2.24.2009
2.19.2009
On Miami Vice
It has been suggested that the opening sequence of Michael Mann's Miami Vice features a profusion of continuity mismatches. Of course, I may have the wrong idea of what constitutes a mismatch by current industry standards, but it seems to me, if you're talking about matches on action, there are at most two errors in that sequence out of... well, a fuck ton of cuts. Moreover, both errors are so subtle that I could only be certain after I played through the patches a few times on my computer.
My hard-nosed contention: whether we like what he achieves with it or not, Mann's mobilization of space in this sequence and throughout his work is undeniably calculated. This is not open to debate.
The sequence starts with the image of a club dancer silhouetted against an animated digital screen. The image is flat. Its subject is abstracted. In its lack of perspective, the composition addresses itself toward the audience obstinately and obtrusively. Its function is to confuse our sense of place, to deny us the security of a set of spatial bearings in experiencing the event we are going to witness. It is a surface-image, covering over the violent Eisensteinian dialectics, which percolate underneath. But what this opening shot pointedly does not signal is that the sequence will proceed without an underlying logic. On the contrary, the logic is there. Only it is "discreet", a word Mann loved to use when describing the plot lines of Collateral in his DVD commentary.
The next series of cuts establishes in order the location of all the players who are taking part in the sting. Proceeding from a second environmental surface-shot where we register the presence of a club dancer then a DJ (a very typical 'Mannian' use of rack focus in conjunction with a simple camera movement, either a track, pan, or tilt - here a tilt), a cut to a longer shot gives us our first glimpse of the club as an architectural space - we register two club dancers receding into the depth of the shot, one of which is the one we saw close-up in the former shot. She is identifiable by the digital screen to which she is adjacent. Then a lateral movement left and a second rack focus give us our first glimpse of the faces of Trudy, Sonny, and Ricardo against this architectural space. The two close-ups which follow show us Sonny and Trudy against digital screens (telephoto), then Sonny and Ricardo against the same screens (wide angle). This contrasting alternation of a flattening effect and a deepening effect between two shots which are content-wise quite similar is again typical of Mann: The heads protrude out, only to be smashed against the screens. Then they are allowed to protrude again. The figures are defined against an antagonistic background screaming for our attention, and all this already preceded by an aforementioned layering of 'surface-shots'. The lighting effect here is bold: our protagonists' eyes are illuminated as points, while the textures of their faces are partially (Sonny) or almost entirely obscured (Ricardo) by shadow. The intensity of their gazes, the unflagging steadiness of their countenances against the background, their discipline as agents with a job to do amid a polyphonic space that threatens to drown them, all combine to express the force of will, which allows human beings a momentary mastery over their environment.
If we count the two shots with rack focus as constitutive of two compositions each, then what we have is seven compositions (five shots) in total. In this sequence, Mann has marshaled a series of environmental details and put them in an order that is coherent, but, and this is the point, only tenuous and temporary. The perspectival control which these agents exercise over the club via focused surveillance will soon be broken by unpredictable happenings, by flashes of impulse and passion, by misguided commitments and games of deception, all delineated within the network of spatial relations late capitalist structures have forced upon people.
Standing for the development of the rest of the film, this brief five-shot segment represents not a lack of order, but the threat of that lack. We have to figure everything out in the moment of its occurring, as the characters do. I suspect this is why so many critics, even supporters of Mann's work, have seen Miami Vice as nothing more than a disastrous jumble with affectations of visual style. They see only jerky hand-held camera movements and vaguely rhythmic cutting, while failing to recognize that Mann's work describes the conditions under which the subject is lost to a "flux" of images, in a precise formal system, which itself is designed to keep that flux at bay. Miami Vice is all about living in the moment, the moment when individual systems of logic must face each other and themselves, must meet their compromises and their contradictions. Thus, Ricardo asks Sonny, and us, "fabricated identity and what's really up collapses into one frame. You ready for that on this one?" And his partner responds, "I absolutely am not."
My hard-nosed contention: whether we like what he achieves with it or not, Mann's mobilization of space in this sequence and throughout his work is undeniably calculated. This is not open to debate.
The sequence starts with the image of a club dancer silhouetted against an animated digital screen. The image is flat. Its subject is abstracted. In its lack of perspective, the composition addresses itself toward the audience obstinately and obtrusively. Its function is to confuse our sense of place, to deny us the security of a set of spatial bearings in experiencing the event we are going to witness. It is a surface-image, covering over the violent Eisensteinian dialectics, which percolate underneath. But what this opening shot pointedly does not signal is that the sequence will proceed without an underlying logic. On the contrary, the logic is there. Only it is "discreet", a word Mann loved to use when describing the plot lines of Collateral in his DVD commentary.
The next series of cuts establishes in order the location of all the players who are taking part in the sting. Proceeding from a second environmental surface-shot where we register the presence of a club dancer then a DJ (a very typical 'Mannian' use of rack focus in conjunction with a simple camera movement, either a track, pan, or tilt - here a tilt), a cut to a longer shot gives us our first glimpse of the club as an architectural space - we register two club dancers receding into the depth of the shot, one of which is the one we saw close-up in the former shot. She is identifiable by the digital screen to which she is adjacent. Then a lateral movement left and a second rack focus give us our first glimpse of the faces of Trudy, Sonny, and Ricardo against this architectural space. The two close-ups which follow show us Sonny and Trudy against digital screens (telephoto), then Sonny and Ricardo against the same screens (wide angle). This contrasting alternation of a flattening effect and a deepening effect between two shots which are content-wise quite similar is again typical of Mann: The heads protrude out, only to be smashed against the screens. Then they are allowed to protrude again. The figures are defined against an antagonistic background screaming for our attention, and all this already preceded by an aforementioned layering of 'surface-shots'. The lighting effect here is bold: our protagonists' eyes are illuminated as points, while the textures of their faces are partially (Sonny) or almost entirely obscured (Ricardo) by shadow. The intensity of their gazes, the unflagging steadiness of their countenances against the background, their discipline as agents with a job to do amid a polyphonic space that threatens to drown them, all combine to express the force of will, which allows human beings a momentary mastery over their environment.
If we count the two shots with rack focus as constitutive of two compositions each, then what we have is seven compositions (five shots) in total. In this sequence, Mann has marshaled a series of environmental details and put them in an order that is coherent, but, and this is the point, only tenuous and temporary. The perspectival control which these agents exercise over the club via focused surveillance will soon be broken by unpredictable happenings, by flashes of impulse and passion, by misguided commitments and games of deception, all delineated within the network of spatial relations late capitalist structures have forced upon people.
Standing for the development of the rest of the film, this brief five-shot segment represents not a lack of order, but the threat of that lack. We have to figure everything out in the moment of its occurring, as the characters do. I suspect this is why so many critics, even supporters of Mann's work, have seen Miami Vice as nothing more than a disastrous jumble with affectations of visual style. They see only jerky hand-held camera movements and vaguely rhythmic cutting, while failing to recognize that Mann's work describes the conditions under which the subject is lost to a "flux" of images, in a precise formal system, which itself is designed to keep that flux at bay. Miami Vice is all about living in the moment, the moment when individual systems of logic must face each other and themselves, must meet their compromises and their contradictions. Thus, Ricardo asks Sonny, and us, "fabricated identity and what's really up collapses into one frame. You ready for that on this one?" And his partner responds, "I absolutely am not."
2.02.2009
This is My Brain on Hou
Having so far failed to make good on my promise to post more regularly, I post an informal, very rough piece on Hou Hsiao-hsien:
More than any other films I have seen, the recent films of Hou Hsiao-hsien play on the link between our visual and aural perception and our sense of duration as a register of reality [02/10/09 edit: Not reality, but more like 'experience'. These senses give access to a world]. In one sense, when we are consciously engaged in a certain way of life, setting aside altered states of consciousness and periods of heightened emotion, life proceeds in an uninterrupted flow of perceived events [02/10/09 edit: events, which recede back into this flow, much in the style of E.H. Gombrich's metaphor, history as a river]. Similarly, in a Hou film, long, roving takes issue us into a space-time continuum stretching beyond the frame, and so also backward into a past and forward into a future. In this sense, there are few moments of truth in a work like Three Times, fewer still in Millennium Mambo, Café Lumière, and Flight of the Red Balloon. It is difficult to pinpoint where the poetry of the style begins. The things we behold exist in the sense that they have been and are in the process of being, including Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s contingent compositions. Thus, there is only this duration, by which I mean this constant flow of visual and aural events, a dynamic perceptual environment upon which the reality [experience] of an imagined world is founded. The result is the much-belabored “hypnotic” esthetic of a Hou film. The most direct signification and embodiment of which is the falling of light across a configuration of surfaces.
On the other hand, over the course of our everyday existence, our attention span is fractured, our mental focus ever shifting, and our memory imperfect. So too our eyes are constantly engaged in hundreds of minute physiological operations towards which we typically pay no notice. Life does not proceed in the uninterrupted flow we have hitherto assumed. Simlarly, Hou builds into his esthetic frequent disruptions (via rack focus and jump cutting, or, in A Time for Freedom, which has no jump-cuts and few changes of focus, intertitling), concentrations (via subtly rhythmic panning, tilting, and tracking), dilations (via cut-ins to ‘zones’ of shallow focus, suspending figures and objects in space) and crystallizations (via rhythmic and tonal resolution) of the duration. These effects, and others, are variously applied, often in combination. Hou’s is a poetics, which challenges any notion of real time, of documentary reality, by manipulating the emotional ['perceptual' is better here. Emotional sounds too classical and dramaturgical] involvement of the audience with the flow of events presented to them, by modulating the mood under which we experience an environment in motion, and by insisting that sensual [sight-sensual, sound-sensual] experience is limited [also, inadequate and helpless] in its subjectivity. On the one hand, Hou claims, we have access to the world only in so far as we see and hear it. Yet on the second hand, our perceptions are limited [as above]. Yet still, on the third hand, these imperfect faculties are what bring the world before us [this sentence seems redundant in retrospect]. It is necessary that we see.
If duration is a matter of how we perceive it, then indeed there can be moments of truth, and in a Hou film, in fact, there are those rare, ecstatic moments where a sensuous image is rhythmically suspended, saturating the duration and turning the event before us into a romance. In A Time to Love, as Aphrodite’s Child builds to a crescendo, a couple’s hands make love in a slender sluice of space, beyond which lights shift out-of-focus, rendering the moment euphorically tenuous. Similarly, individual sights and sounds from each time period in Three Times resonate beyond their situation in a linear sequence of frames and narrative occurrences, and reverberate significantly across the span of the entire film via our memory of it. These flows of images – constantly interrupted, abbreviated, elided, and limited to only one point-of-view, stuck inside looking out, or outside looking in, or telescoping an object in an envelope of shallow focus only to abstract the space between – are the compounds with which Hou fabricates an atmospheric structure for history (i.e. a sense of history, a sense of duration, a sense of reality, a sense of truth).
Those who have accused Hou’s work of political correctness, stylistic decadence, and emotional and intellectual simplicity have typically launched their attacks based on two (incorrect) claims about his art: 1.) The style sentimentalizes history (e.g. A Time for Love). 2.) The style dehumanizes history, even commodifying it (e.g. Goodbye, South Goodbye, Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, Three Times). It should be noted that these two claims are not mutually exclusive. Rather the latter is often seen as the basis for the former. Thus, Nathan Kosub argues: “So much of the section [A Time for Love] is so broadly sentimental – the tenuous but eager joining of hands at a bus stop, say—that real emotion is reduced to social gestures that rely on our own experiences to impart a sense of romance. And that’s no romance at all.” But this is to assume that a traditional romance is the film’s aspiration, when, strictly speaking, the style in Hou’s films has never romanticized history, at least not in the classical sense of the term.
A contemporary like Michael Mann is a genuine dramaturgist of surfaces, whose oeuvre represents a deeply romantic cinema reflected in the intense immediacy of hi-def imagery, the no-holds-barred egotism of star performances, and the all-or-nothing climaxes of plot lines. Like Hou, Mann often deals with people from economically insignificant, even marginalized backgrounds, but, unlike Hou, the entire universe hangs in the balance of their struggle. Out of necessity, Mann's people are constantly posing as bigger and more badass than they truly are. The essential Mann frame consists in a lone figure set flatly against a sea of lights, and yet a characteristic wash of color and texture integrates the figure and landscape with an organic fluidity, so that it becomes his environment. The relation between figure and cityscape is poised between resistance and embrace. The cityscape becomes something other than environment. It becomes an expression of this figure's existential condition. Mann mobilizes surface for the sake of drama. His images are never purely sensual. To romanticize something in the graphic arts is to harness an inner force imagistically as Mann does. The screen surface becomes an expression of historical struggles, of dialectics. This is the Eisensteinian tradition in cinema to which Mann has frequently professed a great debt.
On the contrary, Hou's camera remains always outside his figures, and they are always inside their environment [they're part of it, contiguous]. Hou sets out to sensualize history in a filmic way, to saturate the duration of a series of frames with every ephemeral, environmental detail a given space contains, to saturate his figures in turn and finally to reach an existential condition [Fergus Daly is probably right that existentialism is putting too Western of a spin on Hou's cinema. So a 'cosmic' condition may be more apt here... still, Hou continues to evoke Heidegger for me. His films enact a kind of phenomenology of perception... there, I've said it] via the things themselves. Ceding my unfamiliarity with the oeuvres of Bela Tarr, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Alexander Sokurov, Carlos Reygadas and a number of other filmmakers of recent European and Asian art cinema, at present it seems to me that no filmmaker since Andrei Tarkovsky has so intently sought to exploit the 35mm image’s capacity to record minute, material detail. Nor do any of Hou’s contemporaries play so frequently as he does upon that old fallacy of the modern mind, which would link the impression of film grain inextricably to that of physical reality. Hou’s sensualization of the frame may, as in A Time for Love, culminate in romance, but such instances are rare, and more importantly they are rarified. Romance is often longed for, but it is seldom achieved. That tenuous joining of hands is not an expression of boiler-plate sentiment, thinly concealing an attempt to cash in on festival popularity. It is rather one of the most meticulously defined articulations of a cinematic vision this side of Mildred Dunnock embracing Anne Bancroft in 7 Women. It is one of the most beautiful images in all cinema. It is the achievement of cinematic romance in a formal system where romance has been reduced to a matter of focal length, of mathematical probability, of the crossing of two people’s vectors at a precise coordinate in a nebulous space-time continuum. Here, Hou says, time is suspended and the history of a people comes into focus.
More than any other films I have seen, the recent films of Hou Hsiao-hsien play on the link between our visual and aural perception and our sense of duration as a register of reality [02/10/09 edit: Not reality, but more like 'experience'. These senses give access to a world]. In one sense, when we are consciously engaged in a certain way of life, setting aside altered states of consciousness and periods of heightened emotion, life proceeds in an uninterrupted flow of perceived events [02/10/09 edit: events, which recede back into this flow, much in the style of E.H. Gombrich's metaphor, history as a river]. Similarly, in a Hou film, long, roving takes issue us into a space-time continuum stretching beyond the frame, and so also backward into a past and forward into a future. In this sense, there are few moments of truth in a work like Three Times, fewer still in Millennium Mambo, Café Lumière, and Flight of the Red Balloon. It is difficult to pinpoint where the poetry of the style begins. The things we behold exist in the sense that they have been and are in the process of being, including Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s contingent compositions. Thus, there is only this duration, by which I mean this constant flow of visual and aural events, a dynamic perceptual environment upon which the reality [experience] of an imagined world is founded. The result is the much-belabored “hypnotic” esthetic of a Hou film. The most direct signification and embodiment of which is the falling of light across a configuration of surfaces.
On the other hand, over the course of our everyday existence, our attention span is fractured, our mental focus ever shifting, and our memory imperfect. So too our eyes are constantly engaged in hundreds of minute physiological operations towards which we typically pay no notice. Life does not proceed in the uninterrupted flow we have hitherto assumed. Simlarly, Hou builds into his esthetic frequent disruptions (via rack focus and jump cutting, or, in A Time for Freedom, which has no jump-cuts and few changes of focus, intertitling), concentrations (via subtly rhythmic panning, tilting, and tracking), dilations (via cut-ins to ‘zones’ of shallow focus, suspending figures and objects in space) and crystallizations (via rhythmic and tonal resolution) of the duration. These effects, and others, are variously applied, often in combination. Hou’s is a poetics, which challenges any notion of real time, of documentary reality, by manipulating the emotional ['perceptual' is better here. Emotional sounds too classical and dramaturgical] involvement of the audience with the flow of events presented to them, by modulating the mood under which we experience an environment in motion, and by insisting that sensual [sight-sensual, sound-sensual] experience is limited [also, inadequate and helpless] in its subjectivity. On the one hand, Hou claims, we have access to the world only in so far as we see and hear it. Yet on the second hand, our perceptions are limited [as above]. Yet still, on the third hand, these imperfect faculties are what bring the world before us [this sentence seems redundant in retrospect]. It is necessary that we see.
If duration is a matter of how we perceive it, then indeed there can be moments of truth, and in a Hou film, in fact, there are those rare, ecstatic moments where a sensuous image is rhythmically suspended, saturating the duration and turning the event before us into a romance. In A Time to Love, as Aphrodite’s Child builds to a crescendo, a couple’s hands make love in a slender sluice of space, beyond which lights shift out-of-focus, rendering the moment euphorically tenuous. Similarly, individual sights and sounds from each time period in Three Times resonate beyond their situation in a linear sequence of frames and narrative occurrences, and reverberate significantly across the span of the entire film via our memory of it. These flows of images – constantly interrupted, abbreviated, elided, and limited to only one point-of-view, stuck inside looking out, or outside looking in, or telescoping an object in an envelope of shallow focus only to abstract the space between – are the compounds with which Hou fabricates an atmospheric structure for history (i.e. a sense of history, a sense of duration, a sense of reality, a sense of truth).
Those who have accused Hou’s work of political correctness, stylistic decadence, and emotional and intellectual simplicity have typically launched their attacks based on two (incorrect) claims about his art: 1.) The style sentimentalizes history (e.g. A Time for Love). 2.) The style dehumanizes history, even commodifying it (e.g. Goodbye, South Goodbye, Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, Three Times). It should be noted that these two claims are not mutually exclusive. Rather the latter is often seen as the basis for the former. Thus, Nathan Kosub argues: “So much of the section [A Time for Love] is so broadly sentimental – the tenuous but eager joining of hands at a bus stop, say—that real emotion is reduced to social gestures that rely on our own experiences to impart a sense of romance. And that’s no romance at all.” But this is to assume that a traditional romance is the film’s aspiration, when, strictly speaking, the style in Hou’s films has never romanticized history, at least not in the classical sense of the term.
A contemporary like Michael Mann is a genuine dramaturgist of surfaces, whose oeuvre represents a deeply romantic cinema reflected in the intense immediacy of hi-def imagery, the no-holds-barred egotism of star performances, and the all-or-nothing climaxes of plot lines. Like Hou, Mann often deals with people from economically insignificant, even marginalized backgrounds, but, unlike Hou, the entire universe hangs in the balance of their struggle. Out of necessity, Mann's people are constantly posing as bigger and more badass than they truly are. The essential Mann frame consists in a lone figure set flatly against a sea of lights, and yet a characteristic wash of color and texture integrates the figure and landscape with an organic fluidity, so that it becomes his environment. The relation between figure and cityscape is poised between resistance and embrace. The cityscape becomes something other than environment. It becomes an expression of this figure's existential condition. Mann mobilizes surface for the sake of drama. His images are never purely sensual. To romanticize something in the graphic arts is to harness an inner force imagistically as Mann does. The screen surface becomes an expression of historical struggles, of dialectics. This is the Eisensteinian tradition in cinema to which Mann has frequently professed a great debt.
On the contrary, Hou's camera remains always outside his figures, and they are always inside their environment [they're part of it, contiguous]. Hou sets out to sensualize history in a filmic way, to saturate the duration of a series of frames with every ephemeral, environmental detail a given space contains, to saturate his figures in turn and finally to reach an existential condition [Fergus Daly is probably right that existentialism is putting too Western of a spin on Hou's cinema. So a 'cosmic' condition may be more apt here... still, Hou continues to evoke Heidegger for me. His films enact a kind of phenomenology of perception... there, I've said it] via the things themselves. Ceding my unfamiliarity with the oeuvres of Bela Tarr, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Alexander Sokurov, Carlos Reygadas and a number of other filmmakers of recent European and Asian art cinema, at present it seems to me that no filmmaker since Andrei Tarkovsky has so intently sought to exploit the 35mm image’s capacity to record minute, material detail. Nor do any of Hou’s contemporaries play so frequently as he does upon that old fallacy of the modern mind, which would link the impression of film grain inextricably to that of physical reality. Hou’s sensualization of the frame may, as in A Time for Love, culminate in romance, but such instances are rare, and more importantly they are rarified. Romance is often longed for, but it is seldom achieved. That tenuous joining of hands is not an expression of boiler-plate sentiment, thinly concealing an attempt to cash in on festival popularity. It is rather one of the most meticulously defined articulations of a cinematic vision this side of Mildred Dunnock embracing Anne Bancroft in 7 Women. It is one of the most beautiful images in all cinema. It is the achievement of cinematic romance in a formal system where romance has been reduced to a matter of focal length, of mathematical probability, of the crossing of two people’s vectors at a precise coordinate in a nebulous space-time continuum. Here, Hou says, time is suspended and the history of a people comes into focus.
1.13.2009
As perfect as I can be?
This post marks the first of a series of entries I'd like to record in coming months as I catch the movies swinging through Chicago this Winter. Hopefully, this hitherto neglected space will assume the role of a screening log and notebook, making for a more productive way of procrastinating than watching previews of half-downloaded public domain films until the wee hours...
Brakhage 1952-1957
Stan Brakhage's early films are experimental trance pieces steeped in angst. They are rhythmically hypnotic adventures in psycho-sexual awakening ("Interim", "Desistfilm", "The Way to Shadow Garden", "Flesh of the Morning", "Daybreak & Whiteye") a la Maya Deren, or labyrinthine perceptual journeys across fantastic spaces ("In Between", "Reflections on Black") a la Sidney Peterson or Jean Cocteau. At this point in his development, Brakhage lacks the precise formalism of his forebears. What is beautiful about these films is rather the ripeness of their inspiration as manifested by unpredictable transitions in tone or atmosphere: a single rack focus from a window to the outline of a boy's face and the book he is holding in "In Between", an explosion of negative images at the end of "The Way to Shadow Garden", sensuous close-ups of hands and faces in "Interim", hyped-up performances and exaggerated shadow play in "Desistfilm", etc. In their boldness, these images indicate a young artist's elation at the very experience of making films, and, in this sense, few films are as emotionally naked.
But it is with "Wonder Ring" that Brakhage inaugurates his cinema, which will not be one of moods, of states of mind expressed in ritualized odysseys across high-concept dreamscapes. Brakhage renounces a kind of montage, which links one element to another according to a progression of emotional states. Like Bresson, he internalizes feeling, which is not to say Brakhage's films will be devoid of feeling, but that feeling is once and for all subsumed into and buried within densely patterned thickets of imagery, cut together with an inexorable, ecstatic rapidity.
In "Wonder Ring", the dynamic interaction of surfaces and outlines, captured in the window reflections of the moving Third Avenue El becomes an epic experience, particularly when projected, as it so rarely is, onto a large screen. The facades of buildings are transformed into monumental scrolls of pre-War architecture. The eye dances across these scrolls in search of subtle variations in detail, such as the distinctive color of one building's bricks. On another level, and requiring a precise change in the eye's focus to come into view, there is the interior of the subway car rendered indistinct and cavernous by the film's contrast levels. An abyss of darkness is thus superimposed upon an expanse of surface. Every now and then, we may catch a glimpse of a human figure, but its presence is rendered ghostly and tenuous as pure contour, there one moment, gone the next, disappearing with a change in the availability of filtered sunlight. Sifting through the car windows, this light strikes the city's surfaces in rectangular patches. When the train reaches top speed, everything in view is transformed into an ethereal array of racing abstractions. At a halt, there is unsettling stillness, and once again the ghostly figures of people boarding and dismounting the train. Thus, the world is reduced to all that I can see out my train's window, and yet it does not fail to contain universal possibilities as well as the threat of nothingness.
Brakhage 1952-1957
Stan Brakhage's early films are experimental trance pieces steeped in angst. They are rhythmically hypnotic adventures in psycho-sexual awakening ("Interim", "Desistfilm", "The Way to Shadow Garden", "Flesh of the Morning", "Daybreak & Whiteye") a la Maya Deren, or labyrinthine perceptual journeys across fantastic spaces ("In Between", "Reflections on Black") a la Sidney Peterson or Jean Cocteau. At this point in his development, Brakhage lacks the precise formalism of his forebears. What is beautiful about these films is rather the ripeness of their inspiration as manifested by unpredictable transitions in tone or atmosphere: a single rack focus from a window to the outline of a boy's face and the book he is holding in "In Between", an explosion of negative images at the end of "The Way to Shadow Garden", sensuous close-ups of hands and faces in "Interim", hyped-up performances and exaggerated shadow play in "Desistfilm", etc. In their boldness, these images indicate a young artist's elation at the very experience of making films, and, in this sense, few films are as emotionally naked.
But it is with "Wonder Ring" that Brakhage inaugurates his cinema, which will not be one of moods, of states of mind expressed in ritualized odysseys across high-concept dreamscapes. Brakhage renounces a kind of montage, which links one element to another according to a progression of emotional states. Like Bresson, he internalizes feeling, which is not to say Brakhage's films will be devoid of feeling, but that feeling is once and for all subsumed into and buried within densely patterned thickets of imagery, cut together with an inexorable, ecstatic rapidity.
In "Wonder Ring", the dynamic interaction of surfaces and outlines, captured in the window reflections of the moving Third Avenue El becomes an epic experience, particularly when projected, as it so rarely is, onto a large screen. The facades of buildings are transformed into monumental scrolls of pre-War architecture. The eye dances across these scrolls in search of subtle variations in detail, such as the distinctive color of one building's bricks. On another level, and requiring a precise change in the eye's focus to come into view, there is the interior of the subway car rendered indistinct and cavernous by the film's contrast levels. An abyss of darkness is thus superimposed upon an expanse of surface. Every now and then, we may catch a glimpse of a human figure, but its presence is rendered ghostly and tenuous as pure contour, there one moment, gone the next, disappearing with a change in the availability of filtered sunlight. Sifting through the car windows, this light strikes the city's surfaces in rectangular patches. When the train reaches top speed, everything in view is transformed into an ethereal array of racing abstractions. At a halt, there is unsettling stillness, and once again the ghostly figures of people boarding and dismounting the train. Thus, the world is reduced to all that I can see out my train's window, and yet it does not fail to contain universal possibilities as well as the threat of nothingness.
5.22.2008
On Entrances: Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959)
Hitherto I have seen only the one Andre De Toth film.
To try to sum up what I feel is most powerful about it, I seize on the way De Toth has characters enter a scene. 'Scene' here mostly takes place in the stripped, box-like cabins of Bitters, Wyoming, a remote town situated in a valley, near completely circumscribed by a wall of wilderness and mountains, which also serve as the film's dominant visual refrain. Groups of characters at odds must reconcile without the possibility of escape. The problem is that it's getting crowded in Bitters, even with a population of only 20. Whenever a new character or characters enter(s) a scene alliances shift and priorities are reordered. On a narrative level, this process of entrance and effect is readily apparent: At first, the town consists in farmers and cattle herdsmen, these at each other's throats, but the arrival of a band of outlaws transforms how these two groups relate to each other, forcing them all into the same position within the frame. This is a process which plays out formally without stylistic flourish. The execution is ruthless.
A good example of this mode of 'entrance' is the introduction of Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the more prominent of the film's two heroines and a reservoir of mercy in a filmic universe starved of it. In her initial scene, Helen interrupts a conversation between Bitters's local store owner Vic (Donald Elston) and Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) a cattle rancher and the compromised hero of the piece. Like so many other Ryan characters, Starrett is a primitive, a misanthrope and a control freak. His violent love for Helen will drive him to attempt the murder of her weak farmer husband. Brooding over this course of action, he debates the consequences with Vic indirectly. It is at this point that Helen appears. Rather than merely have her walk 'on-stage', however, as I think would have been common Hollywood practice (a practice which Otto Preminger had by this time carried to the apex of its expressive potential), De Toth cuts outside, to a shot of Helen approaching the general store, and cutting well before Vic has completed his last line: "you call his hand it'll be plain murder". That final word, "murder", hangs over Helen as she walks toward the cabin, hangs over her as if it were suspended in the dense whiteness of the sky above her. When she does make her entrance, even though he could probably manage the staging, De Toth leaves her to her own space in medium shot, emphasizing, in the shot-reverse-shot montage that follows, how the other characters internally size her up, debating her presence outside the master shot, but within the grand scheme. At the same time, this plan gives prominence to her own feelings. It is not until she is invited into the group by Vic's daughter Ernine that she enters this master shot, and then only to pass through it and gain access to a site of hospitality, the family dinner table.
The film is filled with variations of such 'entrances' - Starrett confronted by the farmers, Starrett stopping a diabolical dance late in the film, the disruptive arrival of the outlaws etc. - many of which repeatedly deploy this montage which opposes an individual to a group of individuals. With an acrobat's skill, this mechanism brings moment to moment equilibrium to an intricate network of human relations and emotional tensions perpetually in flux. De Toth's style consists in this attempt to keep all the threads taut and balanced through a rhythmically deliberate suspension of climax. He creates an experience of time that is bitter, harsh, and seeming endless.
Most impressive is that De Toth manages to work this same operation in single shots. After all, these groups, framed in master shot, are not communities, but bands of outcasts. Made up of immigrants and cattle herdsmen, they are all 'outlaws' in a way, sharing no culture and representing no social order, but in fact a social disorder. They inhabit fields of conflict: political, emotional and eventually physical battlegrounds, where the individual is measured in binary terms. There are the weak and the strong. It is that 'entrance' of some other individual or some other group which leads people once on the brink of collective self-destruction to band together. In this sense, the isolation of the individual, represented in medium shot, outside of the intertwined, self-destructive group, represented in master shot, must speak to a kind of freedom, and yet freedom which enables what exactly? Certainly, it is not a freedom from association. Like Helen, we must still confront the group. People still need to be dealt with, social problems to be negotiated. In a world encased by a "white silence" as De Toth put it, the tendency of people to strike out, gang up, betray, and destroy is axiomatic. None shall escape. How then are we free?
The outlaws are in a sense free, but free only to be enslaved to their own drives and desires. Their transgressions and their sins against humanity have led them to this town, Bitters, at the end of the Earth. The experience of the film is an experience of their embalming in snow and ice, embodied most literally in its relentlessly bleak final movement. The freedom granted by the power of brute force leads them only more quickly and hungrily to this end. Like Starrett, they attempt to control the world by submitting others to their sexual will, and grabbing as much as they can. Thus, in staging their 'entrance', De Toth has the band thrust from screen right headlong into the frame, with child-like abandon. While Helen or Starrett pause and are given a confined space to do so, the outlaws go gleefully and even willingly to their own deaths. They cultivate only a vain hysteric's delusion of freedom.
Contrast this with the film's pivotal scene where the three main characters of the film, Starrett, Captain Bruhn (Burl Ives) the leader of the outlaws, and Gene (David Nelson) the band's youngest recruit, must make a crucial decision: will they sacrifice themselves for the town by leading the band to its death in the wilderness? Accruing added intensity in a film mostly staged in long shot, the scene is broken down into isolated medium shots of each man. Each is left to decide for himself his fate. "Every fool has his reasons," notes Bruhn. Thus, true freedom consists in this reflective act, when the individual is forced to look at him or herself, to face the "white silence" alone - as Starrett does in a mirror before he commits himself to a duel - to contemplate what kind of a life is worth living. It is to understand the inevitability of death and the inherent isolation of our existence, and through understanding to decide how we wish to meet death and isolation. We can, like Starrett at the film's outset or the voracious outlaws or the tragic Captain Bruhn, fool ourselves in constructing a false sphere of control over people, animals, and things, or we can give way to our fate with an aim to endure for as long as possible, to control and rely upon the only thing we can, the self. Only after we have faced this choice can we reenter the scene to influence it morally, to steer the group in a new and 'better' direction.
To try to sum up what I feel is most powerful about it, I seize on the way De Toth has characters enter a scene. 'Scene' here mostly takes place in the stripped, box-like cabins of Bitters, Wyoming, a remote town situated in a valley, near completely circumscribed by a wall of wilderness and mountains, which also serve as the film's dominant visual refrain. Groups of characters at odds must reconcile without the possibility of escape. The problem is that it's getting crowded in Bitters, even with a population of only 20. Whenever a new character or characters enter(s) a scene alliances shift and priorities are reordered. On a narrative level, this process of entrance and effect is readily apparent: At first, the town consists in farmers and cattle herdsmen, these at each other's throats, but the arrival of a band of outlaws transforms how these two groups relate to each other, forcing them all into the same position within the frame. This is a process which plays out formally without stylistic flourish. The execution is ruthless.
A good example of this mode of 'entrance' is the introduction of Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the more prominent of the film's two heroines and a reservoir of mercy in a filmic universe starved of it. In her initial scene, Helen interrupts a conversation between Bitters's local store owner Vic (Donald Elston) and Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) a cattle rancher and the compromised hero of the piece. Like so many other Ryan characters, Starrett is a primitive, a misanthrope and a control freak. His violent love for Helen will drive him to attempt the murder of her weak farmer husband. Brooding over this course of action, he debates the consequences with Vic indirectly. It is at this point that Helen appears. Rather than merely have her walk 'on-stage', however, as I think would have been common Hollywood practice (a practice which Otto Preminger had by this time carried to the apex of its expressive potential), De Toth cuts outside, to a shot of Helen approaching the general store, and cutting well before Vic has completed his last line: "you call his hand it'll be plain murder". That final word, "murder", hangs over Helen as she walks toward the cabin, hangs over her as if it were suspended in the dense whiteness of the sky above her. When she does make her entrance, even though he could probably manage the staging, De Toth leaves her to her own space in medium shot, emphasizing, in the shot-reverse-shot montage that follows, how the other characters internally size her up, debating her presence outside the master shot, but within the grand scheme. At the same time, this plan gives prominence to her own feelings. It is not until she is invited into the group by Vic's daughter Ernine that she enters this master shot, and then only to pass through it and gain access to a site of hospitality, the family dinner table.
The film is filled with variations of such 'entrances' - Starrett confronted by the farmers, Starrett stopping a diabolical dance late in the film, the disruptive arrival of the outlaws etc. - many of which repeatedly deploy this montage which opposes an individual to a group of individuals. With an acrobat's skill, this mechanism brings moment to moment equilibrium to an intricate network of human relations and emotional tensions perpetually in flux. De Toth's style consists in this attempt to keep all the threads taut and balanced through a rhythmically deliberate suspension of climax. He creates an experience of time that is bitter, harsh, and seeming endless.
Most impressive is that De Toth manages to work this same operation in single shots. After all, these groups, framed in master shot, are not communities, but bands of outcasts. Made up of immigrants and cattle herdsmen, they are all 'outlaws' in a way, sharing no culture and representing no social order, but in fact a social disorder. They inhabit fields of conflict: political, emotional and eventually physical battlegrounds, where the individual is measured in binary terms. There are the weak and the strong. It is that 'entrance' of some other individual or some other group which leads people once on the brink of collective self-destruction to band together. In this sense, the isolation of the individual, represented in medium shot, outside of the intertwined, self-destructive group, represented in master shot, must speak to a kind of freedom, and yet freedom which enables what exactly? Certainly, it is not a freedom from association. Like Helen, we must still confront the group. People still need to be dealt with, social problems to be negotiated. In a world encased by a "white silence" as De Toth put it, the tendency of people to strike out, gang up, betray, and destroy is axiomatic. None shall escape. How then are we free?
The outlaws are in a sense free, but free only to be enslaved to their own drives and desires. Their transgressions and their sins against humanity have led them to this town, Bitters, at the end of the Earth. The experience of the film is an experience of their embalming in snow and ice, embodied most literally in its relentlessly bleak final movement. The freedom granted by the power of brute force leads them only more quickly and hungrily to this end. Like Starrett, they attempt to control the world by submitting others to their sexual will, and grabbing as much as they can. Thus, in staging their 'entrance', De Toth has the band thrust from screen right headlong into the frame, with child-like abandon. While Helen or Starrett pause and are given a confined space to do so, the outlaws go gleefully and even willingly to their own deaths. They cultivate only a vain hysteric's delusion of freedom.
Contrast this with the film's pivotal scene where the three main characters of the film, Starrett, Captain Bruhn (Burl Ives) the leader of the outlaws, and Gene (David Nelson) the band's youngest recruit, must make a crucial decision: will they sacrifice themselves for the town by leading the band to its death in the wilderness? Accruing added intensity in a film mostly staged in long shot, the scene is broken down into isolated medium shots of each man. Each is left to decide for himself his fate. "Every fool has his reasons," notes Bruhn. Thus, true freedom consists in this reflective act, when the individual is forced to look at him or herself, to face the "white silence" alone - as Starrett does in a mirror before he commits himself to a duel - to contemplate what kind of a life is worth living. It is to understand the inevitability of death and the inherent isolation of our existence, and through understanding to decide how we wish to meet death and isolation. We can, like Starrett at the film's outset or the voracious outlaws or the tragic Captain Bruhn, fool ourselves in constructing a false sphere of control over people, animals, and things, or we can give way to our fate with an aim to endure for as long as possible, to control and rely upon the only thing we can, the self. Only after we have faced this choice can we reenter the scene to influence it morally, to steer the group in a new and 'better' direction.
4.04.2008
On Auteurism
[Posted originally as part of a discussion in the comments section of girish shambu's blog]
To seize upon the notion of 'wholeness' as integral, if not essential, to the auteurist gospel...
As the cinema concerns itself always with the way we see, it seems to me that auteurism is or should be a matter of an object's integrity of vision. Here I use the word integrity as much in an historical, intertextual sense as an individual sense. Thus, when we see a Renoir film we engage not just an individual, abstracted-from-history Renoir but the Renoir situated in a certain area of space-time. As Tag Gallagher put it, it is a matter of feeling the presence of the auteur behind the work. This presence emerges not simply out of darkness - the greatest fallacy of misapplied auteurism is to assume that the film is just that sequence of images we see on the screen - but out of the chaos of history itself. We feel this presence engaging as an eye engages the world around it, attempting to encompass that world within its limited scope, and, depending on its ability, succeeding or failing forthwith. In this sense, all true auteur cinema not matter how plastic is great neo-realist cinema as well. It is a matter of trying to create a space which suspends the ideological and social tensions of a historical process, to open on the world.
The 'presence' of the auteur is manifested stylistically. The auteur is the style. He or she is the stuff of the films themselves. The auteur is not a mere individual - in that no individual is merely that - but everything that makes up the films, even much that seems alien within the frame, and all that is without the frame. Thus, biography, history, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis etc. - all of these are valid ways of describing and engaging the presence of the auteur. All is relevant, because all interweaves into and out of the text. Does it not enrich our experience of Ford to know that Ford's own mother was illiterate? To know that he watched Winslow Homer paint? Mizoguchi claimed that the cinema is essentially atmosphere. So the point of auteurism is to act as a first step in deepening our sense of what this atmosphere is, of what it means to refer to 'atmosphere'. Because atmosphere is not something that can be reduced to the sum of a film's formal mechanics - some scholars do not grasp this and so often stop short in their analyses just as the film is starting to reveal something of itself in their writing. This is not to say that atmosphere is more than style. For I have already submitted that the auteur is style, but style is also atmosphere. Style is not just an assembly of well-oiled parts, though it is most often and most effectively achieved this way. Essentially style is a glimpse of something greater, a way of seeing and encapsulating the ineffable experience of history. So the atmosphere that produced the films themselves from the ethno-capitalist paranoia that spawned Force of Evil to the consciously produced chaos that Rossellini perpetrated on his own sets for Stromboli and Voyage in Italy is part and parcel of what's on screen. We feel all of it as atmosphere. In great cinema, there is a presence, or better put an ocular consciousness which incorporates all around it, harmonizing multifarious contradictions. Yes, it is like magic or alchemy, an act akin to the sublime and the spiritual, if not exactly any of these.
Today, the fallacy of misapplied auteurism is a result of our own post-modern form of nihilism, a late capitalist notion of individuals as separate and self-determining entities rather than, shall we say, nodal entities. None of us are mere individuals. We are all ineluctably connected to the world around us. The auteur is a consciousness that can manifest this tension of whole but integrated individual in the space of the cinema screen. The contradiction that One can exist without every being only One - this is auteurism.
To seize upon the notion of 'wholeness' as integral, if not essential, to the auteurist gospel...
As the cinema concerns itself always with the way we see, it seems to me that auteurism is or should be a matter of an object's integrity of vision. Here I use the word integrity as much in an historical, intertextual sense as an individual sense. Thus, when we see a Renoir film we engage not just an individual, abstracted-from-history Renoir but the Renoir situated in a certain area of space-time. As Tag Gallagher put it, it is a matter of feeling the presence of the auteur behind the work. This presence emerges not simply out of darkness - the greatest fallacy of misapplied auteurism is to assume that the film is just that sequence of images we see on the screen - but out of the chaos of history itself. We feel this presence engaging as an eye engages the world around it, attempting to encompass that world within its limited scope, and, depending on its ability, succeeding or failing forthwith. In this sense, all true auteur cinema not matter how plastic is great neo-realist cinema as well. It is a matter of trying to create a space which suspends the ideological and social tensions of a historical process, to open on the world.
The 'presence' of the auteur is manifested stylistically. The auteur is the style. He or she is the stuff of the films themselves. The auteur is not a mere individual - in that no individual is merely that - but everything that makes up the films, even much that seems alien within the frame, and all that is without the frame. Thus, biography, history, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis etc. - all of these are valid ways of describing and engaging the presence of the auteur. All is relevant, because all interweaves into and out of the text. Does it not enrich our experience of Ford to know that Ford's own mother was illiterate? To know that he watched Winslow Homer paint? Mizoguchi claimed that the cinema is essentially atmosphere. So the point of auteurism is to act as a first step in deepening our sense of what this atmosphere is, of what it means to refer to 'atmosphere'. Because atmosphere is not something that can be reduced to the sum of a film's formal mechanics - some scholars do not grasp this and so often stop short in their analyses just as the film is starting to reveal something of itself in their writing. This is not to say that atmosphere is more than style. For I have already submitted that the auteur is style, but style is also atmosphere. Style is not just an assembly of well-oiled parts, though it is most often and most effectively achieved this way. Essentially style is a glimpse of something greater, a way of seeing and encapsulating the ineffable experience of history. So the atmosphere that produced the films themselves from the ethno-capitalist paranoia that spawned Force of Evil to the consciously produced chaos that Rossellini perpetrated on his own sets for Stromboli and Voyage in Italy is part and parcel of what's on screen. We feel all of it as atmosphere. In great cinema, there is a presence, or better put an ocular consciousness which incorporates all around it, harmonizing multifarious contradictions. Yes, it is like magic or alchemy, an act akin to the sublime and the spiritual, if not exactly any of these.
Today, the fallacy of misapplied auteurism is a result of our own post-modern form of nihilism, a late capitalist notion of individuals as separate and self-determining entities rather than, shall we say, nodal entities. None of us are mere individuals. We are all ineluctably connected to the world around us. The auteur is a consciousness that can manifest this tension of whole but integrated individual in the space of the cinema screen. The contradiction that One can exist without every being only One - this is auteurism.
3.19.2008
Notes on our Voyage in Italy (cont.)
As the Joyces take their first steps toward the car which will take them to Pompeii, they walk toward the camera, as if into the image itself, a plunge, a diving motion suggesting a defeated acceptance of destiny. At this Rossellini abruptly fades out and immediately back in. This fade-cut emphasizes the sweep of Tony Burton's gesture via which we are presented the space as the sweeping back of curtains presents a stage. Another long pan across a space. Earlier we traced inscrutable horizons, this time the maze-like ruins. But unlike the previous pans, this one finds a focal point, a climax, the discovery of the Pompeian man and wife. This couple seems at once to have sprung from the character's thoughts or their dreams. Hitherto, all the encounters in Naples have been ineffable, vague in significance, if nevertheless intensely clear as physical experience. All the things and people Katharine or Alex have confronted have seemed foreign, other. But this time the encounter is at once a discovery of the self. In these bodies, the Joyces recognize a foreign couple and themselves. It is the point of identification and spacial orientation they have so long sought after, but what kind of revelation does it bear? In seeking renewed life, they find instead death, or rather the point of death. These Pompeian figures are petrified at the very moment of its onset, frozen as the revelation strikes. Overwhelmed Katharine/Bergman exits the frame. Alex/Sanders follows after her. Here they share a moment of decency and respect, a tacit acknowledgment of a shared trauma. He makes excuses to Burton. And they depart on their road to each other...
Now a succession of lateral tracks and pans, tracing a continuous movement from left to right. We pinpoint the characters, moving with them, but obliquely so. We move around them and they around us, pivoting as if every space were a turning point, folding up like a screen, only to fold out again just after the moment of their passing. Thus the space seems alive, inhaling and exhaling with the characters, and yet at the same time with a life of its own, containing them as if caught in the "fishbowl of their own emotions" (Gallagher's words). So does it all seem ineluctable, preordained, and yet new, an adventure always into the undiscovered country. For a moment she pauses, and then continues on, he following. As they enter a new section of the ruins, they stop together. He is on the attack, but she parries, and they move on. At the threshold between one section and another, she stops again, this time to apologize. He replies coldly, and, in turn, aggressively she pivots towards the opening. They continue. They pass a beautifully preserved mosaic, but do not see it. They enter a wider section at which they part from each other, only to drift back together as they turn the corner. At last they come to the widest section of the excavated city. Its expanse consumes their feeble words. "Life is so short," she bemoans. ""That's why one should make the most of it," he replies cruelly. They arrive at their car, get in, and drive back to Naples.
All this walking, this negotiating of space and time, all their competition and their mind games, goading each other, relentlessly prodding and poking each other, only through such a process can they be prepared for grace. As pack animals, they experience this ancient and eternal world. It will make them like the donkey Katharine sees while driving to the catacombs. It will teach them to bear each other's burdens as man and woman. Naples will beat the both of them. Thus, in the final scene, they are stripped of their last shreds of self-defense, the remains of their armor against nakedness. Their Bentley, which has, for both of them, offered such a paralyzing sense of security, allowing them to remain always viewer and not doer, is itself rendered immobile. Now the world forces them into motion, forces them out of the vehicle that has transported them like a hearse transports its dead. Yet even now, wounded, ashamed, resentful, they continue to bite and snap at each other until the last, until the miracle of movement itself defangs them. Katharine is swept away first. Alex follows after. Stirred from their own lifelessness into romance, and so into life. As a cripple comes to walk, so they come to love.
Now a succession of lateral tracks and pans, tracing a continuous movement from left to right. We pinpoint the characters, moving with them, but obliquely so. We move around them and they around us, pivoting as if every space were a turning point, folding up like a screen, only to fold out again just after the moment of their passing. Thus the space seems alive, inhaling and exhaling with the characters, and yet at the same time with a life of its own, containing them as if caught in the "fishbowl of their own emotions" (Gallagher's words). So does it all seem ineluctable, preordained, and yet new, an adventure always into the undiscovered country. For a moment she pauses, and then continues on, he following. As they enter a new section of the ruins, they stop together. He is on the attack, but she parries, and they move on. At the threshold between one section and another, she stops again, this time to apologize. He replies coldly, and, in turn, aggressively she pivots towards the opening. They continue. They pass a beautifully preserved mosaic, but do not see it. They enter a wider section at which they part from each other, only to drift back together as they turn the corner. At last they come to the widest section of the excavated city. Its expanse consumes their feeble words. "Life is so short," she bemoans. ""That's why one should make the most of it," he replies cruelly. They arrive at their car, get in, and drive back to Naples.
All this walking, this negotiating of space and time, all their competition and their mind games, goading each other, relentlessly prodding and poking each other, only through such a process can they be prepared for grace. As pack animals, they experience this ancient and eternal world. It will make them like the donkey Katharine sees while driving to the catacombs. It will teach them to bear each other's burdens as man and woman. Naples will beat the both of them. Thus, in the final scene, they are stripped of their last shreds of self-defense, the remains of their armor against nakedness. Their Bentley, which has, for both of them, offered such a paralyzing sense of security, allowing them to remain always viewer and not doer, is itself rendered immobile. Now the world forces them into motion, forces them out of the vehicle that has transported them like a hearse transports its dead. Yet even now, wounded, ashamed, resentful, they continue to bite and snap at each other until the last, until the miracle of movement itself defangs them. Katharine is swept away first. Alex follows after. Stirred from their own lifelessness into romance, and so into life. As a cripple comes to walk, so they come to love.
Notes on our Voyage in Italy (Rossellini, 1954)
That we should find some films so easy to love and others so difficult is one of our most haunting frustrations. So many seem to take different sides on this issue. You can, they say, force yourself to like anything. And are you not lying to yourself then? And, others add, why should the artistic experience thus be a chore? How empty our films would become. But a different viewpoint holds that it is a question of a certain complexity of visual and aural experience, that it is not a question of merely liking or disliking. As Adrian Martin recently pointed out in an NYU lecture series, is not the problem with the majority of contemporary criticism, a certain lack of imagination, a standardized way of parsing a film whereby reviews become plot summaries followed by or dotted with a number of critical interjections that amount to little more than unexamined positive or negative reactions?
What happens when we find something we've never seen before, in form or content? In aspect or philosophy? A work of cinema, Nicole Brenez has said, "doesn’t fix a mission for itself, but that it exists, breaks things open, introduces disorder into what was believed to be an ineluctable political and in particular ideological order, art as catastrophe in fact." And yet I find that the experience is not always as jarring or disturbing as is claimed here and elsewhere. What then, when it does not move or startle us out of our collective imaginary per se? What if instead we are left feeling just a little perplexed, just a little baffled, a little frustrated, as when, looking back on some inconclusive episode of our past, now rendered elusive by a fog of amnesia, we suddenly feel the urge to interrogate it, turn it over and over, replay it countless times? In the same way, I sometimes replay scenes from The Tarnished Angels to see what new effect it will have in store for me, if any, always hoping that maybe today will be the day that this ineffable film will congeal before my eyes and resolve itself in my mind. And I will be at peace...
How do we escape living the same over and over again? In life or in the cinema?
Voyage in Italy is very much a film about escaping the same, the tedium of the already traversed, and the equal and opposite tedium of the ego's efforts to stake a new claim on life and strike a march into uncharted territory. It embodies the very frustration it offers the viewer. So much here seems mundane and empty, but in fact is full in significance, or more accurately, rich in experience. Perhaps it is not that the theme park of simulacra that engulfs today's individual hides an emptiness, but in fact that it creates emptiness, constructs it as ideology. Don't we always highlight the irreality of reality TV, at once coming to the conclusion that there is no real, nothing to grasp on to, not even each other? What a frustrating experience it is to watch television today. In a similar way, are not the Joyces of Rossellini's film themselves frustrated viewers? Their love frustrated. Their drives, be they romantic or bourgeois, spiritual or carnal, physiological or metaphysical, all at once frustrated. Does not the montage of Rossellini's film relegate them to the position of sedentary, immobile, impotent viewer?
Certainly, it expresses a sense of cultural alienation. Bergman's adventures into the monuments and ruins of Naples, her attempts to comprehend and grasp their concrete forms are always already frustrated. Her forays into space bespeak an attempt to regain a cultural point of orientation. Always the camera is moving, often laterally alongside the characters, tracing an ineluctable passage through space. As we move, the world moves with us. The turning of the Earth, it's impossible to avoid. Maybe Rossellini's Naples is eternal, but it is certainly not dead or fossilized like the Pompeii man and woman, and even they too seem to emanate life from their cast bodies. On the contrary, everything is in ceaseless motion. What is eternal is movement. It is the Joyces who wish the Earth stopped turning for their benefit, so that they could get their bearings. "Life is so short," Katharine bemoans. This is perhaps one of the most vulnerable lines in the history of cinema, but: "That's why one should make the most of it," her husband replies cruelly. Neither can help but to take advantage of the other's pain, to feed on it. What a sado-masochistic pair. And all the while the camera pans right and the space opens up like a fan, drowning their words, engulfing their vulnerable figures, the columns lining up, the ground expanding, unfolding a ruin in a motion more vertiginous and insurmountable than any of those stairwell shots in Vertigo.
Reduced to the psychology of spectator, but always also negotiating real spaces, thus unable to parse or grasp them, the Joyces are naked perhaps like Adam and Eve after the fall. They feel shame, fear, pride, jealousy. The whole movie then is a series of elaborate attempts to hide their nakedness that ends in failure, or deliverance? Naples is no paradise. It is a graveyard at times... Naples is the landscape that does not hide its past. Its history of sin? Above all Naples is sensual phenomena: the brightness and heat of the sun, which blinds and enervates, the indigestible food and unquenchable thirst, the young nubile women and the dirty old men, the eternal, breathing Vesuvius and the dead, fossilized Pompeii, the clear figures of statuary and the eroded ruins of temples. It is ancient and sad, yet fertile and gay. In parts it is decadent, in others primitive, or perhaps both at once. Yet always and most of all, Naples is shameless, forthright in what it is, the people openly emotional, openly carnal, everything on the surface! So, not a paradise, but a place honest in its hurts, open in its wounds, it is a place where people dig up their dead, where the dead are not dead.
How to end these notes? What to say? Why so empty after such a rich experience?
What happens when we find something we've never seen before, in form or content? In aspect or philosophy? A work of cinema, Nicole Brenez has said, "doesn’t fix a mission for itself, but that it exists, breaks things open, introduces disorder into what was believed to be an ineluctable political and in particular ideological order, art as catastrophe in fact." And yet I find that the experience is not always as jarring or disturbing as is claimed here and elsewhere. What then, when it does not move or startle us out of our collective imaginary per se? What if instead we are left feeling just a little perplexed, just a little baffled, a little frustrated, as when, looking back on some inconclusive episode of our past, now rendered elusive by a fog of amnesia, we suddenly feel the urge to interrogate it, turn it over and over, replay it countless times? In the same way, I sometimes replay scenes from The Tarnished Angels to see what new effect it will have in store for me, if any, always hoping that maybe today will be the day that this ineffable film will congeal before my eyes and resolve itself in my mind. And I will be at peace...
How do we escape living the same over and over again? In life or in the cinema?
Voyage in Italy is very much a film about escaping the same, the tedium of the already traversed, and the equal and opposite tedium of the ego's efforts to stake a new claim on life and strike a march into uncharted territory. It embodies the very frustration it offers the viewer. So much here seems mundane and empty, but in fact is full in significance, or more accurately, rich in experience. Perhaps it is not that the theme park of simulacra that engulfs today's individual hides an emptiness, but in fact that it creates emptiness, constructs it as ideology. Don't we always highlight the irreality of reality TV, at once coming to the conclusion that there is no real, nothing to grasp on to, not even each other? What a frustrating experience it is to watch television today. In a similar way, are not the Joyces of Rossellini's film themselves frustrated viewers? Their love frustrated. Their drives, be they romantic or bourgeois, spiritual or carnal, physiological or metaphysical, all at once frustrated. Does not the montage of Rossellini's film relegate them to the position of sedentary, immobile, impotent viewer?
Certainly, it expresses a sense of cultural alienation. Bergman's adventures into the monuments and ruins of Naples, her attempts to comprehend and grasp their concrete forms are always already frustrated. Her forays into space bespeak an attempt to regain a cultural point of orientation. Always the camera is moving, often laterally alongside the characters, tracing an ineluctable passage through space. As we move, the world moves with us. The turning of the Earth, it's impossible to avoid. Maybe Rossellini's Naples is eternal, but it is certainly not dead or fossilized like the Pompeii man and woman, and even they too seem to emanate life from their cast bodies. On the contrary, everything is in ceaseless motion. What is eternal is movement. It is the Joyces who wish the Earth stopped turning for their benefit, so that they could get their bearings. "Life is so short," Katharine bemoans. This is perhaps one of the most vulnerable lines in the history of cinema, but: "That's why one should make the most of it," her husband replies cruelly. Neither can help but to take advantage of the other's pain, to feed on it. What a sado-masochistic pair. And all the while the camera pans right and the space opens up like a fan, drowning their words, engulfing their vulnerable figures, the columns lining up, the ground expanding, unfolding a ruin in a motion more vertiginous and insurmountable than any of those stairwell shots in Vertigo.
Reduced to the psychology of spectator, but always also negotiating real spaces, thus unable to parse or grasp them, the Joyces are naked perhaps like Adam and Eve after the fall. They feel shame, fear, pride, jealousy. The whole movie then is a series of elaborate attempts to hide their nakedness that ends in failure, or deliverance? Naples is no paradise. It is a graveyard at times... Naples is the landscape that does not hide its past. Its history of sin? Above all Naples is sensual phenomena: the brightness and heat of the sun, which blinds and enervates, the indigestible food and unquenchable thirst, the young nubile women and the dirty old men, the eternal, breathing Vesuvius and the dead, fossilized Pompeii, the clear figures of statuary and the eroded ruins of temples. It is ancient and sad, yet fertile and gay. In parts it is decadent, in others primitive, or perhaps both at once. Yet always and most of all, Naples is shameless, forthright in what it is, the people openly emotional, openly carnal, everything on the surface! So, not a paradise, but a place honest in its hurts, open in its wounds, it is a place where people dig up their dead, where the dead are not dead.
How to end these notes? What to say? Why so empty after such a rich experience?
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