So, yes, I only told you that story about Ray's books to get to how I rented a double feature later that same week as watching the Renoir film, in my own bit of flânerie . . . .
After I'd left the Music Box screening of Rules of the Game, I thought of how La Chesnaye's pleasure might be like the enjoyment I imagined those kids experienced watching Yellow Submarine. Along with its theatrical rerelease, Yellow Submarine was also newly out on DVD at that time, so I picked it up on my next visit to the video store. At the same time, I happened to notice The Matrix was also available (which I hadn't seen in the theater), so I rented that as well . . . little guessing that it was the same movie.
After all, the advertising tag lines listed in the Internet Movie Database for Yellow Submarine would seem to apply just as easily to The Matrix4:
The forces of good! The forces of evil!
It's all in the mind y'know.
Nothing is Real.
In both films, the world has been put to sleep by implacable dark forces, and a man sets out in a ship to find the one(s) who can reawaken us to reality (even though he calls it a hovercraft, certainly Morpheus' ship more closely resembles a submarine). Morpheus and Old Fred, captain of the Yellow Submarine, may differ sartorially, but they serve similar functions in their stories. Likewise, there's a strange parallel in the initial situations of Ringo (first seen walking down gray streets complaining "Nothing ever happens to me") and Neo (stuck in his life in the cubicles, a Dilbert yet to be unbound).
***
But am I really expecting you to see these as the same movie? Of course not--the differences are too obvious. But the conjunction of these movies, through the chance fact I saw them back to back, along with some surface similarities, suggested to me this might provide a lab in which to test Ray's strategy of film viewing.
Perhaps to narrow the focus, might we just return to that notion of photogénie and see how well that applies? Might a particular moment out of each film crystallize the comparison? Where does each film offer an "excess of meaning" in its images? Another technique Ray considers is the "irrational enlargement" of an individual scene, mining it beyond its obvious function in the film. Might two such scenes that exhibit some degree of photogénie be chosen from these movies to get at their similarities and differences?
A first glance, these films wouldn't seem subject to the notion of photogénie. Wouldn't such a concept be limited to movies that employ more "natural" filming techniques, and leave out animated films and special effects? Animation and digital computer graphic images eliminate (or try to) the accidental or random quality that the Surrealists enjoyed in the filmed image. Certainly the spontaneous aspect of photogénie seems explicitly rejected in The Matrix. In one scene, an attractive extra, a woman on the street dressed in red, "just happens" to catch Neo's eye, the way some bit of beauty in a film might catch ours. But Morpheus shows him that she's actually an assassin in disguise. This accidental beauty is actually an object lesson, namely that letting one's attention wander to follow the pleasure of photogénie is potentially fatal.
Yet might these films still demonstrate anything like the "limonaire moment," a reveling in pleasure? If not a specific image, at least a place with an "excess of meaning"? I might be stretching the concept of photogénie, but I don't think Ray would object. Certainly the popularity of these films attests to their potentials for pleasure--why not search for a crystallized moment of that?
Finding a single image in Yellow Submarine is difficult, since the film moves along apparently spurred on by continuous invention, moreso than logic. Songs and sequences appear without motivation; for example, the scene for "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" just "happens," tied to nothing else in the story. Each scene attempts some new animation tricks, so no one moment jumps out. It seems hard to assign that notion of photogénie to any one image, since they are repeated and reworked, and even tried in multiple color schemes. There's an ongoing sense of randomness, of just testing to see what happens. As a result, any image could be chosen just for its whimsical nature.
So I decided to view the film again, but instead I was looking at where the animation strategy is at its simplest. The sequence that stood out for me when I first saw the film as a kid was the Sea of Holes. There, all of the elaborate animation techniques and pop cultural visuals are set aside in favor of what can be done with basic black and white. A black oval against a two dimensional white background gives the impression of a hole, but its impossible to say if it's facing up or down. And so, Yellow Submarine has it both ways--as well as refusing to settle whether the black holes are figure or ground (sometimes the characters hop on them like they're solid, like stepping stones in a stream, but at other times the Beatles fall through them).
But then, even that ambiguity of perspective is jettisoned. Instead, we're reminded that we aren't looking at a hole at all, but an animator's spot of ink. Ringo picks one up, somehow shrinks it and puts it in his pants, proudly announcing "I've got a hole in me pocket." Later, that hole will be used to free Sgt. Pepper's Band and save the day.
Because of the difference in the way they function in their storylines, Ringo's hole and the "limonaire moment" seem very different. While Dalio's look of rapture offers a point of calm in an otherwise complicated tale, Ringo's line, although apparently just a toss-off, ends up being the "key" to the story line. In that way, Ringo's hole might seem to be a much more privileged moment, and yet it really isn't. Yellow Submarine isn't about stories and their resolutions, but with playing with the unexpected. The film's delight in its own methods is really its version of photogénie.
Next page: "Whoa"
