Disease as a movie theme. Media and genological analysis

The paper concentrates on a comparative interpretation of two films which are classified by their authors as melodramas. The first one is Michael Haneke’s Love and the second one is The Notebook by Nick Cassavetes. The films selected for this analysis represent two different attitudes to disease. Haneke creates a moving image of dying, which is associated not only with physical death, but also the death of human dignity. Cassavetes focuses on a story before the disease of the main heroine, while her affliction is treated as a complement to the happy life, rather than a leading motif. The purpose of the paper is to compare the films from different perspectives: media and genological, as well as to answer the question why directors from various cultures perceive the topic of disease as a film theme in such distinct ways Choroba jako temat filmowy. Analiza medioznawcza i genologiczna


Introduction
The article is an attempt at media and genological analysis of two feature films, which are generically identified as melodramas. The first one, Love, scripted and directed by an Austrian director -Michael Haneke, consciously and consistently refers to the best traditions of artistic European cinema, which focuses on an in-depth analysis of psychological states of characters. In this particular case, it concentrates on the disease of a protagonist whose name is Anna. The director presents her as a victim of a powerful force, though he is sparing with the imagery and editing rhythm of a story. The dramatic question, highlighted in the disturbance of the first act of the work, is whether two retired music teachers can cope with a disease which takes away their dignity and slowly destroys the feelings built over fifty years of an exemplary relationship based on love and trust. The second film, The Notebook, scripted by Jan Sardi and Jeremy Leven, was directed by Nick Cassavetes. The film is an American production that reaches for typical Hollywood solutions: generalisation, blurring the main plot, the advantage of form over content, entertainment, rejection of the poetics of pity and disgust. The stylistic means used, which are attractive to recipients, narrow the image of a woman suffering from Alzheimer to a false vision of an old lady, suspended in a vacuum between past happiness next to her beloved man and a disease about which the characters speak more than the film frames. The reduction of the image as the most important component of film narrative and structure means that the viewers do not sympathise with the main heroine, as her suffering is only an addition to a simultaneously unfolding story about a feeling that overcame social prejudices several dozen decades ago. Therefore, it seems reasonable to look for answers to the questions whether there is one universal method of film analysis and whether a limitation to one research perspective is justified in view of the recipients' expectations focused on multi-level reception of works. The proposed article is a comparative interpretation of film works from two perspectives: media and genological. It takes into account the most important components of the film: image, sound, verbal code (dialogues, internal monologues, comments behind the frame, additions), i.e. variations of aspects of the genre pattern, which is a melodrama, enriched by stylistic means of romantic comedy and psychological drama in the analysed films. In this particular case, a melodrama is treated as a cross-genre, i.e. a creation built of many aspects that do not necessarily function on an equal footing. On the contrary, they exist as a collection of complementary comments or a set of counterpoints that build up tension.

Film language
It is important to remember that every film is a multi-level work of art. Dialogues, sound effects and music complementing or contradicting film narration are inseparably connected with its diversity, i.e. the richness of individual frames, shots, scenes and sequences. Thus, the multitude of information codes, which Christian Metz clearly pointed out in his film research. The researcher stated that each film message is regulated by many systems, and the systems, by creating codes, combine an artistic work with other arts (music and visual arts) or place them in the cognitive space of myths, fairy tales and legends, thus raising them to the universal rank of a sign. An Italian semiologist Umberto Eco sees film as a multifaceted audiovisual message. He claims that: […] by analysing audiovisual communication we deal with a communicative phenomenon of a complex nature, containing verbal, audio and iconic messages. Well, verbal and audio messages, although they have a profound impact on the denotation and connotation value of iconic facts, they are based, however, on their own independent codes that can be analyzed in other relationships. (Eco 1972: 213) According to the researcher, a film cannot be treated as a representation of reality. He offers a different research perspective, disputing with Pier Paolo Pasolini, who saw the mirror of the world -a reflection -in the artistic work. Eco proves that each film work has its own language, shaped by a system of values, experiences and sensitivity of its makers. It can be described by referring to two sequences. The first one, technical, is a set of artistic means that the director has at his disposal, which is compatible with the subject and message of the work and the second one, linguistic, is determined as an audiovisual system that allows to build a specific message. Therefore, Eco states that the language of the film is a set of visual and audio units of expression and signs in the process of artistic communication and, what should be emphasised, has its own grammar, i.e. a set of workshop rules of combining concepts into one coherent message, namely a film work. The recognition of the film as a communication system, and hence a language system, is prompted by the semiological concept of Jurij M. Lotman, who has developed a definition of film that is wide enough to include various communication orders, not just verbal ones. The researcher defines language as an organised system of signs that serves to convey information. He emphasises that: […] film language is a system of iconic signs, which makes it possible to treat word and image as independent, equal types of cultural signs that characterise social communication. (Lotman 1983: 46) Seweryna Wysłouch adds that iconic characters create systems built over visual language, which is a universal message, or iconic code -primary, because it has perception patterns fixed in the consciousness and experience of recipients who can convert codes into characters. It should be unalterably emphasised that within the system formed by film characters, one of the most interesting problems that will be surveyed during the interpretation of the films mentioned in the introduction is the collision of two codes: verbal and graphic. It is only in such an outlined space of analysis that the essence of film appears as a multi-level system. At the point of contact between these codes, the meaning, i.e. the subject and message of the work, is born. It is therefore worth recalling the definition of a verbal code by Jerzy Płażewski, who indicates that: […] the word is used in the film as an element of narrative and dramatic material. As a rule, the word (apart from subtitles) appears in a film work in the form of a dialogue, monologue or commentary, with the first of the indicated dominating in a feature filmdialogue. (Płażewski 1982: 89) The researcher emphasises that regardless of the film type, which can be either an attempt of fully realistic record or a staged creation of the presented world, the image is closely related to the verbal code. The film is therefore a sign that should be read in the widest possible context. It is made up of the creators' competences, their maturity and their own film language as well as the recipient's language and the time of presenting the work (circumstances), i.e. the pragmatic aspect.

Comparative analysis/interpretation of films about disease
An important assumption of this part of the article, whose target is the analysis of two feature films, representing different cinematographic traditions, is the statement that there is no single general interpretation of a film work. It should be clearly emphasised that each of them must take into account a number of cognitive paradoxes that seemingly exclude each other by colliding with many research positions: […] a contemporary film is torn between art and commerce, between the status of a work of art and a product of the popular culture industry, between the subject of research and the commonness of use, between the function of a catalyst for changes in culture and this culture efflorescence, and finally between the role of a medium of philosophical reflection on the world and human and one of the many sources of providing and evoking the most basic emotions or affects, such as crying and laughing, fear and excitement. (Helman 1977: 123) Alicja Helman seems to have touched upon an important issue in the above-quoted definition. Namely, the difference between imaging and creating the meaning in Hollywood and European cinematography is based on a different cognitive foundation. American productions, such as The Notebook directed by Nick Cassavetes, mentioned above, concentrate on telling the truth about life, which is not a synthesis of experience, but a certain mapping of reality, in line with the poetics of the film. It seems, however, that European artistic cinema is focused on the search for the truth understood as an in-depth analysis of the state of the entire society of aging Europe -like in Love by Michael Haneke. The study of the subsequent stages of Anna's disease and its impact on the relationship between the spouses, focuses all the director's and screenwriter's attention. The main difference between the two cinematographies lies in the category of seeking the truth. Mapping and confabulation versus harsh knowledge, which is stripped of the expressionist experience of the past, seems to be an interesting, though a more difficult and more viewer-engaging route to revelation, and even catharsis, understood as cleansing of the mind and collective self.
It is worth recalling that the analysed films are melodramas. The Notebook with elements of romantic comedy and Love with elements of psychological drama. Therefore, both works should be considered as cross-genre. Russell Merritt in a critical test with a provocative-sounding title: Melodrama: the autopsy of the imaginary genre emphasises that the melodrama category is misleading and variable. At the beginning of the cinema, it was associated with adventure, action and men from a lower social class. Ben Singer questions the existence of this genre in modern times. He suggests replacing it with the following terms: psychological, reflective, melancholic or feminine cinema. The first researcher who accurately captured the differences between modern and old melodrama definitions was Stephen Neale. He noted that: […] the basic element of these films is not pathos, love threads or pictures of domestic seclusion, but the action, complications, the character's entry into adventure. Therefore, this is not a feminine cinema (addressed to women), but war and adventure films, drama and horror films -genres traditionally seen as masculine. (Neale 1980: 35) Contemporary artists derive only some variants from the genre pattern. In the analysed films, Haneke focuses on a suffering woman and a breakup of values that cease to be important to her, when in the middle of the second act of the dramatic structure she decides not to live any more. Cassavetes focuses on the kind of story that will shed tears. Both filmmakers succeed in their intended goals. Both films have a clear narrative which positions dramatic elements in various places of the structure that can decide about the reception of works and their final purport, which depends on the sensitivity of both the authors of the works and their viewers.

Aspects of the genre pattern in the analysed melodramas
It is worth quoting the definition of a journalistic genre by Maria Wojtak, a linguist from Lublin. The researcher formulates her perception in such a universal way that her genological theories are also useful for analysing films: […] I treat the genre as an abstract creation, having however various specific realisations in the form of statements, as well as a model of conventions that prompt members of a specific communicative community, what shape to give to specific interactions (Wojtak 2004: 16).

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Stanisław Gajda states that: […] the genre pattern as a typological concept should represent a fragment of reality both in its static, resulting (set of features) as well as dynamic and action (set of rules of conduct) aspects. (Gajda 1993: 245) Therefore, the formulations of both researchers suggest that genre patterns can function in non-verbal space, if we consider the film language to be not only a form of information, but also a series of frames functioning on the basis of iconic communication, enriched by sets of characters creating codes. It should be emphasised that genre patterns consist of certain components: content, structural, stylistic and pragmatic. In my analysis of melodramas (cross-genres) I focus on the first three aspects taken from genological research by Maria Wojtak. a) the content aspect Michael Haneke consistently tells an intimate tale of a couple of musicians who have lived for fifty years in a harmonious relationship. No ups or downs. They were not ready for a shock. Their well-organised life in a steady rhythm is filled with conversations about everyday life. Disruption in the form of illness interrupts the sanctified rituals: shared meals, reading newspapers and books, listening to music, innocent gossip and memories of youth. The disease destroys the frames of bourgeois everyday life in a beautiful apartment, located in the centre of Paris. It is an intruder. The third resident who mocks plans, intentions and sanctioned stagnation that has organised the characters' lives. Anna suffers two strokes. She is changing. Not just her face. She moves in a wheelchair. Then she is only able to lie in bed. Shame gives way to the necessity of shamelessness. She is dependent on her husband, who washes her, helps her in the toilet, watches her in situations that she would like to keep only to herself. Anna undergoes a transformation from a graceful woman into a monstrous puppet. She loses her humanity in the eyes of the viewers and in the eyes of her husband. She becomes an object. The filmmaker does not delude viewers with a vision of the world in the rhythm of words: and they lived together happily ever after. Death is inevitable. It comes unexpectedly at the hands of her husband, who suffocates Anna with a pillow. Not to ease her suffering, but to help keep her dignity. This is a conscious game between the discovered and covered theme of work by the Austrian artist who balances between opposite terms and tries to identify them: old age, disease, loss of dignity. The action in the film is closed. One location. A flat. Life reaches here through people who come around and bring their problems. Anna resembles stars of the European cinema from the early sixties, her caricatural passive and subordinate husband, whom the heroine calls a good monster, moves like Charlie Chaplin. A bow towards genre film. A tribute to the icons of films that have shaped the collective awareness of the audience and the imagination of the director. Iconicity in the service of understanding the goals and motivations of the main characters, though with the universal message of the drama.
Nick Cassavetes in The Notebook aestheticises. He runs two story threads simultaneously. In the first one, two protagonists: a woman with Alzheimer's disease and her husband, repeat the same ritual every day. The man reads to his wife the notes she has kept over the past several decades of their life together. The past dominates the present. Contrary to the Austrian director. Contemporary times talk about Parisian spouses whereas the American couple is told by past. The feeling that brought them together against social norms and prohibitions survived to face the disease. The director simplifies the narrative to combine two periods, themes and narrative spaces, although this is a problematic procedure. Consequently, the main character's disease is presented in a quite shallow way. Thanks to memories that come back for a moment, an elderly woman lives outside of time and space. She is happy and phenomenally beautiful. The others suffer -children and her husband that she does not remember. It is from his perspective that we get to know the story. He is the narrator. We know the love story from a diary, the present day from monologues and the actions of a caring guardian, a former lover who lives in a retirement home to be closer to his beloved. The theme of the film is the love -old age / disease opposition. The message: true feelings never end. Cassavetes universalises his thoughts and film narrative in this way. Old age and disease, however, do not emerge from the screen. We do not believe the characters thanks to this aestheticisation. Cassavetes's motto: beauty above all does not work in a film that could aspire to artistic cinema, like Love by Haneke. There was no consistency and ugliness that would bring the truth about life. Instead, we get a fairytale romance.

b) the structural aspect
The structural variant of both films cannot be discussed without analysing the scenarios. Their record is the basis for determining the most crucial dramatic points of film narratives. The starting point for considering the structure of the analysed films is Aristotle's Poetics, where he clearly pointed out that each work (and he wrote about the drama) has its beginning, middle and end. He also decided that the division of the story into three acts is the most perfect form of dramatising and ordering events on the timeline. In Michael Haneke's film we deal with this structure, although drawn non-linearly. The film begins with firefighters breaking into the apartment of a couple of characters. They find a carefully posed corpse of a woman, strewn with flowers. This means that the creator of the picture starts not from the disturbance in the story line, but from the culmination, i.e. the discharge of tension. It should be reminded that such a procedure and scenario figure in classic works occur at the end of the third act of the film. Anticipation of events is a screenplay figure that in an interesting way highlights the dramatic finale. However, it does not take away the pleasure of watching and analysing the lives of the story heroes. After the culmination, the director returns to a linear story in which we see an ordinary world of the two old people and the first disruption, i.e. Anna's stroke. On the timeline, just after the disruption, in the 24th minute of the work, the first turning point appears, i.e. Anna's second stroke, which completely destroys the characters' lives. In the second act, it is worth paying attention to the so-called point of no return, where Anna breaks her moral code and announces that she does not want to live. The second turning point is the consequence of these words: her husband suffocates her with a pillow when he notices that the woman desperately does not want to lose her dignity and should not wait for natural death. He must free her from the illusions that give no hope. In the film's finale, the husband disappears in the editing sequence realised by the director in the convention of a dream. The last frame of the Austrian artist's image is an indication of hope. A daughter appears in the empty parents' home. She sits down in her father's chair. Life is still going on, and the dramas invariably have their meaning and the untold continuation, as Haneke summarises.
Nick Cassavetes reaches for a different structure. He leads two themes simultaneously, following the Aristotelian structure of three acts. His idea, however, is based on the characters' journey. However, this has nothing to do with road movies, which are a metaphor of adolescence. A parallel narrative, with a clear dominance of the heroes' past, makes the contemporary thread of recalling what has already happened in their lives more likely. The past is evoked while reading the title diary. The past explains the present, which is a commentary on past events. In the thread of the past, the main character meets a rebellious boy from the lower social class at the first turning point. It changes her life. However, they must break up. In the middle of the second act, i.e. at the point of no return, the heroine falls in love with another man and intends to become his wife. At the second turning point, however, she decides to return to the first and last love of her life. It is at these moments that the crumbs of the present appear to raise, on a reminiscence basis, the importance of the choices made by the two protagonists. Cassavetes brings the climax and finale of the story to modern times. The couple, separated, in a metaphorical space, due to the disease, dies at the same time. Cassavetes does not mock the melodramatic purport of such a decision. He highlights it through the mirror, which is the look of a nurse who carefully covers them with a blanket. Weeping, kitschy and without a deeper sense, and yet touching. In accordance with the poetics of the film. It is necessary to recall the words of the American researcher, Erwing Goffman, who explains the penchant of leading Hollywood film studios to escape from the poetics of lament and disgust and even lost identity through illness: […] for example, in America there is really only one type of man who does not have to be ashamed of anything: young, married, white, living in the city, a native of the north, a heterosexual Protestant parent with a university degree, full employment, appropriate appearance, weight and height, and able to boast of recent sporting achievements. Healthy. A woman, even a sick one, must be beautiful. Aging like she was Marylin Monroe. And you cannot show illness, because even if there is, it does not exist. (Goffman 2005: 35) c) the stylistic aspect The stylistic aspect is understood as a set of film means affecting its subject and message, i.e. the analysis of the basic components of dramatic narrative: frames, sound and language of the characters -the main protagonists of the stories told. In Haneke's Love, as noted before, the slow rhythm of the narrative dominates. Contrary to the main theme of the film, namely Anna's disease, the director avoids close--ups. The reality is more frequently objectified by interweaving the narrative with general or medium plans. In this way it is shown that an elderly couple is invariably inscribed in the space of the apartment, which through intertextual references (fragments of poetry, Bach's music, eighteenth-century art masterpieces) stopped in suspense. The most important is happening here and now. The disease blows their inner world apart. The reality around is still the same -orderly, stylish, full of art. Close-ups of Anna's face show her suffering. Not only physical ugliness, but also the internal beauty of her fight, and in the second part of the film -resignation and slow preparation for death. Some scenes, especially the silent ones, last up to several minutes. In this film, dialogues come down to perfunctory remarks. There is no dialogue in the traditional sense, i.e. the exchange of views. Silence replaces everything. It is a declaration of love, devotion and care. Unspoken words hang in the air and foreshadow a catastrophe. The director shoots most of the scenes in the existing light. This is a deliberate procedure which does not bring the characters from the background. It allows them to blend in and eventually blur. The music complements suppressed emotions and sometimes brings back memories. It does not give a rhythm to individual scenes but it organises them. The present versus the past. There is a balancing between negligible action and stagnation. Nick Cassavetes presents the heroes to the world in a different way. The director of The Notebook remains faithful to the parallel thematic narrative. The thread of two young heroes in love is shown by aesthetising the picture. Close-ups, semi-close-ups and details prevail. In this way the beauty of their bodies, which pulsate with youthful passion, is brought out. The cinematographer works from the hand. The vibrations of the protagonists are transferred to the way the camera works. A lot of the photos and the most meaningful shots give an apparently messy, shaky image that remains in opposition to the second thread -the disease of the main character. In these fragments, the director clearly slows down the pace of the action. The static scenes played in a low key (low colour temperature) prevail, thereby giving the effect of dusk -the inevitable end of the time together that is determined by reading the memories. The past is evoked through images and words -dialogues and the husband's monologue. Sometimes the film loses. Instead of artistic, sublime frames, the director lets the characters speak. Instead of showing, he uses a word. This is probably the most substantial weakness of Cassavetes's film.

d) pragmatic aspect
The pragmatic aspect of the film genre in question, namely melodrama, which, as I have clearly indicated, I understand as a hybrid of genres, must be considered in the context of Rick Altman's theories that are still valid. The researcher rightly points out that the reception of films is a long-term process that requires the creation of a community. Altman calls this community a constellation. The American film expert understands it, by analogy with star constellations, as: […] a group of members who become a whole only through repetitive acts of imagination. (Altman 1999: 363) The definition of the researcher, however, raises several cognitive questions and indicates the impossibility of unequivocal identification of film recipients. After all, the viewers of melodrama can be members of other communities, for example, fans of horror movies, romantic comedies or gay cinema. Altman recommends that the pragmatic aspect should be extended with an imaginary concatenation. Consciousness determined primarily by the time the film reaches its audience and the emotions it evokes in them constitutes, according to Altman, the essence of being a member of one constellation community. Thus, it is possible to identify the above-mentioned communities by capturing the moment when the film work most fully engages the audience. It is a moment of immersion in the message of the image, by reading the message and the topic of the film while watching, or returning to favourite sequences that the recipient considers essential or even cult. However, it should be remembered that each member of the constellation community has different life experiences and cultural knowledge. Therefore, it is worth asking whether he or she perceives the film structurally, i.e. with a clear reading of the script sequences and codes of meaning contained in them, or only emotionally. The most important thing, however, seems to be the ability to communicate, which unites members of an ephemeral constellation community. Altman points out that […] feeling a particular type of pleasure connected with watching a film, we imagine that a similar pleasure somehow connects us in similar circumstances of watching the movie. (Altman 1999: 364) The researcher's observations thus facilitate the understanding of the social aspect of the reception of film works. The viewers identify themselves with characters directly -through emotions, and especially compassion, but also indirectly, tracing the codes contained in the dramatic structure of the film plot.
Michael Haneke, in the film Amour, avoids building a constellation community in this sense. He remains in opposition. He does not want mercy, which could be understood as a kind of catharsis. The Austrian director and screenwriter asks questions and avoids answering them himself. In his work, the clues do not lead emotions, but their conscious suppression and lack of naming. Less always means more. The clue for reading the pragmatic aspect of his work is understatement, pauses and the art of silence, i.e. the codes of extraverbal perception. All that matters is happening in the receiver's space of mystery and deeply hidden passions, which do not, however, burst the dramatic tissue of the work, but constitute it as a kind of whispered suggestion. The viewers of Amour build the constellation community in secret. They do not reveal themselves. They are in the middle of a mystery, like members of an elite brotherhood.
Cassavetes is entirely different, and in his film The Notebook, he focuses on a kind of emotion-dripping dialogue. The director carries an open narration. He is not ashamed of the exhibitionism of his characters. They concentrate on feeling, and this is expressed through emotional dialogues and flashbacks. We know the characters' past and their choices. Before our very eyes, the drama of the sick heroine is played out. Cassavetes is not hiding anything. Only the consequences of these choices are accounted for. He leads the audience through the meanders of love and disease, revealing the intentions of the characters, also a kind of specific, American emotionality. It is easy to imagine that his film unites generations and remains a typical tear squeezer, which, it must be clearly stated here, leaves a kind of reflection. It is about the misalliance of the main character and her rebellion against the American correctness sanctified in the 1940s, both political and moral. Indeed, this social aspect might interest more conscious and demanding viewers. This kind of double-reading structure means that the work of Cassavetes has not been very well received in Europe. Just like Haneke's film, it has not gained much recognition in the American market. It has remained the work of a European intellectual who does not want easy emotions. The art is to reach them, but it is the role of viewers who read the works through their own experiences and, nevertheless, thorough knowledge of film art. Haneke avoids dialogue directly, Cassavetes does the opposite. The latter introduces the audience into the structure of the film, consciously counting on their involvement at the emotional level. Intellectual reflection is far less critical. According to the aspects of the melodrama pattern. Surprisingly, both films are on the list of the American Film Academy's one hundred best movies about love. According to film critics, the aspect of the disease has been neglected. Undoubtedly, this was also decided by members of the constellations. On both sides of the ocean, their habits, traditions and different cultures and communication choices are different. Altman confirms this: […] at the end of each genre film, there is a violent reversal, a return to a culturally sanctioned reality that enhances the viewer's enjoyment of the work of art and reattaches the viewers to the schemes that have shaped them. (Altman 1999: 372)

Summary and conclusions
The above considerations prove that there is no single, universal method of film analysis. Those that combine several research perspectives work well. My proposed media interpretation, complemented by genological considerations, allows me to look at the title theme of the disease from several research perspectives and to see the problem more broadly. The analysis of the image, sound and dialogues is justified when the content is to reach potential viewers. Extended by aspects of the pattern gives a broader view of reality and allows one to understand the essence of the film: its ambiguity and iconicity of codes that builds up meaning. It also gives a broader perspective on how films function socially and the principles of their reception, sanctioned by the factor of creative participation in constellation groups.