Montage as subjectivity in Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch

I sometimes think this might be my favorite film, and it demands a lengthy review. But instead I’ll offer a very brief one.

Peter Watkins, as always, uses a mix of narrative and documentation here, but to much greater effect than in his other movies (that I’ve seen, at least). The film is primarily a biography of Munch, but it also contains detailed analyses of his art and his social milieu. My favorite thing about it is its evocation of Munch’s subjectivity via a very dense use of montage and layers of sound. “Present-day” scenes are constantly intercut with pivotal moments from his past; the sound of sobbing continues over interviews and voiceovers about his art. The method is very reminiscent of Faulkner’s style in The Sound and the Fury, in the way that pivotal past moments anchor and define Munch’s ongoing experience, but the layers of sound and imagery are a denser, more textured style only possible in film. The film is also magnificently self-reflexive: Munch is fixated on capturing his experience in his art, and the movie is fixated on capturing his experience as well as his capturing his fixation on that experience. This self-reflexivity is aided by his stares toward the viewer, allowing the film to take on his subjectivity in multiple ways, not only as consciousness but as self-consciousness. But it goes still further by insisting on the subjectivity of everybody around him. It delves into their past and their own experience, and they too turn and look at the viewer. Furthermore, seemingly random contextualizing bits of history are related in voiceover. But all of this is related back to Munch; it is his experience as a contextualizing and contextualized subject, a subject in an intersubjective context.

The Reader (Daldry, 2008); or, the past ain’t through with you, and you ain’t through with the past

When The Reader was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, it was rightly criticized as being undeserving (though certainly many worse films have been nominated, and even won). There’s no denying that its filmmaking is horridly clunky, and that its style is an odd mix of muddledness and hamfistedness. However, despite its weaknesses, I think many people didn’t give it its due. One aspect often criticized is the seeming slightness of the central “mystery” (that Winslet’s character is illiterate); many people criticized the film for using the character’s illiteracy to somehow try to justify her horrendous actions in the Holocaust. Obviously, it is no justification. But there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on in the film, and not much of it has to do with the Holocaust.

The point is that for Winslet’s character, her illiteracy was defining and pervasive. Everything she experienced was experienced in terms of it. It was an essential component of her entire way of life—withdrawn and defensive, closed off from the world, going through the motions of living while in a self-induced state of perpetual guilt and isolation. Like Ralph Fiennes’ character, we might wish that her guilt was related to her actions during the Holocaust rather than to her illiteracy. But the whole point of the movie is that that’s not the case, and that certain, perhaps seemingly trivial things weigh on us and define our mode of being—including our mode of being ethical creatures—whether we like it or not.

However, the crux of the film is not that particular seemingly trivial thing,  or its importance to Winslet’s mode of being. The crux of the film is its importance, and that of Winslet in general, to Fiennes‘ way of being. His affair with her is definitive for him in the same way that her illiteracy is for her: it colors everything else throughout his life. And this is reinforced, and given a particular ethical character, when he withholds his evidence at her trial. He withholds it precisely because of her overwhelming importance to him, which he wants to overcome by ignoring her situation (and by getting it on with a sexy young girl)—but in doing so, he becomes burdened by his own guilt, and henceforth he becomes doubly defined by his relationship to her. He feels the need to finally free himself of her influence and absolve himself of his guilt by understanding her and helping her to remove her own guilt. He wants everything to be “cleared up” in this way; he wants to bring her out into a disclosedness, an ethical state in which she can look outside herself and accept her guilt for her role in the Holocaust and for her role in his life. And everybody could understand everybody and everybody could move past the past. But this is his goal. This is what weighs on him, not on her; she only wants to escape her isolated being in order to find love or companionship. And that difference, which in the end precludes the possibility of him understanding or forgiving her (and hence being able to forget her and forgive himself), is a significant portion of what weighs on him.

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