{"id":955,"date":"2015-02-23T12:05:38","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T12:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/?p=955"},"modified":"2015-05-27T21:42:41","modified_gmt":"2015-05-27T21:42:41","slug":"birdman-or-the-unexpected-virtue-of-ignorance-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2015\/02\/23\/birdman-or-the-unexpected-virtue-of-ignorance-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Dolores Tierney on BIRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, 2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following this weekend’s Academy Awards ceremony, <\/em>Medi\u00e1tico co-editor\u00a0<\/em>Dolores Tierney<\/a>\u00a0assesses one of the biggest winners<\/a>:\u00a0Alejandro G. I<\/em>\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s<\/em> Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)\u00a0which won four\u00a0awards for\u00a0Best Picture, Cinematography, Original Screenplay and Best Director. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Even prior\u00a0to its big wins last night at the Oscars’ ceremony, the\u00a0awards season buzz (flap?) around Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s new film, including this amazing Sesame Street<\/em> parody<\/a> (Big Bird [man] anyone?), was tremendous.\u00a0Birdman<\/em> seems to be a departure for the director. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s first four features, the death trilogy (Amores perros<\/em>, 21 Grams<\/em>, Babel<\/em>) and then Biutiful<\/em> were linked together by the exploration of pain, death, and the inequities of neoliberalism in the developing and developed worlds. Indeed I\u2019ve written about three of those\u00a0films\u00a0in those terms here<\/a>. But now, writing the epilogue for my book<\/a>, I wonder whether\u00a0Birdman<\/em> a comedy, set in a New York theatre, seems to rip up my neatly-boxed and auteurist summation of I\u00f1\u00e1rritu.<\/p>\n

The film follows Riggan Thomson (Keaton) a Hollywood actor famous for playing the superhero Birdman in a Hollywood franchise of the same name. With his\u00a0career in decline, he mounts his own adaptation of the\u00a0Raymond Carver story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.\u00a0<\/em>The film is set in the decaying\u00a0St James theatre during the preview week and in the run up to opening night. In between rehearsals and then the previews themselves, in his dressing room Riggan sits and muses about his washed up career and the play which he hopes will give him artistic credibility. Listening to the dark voice of his\u00a0inner Birdman, he practises telekinetic stunts worthy of his cinematic alter-ego.<\/p>\n

Is this film a departure for I\u00f1\u00e1rritu? Well, Birdman <\/em> does display a number of features which link it to the director’s other work. It has for instance, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu’s signature cyclical nature. It opens and closes with a meteor flying to earth (I wondered when I saw the film\u00a0whether this is supposed to be from the fictional Birdman<\/em> movies). It also has a subtitle The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance<\/em> which, together with some opening quotations by Raymond Carver \u2013 give the film the meditative quality of his previous\u00a0films. Spanish even sneaks in at the margins of the film,\u00a0when a few words of it\u00a0are heard at the beginning (these are actually those of\u00a0the soundtrack composer Antonio S\u00e1nchez asking I\u00f1\u00e1rritu a question). Like all his previous films\u00a0Birdman<\/em>\u00a0has a core creative team of Latin Americans some of whom have worked with I\u00f1\u00e1rritu before including: Argentinean Screenwriters Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone (Biutiful<\/i>), Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who hasn’t worked with\u00a0I\u00f1\u00e1rritu on a feature before), and Mexican drummer Oscar S\u00e1nchez (also a newcomer to the I\u00f1\u00e1rritu stable).\u00a0\u00a0Like\u00a021 Grams\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Babel,\u00a0<\/em>Birdman<\/em>\u00a0is, financially and institutionally,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0a product of\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>the U.S. independent sector, involving monies from\u00a0New Regency and major speciality division Fox Searchlight<\/p>\n

Also strongly\u00a0supporting the idea\u00a0that\u00a0Birdman<\/i>\u00a0represents a continuation for I\u00f1\u00e1rritu is the film’s\u00a0most salient formal feature;\u00a0its\u00a0seemingly unending single take. A characteristic\u00a0of all \u00a0I\u00f1\u00e1rritu’s previous films, the mobile long take in Birdman<\/em>\u00a0is taken to an extreme. The camera\u00a0<\/em>follows characters\u00a0in and out of rooms, up and down the stairs and corridors, on and off the stage and inside and outside the St James theatre on Broadway. Hours and sometimes days pass between scenes\u00a0and yet the shot never cuts.[1. Birdman<\/em>\u00a0of course does have masked edits which take place, like they do in another famous-for-its-single-take-film Rope\u00a0<\/em>(Alfred Hitchcock 1946) in moments where the camera focuses on darkness, usually corners.]\u00a0There’s only one visible cut towards the end of the film when Riggan’s daughter\u00a0Sam (Emma Stone) looks out of her father’s open\u00a0hospital window. Cutting from behind to her face we see her look down for her father and then look upwards and smile. The film’s extended long take is more than a stylistic flourish. A cornerstone of Andr\u00e9 Bazin’s theory of cinema, the long take\u00a0provides the cinematic\u00a0credentials for a script that emphasises the importance of authenticity in stagecraft, in cinematography [2. When the computer generated imagery so beloved of contemporary blockbusters does appear in the film towards the end it deliberately clashes with the realist diegesis as it has been established in the film], in the film business, and in the job of simply being oneself.<\/p>\n

And, it is on the charge of inauthenticity,\u00a0that\u00a0I\u00f1\u00e1rritu calls to account\u00a0Hollywood\u2019s superhero franchises (X Men<\/em>,\u00a0Avengers<\/em>,\u00a0Iron Man<\/em>,\u00a0The Hunger Games<\/em>) and\u00a0the talented actors (Robert Downey Jnr\u00a0et al.<\/em>) who he\u00a0suggests, let themselves get swallowed up in them. Casting\u00a0Keaton to play Riggen (who also left a superhero franchise[3. Keaton played Batman in\u00a0Tim Burton’s\u00a0<\/em>Batman <\/em>1989 and Batman Returns <\/em>1991).]) \u00a0is another seeming weapon\u00a0marshalled in\u00a0the film’s armoury\u00a0of art cinema authenticity.<\/p>\n

And yet despite\u00a0all these auteurist and art cinema elements,\u00a0there are aspects\u00a0\u00a0in Birdman<\/em>,\u00a0in which\u00a0I\u00f1\u00e1rritu distances himself from anything as\u00a0serious as authenticity,[4. Indeed, one of Riggan’s\u00a0most memorable monologues about the abuse he suffered as a child turns out to be deliberately\u00a0put on\u00a0to show Shiner\u00a0just how method\u00a0<\/i>and convincing he can be.]\u00a0and from\u00a0what some reviewers call the miserablism<\/a> of his first four\u00a0feature films.<\/p>\n

Unlike any of I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s previous features Birdman <\/em>is funny, and even hilarious.[4. My favourite line has to be Lesley’s (Naomi Watts) response\u00a0when asked how she knows Mike Shiner. “We share a vagina” she deadpans.]\u00a0 More precisely, its humour often seems to be about punctuating the art cinema seriousness for which\u00a0I\u00f1\u00e1rritu is known. At one point Riggan and method actor Shiner (Norton) carry on an intense conversation as they leave the theatre to walk to a bar. The sequence is accompanied by an edgy drum solo which we presume to be on the excellent and\u00a0inexplicably not Oscar\u00a0nominated<\/a> soundtrack (by S\u00e1nchez). However, as Riggan and Shiner walk, a tracking shot reveals the drummer (S\u00e1nchez in cameo) is actually playing outside on the street. This reveal punctures the seriousness of the moment and is used another time in similar bathos style inside the theatre itself. The tongue in cheek foolery with\u00a0the percussive score\u00a0and other devices (I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s cameo \u2013 as a lighting man who passes Riggan on the stairs) suggests\u00a0Birdman\u00a0<\/em>makes fun of its own artiness, and of its use of the always\u00a0self conscious form of art cinema.<\/p>\n

Also pointing towards Birdman\u00a0<\/em>as a departure is the change in the director’s signature itself. Abbreviating his first surname (Gonz\u00e1lez) to the\u00a0\u00a0initial G for the first time,\u00a0I\u00f1\u00e1rritu emerges as a slightly mainstreamed (or just less ‘other’?) manifestation\u00a0of his former directorial self . Some might argue that this\u00a0change in his signature has been\u00a0accompanied by a similar mainstreaming\/taming of his previous\u00a0films’\u00a0critique of Hollywood (aesthetics and first world politics). \u00a0Indeed, the\u00a0big wins for Birdman\u00a0<\/em>at last night’s Oscars confirm it to be the\u00a0darling of an industry, which\u00a0likes nothing more than to see itself\u00a0simultaneously\u00a0critiqued and\u00a0<\/em>aggrandized\u00a0hence the number of other meta- Hollywood insider-films to have also won Best Picture (The Artist<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Argo<\/em><\/a>) or just won big at the Oscars (The Bad and the Beautiful<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following this weekend’s Academy Awards ceremony, Medi\u00e1tico co-editor\u00a0Dolores Tierney\u00a0assesses one of the biggest winners:\u00a0Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s Birdman or (The Unexpected…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[129,131,54],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu","tag-birdman","tag-dolores-tierney"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2015\/02\/Birdman.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p49QSj-fp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":990,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/990"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}