Home Movies, the American Dream

My favorite film shown in this week's screening was The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra! I was greatly impressed with the sophisticated design of 9413 on such a low budget - its mere $97 purse boasted in the title sequences, framing the film to audiences as an anti-industrial, independent triumph of low-budget avant-garde cinema. From the beginning, it was kept in mind that 9413 was, for all intents and purposes, a home movie. (I read ([on Wikipedia] that it was actually all shot in an apartment that they had painted black and used a single light bulb to illuminate the set). The miniature cityscapes shot in double-vision superimposition, the strobe lighting, the expressionist tendrils and backgrounds - minimal, but well-crafted, spectacular weight and visual appeal never out of mind. I especially loved the finale: the elysian ascent of 9413, on an angelic track, passing by increasingly abstract backgrounds. The acting too was comical and scathing - the gibberish talking of the Star Actor, the wagging finger of The Hollywood Hand, the recurrent stair clime to **Dreams** - even now, almost 100 years later, I found the reductio ad absurdum telling of Hollywood industrial practices - the de-individualization of the Hollywood-hopeful, the empty promise of Hollywood dreams, the authoritarian Hollywood industrial command, the flatness behind the cult of the movie star - still relevant and an accurate portrayal often lemented regarding the Hollywood industry.

I laughed a lot during 9413. I felt sorry for the young aspiring actor being repetitively trodden-upon by the system. I also mourned the loss of the actor as he was lost behind masked guises, and his rise to stardom demise of his individuality. But it was funny, especially his vapid mask. It's so funny.  






In relation to the Horak essay, I think that 9413 embodies the amateur do-it-yourself spirit of the American Avant-Garde. With the advent of cheaper film and cameras that allowed for handheld and on-location shooting, such as the 16mm Cine-Kodak, aspiring artists were able to make moving pictures themselves without having to rely on larger production bodies. 9413 reflects this production mode two-fold through its famously thin budget and its overt criticism of capitalist industrial film practices. Horak points to Dr. Caligari as an often-cited inspirational catalyst for American Avant-Garde. This can be seen plainly in 9413's allusion to expressionist mise en scène. What I couldn't discern during screening was whether this style was a continuance of the expressionist style, (9413 airing only 9 years after Caligari), or a form of appropriation or co-option.  I found Horak helpful in answering this question, as he describes an almost postmodern air about the American Avant-Garde movement - a somewhat cannibalistic response to the various artistic movement in Europe. 9413 appropriates the expressionist vibes of Caligari, I'll argue, in order to posit an argument relating to the delusion of the Hollywood/American dream. As we have discussed earlier, the demented mise en scène of Caligari was to relate subjectivity, the world as perceived by a madman. Hollywood, too, is viewed mystically, feverishly, optimistically, incorrectly. Thus, 9413 is an intertextual satire combining homage to European stylistic modes to criticize an American industrial mode, positing it's own production mode, the amateur force of the American Avant-Garde, as autonomously promising. 

When reading Rees, I found a certain parallelism between 9413 and the futurist movement. Rees credits the Futurists as the first cohort to seek to make films independently themselves, which is later scene in American AG production ideology. Rees also describes the Futurists' desire to culminate the arts under cinema. 9413 indeed combines miniature sculpture, absurd performance, cultural criticism, formal film technique, found footage - to do what no other artistic medium can.