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Reflexive cinema-a cinema about movies and movie-makers-must be understood in both its traditional and modernist contexts. In the orthodoxy of the traditional cinema, of which we can consider the Hollywood genre film representative, the goal of form is to be overlooked. Orthodox storytelling demands that narrative structure function as a transparency. In the many Hollywood and Hollywoodlike movies about movie-making we do not find the rules of traditional storytelling challenged. Sunset Boulevard, Singin'in the Rain, and Day for Night are reflexive films in the traditional mode. Sunset Boulevard is not about Billy Wilder's production of Sunset Boulevard, but about the problems of the characters portrayed within it' Reflexive elements are trained on the film (or proposed film) within the film that we see. Orthodox reflexivity affirms the role of narrative structure as a transparency; modernist reflexivity seeks to reverse this role.
Reflexive elements in modernist films-for example, 8½, Persona, Wind From the East, and WR-are secondarily or not at all directed to "films within the film." Rather they are brought to bear on the films themselves. Opposing themselves to the orthodoxy that submerges form, reflexive elements in modernist cinema bring form to mind.
Reflexivity, which means "consciousness turning back on itself," appears in aesthetic media in two ways: 1) in the artist reflecting upon his medium of expression; and 2) in the artist as creator reflecting upon himself. In the cinema, then, reflexivity is manifest in films about movie-making and in films about the movie-maker (or both). Early examples of these modes are Dziga-Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, concerned with the method of gathering, ordering, and disseminating filmed information, and Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, a journey into the psyche of the artist exploring the complexes, phobias, and childhood traumas that form the wellsprings of his creative output. We can call these two modes of reflexivity formal and personal.
Reflexive techniques which draw attention to the formal qualities of film "as film" can themselves be divided into two categories: 1) the showing of the process and machinery of film production and presentation; and 2) the construction of narrative intransitivity. Examples of the first technique are Joe Gillis (William Holden) laboring over his script in Sunset Boulevard, the brightening of the carbon are and the...