ALIENATION
artifice, construction and emotional distancing to promote critical reflection
Queering is destabilisation
A push back against the status quo
It is subversion
Both deeply intentional
And completely unmotivated
Artifice nested in realness
It’s a show baby
All for show
Bertolt Brecht, known for his Epic Theatre, which famously “breaks the fourth wall” has written extensively on alienation or A-effect, termed in his native German tongue “verfremdungseffeft”, which is interested in a reframing of perception where one takes “a common, recurrent, universally-practiced operation and [tries to] draw attention to it by illuminating its peculiarity.” (Brecht in Willet, 1964, p.145).
Based in Marxist theory and notions of the estrangement of self (Marx, 1844), Brecht’s alienation aspires to make the familiar unfamiliar by exposing its constructedness, dispelling illusion and opening up the possibility of critique. Elin Diamond picked up the mantle in 1988 with her essay Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory repositioning alienation in a poststructuralist understanding of gender identity. By illuminating the performativity of gender and drawing attention to its strangeness, the construct of “womanhood” is exposed. This idea extends easily into queer understandings of identity, gender and sexuality, which take root in postmodernism. As described by Stuart Hall, the postmodern subject is "conceptualised as having no fixed, essential or permanent identity. Identity becomes a ‘moveable feast’: Formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us”(Hall in Richardson, 2009, p.17). Extending this logic into film, alienation becomes active when the inner-workings of construction are exposed, identity laid bare as a collection of elements - when we are made aware that we are watching a film.
ELAGABALUS alienates deliberately, constantly drawing attention to its own artifice through techniques like hyper-stylisation, radical intertextuality and temporal play (see examples here). Privileging ideas over emotion, the film is overtly stylised and has a deceptively simple narrative. On the surface it could be read as a story about a young Emperor who knows that they’re going to die, spins out of control, and then does die, however, beneath this are much deeper themes of queer mortality, excess, desire, passion, power, sex, death drive and worship. It’s post-truth, post-internet, post-feminist, post-postmodern and highly constructed by post-production.
There is nothing natural about the process of filmmaking, despite its ongoing obsession with authenticity and verisimilitude, filmmaking is construction - a means of ideologically manufacturing story and emotion via audiovisual sign systems to manipulate audience interpretation. So, what happens when the illusion is broken, and we see behind the proverbial curtain?
At this point it would be remiss of me to not talk about New Queer Cinema, a term coined by film scholar B. Ruby Rich in a seminal essay of the same name, which celebrated the arrival of an exciting new wave of experimental queer filmmakers in the early nineties. Rich writes:
The new queer films and videos aren’t all the same and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary, strategy, or concern. Nonetheless they are united by a common style: call it “Homo Pomo.” In all of them, there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism in mind. [...] These works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure. (Rich, 2013, p. 18)
Rich cites Todd Haynes as a pioneer of the movement, alongside the likes of Jennie Livingston, Tom Kalin, Greg Araki, Gus Van Sant and Derek Jarman. Taking out top prizes at Berlin and Sundance, Haynes burst into cinematic history in 1991 with his debut feature Poison, a key reference for ELAGABALUS. In a 2010 article When ‘Poison’ was a Cinematic Antidote, Dennis Lim reflects, “What often gets overlooked from today’s fuzzy vantage point is that the New Queer Cinema was a revolution of form as much as of content: the queerness of a film like “Poison” extends beyond story to structure” (para. 14).
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Following the success of his scandalously bizarre 1987 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story which uses Barbie dolls to play out scenes from the years leading up to the musician’s untimely death, Haynes leaned further into formal abstraction. Poison is a tapestry of a film about ostracisation, isolation, desire and gay panic, which interweaves 3 simultaneous narratives:
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Hero - a documentary-style story about a young boy who shoots and kills his abusive father then flies away,
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Horror, an exaggerated 1950s body-horror film about a scientist who accidentally consumes his own distillation of the human sex drive and turns into a monster,
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and Homo, a gay prison romance adapted from a collection of Jean Genet stories.
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Above: An excerpt from Poison (1991), including early parts of 'Homo' and 'Horror' and a quote from Jean Genet
Haynes work is influenced by postmodernist structuralism, along with elements of feminist and queer theories. Like other postmodern filmmakers, he has deliberately problematised viewers’ expectations, exploring the relationship between formal experimentation and spectators’ perceptions. (...) He aims to show the artifice of the filmmaking process - but without denying the strong emotional power of the medium itself. Stylistically, Haynes favours formalism over naturalism, innovation over convention. (Levy, 2015, p. 161)
Poison was co-edited by Haynes and his then partner James Lyons who also starred in the film. Through techniques of parallel editing, the film constructs thematic relations by leaning in to Soviet ideas of montage in which “separate fragments function not as depiction but as stimuli that provoke association” (Eisenstein, 2010, p.134). As James Morrison puts it, Poison “gains meaning through the combination of shots or segments; it is only through their juxtaposition that a larger image begins to emerge” (2007, p.37) In a 1995 interview, Haynes states, “The film, which is so much about editing itself, needed to be open to that process to the greatest extent that it could be and so, when I cut the film with Jim Lyons, we really rewrote it and reconceived it” (Saunders in Morrison, 2007, p,38).
Poison’s alienation comes from its existence as a whole - it is the way the stories flow together or rub against each other; the interspersion of text in the form of Jean Genet quotes; the construction of the shots which lovingly parody genre. Innovative structure is the thing that defines Poison, and like in ELAGABALUS, the style of the film is owed substantially to the choices that were made in the edit.
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Above: Some examples of the alienation techniques used in ELAGABALUS
“The hard truth is that when all the scenes have been edited and finally assembled into a whole story - that’s when the rubber meets the road, and the real work begins.” (Hullfish, S. 2017, p.88)
While clearly present within the constructedness of the set design, the anachronism of the costuming and the referentiality of the varying modes of storytelling, the alienating quality of ELAGABALUS is most prominent in its digital materiality - the means by which it has been constructed by technology (editing software). From early scripting stages, ELAGABALUS was intended to sit within an alienating, hyper-constructed, hyper-aware world with the film operating as a metanarrative where actors portrayed actors who were portraying characters who were reconstructing history. Based on extensive storyboarding, this is the way that the film was directed and shot on set. However, by assembly, it became swiftly apparent that this meta-performance element was not landing.
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Intent on following a similar process to that of a film with a separate Editor and Director, early cuts were assembled in very close relation to the script and storyboards. The first cut resembled a much more formally conventional film, though we hit big issues with clarity - the characters names were too complex and being lost, the hyper-colouring of the world was distracting from focus in the frame, the internal pacing was too slow, the musical number felt disjointed. In early cuts, test audiences generally seemed visually captivated, but conceptually and narratively a little lost. The effect was not so much alienating as it was confusing - successful alienation is considered, not haphazard.
Turning to films for guidance, I drew from Haynes’ Poison and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) for structural guidance. Significantly, I took inspiration from the opening sequence of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) for its unique approach to montage, which was edited by the legendary Jill Billcock. Criticised by other editors for its “MTV style” at the time of its release (Holt, 2015, p.70), Billcock’s iconic cut reinvigorated and contemporised the intellectual montage of the Soviet filmmakers.
Creatively, this was an exciting time. Occupying the roles of both Editor and Director, I was in a position to totally overhaul and reimagine structure without much intervention. It was at this point that the identity of ELAGABALUS started to take form. Alienation is, of course, an effect and effects rely on audience to experience them. While ELAGABALUS has not been released into the broader world at this time, the film was screened extensively throughout the duration of the cut, which aided substantially in its narrative shaping and stylisation.
From peers, the most common responses revolved around entertainment, sensory overload and provocation, noting the film’s success in holding attention and taking the viewer along for the ride. Emotion, though not forgotten, was rarely at the forefront of feedback, rather screenings led to broader discussions of style, art and politics. Upon viewing the Picture Lock Cut, visiting Editor James Manché made associations with contemporary politics and cycles of corruption, while Lecturer Stephen Davis read in ties to art, gender theory and storytelling convention and was drawn to the film’s alienating anachronism. He reported feeling both intellectually and emotionally stimulated, understanding the ideas at play, but also responding to the tragedy that becomes apparent in the closing sequence. While feedback was generally positive and constructive, one viewer did report feeling “pushed away”, though was unsure about where he was being “pushed to”. Overwhelmed by the stylisation, he felt put off by the alienation. As an abstract queer film, I am aware that ELAGABALUS will likely be divisive, and that is very much part of its creative intention.
Through this process of cutting and test screening with my team and peers, we found that it was stylisation and construction that created narrative clarity - the masked boxing in on details directs audience attention, the speed ramping allows for an ebb and flow of pace, the signposting clarifies character and story. It is through these techniques, enacted through editing, that the deliberateness of artifice could take shape.
