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Slouching Towards Bethlehem And Man With A Camera: Analysis
In the 1960s, a new generation of bohemians began congregating in California. They put on parties and experimented, with communal living, psychological transcendence and a rejection of material values. These people built a utopia, the efforts of protesting against the Vietnam War and the inequality in the south. In this sense, California is symbolistic as a literary device to highlight both on the American Dream, but also a fractured social landscape. Joan Didion uses the hubbub of The Haight to convey her observations of a drug-addled wasteland. With this reflection, she compares her observations and opinions into a non- fictional journalistic collection that exhibits fictional qualities. In her essay, Didion uses montage to manipulate time and space similar to the techniques found in film analysis. Specifically, those found in Man with a Movie Camera, which focuses on the working-class citizens of the Soviet Union. Both Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Man with a Movie Camera share a common technique through montage, which allows people to convey complex philosophies in productions to portray a greater meaning as a whole from the diverse smaller pieces.
A key film that features montage is Man with a Movie Camera. This avant-garde production presents Soviet urban life and citizens at work and interacting with the machinery and technology of modern life. Specifically, halfway through the film, the sequence that renders montage rapidly relays between two scenes. One is the woman who folds cigarette cartons and proceeds to fill them with cigars and the other with a room crowded with people listening to the audio on headsets and transferring cables to different ports. This arrangement of passages manipulates time as the two scenes vary at random only showing the movement of the hands of the workers. The hands are representative that all work is work and each job is as vital to the next in constructing a profitable market system. The machines constructed by people have great power to produce, but only become active once workers start using them. However, this scene is ironic as the workers rapidly repeating the operating systems of the rising industry, show how mechanic, and irrelevant they are behind consumer production. These workers are assimilated into the ascending machine-like industry which makes up society. People are apt to forget they are fortunate to have items readily accessible to them because of workers expending time to make society more entertaining. Vertov’s fast motion and jump cuts portray a larger meaning of the industrial society and that the workers should recognize their significant role in shaping a suitable society to prevail in.
Similar to the scenes in Man with a Movie Camera, Joan Didion uses an equivalent technique in the literature to capture an analogous concept. In her essay, Didion highlights on the hippie movement in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. She observes and interviews the people of the movement while attempting to remain objective. Didion conjoins her knowledge in a series of short blurbs that prompt quick transitions from one paragraph to the next. With this in mind, she manipulates time and space in two ways. The first method is her organization of the essay. The style of paragraphs is random, underdeveloped and simplistic. She briefly hints at the counter-culture that was embraced by the younger generation and minimally expands on the characteristics and actions of the interviewees. She develops an informative composition in free styled prose that manipulates the time of the narrative. For this much, her work appears detached and understated. This hinders readers’ ability to determine the chronology and how the surrounding culture affects the characters’ actions but also allows readers to portray their interpretations. Didion’s essay is a written form of the film analysis technique of montage by how each paragraph is intentionally inserted to create something more than the pieces itself.
The manipulation of time and space with a montage is also relevant to the inclusion of narcotics and hallucinogenic references and usage. A drug is a substance that changes the body’s physiology or psychology when consumed. Specifically, in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion observed Max, Tom, and Sharon place “tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash” (Didion 20). Drugs alter the interpretation of time and space and when people use these substances and understanding the concept of space becomes muddled. Psychedelics and tripping transform the state of consciousness leaving gaps and unexplained memories. The unknown time and events that occur while on drugs before and after the trips show the jumps of time and the misconception of space. The brain is unable to process the functions of coherent thoughts. This is then assumed that time and space go by faster than normal when under the control of a substance. Drugs speed up our reality which is shown in Didion’s essay with the pace of quickly moving between each paragraph. Didion’s attempt to use montage is her way of expressing her opinion on the atomization of the 1960s. She rejected the negative aspects of the drug culture but could not ignore the ever-growing movement as it was threatening the Californian frontier traditions of responsibility and self- reliance. Slouching Towards Bethlehem describes the nature of love and death in the golden land.
As indicated through the two mediums, montage can be applied to cinema and literature and is symbolistic of the context or perspective of the content in the form of art. Not only does the effect produce an overarching theme, but the technique suggests the passage of time. In the film, the focus is on the industrial society and how the workers are molded as one with the technology. While in the essay, the focus is on the disintegration of humanity as people are using drugs to escape responsibilities. Within the film, the manipulation of time through montage is fast-paced shots that flash before a viewer’s eyes while montage in literature is the intentional omission of details to develop a simple and quick image that readers are not too invested in. The juxtaposition between ideas that are conglomerated with montage creates tension for viewers which forces engagement. Montage is informative and is an interpretive technique that allows viewers or readers to make connections to the themes.
