La cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995): sociopaths of the world, unite!

In one intriguing sense, this is a Marxist allegory. Two working class women are alienated from their labours and their social roles. That alienation frees them from the entanglements of the social structure. In their freedom, they unite as individuals and work together to achieve a common goal. But these aren’t your typical members of the proletariat: they’re childlike sociopaths with schoolgirl giggles and bows in their hair. One of them is alienated primarily by her illiteracy, which puts her in a situation of perpetual lies and isolation; the other merely suffers from a severe case of ressentiment. The representative members of the bourgeoisie, who employ the illiterate woman as their maid, are kindly but condescending—talking about the maid as if she weren’t there, they exacerbate her alienation.

The film develops this situation with remarkable compactness. Right from the beginning, the score announces that something is deeply wrong and probably about to get worse. But then that score fades away for much of the film, and the plot continually develops in unexpected ways. Although the film’s aesthetic is primarily one of subdued naturalism, it manages to imbue small moments, such as the maid needing to read a grocery list, with palpable tension; and the film’s climax is almost excruciatingly tense (reminding me somewhat of Funny Games), partly due to very effective use of cross-cutting and Mozart. However, the tension is created not primarily via filmic techniques, but via the meticulous development of the characters and their situation, which creates a core of emotions and ethics for the scenes of tension. All in all, this is probably one of the best suspense films I’ve seen.

What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan, 1994); or, the loneliness of the Sartrean lovers

This is a movie for the broken people, the desperate people, the lonely people, the people who hide away from the world. At one point, Tom Noonan’s character says he’s writing a book for those people. But he’s a damn liar and he knows it.

The entirety of the film consists of a real-time depiction of a dinner date between two such people, just a man and woman alone in the woman’s apartment. With finely tuned dialogue and performances, with both humor and tension, the film reveals the moment-by-moment changes in the relationship between them: shifts in affection, power, perception of the other’s personality, perception of the other’s perception of one’s own personality; shifts subtle or overt, gradual or spontaneous. If anything, the dialogue is perhaps too precise in delineating these shifts, occasionally coming off as obvious in its construction.

But what is of most interest to me here is not these fine-grained movements in the relationship, but two overarching aspects that contain them. First, although no other characters appear in the film, the man and woman are acutely aware of the existence of others. The two do not merely exist for one another: they experience their interactions within the context of a plenitude of eyes, a whole social world around them and under the gaze of which their relationship falls. Typically, films do not emphasize this aspect of romance (if they acknowledge it at all), except perhaps in the concrete form of disapproving parents or neighbours. But Noonan’s film insists upon it immediately, by zooming in on all the people that can be seen through the windows of the woman’s apartment—the date occurs in an exposed world, in which all is at least potentially viewed by others, who are themselves exposed in the same manner. All around, infused into the experience of the date, is the potential for it to be seen and judged.

The second, more pervasive aspect that the film focuses on—and which is in some sense the foundation of all social interactions—is the power of the specific Other’s existence and gaze: not the diffuse haze of otherness across the way, but the concrete Other across the table. The Other’s gaze has the power to know you, to strip away the façade and see the festering wounds underneath. And at the same time, the Other refuses to conform to your expectations or idea of him or her: he or she is radically free of your conceptualization of the world, and this fact cannot be escaped…at least if you allow the Other to get under your skin. The two characters respond to these potentialities oppositely: The woman is anxious, eager to know the man better, to let him know her, and to let him know about the cake she bought and the book she wrote. The man, Noonan, hides behind a façade of composure, intellect, and scorn, afraid to know others and to be known: he wants the woman to know all about the book he is not writing, but not the fact that he is not writing it.

In the film’s two pivotal scenes, these opposite stances are pinpointed. In one scene, the woman reads the man a story she wrote. It’s a deeply personal work, a harrowing reinvention of the fairy tale genre; the woman is nervous about the man’s response, but she desperately wants to read it to him, to reveal herself to him. But the man is even more nervous about her revealing herself in this way. He’s uncomfortable with the openness, the intimacy. He wants everybody to behave as easily understood packages of traits, separated and closed off from one another. With heavy shadows and cuts to creepy dolls, the visuals wisely play up the frightful discomfort of the scene, the sense that something is being shown that the man fears. (And interestingly, during this scene the camera again zooms through a window to reveal an outsider in another apartment, again emphasizing the haze of otherness out there; the man is not merely afraid of intimacy, but of it altering his Being-in-the-social-world, the way he presents himself for the eyes of the abstract They.)

The second pivotal scene is the final one. In that scene, the man becomes so fearful of the situation that he gets set to leave for the night, pretending to be entirely oblivious to the woman’s pleas for connection. When she grows angry and correctly accuses him of disingenuousness, he admits that he is living a lie, that he is a broken man, a fearful man, an ashamed man who only likes to pretend to have written a book for such people, and who goes home everyday only to watch TV and lament all his failings. Finally, at this point, he wants the woman to know him, wants her to accept and comfort him. But it’s too late. He’s already screwed everything up. He’s been screwing it up for years.

Report (Conner, 1967): that tragic moment, so different and so new

I’m very interested in how a particular event in one’s life can become a kind of core, around which everything else revolves. One experiences life in terms of that event; it lingers, sometimes underneath, sometimes atop each subsequent moment, perpetually coloring all of one’s thoughts and feelings.

Report isn’t quite about that, but it is a sort of filmic analogue of it. The central event, in this case, is the assassination of JFK. Video footage of JFK in his car is shown…then the screen collapses through a sequence of glitches into abstract flickers and finally pure blackness. Over everything, audio recordings detail the event. It’s built up as something dreadful and momentous. More video footage of JFK in his car is shown…again and again, as if time is out of joint, as if this moment weighs down on all others, inescapably. We see a countdown, the kind that precedes the beginning of a film, but it just repeats, never reaching its endpoint. A flurry of footage follows: a bullfight, parades and war scenes, buildings and flags, advertisements, Frankenstein, mushroom clouds and the statue of liberty, a lightbulb bursting in slow motion and a boy falling out of a pool. All these entirely dissimilar scenes, images of Americana, images of film, images of alternative flows of time, are entangled with the assassination, ineluctably colored by it. Everything is viewed in terms of that one event. It claws everything toward itself, and it won’t let go.

It’s a powerful movie. It should be seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeI_25S3YqY

Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984); or, beware the naked man in the chair

This is some kind of a brilliant movie. Cassavetes’ other films typically seem very hermetic—a small cast of characters in a very singular locale, a little self-contained world of histrionics and flagrant emotions. But here, the scope is broader, the characters travel about and interact with seemingly “ordinary” people. Much of the film has the vibe of a fish-out-of-water comedy: as if the characters from Cassavetes’ other films woke up in their late middle ages, disoriented, probably hungover, suddenly realizing they are completely out of place in the world and that their children hate them. It’s all very humorous. I laughed, anyway.

The basic plot tells of a brother and sister. The brother, played by Cassavetes, drinks heavily and sleeps with a different woman or two each night—his young son runs away from him in terror. The sister, played by Gena Rowlands, loves obsessively and suffocatingly, and is in the process of unwillingly being divorced—her daughter tells her, deadpan, that she hates living with her. Those scenes with their children are pretty funny.

Even when it’s not outright funny, the film’s got a sublimely woozy, jazzy atmosphere; not coincidentally, both of the main characters pass out within the first half hour or so. The pace is relaxed. Unless YouTube was up to some hijinks, there seems to be a lot of almost subliminal jump cuts, as if the movie is about to fall asleep. YouTube definitely contributed a foggy haze, though I think some of that must have been there to begin with. Early on, much of the dialogue consists of hilarious non sequiturs. Cassavetes himself looks like a terminally exhausted demon jester, grinning devilishly while appearing to be on his last legs. The best scenes occur in the dark, with one or two light sources illuminating the characters, and some laid-back jazz playing in the background. It’s mesmerizing, watching these people go about their gradual self-destruction in such an easy atmosphere.

None of this is to say there’s no poignancy to be had. No, there’s poignancy aplenty. Only a few seconds after Cassavetes’ son runs away from him, as Cassavetes takes a beating from his son’s concerned stepfather, his son says repeatedly, pleadingly, that he loves him. The moment is all the more affecting for its abrupt switch from humor. And towards the end, Cassavetes’ devotion to his sister becomes very touching.

That part, toward the end, is where the film gets strange, with the arrival of a lot of farm animals and a musical interlude. The animals, though they afford the film its comedic highlight, felt a bit too much like farce; they fit with the general tone, but they perhaps push that tone a bit too hard. However, the heightened absurdity becomes perfectly justified by the film’s finale. Outside of a Herzog film, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered such a transcendently absurd ending. It involves a thunderstorm, a goat, a naked man in a chair, and faces seen through rain-covered windows. It feels like a culmination, a refinement of the unreal world that Cassavetes’ characters inhabit, a world of incoherent emotions and mad gestures of love. At the same time, it feels just like the best moments in life, the moments that suddenly stand forth, when we’re acutely aware of not only them, their feeling of reality heightened and scintillating, but also of all the moments that they contain, all the events in our lives that have led up to them. It’s magnificent.

L’Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962): anxiety, ennui, and the weight of the vacuum

You know when you desperately want to say something but you’re too wracked with anxiety to get it out, your mouth is filled with tongue, your throat aches, you feel a pressure in your chest and and a frantic energy in your frozen limbs, and the space around you weighs down, constricting you and seemingly engorged with its emptiness? Well, L’Eclisse does a damn fine job of capturing that feeling. In its opening scene, in which Monica Vitti ends her engagement, the characters barely talk, but the space around them won’t shut up. In one shot, the camera slowly arcs around the faces of the two former lovers; unlike a still shot or a pan, the shot insists on the three-dimensionality of the space around the faces, makes us aware of it all around them. Monica Vitti is adrift in space. Everything in the scene—frames-within-frames, reflections, objects leaping forth, others flattened, recessed, a blowing fan in the foreground, looming large in front of a tangible void, other objects in the vast distance far behind, Vitti lost in the divide—everything  relentlessly reminds us of it, this space around her. The space is palpable, it separates, it weighs down, it cannot be overcome. In it, Vitti is the model of ennui, of aimless, unspoken miseries. Most everything in the movie is unspoken.

The characters go through their motions, they engage in ridiculous, empty amusements and activities: an embarrassing tribal dance in black face, the glorious frenzy of the stock market exchange. Should the fleeting love affair at the center of the story be included in that list? I don’t know. It’s a fine love affair as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far. At film’s end there’s a sequence lasting seven or eight minutes. In this sequence, the central characters are nowhere to be found. There’s nothing but space.

Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970); or, oh my god, space is breaking!

One of the things I love about 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps my favorite movie, is the way its ending uses film to show the evolution of humanity beyond the confines of our everyday understanding of space and time. Serene Velocity, available for viewing here, basically refines that idea to its essence. It shows us a well-defined space, a hallway, that it then completely breaks apart simply by cutting between different shots, and our whole feeling of space is broken apart at the same time. It’s mesmerizing and overwhelming.

Our usual notions of space and time are based on our view of them (our visual field) from a single position and with a smooth movement forward in time. Even when we think of an “objective” viewpoint, it tends to be conflated with what we would see if we just stood there looking at something. And when we think of space and time from a scientific or mathematical perspective, it tends to be as a rigid structure through which things move. By alternating between the different shots, the film breaks down all these notions by not allowing us to see the hallway from the position of an idealized spectator, and it simultaneously makes the hallway into a fluid rather than rigid space. Also, I think the length of the film is essential, since the film’s rhythm, particularly of its variations in lighting, serves to explore the moods of the space.

It’s also something of an attack on what I think are some basic misinterpretations of cinema: the notion that film simply records “reality”, and the opposite notion that film simply presents illusions, fabricated images that are pointedly unreal. The broken up hallway is clearly not simply a recording of the outside “external reality” of anything; it is an exploration of entirely different dimensions of that “outside” which we are in and which we experience. At the same time, it is not presented as a “pure image”, as a symbol or illusion; it is presented as as an exploration of the actual reality of the space, the limits and extensions of it—not in its empirical, “objective” dimensions, but in its dimensions of feeling and perception. Or as Gehr said it,

In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.

The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991): the sea of sense

Veronique is an ethereal rumination on the profundities of sensuous experience, fate, and human interconnectedness. My two favorite shots come relatively early in the film. In the first of them, one of the two central characters sings in a choir as it begins to rain. The other singers appear to scurry to shelter in the background, but the singer in the foreground continues to sing, sublimely, before looking up and smiling almost ecstatically. The shot is framed tightly around her, such that the rain almost appears to come from nowhere—what’s important is her immediate experience of it. There is an overwhelming glory in this moment, a transcendent embrace of its existence-as-moment, of the pure, immediate and sensuous experience of it. The second of my two favorite shots is a view of buildings through a window. A distortion in the image, caused by the glass, moves across the frame, stretching and smearing bits of stone and grass is in its passage. It is almost as if the film is revealing something mystical, something beyond our grasp, hidden within or between the quanta of our experience.

In some sense, the whole film is like these shots: a miasma of sensuous experience, built from stunning interplays of light and dark, colors and sounds. In several scenes, the immediacy of these experiences as experiences is brought home by first-person-perspective shots. But the beauty of the movie comes not only from the beauty of its images and sounds, or the moments in our own lives that they evoke—those rare moments when we were suddenly clearly aware of the sublimity in living and breathing and feeling—but from its central narrative conceit of the double. The two central characters are identical in almost every way. Both are singers and both are of ill health. One dies while singing, and the other immediately afterward gives it up. In these two characters, the film seems to suggest a metaphysics of sensuousness: it is as if there is an underlying quintessence, a great sea of joy and hurt and sounds and sights, and we all take part in it, almost as though our individual identities are simply ripples or agglomerations of this medium of raw experience.

At one point, a puppeteer puts on a show in which a dancer dies and is reborn as a butterfly, and we immediately think of this story’s relationship with the two central characters: the one dies, the other lives by avoiding the path of the first, almost as if the experience of the one transmigrates to the other. Later, the puppeteer manipulates the surviving woman. With obscure cues, he draws her into loving him. She loves him nonsensically, with abandon. The question of human freedom is raised: if two people can be one, or one person two, if all is sense and mystery, then the notion of freedom is absurd. We are all parts of the vast sea, and the motions of this sea are ineffable. But our existence is a partaking of the whole, and on occasion we catch a glimpse of that whole and feel that it is sublime.

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967): madness and representation

The opening scene: a vaudeville show, the titular Titicut Follies, performed by the inmates and guards of a hospital for the criminally insane. These shows are presumably put on to give the inmates something to do, something to accomplish and perhaps take pride in, and as a way of integrating them into a normalizing social context. But this scene offers no justification: it shows only the performers, partly in shadows and singing away. In refusing to contextualize the performances as (feeble) attempts at socialization, we see them within a whole history of underlying carnivalry in society’s modern attitude toward madness. They are condescending showcases. “Oh, listen to those madmen sing. Aren’t they having fun, those poor madmen. What a show!”

One of the best scenes: a shot is held seemingly interminably as an enraged inmate stamps, naked, back and forth in his dark, barren cell, stopping once to hammer his fists against his barred window. It is riveting, the overpowering reality of a completely broken human being, fragile and enraged and despairing. The camera cuts to a closeup, presumably a few minutes later (though it could be any time), and the now-calm man informs an off-camera questioner that he was once a teacher; his sudden calmness and the facticity of his life history makes the weight of his despair and stifled rage all the more palpable and catastrophic.

This scene, and the film’s hyper-realist style in general, insists on the textural reality, the painful human intimacy of what we’re viewing. It is an attack on society’s representation of madness, the representation exemplified by the vaudeville show. The film insists on the fleshy humanity of the inmates and the dehumanization they undergo in the institute.

Of course, even the “reality” that the film insists on is another very particular representation of madness. But the film’s representation is self-reflexive: it makes an issue of representations. Indeed, the whole movie is a layering of representations. And at its center is the structure of the mental institution itself: the institution both passively representing society’s conception of mental illness and actively participating in the construction of that conception, defining “mental illness” and forcing its inmates into the confines of that meaning.

Oh Dem Watermelons (Rob Nelson, 1965): semiotics of the melon

I’m pretty sure this movie is a masterpiece. It begins with a still shot of a watermelon on a patch of grass. The edges of the film are blurred like in those old-timey daguerreotype photos (as in The Assassination of Jesse James). There’s an old-timey song playing, in which a slave laments the death of his master, playing on the watermelon’s traditional role as a signifier of black people and good old-timey southern slavery.

Then everything starts disintegrating. There’s a flurry of scenes showing the watermelon in a variety of bizarre situations: it chases people down a street, falls out of a rocket, is sliced open and has animal organs pulled out of it, makes love to a woman (or vice versa), and is destroyed in any number of ways. This mirthful deconstruction of the watermelon’s traditional signification is accompanied by an analogous change in style. The old-timey music transitions into a droning, repetitious pattern of tones (composed by Steve Reich), and the editing and cinematography become almost frantic. Near the end, there’s a sequence of shots where the camera whips around so rapidly that the images are dissolved into abstractions reminiscent of Man Ray’s rayographs in Emak-Bakia. Then there’s a sequence of edits so rapid that it bests Eisenstein’s most audacious montages. I think I saw a crucifix in there somewhere, but it might have been a telephone poll.

Amazing stuff. The playing with symbols, as well as the use of music to keep things lively, reminded me somewhat of Scorpio Rising, which is one of my favorites.

Here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvs0-nPNha8

Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997): fantasy in motion

What I love about Miyazaki isn’t his recurrent themes of nature or his depictions of children growing up in a fantasy world. What I love is how he creates images, moments, and scenes of wonder. He doesn’t try to jazz them up with fancy editing or camera angles, distractingly trying to convince us of just how much wonderment they contain; he simply displays their essential features and movements and then lets us marvel at them. He often takes advantage of the unique capabilities of cinema by focusing on motion and change, on moments that unfold in time. For example, in Princess Mononoke, when a forest god walks, foliage grows and dies in his footsteps, and Miyazaki shows this in a single shot, emphasizing the continuity of the process. (Only a few minutes later, this moment is contrasted with an event of such rapidity that it collapses the flow of time to its limit, as a severed wolf’s head springs through the air and bites off a woman’s arm, all in a split second. Again, motion and change are emphasized (extending even to violent changes in the bodily forms of an iron monger and a wolf god), and the moment of lightning speed gains much of its impact from its contrast with the preceeding slowly unfolding moments.)

The point: Princess Mononoke is so filled with wonder that it’s in danger of bursting. It follows the usual mythical journey of a hero into a land of the unknown, but it’s not overly concerned with the hero. Instead, it’s all about the unknown—in the proper fabular sense of folk tales, in which bizarre events seem to happen with no sense at all, or at least with a grand ambiguity, even an arbitrarity. In this world, everything is always in motion, always metamorphosing; there is nothing fixed, nothing certain…especially physical forms, which frequently transform and are dismembered with alarming frequency (reminding me of the utter lack of reverence for the human body displayed by English legends, particularly in their wondrous beheading contests). As soon as the hero begins his journey, his arm is transformed into a wriggling gargantua. Later, a god or two is killed as if such a thing were an everyday event. And all of this is marvelously evoked by Miyazaki’s emphasis on the motion of wonder (or the other way around).