What is a great movie? Part Two: lonelygirl15 and You.

(This is Part 2 of a series of n, in which n is an undefined value related to our unpredictable willingness to let it go. Part One here.)

In 1952 a young man named Guy-Ernest Debord created a true cinematic work of art. The following clip constitutes the first four minutes of the film. If you feel able to, we suggest watching it in its entirety. If you are not a fluent speaker of French (we are not -- our only French staffer is currently on vacation), an English transcription of the spoken dialogue can be found here, but the most important quality of the clip is visual.



Assuming you completed your viewing, you will notice that the white screen, at the end, turned black for several seconds. In its entirety the film, entitled Howls in Favor of de Sade, is 64 minutes long -- it consists of a series of white screens, during which voices speak lines of text, alternating with periods of blackness, during which there is silence. The film ends without warning after the last twenty minutes of black screen.

Any irritation you may feel at having four minutes of your time wasted is perfectly justified, and accurately reflects Mr. Debord's intention. More than likely you stopped the clip fairly early on, perhaps read the text instead, or simply gave up altogether. When the complete film was first shown at festivals at the time of its making, billed as "outrageous," "shocking," and "scandalous," baffled audiences often erupted in fury and occasionally vandalized the theater at having been "tricked." To quote art historian Guy Atkins, as quoted in turn in Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces:

"When the lights came up there was an immediate babble of protest. People stood around and made angry speeches... [the] protests were so odd that it was as if Guy Debord himself was present, in his role of Mephistopheles, hypnotizing these ordinary English people into making fools of themselves... those who had just seen the film came out of the auditorium and tried to persuade their friends on the stairs to go home, instead of wasting their time and money. But the atmosphere was so charged with excitement that this well-intentioned advice had the opposite effect. The newcomers were all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank! Afterwards one realized that Debord's use of silence and emptiness had played upon the nerves of the spectators, finally causing them to let out 'howls in favor of de Sade.'"

The film is a work of art, then, precisely because Debord was not trying to make a great film. He was trying to create a situation: a stirring of savage emotions. This childish prank was ridiculously effective.

Before the release of the immensely successful Blair Witch Project, the filmmakers went to great lengths to cultivate the movie's mystique -- with its convincingly "documentary" look and its improvised, naturalistic performances, the early promotions for the film deliberately obfuscated the issue of the film's "reality." Despite leaks, enough confusion persisted in the public's mind that many of the excited teenagers who crowded into the theaters were under the impression that they had come to see a true, live ghost story captured on film.

Viewed as reality, the movie presents a terrifying situation: three ordinary film students lost in a forest and stalked by unseen forces of murderous evil. One can empathize utterly with their fear, and even the stupidity of their actions. Who among us could think clearly in such a situation? Who among us would not, like Heather, kneeling before her camera in the darkness, be reduced to hysteria and tears?

It was when it was viewed as a movie, structured and created, that disappointment began to set in: the characters, once empathetic, became "annoying" and "amateurish," the camera-work "irritating," the idea "dumb." Note a sample user comment from the IMDB:

"I have been going to the movies for over 35 years....my compliments to the producers of this film....I never thought anyone could actually steal my money....you did!!!! Who was paid to say it was scary?? Who was paid to put this in the movie houses?? When this thing was over..the people around me were mad....and yelling for their money back!!!!!!!Terrible is too nice a word for this piece of nothing!!!!!!"

A familiar complaint.

The film still has its admirers, and is in fact a reasonably well-done example of the genre. But the disappointment engendered by its own engineered expectations created, if not riots, a mini-situation. A similar fuss came up recently on Youtube, in which the videos of a user identifying herself as "lonelygirl15" began attracting attention -- a supposedly authentic vlog created by a teenage girl, containing hints of a cultlike conspiracy surrounding her. When the girl was revealed to be an actress, "lonelygirl15" turned out to be a registered trademark, and the whole to be a scripted project, the "tricked" users who had followed the log (many of whom, judging by the posted comments, seem to have been lecherous adults) unleashed a hail of abusive messages, parody response videos, and outraged protests about "cheaters on Youtube." The "hoax" (if you assume that anything on the site should be believed to be real) made the national press. Needless to say, the videos are still some of the most viewed on the site, despite the continuing torrents of obscene invective.

Are these works of art? The corporate implications of the latter two examples blunt the possibilities: it's all business. Debord's motives were perhaps purer, and something about the sadistic minimalism of Howls still renders it at least quite useful for sparking arguments. But is a truly great film something more than a film? Is it something that, at least briefly, genuinely disorients our senses, and shocks us into becoming, ourselves, the "art?"







"I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it."
--David Lynch

"The unsuspecting folk with whom Borat interacts never see it coming as he lures them into exposing their darkest sides. A gun shop owner responds to Borat's inquiry about the best weapon to hunt a Jew without hesitation: '9 mm.'"
--Scott Renshaw, Charleston City Paper, 11/1/06

"The facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. Let me begin by playing a tape for you."
--Colin Powell, to the UN, 2/15/03