#MediaMonday: Self Reflexivity

Good Morning Everyone,

With the 60 Second Horror Fest Pop-Up wrapping up this Friday, I wanted to take one final opportunity to talk about another of the requirements of that contest. Within the prompt, we asked teams to show a character using a camera in one of their shots. 

Now, many people would call a shot of a camera shooting a camera being "meta". However, there is a much more complex theory at work here.

Therefore, Today's Lesson is: Self Reflexivity in Cinema

At the world's first film school (The Moscow Film School), there came a theory that was called Formalism that sought to make sense of cinema by focusing on the formal elements of the filmmaking process (cinematography, editing, etc.). Out of that movement came a concept called Verfremdung. 

Verfremdung can be translated as, "the distracting effect" and this idea was to remind your audience of the production-nature of cinema, breaking the spell of overly-produced narrative film. Associated with verfremdung is a fantastic concept called Self Reflexivity. Self-reflexivity means that you specifically direct the audience's attention to a character using equipment to shoot a film while we are watching a film. This creates a truly unique effect within the audience by establishing a self-awareness of the production process within the viewer. This is supposed to invoke a deeper connection within the viewer and bring on a conscious acknowledgment of the subjectivity and inherent manipulating effect of film.

One of the best examples of this concept in early cinema is called Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov in 1929, which shows the main character manipulating cameras on screen to create a narrative for the audience (including some amazing overlay shots). In a later example, Billy Wilder used this concept to terrifying effect in the closing scene of the classic, Sunset Boulevard (1950). A beautify re-imagining of this concept creates an unforgettable ending to the film Mid-90s (2018) where one of the main characters hits play on a camcorder, finally showing us, as the audience, the video that they have been shooting the entire film. 

This effect can be really fun and can create a unique narrative for a story that needs it. In Sunset Boulevard, for example, what better to conclude a film by showing a silent screen actress trying to recapture her former glory by calling attention to every piece of production equipment inside her home and allowing her to deliver her monologue, talking to the director as she does it?!?

In a horror film, such as the 60 second films, self-reflexivity can remind the viewer to not trust their eyes or to perhaps focus their attention on what is off-screen rather than what is on it. 

Have a discussion with your students about how and when to include self-reflexivity in their films and what effect that has within the viewer. Then, if you have time, try to watch an example of it from earlier cinema. 

Your students will love figuring out how to manipulate their audiences by using this narrative tool when the time is right and I look forward to watching this effect in the horror films after they are submitted this Friday! 

Talk to you soon,

Josh Cantrell