Talking about film ontology is a lot sillier than it sounds. Ontology is the "philosophy of being" and I'm using the term anytime film refers to itself. For example, I was lucky enough to see "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971) in a movie theatre. It's a road movie about a cross-country race between two cars and their drivers (it's better than it sounds). After 1-3/4 hours or so, one of the cars gets on the road again after being repaired and then something happens: the film appears to get stuck in the projector, we see the sprocket holes, the film jams, then burns, then the screen goes black. After 12 long seconds, people started yelling: "Hey", "Fix it!" etc. About 20 seconds of silence later, the credits roll. The whole thing was fake, and we - the whole audience as far as I could tell - was definitely fooled. (And the whole stunt did have an existential point; what's been called in another context "instant Ingmar.")
A more recent example - I think you're ahead of me here - is that "inserting the porno frame" business in "Fight Club." But the whole lesson that Brad Pitt delivers in the middle of the movie was just that, a lesson. The true ontological moment of "Fight Club" was 1/24 of a second long: it's the porno frame that's inserted just before the film ends.
Now I had wanted to expand this to include the times when a film forces you to ask "What am I watching here?" Which is the effect "The Blair Witch Project" was going for. I suppose there were some people when it was first released who were drawn into that whole internet-tie-in-thing, but after that, we all just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
But reality TV has drained all the fun out of this impulse. When you're watching TV, and you ask "What am I watching here?" nine times out of ten you're simply watching something that's been staged. It's fake in some way so we just stop caring.
Brakhage - especially in his late films - may have been 100% ontological. I'm not sure. But there are very few ontological moments in commercial cinema, so if anyone can think of one, please let me know.
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that movie ending sounds like a surefire way to piss people off.
ReplyDeleteif youre just talking self-reflexivity, i can think of a couple pretty good examples -- adaptation becomes a self-parody in the third act, and does a pretty good job of making fun of hollywood in the process. along the same lines as blair witch, cloverwood claims itself to be a camcorder recording piece of evidence. better than that, i think, is the ring (although maybe not a better movie) -- the whole premise is if you watch a cursed tape, you die in 7 days or something like that, and of course by the end of the movie you realize that the movie youre watching is that cursed tape, and the filmmakers have only made it to spare themselves (showing the movie to someone else prevents your death). pretty good marketing paradigm - show our movie to someone else or die.