Side Effects: Your reaction to the photos may vary

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Side Effects

Spoilers ahead: Unless you’ve seen Side Effects you should probably stop reading. It’s a movie that deploys its share of plot twists.

There’s a moment in Side Effects (2013) that is reminiscent of Gene Hackman’s descent into paranoia in The Conversation. Jude Law’s pyschiatrist character, Jonathan Banks, suspects that the patient he has been treating, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is faking her depression. Jonathan thinks that Emily has murdered her husband under the guise of the somnambulatory side effects of her medication. Because Jonathan is caught up in the negative publicity of the new medication his reputation starts to suffer. While he investigates, his life unravels. His medical practice cuts him loose and he spends long hours at home poring over medical journals and newspaper reports. Near this Conversation-esque juncture his wife Diedre walks in and confronts him with some incriminating photographs of an affair with Emily.

She shows him the packet of photos: there are some of Jonathan talking with Emily in some swanky hotel lobby. She is holding a pink-striped bag. A subsequent photo shows Emily posing on a bed in lingerie, looking at the camera, the same bag on the edge of the bed providing the clear implication that she is wearing the recent purchase. This is enough for Diedre, who is already on edge over his obsession with Emily. After Diedre leaves, Jonathan is not quite as alone as Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul, reduced to pulling apart his apartment in search of the bugs he knows are there. Nevertheless, it’s a low point that he must struggle through.

Side Effects is a film that toys with the idea of epistemology at various levels. How do we the audience know what is going on (the film leads us first one way then the other)? How does Jonathan know—aren’t his investigations getting increasingly hysterical and desperate? How do drug companies know what works (this critical look at big pharma emerges as Jonathan gets recruited into a running a drug trial that he puts Emily into and as the manipulation of the company’s stocks comes into play as well)? And back to these photographs: how does Diedre know that he’s having an affair? Well, they show them together and then Emily in her sexy undies. But Diedre doesn’t evaluate the evidence very carefully. For a start, the pictures have two completely different points of view. The first one is surreptitious: two people talking some distance away, apparently unaware of the third party taking the picture. The second photograph is framed much more closely with Emily posing directly for the camera. Jonathan might be the implied photographer of the lingerie picture but he could not be for the one in the lobby. If some private investigator is meant to be the author of the shots then the second one is too intimate for that to be consistent either. Oh, wait, maybe Emily planned the blackmail all along and she got an associate to shoot them in the lobby while later giving her camera to Jonathan to document their tryst. But there is no picture of Jonathan in his slinky briefs completing the circle. It ought not to be a convincing scam, especially as the lobby meeting is precipitated by Emily finding Jonathan and Diedre together at a café and asking to talk to him for ten minutes.

It’s a weak link in the chain of convincing lies that entraps Jonathan. We the audience know it’s a set-up because we’ve seen the secret pictures being taken. It’s such a weak link that I am amazed that Diedre doesn’t see through the fraud immediately and use it as a reason to rally to his side rather than abandon him as she does. But let me put aside this small annoyance at the movie’s plotting to talk about what it says about the value of photographs as evidence (and on the whole this is one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year). Even if the photos had been more realistically ambiguous, the point would have been the same: Diedre already has an interpretive framework about the situation that guides how she reads the pictures. She has enough prior frustration with him for just about any range of pictures to become the catalyst for her leaving. We can see this in her first scene, the one where Emily appears desperate for a quick chat. Maybe on examination the presentation of the pictures is a little unconvincing, but maybe I should just stop whining and allow them their diegetic role as visual misdirections. Perhaps we shouldn’t have even seen the photos and I would have been happy with their role as plot-advancing maguffins (like the unseen blueprints or plans from North by Northwest or the mysterious glowing suitcase from Pulp Fiction).

There is another time, though, that photographic evidence is brought to bear on the case. This is before Emily and her accomplice, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones) try the photo blackmail. Jonathan, still acting as Emily’s doctor after her not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity exoneration but convinced of her culpability, conducts an interview where tells her that he’s administering a drug that will cause her to get drowsy and candid. He records the session on video. Emily does gets drowsy and says nothing incriminating. But he’s given her only saline, and caught her fake reaction to the fake drug on tape. Vindicated, he goes to the State’s Attorney. Here the interpretive framwork is legal rather than personal. Double indemnity, illegal drugging, he refused to work with the prosecution before — the pictures are unfaked recordings of fake behaviour but it doesn’t matter. The legal framework can’t use them. Like the lobby/lingerie pictures, the actual content of this video evidence is irrelevant. The pictures only work if they can fit into the right context.

It’s a trope of the wrongful-accusation story (although this film isn’t just that). We know (or we think we know) what’s going on. The protagonist thinks he knows what’s going on. If this were all there was there would be just opinions that didn’t rise to the level of belief. Having a nugget of something solid like photographs helps to anchor this belief (though as any detective story reader will tell you, it can disintegrate in a heartbeat), but if the right framework doesn’t exist for anyone else then the nugget is fool’s gold. At any rate the well-calibrated conflict of these two forces makes the protagonist’s vindication almost possible, always desperate, and riveting to watch and hope for.

“Go to all the good movies you can”

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Roger Ebert

I opened up Facebook last Friday to see a link posted overnight from friend in the US about the death of iconic film critic Roger Ebert. What?! This was just the day after I read Ebert’s blog post about how he was shifting his attentions away from film reviewing as frequently to attending to his film festival, a new website and other things. He’d been ill for a long time with cancer, but his presence was large with his unflagging reviewing and his prolific tweeting (and Twitter is now running over with tributes to him). His writing wasn’t as large a part of my movie consciousness as it was for American cinephiles; growing up in Malaysia and Australia exposed me to different dominant critics. But I now feel somehow like I’ve always known about him.

[Roger Ebert (centre) with (l–r) Terry Zweigoff, Jason Reitman, Errol Morris, and Philip Kaufman at the San Francisco International Film Festival, 2010. Photo by Kanaka Menehune on Flickr, Creative Commons]

There’s plenty being written about him, so I just want to mention a few things. Dana Stevens from Slate magazine has an admiring obituary and a memento of a lovely gesture from Ebert: a letter to the teenage Stevens in response to her fan mail. “Go to all the good movies you can, and write-write-write for anyplace that will print your stuff” he tells her.

Ebert being himself sometimes a writer of profiles, it was an interesting moment when Esquire sent writer Chris Jones to interview him. He was by this stage not able to speak, and the interview was conducted with text-to-speech and post-it notes. Chris Jones talks about the interview and the process of writing the profile on the Typecast podcast (the discussion turns to Ebert at about 12 minutes), and Ebert himself wrote about the experience; the mutual respect the two writers have makes for an interesting behind-the-scenes look at what is now an iconic article. Ebert “winced” a little about his photograph in the magazine, but he was ultimately happy with the piece: “That’s all you can really ask: For Chaz [his wife] to be able to read the article and say it was about me.” Chris Jones has written a moving coda to the interview, putting up pictures of some of the post-its that Ebert scribbled on. Two strike me: “There is no need to pity me. Look how happy I am. This has led to an explosion of writing.”; and “These things come to us, they don’t come from us. Dreams come from us.”

My experience of Roger Ebert continues into the future. Aside from reading his recent reviews as I work my way through the movies as they get released, his collection Awake in the Dark is a book I acquired over a year ago that has remained in my ‘current’ pile, something to keep dipping into. He writes about Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven as being “truly bottomless; the deeper into it I look, the more humanity and sadness and truth I see, but I never get to the end of its mystery”. This is not just a comment about that film, but an approach to film-watching and to life that Ebert embraced. Chris Jones tells Typecast about Ebert’s books in his home: “…Roger, every book was cracked, he’s a voracious reader, you know, that tells me something about him”. A voracious reader, an energetic writer, a generous soul.

Barbara: Comparing two shots

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Barbara, Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold’s 2012 film Barbara opens on a shot of the eponymous Dr. Barbara Wolff on a bus, soon to start her first day of work at the rural hospital to which she has been exiled. It is East Germany in 1980, and she has apparently been sent away for trying to get an exit visa. Most of the story is told from her point of view, and the coolness and suspicion she displays seem justified. Her landlady is prepared to inform on her at any provocation, and her boss at the hospital, André Reiser, has been given the task of submitting reports on her.

Her attitude to Reiser softens over time, but the landlady remains an antagonist. Her first meeting with Barbara is hostile, although she does give her access to an old bicycle. The bicycle comes to be an important thing for Barbara: she uses it to get to a rendezvous in the forest with her West German lover, it is a means of being less dependent on car rides from Reiser (well-intentioned though they might be), and she uses it to gather and hide the cash she needs for her defection. It’s the means to small and larger liberties.

Finding the bicycle leads to the first of two very similar and telling shots. Barbara holds the inner tube in her bath, testing it for air leaks. She moves the tube along, and sure enough, some bubbles appear. It’s part of the process of organising her new life in the small town.

Later in the film we see her hunched over that bath again. This time she’s testing how watertight the package of cash is. Her defection is being planned by her lover, and he’s given her instructions to prepare for a waterborne escape. The shot is nearly identical to the earlier one with the inner tube: over the shoulder, from her point of view. We see her hands holding the objects under the water: one is an element of the everyday and the other is something she could go to prison for. Is it too literal to see this as a metaphor for her taking things into her own hands, in a situation where there is so much that is pushing her to simply acquiesce?

The consonance of the two shots, the tight framing, suggests the subterfuge and attention that Barbara needs to defect are demanded similarly in the small everyday acts of her life. Not that the everyday is without consequence: even getting hold of stockings and western cigarettes needs secrecy, and being out too late elicits questioning from the authorities. It’s a suggestion that, for Barbara, both the everyday and the remarkable are not that distinct, and that the struggle to live an ordinary life can call for extraordinary measures.

Photographs as objects or as images. Or both.

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Ben Lowy, Deborah Parkinson, Ian Ruhter, Jörg Colberg, Sally Mann

Jörg Colberg’s recent blog post about the role of process in photography makes a good argument that the artistic value of a photograph is not dependent on its process. A bad photograph is still a bad photograph, even if it is made on large format wet-plate collodion. Colberg says that the rise of Instagram and similar things as having done “a huge favour” for him as a writer and teacher, for allowing people think of processes like tintypes as “filters” and to pay more attention to the content and meaning of the image rather than judging it on its style.

Colberg is clear to separate monetary value from artistic value, and this is important, because photographs are often evaluated on that monetary basis. Photography is a strange thing in some ways, with the medium promising infinite reproducibility while its market provides limited editions and finely crafted rare objects. Photographers have to make money from their work, so I’ve no objection to that, but what this means is although I can probably never own an original print-object of major significance I can still enjoy it as a reproduction in some book.

[Silver and Light, a short film about Ian Ruhter's project travelling around America with his large wet-plate collodion campervan camera]

Photographs can have value as craft objects as well as visual texts. Certainly to see a nice print live on a gallery wall is a great thing in itself, but this is not the limit of what photographs are. It’s possible to admire a photograph for how well wrought it is, but this is different to admiring it for what it says. Part of the amazement with which people approach the work of Ian Ruhter is about the sheer dedication he displays to the construction of his large and unique wet-plate metal pieces. [update 25 Mar 2013: Just noting that in his case I think his pictures themselves are strong too] There can also be a pleasure in the effect, in the ostranenie or defamiliarization of the world that a particular style provides, a way of looking at the world in a new way. But I’m maybe confusing things here: a real tintype may look identical to a digital tintype filter and defamiliarize the world in the same way, even though the actual processes are quite different. Nevertheless, as Colberg points out, sometimes the process does contribute to its meaning (he uses Sally Mann’s Proud Flesh series as an example, with the deteriorating surface of the collodion photograph being “a metaphor for the fragility of the flesh”. I’ve discussed Sally Mann in similar terms elsewhere. So for the viewer, the craft of the photograph sometimes contributes to the meaning of the photograph. I love it when this happens. But it doesn’t always. And Colberg suggests that it happens less than I might think.

There is another distinction we can make, aside from the monetary/craft/artistic one, and that is the significance of process from the point of view of the photographer rather than the viewer. The photographer Deborah Parkin tells us on her blog (via Colin Pantall) that, suffering from depression, she found it invaluable to work deliberately and slowly on a wet-plate process as a means of finding joy and absorption. She acknowledges that the resulting pictures, especially as seen on the web, may appear no different to ones generated in hipstamatic, but that the process nevertheless is a crucial one for her.

Even though there may be no difference to how we view pictures, even if we can’t tell from looking whether a photograph was made with a plastic camera or a digital app, the process still influences the outcome. For some photographers it might mean the difference between having some pictures or none at all. It’s like a writer using a particular language — sometimes, as with Samuel Beckett writing in French as an aesthetic strategy or Ngugi wa Thiong’o writing in Gikuyu as a political one, and sometimes because that’s just what the writer knows. Photojournalist Benjamin Lowy is gaining a reputation for his Instagram pictures; his reason for shooting this way is the more liberated approach he is able to take and the “happy accidents” that sometimes arise from the spontaneous shooting. In most cases it doesn’t matter if the images exist on the page or the phone, and it doesn’t matter if they were made with iPhone or Hasselblad. But with pictures like Lowy’s it matters that he got them in the first place. How we look at pictures once they’re made is a different issue. That we can separate the two things, or that we sometimes have trouble doing so, is an indication of the complexities of photography.

The Pictures are in the Ice

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Chasing Ice, James Balog

An Inconvenient Truth was a significant documentary, not just for its prominence in the public debate over climate change, but also because it was the first documentary to win two Oscars in 2007, for Best Documentary and Best Original Song. Coming close on both counts but not quite repeating the achievement in 2013 was Chasing Ice, Jeff Orlowski’s film about the work of photographer James Balog.

I’m partial to the song that did win the Oscar, Adele’s “Skyfall”. It’s the most memorable one from the recent Bonds, but I found J. Ralph’s “Before My Time” (performed by Scarlett Johansson and Joshua Bell) more memorable. The fact that it came at the end credits of Chasing Ice made a more meaningful connection to the movie, and the more languid pace allowed me to listen to it more attentively. This is one of the best closing credit sequences I’ve seen lately, documentary or no.

[Closing credits for Chasing Ice: "Before My Time" by J. Ralph Feat. Scarlett Johansson & Joshua Bell]

Chasing Ice is an elegant contribution to the body of documentaries concerned with enviromental degradation and global warming. It’s more finely focused than An Inconvenient Truth, a film which generated a lot of discussion and made its way strongly into the cultural consciousness. Although based on Al Gore’s relatively static slide presentation (an extended TED-like talk before the ubiquity of TED talks), it’s animated by Gore himself, drawing on his Southern preacher style and made more personable by the many family photographs and stories scattered through the film. It’s also driven by Gore’s argument about the nature of the changing planet that he supports with graphs and interviews and photographs. The pictures he shows are before and after shots of places with long-term visible climate effects, and it is this element of the visual material that Orlowski and Balog make use of so effectively in their film.

There are two issues with the use of photographs for this purpose: 1) What do they show us? How effective are they as evidence for the point being made about glacial transformation or rainfall? Sometimes their status as evidence is circular: we trust the photograph because of what the narrator is telling us, and we believe what the narrator is telling us because of the photographs. This is why all the other evidence Gore provides in his film is so important. 2) What kinds of photographs do you present in support of an environmental argument? Pristine wilderness or decay? The vivid beauty of Peter Dombrovskis‘s photographs of Tasmania seemed to have had a lot of influence around the Franklin River preservation in the 1980′s. But it’s also important rhetorically if not epistemologically to see other kinds of pictures too, like the toxic deserts of Richard Misrach.

James Balog’s use of photographs in Chasing Ice speaks to both these issues. His project with the photographs is to set up still cameras in various remote locations to record in time-lapse the movement of glaciers and icy landscapes. He does this within and across seasons and presents pictures that are strong demonstrations of the diminution of these formations. The answer is in the ice, he keeps saying, and even though this is true in the sense that ice core samples are a basic source of data for climatologists, the answer to how to see all of this is in the ice. Balog constructs with his time-lapses a convergence of moving and still images that have strong evidentiary and persuasive value on their own terms.

Of course one always needs a context for looking at images, but here the images have an extra resonance and meaning, not just as illustrations. His ice photography is framed not just as an art project but as a scientific one; like a lot of his photographs it’s a melding of the two. His TED talk from 2009 draws a lot of these ideas together and shows some of these timelapses (at 8’51″, 12′, 13’40″, 15’30″ and video of a glacier calving at 16’12″).

[James Balog at TEDGlobal, 2009]

The second issue around environmental photography, whether to show beauty or degradation, (Ansel Adams or Robert Adams?) is also something that is accommodated by Balog’s approach. His subject is ice. Ice! I’m glad I saw this film on the big screen because the overwhelming grandness of those glaciers calving and crashing into the sea was magnificent and scary and sad and awe-inspiring all at once. It’s not as if we were in some smoky sulphur mine or grim and baking oil field; these locations were amazingly watchable.

Balog is careful to show some sense of scale in a few of his pictures, and having his process documented in turn by Orlowski is gripping in its own way. The sequence with the puny humans abseiling down an ice cavern getting closer and closer to its infinitely deep rushing waters equals the tension of any episode of The Walking Dead.

Balog’s attention to the ice and the emphasis on the ice survey project make for a film that is precise in the point that it makes about the environment. There are depictions of the hero photographer that exist as a standard trope in a lot of photographer movies both fictional and nonfictional (patient wife who suffers his absences, dogged insistence on trudging forth despite doctor’s orders); these I found a little distracting, but on the whole the film maintains its focus on the point it is making about the ice and the environment. The photos aren’t left to carry the entire weight of the argument though, there are a few scientist-authority-figures appearing, and in fact some well-made graphs as well. The movie recognises what it does best to contribute to this cause–give us some stunning images–and it wisely leaves the details of our own engagement and action to a couple of websites, for the Extreme Ice Survey and for the movie. Balog’s ice photographs are spectacular and this movie shows them on a bold scale. The project is something between still and moving images and takes its place in documentary form in a way that is logical and arresting.