapter ��Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space�� helps contextualize the environment portrayed in Tangerine. He emphasizes that the city��s relentless efforts to secure itself led to the dismantling of accessible public space. He describes how the city��s use of hostile tactics, like reduced access to water, barrel-shaped bus benches, overhead sprinklers, and locked trash bins has spatially confined marginalized groups in increasingly smaller areas.[1] Since the article��s publication in the 1990s, LA��s rise in a controlled privatized environment has only worsened the life conditions of marginalized populations as shown in Tangerine. The film illustrates that there are only a few places that the protagonists are allowed to enjoy apart from the streets.

Ted Killian��s Article, ��Public and Private, Power and Space�� helps analyze how the film��s protagonists make use of public space. He moves beyond definitions of public space and focuses on the power relationships within these spaces. For Killian, publicity and privacy are not inherent characteristics of space but rather expressions of coexisting power dynamics. For instance, publicity is the power of access and privacy is the power of exclusion.[2] Tangerine��s marginalized characters have little to no power of exclusion and no power of access. Faced with this situation, how do they manage to enjoy public space?

Los Angeles�� sprawled and unplanned nature directly affects Sin-Dee and Alexandra. Busy with ever-continuing car traffic, the film��s main setting on Santa Monica Boulevard echoes the character��s chaotic lives and proves to be hostile. Los Angeles�� destruction of accessible public space in favor of secured privatized spaces directly impacts Tangerine��s marginalized characters.[3] With limited access to spaces that allow them to exist in a city that rejects them, they must find strategies to survive such as caring for one another, finding privacy, and sustaining familiarity with their environment. To expose how those themes come through in the film, this essay studies how the film techniques achieve authenticity, examines selected scenes formally, and explores how the juxtaposition of different scenes can create new meaning. Finally, the essay concludes by answering how the images and sounds from ��Tangerine�� tell something about Los Angeles and how incorporating aesthetic strategies common to film shapes architectural urban studies.

Realism and Authenticity

Sean Baker employs several strategies to convey realism such as on-site shooting. ��Tangerine�� is geographically accurate adding authenticity in portraying the reality of people living in this neighborhood. In a sprawled city dominated by cars, the protagonists�� travels between spread-out locations happen mainly on foot, on the bus, and on the metro. The distances they cover walking, as well as the metro, and bus rides, give the viewer awareness of the city and show what it means to physically move between its locations. For instance, Sin-Dee travels around 12.5 km on foot and 15.8 km in transit over the movie��s course. Mapping their movements shows how they repeatedly revisit locations and provides insight into the familiarity they have with their environment. When they visit locations, the viewer is made aware of their familiarity with the area with the many encounters they make. Alexandra distributes her flyers for her performance to every acquaintance that crosses her path. As the film progresses, they revisit locations that had been previously shown making the viewer increasingly familiar with the city��s environment as well.

Figure 1. "Sin-Dee��s Locations in Order of Appearance," Mapped by Alexandre N��ron.

A) Donut Time

B) Launderland

C) El Gran Burrito

D) Vermont/Santa Monica Metro [Metro transit]

E) Hollywood Blv.

F) Grand Motel

C) El Gran Burrito [Bus Transit]

H) Mary��s Hamburger [Bus Transit]

A) Donut Time

B) Launderland

Baker��s unusual use of an iPhone 5s camera for shooting and the use of non-professional actors adds to the film��s realism. ��Shooting on the iPhone 5s enables a highly flexible camera, which relates intimately to the bodies consistently in motion. Such cinematic mobility affords the viewers immediacy and intimacy about the characters�� interaction, as they move in and out of strip malls, donut shops, and run-down motels.��[4] The filming setup, paired with on-site shooting allowed non-actors to feel more comfortable on camera as phone cameras are approachable. The small camera size also allows closeness with the actors and brings the viewer in proximity to the characters. ��The proximity to the characters conveys their comfort with their own bodies, which differentiates this film from conventional depictions of transgender characters who are shot from a distance to create their exotic otherness.��[5] The smaller filming setup also permitted filming in tight spaces such as Donut Time and Mary��s Hamburger��s bathroom which brings the viewer into the characters�� privacy.

Scenes Formal Analysis

Intrusion �C Sin-Dee Smoke Break at the Metro Station (15:02 �C 17:07)

Figure 2. "Sin-Dee Smoke Break at the Metro Station," Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

The bus bench scene signifies a pivotal moment in the narrative. Alexandra and Sin-Dee have parted ways, leaving Sin-Dee by herself to deal with the emotions stemming from her boyfriend��s infidelity. She finds herself in a very public space during this highly emotional moment. The viewer witnesses her enjoying her privacy until a bus arrives, invading her space. Once the bus departs, she is finally left alone to process her emotions and choose how to react.

In the first cut of the scene, we follow her walking, tracking her in a full shot. Baker utilizes a bicycle and an iPhone camera with a stabilizer to track her movement. The perceptible shakiness of the camera, despite the stabilizer, contributes to the dynamism and determination of her walk. [6] Upon reaching the street corner, the cut changes to a low wide-angle shot, placing her small in the center of the frame. The wide-angle evokes a surveillance camera and echoes Los Angeles�� hostile surveillance mentioned by Davis. Sin-Dee attempts to capture the attention of passersby who actively ignore her while she asks strangers if they have ��fire�� to light her cigarette. She must yell at a man to force him to pay attention to her. When the cigarette is lit, the scene cuts to a close-up shot of her face against the sunlight, with the metro station in the background. Although the film is set in winter, the dry heat of LA is perceptible through the sunlight. The lack of shade and vegetation makes the street corner particularly uncomfortable, but it doesn��t deter her from sitting at the bus stop, as her lack of access to private spaces is a usual constant in her life.

The cut changes to her sitting on the bus bench in a still high-angle medium shot. Her face is at the bottom of the frame, where her gaze is also turned. By evading the frame, this suggests she is enjoying privacy by closing herself off from the surroundings and letting down her guard. This view alternates with another low-angle shot from behind the bus bench that conceals her and further emphasizes her privacy.

A bus enters the frame and invades her space. The gazes of people coming off the bus infringe on her privacy. The bus��s advertisement with a model��s piercing eyes peeking above the bus bench further expresses the intrusion into her privacy. From the front-facing shot, a man enters the frame and invades Sin-Dee��s space, signified by her annoyed reaction. She turns her gaze to the other side of the frame to maintain the little privacy that remains, looking away from strangers gazing at her. When the bus leaves, she regains privacy, although she is more exposed to the street and its traffic. The traffic��s continuous flow is less intrusive than the pedestrians who came and gazed at her. Left to herself, she can process her emotions and choose how to react to her boyfriend's cheating. The classical music that played throughout the scene, marking the moment��s stillness, transitions to rhythmic electronic music when she makes up her mind at the end of the scene.

Care and Intimacy �C Getting Ready in the Club Bathroom (46:39 �C 48:29)

Figure 3. "Getting Ready in the Club Bathrooms," Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

The club bathroom scene is significant in the film as the space that provides the most privacy and intimacy throughout the plot. When in this space, Sin-Dee, Alexandra, and Dinah let their guards down and are shown to be more vulnerable. Their attitude contrasts with their outside selves when in the streets they must remain tough to survive. The bathroom is also a space of care, where acts of kindness are enacted between them. Alexandra and Sin-Dee��s relationship is akin to sisters as they fight, teach, forgive, support, and let down one another.

The scene starts with a medium shot of Alexandra preparing herself in front of the mirror with Sin-Dee watching her. The camera is at its most zoomed-out for this scene and emphasizes the space��s tightness. The camera is handheld and constantly reframes as it moves closer, positioning itself between Sin-Dee and Alexandra. This frame shows a full view of Alexandra��s right profile while her left profile is displayed in the mirror��s reflection. Intruding in their conversation, the camera pans to the other corner of the room where Dinah observes them while sitting on the toilet. The lighting color changes in intensity on the two sides of the room and hints at their emotional distance. The camera cuts for the first time to show a full view of the bathroom, with Dinah in one corner and Alexandra and Sin-Dee in the other. From this point, the camera cuts in between close shots of both sides of the bathroom. In a brief instant, Sin-Dee enacts care towards Alexandra by doing her make-up until Dinah entices her to consume drugs. Energetic music fills the scene as Alexandra loses Sin-Dee��s attention. She is then left to herself and shown alone with her reflection. The mirror extends the bathroom��s space into another world where Alexandra exerts control over her image.

In a subsequent moment in the bathroom where only Dinah and Sin-Dee smoke together, complicity and care emerge between them. The tight and intimate space combined with the close-ups of their faces and gaze exchanges illustrates their growing closeness. Throughout the scene, a dim red light emanates from above the mirror and calms down the characters' energetic natures. Even the rotating disco lights on the ceiling have a calming, hypnotic effect rather than an energetic effect. The lighting choice contributes to creating another world away from the hostile streets outside.

Family and Domesticity �C Forgiveness in the Laundromat (1:23:41 - 1:25:38)

Figure 4. "Laundromat scene," Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

The film��s closing scene is significant in showing the characters' access to domesticity and the importance of their relationship for support. After the Donut Time escalation where Sin-Dee learns of Alexandra��s betrayal, Razmik and Dinah return ��home��. Meanwhile, Sin-Dee flees Alexandra, who keeps following her to patch up their relationship. When Sin-Dee is assaulted by people in their car, Alexandra takes her to the laundromat to clean her up. This moment is pivotal in the film as it shows the strength of their bond.

Razmik and Dinah are shown in alternating frames during their return home. Razmik has access to domesticity, yet he is isolated in his own family. A still wide-angle shot of him alone in his living room illustrates his isolation. His living room appears uncomfortable with its low ceilings and oddly arranged furniture. Even though he has access to a home, he and his family are trapped because of their marginality. Meanwhile, Dinah returns to the motel/brothel where Sin-Dee took her from. She is refused access as she was replaced by another girl. She is left to spend the night outside in the cold with little clothing. A full still shot of her waiting in front of the motel also shows her isolation and how she is trapped by her marginalized situation.

After being assaulted, Alexandra takes Sin-Dee by the hand and leads her to the laundromat. Although they have not yet reconciled, Alexandra takes care of Sin-Dee. A handheld tracking shot follows them walking along the window in front of a strip mall. Their assured walk indicates to the viewer that they know where to access a space to clean Sin-Dee. When they enter the laundromat, a pan accompanies their movement from an all-glass exposed entrance to the back of the laundromat, where they find a nook with a sink. A still medium shot of them inside the nook shows the tightness of the space and illustrates its privacy from the street. In this vulnerable moment, Sin-Dee must undress and take off her wig soaked with urine. Alexandra washes off her body and supports her when she must take off her wig. Being forced to dress down is especially difficult for Sin-Dee as this strip is part of her identity and prevents her from ��passing�� as a woman.

The scene cuts to a low-angle still medium shot of them both sitting with their backs turned against the laundromat��s glazing. This long shot has them alternating gazes toward each other as the first step in their reconciliation. As they continue to flee each other��s eye contact, Alexandra takes off her wig as a peace offering and gives it to Sin-Dee. The camera cuts to a still shot of the moment, seen from outside looking into the laundromat. Alternating exterior shots show them exposed by the well-lit space. Although they can be seen from the street, the moment they share is enjoyed in privacy. The scene cuts back to the interior still shot of Alexandra helping Sin-Dee to put the wig on. At this moment, they exchange tender eye contact. The scene ends with Sin-Dee reaching out her hand to Alexandra, which signifies her forgiveness. The screen turns to black with the laundry machine sounds continuing throughout the credits. Although they don��t return to a domestic space, Sin-Dee and Alexandra return to each other. Their bond of support and care for one another allows them to overcome the harsh conditions of their lives.

Juxtaposition of different scenes

In the film��s plot, the protagonists keep returning to the same locations and establish familiarity. I had an interest in juxtaposing different scenes that explore those familiar locations during daytime and nighttime to observe how they change. I was also interested in comparing how the exterior and interior of those spaces changed in perception in response to light to understand how it impacted the character��s privacy.

Figure 5. "Donut Time Storefront Location Night/Day," Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Figure 6. "Donut Time Interior Location Night/Day," Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Donut Time is a heavily present location where a lot of screentime happens. Like most of the spaces shown in the film, such as strip malls, storefront facades are mostly glazed from 24 to 30 inches from the ground up to the ceiling. The highly glazed facades paired with strong fluorescent lighting drastically change perception from day to night. From the exterior, the inside appears completely exposed at night. On the other hand, in the interior, it is the street��s activity that is most visible during the daytime. In the opening scene, people and cars passing in the street are much more visible. The context plays different roles, appearing more or less in the scenes depending on the time of day. This reverse relationship makes the interior feel more private at night for people inside although it is more exposed.

Figure 7. "Donut Time Escalation," Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Figure 8. "Donut Time Exterior High-Angle Shots,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Sean Baker used two cameras while filming to alter shots between different angles. In exposed locations like Donut Time and Launderland��s final scene, exterior high-angle views briefly interrupt interior shots. Similar to Sin-Dee��s bus bench scene, where strangers�� gaze intrudes on her privacy, these exterior shots indicate the passerby��s perspective looking into the interior action.

Figure 9. "Strip Mall Day Approach,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Figure 10. "Strip Mall Night Approach,�� Sean Baker, Tangerine, 2015.

Varying levels of exposure serve the characters as well. When looking for Sin-Dee, Razmik easily sees through a fast-food glazing to find an acquaintance to help find Sin-Dee. When put in comparison to Sin-Dee looking for Chester, Launderland appears much more private in the daytime. In their approach, Sin-Dee needs to come much closer to see inside than Razmik in his car at night.

Conclusion

Sean Baker��s film ��Tangerine�� showcases Los Angeles�� multifaceted layers. Techniques used to make the film, such as on-site filming, the use of an iPhone camera, and non-professional actors immerse the viewer in the raw unfiltered reality of LA��s streets. Plunged into the backdrop of a chaotic and hostile city, much like the protagonists, we find ourselves becoming familiar and at ease in spaces originally designed to be anything but comfortable.

In ��Tangerine��, the city can be felt through its inhabitants, backdrops, noises, and spaces visited by the characters. Since we revisit these spaces at different times, it allows us to witness how they change. By juxtaposing images and sounds from day and night, we notice the subtle shifts in atmosphere. Suddenly, the city appears more alive as it is constantly shifting in time. The film��s aesthetic strategies such as natural lighting, sound, and movement convey atmosphere beyond visuals. Incorporating these strategies could shape architectural urban studies to fully account for the dimension of time.

Sin-Dee and Alexandra not only navigate LA��s streets but also leave their mark on the city. Their vibrant personalities, struggles, and resilience seep through the film��s aesthetics and the spaces they move through such as strip malls, donut shops, and run-down motels. Their mutual support and care for one another allow them to survive in this harsh city. The city shapes the protagonists, but they, in turn, shape the city. In the end, Tangerine challenges the viewer to see Los Angeles as a living city shaped by the rhythms of time and the subjectivities of its inhabitants.

[1] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 2006), 233.

[2] Ted Kilian, Public and Private, Power and Space (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 125.

[3] Davis, 226.

[4] Barbara Caroline Mennel, Cities and Cinema (Milton: Routledge, 2019), 184.

[5] Mennel, 185.

[6] Mekado Murphy, ��Sean Baker Talks ��Tangerine,�� and Making a Movie with an iPhone,�� New York Times, July 7, 2015.