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Film Details #2: The Red Roses in Eastwood's The Gauntlet

Film Details is a blog series of posts focusing on a specific detail in a film. Details may vary from a single shot, a particular cut, or a piece of sound to individual scenes, objects, and other elements in mise-en-scène as well as larger-scale motifs in the film under scrutiny.

Widely panned by critics, Clint Eastwood's sixth directorial feature The Gauntlet (1977) is not generally considered a good film. It's shallow, unoriginal, and childish action entertainment. I am not going to challenge this received view of the film. Rather than commending the film or "re-evaluating" it as a whole, I would like to point out a small detail in one scene of the film which, despite its minuteness, I believe, embodies a less discussed but intriguing aspect of The Gauntlet and Eastwood's cinema in general. It is a bouquet of red roses that appears in one surprisingly subdued scene whose restraint tone, however, remains hidden beneath the noise of gunshots in the film's louder sequences.

Despite the show-off spectacles typical for the action genre, at its heart, The Gauntlet is a love story about two lonely castaways on the run. An alcoholic middle-aged good-for-nothing cop Ben Shockley, played by Eastwood himself, has been given the task of bringing a prostitute with ties to the mob, Gus Mally, played by Eastwood's then-partner Sondra Locke, from Las Vegas to Phoenix in order for her to testify in a trial against the mob. What's supposed to be a routine job of escorting "a nothing witness" for "a nothing trial" turns out to be a rather unnecessarily elaborate hoax to get both of them dead because Mally has incriminating information about Blakelock, the Phoenix head of police, who gave Shockley the assignment. Blakelock chose Shockley because he assumed the drunken bum would not get the job done. While running away from Blakelock's henchmen, Mally and Shockley begin to fall in love. Their journey culminates in the film's well-known finale, a ludicrously absurd sequence where Mally and Shockley drive an armored bus through the titular gauntlet of police officers shooting at them all the way to Phoenix City Hall. Having survived the ordeal and revealed the prevalent corruption in the police force, they walk away to their future together.

Known for his macho westerns and rough detective stories, Eastwood the director has never had much of a knack (let alone a penchant) for creating romantic relationships on screen. The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Breezy (1973) are the rare exceptions -- and the less said about the latter the better. To put it bluntly, and this also explains many of the issues in the two exceptions, Eastwood is too fast and impatient of a director to trust in budding developments and tender subtleties. Despite (or precisely due to) such rapidity, Eastwood's films paradoxically feel slow; to quote critic Pauline Kael, there is a "dead feeling" and a "passionless quality" in them [1]. However, the detail of the roses, which Shockley orders for Mally in a key scene before the action finale, interestingly speaks against this generally warranted presumption about Eastwood.

Mally and Shockley seek cover in a run-down motel in a small Arizonian town near Phoenix. While Mally is taking a bath, casually enough to leave the bathroom door open, which already builds erotic tension for the scene, Shockley calls the motel desk. "Would you have anything like room service in this joint," he asks. Receiving an apparently negative answer, Shockley suggests: "Well maybe you could send your kid out. Pick up some steaks, fried chicken, something like that, maybe a bottle of wine." As the desk inquires whether Shockley would like anything else, he says: "Is there anything like a florist around this neighborhood?" The phone call is executed in one medium close-up of Eastwood, but after the last question there is a cut to a reverse view of Mally in the bath from Shockley's point of view in the other room as she swings her arm from the tub to its side.

The image of Mally's limp arm by the side of the tub then dissolves into a shot of Mally's hands picking up red roses from a box, apparently from a local florist's shop, and placing them into a rather tacky yellow jug. This awkward piece of decoration is probably the best thing they could find from the motel given that they are also drinking wine from plain ordinary glasses. Mally smells and gently caresses each flower as she puts them in the jug. Not much emphasis is put on the roses because immediately after the dissolve Shockley begins to open up about his life, and the spectator's attention is drawn to the dialogue: "When I was a kid growing up, I used to hate cops." Once he got a little older, he became to see cops as "the only people I knew stood for something" and therefore eventually joined the forces. Eastwood hits the gist of his monologue when he says: "I had this dream, boy. I had this dream of meeting the right woman and having kids. Most of all, breaking that big case. I can just see him pinning captain bars on me and… Well, the years went by. Never did meet that right woman. Seemed like other guys were always breaking the big case. After a while you get to the point where you just put in your twenty and wait for your retirement. Now I get the big case and I'm picked to go down with it."

While Shockley is pouring his heart out, Mally is very slowly placing the roses into the jug. It is as though she lingered on each rose to appreciate its shape, texture, and scent. Given the context of Shockley's monologue, the roses begin to acquire a sense of vulnerability. In their fragile yet beautiful state, the roses are a reminder of the characters' lost dreams.

Struck by the bleakness of Shockley's closing words, Mally walks away from the roses and tells Shockley that they do not have to go back to Phoenix to get shot dead; they are free to go "any place." Shockley explains that he must go back so that he will know that he at least tried to prove himself in a fight against the perennial villain of Eastwood's cinema: the government. Surprised by his devotion, Mally calls her mother and tells her that she has found a man and that they are going to settle down and have children. It's an odd turn of events to say the least, a turn that slightly surprises Shockley but not nearly as much as the spectator. In another phone call from the motel, Mally calls the bookies of Las Vegas to put all her life savings (5,000$) on a non-existent race horse ("Mally No Show") that the mob has set up to bet on her not making it alive (yes, for some reason). Hell-bent to put everything on the line for a second chance, she grabs the red roses from the yellow jug, puts them back into the box, and tells Shockley: "Let's go."

It's at this moment when Mally takes the roses back from the ugly jug where they would have been left do die without admiration that the roses become even more important. No longer are they mere souvenirs of lost dreams but frail promises of the possibility of reaching dreams ahead. Taking the flowers is kind of a long shot (they might die without water, of course), but it's worth the risk.

Although the silly and implausible details of the story start to leak into this scene from the overall bad movie that The Gauntlet is, the scene still stands out for its slow-paced and subdued sensitivity against the more fast-paced, action-packed, and heavily underlined scenes of the film. Prior to the motel scene, there is first an extensive chase sequence where a helicopter tries to kill Mally and Shockley in a car and then a sexual assault on Mally in a moving train. Moreover, the motel scene is followed by the climactic sequence in which Mally and Shockley try to get to Phoenix City Hall in an armored bus while a number of police officers try to shoot them dead at Blakelock's command. Even at the beginning of the motel scene Eastwood still cannot resist playing his type as he calls his colleague that he is coming for Blakelock to "nail his ass to the wall!" It's really the following call to "room service" that sets the mood for the rest of the motel scene, a significant respite and change of pace.

It is almost as if the dissolve of the bathtub shot to the flower shot resonated with a slight shift of tone. This dissolving match cut, which is followed by a gentle upward tilt from the box of roses to Mally's upper body, is also an exceptionally beautiful stylistic device in Eastwood's cinema. To me, this aesthetic moment belongs to the same sphere with the alluring bifocal lens shots in Unforgiven (1992). It creates an important pause in the rhythm before the appearance of the red roses.

The dialogue in the scene might sound like typical Eastwood schlock, but at the same time it does feel appropriate to the "loser" (as Eastwood would call them) characters with big dreams but slim prospects. "You're a faded number on a rusty badge," Mally sums up Shockley in an earlier scene, and her "college degree" does little to elevate her. Regardless of the possible low-brow aspects of the dialogue in the motel scene, the red roses -- or, more specifically, the way the roses are used in the film -- come from another place.

The red rose is of course not an unconventional romantic symbol by any means so there is a familiarity to that place. One might say it's even a cliche. Yet, just like the paperback words from their mouths, the symbol fits these characters and their life worlds like a glove. The roses embody not just a better life but precisely the main characters' rather naive view of that supposedly better life somewhere in northern Arizona, "maybe near the canyon" where it's "supposed to be really beautiful." The roses embody what the characters are reaching, whereas the other details in the mise-en-scène of the motel space, such as the ugly yellow jug that sticks out like a sore thumb or the plain ordinary glasses for wine in a badly decorated space, are the mundane world of their discouraging everyday lives they wish to escape. Now, as the possibility of resistance and redemption shines ahead, it's time for wine and roses in the desert. It's farewell to the bottles of Jack Daniel's that Shockley has been gulping down throughout the film.

What is more important than the general symbol value attached to roses is obviously the meaning the roses bear for the characters. It's probably been a while, if not an eternity, since Shockley has bought flowers for a woman. And it's probably been equally long since someone has shown a gentle romantic gesture towards Mally the prostitute. Thus the scene contrasts not only with the preceding sexual assault but also an earlier scene where a cop crudely demands information about Mally's sex work lifestyle. Given the casual impoliteness and abuse she has been accustomed to, one might even see Mally's act of gently caressing the flowers almost emblematic of her wishes and desires for how she would like to be touched and cared.

There is this charming, unspoken sense of the unseen world of emotions in the roses. It's worth pointing out that the roses are never brought up in the dialogue after the open-ended question about a local florist. Although Mally carries the roses from the motel to the bus, from the bus to the final confrontation at Phoenix City Hall, and even remembers to pick them up from the ground when she leaves the place with the wounded Shockley as they walk away in the end (and the box of roses is visible in the film's final long shot), no verbal attention is ever drawn to these flowers in the film.

This is quite exceptional for Eastwood. Things are often hammered in and very little room for subtlety is left. It's not enough that the obnoxious selfishness of the boxer's parents is acted out in an embarrassingly exaggerated way in the director's most overrated film Million Dollar Baby (2004); it also needs to be constantly frowned upon by other characters. Eastwood essentially ruins one of his better films, a tender melodramatic love story, The Bridges of Madison County by having badly performed grown-up characters in the frame story either state the obvious or act like little children when it comes to discussing a hidden family secret from the past. The worst part about it is the raison d'être for such juvenile execution of the material. Eastwood has the bad tendency to use stupid supporting characters to, first, elevate his main characters and to, second, satisfy his audience's desire to feel like they are on the right side of the story or history. This habit reaches cringe-inducing levels in scenes depicting government investigators' doubts toward an American hero in Sully (2016), an embarrassing piece of "entertainment" that feels like the equivalent to a teenager flipping the finger to his close-minded parents.

The presentation of the red roses in The Gauntlet, which as a whole is not short of these flaws, of course, comes from another place in Eastwood's oeuvre, the almost terra incognito of understatement. Just as the roses are never mentioned in the dialogue, there is, for example, no scene where Shockley would hand the flowers to Mally. Thus Eastwood's screen persona avoids being embarrassed as he is by Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County when the lady makes fun at the expense of his self-picked bouquet of flowers, but more importantly the use of narrative ellipsis eludes the dangers of sentimentality -- one of the most common shortcomings in Eastwood's films. Furthermore, there is no previous scene where Mally would express her desire to receive flowers nor is there any indirect indication about flowers. One might, for example, imagine a scene where either Shockley or Mally would see someone receiving flowers, but no such scene exists in the film. The roses, so to speak, come from nowhere. There is this subtly building romantic tension in the motel scene, which is a bit undermined by the unexpected call to Mally's mother, but the red roses continue embodying a broader space of meaning that remains understated: the imagined other realm of happiness. Mally picks the roses up and carries them to the end in an effort to hold on to the dream of that place -- the nowhere zone from which the roses come. In a strange way, as an attentive viewer following the roses in the film's final act, I catch myself holding on to the red roses as well in a similar effort to appreciate this unseen territory of understatement and sensitivity in Eastwood.

If this makes sense, then I might say that the tension between the ugly everyday life of Blakelock's "dirty laundry," the aggressively curious police officer, the yellow jug, the ordinary glasses, on the one hand, and something finer somewhere "by the canyon," on the other, re-emerges as a tonal tension in the film. Most of the film's tone is typical Eastwood: fast, furious, and slightly humorous. There is a sense of masculine toughness that Eastwood's screen persona very much incarnates, but which is, I should add, interestingly contrasted with Locke's character who is obviously the smarter one. Yet, there is also this subdued layer of sensitivity that is barely whispered. It finds its elusive shape in a hue of redness in a sleazy motel. And it's strangely touching.

If this is true of The Gauntlet, then the tonal significance of the red roses in the film also reflects a larger characteristic in Eastwood's cinema. His films are rough, both in terms of toughness and "rough around the edges," but there is also, quite often, these subtle nuances of sensitivity in his films, which have bloomed into full-blown pictures very rarely in the director's career. Yet such nuances characterize many of his tougher films. In Heartbreak Ridge (1986), for one example from a "tougher film," there is a carefully arising level of sensitivity in the portrayal of a veteran's alienation from the surrounding world which is nicely juxtaposed with his ex-wife's sense of uncertainty during his years spent fighting over seas. Both experience emotional malaise and estrangement, but in different ways. In True Crime (1999), an ordinary divorce scene gives a tender blue undertone to an otherwise boring run-of-the-mill suspense story, and in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) the difficulty of making oneself emotionally available is expressed in small non-verbal gestures by a tent.

The red roses in The Gauntlet exemplify this more wide-ranging, though still often hardly distinguishable, layer of understated sensitivity in Eastwood's films. It stands in contrast to both the general aggressive tone of Eastwood's cinema as well as the lack of focus on more sensitive material like human relationships. As a whole, The Gauntlet might be "a very stupid movie" with "not one bit of wit" in it [2], but Eastwood's use of the red roses brings in a charmingly sympathetic hidden layer of gentleness and subtlety, the focus on which discloses, at the very least, a tiny bit of emotion, if not wit, in the film.

Notes

[1] Pauline Kael says this in the BBC documentary The Man with No Name (1977) on Eastwood. Versions may vary, but in the version I have seen the timestamp is 35:28-35:46.

[2] Gene Siskel writes this in his 1977 review of The Gauntlet for Chicago Tribune: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/37475174/gene-siskel-movie-reviewthe-gauntlet/

#The Gauntlet #Clint Eastwood #1970's #American

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Film Details #1: The Stairs in The Red Shoes

Film Details is a blog series of posts focusing on a specific detail in a film. Details may vary from a single shot, a particular cut, or a piece of sound to individual scenes, objects, and other elements in mise-en-scène as well as larger-scale motifs in the film under scrutiny.

One of the most memorable shots of The Red Shoes (1948), a mesmerizing classic of fable and ballet cinema, is actually a subtle combination of two identical shots by means of an almost unnoticeable jump cut. It is the image of Moira Shearer’s legs as she is rapidly running down a narrow spiral staircase. The shots are in a fairly small scale and framed in a manner that crops the rest of the character’s body so that attention is distinctly placed on the radiant red shoes on Shearer’s feet. Yet the background, or not just a simple backdrop of course but a space in which this event occurs, is also important: the staircase. Director Michael Powell has explained how he achieved the trick together with his crew. In order to capture the quickly moving legs of the actress, they had to first commission a separate spiral staircase to be moved and filmed, then make a rotating mount underneath the staircase so that they were able to move the spiral staircase in synchronization with the downward movement of the camera on the crane without losing the actress behind the edges of the staircase [1]. The impression is impeccable and alluring. There is an enigmatic sense of movement that feels impossible in a way that strangely resembles the viewing experience of a similarly enchanting, though very different, trick shot of a staircase in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). What should draw specific attention to the staircase at this crucial moment in The Red Shoes, however, is that this is not the first instance of the in-between space of transition in the film. There are plenty of steps along the way.

Before compiling, analyzing, and interpreting the many stairs of The Red Shoes, it is important to provide a short reminder of the film’s basic story line. It is crucial to bear this in mind because it is the story and the characters’ core relationships that introduce the film’s key theme that is articulated and structured by the staircase motif.

The Red Shoes is a film about the conflicts of life and art. It tells the story of a young aspiring dancer Vicky Page, played by Shearer, who is hired by Boris Lermontov, played by Anton Walbrook, to his renowned ballet company. During the time that Vicky is hired, Lermontov also employs an up-and-coming composer named Julian Craster, played by Marius Goring. Together they achieve great success, both creatively and financially, when Lermontov produces a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale The Red Shoes, starring Vicky and with music composed by Julian. To much of Lermontov’s disappointment, however, since he sees other matters besides art as destructive to the creative enterprise, Julian and Vicky end up falling in love. Lermontov fires both of them in hopes that Vicky would leave romantic love behind and come back to the lure of the red shoes and ballet, as she eventually does. Yet, Vicky remains torn between the two men, who represent her conflicting desires for love and art, and in the end dies by falling under a train. She is, just like the protagonist in Andersen’s fairy-tale, unable to take off her red shoes; she is incapable of shaking off her pernicious passion for art. The story is rather simple, but it is elevated by a cleverly treated intertext of the Andersen story. The theme is as old as mankind, but Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger craft a unique cinematic discourse to articulate the theme and give it new meaning. Even more so, the film is rife with details that have this very effect. The staircase motif is one of them.

There is a plethora of stairs in the film. There are the stairs on the balcony to which Vicky runs and from which she falls to her death after leaving the rapid plunge to the spiral staircase behind. These steps on the balcony (and not the spiral staircase) are in fact the real last stairs of the film. More towards the beginning of the film, there are also the almost off-screen stairs leading to the party held by Vicky’s aunt in hopes of attracting Lermontov’s interest in her niece who is an aspiring dancer. There are the behind-the-scenes stairs leading to the stage at Covent Garden where Julian goes to after Lermontov has hired him for Ballet Lermontov. There are the further steps Julian climbs with Irina Boronskaja, the leading dancer of Ballet Lermontov who eventually leaves the company due to her marriage (exemplifying what Lermontov fears for Vicky). There are the stairs behind the stage which the dancers, including Vicky, walk down after the first class is dismissed. More towards the end, there is an underground staircase which leads to a platform at a railway station which Lermontov climbs to reach his train only to discover Vicky trying to convince him that there is room for more in her life than just dancing. 

All these scenes concern, more or less explicitly, a movement between the outside world of real life and the dream world of art. I shall flesh out this interpretation in more detail below. It is perhaps more direct in scenes where characters move through stairs to the stage or away from the stage and it is perhaps less explicit in scenes such as Lermontov’s arrival to Vicky’s aunt’s party or his arrival to the train platform. But it is there, nonetheless: Lermontov’s confident walk on the stairs precedes Vicky’s attempt to reconcile the conflict; she tries to make Lermontov agree to let her dance as well as live her love life. 

However, one scene not mentioned above is especially characteristic of this thematic function of the staircase motif. During the first day that Vicky and Julian are working for Ballet Lermontov, Lermontov climbs the small stairs of the theater from the auditorium to the stage. This moment, though seemingly minute especially when considered in the context of the staircase motif, is revealing in terms of the thematic function of the stairs in the film. In the long take, Lermontov first passes Julian trying to reach him in the auditorium and then Vicky trying to contact him on the stage. Lermontov moves from the shadows, that is, the real world, to the limelight of the stage, the dream world of art. It is this movement between these two worlds that is reflected by the many stairs of The Red Shoes.

All the stairs mentioned above are quite minor. That is to say, one does not really pay attention to them unless one is specifically looking for them. Even the thematic function just outlined might seem a little vague at first. But it becomes more salient, I believe, when one looks at these instances in the broader context of the staircase motif with its most important manifestation. To be more specific, there are three scenes in The Red Shoes in which stairs gain increased significance: there are the entrance stairs of Covent Garden in the beginning, the stairs of a castle-like building in the middle, and the stairs in the end (the spiral staircase and the stairs on the balcony). Since I have already described the final scene with the spiral staircase and the stairs on the balcony, I will start by describing the beginning and middle scenes both of which have not been mentioned above. 

The stairs in the beginning are actually the first thing that are seen in the film. The film begins with a low-angle shot of a staircase leading up. Off-screen noise of a crowd from the outside is heard on the soundtrack. A porter enters the screen space at the top of the stairs and walks down a few steps. A cut reveals two guards holding the door shut below the staircase. The porter tells them to open the doors and let the awaiting crowd in. The crowd is a group of excited students about to lose it over ballet. It is opening night for Ballet Lermontov at Covent Garden. The camera follows the intense running of the students through the stairs until it settles on a corner to capture their enthusiastic movement -- which even ends up tearing a Ballet Lermontov poster for the show on the wall. The real world that is left behind is tactile, palpable, whereas the world of art is anything but. The audience is there to sit still; they are there to see and to hear, as they very clearly emphasize in dialogue with each other. It is this opening scene that establishes the theme of movement between the two worlds through the staircase motif.

Between the scene with the stairs in the beginning and the scene with the stairs in the end (both the spiral staircase and the stairs on the balcony), there is appropriately another chief scene involving stairs in the middle of the film. It is the scene where Vicky, all dressed up in a beautiful blue dress with an adorable tiara, accentuating her red hair in glorious Technicolor, is summoned by Lermontov to attend his company in an eerie castle-like building straight from the pages of a fairy-tale. Arriving to the scene, she climbs a stairway only to find a massive set of steps covered in grass. At the top, there are more stairs to be climbed. And what awaits her after all these steps? Lermontov telling her that she will be cast in the lead role for his new ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale The Red Shoes. The length of passage from the ground to the higher top where Lermontov awaits seems to reflect the hardship that entrance to the life of art takes. At the same time, however, the duration of the journey to the top expresses the detachment of the world of art from the real world below. Furthermore, the long stairway covered in grass has a mystery to it, enhancing the transition to the dream world of art. It is as if the film took a momentary pause to emphasize not only the narrative importance of this turning point but also the enchantment of art, which is both alluring and horrific.

As said, the stairs in these three scenes are more noticeable. They articulate, perhaps more explicitly, the theme of movement between the real world and the dream world of art. In the opening scene, excited students rush the stairs, leaving the tactile real world behind, to get closer to the dream. Julian Craster, the composer who Lermontov eventually hires for his company and with whom Vicky ends up falling in love, sits on the balcony, listening to the music. Vicky, however, is closer to the stage; she is already enamored, perhaps too enamored, with the dream world of art. She is the one to tell Lermontov that the way others justify continuing to live is how she justifies dancing. To her, the raison d’être for human existence is equivalent with the raison d’être for dancing. And, of course, she is the one who ends up dying for it. In the scene mentioned just above, the scene where Vicky walks up the high stairs of the castle-like building to hear Lermontov’s life-changing announcement, there is a similar sense of inter-world movement. Vicky is dressed as a princess, not for this occasion that has come as a surprise to her; she climbs the stairs covered in grass to a castle; she learns that she will be starring in a ballet based on a fable. The fairy-tale connotation could not be more unambiguous. The real world is left behind as the character is elevated (also concretely via the long stairs) to a spiritual plane of art. The fairy-tale aesthetics are used to further highlight the detachment of the world of art from the real world, a detachment that is, as said, both seductive and frightening.

In both of these scenes, characters move closer to the realm of art. In contrast to them, the famous image of Vicky rapidly running down the spiral staircase conveys an opposite kind of movement. This is not just to point to the simple fact that people are running or walking up in the first beginning and middle scenes, whereas Vicky is running down in the last scene, but to make a metaphorical observation about these kinds of movement. In a word, Vicky’s rapid run is her fleeing the dream (her dream) rather than getting closer to it. Following the scene where she is practically torn apart by Lermontov and Julian, the former embodying the dream world of art and the latter the real world with romantic relationships, Vicky is struck by a feeling of horror as she wobbles toward the stage escorted by her dresser. She -- perhaps controlled by the red shoes like the girl in the Andersen story -- starts to withdraw. She rushes away and storms to the spiral staircase. The image of her legs racing the stairs represents her fear, her uncontrollable need, and her conflicted desire to get farther away from the dream world of art that means everything to her, but also, in the same breath, her conflicted desire not to leave the art world that has started to consume her. The ambiguity of what is in fact happening in this finale (is it Vicky’s own free will or the spell of the red shoes? Is Vicky running away back to her love or is she running to her death?) emphasizes the unresolved conflict of art and life that torments the protagonist.

What is striking about the spiral staircase in contrast to the other stairs in the film is its surreal dimension. When one sees stairs in the film, one is quite sure of their location and spatial relation to the other spaces. This is not surprising at all because stairs are precisely a connection link between two or more spaces, typically between floors. There can be clear visual cues such as an arrow sign and the word “stage” on the wall reminding us where the stairs are leading or cuts from previous scenes to subsequent scenes that provide spatial context for the stairs. Such is the case, for example, with the scene where Vicky is training with the other dancers of the company. The scene ends with the choreographer shouting “class dismissed!” A cut shifts us to the behind-the-stage stairs which Vicky climbs down (see the image above). One can see the word “stage” on the wall in the background. The camera follows Vicky as she moves farther away from the stage until the camera stops at the music rehearsal room where the next cut shifts us. For another example, take the scene with the castle-like building. A cab driver picks Vicky up from the hotel. A long drive takes her to an unknown destination, but shots of the beautiful natural environment give the spectator a spatially coherent sense of the journey. After the drive, Vicky is then seen at the beginning of the first stairway which she starts climbing; next, a cut to movement shifts us to her arriving to the top of these stairs where she opens a gate, in a mobile following shot, to the huge flight of stairs covered in grass. Finally, a dissolve shows her arriving to the top of yet another staircase, which eventually leads her to Lermontov. In both scenes, the spatial relations are very clear. No such cues are available for the image of the spiral staircase. 

After the shot of Vicky running away in fear, there is a cut to the conductor of the orchestra starting The Red Shoes ballet. The next cuts shifts us to the spiral staircase whose exact location in the building remains a mystery. The following cut does not help provide context for the spatial relations either: the camera remains on Vicky’s legs in the red shoes, with the rest of her body cropped off, walking an unknown hallway and climbing down a few steps until she arrives to the stairs on the balcony which lead to the more familiar space of the balcony over the railway tracks. In addition to the shots preceding and following the two combined shots of the spiral staircase, the shots of the spiral staircase themselves further enhance the spatial ambiguity. Given the velocity of Vicky’s flee and the duration of the two shots, one would assume that the spiral staircase covered quite a long journey. It is hard to see where exactly in the building such a large spiral staircase would be located. It is possible, of course, but it is not clear by any means. It is a surprise to the spectator, and that surprise is precisely the point.

More important than the shots surrounding the image of the run in the spiral staircase is, of course, the overall uncanny impression of the image of the spiral staircase itself. By combining the fast movement of the actress with the synchronized movement of the camera as well as the unnoticeable movement of the spiral staircase, the image gains a totally unique sensation that is quite difficult to be put into words. The fact that the actual staircase in the physical space (of the studio setting) has been moved with the help of a rotating mount while filming enables the camera to capture the actress’ movement in a different way than it would had the staircase remained still. However, since the staircase does not move in the diegetic space (i.e., the space of the fictional world where the characters act), the visual impression is perplexing to say the least. This only highlights the surprise factor of the cut to the spiral staircase. The surrealism of the image emphasizes that the protagonist’s flee is not really physical or concrete but metaphorical. In the poetic space of the film, the character is detaching from the dream world of art that means everything to her -- from the world whose detachment from reality had been established at the latest with the fable-like stairs covered in grass. The unresolved conflict can only end in death. 

In addition to the thematic trajectory outlined by these three scenes (first steps toward the world of art at Covent Garden in the beginning, then entrance to that world via the stairs covered in grass in the middle, and finally an escape from its consumption of the soul in the spiral staircase in the end), it is worth noting that the famous seventeen minute ballet sequence of the film also features stairs. That is, stairs are involved significantly in the production design of not only Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes but also in The Red Shoes by Ballet Lermontov. There is a staircase in the background of the main milieu of the ballet, which is first being walked up and down by two women. In the end, the girl with the red shoes, played by Vicky, collapses on the stairs after being exhausted by the red shoes. Having been released from the curse of the red shoes by death, Vicky’s body is finally being carried by a man toward the stairs.

Although these uses of the staircase motif take place in a story within the story (the Andersen story as a ballet performed by characters in the film), it is quite interesting that stairs appear in the beginning and the end of the ballet, just as in the film itself. Stairs in the ballet also connote transition and, specifically, death. It is as if the stairs, which in the first instance are associated with entrance and movement, eventually turned into a gateway between two worlds. Vicky is first brought to the world of art (the first instance of the stairs in the ballet), then dies for it, and is finally being taken away from it back to reality (the last instance of the stairs in the ballet). This affinity between the ballet and the film should not come as a surprise, of course. For the ballet, to a very large extent, reflects many of the events in the film, including Vicky’s budding conflict between Julian and Lermontov.

The staircase is an in-between space between spaces. Movement in the staircase thus usually connotes transition. Here, I have claimed that the stairs in The Red Shoes operate as a metaphor for the characters’ (mainly Vicky’s) movement between the real world of life and the dream world of art. The movement is oftentimes casual, but even then it exemplifies this thematic function. In scenes where the movement is less casual and the staircase is more salient, that is, the three scenes in the beginning, middle, and end discussed above, the articulation and structuring of this theme is more conspicuous. Vicky is first pulled toward the dream world of art by its mysterious lure in the first and second of these scenes, which establish the detachment of the dream world of art from reality, but in the end she is almost pushed away from the dream world by its even horrific enchantment with which she once identified so strongly. In the astonishing shots of the spiral staircase, the link between the worlds has broken down, which is reflected by the eerie movement in the shots and the ambiguity of the relations to other spaces. The image is a shock. The extraordinary effect of the image of the run through the spiral staircase, a spatial link both displaced and uncanny, expresses this ambiguous and unresolved conflict of art and life in the life of an artist.

Notes:

[1] Michael Powell tells this anecdote to Peter von Bagh at the Midnight Sun Film Festival in 1987: “At the end of the film, when the girl runs to her death in the red shoes, she gets out from her dressing room. I thought that it would be terribly boring if she just ran the stairs down in an ordinary way so I had a spiral staircase of roughly six meters made for the scene, the likes of which are used in industrial facilities. I asked Moira if she could run down the stairs in her ballet shoes. She told me she could. The camera had to shoot the running from a descending crane. I asked Moira to run as fast as she could because I wanted the shot to be as short as possible. I gave Moira the signal to go, and she ran the stairs down faster than the camera was able to follow. She beat the camera by roughly 20 film frames. The cinematographers were ashamed. She had to run again, and this time the camera kept up with her, but when Moira ran the spiral staircase, she was of course momentarily concealed by the staircase for every lap. Since the camera was unable to turn around the staircase in the same speed, we had to have a rotating mount made for the staircase whose speed could be controlled so that Moira was constantly kept in front of the camera. We told Moira that now she could run as fast as she wanted. She ran and won the camera again by two seconds. Later, once we had the shot, my editor Reggie Mills asked me if we could lengthen the stairs. I answered no, unless we would get a new staircase. But the shot was too short as it was so we decided to develop it twice and then cut the pieces together so that it would look like one shot.” (Peter von Bagh, Sodankylä ikuisesti [Sodankylä Forever], WSOY, 2010, p. 55; my translation from the Finnish text.)

#The Red Shoes #Michael Powell #Emeric Pressburger #1940's #British

[essenceoffilm]

Foreigner Himself

Nicholas Ray is a filmmaker who is celebrated as the poet of lonely souls. His films portray people who feel displaced and estranged even on fairly familiar ground. “I’m a stranger here myself,” says a character from what must be the most unique western ever made. All of Ray’s characters are kindred spirits to that one in Johnny Guitar (1954). They are homeless -- in the less urgent meaning of the word. These existentialist themes of solitude and alienation were not uncommon for Ray’s generation of American directors, who had their breakthroughs right before the invasion of television during the late 1940′s and the early 1950′s, but no one tackled them with the cinematically energetic sense of existential malaise as Ray did. To the new generation of young French film critics, primarily in the 1951 founded film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, these fresh American directors with their quickly produced B films exemplified novel individuality, stylistic personality, and poignant critiques of the American society. All the young American directors were rising poets to them. But Ray was their darling. Above all, it was Ray who represented the individual who could find a place for his own original expression in the Hollywood studio system. His films of the 50′s, such as In a Lonely Place (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1951), and Rebel without a Cause (1955), were fierce, distinctive, poetic, and full of cinematic energy. Classical virtues of coherence were secondary to the young Turks of Cahiers; to them, a film with even a few shots of personality could win over a classically good film of quality that had no personality to it -- that lacked what some of them called poetic intuition. Ray was the embodiment of such cinematic poetry. To Jean-Luc Godard, as he famously wrote in a review of Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957), Ray’s name was simply synonymous with the seventh art. 

Like his peers -- as well as other Hollywood directors -- Ray eventually succumbed to the big studio system, as that seemingly eternal giant was taking its last breaths, by making big-budget spectacles at the end of his career. After his fairly successful Biblical epic King of Kings (1961), Ray made another historical spectacle for producer Samuel Bronston. Unlike its predecessor, however, 55 Days at Peking (1963) bombed at the box office and had a negative critical reception. While many of the generic films of this transitional era -- such as Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963) -- were not very good in any artistic sense, they usually made a lot of money. The financial and artistic disappointment of 55 Days at Peking must thus have been even more tragic for Ray as the film that practically ended his career [1]. In a strange way, nevertheless, it feels like a very appropriate end for Ray’s time in Hollywood’s limelight of outsiders. 

A Ray Story

55 Days at Peking takes its title from Noel Gerson’s novel of the same name which concerns the actual 55-day-long Siege of the International Legations, a climactic event during the Boxer Rebellion in China, which The Sun called “the most exciting episode ever known to civilization” [2]. The Boxers were Chinese nationalists who opposed foreign forces in China. Christianity represented such foreign presence at its most salient. The Boxers performed martial arts in the streets and started to gain big support after famine and anti-imperialist sentiments had begun to spread in the country in the late 19th century, partly due to a humiliating loss in a war to Japan in 1895. The Boxers’ violent attacks on foreigners and Chinese Christians reached a peak in the summer of 1900 when they forced some of them into a siege for 55 days. On August 14th, the siege ended in the foreign victory of the Eight-Nation Alliance (consisting of countries that were to tear each other apart in the following two world wars!). A year or so later, the Boxer Rebellion came to an end. It was the loss of the Boxers in the Siege of the International Legations, however, that had sown the seeds for the downfall of the Qing Dynasty, which fatally took the side of the Boxers in the conflict and was finished itself a decade later as China became a republic in 1912. 

The fact that the historic event has been pompously called “the most exciting episode ever known to civilization” should have already sparked the interest of more than a couple Hollywood producers (there’s a tagline ready to be printed), but it has surprisingly been filmed very rarely on screen. And for some reason this catchphrase did not catch the attention of the film’s advertisers -- which strikes me as odd for the simple reason that back then they used anything as a selling tagline. Reasons are probably plentiful, but what is more interesting in this context is that the story of the Boxer Rebellion from an Anglo-American perspective sounds perfect for a director like Ray. Although 55 Days at Peking represents Ray’s artistic downfall, which was less than just metaphoric as he collapsed during production due to his declining health, it does exemplify the main themes of Ray’s cinema -- or Ray as cinema -- and Ray finding his own place somewhere else. Rather than picking up the many problems in the film, which I will bring up later, I would like to linger on appreciating this suitability of the story for Ray that is not all unambiguous and, as far as I know, has rarely been recognized by people writing on the film. What I wish to point out is that even though the genre (historical spectacle) and the subject matter (the Boxer Rebellion or, more generally, Chinese history) are foreign to Ray’s cinema, the core of the story (an American individual feeling not-at-home) and some of the film’s stylistic aspects ring true to what we could call, in the spirit of the young French critics, Ray’s poetic intuition. 

55 Days at Peking centers around an American major, Matt Lewis (played by the biggest star of the Hollywood historical spectacle, Charlton Heston), who knows the local ways of Beijing. He is introduced to us as the leader of the US military garrison filled with young blood to whom he tells that they should not think any less of the Chinese just because the Chinese do not speak English -- and proceeds to arrogantly teach them the only Chinese words they’ll need, “yes” and “no,” because everything is for bargain and nothing is free. Arriving at his hotel, Lewis meets what will turn into his love interest, a Russian Baronness Natasha Ivanoff (played by Ava Gardner), who seems like an abandoned character from a Tolstoy novel. She wants to leave China but cannot because her visa has been revoked by the brother of her late husband who, as it is later revealed, committed suicide due to Natasha’s extra-marital affair with a Chinese officer. The dire situation in Beijing turns worse when the Chinese Empress of the Qinq dynasty decides to take the side of the Boxers in the heated political climate. As the siege begins, Natasha and Lewis find themselves trapped in a foreign country. Lewis gets help from a British officer, Sir Arthur Robinson (played by David Niven) with whom he blows up a Chinese ammunition warehouse. In the final act of the film, Lewis needs to leave Beijing to deliver a message to nearby Allied forces in order to put an end to the siege. While he is gone, Natasha sells a valuable necklace of hers, which would provide an ace against her brother-in-law, to acquire food and medical supplies for the wounded westerners and Chinese Christians. Her material sacrifice is elevated by a spiritual one since she dies in the process of providing help to those who need it. Lewis’ message reaches the Allied troops, but he will not be reunited with his love. Shortly after his return, the Allied troops arrive and put an end to the siege. 

Cut Loose

Despite the many shortcomings of the film, which I will dissect in a moment, the heart of this story is Lewis’ experience -- which also ties it to Ray’s cinema. Granted, it is hard to see this if one looks at 55 Days at Peking as an individual film or in the context of other Hollywood spectacles from the late 50′s and the early 60′s. Viewed in the context of Ray’s oeuvre, however, 55 Days at Peking looks less like a failed portrayal of the Boxer Rebellion and more like a big (if not entirely successful) tale of alienation. Thus, from an auteurist perspective, the film opens up as a story about Lewis’ sense of homelessness in a foreign environment that is growing more hostile toward him.

All of Ray’s films depict individuals who are tormented by a sense of homelessness. They of course experience it even in their domestic environments. The famous line cited above from Johnny Guitar is the most well-known example. The title of In a Lonely Place says it all as it is a portrayal of people in Hollywood. The theme is also articulated quite concretely in Ray’s films that involve characters moving to another place, though still within America. In On Dangerous Ground, a tough cop must move elsewhere to find home. In Rebel without a Cause, a teenager’s loss of direction is aggravated by his family moving to a new town. As far as I know, 55 Days at Peking is Ray’s only film in which the central character resides in a country other than the States. Lewis’ sense of homelessness, innate to him as a character in the Ray universe, is only heightened by such displacement. Making matters worse for his implicit malaise, which remains unaddressed at the level of the film’s dialogue, one might say, the social atmosphere starts boiling up. It is during the hottest months of the Boxer Rebellion that the sweats of his homelessness come to the surface. And this is essentially what happens to Ray’s characters in his other films as well, though in a less grandiose scheme. 

55 Days at Peking begins with a sequence in the Forbidden City where an execution of a Chinese general is about to happen because the general, part of the Chinese army, has been shooting the Boxers. One of the leading figures in the army, Jung-Lu arrives to call off the execution. He asks the Empress to take his life instead of the general’s because it was he who gave the command to shoot the Boxers. “They were burning Christian missions, killing foreigners,” Jung-Lu pleads in an effort to justify his command. The Empress declines his offer, listening rather to an ancient prediction in a fatal mistake of taking the side of the Boxers. As a smug smile raises on the Empress’ face, the sequence concludes with a brief and surprising low-angle shot of the executioner swinging his sword from the top frame to the low frame, implying the off-screen cut of the Chinese general’s neck. As the sword falls to the low frame of the shot, however, there is -- in a stroke of visual genius -- a cut to a medium close-up of Heston as Lewis. A clever way to end the first sequence and tie it in with the next, this transition is the best cut in the whole film. More than an energetic beginning for what turns out to be a mediocre story, the cut also has a thematic dimension. 

In order to appreciate all of this, let us take a moment to remind ourselves that Ray is often celebrated as one of the great visionaries of the CinemaScope format. Already his Rebel without a Cause brought new sensitivity and intimacy to the newly invented (in 1953) wide aspect ratio that enhances horizontal compositions in a way that is usually just for “snakes and funerals,” as Fritz Lang cunningly puts it in Godard’s Contempt (1963, Le mépris). The width of ratio tends to encourage directors to cut less and use larger shot scales, but Ray combines the wide aspect ratio with close-ups and a faster editing rhythm in Rebel without a Cause -- which is, in my view, alongside Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès (1955), the best CinemaScope film. The introduction of Heston as Lewis in 55 Days at Peking bears resemblances to this. The shot of the executioner swinging his sword is extremely brief (barely a second), but it lies in between of two shots that are longer in duration: the medium close-up of the Empress indulging in her fatal decision is four seconds, the medium close-up of Lewis is seven seconds. The brief shot in between creates an abrupt, surprising sense of acceleration in the film’s editing rhythm, which is calmer in the rest of the film. It makes the visual transition from the Empress to Lewis feel quick, abrupt, out of the blue. Such editing is not considered the done thing when it comes to the use of the CinemaScope aspect ratio. Nor is the use of close-ups. But Ray creates a language of his own out of all of this. It’s a minor detail, you might say, but it’s really one of those small wonderful things that remind you that you are indeed watching a Hollywood spectacle by a real auteur rather than an anonymous factory. I think the cut is definitely worthy of more attention.

The cut from the Empress to the executioner or the cut from the executioner to Lewis is not a match cut; yet it is a match cut of sorts. A match cut in the traditional sense is a cut between two shots that share a visual correspondence: a similar object lies within the same area in their distinct screen spaces (the most famous example being the match cut from the extinguishing match to a setting sun in Lawrence of Arabia, 1962, another CinemaScope spectacle from the same time). While the shot of the executioner lacks direct visual correspondence with either the shot that precedes it (the medium close-up of the Empress) or the shot that follows it (the medium close-up of Lewis), there is not just a match between the two medium close-ups separated by the shot of the executioner but there is also a less visual and a more mental equivalence between the shots due to the cutting. 

The equivalence comes from the idea of cutting. The executioner is a character who cuts necks and hence his position in the brief shot that mediates two longer shots is a clever idea in itself. The movement of his sword serves as a ticking clock for the shot’s duration. Thus it wires a tension and creates a visual conflict, which will turn into a dramatic one in the film, between the Empress (or the Qing dynasty in general) and Lewis (or the foreigners in general). The cut is also associated with the political act that already happens now in the Empress’ decision to continue with the execution even though she will make this decision more explicitly later in the film: to take the side of the Boxers. It is the act of cutting ties to the foreigners. After all, the execution takes place because Chinese generals have been shooting the Boxers who have been killing foreigners. This is the main thematic function of this cut. When put in words, it might start to sound too much on-the-nose. But when seen in the film, it is implicit and subtle. 

There is yet another function, however, though it is a far subtler one. The shot of Lewis is in the scale of medium close-up (from the clavicle upward), but since Lewis’ head is moving vertically within the confines of the frame (horizontally his head stays put due to the synchronized movement of the tracking camera), the shot also has this strange framing where Lewis’ head lies in the very lowest area of the screen space, the rest of his body cropped off (including his neck and clavicle), with some superfluous empty space above and around his head. The cut to the next shot, a long shot of Lewis with his military garrison, introducing him like a character from a Fordian cavalry western, affirms that this movement is due to horse-riding, but taken in isolation, there is this strange visual movement of the head in space. Granted, the spectator does not experience the movement of the dislocated head as strange because they are used to associate such movement as well as the character’s attire with riding a horse (a call-back to cavalry westerns). However, since the brief shot in between has created this sense of not only acceleration but also haste, the shot of a head in space does catch one a bit off guard. It is the first shot of one of the film’s main characters after the 14-minute opening sequence. It is crucial that this shot in particular introduces the protagonist of the film. It’s a very Ray-esque shot: a lone man being nowhere. The sense of visual strangeness, visual unheimlich, if you will, in the shot is later heightened by the fact that the spectator learns that Lewis is indeed a resident in a foreign country where he does not belong. This obviously plays a part already in creating this initial visual strangeness because we are transformed, via the cut, from the Forbidden City of Beijing to a lone man straight from a cavalry western in anonymous space. There are Chinese buildings in the background, but their cultural architecture is hardly recognizable. They are just buildings that are in contrast to Lewis’ clothing and being, his whole habitus. He is homeless, cut away, floating in air. He is, to paraphrase Johnny Guitar, a stranger here himself -- even though he teaches crude lessons to his soldiers about China. 

The theme of home is thus articulated visually before it grows out from the narrative. On the narrative level, the theme is treated by Lewis’ relationships to the other characters, primarily to two female characters. 

One of the chief dramatic motifs for the theme of Lewis’ alienation (or his sense of unheimlich, not-being-at-home) is a young Chinese-American girl. She is the daughter of one of Lewis’ soldiers who has had a love affair with a Chinese woman, but the woman has been killed. In the beginning, the soldier asks Lewis for advice with regard to the girl: should he take her back home to the United States or leave her in China as an orphan? Lewis replies cynically that the girl should definitely be left in China because back home she would be “treated like a freak,” while here “she’ll be among her own kind.” Putting aside the character’s racism for a moment (after all, the girl is also half-American), Lewis’ cynicism, I believe, exemplifies his attitude toward himself more than toward anyone else. He himself feels like a freak, a creature hanging in mid-air, cut loose from the homestead. When the girl’s father dies in action during the siege, Lewis must confront his cynicism or self-loathe as he has to inform the girl of her father’s passing. After a series of attempted evasions of duty, Lewis goes to the Christian mission to talk with the girl. He manages to imply the truth, but is unable to say it up front. He asks help from the Christian minister there who tells him that all men are fathers to all children, but one can believe this only if one feels that way about the world. On a wider scale, the minister is speaking for a non-cynical attitude toward the world. After the siege has ended, Arthur (the Niven character) tells Lewis that now he will leave China and go live “every Englishman’s dream” with a family, a few books, and a dog in the countryside. Nothing less cynical than that. He then inquires about Lewis’ future plans.

Arthur: “What about you? What’s home to you?”

Lewis (laughing): “I don’t know... I have to make one yet.”

In the final scene, as he is once again riding on a horse, going away from his non-home, he picks up the young Chinese-American girl from the crowd. Although his change of heart is motivated by the character’s arc throughout the narrative, there is a similar feeling of haste to this decision as there is to the abrupt cut in the beginning. There is optimism in the end, but also, within the context of Ray’s whole oeuvre, the film’s ending seems too good to be true.

Another important element for Lewis’ character development and the theme of home is his relationship with Baronness Natasha Ivanoff (the Gardner character). It is quite appropriate that Lewis lays eyes on Natasha for the first time while his soldier is telling him about the young Chinese-American girl. He meets her at the hotel where they play a game of sexual innuendo. Soon, a more emotional connection starts to build between them. In the scene where Natasha reveals her past to Lewis (that her husband committed suicide because she was unfaithful to him with a Chinese general), she asks him, connecting their relationship to the young Chinese-American girl, whether the same could not have happened to him: “Couldn’t you have fallen in love with a Chinese girl?” Lewis has no answer, but he kisses Natasha fiercely. It’s an affirmative answer that is obstructed by his cynicism or self-loathe. Although the fact that nobody in this film speaks anything but English might be disorienting, it is true that Natasha is a foreigner not just in China but to Lewis (the American-as-can-be Heston) as well. She’s Russian -- which meant two different things in 1900 and 1963 (and yet again in 2020). Natasha has her own character arc of growing away from selfishness to altruistic self-sacrifice. Thus she further motivates Lewis’ development. In her death, Lewis experiences a loss of love and becomes more aware of his tormenting homelessness, which, in the end, makes her pick up the young Chinese-American girl. Whether it is his new-found altruism or his egoistic fear of loneliness that makes him do this is arguable. Similar ambiguity lies in the emerging sense of responsibility at the end of Rebel without a Cause as a fellow young man’s death shakes something up in the torn-apart protagonist. 

A Triumph (of sorts) in Weakness

Unfortunately, it’s precisely these two major sub-plots (Lewis’ relationships to the young Chinese-American girl and the Russian woman, Natasha) that are the biggest weaknesses of the film. This is unfortunate because, when it comes to narration, these are the main aspects in which Ray deals with the leading theme of homelessness in the film. It is true, of course, that the character of Arthur (played by Niven) is also important: he represents the happy home life that Lewis lacks, while Natasha and the young Chinese-American girl represent possibilities of acquiring it. But the slightly better quality of his character does not excuse the lowbrow characterizations of the two female characters. 

First, the young Chinese-American girl is a mere stock character -- less from a Dickensian story and more from mediocre melodrama. Her character is reduced to a sentimental tear-jerker. What makes this worse is not just the film’s duration, which would definitely allow deeper characterization for her, but also its implicit racism that is evident in its reliance on white Hollywood actors playing the Chinese in “yellow face.” While far from the outrageous in-your-face racism of Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), this convention of playing Asian characters in “yellow face” just heightens the superficiality of the Chinese characters. It’s also worth pointing out the confusion that stems from this convention. At times, it takes time to realize that a character is indeed supposed to be a Chinese character. When everybody speaks English and looks like someone from London or Los Angeles, it’s hard to tell. All I know is that Jung-Lu (played by Leo Genn) definitely does not look like a Beijing local. Although the young Chinese-American girl does not generate such immediate difficulties in recognition, this background makes the character’s superficiality feel more poignant. She’s nothing but a visual figure -- with a few terribly written lines. On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that she has no other purpose for the film’s narrative -- which is, of course, precisely the problem for some. In this sense, she’s like Natalie Wood’s character in Ford’s The Searchers (1956) who the film’s protagonist, played by John Wayne, first despises but then suddenly embraces. Wood’s character is certainly not a very complex one, but she never feels like a mere tear-jerker either, whereas the young Chinese-American girl definitely does. And that’s essentially the problem here. Since 55 Days at Peking, seen from an auteurist perspective, should not be received as a story of the Boxer Rebellion but as part of Ray’s cinematic oeuvre of tortured and alienated American men, it is less problematic (at least in my opinion) when characters serve only narrative functions for those lonely souls. What remains problematic, when it comes to the aesthetic quality of the film, however, is the childish sentimentality with which the character is constructed. 

Something similar goes for Natasha. Gardner is a good actor, but here she is at her weakest. It’s almost like Heston brought out the worst in her. For they were destined to fumble around a decade later in the ludicrously bad disaster film Earthquake (1974). While there is sexual tension between the two from the first scene that introduces them, as Natasha first makes fun of Lewis’ attempts of picking her up but then agrees to share the room with him, it’s a little difficult to buy the love that grows between them quite rapidly. There is a dance sequence -- that must forever exist in the shadows of Visconti’s The Leopard (1963, Il gattopardo) from the same year -- but the love still feels unearned, nevertheless. The scene where the two finally kiss, after Natasha has shared her history of infidelity with Lewis, comes particularly out of nowhere. Making matters worse, the scene ends really abruptly. The kiss has this long set-up with Natasha’s brother-in-law and the lingering disclosure of truth, but then the scene suddenly ends with a quick kiss that transports us to a completely different scene. There is no mediator, just a straight cut. It feels like someone just had to shorten the film and took out the remaining 10-20 seconds of the scene in the last minutes before the film’s release. “Okay, they kissed, let’s move on!” Strangely enough, Natasha is involved in the film’s other terrible cut: a quick pan that turns into a cut when the camera shifts from Arthur mourning his son’s serious injury to Natasha taking care of a wounded man. Let alone the fact that quick pans are not considered the done thing with CinemaScope (and for good reason), it’s quite astonishing how badly this stylistic device fits with the rest of the film with regard to camera movement and rhythm in general. There is no other shot like it in the film. And its distinctive singularity is not of the good kind. There is no raison d’être for it.

Despite these awkward characterizations and stylistic details, there is a sense of Ray’s artistic presence in this film. Ray is known as a director who sometimes did not oversee his projects to the finish line, and, given the fact that he had to stop working due to a collapse on set during production, it is hard to tell which aspects of 55 Days at Peking really come from him. At the very least, however, one can say that the theme of homelessness that is first articulated by cinematic means in the form of a match cut of sorts and then by narrative techniques (albeit poorly executed ones) fits with the rest of Ray’s oeuvre. Even if the narrative techniques with the young Chinese-American girl and Natasha lacked quality, there is something earnest in the portrayal of Lewis’ relationships to them. After all, the point of the film is not to tell this great love story between an American and a Russian nor a story where a lone man grows into a father figure for an orphan. The Russian woman and the Chinese-American girl are there just to bring about something in the protagonist who is the film’s focus. Through them, the film articulates Lewis’ sense of homelessness. In this sense, the unearned love between Lewis and Natasha feels less like a poor version of a great love story and more like an apt portrayal of feelings that are motivated by the characters’ self-loathe and disappointments. Perhaps it’s the kind of infatuation that one wishes to be love even when it is not. It’s the wish-fulfillment fantasy where reality is romanticized -- ideas of love pasted on sore wounds. This can be seen in the scene where Lewis and Natasha meet for the last time. Natasha must cut their meeting short because the doctor needs her medical assistance. Lewis waits in the corner as she does her duty. She comes back and they share this brief impassioned moment. In this scene, Ray’s sense of mise-en-scène is as good as it gets in this film. The quicker cutting separates the two, and the strong contrasts of shadows in the space exhale a sense of death above them. We know that this will not last -- and we seem to share the characters’ implicit epiphany that maybe it even should not. When Arthur expresses his condolences to Lewis’ loss, Lewis’ indifferent shrug is simultaneously repressive and honest. 

It’s this aspect of idealized love in a reality that lacks it and alienation in a hostile environment that make 55 Days at Peking an interesting film. At its heart, it is a story about abandoned alienated people trying in vain to find each other, which casts a shadow of doubt above the happy ending. These aspects also make it a Ray film. Its cinematic energy, evident in the match cut of sorts, comes from the poetic place of Hollywood that made the young French critics of the 50′s fall in love with the dream factory. While one senses the presence of such fire, one also senses powers constantly putting it down. There’s this strange co-existence of different ideas and forces pulling to the opposite directions in the film. Although 55 Days at Peking is, I believe, best appreciated from an auteurist perspective as a tale of alienation (as a story about Lewis’ experience of homelessness in a foreign environment) and not as a historical story about the Boxer Rebellion, it has two scenes, one in the beginning and one in the end, which try to make it precisely into something like that. During the opening sequence, before the one in the Forbidden City, the camera on a crane descends before two elderly Chinese men. One complains about the noise surrounding them: “What is this terrible noise?” The other responds: “Different nations saying the same thing at the same time, ‘We want China!’” The scene is cheesy, but, more importantly, unnecessary and unfitting for the whole of the film. In the final sequence, there is a similarly awkward brief scene of the Empress repeating the words “the dynasty is finished” in the Forbidden City. The Boxer Rebellion provides a great historical background for Ray’s story about alienation, but the film has really nothing to say about that historical event -- nor should it. In these two scenes, however, the film seems to think not only that it should have something to say about it but also, and more embarrassingly, that it actually does have something to say about it. These two scenes perfectly exemplify the film’s confusion over its own identity which might, in fact, be the most appropriate (albeit tragic) way to end Ray’s career in Hollywood where he was constantly trying to find his own voice, his own sense of home, surrounded by forces that felt foreign to him. 

Notes:

[1] Although Ray still made two films afterwards, We Can’t Go Home Again (1973) and Lightning Over Water (1980), his poor health did not allow him to be responsible for them as the primary director. He made We Can’t Go Home Again with his students and Lightning Over Water is more a film by Wim Wenders than it is by Ray. At the very least, 55 Days at Peking is Ray’s last film made in Hollywood -- in the world that made him who he is as an artist. 

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_the_International_Legations

#55 Days at Peking #Nicholas Ray #1960's #American

[essenceoffilm]

“Is She Real?” and Other Distant Dreams within Dreams: Fifteen Films Which Are Completely Their Own Thing

There are films which stick to one’s mind due to their greatness as well as those which do the same for their extreme inferiority. Mediocre films have a tendency to leave one’s mind like an uneventful day once the night falls. Then there are films which one keeps coming back to because they are completely their own thing. These are films which stay in memory due to their striking originality. They might be masterpieces, and thus greatness could be among the explanans for the phenomenon of preservation, but they do not have to be. In terms of quality or personal preference, these films might be somewhere in the middle. They elude the nightfall of oblivion on other grounds. Although their survival of the test of time can thus be explained by reference to uniqueness, it should be emphasized that uniqueness in this case does not mean any conventional weirdness or doing the extraordinary. The notion I am interested here is not what you might call in-your-face uniqueness (feel free to insert a list of contemporary “indie” directors). Rather, I am interested in the unique unique. I am talking about films which stay with you, but you can’t really point your finger at them and say why; they stay with you not because of quirkiness, of artistic mastery, of historical significance, of intricate story or peculiar characters, but because of an utterly original approach to cinematic discourse -- which might, of course, include all of these to altering degrees. Such originality might be less obvious, but it is there, it is real, and it is singular.

The following list of fifteen unique films will not include the obvious candidates from the first films which did this or that to the weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird adventures. I have tried to resist the urge to go where the fence is lowest and make a list of “weird movies”; instead I have tried to focus on a more subtle notion of uniqueness. The challenge as well as the allure of list-making are the constant limitations one sets for oneself. That is also the reason why no director pops up twice in the list. Another yardstick for a unique film of this kind is that the film in question cannot really be compared to anything else. Or if it can, the comparison remains loose at best. Hence the absence of films from auteurs whose bodies of work form distinct unique wholes but precisely as wholes, not singular parts. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Douglas Sirk, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Rouch, Michelangelo Antonioni, you name it. All of them managed to craft an original cinematic discourse, but they developed the execution of that discourse in countless films that form an admirable whole of aesthetic consistency. 

So, here, I am not interested in cultural peculiarity, a director’s originality, or uniqueness within a genre. I am interested in a slightly different kind of personality with regard to cinematic discourse. Although each of the following fifteen films exemplifying this unique uniqueness obviously belong to a director’s oeuvre, I believe that all of them stick out in one way or another. They have not been listed in order of personal preference or quality but in terms of uniqueness (which is, of course, a notion difficult to define, and which is a notion not completely free from personal preference and quality, I’m sure). As such, they tell another story, perhaps unique by nature, about the enigma of the seventh art.

15. Cria cuervos (1976, Carlos Saura, SPAIN)

It is an indescribable delight to witness Carlos Saura’s magnum opus Cria cuervos (1976) unfold before you for the very first time. Since the film, which tells the story about a young girl and her two sisters who try to cope with growing up after the death of their parents, was released one year after Francisco Franco’s death, it has become something of a standard interpretation to watch Cria cuervos as an allegorical tale of "the children of Spain” coping with the loss of their patriarchal leader in a new social reality. Yet any serious spectator will tell you that this is just one side of the film’s multi-layered coin of meanings. Its ambiguous structure might tie in with the prevalent narrative tendencies of Saura’s generation of left-wing Spanish directors, but it also works as a metaphor for the vague human mind. Not only cutting but also panning between the present, the past, and an imagined future, the film unfolds as a poignant story about loss and longing, the desire to be somewhere else, something else, some other time.  One of the best films about childhood ever made, Cria cuervos denies romantic innocence without falling into the trap of naive pessimism. It embraces childhood as a part of being human, being mortal, being without something, being toward loss, being as always losing something.

The most famous scene from the film -- and an example of just this -- is definitely the scene where the young girl, played by the unforgettable Ana Torrent, listens to a pop song “Porque te vas” by Jeanette, a nostalgic love song about leaving that reminds the girl of her mother’s death.  A touching moment beyond words that can only happen in the cinema, this scene exemplifies beautifully the tendency of children to cling onto seemingly insignificant objects that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The images where the girl quietly moves her lips in synchronization with the song are breath-taking and heart-breaking. The way how Saura executes this brief scene, in one sequence shot, is just so original, so inimitable, and so Saura. The emotions are not clearly visible on the child’s face, most likely because she is unable to understand let alone express them, but they come from another place that lies somewhere in between of sound and image. The context for this scene is her frustration with her aunt, who she briefly impersonates (”turn down the music”), which further pushes the obvious meanings and the obvious feelings outside. Maybe it is just a random pop song? What is left is the ambiguity of meaning and feeling. And that resonates. Powerfully. I have never seen anything quite like it. These are unique images which speak loudly about the power of cinema. Some might say that what makes Cria cuervos as unique as it is are Ana Torrent’s dark button eyes, but, in reality, it is how Saura frames them, how he lights them, and how he cuts from them. Cria cuervos has no single detail which would exhaust Saura’s style; yet his sense of composition, his choice of shot scale, his sense of color, sound, and movement are in every second of the film; they are characterized by the subtlest nuances which distinguish an ordinary beautiful object from a true work of art.

14. Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Abbas Kiarostami, IRAN)

Abbas Kiarostami’s penchant for meta-cinematic discourse, which addresses enduring human themes through postmodern questioning of the possibilities of representation, reaches a peak in Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Close-Up). Based on true events, it tells the peculiar story about a poor Iranian man, Hossain Sabzian (played by himself, like all the performers in the film) who pretended to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf for the Ahankas, an upper-class Iranian family to whom Sabzian told that he wanted to use them and their house for his next film. When Sabzian’s hoax was revealed, the Ahankha family sued him only to drop charges after Sabzian’s intentions proved out to be more complex than those of a traditional impostor. Kiarostami mixes documentary footage with staged scenes of what happened to the extent that it is impossible for the spectator to make a distinction. Not because of slyness, or Kiarostami’s talent to cover his tracks, but precisely because the distinction disappears: when the people involved are placed in front of the camera, acting out what has happened in the not-so-distant past, there is no longer a sense of staging but of being.

In a marvelous moment of poetic intuition and cinematic genius, Kiarostami’s camera picks up an empty spray can rolling downhill on asphalt. In the spirit of the “phenomenological realism” of the Italian neorealists, Kiarostami’s objets trouvés, like the empty spray can, are not symbols for something else. It might be juicy to see meaning written in the code of the empty spray can, say, in terms of the looming void behind the roles we all play, but Kiarostami’s camera uncovers it as a mere abandoned tool. Heidegger would call it Vorhanden, a being present-at-hand, whose factual existence is obvious to us after it has lost its functional purpose in its appropriate context, its primordial being as Zuhanden, a being ready-to-hand that one surrounds oneself with in the everyday reality of practical life. Even if this coarsely rolling empty spray can was the postmodern alternative to Sisyphus’ rock, it would be more a metonymy than a metaphor. It is a desolate, cast-off tool whose lonely mundane being paradoxically charms us in its banality. It is, what we might call in the spirit of anticipation, the taste of cherry.

Here, in the peculiar zone between metaphor and metonomy, meaning and the lack of it (or independent meaning), inhabited by empty spray cans, lies the uniqueness of Nema-ye Nazdik. There is nothing holy or sacred in Kiarostami’s images. The material density of the rough texture of the depicted reality drains from them. The close-ups of the film -- whether in actual shot scale or in narrative intimacy achieved by precisely restrictive framing and extensive use of the off-screen space -- startle us with this banality of the facticity of being and the phenomenal surface of reality. The final close-up of the film shows us Sabzian, looking down, holding a bouquet at the gate of the Ahanka residence where Makhmalbaf has taken him to make amends. One senses the Chaplinesque tragedy of life in close-up. It is tragic because there is no comfort from contextualization; there is a factual detail thrown at us in its strange existential disclosure. A rolling empty spray can or a structured identity at ruins -- revealed, stripped, naked. The human theme of longing coalesces with the meta-cinematic theme of the possibility of representation as one feels the unquenchable thirst for escape, the yearning to be someone else in this banal world of objects-at-present. Where else in the cinema does one find all of this? 

13. The Wrong Man (1956, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)

Although Hitchcock is definitely a genre director, meaning that he really devoted his whole career to the genre of suspense (whether in thriller, horror, espionage, or adventure), he made a lot of films which pushed the limits of genre aesthetics, conventional narration, and classical style toward unexplored territories in the land of film. Hitchcock’s legacy is in fact constituted precisely by his relentless desire to look for new ways of cinematic expression. The most obvious example would probably be the “trilogy” in which Hitchcock tested -- and, perhaps to popular opinion, failed -- the slow aesthetics of the long take: Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), and Stage Fright (1950). Their uniqueness is admirable, and the two latter border on masterpiece, but the most unique of Hitchcock’s films is, I believe, The Wrong Man (1956).

If Hitchcock, the great manipulator of his audience whose “buttons” he loved to push, is placed in the group of directors who mastered formalist montage over realist mise-en-scène, following a heavily Bazinian distinction, we might conclude that The Wrong Man is the closest Hitchcock ever got to cinematic realism. Although the film does manipulate the spectator, guiding their gaze throughout rather than giving them the freedom of deep focus and multiplanar composition (the cardinal virtues of Bazin’s theory), its austere mise-en-scène, economic narration, and minimalist editing make it Hitchcock’s most Bressonian film. Interestingly enough, and this will bring us to the film’s uniqueness in a moment, Hitchcock’s biggest fan and André Bazin’s most famous disciple, François Truffaut first expressed great appreciation for The Wrong Man when it came out and later disowned the film in his famous interview book with Hitchcock [1].

The passage where Truffaut challenges Hitchcock, not in order to humiliate him but in order to get him to defend his artistic choices, is among the best parts of the whole interview book. Their discussion concerns the scene where the protagonist, played by Henry Fonda, is taken to his prison cell where he does not belong to because he really has not committed the crime he is being accused of committing. There is no dialogue or voice-over narration to tell us what the character is going through, but Hitchcock’s cinematic narration still visually focalizes into his internal, first-person point of view, while switching to an external, non-focalized third-person perspective in medium shots of the character in captivity. Hitchcock cuts between these medium close-ups of the character’s face as he is looking at something and point of view shots of the austere cell that serves as the object of his gaze. There is no music, no sound -- just stark images of a narrow, grey space. The calm cutting between these two types of shots manages to reflect the character’s inner life which becomes, so to speak, externalized by cinematic means. It is as though his mind extended to the space whose austerity became to articulate his experience of imprisonment, isolation, and, ultimately, loss of self. The non-subjective space turns subjective; its concrete features start to channel the character’s mental states in ways which contemporary directors like Lucrecia Martel have mastered.

The problem Truffaut has with the scene is its ending. The scene concludes with a medium shot where the protagonist leans against the wall of his cell, eyes closed, distraught, powerless. Suddenly, non-diegetic music starts playing on the soundtrack and the camera begins swirling in a circular loop around the character. As the movement of the camera accelerates, the music intensifies and finally reaches a crescendo coinciding with a fade-to-black to the next scene. Truffaut disliked this shot because it seemed to break with the Bressonian asceticism that Hitchcock had been practicing prior to it. It is also noteworthy to add that never again is there anything like this in the rest of the film (and thus the shot does break against the norm of consistency): The Wrong Man returns to its minimalist, Bressonian roots, letting go of the striking expressivity of such camera movement (which is not used to follow a character or reveal further details of narrative significance in the diegetic space). One might recall, for example, the unforgettable shot which dissolves the praying protagonist’s face with the “right man’s” face, and what a completely different feel that shot has to it -- it is something Bresson would never do, but it is something the Bressonian side of Hitchcock does.

Despite Truffaut’s challenge, Hitchcock refused to defend his film, disappointingly noticing that it was not that important to him. That might be the case, but it might also be that Hitchcock was not sure of his artistic choice, or he didn’t know how to explain his intuition, or he didn’t want to argue about such matters. Maybe he thought he had failed in his experiment. Either way, it is this moment which always gets me. It feels a little awkward, and it always pushes me just a little away from the film, to a strange borderline zone of cringe -- but, at the same time, it feels wonderful. It’s the moment where one can so clearly see Hitchcock’s legacy as an innovator and a re-generator, looking for new ways to make films -- and not always with success. It’s the moment when you realize that you are not watching Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956, A Man Escaped) but The Wrong Man. It goes against the realist style which avoids blatant and outspoken expression, but it goes so well with Hitchcock’s own style where a sudden cut to an extreme long shot from an extreme high-angle on the top of the United Nations building is completely natural. It’s also one of those moments, definitely alongside the great dissolve of the two faces, where one can sense the presence of cinematic uniqueness. Although I think Un condamné à mort s’est échappé is a better film, there is really nothing like The Wrong Man. From Hitchcock’s startling opening monologue to the inexplicable happy end, bordering on Sirkian irony, The Wrong Man is really its own idiosyncratic thing.

12. Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, FRANCE)

Master director Max Ophüls’ final film and cinematic legacy Lola Montès (1955) is the definitive cult film. It’s strange, it’s wild, and its off-the-rails uniqueness made it a massive flop. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of... the dreams in cult film land. A lavishly told story about a woman with hundreds of lovers, who is now presented to us as a circus attraction, did not resonate with contemporary audiences. With the exception of the new film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, who were to define the cinema of the following decade, everybody hated the film. To those who understood the magic, however, it was wonderful. To those who still do, it is beyond divine. The combination of box-office and critical failure with a huge budget and an unprecedented desire to challenge convention from the 50-year-old director, who was soon to pass away, turned Ophüls into a martyr figure for the new generation of French filmmakers. Like Orson Welles, Ophüls was -- to them in their own land -- a misunderstood genius, a maestro who died two years after the release of his final film that found too few kindred spirits.

What makes the case of Ophüls’ martyrdom so fascinating is the fact that on paper Lola Montès sounds like everything Truffaut et co. hated. It is based on a novel, its script has other writers in addition to Ophüls, it has an all-star cast (and without the obvious choice, the Ophüls favorite of the 50′s, Danielle Darrieux!), and it has lavish production values backed by a big budget. Does this not sound like le cinéma de qualité par excellence?

The fact that Lola Montès sounds like dull quality cinema on paper, however, does not mean that it looks like it on celluloid. And that’s what makes it unique. Known for his penchant for sumptuously elaborate camera movement (to the extent that a camera which is not moving on tracks simply looks naked in the Ophüls universe), Ophüls went an extra mile to make his forward-tracking dolly shots work in a wide circus arena without revealing the tracks. Resonating with the width of the diegetic space and the volume brought to it by such cinematography, Ophüls also widened his film into color and the CinemaScope aspect ratio for the first time in his career. Unlike anyone prior to him and few after, during a time when CinemaScope had not been around for longer than two years, Ophüls made the unexpected decision to play with the aspect ratio. For most of the screen time, we see the events unfold in 2.55:1, but, every now and then, when mood or character identification so requires, Ophüls narrows the aspect ratio back to the Academy ratio by placing curtains on both sides of the lens. The peculiar technique of altering the aspect ratio within shots in itself is enough to make Lola Montès unique, but the way it connects to the theme of the theater -- not only as the circus milieu but also as the publicization of the private sphere -- and the surprising yet accurate (which never feel too much on-the-nose) choices Ophüls makes in using it turn Lola Montès into a bizarre marvel. 

11. Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)

On paper, again, Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon (1947) seems like nothing but a love triangle done to death. Joan Crawford plays a woman who is having an affair with a married man, played by the impeccable Dana Andrews, but in the middle of their troubled affair -- that would suffice to constitute a love triangle -- enters a returning war veteran, played by Henry Fonda (the only actor to appear twice on this list!), who also catches the woman’s eye. The film unfolds as a series of moments which push the female protagonist to the embrace of one man or the other. What makes the film so unique, however, is its original cinematic discourse, its use of style and narration. In his admirably insightful new book on 40′s Hollywood, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2018), professor of film studies, David Bordwell calls Daisy Kenyon “one of the most psychologically opaque films of 1940′s” [2]. Preminger’s cinematic narration is characteristically restrictive of narrative information. There is no voice-over, which would provide the spectator information about the characters’ inner motivations and feelings, but this is only made more ambiguous by the dialogue where the characters keep making contradictory statements about themselves and others. It is difficult to keep track of their mood swings as well as their cognitive discontinuities, and make any cohesive conception of their true motivations and feelings. This was yet to become the dominant characteristic of modern European cinema (mainly Antonioni, above all), but here it blends with classical Hollywood.

The film is filled with strange moments of peculiar, recurring pauses in dialogue which enhance an ambiguity that starts to feel bigger than the characters and their petty worries. Fonda’s character suddenly ends a moment of conversation with Crawford’s by saying “my wife’s dead” without receiving a response of any kind from his romantic interlocutor. Similarly, he nonchalantly proclaims his love to her -- “I love you” -- but gets no response in another passing moment of indifferent quietude. There are no typical responses nor are there typical initiatives. There are only words that try to grab onto something but most often miss their targets that perhaps never even existed.

The lack of conventional non-diegetic music, the use of deep-focus cinematography, deep space compositions, and lingering shots create a mood of emptiness and despair, which reflect a deeper difficulty in expressing oneself. This theme is articulated on the formal level of style and narration, but it also becomes knitted into the story world toward the end when the courtroom sequence plays with the ideas of illogical human behavior and the impossibilities of finding out what people have done and felt. When one of the two men and the Crawford character embrace one another in the film's final shot, it is equally impossible for the spectator to believe that this is the stable, happy end of a typical Hollywood romance. It is merely another dumbfounded pause, another pointless initiative, another unnoticed response, which will soon be followed by quietude, distance, and alienation.

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir, AUSTRALIA)

Australian director Peter Weir has made a lot of weak films (I am not a fan of the sentimental Dead Poets Society [1989] or the pseudo-intellectual The Truman Show [1998] -- though I do have a little thing for Fearless [1993]), but his breakthrough film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is a real treat. A fictional account of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during an all-girls boarding school’s picnic on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, Picnic at Hanging Rock begins with a quasi-documentary opening text and concludes with an extra-diegetic voice-over discussing the case, making it seem as if the story was true. More than fooling the audience, this device guides them into another world, where something like this might have happened, and into the hypnotic trance of a mystery, all of which is enhanced, of course, by the first images of a foggy landscape and the girl’s words in voice-over:

What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.

Weir’s greatest film leaves a lasting impression with its unique, impressionist aesthetics of pale colors, quiet sounds, soft focus, lush cinematography, eerie panpipes music, and an often strictly limited field of focus. It is as if the film had been shot through lace or a veil, giving the effect of the faded fantasy image of the romantic belle époque. The final jaded slow-motion shots of the group before the disappearance have an otherworldly quality. They bear a resemblance to impressionist paintings, but the jaded pace of the visual stream of the images emphasizes their mechanic artificiality as though these were paintings made with the first motion picture cameras. Weir’s narrative structure is likewise closer to poetry or painting than to prose as the focalization of the narration is constantly switching, the characters remain a mystery with their inner world and their psychological motives left completely in the dark, the relations between the diegetic events are vague to say the least, and Weir cuts between them in an unconventional fashion. It is nothing short of cinematic uniqueness which stays with the spectator for the rest of their life. One of the most sensitive and clever mystery films of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock keeps astonishing with its whimsical combination of mystery and reportage, impressionism and mystique, the fantastical and the real.

9. A Canterbury Tale (1944, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK)

Made in the days of Capra’s wartime propaganda series Why We Fight (1942-1945), whose patriotic spirit spread across the Atlantic to films calling for Anglo-American solidarity, Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) defies tired cliches and patriotic sentiments in its utterly unique rhythm and tone. Taking Chaucer’s classic as an inter-textual framework, A Canterbury Tale focuses on three characters who, on their way to Canterbury, stop at a small village where a mysterious “glue-man” is terrorizing young women who dare to date soldiers. In contrast to most of the wartime productions of the time, Powell and Pressburger’s film turns its gaze from the grandiose to the minuscule, a small village that is unafraid to show its quirky silliness but as such grows into a metaphor for western civilization.

One of the famous director duo’s biggest critical and commercial flops, A Canterbury Tale defies easy classifications. What makes the film unique in a timeless sense lies in its tone and rhythm that are hard to describe. The set-up could mark the beginning of a frivolous farce, and the film is definitely not lost on moments of genuine hilarity, but, as a whole, A Canterbury Tale develops toward the area of peculiar pathos, humanistic tenderness, and profound melancholy. The mythic and the mundane, the romantic and the realist, the everyday and the sublime, the eternal and the transient all find their strange fusion in the film’s rendez-vous of distinct tones, moods, and ideas. Classical studio artificiality gets mixed with on-location authenticity, which is characterized by historical uniqueness as the contemporary spectator realizes that these places are no longer there, creating a tone like no other. In terms of rhythm, the film is always flowing without a hurry, yet never too slowly to announce itself as different or weird. The film’s uniqueness seems so simple, encapsulated in the smallest of things (the co-presence of the past and the present, the smell of the countryside that is imagined through the images, the allure of the any-space-whatevers), but it is so difficult to describe let alone achieve. It must be seen to be believed...

8. Dong (1998, Tsai Ming-Liang, TAIWAN)

The late 1990′s attracted some filmmakers to imagine eschatological scenarios and project them on the big screen. The approaching arrival of the new millennium generated visions of both anxiety and hope, but man’s relentless tendency toward end-of-the-world nightmares drew him closer to the former. These cinematic efforts on the brink of the new millennium usually vary between downright awful (Armageddon, 1998; End of Days, 1999) and surprisingly tolerable (12 Monkeys, 1995), but Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s -- who had made a reputation for himself with the understated tale of eroticism Ai qing wan sui(1994, Vive L’Amour), whose final shot in itself might earn its own prize of uniqueness -- Dong (1998, The Hole) shows not only genuine originality and imagination before new times but also a unique tonal combination of both emotions associated with the historic transition: fear and hope.

These emotions are tied together in the film’s thematic nexus of encountering something new, a theme that is treated by Ming-Liang appropriately in an utterly novel fashion. The story takes place in a block of flats in the semi-urban outskirts of a Taiwanese city where people live in quarantine due to the lack of clean water, a problem that has some dire consequences, fitting for the new millennium: without water, people turn into cockroach-like entities that crawl in the dark spaces of moist dirt and dry trash. Two people, a man and a woman, who try to survive in this situation, are united when a hole appears on the man’s floor (being the woman’s roof) due to plumbing renovations. This hole, which is both physical and emotional -- concrete to the point that we can sense its material urgency and abstract to the point that words are not enough to express it -- begins to generate unprecedented intimacy between the two. The characters rarely communicate. At best, they might yell at each other when the woman, the neighbor beneath, finds her ceiling leaking. But there is a more tender connection, one that cannot be expressed by them. In a stroke of charming genius, Ming-Liang uses 50′s-style musical sequences, where well-dressed characters sing Grace Chang’s songs and perform dance numbers that convey the introverted characters silent feelings in a manner that obfuscates more than it clarifies (there is no aha-moment tailored for the spectator). As these musical sequences take place in the same desolate urban spaces where the characters exist, Ming-Liang’s realist aesthetics of the long take, deep space compositions, and a detailed naturalist mise-en-scène of faded colors and flickering lights are challenged by romantic artifice. The space, which turns into its own character, starts dreaming. It dreams of becoming something else, somewhere else, far and away, safe from the arrival of the new.

As the world prepares for never-before-seen destruction, the holes in the characters’ souls become tangible in the form of a narrow gap, not only the grey chasm between the two apartments but also the distinction between these two diegetic dimensions (the world of song and the world of silence). As the new both anxiety-inducing and hope-awakening millennium approaches, the two characters encounter love, something they had not expected, something they had forgotten, something that appears in a totally unprecedented form -- to them as well as to us, the audience. This unique story provides us with an interlude to reflect. Where are we going? New times are coming. We can always look back to the past. We can find solace in its embrace. What is collapsing? What can be recovered? What will the abyss of the hole engulf? And what will it bring about in times of chaos? A new connection, a new intimacy, a new cinema?

7. Herz aus Glas (1976, Werner Herzog, GERMANY)

Shot mainly in director Werner Herzog’s home environment of Bavaria, accompanied with gorgeous landscape shots from all over the world which still merge with the same central milieu, as well as Popol Vuh’s score, Swiss yodeling, and medieval music, Herz aus Glas (1976, Heart of Glass) is the shining ruby in Herzog’s prolific yet familiar oeuvre. Although Herzog is often celebrated as an eccentric filmmaker whose cinema constitutes an entirely unique thing of its own, his films are usually quite clearly connected to one another, and one knows what to expect from them (which is also a compliment to Herzog’s auteur caliber). Herz aus Glas, however, brings a breath of fresh air into a catalog that already seems to be as fresh as fresh can be. It is definitely the film that sticks out. No other Herzog film employs his unquenchable desire to pursue new profound images as strongly and startlingly.

The story concerns a Bavarian town in late 18th century whose main source of income comes from blowing a rare type of ruby glass. When the secret of the ruby glass passes away with the town’s deceased master, a prophetic seer from the hills descends to the townspeople and foresees their destruction. To anyone who has seen the film, it is quite clear that the story is secondary to the film’s strange, private discourse which might be better left unanalyzed since its mere verbal description seems to aggregate an insult at worst and a failure at best.

While there are certainly more than one factor which explain the film’s incomparable uniqueness (the presence of seemingly unrelated landscape shots as an additional level of discourse, the ambiguous story as well as its elusive structure, the extremely stylized mise-en-scène that creates a sense of alienation and distance), the raison d’être for the film’s reputation obviously derives from Herzog’s exceptional decision to shoot the whole film with the actors under hypnosis. Consequently, the film is rife with images of hypnotized people who stare very attentively at something in the off-screen space -- something, an object, a sight, an event, something that remains a mystery to the hopelessly unaware spectator. In the physical space, the actors are obviously looking at something Herzog the hypnotist has guided them to look at, but in the diegetic space, the characters are looking with great attention and focus on their pre-determined doom. Their focus is startling because, despite their attentiveness, they do nothing but walk towards their demise. This works because, though pre-determined, their doom is indeterminate in the sense that they cannot really make any sense out of it. A stroke of genius on Herzog’s part, this heavily stylized acting turns into a metaphorical framework for a community which is under collective hypnosis heading out to the horizon of destruction with a sense of blind determination.

The film is totally alienated from classical story-telling, and many of its scenes take place in spaces which we might see only once and whose relations to the rest of the spaces remain unclear. Mapmakers of fictive worlds, beware. They are places which Herzog remembers from his childhood, or places which he has imagined for his past or future. There are many elements which would annoy the regular movie-goer from the slowly developing cry of a woman as she witnesses two seemingly dead men on the ground to the inexplicable bursts of laughter from the old man. There are plenty of scenes which seem to serve no clear purpose. There is a scene where a painting falls from the wall behind a man after which he tries to lift it, fails, and then returns to his original posture as if nothing had happened. There is also a sequence shot of a glassblower making a glass horse out of the melt matter. This scene has no obvious meaning in the film, nor should it; the shot is just there. It is there for us to marvel at it and to reflect on the beauty of craftsmanship, the art of glassblowing.

If the quest of Herzog’s cinema is to always look for new images, then Herz aus Glas delivers more than any of his films. One of the many peculiarities of the film are the recurring landscape shots from all over the world which remind one of Herzog’s brilliant documentary Fata Morgana (1971). These landscapes might be the visions of the attentively looking townspeople or not. As such, they might be images of destruction, of the end, or of the beginning -- or not. They might be an imagined landscape of origins. My personal favorite is the shot, which has been done mechanically by a frame-by-frame technique, of a river of clouds on the top of a forest. There is an enchanting mystique to this hypnotic image. When we look at it, we might think that it is about something, but we should not make the mistake of trying to explain what that something is. Nor should we find an external point of reference to call it a metaphor for something else. We should embrace its mere cinematic aboutness.

6. The Quiet Man (1952, John Ford, USA)

John Ford, the man who made westerns, is to modern America what Homer is to ancient Greece. Beyond the genre of lonely travelers in the wild west, Ford took his cinematic myth-making to other worlds. They Were Expendable (1944) provided the first signs of Ford’s unadorned and unsung sensitivities beyond the desert, which, after initial opposition, he was able to appreciate (sort of) after Lindsay Anderson pressed him on the emotional depth of the film in his celebrated interview book. The real deal when it comes to Ford’s hidden personality, his artistic ambition, and his aesthetic sensitivity, however, is The Quiet Man (1952), a film like no other if there ever was one. It is a unique, poetic fable of pastoral idyll, understated modern anxieties, battling dialectics of reality and fantasy.

A classical love story where a man, Sean Thornton, played by Ford soulmate John Wayne, returns to Ireland from America where he falls in love with Mary, played by Maureen O’Hara, The Quiet Man is like an idyllic postcard, a tale of the fantastical countryside that is presented in an overly romanticized fashion. Its humor, varying between masculine slapstick and battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy, would make the advocates of the me-too era cringe. However, I believe that Peter von Bagh was right in seeing the film as greater than life. To him, its scenes of love carry “metaphysical might.” [3] There is more to them than the eye can see. When Sean pulls Mary away from the door opened by ferocious wind to kiss her for the first time, there is a sense of baroque awe as Mary’s hems bend against her rigid legs in a gust of divine wind. Perhaps telling of its uniqueness, the film’s closest kindred spirit seems to be a film that looks totally different, Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), which carries similar “metaphysical might.” 

The Quiet Man was not received well during its initial release. Its fable-like illusions threw away all hopes of Ford’s return to the realist cinema of Hollywood he helped establish in the late 30′s and early 40′s. The far landscapes of the wild west were replaced by a postcard idyllic Irish village of Inisfree where trains are late, chores can be put on a halt to chit-chat, and traditions persevere. From the beginning locus amoreus of a boat by lakeside at dusk to pastoral iconography of a redhead shepherding sheep, a priest fooling fish, and drunkards playing the accordion, The Quiet Man is Irish pastoral of 50′s American optimism. Despite the film’s idyllic nature and the romantic mise-en-scène that gives birth to it, one would be making the mistake if one concluded that The Quiet Man was completely lost on realism. “Inisfree is far from heaven, Mr. Thornton!,” reminds one character. It is rather that in it Ford manages to find a totally unique combination of realism and romanticism, the modern and the traditional, the American and the Irish, in a fashion that reminds me of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Sean escapes America, the land of freedom and opportunities, to his home country of Ireland. Although never stated explicitly in the film, one can see a social undertone, as noticed by von Bagh: during the Korean War, which was still going on, disillusions scattered throughout America. Inisfree’s distance from heaven might be lost on Sean’s nostalgic eyes, but he seems to imply something about the looming vicinity of realism to us when, upon seeing Mary for the first time, his yet undiscovered love interest and wife-to-be, he states: “is she real?”

It is, in fact, this scene, this first encounter between the lovers-to-be, that always gets me. Its uniqueness escapes words. The scene begins with a long full shot of Mary amid sheep, which is motivated as Sean’s point of view shot as the scene progresses. There is a cut to a low-angle medium shot of Mary, which is followed by a reverse shot of Sean and then another low-angle medium shot of Mary, as she slowly vanishes beyond the frames of the screen space. A return to the long full shot of Mary amid sheep is followed by a medium shot of Sean. Dumbfounded, amazed, looking afar, and hopelessly in love, he says: “Is she real?” Ford’s brilliant choices in montage and shot scale articulate the distance between the characters, which will be a recurring theme in the film -- “There’ll be no locks or bolts between us, Mary Kate!” -- while also bringing them in close intimacy that still remains a mystery to both of them. There is a heavenly feeling to all of this. Where are we? The modern Sean, escaping the disillusions of 50′s American optimism, might be asking himself: “Is this -- Inisfree -- real?” We, the viewers, we, the lovers of the film, we, the lovers of cinema, might be asking ourselves: “Is this -- The Quiet Man -- real?”

5. Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Sergei Parajanov, USSR/UKRAINE)

Ukraine-born director, Sergei Parajanov’s breakthrough film Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) is on fire. It is on fire like a mixture of jazz and opera, a blend of ancient epic and modernist poem, a mishmash of waltz and jitterbug that never, for some odd unfathomable reason, feels haphazard. It feels eternal, timeless, and archaic, but, at the same time, contemporary and modern. The truly marvelous thing about all this is the fact that the story itself is a fairly traditional love story. Ivan and Marichka, whose families are rivals by heart, fall in love at a young age. After Marichka drowns in an accident, Ivan falls into depression but then remarries. In his new life of work and dull everyday chores, he is tormented by the memory of his first love. In the end, he dies either due to a hit from a sorcerer, who has made passes at Ivan’s new wife, or due to his incurable loneliness in a void universe without love.

Such a classical romantic tale acquires an unprecedented energy from Parajanov’s cinematography that is characteristically free and mobile -- in stark contrast to that of Sayat Nova (1969, The Color of Pomegranates), the director’s best-known film. The handheld camera is always on the move. It does not shake in the sense that the contemporary spectator has become accustomed to identify “handheld camerawork;” in fact, it can be very steady at times, but it moves quickly and ferociously. It pans so fast from one place to another that the eye does not register the spaces between the two steady screen spaces before and after the pan. It can appear to be fixed on a spot, but then it starts gliding or flying as in the amazing shot of Ivan lying on the large raft on the river. Watching the film unfold on the big screen is like having your head dislocated in some strange non-physical sense. One might think that such energy is distracting and makes one pay too much attention to the cinematography. The effect, however, is the opposite. It’s hypnotic. Everything feels intuitive and natural. One simply feels bewildered before this film to the extent that one starts imagining new images to the film. It is as if the camera found freedom and was liberated from its physical ties, becoming a disembodied eye whose movements are impossible to be predicted. The spectator never knows where the camera is going to move next, what the next angle will be, or in which scale the next shot shall be.

As such, the camera turns into a lyrical speaker of a poem or a stream-of-consciousness narrator of prose who identifies with the characters’ experience that cannot be accessed unambiguously. The most obvious example is not surprisingly the use of point of view shot when Ivan’s father is axed to death: red blood fills the screen, which is followed by a strange image of red silhouettes of running horses. Less obviously subjectivized stylistic decisions, where the camera identifies with characters’ experience, include the beginning scene where there is a “point of view shot” from a falling tree’s perspective, which is followed by a hypnotic spin of the camera as though it detached from material reality after a character dies under the tree. During the first embrace of Ivan and Marichka, Parajanov’s camera keeps the characters in focus and in a tight medium close-up, but the intimacy is complicated by implied visual distance: the use of the telephoto lens coalesces multiple layers of tree branches and other flora as a soft, flat veil enfolding the lovers in their natural innocence as the camera encircles them in eternity. When Ivan falls into depression after Marichka’s death, not only are the colors replaced by a surprising shift to black-and-white but also the movement of the camera becomes significantly calmer and slower. When Ivan starts feeling the presence of the dead Marichka -- as a ghost, as a memory -- there is a series of jump cuts showing Marichka behind Ivan’s window, rather than a return to the previous stylistic program. All of these exemplify cinema’s ability to subjectivize without the use of point of view shot or voice-over. Parajanov realizes this potentiality beautifully and uses different cinematic means without restriction but never without a consistent vision.

There are shadows from the past which obstruct Ivan and Marichka’s innocent love, but there are also shadows from the new past which prevent Ivan from moving on with his life. In an unforgettable scene that is still unparalleled in film history, Marichka’s ghost entices the delirious Ivan, recently struck by the sorcerer, to death in a wintry forest. Both characters move toward each other, but they do not seem to be walking in the medium shots that only show their heads moving against the background of the white forest as their voices sing a song of love without their lips moving. There is a strange sense of movement and ceased time. There is a touching sense of the wonderful yet painful grip of love. There it is, unshadowed, unforgotten, now.

4. Sud pralad (2004, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, THAILAND)

In terms of mere structure, this film is bonkers. Hardly ever has a film dropped as many jaws as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s breakthrough feature Sud pralad (2004, Tropical Malady) during its initial festival release. At first glance, it might be tedious, it might be irritating, it might be, well, just too mysterious. It might feel too private. As one allows the images and the sounds to sink in, however, this masterful, dualistically structured film starts to make sense like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Even more so than Lynch’s, I believe, Weerasethakul’s film is one of the best and most unique films ever made about love.

What begins as a love story between two men, a soldier and a country boy working at an ice factory, ending in an unexplained break-up, suddenly turns into a silent fable about a shape-shifting shaman and a soldier. The second part can be seen as an allegory for the first -- or vice versa. They comment on one another. They are co-dependent. They are lovers. There isn’t one without the other. What is more important than the logical connections between the two parts (one can either see them as flip sides of the same story or as a continuous story in the same fictive world) are their sensual and emotional resonances. Being a love story, the film’s English title (which is not a direct translation, one might add) already suggests a peculiar vision of love: not as a cure or as a utopia but as a malady, a sickness, something that consumes one’s body and soul. As the two men separate, they first devour each other. There is a sense of mystery in the air. What happened? Exactly. Who knows. Who’s to say?

Since their feelings -- both in initial infatuation and in the out-of-the-blue separation -- cannot be explained in words, they are articulated by the fable. The soldier is being consumed by the shaman, he is dying because of him, but he is also dependent on the shaman and must approach him. As the shaman shifts into a tiger, the aspect of consumption becomes poignantly discernible. Weerasethakul uses many lingering shots in the dark forest that suggest a fluctuation between the two characters. There is movement in the screen space, but is it the soldier or the tiger? They finally face each other in a bigger-than-life scene of intense stares that will haunt you for an eternity. The stare of the tiger occupies the screen space, dominating, hypnotizing the audience. There’s a strange sense of fear but also of lust; there’s an inexplicable desire to surrender as the malady takes over. Weerasethakul’s long take allows the tiger’s stare to sink in, to drill down to the spectator’s spine where its sensuous force begins to fester. The moment of devouring is at hand. This scene breaks hearts and sews them back together. 

Weerasethakul’s inimitable cinematic discourse, which operates on the immediate level of senses and sensations, uncovers animals and other natural entities in their own right, as they appear, rather than as conventional metaphors for something else. They are embraced as the Other. Indeed: Sud pralad is a film about primordial otherness of everything else beyond oneself, a theme that Weerasethakul tackles by telling a love story. Because in love one experiences otherness most intimately but also most painfully. One might be very close to the other, but one also experiences the growing distance. One must confront the insurmountable challenge to understand the other. There is one’s own mind to keep one company, and then there is the rest of the world. There is the man devouring one’s hand and then going away for good. There are street lights in the night. There is music in the air. There is a sense of heartrending wonder. There is the intensely staring tiger ready to devour the one. And there is the one ready to take the plunge.

3. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies, UK)

By its enigmatic title alone, Terence Davies’ heavily autobiographical film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) invites expectations of originality, and those expectations are not disappointed to the slightest. The ambiguous title is rife with meaning, but at the most direct level it works as a structural point of reference since the film is distinctly divided into two separate parts. A story about a working-class family living in Liverpool, the film’s first part, “Distant Voices” focuses on the power the family’s father has on their co-existence in 1940′s, while the second part, “Still Lives” portrays the lives of the children in their early adulthood in the 1950′s -- away from the presence of the war but still far from the new youth culture that was about to emerge. Under the father’s abusive influence, they cried and sang in a bomb shelter; now, safe from heavy rain in a cinema, they cry as they watch Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). This is but one parallel in a film where things get entangled, where popular culture, communal singing, historical events, universal themes, and extremely personal memories fuse in an unprecedented network of cinematic thinking.

The peculiar two-part structure, made striking by the two-year gap in production and inevitable change in some of the crew, would be enough to mark the film as singular, but this narrative division is only one element in an idiosyncratic whole that constantly draws the spectator’s attention to the artificial nature of the cinematic representation in question. The film’s narration itself is self-aware to the extent that the spectator inevitably pays attention to it: the non-linear representation of past events in an order that seems associative at best is bound to make the spectator ponder representation. Davies thematizes representation or, more accurately put, memory, its mechanics, and the possibility of representing and remembering. On an immediately stylistic level, Davies employs heavy use of light coming from an off-screen source as well as over-exposed light in the screen space which, together with the pale and tainted colors that filter every image, give a peculiar, golden hue to the sepia-like, nostalgic mise-en-scène reminiscent of scuffed photographs. The cinematography, which varies between utter stillness and slow pans and dolly shots, often gives a strong impression of tableaux vivants from early cinema, which remind one of old family photographs. The same goes for the film’s strikingly exact and centralized compositions: never has a symmetrical two-shot felt this precise and powerful, static and dynamic at the same time -- artificial and proud of it.

On both levels of narration and style, Davies draws the spectator’s attention to the artificiality of everything: that all this has been “produced” -- structured and conditioned by a mind that is reminiscing something. That something belongs to a world that no longer is, and that never was just like this. It is an utterly unique world that is only here and now, in the moment one is watching this film and remembering it in their own mind. There is a sense of discipline and order which always leave something outside, making it absent, outside of memory’s reach, while encapsulating something, making it present, within memory’s constituted and conditioned sphere. On both levels, Davies’ film is strongly characterized by elements of distance and stillness as his filmic portrayal of family leaves his characters relatively distant, beyond our absolute reach, in picturesque mobile paintings that invite us to reflect what lies beyond their frames of stillness and distance, sight and sound.

2. Zerkalo (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR)

It’s nothing. Everything will be alright. Everything will be...

A monumental yet intimate masterpiece of memory, undoubtedly the best film on this list, if not simply the best film ever made, and one of the few films I have seen more than ten times, Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal film Zerkalo (1975, Mirror) is beyond flawless. Like Bresson, Tarkovsky certainly has a very distinctive oeuvre that feels consistent in its stylistic unity, but there is something intensely singular about Zerkalo that elevates it above a body of six other masterpieces or fringe-masterpieces. Some directors have tried to follow Tarkovsky in creating their own mirrors, but none have achieved either the same level of quality or of uniqueness. The beautiful thing about the film is, and this is key to its uniqueness as well, that Tarkovsky manages to bring the private to the public (not only by juxtaposing his own experiences with Russian history but also by uncovering the universal structure in human experience) without ever coming close to sacrificing the innate privacy of some of his images at the altar of effortless intelligibility.

The first time viewer is bound to be confused by the enigma. In the course of repeated viewings, however, the fuzzy reflection begins to take shape. A dying poet recalls his life which unfolds in sequences that take place in three different time frames: his childhood in the early 30′s, his adolescence during WWII in the early 40′s, and his parenthood in the late 60′s. He ventures into the abyss of his suffering as well as that of his nation and humankind in general, but, in the midst of pain, a vague promise of peace is discovered. Mixing archival footage with traditional scenes of dialogue on different time frames, reciting poems and playing music, using oneiric images as well as concrete motifs of mirrors and fire, juxtaposing colors with sepia and black-and-white, Zerkalo coalesces the personal with the collective and the dreamlike with the material. It creates an unparalleled rhythm that has an eerie, otherworldly feel to it, which, nevertheless, feels so intimately tied to nature and sensation that one can almost touch it. But when you reach your hand toward the mirror, it once again reveals its elusive shape that escapes your grasp. 

In its stream of impressions and ideas, the poetically flowing narrative of Zerkalo works as a lucid parable of the human mind. The mere viewing experience of the film works as a cheap form of psychoanalysis for some. Film scholar and programmer Antti Alanen calls it “a space odyssey into the interior of the psyche” [4]. The ambiguously focalized narration flows in ways which resemble free association. There is an event and there is another; there is an image, then a sound; there are pauses and gaps, inexplicable connections of heart and soul, lines drawn by a tormented mind trying to comprehend and grasp something that, as he himself puts it, cannot be expressed by words. From grand sights such as the collapse of the house and the flight of a bird through a window to tender details of a human hand before a flame, a redhead with a blistered lip in the snow, and a cut from one gaze to another, the film’s narrative flow follows a logic of its own, a logic on a higher level, a logic that feels consistent but cannot be laid out in non-cinematic terms. To some, there is spiritual force in this, the power of both the subconscious and the Hegelian Weltgeist traversing across the images.

Zerkalo tackles questions that are no less than the biggest but also the simplest in life: What is human life? What is its meaning? What is its meaning to us as individuals and as mankind? Why and how is it experienced as meaningful? There are no answers, there is no great revelation, and how could there be, but there are little junctures of awe, touches with the world, small manifestations of fire before us. The protagonist’s ex-wife wonders why something like the burning bush never appeared to her. We might wonder the same. In Tarkovsky’s mind, it seems to me, this is due to the loss of connection to something transcendent to us and our petty affairs -- not necessarily to god but perhaps to nature, to values as such, to what really matter, to our primordial origin. Or, perhaps, more modestly, there is a loss of connection to the mirrors around us, manifesting as the inability to accept bewilderment and live in lack of comprehension. The film is full of moments of such transcendence: the bird landing on the boy’s head in a strikingly beautiful composition of Brueghelian proportions, the massive gust of wind blowing over the departing man on the serene field after a chance encounter, the mysterious fall of an oil lamp from the table on the wooden floor, and the disappearance of a faint ring stain on a table as the lady vanishes. What are these magical moments, these manifestations of burning bushes, other than Ereignisse that ask us to accept irrationality, to look into the mirror and marvel? The great revelation to the big questions might never come, but the reflection on the mirror keeps getting clearer only to be beclouded again and vice versa.

1. Sans soleil (1983, Chris Marker, FRANCE)

Contrarily to what people say, the use of the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: all I have to offer is myself. [5]

These are the words of Chris Marker. A private recluse, a documentarian, a poet and a reporter of the cinema, Marker escapes easy classification. The creator of the most unique short film La jétée (1962), Marker is also celebrated as the father of subjective documentary. After making what is most likely the best depiction of the political turmoil in the second half of the 20th century in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977, A Grin without a Cat), Marker turned inward -- or did he? -- in the pioneer piece of whatever you want to call it, poetic essay film or subjective documentary, Sans soleil (1983, Sunless). “I could tell you that the film intended to be,” Marker affirms, “and is nothing more than a home movie. I really think that my main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies.“ [6]

Anybody can make home movies, and everybody does in these pathetic days of YouTube vlogging, but only Marker can make home movies that are simultaneously ultimately his and ultimately ours. A home movie for the ages, Sans soleil tackles the perennial topic of French cinema (think of the whole oeuvre of Alain Resnais), the difficulty of memory, which has both individual and social implications for the representation of the past. In the beginning, there is an image of children in Iceland. Happiness signified. Is this a memory? Images signifying a happy childhood memory, any-memory-whatever. “How can you remember thirst,” asks the man behind the camera, whose letters the female voice-over, the alleged receiver of these letters with an alleged sender, another disembodied character like the man, reads out loud.

Marker’s Sans soleil does not develop ordinary motifs or conventional techniques in dealing with memory. No matter how innovative -- and groundbreaking -- Resnais’ methods are, they are no match for Marker’s meta-approach. Rather than thematizing memory with a device, Marker deals with the theme through itself, by trying to remember it, by trying to become conscious of itself. The man wonders how have people been able to remember anything without pictures. Pictures are the memory. Montage is the memory. Viewing the film is memory.

While timeless, Sans soleil is also absolutely a film of its time. It comes right out of the postmodern era when man’s relationship with history, time, memory, and space was challenged on all fronts of human thought and creativity. The history of the documentary film is filled with numerous travelogues -- from the ghost train films of early cinema to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934) -- but Marker’s Sans soleil challenges the whole possibility and meaningfulness of the travelogue. In his mind, in the mind of Sans soleil, time and space cannot be conveyed over individual, experienced knowledge. The poetic narration of Sans soleil constantly turns to itself and challenges its representation. The film consists of shots, which are more or less separate from one another, that are organized by the letters read by the woman, letters that she has received from a man, the man behind the camera. Thus there is a double focalization, the word and the image. When the levels of the image and the words of the letters occasionally coincide, the spectator is tempted to think of the images as shot by the man from his point of view, but Marker’s film seems to escape such an easy way out of the puzzle. Marker takes man’s relationship with history and the past by dealing with the relation between real and reconstructed memory. Is there a difference? Is there a difference between our collective history and our personal histories? Is there a difference between a home movie and a movie? Is knowledge of the world possible?

We know little of Marker’s private life. His most private and personal film, Sans soleil, perhaps paradoxically, adds nothing to this lack of knowledge. In a strange way, it achieves an extremely intimate level by creating a peculiar distance. It hides behind images and words. We never see the central characters. We see reconstruction. We see implications. We see conclusions without premises. We see the end of the road but not the road.

There are no clichés in Sans soleil because it is beyond the definition of cliché and convention. The man behind the camera has seen so much that at the moment only banality interests him, as he states in a letter. The unique and the original have become dull. The banal is the new unique. He preys banality like a bounty hunter. In this quest, banality turns into something else -- or does it? In a synthesis of banal moments, the montage of images becomes its own living thing.

A filmic version of stream of consciousness, the only structure of Sans soleil is its lack of structure. There is fragmentation on both the level of the whole and the level of the part. The words stop and random notes put a pause on a flow that, for a moment, seemed to have a clear structure. “By the way, did I tell you that there are emus in the Île de France?” The images freeze, the words stop, the images continue, the images give rise to a continuation into an unprecedented series of separate images. Yet, despite all of this, the film has a rhythm like no other, and it never feels scattered. It is cohesive on another level. It follows the unknown logic of its private internal auteur. Sans soleil is not remembered for its words nor for its images, but for the synthesis of it all -- and, most importantly, the impressions and feelings that arise from this synthesis. We do not remember individual shots, individual sentences, or at least we do not think of them. We remember the film.

I remember the cut from the Japanese dancing to an emu. I remember the abrupt cuts from the serene desert to the chaotic Hong Kong. I remember the cats in the temple. I remember. I remember the electronic sounds accompanying swans in a lake. I remember the counterpoint. I remember the tension, the voltage, the trance of it all. I remember the lack and the absence. I remember the presence and the richness. I remember the unique, the one and only, Sans soleil, the distant voice that both fades and stays in memory.

Some runner-uppers, or the mandatory honorable mentions: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino apparatom (1929), Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987), Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986), Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930), Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968), Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952). Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Notes:

[1] Truffaut, François. 1984. Hitchcock. Revised Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, p. 239-243.

[2] Bordwell, David. 2018. Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 220. 

[3] Bagh, Peter von. 1989. Elämää suuremmat elokuvat [Films Bigger Than Life]. Otava, p. 405. My own translation. 

[4] https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/785.

[5] https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/.

[6] Ibid.

#General posts on film

[essenceoffilm]

Through the Melancholy of the Passage of Time

He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one [1]

“To walk down memory lane” is a clever English idiom since it combines the psychological act of reminiscence with the concrete, physical act of walking down the lane. Its aptness stems from the fact that we humans tend to remember spatially. Memories may or may not be easily localized in the brain, but their mental content is often tied to spaces or, specifically, lived spaces, the way we experience them, to borrow a term from Juhani Pallasmaa [2]. The lane is a term that denotes a type of space, a part of the roadway, and, in the idiomatic expression of walking down memory lane, the spatial term has a temporal twist to it as the space of the lane refers to the past. The lane connotes home, family, and childhood. The sweetness of the nostalgia for these things can make one lose themselves on memory lane. This is essentially what happens to Ned Merrill, the hapless protagonist of Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968). 

The Swimmer is based on the short story of the same name by John Cheever, “the Chekhov of suburbs,” which director Frank Perry’s wife, Eleanor Perry turned into a screenplay. Cheever’s short story tells of Ned Merrill, a married man and a father, who, while spending a lazy Sunday by the swimming pool of his neighbors’ domicile, decides to swim from their place to his house by using the many pools of their bourgeois neighborhood. As Ned starts to get closer to his home, pool by pool, he begins to realize that he is swimming down the poignant memory lane. In other words, Ned starts to realize that he seems to exist in a different time from the rest of the world. He is clinging to the past of having a decent family life before an apparent divorce, debts, and loss of home. When neighbors and friends remind Ned of this, he seems totally oblivious. “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy,” an elderly couple of the Hallorans tells the protagonist in Cheever’s short story; “Why, we heard that you’d sold the house and that your poor children...” [3]. After hearing about the bypass surgery of his old friend, Ned is puzzled. “Was he losing his memory,” the third-person narrator wonders about Ned’s predicament, “had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend has been ill?” [4]. Not until the very end, when Ned is confronted by his empty, closed, and run-down old house, does the concrete of the lane hit Ned straight in the face. 

Perry’s film adaptation preserves the core ideas as well as the basic structure of Cheever’s short story, but it also makes some significant changes to externalize, so to speak, the story that operates mainly on the level of inner life. These changes manifest in the form of added dialogue, new characters, and additional action. For example, there are, most notably, two significant characters added to the film who do not appear in the original short story: Julie, played by Janet Landgard, the young woman who had a crush on Ned when she worked as a babysitter for his children in the past, and Shirley, played by Janice Rule, the neighbor with whom Ned had an extra-marital affair in the past. Both of these character additions are used to highlight Ned’s alienation from both his family life and the present in general. Julie is shocked by Ned’s obliviousness to their age difference and runs away after Ned makes a pass on her. Shirley, on the other hand, is utterly frustrated by the sudden return of Ned’s desires and locks herself out from him. They live in the present and they react negatively to Ned’s inability to do so. The film also removes Ned’s wife, Lucinda, whose name is carried by the “Lucinda river” of the pools Ned swims through, who makes a brief appearance in the beginning of the short story where Ned is hanging by the pool of the Westerhazys, one of their neighbors. This change might, I believe, actually improve Cheever’s original idea because it emphasizes the absence of Ned’s family -- also elaborating the idea that the two have divorced (which may or may not be the case in the short story). Overall, this beginning scene has a lot of dialogue in it compared to its minimalist concision in the original text. After gazing at the Lucinda river, Ned talks about his plans to the people around him and converses about other matters, while the short story has barely enough lines to fill one page. 

Since the film has additional character and new dialogue, it is bound to face the question how the characters and their manners of speech should be dealt with since the original text does not provide a point of departure. Perry’s bold move is to use overly punctuated, exaggerated, and theatrical acting which creates an ironic distance between the characters and the audience. While at first glance the contemporary spectator might simply see these as emblematic of poor production values during the New Hollywood phase, Burt Lancaster’s campish performance as the constantly smiling Ned in his youthful swimming trunks gains a poignant melancholy to it as the film goes on. There is a similar sadness to his relentless smile as there is in Setsuko Hara’s tendency to force a smile in Ozu’s elegiac Late Spring (1949, Banshun). 

In addition to characters and extended dialogue, Perry’s film also creates new scenes to the story. There is, for one, the scene where Ned swims through an empty swimming pool, dedicated to swim through all of them, with a young boy. An obvious visual metaphor for Ned’s useless attempt to project his fantasy of the preserved past on the dry present, the scene feels a little awkward and out of place, but, at the same time and as such, essential to the unique film. The scene with Ned running by the side of a horse and the scene where he and Julie run through an obstacle course, both of which are not in the original short story, are so strange and awkward that their displacement makes the spectator wonder why in the world were they added to the film. There is charm to their awkwardness, however, as there is to the rest of the film’s New Hollywood aesthetics of unnecessary zooms and slow-motion. 

Although Cheever’s short story is not completely exhausted by subjective interiority, since it has dialogue as a source of additional information beyond Ned’s deluded perspective and it is, one might add, told from the third-person perspective of an omniscient narrator, its epistemic connection to Ned’s perspective is stronger than that of the film. This is mainly due to the primal difference between literature and cinema since the latter can hardly escape its realism and attachment to the concrete. Fortunately, Perry realizes and embraces this, taking advantage of cinema’s prized abilities. After all, Ned’s action of swimming through the river of pools is bound to the concrete; it is bound to bodily activities and real spaces of memory lane. 

This change in narrative perspective is already eminent during the opening credits. Perry uses shots of a forest in autumn, including a shot of an owl, emblematic of the “last hours” of Ned’s “summer day,” which hints to the attentive spectator that it is already autumn rather than the summer. In Cheever’s short story, this is revealed only toward the very end. Thus Perry’s film elaborates the build-up to the revelation of Ned’s detachment from the reality of the present to the fantasy of the past. 

The film is, however, rooted in Ned’s epistemic perspective and most of the diegetic information provided by the cinematic narration is shared by Ned and the audience. All the information that challenges Ned’s delusion comes from what other characters say directly to Ned so he also, at the very least, receives that information (even if he does nothing with it). Perry also uses such cinematic means as prolonged dissolves, zooms, slow-motion, and point of hearing to reflect the subjective perspective. The shot, which superimposes a close-up of Ned’s face with the landscape of the Lucinda river at the moment when Ned decides to swim through it, is a perfect example of subjectivization without a point of view shot. The same could be said of the beautiful shots of Ned and Julie walking in the woods, where Julie talks about her past crush on Ned. The shots are either out of focus or the characters are in the background, which is out of focus, as the foreground is dominated by flowers and trees in focus. 

Resonating with the beginning shots of nature in autumn, the film ends with a startling change in narrative perspective. Although Ned’s discovery of the emptiness of his house (signifying that he did, in fact, lose it) is told from the third-person perspective in the short story, it is also specifically said that Ned sees the emptiness of his house: “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty” [5]. In Cheever’s text, it is Ned who looks in at the windows. In Perry’s film, on the contrary, Ned arrives at the door and desperately shouts and pounds it, but he never looks in at the window. Instead, there is a cut from Ned by the door in long medium shot to a medium shot of a hole in one of the windows. A slow zoom-in toward the hole is followed by a cut to a reverse shot of the window from the inside of the house where the camera pans to the left, disclosing the sheer emptiness of an abandoned domicile, ending up at the closed door that is being pounded by Ned. A final cut returns us to Ned by the door, outside. Although there is no sudden change in narrative perspective or “ocularization,” because the shots of Ned by the door are not subjective point of view shots either, there is nonetheless an unprecedented change in perspective because the spectator, for the first time, sees something that Ned does not. Obviously, the spectator has already began to “see” further than Ned, but here such seeing becomes literal. The device is, however, brilliantly not in violation of the rest of the film (especially if the opening credits sequence is taken to account, but without it as well) nor even of the short story (even if such a violation only mattered to people to whom books are holy sacraments not to be misrepresented by adaptations) because it still reflects Ned’s experience. Standing by the door, pounding and shouting, Ned realizes his delusion, his self-betrayal, and the overall emptiness of his existence. It is cinematic free indirect discourse, something whose literary counterpart is prevalent in Cheever’s short story. 

As Ned falls to the ground before the indifferent door, his demise is perpetuated by freezing the frame, a typical cinematic device of the period. Following Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959, Les quatre cents coups), George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a key film of the New Hollywood movement, ends with a freeze-frame of interrupted movement, but Perry’s The Swimmer did it first. The film is overall rife with New Hollywood aesthetics from the slow-motion shots of running in the obstacle course (as well as the existence of the scene in general!) to the zoom-ins to close-ups of human faces and the long shots of Ned and Julie walking out of focus. Where the lack of focus enhances the melancholic and nostalgic atmosphere, the slow-motion shots (not only of running but also of swimming) and the freeze-frame articulate the theme of movement: time is, quite literally, slowing down in Ned’s experience, and it freezes when he meets the wall putting a stop to his painful denial of death. 

Due to its existential tone, The Swimmer resides in the spheres of the films of Antonioni and Fellini. Like La dolce vita (1960) or La notte (1961), however, The Swimmer also has its social dimensions. The whole idea of an urban terrain filled with pools and rife with water seem to carry critical echoes, which are only emphasized by the scene, which one could see as being developed into an accumulating gag by someone like Jacques Tati, where a couple commends their recently installed filter in their pool that removes 99.99% of all excessive material from the water. Its satirical edge is never too sharp to notice, however, and it is constantly softened by the film’s elegiac ubiquity. 

An existentialist parable, Perry’s The Swimmer externalizes the inner life of its protagonist by adding dialogue and characters as well as by utilizing cinematic means and changes in narrative perspective. As such, it surmounts the dull “quality” adaptation. This externalization is more than appropriate because, just like the metaphor of memory lane, both Cheever and Perry have realized that memories are not only temporal but also spatial; they attach to places, environments, and our bodily activities in them. Maybe Ned decides to swim through the pools because swimming in pools and walking in his trunks remind him of summer and carefree existence with his family. In the end, what would be a better allegory for these mechanisms of memory and nostalgia, where space and time coalesce, than a seemingly consistent chain created by pools separated by yards, fences, and lanes?

The original poster for The Swimmer advertised the film by presenting the customer with a rhetorical question: “When you talk about The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?” Despite the awkward, campy clumsiness of the expression, which actually fits with some of the charm of Perry’s film, it was hard not to think about myself when I walked out of the cinema into the excessively warm summer evening. It is a cinema from which I have walked out for thousands of times ever since I was a 16-year-old. It is also a beautiful, old art deco cinema from the days of silent cinema that is currently being left behind by its long-time tenant, the Finnish film archive. Walking out from the cinema into the more than familiar streets of Helsinki, there was a call in the air to take a stroll down memory lane. 

Notes:

[1] Cheever, John. 1964. “The Swimmer”. In The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, p. 62. 

[2] Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2007. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. 

[3] Cheever 1964, p. 71. 

[4] Ibid. p. 72. 

[5] Ibid. p. 76. 

#The Swimmer #Frank Perry #American #1960's

[essenceoffilm]

The Spaces in Between

After two decades of acting in Japanese films, a happy coincidence altered the course of Takeshi Kitano’s career in the cinema. In the middle of the production of Violent Cop (1989, Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki), director Kinju Fukasaku stepped down due to a scheduling conflict with the main actor, Kitano’s other commitments. Kitano was given the opportunity to direct the film at his own pace, and thus the door was opened for him into the land of world cinema. Although Kitano has become the better-known director, the two returned to the original dynamic for the last time in Fukasaku’s final duology Battle Royale (2000, Batoru rowaiaru) and Battle Royale II (2003, Batoru rowaiaru II: Chinkonka) where Kitano plays a walking parody of a sadist. Sadism and violent tendencies are something which are, not surprisingly, characteristic of Kitano’s directorial debut as well since Violent Cop is a twisted take on the Dirty Harry archetype. In violence, in the trenches of Japanese culture and post-ultraviolent cinema, there is a middle path to be walked by Kitano which branches into multiple interconnected paths. There is the tonal path between lyric tenderness and graphic violence, there is the ideological path between the samurai code and nihilist anti-ideology, there is the path of agency between director and actor; and, finally, there is the path just between.

From Yasujirō Ozu, the master of the minute and the precise, who turned film making into an art of Japanese tea ceremony, we have learned that the Japanese life unfolds in three spaces: the home, the office, and the bar. Ozu’s characters have to transit from one of these spaces to the next, and these moments of transition Ozu fills with beautiful shots of still life, architecture, nature, and seemingly insignificant details. Violent Cop takes place in the spaces in between of these primary spaces. Where Kitano’s film lacks the compositional beauty of Ozu and the precision of Ozu’s Zen mise-en-scène, his film digs up these spaces, employs them, and uncovers them as real. We are convinced of their thereness. The seemingly insignificant details are not elevated to aesthetic objects of disinterest but they have their own realist poetics as objet trouvés. It is realism against formalism. It is disobedience to obedience. It is violence against serenity.

The story unfolds as a semi-rougher version of cops and robbers. Kitano plays a cop who disregards rules of good conduct and appropriateness for law enforcement. The killing of a drug dealer leads the cop and his partners on the hunt for another drug dealer whose businesses turn out to have ties to the police. When one of the cop’s close partners is being pressured for his connections to the drug business, he is found hanging from a bridge after an apparent suicide. After the unfortunate incident, things take a turn for the worse when the drug dealer abducts the cop’s sister, subjecting her to gang rape and drug abuse. The cop is finally able to track them down, killing both the drug dealer and his delirious sister before dying himself from the bullet of another police officer. The circle goes on as a rookie cop takes the role of his deceased predecessors of corruption in the sterile offices of the police.

Since Violent Cop was made almost two decades after Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), which popularized -- and, in its unnecessary sequels, exhausted -- the archetype of the violent vigilante cop, it is reasonable to posit the question whether Kitano manages to bring anything new to the subject matter. Kitano’s film resembles Siegel’s for both violence and realism, which is equally social and aesthetic, and they also resonate with one another for their thematic darkness. Both films are characterized by a melancholy epiphany about the pointlessness of moral struggle, though Siegel’s decision to leave his hero alive to give the finger to the law enforcement yields a less nihilistic tone to his film. Kitano’s film also amps up the darkness by crafting a much more cynical and violently reckless character. Kitano's cop is as indifferent to rules as Harry, but he is also strangely indifferent to morality. Although he goes to slap some sense into a kid who was harassing a homeless person, he also shoots a bystander by accident without flinching. He can shoot his sister if she seems disgusting and degraded to him. It seems that the violence of Kitano’s cop carries less moral connotations than that of Harry’s. The moral implications of some of his actions are just accidental features of deeply self-destructive and sadistic acts. His violence carries a misanthropic indifference to it. There is loathe for the world and loathe for himself in it. If the world always has something of us in it and we have something of the world in us, then Kitano’s cop bends in an existential vicious circle.

Although the film, like the brief synopsis above might suggest, has a traditional structure with a contained, centralized exposition, and a main character's goal whose fulfillment unfolds in a linear manner, the narrative rhythm has a strange lingering pace, breathing a cool sense of melancholy into the slick and smooth film. Despite the clear structure, it feels like scenes just follow one another without a clearly determined goal. It is as though the narration formed a shady reflection on rainwater of the protagonist’s urban existence. The reason for this feeling with regard to narrative, which manages to be modern and traditional at the same time, emerges from Kitano’s stylistic choices.

Cinematic modernism has its roots in Italian neo-realism, which liberated cinema into the streets of everyday life, and Kitano’s Violent Cop is characteristically realist in this tradition. Although the three primary spaces of the home, the office, and the bar make their appearance, the vast majority of the film takes place in exterior spaces of crowded streets, construction sites, sidewalks by highways, and narrow alleys.  A wide range of shot scales, deep space compositions, and the occasional use of telephoto lens give an additional realist breath of air to these on-location images of urban spaces. It’s the realist postwar film-noir in color. Characters are embedded to streets without names and crowds of faceless people. They walk in deeply composed spaces whose depth of field puts them in between the camera and the far background.

In many scenes, the editing is not analytical and there are no conventional establishing shots, enhancing a feeling of uncertainty about what is to come. The film begins with a shot of a homeless man whose tightly framed space is disturbed by an unexpectedly thrown object. Only later, the diegetic space reveals itself. In another scene, the drug dealer throws a man on the ground and starts kicking him. Only after the man reaches the surface of the ground, and after a cut to an extreme low-angle shot, is it revealed that they are in fact on a high rooftop. The insecurity of the spaces in between constantly uncovers as the threat of violence. An innocent bystander loses her brain when the cop’s aim is altered and a cop’s head is mushed by a metallic baseball bat. Violence is everywhere in the spaces in between, but violence in itself is nothing. It is used as an articulation of power: the kids elevate themselves by harassing the homeless man, the drug dealer exemplifies his stature by throwing the man off the rooftop. Brains on the sidewalk are traces of collateral damage. Men who have power are never triumphed by mere violence. The cop and the drug dealer both sustain extreme violence without flinching. The bullets practically go through them in the final confrontation. As the film’s original title -- “That cop, being violent” --, which has its roots in Japanese criminal reports, suggests, they exist violently.

The film climaxes in violence in an ambiguous space where spatial relations are vague and unknown. The cop walks against the drug dealer’s bullets until the former finally kills the latter. His sister emerges from darkness in drug delirium, which prompts him to shoot her as well. After he is shot by the police, the space is briefly lit up, revealing it to be a large hall with symmetric pillars of concrete. It is an urban clearing where human truths begin to look painfully obvious and unambiguous. Universal indifference and enduring solitude echo in its silent emptiness as the light finally turns off again, leaving nothing but a faint surface of light on the cop’s corpse in darkness. Nothingness reigns in the space in between.

The violent climax is, however, followed by two brief scenes. We see the rookie cop, who was following in the protagonist’s footsteps, walk on the highway bridge, where we have seen the protagonist walk before, in a telephoto shot with a deep field of focus. From this space in between he walks into the office, the police station where he is given the mission of corruption. Nothing mattered, in the end. As though in sterile lack of care, Kitano’s camera turns to a secretary typing on the side. The frame freezes her mundane act exemplifying the banality of evil. All the dying, the violence, the pain had no impact. The everyday goes on. The life on the streets goes on. Violence goes on. Violent Cop film is not an ideological outburst -- it does not celebrate nor frown upon Harry-like dirtiness -- but rather a cinematic poem of these truths of the spaces in between.

#Sono otoko kyôbô ni tsuki #Violent Cop #Takeshi Kitano #Japanese #1980's

[essenceoffilm]

Transcendence in the Sleepless Streets of New York City

Light sleep denotes the state of non-REM sleep where the person has not yet fallen into heavy sleep from whose lull it is more laborious to arise and which thus provides one with real rest rather than shallow slumber. It is appropriate that Paul Schrader, the American poet of modern sleepwalkers in urban spaces, would title his most personal film as Light Sleeper (1992). To call Schrader’s heroes sleepwalkers is a little misleading, however, since his characters aren’t really asleep; they are constantly awake but in a drowsy, quasi-delirious state. They are never totally asleep nor totally awake. They lie in between of the bed and the street. They exist in stasis like the characters in Robert Bresson’s films, which Schrader admires immensely. 

The lethargic protagonist of Schrader’s Light Sleeper is a man named John LeTour, played by Willem Dafoe, an ex-drug-addict and current drug dealer who is re-evaluating his profession as his boss, played by Susan Sarandon, is planning a career change by starting up her own cosmetics business. In these times of change, LeTour comes across an old love from the past, Marianne Jost, a woman who has been straight and out of the drug business for several years. A tragedy in Marianne’s family leads her back to drugs and finally to death, which sets LeTour on a mission of senseless violence against those who he believes are responsible for Marianne’s death. In jail, awaiting his sentence of many years, LeTour reconnects with his boss, reflecting on the strangeness of his path like Michel in Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). 

Given this chain of fictive events, Light Sleeper ties in most obviously not only with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which Schrader wrote, but also, and more importantly, with Schrader’s earlier films Hardcore (1979) and American Gigolo (1980). All of these films portray a man’s journey in the urban underworld, culminating with an act of violence. Hardcore is perhaps the farthest away from the formula since it portrays a father who goes to rescue his missing daughter from the porn industry, while Taxi Driver comes across as the clearest parallel work as a subjectivistic depiction of a lonely man who redeems himself through a purification via violence. Yet it is really American Gigolo which is the closest in spirit to Light Sleeper (though it lacks the extreme violence of Light Sleeper and Taxi Driver; it culminates with an accidental act of violence). 

This seems more than appropriate because Taxi Driver is, after all, a film by Scorsese whose vision overrides that of Schrader. Taxi Driver famously ends with an open epilogue sequence which can be interpreted in many ways, but is probably best grasped as a delirious death dream in which the protagonist finds spiritual solace after his self-destructive burst of hatred toward others. American Gigolo and Light Sleeper, on the other hand, end with sequences which are clearly rooted in reality in the sense that they leave no possibilities to interpret themselves as dreams or other such detachments from the established diegetic world. They conclude with a serene return to tranquility after the burst of violence. They show their protagonists in prison where they are visited by a woman in whose presence they are touched by something transcendent -- not necessarily something divine in the theological sense, but something external and non-private in the metaphysical sense; that is, they are touched by a dimension of sense and meaning beyond their lonely isolation. 

It is not a happy ending in the most conventional sense of the term since it merely uncovers the manifestation of a vague promise of something better. The endings of both American Gigolo and Light Sleeper pay homage to Bresson’s Pickpocket which ends with Michel finding an ambiguous sense of purpose as Jeanne, a young woman living near him and the only person who seems to have the smallest ounce of care for his sake, keeps on visiting him in prison. American Gigolo goes the whole nine yards with the homage by imitating the restraint acting, ascetic mise-en-scène, and minimalist editing (with mechanic fades to black closing each brief scene, depicting the flow of time between the visits between the man and the woman), whereas Light Sleeper condenses the essence of the encounter into one single scene with an acting style more established in the whole of the film. The homage is most apparent, of course, in the final lines of the films. Bresson’s film ends with Michel saying: “Oh, Jeanne, pour aller jusqu’à toi, quel drôle de chemin il m’a fallu prendre” (”Oh, Jeanne, what strange path I had to take to come to you”). American Gigolo concludes with Julian saying: “My God, Michele, it has taken me so long to come to you.” Light Sleeper turns it around by having the woman, LeTour’s boss played by Sarandon, simply say: “Strange how things work.” 

Some might accuse of Schrader not only for copying but also for repeating and thus just doing the same thing over and over again. The way I see it, however, is that the filtered ending, which always changes a little, keeps gaining new meanings, and at the point of Light Sleeper it has become even more touching than in American Gigolo. It is heavy with significance and emotional baggage; yet it never feels semantically heavy in the sense that it called for any decoding or interpretation. It has a great balance between heaviness and lightness. The heavy prison bars of Pickpocket and the sterile glass separating the lovers in American Gigolo have vanished in Light Sleeper, and there is only an institutional barrier in the air between the two, which cannot come in between their emotional reunion, exemplifying the transcendental manifestation. 

In order to appreciate the impact of the ending one should keep the rest of the film in mind, too. For its understated optimism and serenity are paralleled by preceding aesthetics of death, violence, and misery. Schrader’s style in Light Sleeper is probably easiest to grasp by thinking of it as neo-noir. Neon lights illuminating interior spaces from an outer source, seedy streets with paper trash, and run-down apartments of New York City characterize its concrete sense of milieu. In homage to genre tradition, Schrader even has a voice-over of LeTour reading his diary entries. Although this device is never overused to the extent where it would turn the film into pastiche, it certainly feels loose and unnecessary -- an unattached reminder of Taxi Driver. 

The awkwardness of the voice-over goes together with the other weaknesses of the film. Schrader’s narrative fumbles at times without a clear sense of where it is heading (there is, for one, “a sub-plot” of a park murder case which is mentioned twice in the film but then goes nowhere) and his style is less than consistent in terms of acting, editing, and music (which is further emphasized by the connection to Bresson, the master of stylistic consistency). At the same time, however, these are difficult to be taken solely as weaknesses since they seem to enhance the overall impact of the film. There is something similar in Schrader’s narrative looseness to the films of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Alan Rudolph in the 70′s and the 80′s. The overall impact of Schrader’s style is a cinematic articulation of a certain mode of being in the world, a lethargic, fatigued, and intermittent being, an existential narcolepsy, light being on the surface of the world. 

Without going into a detailed stylistic analysis, it could be stated that Schrader achieves this impact by an execution which finds balance between realism and stylization. In a word, the idealist, transcendent ending (which, however, never loses its touch with reality) of the film is preceded by big piles of dirt. As an aesthetic synopsis of his earlier films and as an anticipation of the ending of the one in question, Schrader begins Light Sleeper with a slow low-angle dolly shot of a run-down, dirty asphalt street. The shot concludes with a slow dissolve from the surface of the street into a medium shot of the perplexed protagonist. The street is a tainted mirror of the character’s soul like in the best works of Buñuel. This dissolve, this cut, this double image is a perfect metaphor for Schrader’s style as a whole in this spectacular film. When the camera tracks toward LeTour’s face in the final shot, framing his face in a tight extreme close-up, his aged, tired face bears a resemblance to the worn asphalt of the street, the world which he cannot shake off from him. 

In terms of neo-noir, Light Sleeper can also be seen as another tale of the burden of the past. LeTour must carry his burden everyday as he walks the streets of drug dealing. Marianne must carry it too, and the burden eventually becomes too heavy for her. Yet it seems that Schrader is less interested in the psychological ramifications of this burden than in the overall theme it connotes: the existential imprisonment of man, which Bresson brought to the attention of the cinema. Like Michel in Pickpocket, LeTour is more imprisoned outside than inside the prison. He lives a life of constant fatigue and insomnia which he has acquired in exchange for losing his drug addiction. When he sleeps, he is a light sleeper who never gets real rest. When he is awake, he is a light being who can never really be. His lonely isolation is reflected by the emptiness of his ascetic apartment -- whose emotional core is encapsulated in the stereo playing LeTour’s ex-lover’s name on repeat (”Marianne Jost, Marianne Jost, Marianne Jost”) -- next to which there is a gulf of garbage awaiting LeTour’s soul as in the grim ending of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Like Michel, LeTour finally redeems himself, and, paradoxically, attains abstract freedom through concrete imprisonment. Strange how things work.

Schrader is a great admirer of the mechanic stasis of Bresson’s endings, and he has never come closer to their artistic quality than in Light Sleeper (though detached from Bresson’s absolute purity and mastery, the film also transcends mere imitation). While American Gigolo imitates Pickpocket more closely, Light Sleeper seems to enrich its homage with uniqueness. The former work was exercise for the latter. Of Bresson’s endings Schrader writes: 

Stasis is the quiescent, frozen, or hieratic scene which succeeds the decisive action and closes the film. It is a still re-view of the external world intended to suggest the oneness of all things. In Diary of a Country Priest it is the shadow of the cross, in A Man Escaped it is the long shot of the darkened street with Fontaine and Jost receding in the distance, in Pickpocket it is Michel’s imprisoned face, in The Trial of Joan of Arc it is the charred stump of the stake.

This static view represents the ‘new’ world in which the spiritual and the physical can coexist, still in tension and unresolved, but as a part of a larger scheme in which all phenomena are more or less expressive of a larger reality -- the Transcendent. [1] 

It is more than evident that the ending of Light Sleeper is Schrader’s attempt to articulate precisely “the oneness of all things” or “the ‘new’ world in which the spiritual and the physical can coexist.” Though still in tension, their phenomena (say, thought and emotion on the one hand, objects and states of affairs on the other) express the underlying unity. Closing his eyes and silently reflecting on the strangeness of his path, LeTour experiences a touch by the transcendence, an external dimension of value, sense, and meaning. Neither Bresson nor Schrader are interested in making metaphysical claims for the existence or non-existence of such a dimension. That work will be left for the metaphysicians and the meta-ethicists. As artists, Bresson and Schrader are interested in the human experience of this transcendence. The experience of its presence on the surface of the world. The unity of the real and the irreal, or the concrete and the abstract, in experience is why Schrader’s style never departs from l’éffet de réel and the abundance of observational data characteristic for the cinema. As the camera closes in on LeTour’s face as he closes his eyes and presses his mouth against his boss’ hand, the vicinity of the camera allows the image to register slight movement of LeTour’s eyes beneath his eyelids, implying his entrance into real rest from the prison of light sleep. This subtle bodily movement is neither solely physical (in terms of simple movement of a physical object) nor solely spiritual (in terms of mere expression of emotion or thought without a physical correspondent). It is both. The registered movement on the surface of the world, captured on the surface of the cinematic image, is Schrader’s final word on the oneness of all things. 

Notes:

[1] Schrader, Paul. 1972/1988. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. Da Capo Press, p. 82-83. 

#Light Sleeper #Paul Schrader #1990's #American

[essenceoffilm]

Falling Deep into the Hole

Ace in the Hole (1951), the super-cynical story about a selfish journalist’s ruthless quest for fame at the expense of another man’s life, marked a turning point in Billy Wilder’s career. It was the first of his films he produced in addition to directing and co-writing, it was the first film he made after breaking up with his long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Charles Brackett -- this time teaming up with two co-writers, Lesser Samuels and newcomer Walter Newman --, and it was his first film which was both a box-office failure and a critical flop. Paramount Pictures took such a hit that they decided to reduce the financial losses from Wilder’s next paycheck in their upcoming project, Stalag 17 (1953) which, fortunately for Wilder, proved to be a smash hit among both critics and the audience. As time has went by, people have come to understand Ace in the Hole better, and to some, yours truly included, it represents Wilder at his absolute best. Never before and never again would Wilder succeed so deeply and so widely, attaining the level of true cinematic masterpiece in which style, theme, and character form a riveting whole where a film lover can repeatedly fall into. 

Such retrospective appreciation would do little to Wilder in his plight back in 1951, however, when it must have, for a moment at least, seemed like a big mistake to abandon Brackett. After moving to Hollywood in the early 1930′s due to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, where he had already acquired success as a scriptwriter, Wilder teamed up with Brackett towards the end of the decade. With Brackett’s assistance, Wilder wrote his best scripts to date, including such screwball classics as Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) and Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939). In desire for more creative control, Wilder decided to become a director himself so he could direct the films based on the screenplays he wrote together with Brackett. And the rest is history. All of Wilder’s films from The Major and the Minor (1942) to Sunset Boulevard (1950) -- with the curious exception of Double Indemnity (1944) written by Wilder and the novelist Raymond Chandler -- were co-written by Wilder and Brackett. Considering the success of these films, which was both critical and commercial in nature, this partnership was dy-na-mite. Not until a decade later would the director find such a professional kindred spirit in I.A.L. Diamond with whom Wilder co-wrote all of his films from Some Like It Hot (1959) to Buddy Buddy (1981) alongside the precursor Love in the Afternoon (1957). 

It seems that the first cracks in the professional partnership between Wilder and Brackett were not formed by Wilder’s detour with Chandler, but rather in the curious case of A Foreign Affair (1948). Wilder and Brackett wrote the film together, but Brackett allegedly did not like the film’s cynicism and especially its portrayal of amoral Americans in post-Nazi Berlin (which, of course, was something Paramount and the American politicians did not care much for either). Although Brackett and Wilder still joined forces to write Sunset Boulevard, which is one of the biggest classics of American cinema, the crack was widening and the gap between the two was deepening. According to numerous sources [1], which do not always seem to be consistent with one another, the happy couple had decided to break up before Sunset Boulevard. Despite the factual chronology, it would not be hard to imagine Wilder suggesting a story like Ace in the Hole (the origin of which is another story to tell!) to the more-or-less conservative Brackett after just making their most cynical and grotesque film to date, and see how Brackett would have finally thrown in the towel. Having made the army and the American entertainment industry look extremely bad, Wilder’s next directorial effort would go for the unholy alliances between the media, the freedom of speech, American democracy, and market economy. If Wilder was ready to run the risk at the expense of losing Brackett [2], it must have been a pretty hard blow to read the reviews and the box-office results after the release of Ace in the Hole. In retrospect, for what it’s worth, the risk paid off. Wilder made the best film in his career even if contemporary critics were not able to appreciate it. 

The Story

To Wilder, films are essentially about telling stories, and he was a strong believer in the screenplay, which is why it seems appropriate to begin from just that: the story. 

The story of Ace in the Hole was inspired by the real-life account of Floyd Collins, a cave explorer who fell into a hole while investigating Sand Cave in 1925. Collins’ predicament was widely covered in the media, earning one Pulitzer Prize for William Miller of The Courier-Journal. Miller went into the cave to interview Collins and he played a role in his rescue operation, which did not end up happily: despite laborious attempts of rescue, Collins died in two weeks after the fall. The story, however, left a lasting impression as it is often mentioned as one of the biggest media events of the 1920′s alongside Charles Lindbergh’s famous first transatlantic flight in 1927. Its impression is even noticed in Ace in the Hole when its protagonist refers to the Collins incident in an effort to convince his young, rookie photographer of the large scope of the scoop they are about to uncover. It is important to emphasize that Wilder’s film is not an attempt to retell the story or to suggest what might have happened in the Collins case. As a matter of fact, the historical sources paint a very good picture of Miller as an honest journalist of high principles. In turn, Wilder’s film offers a consciously exaggerated account of what could happen in a similar situation where the journalist in question had a set of lower principles. 

The fictional story begins with a down-and-out journalist, Chuck Tatum (played by Kirk Douglas) looking for a job in a small newspaper in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he wishes to find a big story to take him back to the top. He gets the job but not the big break. After a year of finding nothing but typical small town stories, Tatum is sent to report on a rattlesnake hunt. This seemingly boring assignment  leads him to another one when he makes a stop at a remote gas station where something out of the ordinary is taking place. Behind the gas station, Tatum finds a small group of local people waiting outside a cave where an explorer has fallen into a hole. The explorer, Leo (played by Richard Benedict) cannot escape, and he cannot be rescued without careful drilling. Tatum sees the makings of a big story in the situation which he wants to use for his own benefit. Not only does he start writing the articles for the small town newspaper he works for and making contacts for the bigger papers he wants to work for but he also takes an active role in prolonging the rescue operation in order to make the media hype last as long as possible without losing the man’s life. He gets help from Leo’s indifferent wife, Lorraine (played by Jan Sterling), who is eager to gain money from the tourists pouring into the area in order to ditch the gas-smelling desert she lives in as well as her equally mundane husband. The relationship between Tatum and Lorraine is not a romance. It is a battleground, a constant tension between love and hate. In addition to the frustrated wife, Tatum also gets help from town’s corrupt sheriff (played by Ray Teal), who wants to use the rescue mission as a vehicle for his reelection. The situation soon turns into a quickly escalating media circus, and, in the end, Tatum’s plans to prolong the rescue go awry as the man in the cave dies due to pneumonia and lack of proper medical assistance. Tatum’s human interest story goes down the drain without a happy ending, and Tatum must fall with it. Quite literally, he falls back to the bottom where he came from as he collapses on the floor of the Albuquerque newspaper office, fatally wounded by a scissor cut in his stomach caused by Lorraine after their love-hate relationship lost its love at the expense of hate. 

The Hole 

Wilder’s Ace in the Hole revolves essentially around three distinctive milieus. There is the Albuquerque newspaper office, the gas station with its surroundings, and the hole. Where the newspaper office represents the life of boredom and failure to Tatum, the gas station represents the same for Lorraine the wife. Both feel like they are trapped, imprisoned, and cannot get out. Ironically, it is the ultimate space of imprisonment, that is, the hole, which gives them their highly desired promise of escape. The hole imprisons a man, but it also contains a treasure. It is a media treasure for Tatum to get back in business. It is a money treasure for Lorraine to get out of the damned desert. In order to fulfill their nightmarish dreams, they must venture into the hole. In Lorraine’s case, this means the descent to utter indifference for her husband. In Tatum’s case, this means the concrete descent into the hole which only gives a physical reality for his moral fall and loss of any remaining bits of self-respect. 

The hole in the narrow cave provides a stark visual contrast to the other milieus which have more centrifugal spaces. The newspaper office might be a closed setting, but it is also well-lit and often filled with people who are ready to go out to “tell the truth,” as their embroidered message on the wall proclaims. The gas station might be surrounded by a desert of unending emptiness, but there is always light, there is the sky of promises, and there are the occasional buses to remind of the theoretical possibility of departure. It might become either less distressing or more when the crowds take it over, but even then the gas station provides its corners of privacy for those who cannot stand the ubiquitous din of mankind. The hole, on the other hand, has no benefits. It is the physicalization of all forms of loneliness, loss, and isolation. It is the lonely chamber of death. It is dark and narrow there. The hole is a primordial space, a statement of indifference from reality to man. Although it entraps only one, its depth swallows a bigger bite. It grows and festers. 

Leo, the man in the hole, tells Tatum that the cave he was exploring is a sacred burial site for the local natives. It has its own history which he was about to disturb in his search for treasures, perhaps his own escape. We are already hinted about the ominous presence of something unknown (either in terms of metaphysics or cultural difference) when Tatum’s photographer notices an elderly woman -- later identified as Leo’s mother -- praying by a home-made altar in the backroom of the gas station. Leo suggests to Tatum that the spirits caused his predicament. Even if Wilder’s narrative made little to no suggestions of the diegetic plausibility of Leo’s assumption, the presence of the native myth creates an intriguing contrast to the film’s realist aesthetics. Simultaneously, it emphasizes the theme of the damnation of the modern world. Tatum proclaims to his naive boss, Mr. Boot in the Albuquerque newspaper that times have changed and that they are now living the later half of the 20th century. No more room for calmness and fairness. Collins belonged to the world of yesterday. Tatum is tomorrow. Thus the native myth provides the film with an additional discourse, articulating for the loss of some ancient form of dignity that has fallen short and that has been driven under the big and the noisy. The gorgeous slow pan shot where the faceless crowd of people straggle from the bypassing train to the sight of the accident, which has turned into a big carnival, has both satirical edge and melancholic depth. Something has been lost. Something is beyond retrieval. Something has fallen deep into the hole. 

The Depth 

Given the grim, pessimistic story and the cynical, antiheroic protagonist of Ace in the Hole, it is no wonder that the film has often been conceived of as a film-noir. Against the tropes of the genre, however, Ace in the Hole does not take place in a big city with narrow alleys, wet metal surfaces, and restricted light cutting through darkness. Yet its portrayal of the big media circus carries similar sensations of threat and hostility, the experience of losing individuality and self-hood. As does the hole, of course, with its stark contrasts of dark surfaces in the screen space and tiny areas of light reflected by Tatum’s torch. Against the archetypes of the genre, its protagonist is not led to destruction by a conventional femme fatale but by himself. On the other hand, Tatum does receive the final stroke from the treacherous blonde who probably would have been the femme fatale for her husband sooner or later. Moreover, the whole scenario of a remote gas station with a bored housewife who exists in a standby mode of utter indifference and borderline hostility resembles the noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by James M. Cain. Many elements are there, but they do not quite seem to constitute a genre-specific discourse for Wilder’s film, which is its own thing even in the company of conventions. 

The bravura of its singularity is the realist aesthetics which Wilder develops to structure and articulate the film’s guiding idea of depth. Wilder’s style in the film is the consummation of the realism in A Foreign Affair and of the absurdism in Sunset Boulevard, which, of course, also represents what has come to be known as spatial realism after Bazin. Wilder’s spatial realism in Ace in the Hole comes in the form of a calm editing rhythm, which never relies on montage to create a feeling of hysteria, the long duration of the shots, and the slow fluency of the movement of the camera. In addition, Wilder’s matured sense of mise-en-scène uses deeper planes in his image compositions, and the field of focus is always accordingly deep. The impression of realism is emphasized by the use of the normal lens and, obviously, the classical Academy aspect ratio as well as the ascetic sound world which draws attention to the dusty materiality of diegetic sounds. 

The central aesthetic feature of depth can be appreciated already in the scenes at the newspaper office in the beginning where a lavish mise-en-scène unfolds in dynamic compositions of depth as well as in the ironic shot where Lorraine takes a bite out of an apple in the shallow foreground of the screen space while Tatum is having a phone call inside the gas station in the deep background. The latter image brings a key scene at the end of the first act to its conclusion as it hints at Lorraine’s connection to Tatum in terms of egoistic indifference. While the act of the bite works as a mere rhythmical punctuation, the obvious symbolic meaning behind Lorraine taking the bite out of the apple is the allusion to the biblical fall of man (with Tatum the snake in the background), but the gist of the shot concerns the characters’ affinity which has not yet been disclosed on the level of diegetic information but is now anticipated in terms of mise-en-scène. Lorraine pretends to be out of Tatum’s plan -- quite literally by finding herself in front of the gas station door as Tatum is pushed into the background -- but her careless bite uncovers the hidden fact that she already knows the name of the game. She takes a bite out of the forbidden fruit which hangs from the same branch that has poisoned Tatum’s soul. 

These cases of visual depth only set the stage for something far deeper, however, as Wilder’s visual motif becomes a dominant feature in the subsequent mass scenes shot on location. Ace in the Hole was filmed in New Mexico whose desert sand feels rough and coarse on the gritty, grained celluloid. Wilder’s magnificent pans of “the big carnival” embrace the whole depth of the space in one breath. It is vital to repeat that Wilder never uses montage -- not in the sense of a montage sequence nor in the sense of pronounced, rapid editing -- to give an impression of chaos. Instead of cutting quickly between close-ups of shouting faces and medium shots of people shoving one another, Wilder uses slow movements of the camera in large shot scales which yield the cinematographic depiction a certain kind of disturbing distance.

It is precisely due to this aesthetics of depth why the ending of Ace in the Hole is as impressive as it is. The scene is the Albuquerque newspaper office. The camera is on the floor level, startlingly beneath the line of modesty set by Ozu, as Tatum ambles slowly into the space in the deeper plane of the screen. His entrance is accompanied by his offer resonating with the beginning -- “How’d you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot? I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.” -- but it is cut short when he falls on the floor: flat, beaten, dead. Tatum’s physical descent from the top of the screen space to its bottom as well as his approach from the deepest plane to the shallowest ends with a tight close-up of his tortured face. This shot scale is a rarity in the whole of the film, but it is also worth stressing that once again there is no montage. The brief scene is executed in sequence shot. There is nothing but the montage within an image. The coinciding descent and the approach manage to articulate the character’s final downfall and his deepest abasement. It is as if the frames he had built up for his ever-widening, panning arsenal of banal cruelty came crashing down. In the temporal development of the shot, the depth disappears, and only his dying face remains. It seems that there is no world beyond it. It is as though the depth swallowed him, turned back inward, imploded inside him, and vanished. In terms of structure, Wilder’s cinematic stroke of genius in the end also ties in with the beginning shots during the opening credits sequence of the flat surface of the desert soil where there is no depth. The depth came in with the arrival of Tatum and it left with his departure. It exploded only to implode. 

The Snakes

Ace in the Hole is best remembered as an ahead-of-its-time media satire, which is emphasized by its alternative title “The Big Carnival” imposed by producers against Wilder’s wishes (also used in the 50′s print I recently saw), but Wilder’s original and better title highlights the film as a tale of a journalist. It is only around this tale that the media satire is formed. The title “Ace in the Hole” refers to a scene where Tatum tells the sheriff that “we’ve got an ace in the hole” in an effort to convince him that they have got something special, a golden ticket to the top. Thus the title bears the meaning of the main character’s quest for making it big by any means necessary, his need of getting out by going in. 

The film’s focus on the main character’s arc is evident throughout as Wilder both begins and ends the film with Tatum. The very first shot of the film (after the opening credits) shows Tatum nonchalantly sitting in his car, reading a newspaper, while it is being towed. This visual exposition of character establishes Tatum’s eccentricity, alienation, misfortune, and failure, but also his unique indifference. He is cocky and utterly indifferent. The towing of his car might make him look like a loser, but he knows that he must make the best of it and look like a winner who doesn’t care -- he’s just getting a free ride. It is this indifference of his toward the conventional norms and values of the society which he puts on table as he walks into the newspaper office whose corny “tell the truth” embroidery he mocks. It is this indifference which gets him the job. It is this indifference which takes him to the scoop in the hole. It is also, however, what gets him in the end. Douglas embodies the man perfectly in a performance varying between absurdity and realism. Douglas’ bodily being captures the character’s indifferent essence by his physical performance which exhales thick frustration and coarse self-loathe. The latter culminates towards the end where Tatum begins to feel sorry for the dying man in the hole and loathe the grotesque charade he has created. Being responsible for both, these feelings manifest as self-hate. The film ends like it started: with this desperate man, trying to sell himself as cocky as ever, a thousand-dollar-newspaper-man, but this time he is free of charge; he can be had for nothing because he is nothing. And there he is, thrown at us in the distressing tightness of the close-up where depth implodes. 

The depth ventures in the direction of other characters, too. It is as though cruelty festered from Tatum to the people around him. He pollutes. Although this cruelty, or its seeds at the very least, might have existed before his arrival, the power of his presence brings it out in others. At first sight, Lorraine contemplates leaving the place. She is not interested in playing the role of the grieving wife. In her husband’s predicament, she only sees the opportunity to ditch him. Yet Tatum convinces her to try out for the role, embarking her on the road to exploitation and egoism, because both of them feel stuck. “There’s three of us in the hole,” Tatum asserts. The hole has swallowed them long before the accident. And the misfortune of one can present an opportunity for the other to climb up. As Leo’s accident turns into demise, Tatum fails to free himself from the maw of the hole, falling back deeper into its bottom. 

Like snakes, the corrupt sheriff, Lorraine, and Tatum arise from the holes of the coarse land, searching for a new resting place, but the hole sucks them back in. The initial, dull small-town story which Tatum had to report on before embarking on the journey to cover Leo’s predicament was the rattlesnake hunt. When the sheriff makes his first appearance in the film, he is seen feeding the snake he caught in the hunt. To Tatum, he is the dumb rural law enforcer to be fooled. Overall, the snakes embody the boring small-town journalism Tatum has been doing for a year and the type of life he hates. The snakes emerge naturally from the stark milieu -- like the sand and the rocks -- and thus represent it quite naturally. In more symbolic terms, however, the snakes also represent deception, betrayal, and cruelty all of which characterize the actions of Tatum and Lorraine. The snake embodies both their cruelty and their loathe for the world as well as themselves trapped inside it. 

The Carnival 

Among narrow holes and crawling snakes, the width of the depth finds its largest dimension in the media satire of the film as indicated by the alternative title. On this level, Ace in the Hole comes across as a cynical cross-section of the American society where capitalism has infiltrated all areas of human practice from thinking to relationships and from the media to democracy. Journalists in fiction film usually vary between the extremes of do-gooder idealism and ruthless nihilism. Where Frank Capra’s reporter heroes of the 1930′s often represent the former, Wilder’s Tatum pushes the latter to its extreme. If Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) -- as well as Wilder’s inferior The Front Page (1974) --represents the quintessential cynical satire of the world of journalism, Wilder’s Ace in the Hole throws that film to the lightweight league. 

To some contemporary critics [3], Wilder’s film went too far in mocking the values of democracy and the free press. In Wilder’s vision, both appear as powers which are prone to misuse in the capitalist system. What makes Ace in the Hole harder and more cruel in comparison to Wilder’s other manifestations of cynicism such as A Foreign Affair and The Apartment (1960) -- both of which are excellent films! -- is that there is no redemption. The depth explodes and swallows people whole. There are no lessons to be learned. Moreover, unlike A Foreign Affair and The Apartment, Ace in the Hole does not offer a romantic subplot. The closest thing it has to that is the hostility Lorraine and Tatum feel toward one another -- and themselves. If A Foreign Affair was characterized by that wonderful Lubitschesque quality of social satire where the people are not necessarily evil but the system is, Ace in the Hole goes for the opposite: it claims that the system stems from the people who are evil and cruel by nature. Ace in the Hole is not just a film about capitalism. It’s about the conception of the human being, not to be entirely distinguished from the human being itself, behind it. 

It seems that Bosley Crowther, the main contemporary critic who disliked the film’s critique of the society, justified his disapproval by deeming the film implausible. Although commending the cinematic quality of Ace in the Hole, Crowther claims that “Wilder has let imagination so fully take command of his yarn that it presents not only a distortion of journalistic practice but something of a dramatic grotesque” [3]. According to Crowther, the film “is badly weakened by a poorly constructed plot, which depends for its strength upon assumptions that are not only naïve but absurd.” These absurd assumptions include the fact that Tatum is able to take over the story without letting other reporters take part in reporting the story and that he eventually feels remorse for the death of Leo. In a moment of idiocy, Crowther critiques the ending “when Mr. Wilder’s monster plunges piously to his death with shame in his heart and a stab wound draining tediously in his side, the whole yarn collapses limply and depressingly at the audience’s feet.”

Although these are the opinions of merely one critic of the New York Times (one critic I am disagreeing with the more I read him, I might add), I think they are relevant from a general point of view. I would not be surprised if similar “assumptions” as well as the “dramatic grotesque” bothered the modern spectator who often prefers dramatic plausibility and realistic content to artistic articulation. Looking at the two assumptions Crowther attributes as mistakes in Wilder’s narrative, it seems to me that Crowther is just talking about his own assumptions about fiction film. Ace in the Hole is not supposed to be a realist report on a Collins-like situation. Although realist in its cinematic style, the film also carries the features of absurdism which Wilder first presented in Sunset Boulevard, another film which would hardly be called “realistic” despite its aesthetic features of spatial realism. If “the yarn” of Ace in the Hole collapsed in its final shot, so would that of Sunset Boulevard in its iconic ending. To put it simply, and hence potentially a little obscurely, Ace in the Hole is realist in form but absurd in content. Critics like Crowther -- who the current newspaper world is rife with -- can never appreciate distinctions of this kind. 

Obviously, the character of Tatum is an exaggeration. He is a caricature. Wilder exaggerates, but not for mere shock value; rather Wilder does it to succeed in his satirical depiction -- presenting the complex relations between democracy, the media, political corruption, and market economy in less than two hours -- and, above all, overall grotesque conception. The way I see it, Tatum’s sudden feelings of remorse, implied by the brief scene where he announces Leo’s death on the top of the cave as well as his burst of anger toward Lorraine’s indifference, do not indicate an abrupt change of heart. On the contrary, his quickly escalating feelings of hate reflect his experience of total failure and disappointment. Leo’s death marks the end for his human interest story; it marks the end to his career. Although his behavior might indicate a sudden loss of interest in the whole game of journalism, again, it should not be seen as a change of heart, but as the final fall into the depths of hate and self-loathe. Ironically, Crowther is on point in picking the word “grotesque.” The ambiguous term is often used to describe a combination of conflicts in an appalling, uncanny form. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a grotesque character. The soulless spaces of plastic modernism in Tati’s films are grotesque places. Rarely, however, has the term been as apt as in the case of Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. A realist, absurdist tale of a super-cynical individual and the society his innermost -- or the human essence lurking behind capitalism -- seems to pollute is grotesque by its very nature.  

The Auteur

In cruel irony, Wilder’s grotesque tale of the deep fall of man seemed to turn out as a failure. Leaving Brackett, taking the producer’s chair, and charging up the cynicism did not turn Wilder’s next effort into a critical and commercial success. Wilder did not fall, however. Let alone the highly successful and exquisite subsequent production Stalag 17, further developing the combination of cynicism with warm comedy which Wilder started to do in A Foreign Affair and consummated in The Apartment, the film in question appears in retrospect as Wilder’s boldest project. It is needless to downplay Wilder’s often hilarious and intelligent bravura films of tragicomedy at the expense of commending Ace in the Hole, as they are spectacular pieces of cinema in their own right, but, at the same time, Ace in the Hole does represent the part of Wilder that made him wilder. It wholeheartedly embodies the cynical core which gives his comedies their best edge. Upon seeing the highly praised The Lost Weekend (1945) for the first time, I remember feeling a little disappointed, thinking that the famous comedian can’t do tragedy. But it turns out my disappointment was about something else. The Lost Weekend might represent the type of cinema which the likes of Crowther admire -- a well-written, well-played, and altogether well-spirited film. A sure bet. But it isn’t quite Wilder, if you ask me. Something’s a bit off. It turns out that in extreme tragedy, in the type of tragedy which borders on absurdism rather than psychological realism, there is something deeply similar to Wilder’s absurd comedy. In the case of Wilder’s work, which can be divided into three periods (the first with Brackett, the second with others, and the last with Diamond), there’s plenty to choose from. But I choose Ace in the Hole. A masterpiece. 

Notes:

[1] The most significant historical source for the relationship between Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder is Brackett 2015, which consists of Brackett’s diary entries from the 30′s and the 40′s. For further information and reading see this article and this book review. 

[2] This seems not to be the case since the duo of Brackett and Wilder broke up at the very latest in 1950, but the idea presented here is clear: Wilder probably never suggested a story like Ace in the Hole to Brackett (it was most likely part of the new deal he signed with Paramount, this time without Brackett), but he “ran the same risk,” so to speak, with making films like A Foreign Affair and Sunset Boulevard. Ace in the Hole only took this development further, supporting the argument that it was ideological (whether in terms of politics or philosophical worldview or both) differences which came between Brackett and Wilder. 

[3] See Crowther 1951.

References:

Brackett, Charles. 2015. “It's the pictures that got small!”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age. Edited by Anthony Sline. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Crowther, Bosley. 1951. “The Screen in Review; Ace in the Hole,’ Billy Wilder Special, With Kirk Douglas, Arrives at Globe Theatre”. In the New York Times, June 30th, 1951. 

#Ace in the Hole #Billy Wilder #1950's #American

[essenceoffilm]

Truffaut Salutes to Books and What They Represent in Peculiar Sci-Fi

Produced in between of Le peau douce (1964) and La mariée était en noir (1967), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) marked French director François Truffaut’s brief departure into the international territory of non-French cinema. Not only was the film Truffaut’s first film in English but also his first in color. Running the risk further, the film meant a new opening for the production company of Universal, too, since it was their first European production. Given these risky factors at play, it might not be surprising that Fahrenheit 451 was not a success. It did not do particularly well in box office and it was a critical flop. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote a hostile review, concluding that Fahrenheit 451 “is a dull picture -- dully fashioned and dully played -- which is rendered all the more sullen by the dazzling color in which it is photographed.” According to Crowther, Truffaut would be successful only if his intention was “to make literature seem dull and the whole hideous practice of book-burning seem no more shocking than putting a blow-torch to a pile of leaves.” [1] Whether one agrees with Crowther’s critique, emphasizing the failures in acting and the execution of the material, or not is besides the point, because the film could also be criticized for marking Truffaut’s artistic regression in terms of more formal aspects. Although Fahrenheit 451 might in this sense represent the wrong path of traditional film which Truffaut took and which Godard, for one, abandoned, and as such might justifiably be left in peace by some aficionados, it has garnered critical appreciation in later rediscovery. James Monaco has commended its visual style, though he has also felt that the film is unnecessarily dull [2]. Despite being Truffaut’s weakest film of the 60′s, it seems to me that Fahrenheit 451 is at the very least worthy of discussion and has many good elements to its merit which should not be overlooked. 

Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 takes place in the not-so-distant future where firemen do not set out fires but burn books in order to prevent critical thinking. Oskar Werner plays the obedient fireman Montag who never reads the books he burns because they do not interest him in the slightest. As a result of his intellectual indifference, things seem to be going quite well for Montag. A promotion is coming his way and he has a beautiful wife, played by Julie Christie, who is fully content with her life which consists of watching semi-interactive plays on her futuristic flat TV screen. One day, however, an elementary school teacher, Clarisse, also played by Christie in a double role, enters Montag’s life, and she is able to spark a budding interest in Montag for the books he burns. After discovering Dickens, Montag turns into a reclusive bookworm who raises suspicion in his wife who eventually informs Montag to the officials. Becoming an enemy of the state, Montag leaves society with Clarisse as they join a remote tribe of “the book people”, an eccentric group each of whose members have memorized a book and thus have become that book. Their escape is a success, and a living library wanders in sad snowfall in the iconic ending of Truffaut’s film. 

Not your typical science fiction film, Fahrenheit 451 does not unfold in action-packed sequences and it does not have a lot of things going on for its nearly two hours of projection time. Telling of the film’s peculiarity even in the context of Truffaut’s oeuvre is that Truffaut kept a diary of the film’s production (something he did not do for his other films) which was later published by Cahiers du Cinéma. In the diary, Truffaut expresses both his likes and dislikes for the film in question, admitting that “I like the film quite well when I see it in pieces or three reels at a time, but it seems boring to me when I see it end to end.” [3] Prominent New Wave scholar James Monaco agrees, arguing that where Truffaut succeeds in creating a powerful visual aesthetics, he fails in captivating the audience with a dramatic narrative: 

Clear, fresh, and evocative, these images and sounds create a strong mood for the film, as does Herrmann’s music; but the mood can’t carry the full weight of the de-dramatized and de-politicized science fiction. [4]

Monaco’s complaint regarding the “de-politicized” nature of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 refers to the popular sentiment that science fiction ought to be political. Whether this is the case or not is open for debate, but it seems nonetheless appropriate to take a look at the dystopian society Truffaut portrays in his film. After all, this is why so many people are drawn to science fiction, I believe, since it offers a narrative form to operate utopian contemplation through negation (that is, by portraying dystopian societies) -- from Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). 

If Godard paid little attention to such aspects of the genre in Alphaville (1965) due to his ubiquitous fascination for the formal and meta-narrative elements of cinematic representation, Truffaut would pay even less attention due to his enduring emphasis on the people. Both Godard and Truffaut create their dystopian settings with few cinematic strokes, but Godard’s remains more abstract, whereas Truffaut’s feels (perhaps surprisingly) more real and concrete, even if parodist to an extent. Most diegetic information regarding the dystopian society in Fahrenheit 451 is provided in the background events and details in dialogue -- which, frankly, quite well fits with Truffaut’s overall emphasis. Based on the information, the spectator can deduce that the state of this dystopian world tries to alter history, to eradicate the citizens’ memory, and to manipulate them to believe what it wants them to believe. It is suggested that the state is covering up a war, and in the end we see the state’s successful manipulation of Montag’s TV death for the audience in front of their screens. The characters lack not only a collective memory for their shared history but also their private memories. Montag’s wife, for instance, does not remember when she and Montag first met. Given Truffaut’s intentions, his portrayal of the society is appropriately most interesting in its depiction of humanity. The people lack a connection. They don’t look at each other. They sit in train carts and wait for nothing. They sit in front of their televisions and are captivated by seemingly non-empty images.  They are imprisoned by the images which have taken over the life they no longer remember. They live in the society of the spectacle.

The way I see it, here lies the most intriguing aspect of Truffaut’s portrayal of the dystopian society; that is, the increasing power of the image. At first, it might seem odd to critique the power of the image and praise the power of the word by cinematic means, but it works because the spectator is frightened and caught by the very power of the image. This takes its point of departure from the very beginning since the opening credits of Fahrenheit 451 which are not shown in text but recited out loud (like the closing credits of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942).  Despite the striking filters of bright color and the quick zoom-ins characterizing the opening credits sequence, the lack of written text is not a mere exercise in 60′s cinematic coolness; rather the opening establishes the Leitmotif of the film, the absence of written text. No where in the film do we see written text (with the obvious exception of the banned books -- and the first time we do as Montag discovers literature is unforgettable). The state only uses numbers and images. Not only has speech overthrown writing but image has overthrown langue, the linguistic system at large. 

Depicting a society where images dominate our lives more than words, Truffaut (and undoubtedly Bradbury as well, though I have not read the novel) was definitely ahead of his time. Truffaut must have experienced the fact that more books were printed in his time than ever before, but perhaps he felt that those books weren’t really cared for, loved, and embraced. Nowadays, in the second decade of the 21st century, the theme feels even more urgent. Books are printed less and less, while old books are being thrown into dumpsters. People read less, and many of those who do seem to prefer listening to online audio books. Thus Truffaut’s attempt to give books their magic back, to make them resemble valuable living things, might even be appreciated more fully today in 2017 than in 1966. There lies deep melancholy in the powerful images where the wind turns the pages of the books before flames coerce the thin pages to curl up in agony. In the 60′s, Truffaut might have meant to salute to literature, but from today’s perspective, he is also saluting to the art of the printed word, to the physical texture of books. 

The reason behind Truffaut’s ode to books is the idea that books represent something, and that something is what Truffaut is saluting to. It is what is sometimes called inner life; yet this requires a specification because the books in Fahrenheit 451 certainly do not denote individual mental life but rather the collective inner life of mankind. Thus it might be better called Geist or the dimension of Lebenswelt which contains the impractical and disinterested (in the sense 18th century aestheticians used the term, the purity of aesthetic desire) aspects of consciousness: emotions, values, beauty, love, theoretical reason. It is important to emphasize the fact that theoretical reason belongs to this dimension as well because Truffaut is not elaborating a conventional emotion versus reason scenario -- unlike one might expect in a story like this -- but rather a narrative reflecting the eternal struggle between the practical and the impractical (the theoretical, the self-deliberate) the latter of which includes emotion and art as well as sciences and philosophy. It is this dimension, which might be better left unnamed, which Truffaut salutes to in his cinematic ode to books. 

Yet Truffaut’s call for the love of books went on deaf ears. Rather than romantic and passionate, Fahrenheit 451 was received as dull and desolate. Crowther writes that 

[N]othing could be more depressing than seeing people ambling through the woods of what looks to be a sort of adult literary camp, mechanically reciting ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and Plato’s ‘Dialogues,’ or seeing a dying man compelling his grandson to recite after him and commit to memory Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished ‘Weir of Herminston.’ What a dismal image we have here of the deathless eloquence of literature! [1]

While the ending might be depressing in the sense that it shows the desolate state which humanity is in, I think Crowther fails to appreciate the wider picture. The final images where the characters pass the camera in serene snowfall while reciting the books they have become is supposed to be melancholic. But its melancholy is romantic by nature. It further emphasizes the leading theme of books as organic and living; since the state tries to destroy them, the people try to save them by embodying them. After seeing books burn in agony, we see them live in another form. Truffaut was already establishing this theme in the scene, which ends with one of the highlights of the film, that is, the montage of the burning books at the secret library, where the old lady wants to die with the books. Yet she had not yet “become a book” which is why her death feels less tragic, but she wanted to die “like she lived,” meaning a life with books, the impractical dimension of emotion, art, and theoretical reason. The way I see it, the living books wandering in snowfall is not a depressing sight of idiotic learning by heart but rather a melancholic view of people trying to maintain that dimension in a world which does not see value in it and therefore tries to demolish it. 

The reasons behind the critics’ dismay probably concern the overall execution of the film, however. First of all, since the film was Truffaut’s first in English and he was anything but fluent in the language, the spoken dialogue in the film can have an unnatural stiffness to it. Second, Truffaut did not get along with Werner, and Christie seems to have been a last minute choice to play both the role of the wife and the schoolteacher -- roles which were not supposed to be played by one actor. Third, the film was Truffaut’s first and only science fiction film with whose stylistic and narrative execution he may not have been that familiar. 

Although the first point of criticism seems valid enough, I think the unwieldy delivery of the lines as well as the overall stiffness in the actors’ performances fits with the rest of the picture. If Fahrenheit 451 is really a film which tries to depict a dull-minded society whose inhabitants have lost touch with the Geist, the impractical dimension of Lebenswelt, it seems appropriate to emphasize their absent being. Even if this was not intentional but merely due to Truffaut’s inability to work properly in English, it works in the context of the film. 

Agreement on the second point of criticism seems almost unanimous; in other words, most people agree that Werner and Christie were bad choices for the roles. I will sustain from making argument for either position, but I think the fact that Christie plays a double role is worth discussing briefly. It seems to have been a last minute choice and as such it did not influence the original script. This, however, makes the choice to use the same actress for both roles seem irrational and unfounded only if one agrees with the idea that films can be reduced to the screenplay. If one holds a different position, it seems entirely plausible to argue that Truffaut’s film developed while filming and the use of Christie in a double role influenced it. 

It seems worth noting that I, as a spectator of the film, tend to forget this double role before I sit down to watch it (perhaps writing this down puts an end to that cycle). The same thing has happened with me in watching Luis Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir (1977, That Obscure Object of Desire) where two actors play the same part. Regardless of whether one shares this experience or not, the use of the same performer for two roles seems thus to immediately emphasize and enhance their dualistic fellowship. The wife and the teacher, the obedient believer of the state and the passionate lover of books, are two sides of a coin. In the spirit of Cartesian dualism, one could go as far as claiming that the teacher represents the detached soul of the empty wife whose consciousness has been extracted due to the absence of books and the impractical. On the other hand, the dual presence of the same actress emphasizes the blurriness of individual boundaries in the dystopian society of the spectacle Truffaut portrays; it highlights the impression that the zombie-like people merge into an unidentifiable visual mass under the same, all-mighty image. 

To my mind, the third point of criticism is most interesting. It concerns the genre of science fiction and assumptions about what it should be like. Truffaut’s departure from the genre is evident to some by the lack of technological gadgets and supernatural elements both of which are apparently included in the Bradbury novel. Truffaut’s film is also more de-dramatized than most science fiction in the sense that it moves rather slowly and there is little tension between the ice cold characters. Moreover, it does not come across as political, unlike many of Bradbury’s novels as well as other dystopian narratives. Monaco seems to rely on basically these genre assumptions in his critique of the film: 

[T]he very nature of science fiction as a genre, as opposed to the drama of adultery or the revenge play, is just that it provides the novelist or filmmaker with a structure akin to parable and fable so that he can speak of grand themes convincingly. By muting that aspect of Fahrenheit 451 Truffaut made it almost impossible for the film to succeed with audiences. (...) When Fahrenheit 451 is compared with Jean-Luc Godard’s venture into science fiction, Alphaville, made a year previously, it becomes even more apparent that what is missing in Truffaut’s try at the genre is some sense of active resistance to the dismal, suffocating existence it postulates. Bradbury’s original novel, like Godard’s Alphaville, is deeply rooted in politics; Truffaut’s film ignores them. [5]

Monaco rests on the same argument when he agrees with Crowther that Truffaut fails to induce passion for books in the brief and weak ending where Clarisse and Montag “are still spaced-out, passive children of the TV-stoned generation they think they have escaped. They have advanced from narcissism to idolatry, no further” [6]. 

I think Monaco’s criticism relies a little too heavily on the presupposition that science fiction should be dramatic and political. Since Fahrenheit 451 is science fiction, but it is not dramatic and political, it fails this normative command and, according to Monaco, is therefore a bad film. Although this is a formally valid argument, I don’t think the normative premise is necessarily true. It would be the same thing to argue that war films should have dramatic war sequences, and because Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), which is a war film, does not, it is a bad film. For another example, I don’t think another French New Wave film, which also represents science fiction, is that dramatic or political either, which is Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968). Its power stems from somewhere else. I think Monaco is essentially guilty of the same naivety as Crowther both of whom try to explain their disapproval of Fahrenheit 451 by referring to conventional notions of what narrative film should be. After all, Truffaut’s genre films of the 60′s from Tirez sur le pianiste (1960, Shoot the Pianist) onward were not about trying to make classic genre films but precisely about “exploding the genres,” as Monaco himself puts it in one of his apt chapter titles. In this sense, it seems a little silly to evaluate the film by comparing it to the traditional formulas of the genres.

The way I see it, a much better strategy in arguing against Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 would be to say that it does not go far enough into the direction of “exploding the genres,” stylizing its aesthetics, and utilizing de-dramatization in spite of trying to do that by challenging classical conventions of the genre. Although I tend to lean toward such an evaluation, as I feel that Fahrenheit 451 is among Truffaut’s lesser works of the 60′s, the development of the argument goes beyond the scope of this post. In order to suggest such an evaluation properly, however, it might be beneficial to take a brief look at Truffaut’s modern style in the film before concluding because that is, I believe, where the biggest merits of Fahrenheit 451 lie. 

Even if Fahrenheit 451 had a fairly classical structure in terms of narrative, Truffaut gives the film a taste that is totally unique and Truffautesque. The stark and dismal mise-en-scène, in perfect harmony with the intellectual state of the society, leaves a lasting impression with the bright, red firetrucks against the gray autumn environment, the black fascist uniforms of the firemen, the shocking 60′s decor, and, of course, the aforementioned stiff acting which emphasizes the characters’ absent presence in the sullen space. In the ascetic sound world, Bernard Herrmann’s classical and minimal score breathes an air of strangeness into a world it never seems to have known. 

In the spirit of 60′s nouvelle vague, Truffaut uses a lot of jump cuts to distort temporal organization but also more classical dissolves which are, however, modernized by occasional fade-outs laden with bright colors. One example of the peculiarity -- and the difficulty in grasping the film as a consistent whole -- of Truffaut’s style is the surprising change in the film’s aspect ratio when the image of 1.66:1 is briefly cut in half as the firemen investigate a playground. The purpose seems obvious: it guides the spectator’s gaze in a quasi-Hitchcockian fashion, taking away the freedom whose importance Bazin always emphasized with regards to observing the space. A more common way of doing this is the iris device which has echoes to the silent era, and Truffaut also uses the iris once in the film. Although these cinematic means are used ever so sparingly in Fahrenheit 451, they do suggest how Truffaut is constantly controlling our gaze just as the state is the illiterate minds of its people -- another great example without any particular device besides extreme close-ups is the scene where Montag discovers literature for the first time with Dickens as his guide. 

Like the juxtaposition of jump cuts with dissolves, Truffaut also uses both long and short takes. There is the single shot which covers the scene of Montag and Clarisse walking from the train to their homes next to each other, but some scenes are, conversely, executed as intense montages of close-ups when, for example, the fire station has an alert before the destruction of the secret library. The movement of the camera in both examples is slow and calm, but Truffaut’s camera is also wild and playful in zooming and panning rapidly. 

As these means are combined with not only a classical structure but also more classical means (such as establishing shots and shot-reverse shot sequences), Truffaut’s contradictory style gives Fahrenheit 451 a peculiar, disorienting tone. This tone might explain why some dislike the film so heavily, but also why we keep coming back to it. I would call the tone naivistic because it feels playful and simple. The juxtapositions are done for the sake of beauty -- for the impractical dimension. The naivistic tone also fits well with the childlike characters of the film from the obedient and illiterate citizens to the overly idealistic book people. This is, of course, not to look down at the film but to appreciate its fable-like quality. There is something wonderfully naive about the film’s aesthetics. The playful surprise of the cinematic means used thus articulates the integral theme of creativity which reaches from art and love to science and philosophy. 

Despite a tragic topic of intellectual apocalypse, this tone gives Fahrenheit 451 not only an optimistic but also a strangely lightweight mood. The original material would no doubt provide a framework for a big and melodramatic spectacle, but Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 feels as intimate as Truffaut’s closed chamber dramas of few characters and milieus. Truffaut is asking great questions, but those questions are presented in a circle formed by a handful of people. The sad snowfall of the end culminates this simplicity and further romanticizes Truffaut’s wonderfully naive universe which praises man’s will to preserve that which has no apparent usage. 

Notes:

[1] Crowther 1966.

[2] Monaco 1974/2004, p. 71. 

[3] Quoted in Monaco 1974/2004, p. 69. 

[4] Monaco 1974/2004, p. 71. 

[5] Ibid. p. 70. 

[6] Ibid. p. 71. 

References:

Crowther, Bosley. 1966. “'Fahrenheit 451' Makes Burning Issue Dull:Truffaut's First Film in English Opens Plaza Picture Presents Dual Julie Christie”. In New York Times, November 16th, 1966. 

Monaco, James. 1974/2004. The New Wave. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Harbor. 

#François Truffaut #Fahrenheit 451 #British #1960's #French New Wave #Nouvelle Vague

[essenceoffilm]

Being Towards Death in the Highest Gear

While Welles may have eulogized the genre with 1958's self-deprecating Touch of Evil, Lewis christened its rebirth a decade earlier with Gun Crazy, leading the genre's charge into a more chaotic and intensely introspective period. -- Christopher Justice [1] 

Wroom, wroom, bang, bang.

These onomatopoetic words, often associated with the infantile, always seem to come to me when thinking of the right words for discussing 1950′s pulp film-noir. It was François Truffaut’s decision to include such words in the beginning of his review of a film by Samuel Fuller, and it is my decision to do the same in this essay about Gun Crazy (1950) by Joseph H. Lewis, another king of the B. The wonderfully straight-forward title of Lewis’ film -- which is, one might add, the more popular title in comparison to the alternative but equally outrageous Deadly Is the Female -- seems to outline its central themes: guns and craze. In this case, the latter does not only indicate psychic disintegration but also social and existential rapidity, that is, the hurry within man and his society, the being in the highest gear. Departing from the film-noirs which transcend the story by obfuscating narrative and plot, while resembling the film-noirs which transcend the story by simplifying narrative and plot, Gun Crazy never feels difficult or ambiguous due to the craze which reaches from the story to the level of form. It is evident to any viewer of the film that Gun Crazy can be grasped quite quickly as a three-act story, and this fact only emphasizes the depth of its wroom-wroom-bang-bang craze.

It begins with the juvenile yet ominous theft as a young boy (played by the young Russ Tamblyn, the future Twin Peaks star!) breaks the glass of a showcase of a gun store. His crime leads him to court which sends him to a boarding school. The gist of the first act concerns the boy’s return as a young man who has spent some time at the army after getting out of the boarding school. Accompanied by his two childhood friends, whose passion for guns was never as intense but neither was their disapproval of violence, the young man, named Bart, played by John Dall, visits a carnival where he encounters an alluring gunfighter the like he has never seen: mainly because she’s a she. The gunslinger from the opposite sex turns out to be a femme fatale who goes by the androgynous name Laurie, played by Peggy Cummins. The second act begins with the couple’s serene co-existence whose harmony is soon -- abruptly to the spectator, one might add -- interrupted due to Laurie’s ever-growing, demanding taste for the luxurious life, leading the duo eventually to the life of crime as bandits. Their happy life ends with the fatal heist of a meat packing factory whose failure puts a stop to their short-lived success. The third and final act depicts their constant run from the law which culminates in their death in the misty fields of desolation and poignant serenity. 

Due to its obvious allusions to the strongly romanticized account of the criminal life of Bonnie and Clyde, Gun Crazy is easily associated with the great number of films taking inspiration from the legend, including Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974). Yet it seems to me that Lewis’ film is best understood in connection not only to these “public enemy” stories but also to cinematic stories of mad love in general, that is to say, films such as Sjöström’s The Outlaw and His Wife (1918, Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru), Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), and Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge (1991, Les amants du Pont-Neuf), which -- interestingly enough -- all revolve around lovers on the run.

These allusions capture something theme-wise, but the full understanding of the film’s context requires the appreciation of historical context. Gun Crazy is the first of the two films people usually have seen by Lewis, the second being The Big Combo (1955). Both are iconic film-noirs in the sense of developing and exploding archetypes. Both also include some of the most iconic shots associated with the genre: The Big Combo ends with the famous long shot of the female silhouette waiting for the man in fog, and Gun Crazy has the legendary sequence shot of the bank heist filmed entirely from the backseat of the couple’s getaway car. Both films also belong to the same period of the genre. If the classical era of film-noir ended with the final act of the Second World War after which the darker variation of the crime film turned into an even darker vision of a cynical world inhabited by disillusioned losers, representing the beginning of the new post-war era of the genre, then the final stage of film-noir is exemplified by the darkest variations of the dark crime film. It is the time when psychopaths, atom bombs, and hectically increasing hurry became emblematic of social and existential malaise. In this context, Gun Crazy finds its closest partners in crime in Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950), Maté’s D.O.A. (1949), and Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952).

Although this thematic and historical width of Lewis’ Gun Crazy opens the film up from its potential seclusion in eccentricity, it also challenges some genre conventions. According to film scholar Christopher Justice, Lewis’ film abandons narrative and visual conventions in using episodic structure, open spaces, and well-lit, daytime locations -- the antitheses for the iconic claustrophobic chambers of film-noir aesthetics [2]. While the story has the typical film-noir formula of a desperate, clueless man being driven into the lure of a femme fatale, the film does not reduce the woman into an embodiment of treacherousness (despite having the misogynistic alternative title), but rather uncovers the character as an archetype lost in authentic, even if utterly mad, love. Their love is mad because in the eternal symbiosis of Eros and Thanatos, their love engages with the lust for violence. Laurie might love Bart, but to her, love is always destructive and twisted. Nor does the film explain Bart’s desperate cluelessness by referring to any traditional situation of being cornered but rather to his existential strangeness and his desire to find a kindred spirit, a gun-loving soul lost in an unwelcoming world. In Spring Breakers (2012), they’d both be sucking guns.

From its title to its action, Gun Crazy is a film about guns which is why many contemporary spectators might find it hard to resist the temptation of locating Gun Crazy into the on-going debate about gun control which the rest of the world besides America is not having. Resisting the temptation or not, the way I see it, Gun Crazy is best understood when its gun theme is approached less concretely. In the era of sound film, guns seem to belong to the same category with cars and airplanes in that they are emblematic of a new age where transportation, violence, power, and social status are fundamentally changing. These technological inventions connote cultural pessimism, or the feeling that the new inventions have not improved our quality of life but rather have only accelerated our journey toward nothingness. With ironic thanks to modern medicine, we might be living longer, but we are also living faster and hence feeling like we are not living at all. We are “thrill crazy,” as the film’s poster describes itself. Guns carry a similar curse: "The film reminds us that guns are tools, instruments, and by-products of American democracy: they can build and destroy democratic states," as Justice sums up [3].

In addition to potential political meanings (bear in mind that one of the principal writers of Gun Crazy was the famous blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo), critical literature on the gun theme of Gun Crazy is rife with psychoanalytic interpretations [4] which, to my mind, should not be considered exhaustive but rather the other side of the film-noir coin: for the dark genre is always best understood as the bastard child of wartime anguish, postwar disillusionment, existentialism, and psychoanalysis, all of which were cutting through the western world in the 40′s and the 50′s. As a result, the full understanding of any film-noir seems to require a holistic perspective which looks at the films from different viewpoints. To me, these viewpoints are best united when put together under the rubric of the films’ style and narrative. 

In allusion to psychoanalysis, Gun Crazy begins with childhood and the lack of parental guidance. It begins with the young Bart’s obsession for guns which, despite eventually leading him to the life of crime, is not associated with violence. At court, Bart’s big sister a.k.a mother figure tells the story of Bart feeling deep remorse for once killing an innocent bird. Bart’s obsession for guns is different. Bart explains that shooting is the only thing he’s good at, and that upon shooting “it’s like I’m somebody.” Given the obvious phallic metaphors guns lend themselves to, it has become something of a standard interpretation to see Gun Crazy as an oedipal story. After all, Bart does not have a mother nor a father. Therefore, the entrance of Laurie into his life is phenomenal: Justice claims that “[p]sychosocially, she is Bart’s Oedipal mother and first love, but she is also the father figure he must compete with for approval” [5]. This seems most evident in the androgynous appearance of Laurie, who refuses to wear skirts to work and whose male outfit at the carnival is juxtaposed with her womanly figure emphasized by composition and lighting.

In true Lacanian expansion of Freudian ideas, the perennial oedipal complex which torments Bart’s existence manifests itself outside his relationship with Laurie in the society in general. It is clear to the spectator from very early on that the state has failed to help the boy without parents. The police officer in the beginning, the judge at the court, and the military forces all just pass him along. Without Laurie’s appearance, the capitalist carnival would have done the same. Unlike a Dickensian orphan, Bart does not end up in an abusive foster home or to an eccentric life of great expectations, however; rather he becomes a drifter who turns into a menace to society due to his rootlessness. To Justice, “Gun Crazy is fundamentally a visual and narrative rejection of the state, and Bart’s ‘fatherless state’ is a metaphor for America’s profound ineptness” [6]. Bart and Laurie are strangers to the mainstream; hence they abandon the state, they abandon bourgeois work, and they abandon traditional, “rational” love even at the expense of their life.

Both Laurie and Bart have a thirst for shooting. It’s what they’re good at. The gun is the phallos which Bart obsesses over due to the absence of his parents; it is the phallos which Laurie obsesses over due to the absence of male genitalia. They transfer their lack to guns which come to embody the object petit a, the unreachable object of desire which is now within arm’s reach. Laurie the woman is not as good at shooting as Bart the man -- though just by an inch, or by a match -- but she is a much more powerful figure since her obsession is deeply tied to violence. Bart can stop this destructive force in Laurie, the force that is now within him as well, only by shooting her which also leads to his own demise by the bullets of the police. He had to die. The woman, the force, the violent craze had become his raison d’être, the very condition of possibility for his existence.

While it’s all fine and dandy to throw around Freudian and Lacanian ideas when discussing films which really lend themselves to such discourses, I find it necessary to locate the social and psychological interpretations of the film in a wider context of narratology and stylistics which are captured by a phenomenological interpretation of the film [7]. As such, Gun Crazy is an existentialist tale of being which discloses crazy being through a crazy tone. 

The crazy tone of Gun Crazy stems from Lewis’ narrative which is incredibly ardent, fast-paced, and economic. Take the first scene, for example. A boy and a showcase. The boy breaks the glass and takes a gun behind it. As he runs away, he slips in the rain and the stolen gun rolls to the feet of a police officer. Cluelessness and gun mania have been told to us about the protagonist. The next scene is the courtroom scene where we first hear witness accounts from other characters -- and see flashbacks focalized into their point of view (read: Bart’s perspective is conspicuous by its absence). Not until the very end of the scene do we hear what the boy himself has to say (”it’s like I’m somebody”) -- and with no focalized flashbacks. As the judge reads the sentence, Lewis’ camera slowly tracks toward the young Bart’s ear. By this subtle cinematic gesture, Lewis’ stark narrative emphasizes the strangeness of the boy, his state of being an outsider: he can hear, but he is not being heard. The external perspective prevails at the expense of the inner -- his strangeness cannot be understood. And it hurts because it is true. As the camera briefly lingers on Bart’s ear, the judge says from the off-screen space that the boy is to be put to a boarding school “until further notice.” What follows is a match cut from the ear to a telephone which Bart’s sister answers. The match cut, of course, cuts from Bart’s childhood to his adulthood. Nothing of his in-between adolescent years is told to us. Instead, narrative moves forward with a fervent speed. 

In congruence with the rapidity of the tone, there are many single shots in the film which contain a lot of diegetic information that has been packed up economically: a journalist speaks about the robberies to a radio microphone and newspaper headlines fly toward the camera. Narrative economy is also characteristic for the film’s many montage sequences which cover the couple’s honey moon, their first series of heists, the media coverage of the heists, and an ever-growing police chase. Considering the film lasts less than 90 minutes -- that’s a lot of montage sequences. A certain mood of rapidity, hectic, and hurry characterizes these scenes. The mood takes over the whole of the film. A single shot where Lewis uses framing to connote meanings and feelings can be found in the scene where Laurie convinces Bart to do the one last heist of the meat packing company: as Laurie makes her demand, Bart lifts his head momentarily out of the screen into the off-screen space as if his cluelessness reached a peak, a new limit of despair, went beyond it, out of the screen space, and thus anticipated his voyage to non-existence accelerated by bullets. Before the journey, however, his head returns to the screen space to be convinced by Laurie’s embrace. Like the lingering shot of Bart’s ear at the trial, this shot also enhances the feeling of strangeness, being an outsider, being under the power of someone else by framing the character’s face off. 

The ultimate moment of economic narrative is, of course, the film’s bravura shot, the robbery scene which is executed with one long sequence shot. At first glance, this Bazinian shot, which emphasizes duration, depth, and continuity, might seem contradictory to the aesthetics of hurry and craze I have been attributing to Gun Crazy. After all, Lewis’ decision to rely on such stylistic realism might remind one more of Italian neorealism and the quasi-documentary film-noir it inspired (The Naked City, 1948; Call Northside 777, 1948; The Set-Up, 1949) and, as such, the sequence shot might seem to stick out like a sore thumb -- given that there are no other shots like it in the entire film. On the other hand, this famous shot feels so modern that it could have been made convincingly in some nouvelle vague film. Godard’s Bande à part (1964) is the first which comes to mind since it makes homage to many film-noirs, Gun Crazy included. Taking this association into consideration, the shot does not seem to stick out so strongly. In Justice’s words, “Lewis’s contradictory, inconsistent style may be the most distinguishing characteristic of his directorial ethos, which reveals a radical departure from his contemporaries’ predictable technical and thematic approaches to genre, particularly film-noir” [8]. At best, the shot might be representative of Lewis’ aesthetic transgression anticipating the Godardian combination of Bazin and Eisenstein. In the end, maybe the enigma of the shot draws the spectator’s attention to time and movement, the fleeting Heraclitean flux of moments in the stream of which the modern man is about to burst into pieces, exploding in the intensity of a car crash and a gun bang.  

Rapid narrative, which provides diegetic information in a concise, economic fashion, is not necessarily a virtue on its own, but the way Lewis uses it in Gun Crazy certainly is. The crazy narrative reflects the mode of the characters’ being in the world. When Bart is telling Laurie about the fear he felt as he was shooting at the police car chasing them (Bart’s moment of guilt which the spectator associates with the earlier witness accounts of the dead bird and Bart’s subsequent reluctance to shoot a mountain lion because of that), he describes his feelings in a desperate tone: “It’s like everything was in high gear.” When Bart says these words, he is driving a car. He is driving the metaphor of the modern world, the vehicle partner of the gun, the wroom of the bang. It’s the only thing present in the surrounding environment that he can identify with. The car -- like the gun -- is an essential part of his being. The hectic and tormenting hurry which characterizes his existence to its core, but also feels strange and unhomely. He is in a way which he would not want to be, but he can’t help it. His being is in the highest gear toward nothingness. Recalling Godard’s Pierrot le fou -- and Godard was, of course, an admirer of Lewis --, Ferdinand, the protagonist of the film, looks into the mirror of his car and says that he sees nothing but “the face of a man who is driving towards a cliff at 100 km/h.” Ferdinand’s lover, Marianne, comforts him by saying that she sees “a woman who is in love with the man.” Similarly, Laurie tries to comfort Bart by saying that “at least we have each other” which is followed by Bart’s laconic reply: “but the rest is torture.” 

It seems obvious that Bart is talking about the criminal life the couple is having (he would not have made the comment during their honey moon), but the fact of the matter is that this modern life of carelessness, enabled by their gun crazy ways, is the only life they could live. Thus Bart is speaking nothing but experienced truths about his mode of being in general, the being in the highest gear, which is exemplified by Lewis’ cinematic narrative. 

If the rapidity, the cars, and the guns indicate the modern world, the breakdown of the couple’s getaway car in the middle of a forest road, while being chased by the police, and the following departure into the woods where they get lost indicate their final aberration from the modern world, the only life they knew, and the life they could not continue. Their aberration into nature denotes the approaching arrival of death, the burnout of their existential battery. As the day begins to dawn, they wake up on the misty fields where they are to die self-destructively -- in the rapid blink of an eye. There are no more sounds. There is no onomatopoeia for death. 

Notes:

[1] Justice 2012, p. 228. 

[2] Ibid. p. 237.

[3] Ibid. p. 231

[4] See Justice 2012; see also Lee 2012.

[5] Justice 2012, p. 229.

[6] Ibid. p. 233.

[7] What often lacks in political and psychoanalytic interpretations of films is an attentive discussion on style and narrative. Though this is hardly the case in every situation, I find it better to enrich those interpretations with a wider context of a phenomenological approach which appreciates the relations between the film’s topic, theme, narrative, and style. 

[8] Justice 2012, 225. 

References:

Justice, Christopher. 2012. "Rejecting Everything: Gun Crazy and the Radical Noir of Joseph H. Lewis". In Gary D. Rhodes (ed.) The Films of Joseph H. Lewis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, p. 223-241.

Lee, Michael. 2012. “Music, Masculinity, and Masochism in Gun Crazy”. In Gary D. Rhodes (ed.) The Films of Joseph H. Lewis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, p. 242-254.

#Gun Crazy #Joseph H. Lewis #1940's #Film-Noir #American

[essenceoffilm]

The Bodily Discontinuity of Reality in Makavejev’s Love Affair

Fifty years ago, in the prominent year of 1967, some French directors were declaring the end of cinema, while others were just getting started. In the Eastern part of Europe, where cinema had begun to find new freedom during the cultural thaw in the late 50′s, directors were not as keen on making apocalyptic declarations regarding their artistic trade because the tide of the new wave was arriving there later. The Yugoslavian cult director, Dusan Makavejev is no exception. After making a great number of short documentaries from the mid-50′s to the early 60′s, Makavejev made his feature debut, Man Is Not a Bird (1965, Covek nije tica) when the new wave was already slowing down in France. Primarily, the film opened the door to Makavejev’s best film two years later, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967, Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T.). Made nearly a decade after the monumental breakthroughs of the new wave in France, Makavejev’s magnum opus still radiates the fresh cinematic thought characteristic of those films filled with both young playfulness and artistic rigor. Despite being late bloomers of the wave, Makavejev’s Love Affair does not really fall into the category with Eric Rohmer’s belated The Collector (1967, La collectionneuse), though they share an intriguing affinity. Rohmer’s treatise on sexuality and the human body is characterized by tranquility and aesthetic serenity, whereas such features are replaced by a ferocious yet ironic analysis of man’s bodily being in Makavejev’s satire. 

Love Affair is both a typical film for its time and an untypical film of timeless nature. Makavejev’s peculiar narrative basically carries two story lines side by side which coalesce in the end. In the first, a girl, working as a switchboard operator, named Izabel falls in love with Ahmed, a boy working at the sanitation department. In the second, the police find Izabel’s corpse in a cesspool and take it to the morgue. In addition to these diegetic lines of the two-fold story, there are separate levels of discourse. Most notably, there is a sex researcher talking directly to the camera about sex. He kicks the film off by asking the audience whether they are really interested in sex, knowing the predictably positive answer himself, of course, and adding that he too is interested in sex, though obviously as a mere object of research. The presence of a scientist presenting data to comment on the diegetic events anticipates the more well-known use of such narrative methodology in prominent French New Wave auteur, Alain Resnais’ My American Uncle (1980, Mon oncle d’Amérique). Makavejev does not, however, distinguish the scientist’s commentary into as a clearly separated level of discourse from the diegetic events as Resnais does which is why the scientist’s relation to the rest of the film remains more implicit. For one, Makavejev’s scientist does not directly comment on the characters and their behavior, whereas Resnais’ precisely explains what is witnessed on the screen. As a result, Makavejev’s approach feels more essayistic, more “new-wavy,” and less clearly delineated. In fact, it seems that the other additional modes of discourse in Love Affair join this level of discourse where the sex researcher belongs to: these include erotic images and a silent Yugoslavian porno called “Adam and Eve.” There is also a brief passage of prose as an inter-text which directly comments on the diegetic events in the characters’ life, seemingly separate from both levels of discourse: the diegetic world and the sex researcher’s world. 

This short sketch should give an impression of the aesthetic principle that dominates Makavejev’s cinematic style. It is the principle of irregularity and imbalance. Mainly due to a major influence from Godard, montage became a dominant feature in new wave cinema. It meant a wish of the new filmmakers to distance themselves from what has been called “quality cinema” and to emphasize the cinematic (or, to some, “artificial”) nature of their work. They wanted to make films which were films -- not visual illustrations of novels or plays. Makavejev essentially continues Godard’s cinematic thinking in cutting between different levels of discourse, constantly interrupting the narrative flow, and using sound (and music) as counterpoint to the image. In line with aesthetic irregularity, Makavejev combines static shots with free handheld camerawork, and his mise-en-scène has a naturalist sensuality to it. 

In terms of content rather than form, Makavejev’s Love Affair also shares an affinity with the basics of the new wave. First, there is the theme of young love. Although the spectator knows that it will end in tragedy (and finds that it ends in even deeper tragedy), it has the freshness, the sensuality, and the eccentric seriousness of the lovers’ complicated relationships created by Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais. Second, there is the theme of freedom which is -- as one might expect -- dealt with both individually and socially. To many, one might assume, Love Affair is a feminist film about the liberation of women or a political film about the budding liberation of the individual in the socialist regime but it is also (par Godard et al) an existentialist film. This brings us to yet another new wave theme, that is, the existentialist theme of being. While crafting a multi-layered story in the socialist system, Makavejev focuses on the individual and their private being, their bodily being toward death. 

All of the film’s three levels (that is, the criminal investigation of the missing switchboard operator, the more or less educational comments by the sex researcher, and the love story of Izabel and Ahmed) concern the human body. The perspective of the first is objective and its object of research is what the German phenomenologists of the 20th century called Körper, the physical body. The perspective of the second is also objective but its object of research is not only Körper but also what those thinkers called Leib, or the lived body as distinguished by the French (le corps véçu). Both Körper and Leib are studied from the frame of sexuality. The perspective of the third, however, is subjective or, dare I say, phenomenological, and its object of research is purely Leib. It takes bodily being in its entirety. Makavejev, like phenomenological thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one might continue, never makes a three-fold distinction like this. In Makavejev’s multi-layered vision, these perspectives coalesce and the lines between them become obfuscated. When Ahmed describes Izabel’s skin as silky while lying in bed, Makavejev makes a straight cut to the morgue where the same skin is being categorized by less sentimental terms. There is a transition from the third perspective to the first, which is indeed merely a change in perspective, but Makavejev’s cut seems to emphasize the phenomenological vagueness underlying the distinction between Körper and Leib; the latter seems to always entail the former. That is to say, in life, one always seems to be dying. 

In fact, the most famous shot of Makavejev’s Love Affair, that being the full shot of the nude Izabel lying on bed while a black cat has curled up on her thighs right by her bottom, encapsulates this vagueness. Arguably, the shot calls for symbolic interpretations, but Makavejev might be doing something else rather than triggering the neural areas in the spectator’s brain hard-wired for psychoanalytic-feminist interpretations. He might be drawing our attention to the limitations in the first and the second perspectives: we are brought before inexplicable images. If this is not the purpose of cinema, I do not know what is. From this iconic shot, Makavejev cuts to a close-up of Izabel’s buttocks making them appear as twin peaks from which Makavejev further cuts to a brief montage sequence of Izabel baking, an innocent act which starts to look disturbingly (though also intriguingly) erotic. Given that these shots are preceded by the scene at Ahmed’s narrow apartment where there is not enough space and where Ahmed orders the nude Izabel to put some clothes on, Izabel’s nudity and her fiery baking inevitably manifest as expressions of freedom. The iconic shot itself, however, despite this contextualization, appears as utterly inexplicable, as an image of a mundane moment of bodily being. In it, one might observe the female body as a mere Körper, a physical body in a renaissance painting, but, due to the power of cinema, enhancing the power of human presence, one is almost coerced into observing the body as a complex, consisting of both Körper and Leib. 

The vagueness in bodily being is articulated cinematically by combining separate levels of discourse and cutting unexpectedly between them. This, in turn, seems to bring the vagueness in bodily being into the structure of reality. Reality becomes vague as well. It, like the body, manifests as discontinuous. There is no continuous linkage from the first perspective to the second and third; rather they form a bundle of discourses which both struggle and support. The reality which Makavejev’s film discloses is discontinuous and ambiguous, a reality where there are no clear boundaries -- just like in the films of Godard. 

Makavejev’s cinematic thought is, in fact, very close to Godard who always emphasized his connections not only to Merleau-Ponty but to Hegel as well. At its heart, Makavejev’s dialectical thought never excludes opposites but considers them as mutually belonging and enriching. The spectator cannot help but notice this in the film’s tone, effortlessly varying between the tragic and the comic, the satirical and the elegiac, the romantic and the grotesque, the documentary and the playful. At the core of it all, there seems to lie the human heart which remains inexplicable, a mystery. The film’s title has two parts: there is the “love affair” and “the case of the missing switchboard operator.” Both perspectives are there. Both Körper and Leib are in play. When Makavejev makes us listen to apparently non-diegetic German propaganda music chanting “heart, renovate,” we become more and more convinced that historicist projects of creating a new man cannot work. There are affairs which just belong to the heart. 

#Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. #Love Affair or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator #Dusan Makavejev #1960's #Yugoslavian

[essenceoffilm]

Primal Binary Battles

One does not regularly remember the name of J. Lee Thompson nor should one, really. Sometimes good films appear in unusual places, in the hands of understandably overlooked directors. For Thompson’s thriller classic Cape Fear (1962) might just be the only decent film in an otherwise sub-par oeuvre. When Brian De Palma remade Howard Hawks’ classic tale of fascist megalomania in Scarface (1983), he felt it necessary to dedicate his re-imagination to both Hawks and scriptwriter Ben Hecht. Such sense of responsibility did not occur in the mind of Martin Scorsese when he remade Cape Fear (1991). Kudos to the performers and the music of the original version, Scorsese cast the original actors Gregory Peck, Martin Balsam, and Robert Mitchum in supporting roles, used Bernard Herrmann’s original score, but essentially changed the film’s visual aesthetics. The reason might be that the 1962 version of Cape Fear is not representative of Thompson’s mediocre cinema -- one can recall the catastrophe of Mackenna’s Gold (1969), Death Wish 4 (1987), or two terrible Planet of the Apes sequels -- but is actually quite a solid film, most likely due to a multitude of reasons: from Thompson’s strokes of luck with John D. MacDonald’s tight pulp novel and Herrmann’s Hitchcockian music to Mitchum’s bestial performance as the psychopathic criminal Max Cady, Cape Fear remains a genre classic and a gem to visit whenever one feels that one has memorized the Hitchcock canon through and through again. Its story is such a frightening reminder of the fragility of our legal system that Michael Haneke might be inspired, but its plot also seems to capture a deeper, primordial myth of conflicts within humanity. 

The story encapsulates this myth into a dramatic conflict between two characters, or two sides of the same coin. Sam Bowden, a lawyer, a husband, and a father, played by Gregory Peck, has created himself a sustainable career and a reputation as a successful model citizen of the American idyll. One day a creature from the past emerges when an ex-con by the name of Max Cady approaches Bowden, reminding him of an old case where Bowden performed as a witness to Cady’s crime which sent Cady to prison for eight years. Soon Cady starts making a mockery of everything Bowden has believed in and built his whole life on. Cady’s very presence in Bowden’s vicinity seems to mock the American legal system whose loopholes Cady exploits in order to drive Bowden crazy and have his vengeance. Where Cady uses legalities to get to Bowden, Bowden, conversely, must resort to crime, the external world to his secular god of law, to get to Cady. Their conflict culminates in a thrilling sequence where Bowden tricks Cady into attacking his family in their houseboat on the Cape Fear River. Even though things take a surprising twist, Bowden is able to find justice, keep his family relatively intact, and capture Cady for the police.

As mentioned, Cape Fear is based on a pulp novel, The Executioners (1957) by John D. MacDonald. The film adaptation was allegedly supposed to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but unclear disputes led to an (we may assume) unfortunate directorial change from the master of suspense to Thompson. Hitchcock’s presence (whether as a possible storyboard artist during pre-production or just as someone who saw cinematic potential in MacDonald’s story) illuminates the film from Herrmann’s score, which sounds very similar to his score in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), to Thompson’s use of stylized lighting with heavy contrasts, striking choices of camera angles, and a narrative relying more on subtle innuendo than graphic depiction (which is completely altered in Scorsese’s remake). A further, though minor, connection to Psycho is that Martin Balsam plays the hero’s assistant in both films. Both films also discuss split personality: Psycho does it more directly in the schizophrenic character of Norman Bates, while Cape Fear does it more indirectly in the dualism of Bowden and Cady. These make Cape Fear a contender for “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made” against Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) and Donen’s Charade (1963). 

Unlike Cukor’s traditional Victorian period picture and Donen’s lighthearted romantic adventure, Thompson’s Cape Fear was quite a bold film for its time. Sharing another similarity with Psycho, Cape Fear most likely succeeded in shocking its contemporary audience. Although the film was toned down from the MacDonald novel to the extent that the word “rape” was not allowed to be mentioned, the threat Mitchum’s character embodies feels very real and urgent. His nihilistic disregard for his own life and his greater maliciousness toward Bowden and the bourgeois society he represents are further accompanied by the innuendo regarding Cady’s sexual interest not only in Bowden’s wife but also in Bowden’s pre-teen daughter played by Lori Martin. While failing to attain the level of Psycho, Cape Fear still remains shocking and not only for the sake of being shocking; its atmosphere of threat and danger reflects deeper, mythic themes studied beneath the surface level.

It is sometimes preferable to leave things undisclosed and avoid a conventional exposition in the beginning of a film, but the introduction of Mitchum’s character in Cape Fear succeeds in simplicity and represents pure visual art of exposition. The film begins with a man in white clothing walking to a courthouse. Walking the outdoor stairs, the first thing he does is taking a look at a woman’s bottom. When inside, walking the indoor staircase, he nonchalantly passes by a woman who drops a book without the slightest consideration of giving a helping hand. As the man finally reaches the door of a courtroom, where Sam Bowden is currently at work, another lawyer takes a long look at him. The man is an outsider. The man is Max Cady. This succinct and concise wordless exposition establishes the character’s disposition: his carnal licentiousness, his promiscuous relation to women, his selfishness, and his unsuitability to the surrounding environment. 

These features come to determine Max Cady, the devil in white clothing. The solid exposition associates sexual virility with impoliteness and licentiousness, but it also importantly emphasizes the disproportion between the character and the environment. Max Cady does not belong to the courthouse, to this town, to the United States, to this human world -- or so people like Sam Bowden, those who built that world, would like to think. The reason for this disproportion between Cady and the world, both moral and ontological by nature, is the fact that Cady represents anarchistic fascism. He is the Hobbesian man in the state of nature where man is a wolf to his fellow man. He embodies the primal forces which threaten western democracy, the natural forces which ought to be repressed by a social contract. He is the evil which lurks in darkness to attack the good residing in broad daylight.

In other words, there is a battle between nature and civilization, a battle which normally remains hidden in the hearts of men, but which now emerges on the surface of the society. The conflict between Cady and Bowden constantly drives the latter on the brink of abandoning civilization and its pillars of law as the barbaric impulses of nature allure him. “Cady is an animal, so you have to treat him like an animal,” affirms a private detective who suggests Bowden to hire a couple of thugs to beat up Cady. The forces of nature embodied by Cady tempt Bowden who is about to deceive Cady, to abandon the rules of civilization, to play by the rules of nature, but, in the end, or at the eleventh hour, Bowden finds strength to rely on civilization and gives Cady to the police. He cannot murder Cady. At the last moment, he realizes that he cannot abandon everything he has believed in and built his whole bourgeois life on. Despite the seeming return to the tranquility and peace of the civilization in the end, primal hatred and lust for blood gleam in Bowden’s furious eyes as Bowden denies Cady of his last wish to die (”I just don’t give a damn’”), finding pleasure in describing the torturous length of Cady’s prison sentence to come. Thus the primal forces of nature find their vague embodiment in the world of law, too; they manifest in the justice of punishment under the accepted guise of the social contract. 

Given the social nature of the themes treated in Cape Fear, there is an undeniable presence of class conflict in the dramatic battle between Bowden and Cady. Although the spectator probably identifies with Bowden’s anguish, they must also notice Bowden’s higher social status to Cady’s blue-collar being. Bowden has good relations with the police, whereas the police take a doubtful attitude toward Cady. Bowden can afford a private eye and a couple of thugs, whereas Cady must rely on his own physical force. Bowden has had not only the time but also the social opportunities to build a family and a career, whereas Cady has lost both. Cady’s lower social position is highlighted not only by his relaxed clothing and the doubt he evokes in those around him but also by the relations between him and the other characters. A woman, who Cady picks up at a bar and later rapes, tells Cady how good it feels to know that one “cannot sink any lower.” To her, Cady is the “rock bottom” she is now hitting. Cady’s unsuitability to the social environment surrounding him only emphasizes his determination: what does Cady have to lose? 

In one sense, Cape Fear traces the sources of the vigilante ideology to these feelings of disappointment. Cady takes not law but moral justice to his own hands when he feels (erroneously or not) that the former has not been in service of the latter. Bowden does the same when he feels that the law is incapable of protecting him. The vigilante heroes of the American society are disappointed individuals who seek justice beyond civilization. The suggested path, of course, is not that of the vigilantist but of Bowden who, in the end at last, is able to find solace in the realm of law. The irony is that the solace remains just as sadistic. It is still dominated by fear and hate. 

Cape Fear is really a treatise on these primal emotions or their myth. The film concerns fear and hate that are both rational and irrational. It is fear that guides Bowden to act against Cady’s hate, but fear and hate are close companions -- just like Bowden and Cady in their battle. If Bowden’s fear slowly turns into hate, it takes a little longer for Cady’s hate to turn into fear, but eventually fear begins to gleam in Cady’s frightened eyes as well when Bowden corners him in the woods of the Cape Fear River and denies Cady the possibility of death his suicidal behavior was aiming at; when Cady loses the reality of violence, the only reality he knows well enough to call home, and receives an anticipation of his sentence to come. Cady becomes a scared animal in the darkness of nature. Fear might turn wolves into rabbits, but hate also makes villains out of heroes. As the camera slowly tracks backward from the narrow clearing in the woods where Bowden has Cady at gunpoint, what else but a mixture of fear and hate gleam in the eyes of Bowden and his family as they quietly sit on the boat in the middle of wilderness. The film brilliantly ends with a picturesque shot of the boat sailing across the Cape Fear River surrounded by the woods whose trees frame the shot into an ominous image of contrasts. These trees are by symbolic nature the same trees that grow in the backyard of the Bowden residence; they are the trees which remind of the triumph over nature but also inevitably of the fragility of civilization. The trees frame the boat’s journey on the foreground but also on the background as the dense forest looks like an impenetrable wall of darkness. The Bowdens have survived, but the battle has not been resolved. It continues in the infinite circle embodied by the dark, unpredictable world of the trees. 

This ending is telling of the cinematic potential in Cape Fear. While far from being a masterpiece, the film is still thrilling and atmospheric precisely because the appropriate cinematic execution has been discovered for the articulation of the primal battles constituting the drama. Fitting to Cady’s estranged disposition, Mitchum plays the role like a beast among men. His expressionistic acting of exaggerated gestures, cocky poise, and dry malicious remarks has been subdued from his lunatic embodiment of the big bad wolf in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), but the power of his presence still manages to electrify the natural forces his character of Max Cady represents. Enticed by these forces, Bowden is conversely played by the restraint and cool, yet constantly on the verge of exploding Gregory Peck whose solid face contains these characteristics effortlessly. Herrmann’s string-based score discovers a parallel dimension in music where low sounds are juxtaposed with sounds of a higher pitch. The calm editing rhythm is likewise associated with a deliberately surprising cinematography which, at times, switches from the fluency of slow movement to rapid tracking shots following the tightening of the characters’ nerves in action. The same goes for the film-noir-esque use of light and shadow in the film’s stark mise-en-scène of contrasts, playing with the aesthetic conflicts of day and night, narrowness and width, distance and closeness. The spaces have been carefully chosen and constructed to aid in the elaboration of mood for the entire film. The finale marks the shift to the titular milieu of Cape Fear in North Carolina where the counterpoints collide in physical battle. It leaves a lasting impression of vulnerability and threat due to a new found awareness of the presence of fear and hate. Cape Fear is definitely worth remembering. 

#Cape Fear #J. Lee Thompson #1960's #American

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Winner and The Big Sleep: Lessons from a Disaster

Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novels written during and after WWII are mandatory readings for all cinephiles due to their undeniable importance to the development of the enigmatic genre known as film-noir. Many crime films from the period owe a great deal to Chandler whether they credit him or not. In addition to an apparent influence on the genre as a whole, Chandler’s novels have also inspired a number of direct adaptations. The most famous of these are Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946). During the neo-noir craze of the 1970′s, Robert Altman brought fresh air into Chandler adaptations with the unique The Long Goodbye (1973), while others at the time felt the need to repeat what had already been done: Dick Richards remade Dmytryk’s Chandler adaptation with Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and Michael Winner, known for Death Wish (1974), re-imagined Hawks’ re-imagination of Chandler with The Big Sleep (1978). Both Richards’ and Winner’s films star the aging, iconic film-noir (anti)hero of the 40′s, Robert Mitchum and both try to milk his screen charisma in compensation of their sheer lack of cinematic vision. If Richards and Winner did not take themselves so seriously, one could try and save their films by associating them with the silly film-noir parody Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), an association which would, surprisingly, be in their favor, but as sober remakes the two films remain embarrassing pastiches of the genre. Whereas Richards might develop something that makes his film bearable, Winner’s film is a total disaster and a cringe-worthy experience for those who do not know what to expect before watching it. Nonetheless, I do believe there are lessons to be learnt from Winner’s failure, lessons which either recount or remind us what really matters in film. 

One of the most common observations with regards to Hawks’ The Big Sleep is its narrative complexity. After watching it, spectators often remark how they had no clue about what was going on in the film -- and if they did, they could not recount its plot after a few hours --, but more importantly they always seem to add how little this narrative ambiguity hindered their viewing experience and enjoyment. They might, of course, add how much they loved the screen chemistry between the evergreen duo Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a chemistry that was strong enough to be emphasized at the expense of the intelligibility of the plot. A famous anecdote about the production of the film tells that director Hawks wired his scriptwriter William Faulkner to inquire who, if anyone, shot general Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor in the story. When Faulkner had no answer to Hawks’ question, they went to Chandler who allegedly admitted his own lack of knowledge regarding the question. The anecdote is probably false, but it makes a point: the intelligibility of plot is secondary to mood and atmosphere in The Big Sleep and the genre of film-noir in general as well as, I would argue, in cinema and art overall. 

While the 1946 version lacks vital diegetic information, provided in the novel, which makes it difficult for the spectator to follow the plot, Winner’s 1978 version tries not only to provide this information and communicate it more clearly but also to fill in possible gaps with explanatory voice-over and flashback sequences. These flashback sequences show, for example, the character who kills Geiger, which remains more implicit in the 1946 version. The funny thing is that no matter how much Winner tries to clarify Chandler’s story, the spectator of his film, who has not read the novel, will most likely still remain more or less perplexed due to the abundance of vital diegetic information provided in a short period of time and the great number of important characters whose names are only briefly mentioned. The more serious lesson to learn from all this is how irrelevant the clarity of plot is in film-noir and in a story like The Big Sleep. Hence the first lesson to learn from Winner’s failure is the irrelevance of narrative clarity and comprehension.

A common complaint with regards to film adaptations is their lack of loyalty to the original text. To me and many others, this complaint has never represented anything but idiocy and the lack of appreciation for artistic innovation. There is no need to “remake” something; there is only the need to “reinvent,” which can mean either a completely novel innovation or a modification of something old. Hawks definitely belongs to the latter category, which is why film critic Robin Wood loves to compare Hawks to William Shakespeare, another artist whose greatness is born from the combination of traditional, already established materials into a new whole. Following this complaint, a popular compliment with regards to film adaptations is their loyalty to the original text. This is perhaps the only compliment Winner’s The Big Sleep might deserve, but given the above is true, it is not really a compliment. 

Winner’s The Big Sleep is loyal to Chandler’s novel in at least three respects. First, it presents the story with the same level of narrative clarity so that it is at the very least possible for the spectator to grasp the plot and thus construct the story world completely. Second, Winner does not change the story from Chandler’s original presentation (with the exception of changing the location from 30′s Los Angeles to 70′s London for some reason which serves no purpose and as such does not really alter the original presentation). In Hawks’ version, the ending is changed so that Carmen/Camilla Sternwood (the general’s wilder, mentally disturbed daughter) did not really kill Reagan; Eddie Mars did (or, given the lack of clarity in the film, this is at least strongly implied). In Chandler’s original story, however, Eddie Mars blackmails Carmen’s sister, Vivian so that Carmen would not get caught for killing Reagan in disturbed rage. Winner even uses the same scene from the novel where Marlowe deduces this to be the case when Carmen has an epileptic seizure after failing to shoot Marlowe. In both the novel and the 1978 version, Marlowe demands Vivian to institutionalize her sister into psychiatric care. Third, and in relation to the second, Winner’s film is not limited by Hollywood censorship of the Hays’ code which prevented Hawks’ 1946 version from explicitly stating (or even really implying) Geiger’s homosexuality, the fact that Geiger’s “book store” sells pornography, and showing Carmen in the nude. In the novel and in both versions, Geiger’s male lover kills Joe Brody because he believes that Brody shot Geiger, but this relationship between Geiger and the man is not revealed in Hawks’ version, which further enhances the ambiguity of the story with its many twists and turns. In the novel and in both versions, Geiger takes erotic pictures of Carmen under the influence, but only in the novel and in Winner’s version is Carmen naked; in Hawks’ 1946 version, she wears a Chinese dress, a costume which connoted eroticism to the audience at the time. The same concerns the scene where Carmen tries to seduce Marlowe in his home. 

Some contemporary critics felt that Winner’s version captured the dark undertones of Chandler’s novel better due to this loyalty. Since Winner is able to show nudity, perversion, and violence without having to pay lip service to censorship, his film articulates the gloomy nuances of the story more appropriately. This could not be farther from the truth, however. The fact that Winner’s film feels more laughable or cringe-inducing than tragic or dark only goes to show how little these elements of “openness” have to do with creating an appropriate mood and atmosphere. While Hawks’ version might be more tamed than Chandler’s novel, it attains its darkness in a different fashion; it achieves to create a dark atmosphere by the narrative ambiguity which characterizes the film’s tone throughout, expressing and exemplifying a sense of moral complexity and ontological vagueness. Granted, the additional romantic subplot between Marlowe (Bogart) and Vivian (Bacall) in Hawks’ version not only takes liberties but was also emphasized due to studio demands; yet the romantic plot is a bit more complicated with its existentialist twist of “guessing” and “nothing you can’t fix.” Furthermore, this only goes to show how such alterations can improve and enhance innovation beyond mere adaptation. Winner’s film fails to create a dark, ominous mood because the only elements Winner uses to create such a mood are precisely the violence, nudity, and perverse themes stemming from the Chandler novel, whereas Hawks’ version creates the mood by embracing an ambiguous tone obfuscating the whole. Hence the second lesson to learn from Winner’s failure is the irrelevance of loyalty. 

These two lessons, I believe, constitute the gist of what the spectator gets from Winner’s The Big Sleep. In addition, there are more minor lessons, less important for cinema in general, yet more revealing regarding the differences between the two versions. 

Something that might go missed for an average movie-goer enjoying the classic 1946 version is its strangeness in the Hawks canon. While the film was a box office success and has become a genre classic, it has never been considered that important in the context of the whole of Hawks’ oeuvre. One of the main pioneers of the classic Hawks canon, Robin Wood, lists it among Hawks’ “failures and minor works”. The reason for this neglect might be that The Big Sleep does not seem to fit in with Hawks’ other films. Hawks films are usually about all-male groups and their solidarity, their narrative is classical and conventional, and his style is simple. Although The Big Sleep might be classical and simple in its style (calm analytic editing, Academy aspect ratio, camera movement subjected to the movement of the characters, no extreme shot scales), its film-noir aesthetics might be less transparent than in Hawks’ other films. More importantly, the complex narrative hindering narrative comprehension is the sole exception in Hawks’ otherwise clear-cut narrative work. Moreover, the emphasis on the individual and his estrangement from the world is far from the group solidarity in films such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Rio Bravo (1959). 

The connections of The Big Sleep to Hawks’ other films and the presence of the Hawksian element nonetheless in the film are the topic for another essay, but here it suffices to observe what an untypical film The Big Sleep was for Hawks. Given that the film is still at the very least well-made and good, this only goes to show what a talented filmmaker Hawks was. Hawks was never tied to any particular genre; he was a touche-à-tout of Hollywood cinema. He was ready to try different topics and themes, but he always held onto his own cinematic vision. Although The Big Sleep might represent a counter-example, given that the film was changed due to studio demands a year and a half after production, it does not really represent any such thing because the cinematic vision I am talking about goes deeper; it is a vision stemming from an interrelation between style, narrative, and character. Whereas Hawks has a cinematic vision which passes through The Big Sleep, Winner does not. Winner’s version is a terrible mess which tries to mimic the 40′s film-noir genre by using voice-over and point of view shots, but it also throws in abrupt zooms, pans, and flips-of-the-screen as transitions, and uses a quicker editing rhythm. Hence the third lesson to learn from Winner’s failure is simply the superiority of Hawks to Winner. 

The fourth and final lesson to learn concerns the importance of small details. The 1946 version of The Big Sleep is a classic for a reason: people go back to the film because it works. It works, for one, because its elements are in harmony with one another. While lines and lines could be written how bad Candy Clark’s awkward performance as Camilla/Carmen is in the 1978 version, which makes even the most cynical spectator of the 1946 version appreciate the naive simplicity in Martha Vickers’ not-so-great performance, I shall concentrate on one scene in particular which, to my mind, reveals the incompatibility of details in Winner’s film as well as his lack of cinematic vision. 

This is the scene where Marlowe meets with general Sternwood for the first time. Given that general Sternwood is played by the aging James Stewart in Winner’s version, this scene is certainly interesting, but it falls flat in comparison to the scene in the 1946 version when it comes to establishing the story, theme, tone, and atmosphere for the film. The scenes are very similar; in fact, the dialogue is almost identical. Their difference stems from nuances in editing and acting. While the scene in the 1946 version has a slow editing rhythm, varying calmly between full shots of the greenhouse where the two meet and medium shots of the two characters, respectively, the scene in the 1978 version has a quicker editing rhythm, varying between full shots of the greenhouse, medium shots, and close-ups of the characters. The rapid montage (or rapid in comparison to the 1946 version, that is) does not create tension between the characters nor does it enhance an impression of something being concealed; on the contrary, the scene separates the characters and gives an incoherent impression of detachment which does not seem establish anything relevant for the rest of the film. Both Stewart and Mitchum seem to deliver their lines tiredly. When Mitchum says the line “she [Camille] tried to sit on my lap... I was standing up,” the scene is in full shot showing both characters and after a brief silence there is a cut to a close-up of Stewart’s face as he bursts out laughing. Not only does Mitchum deliver the line without any of Bogart’s dry laconic wit but Stewart’s unprecedented bursting out into laughter feels so off that it is unbelievable Winner did not cut it out. The choice to cut to a close-up of his laughter further emphasizes the act, drawing the spectator’s attention to it, which again hinders the establishment of a dark mood; had the scene remained in full shot of the milieu for a little longer and had Stewart emitted nothing but a quiet smirk, the scene might have been better. If this scene pales in comparison to the simple yet efficient scene in the 1946 version, the fourth lesson to learn from Winner’s failure is that the value of a film is eventually constituted by the tiniest factors from the delivery of a line to editing, shot scale, and camera movement. 

Although Mitchum is a great actor, I think his performance does not work in Winner’s The Big Sleep. Mitchum might be stepping into too big shoes, which had been stretched to infinity by Bogart, but his age also makes him into an old stranger like Stewart in the film: neither of them really fit in. The sad thing about the film is, of course, that Stewart and Mitchum are still the best thing about it. While the idea of casting an old film-noir icon to star in two remakes of classic film-noirs in the 1970′s (Richards’ and Winner’s) is arguably intriguing and tempting, I think Mitchum should have retired with Peter Yates’ masterful The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). Yates’ film is a neo-noir where Mitchum plays an aging truck driver who has helped many criminals in the past but whose better days are behind him. It is a perfect swan song to Mitchum’s screen persona, whereas Richards’ and Winner’s films feel like embarrassing attempts to achieve something that had already been lost. 

These fours lessons concerning the vital importance of small details for cinematic value, the superiority of Hawks as a director to Winner, the irrelevance of loyalty to the original text, and the irrelevance of narrative clarity and comprehension do not necessarily tell us why Winner’s The Big Sleep is such a bad film, though they do imply it, but they hopefully tell us something about what matters in cinema. In the end, Winner’s ability to depict homosexuality, violence, and nudity more openly mean very little  when it comes to creating atmosphere. His loyalty to Chandler’s original novel means even less for, well, anything. His attempts to clarify the story only rob it of its essential ambiguity which, in the end, is more important than the story itself. Thus what we might learn from Winner’s failure is that cinema is not literature nor is cinema (or even literature) solely about telling stories; cinema does not occur in writing but in cinematic execution, or cinematography, acting, mise-en-scène, and editing. Although Hawks’ The Big Sleep is far from a masterpiece, it trusts in the cinematic power of these elements more than the clarity of its story, which is something people like Michael Winner will never understand. 

#The Big Sleep #Michael Winner #1970's #American #Neo-noir

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Narrating Nothing But the Form

There is always a sense of awe both in the film object and, presumably, in the mind of the viewing subject when a film by Miklós Jancsó unfolds on the screen. Despite the possible clarity of the emotion of awe and its quality, it is quite difficult to spell out the specifics of this emotion and, even more so, the reasons behind it. Its point of departure lies in the grandiose nature of Jancsó’s peculiar minimalism. Jancsó’s magnum opus, the most widely known of all his masterpieces, The Red and the White (1967, Csillagosok, katonák) is both a vast epic of war and a minute piece of abstraction. The spectator is simply at awe, trying to grasp what is being done with cinema before their eyes. Rather than seeing a story, let alone following the narration of one, the spectator witnesses the stream of seemingly unconnected shots which, at the same time, seem to be connected by a logic of a higher order. In the year which is now escaping beyond the border of half a century, in the year when the French began to sense “the end of cinema,” and Hollywood started to reinvent itself, Jancsó continued his own thing, maximizing his cinematic potential.

The problem some people have with films like The Red and the White is that they do not seem to be about anything. While films like these are clearer than, say, experimental films such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) which consists of nothing but the leisurely journey of the camera through one room, they can still rub the spectator the wrong way. Their lack of “aboutness” comes down to the fact that they do not seem to tell something. With regards to The Red and the White, or Jancsó’s cinema in general for that matter, one seems to have every right to posit the reasonable question whether the notions of story, plot, and narrative have any application for the understanding of the film in question. At worst, the clinging on to these traditional notions might divert the spectator away from the film, frustrating them when there are no clear answers to be found; at best, however, these notions might guide the spectator into grasping the film from a different point of view, perhaps more fully and vividly, a little less emptily.

The most obvious case for a starting place with these traditional notions is the fact that The Red and the White does have a topic. Its topic concerns the role of the Hungarian communist partisans in the Russian Civil War in the year 1919. The film covers different events where the red and the white collide, take turns in killing one another, and lose themselves in the far landscape. Without narrating a story in the conventional sense, delivering character delineation, or providing any clear-cut problems to ponder, let alone for the characters to solve, Jancsó has made a work which might just be the greatest war film of all times. If not, The Red and the White shall share the top place with Rossellini’s Paisà (1946). Like Rossellini’s neo-realist masterpiece, so does Jancsó’s magnum opus consist of different, unconnected episodes which paint a picture of war -- not the war but war per se -- that is greater than the sum of its parts. Both films capture the form of war, its dialectics of winners and losers, of defeat and victory, of death and rebellion; that is to say, the interconnected and interchangeable nature of such purported polar opposites. Unlike Paisà, however, The Red and the White goes beyond capturing the form of war; it embraces the form of war in its own aesthetic form and as such, if I’ll allow myself a slight exaggeration, narrates nothing but the form.

Jancsó’s film was shot in the far steppe of Volga which seems eternal and infinite in both space and time. The stark, grand landscape dominates Jancsó’s mise-en-scène of contrasts, enhancing an interplay between sky and soil as well as other natural elements, in a fashion bringing western classics to mind. This co-presence of the grand and the minute is why I find it appropriate to talk of Jancsó’s epic minimalism. The film’s soundtrack is similarly ascetic as recurring, heavy sounds of gunfire echo in the emptiness of the space, enhancing an impression of an unending space from which man can exit by no means other than death. To lend the concept from the Russian formalists, the dominant feature of Jancsó’s style is, however, without a doubt, the mobile sequence shot. Jancsó’s slowly moving camera both articulates and structures the space. In Jancsó’s cinematographic aesthetics, where the camera seems to dominate all the other elements, the characters are mere elements in the mise-en-scène; to Jancsó, like to Antonioni, they are equal to other natural and artificial elements seen in the screen space. The characters are subjected to the rhythm of the cinematographic aesthetics; it is as though they settled into its dynamic compositions of movement and duration.

It is this cinematographic aesthetics of Jancsó which is used to articulate what has been above called the form of war. Its form is disturbing, perplexing, and confusing; its form denies comprehension and clarity. Its form is dialectical in that it emphasizes the inevitable presence of contradictions, the clash of polar opposites, and the changing of roles -- in which winners become losers and vice versa -- where nothing else sustains but the form as such. Throughout the film, Jancsó’s mobile camera picks up someone, a character for the spectator to observe and follow but only for a brief while before they die, before the camera drops them off, leaves them to the off-screen space of death. The characters in focus are constantly altered and only the other stylistic elements remain consistent, implying the pervasive nature of the form of war. The distance of the camera to the characters prevents the spectator from identifying with them and even hinders the simple act of identifying which of the characters are the white and which are the red. The film is characterized by powerful dedramatization due to this, a feature well-known in Italian neo-realism. In one scene, the spectator follows a soldier who shares a brief moment with a woman. As the soldier is being executed by the Russians, the woman in the nude is left to stand on the empty pier by the river of death which flows in the background throughout the film. It is as if all action disappeared within the frames of this long shot as Jancsó’s extremely long take goes on, palpating the silence and the emptiness surrounding the quietly petrified woman. Jancsó abstracts war, he takes its content away, when nothing but the geometry of war, the vile choreography of death remains. 

Despite being such a characteristically style-oriented film, The Red and the White can be approached with the notions of story, plot, and narrative, just like the style-oriented films of Antonioni, Ozu, or Bresson can. Lacking a linear narrative, The Red and the White is a series of unconnected events which are tied together by the topic (the role of the Hungarians in the Russian Civil War), presumably chronology (the temporal order of the diegetic events can be assumed to be chronological, though this is certainly not necessary), and recurring characters (who do not recur often enough and who are not exposed strongly enough to become “main characters”). Supported by these as well as other elements, the spectator is able to construct a fabula or a story world in their mind; it is, however, a world where “nothing happens” in the traditional sense of the word. Therefore, plot should be understood as a fragmentary syuzhet, whose detached elements are held together by an impressively consistent cinematic style. Style structures the fabula and orients the spectator. Although the spectator does acquire information about the fabula or the story world through the characters (they do talk about the war in some scenes, albeit in such a detailed fashion that creating a full-fledged picture of the situation remains an unreachable possibility for the spectator), the information is always first and foremost given, and given more strongly, by other cinematic means. These include, for an obvious example, the costumes worn by the actors, which not only set up the historical milieu immediately for the spectator but also imply the nationality of the characters. Moreover, Jancsó’s choices in composition, framing, and camera movement also certainly provide information about the story world and the dramatic situations taking place in it. The film even begins with a strikingly visual instance of narrative: a shot of a historical Russian map is followed by a long shot of soldiers on horses riding toward the camera in slow motion. A cinematic exposition, an exposition without character delineation, establishes the milieu as well as the central theme of the form of war. 

One good example of Jancsó’s narrative dominated by his cinematographic aesthetics is a scene consisting of one sequence shot. In the scene, the white are executing the red who are lying on the ground at an impartial soldier hospital. As off-screen sounds from galloping horses interrupt the action, the camera travels with the white executors to a river on whose other side the horses are seen galloping. The camera starts to draw closer to a white general who is then suddenly shot by a bullet from an off-screen source. After examining the general’s corpse in medium close-up for a while, the camera tilts up and tracks backward, revealing a red soldier shooting the general’s corpse and taking control of the situation. As the camera keeps moving, it turns out that the dramatic conflict has been turned upside down: the red are executing the white. Despite this dramatic change, there is no change in style which would imply a victory or a moment when the spectator should cheer for the heroes (say, a change in non-diegetic music or editing). Although there is a change in the story world, the form of war remains the same, it is articulated similarly, and Jancsó’s cinematographic narrative continues to stay indifferent to its content. 

The indifference with regards to content in Jancsó’s narrative might make The Red and the White seem apolitical and amoral, which is probably why the film was banned in Soviet Union. Its un-heroic picture of the Civil War did not fit the country’s purposes. This indifference might, however, be less apolitical than the Soviet officials of the 60′s thought. After all, the film does end with a massacre of the red as they march toward the white who will soon execute them, which is later followed by the unforgettable final shot of a red soldier (who one might consider the “protagonist” of the film, about whom the spectator just knows nothing) unsheathing a sword as a mark of uprising. In this sense, the indifference might be a mere consequence of Jancsó’s radicalization of Eisenstein’s cinematic doctrines: Eisenstein’s montage cinema tried to minimize the importance of individual characters, displaying only the dialectical form of conflict, oppression, and rebellion. While Eisenstein’s cinema had a clearly Marxist tone in its emphasis on class struggle and the inevitable solution of the struggle via revolution, Jancsó’s formalism goes further in minimizing not only character but also story, plot, and classical narrative. Jancsó makes abstract cinema, something that was still unknown to Eisenstein who loved Meyerhold’s physical or “biological” theater. 

The vital thing to notice about Jancsó’s formalism, I believe, is its lack of symbolism. Jancsó’s relationship with symbolism was going to evolve further in his work in the 1970′s, for example in the highly symbolic Red Psalm (1972, Még kér a nép), but his work in the 60′s is still characterized by the lack of any. Although The Red and the White has visual and content-related themes, and topics, and motifs (horses, nude women), Jancsó’s cinematic mode of representation never orients the spectator to interpret the things viewed as metaphors for something else. Nothing but the film object, the cinematic récit remains, which can be quite liberating even for those who have the problem with films like The Red and the White addressed above. It liberates the spectator to see nothing but the form, to enjoy its play of the sensible and the cognitive, which might give rise to an intellectual contemplation emerging from an aesthetic experience. Here lie the origins of Jancsó’s unique epic minimalism. 

#Csillagosok katonák #The Red and the White #Miklós Jancsó #Hungarian #1960's

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To Be Is Not to Be

Helmut Käutner’s The Rest Is Silence (1959, Der Rest ist Schweigen) is an unlikely masterpiece in the sense that one does not expect it to be such. It seems that the likelihood for discovering a brilliant let alone masterful film from the many film adaptations of classic literature in postwar European cinema between the late 40′s and the beginning of the new wave in the late 50′s is quite low. Many of these adaptations, or those made in France to be precise, are which François Truffaut famously dismissed as cinéma de qualité, or mere visual illustrations of great stories. Käutner’s innovative adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a startling discovery, however, since it looks very modern precisely due to its cinematic style which its greatness stems from, but at the same time it does this modernist novelty in a completely different way than the masterpieces of Bresson and Antonioni in France and Italy, respectively. Käutner’s The Rest Is Silence is a carefully delineated work of starkness whose possible flaws seem to be precisely considered accents in an otherwise smooth melody about human existence. 

The Hamlet character of Käutner’s “modernization” is a Harvard philosopher, John who returns to his home country of Germany from the States to find tensions within his family with connections to the local heavy industry. After the death of his father in mysterious circumstances, John’s mother has married his father’s brother. The Ophelia of the story is Fee, the daughter of John’s mother’s brother, a young woman who falls in love with John but eventually, like Ophelia, loses her mind after her father’s senseless, accidental death. Unlike Shakespeare, Käutner does not kill all of his characters but he does escort them to the doors of death. In the climactic moment of the final disclosure of the enigma, John’s mother shoots her new husband after his guilt for the death of John’s father is revealed more publicly. In a descent from seeming victory, John exits to silence and emptiness as he walks in the desolate industrial area of Ruhr. 

Against all odds, Käutner’s modernization does not feel like a forced attempt to squeeze something new out of the world’s most famous play. While there are such more or less typical “modernizing” changes as that John does not stab his mother’s brother through a curtain like Hamlet but slams a bathroom door to his face and that John does not use theater to distress the murderer of his father but ballet, they never feel like self-deliberate winks at the audience familiar with Shakespeare. Käutner’s idea of combining Shakespeare’s drama with the detective genre, as John’s attempt to discover the truth about his father’s death unfolds like a Chandler novel or a film-noir, is brilliant, but this mixture of genres does not capture Käutner’s cinematic insight completely (after all, Shakespeare was all about such mixture of genres, topics, themes, and approaches as well). Historically speaking, The Rest Is Silence belongs to the budding popularity of adapting Shakespeare in postwar world cinema -- from Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and Welles’ Macbeth (1948) to Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960) -- and, just like all of these great films, Käutner’s adaptation also ventures beyond mere adaptation by seeking out an original cinematic discourse. 

Not widely known today but back in the day a very famous man, Helmut Käutner is one of the principal directors of postwar German cinema. He started working in film during the Nazi era and in the 50′s made it to Hollywood, but when American producers did not want to finance his vision of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he returned -- like the protagonist of the film -- to Germany. To Olaf Möller, a film critic who introduced the film at the screening I attended last April in Helsinki, Käutner is one of the masters of the period alongside Wolfgang Staudte and Harald Braun (whose film I have also written about here). In an attempt to reform German cinema, the three of them founded the film company, Freie Filmproduktion whose first production The Rest Is Silence was. It is quite surprising to think that there was actually a sincere attempt, which stemmed from the aesthetic interests of the artists, to reinvent German cinema before the outbreak of the new wave in the late 50′s by old directors of the trade all of whom had worked during the Third Reich. The attempt (with the artists involved) was soon to be buried by the new pages of history, however, when the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which was to function as a foundation for New German Cinema in the 70′s, distanced itself from the German counterpart of cinéma de qualité which it deemed unworthy of attention. Like some of the forgotten maestros of postwar French cinema, so has Käutner gone through a rediscovery which continues to this day. While The Rest Is Silence might sound like the epitome of dull cinéma de qualité as a film adaptation of a classic play with professional actors, it is truly innovative in its use of the medium. The same cinematic blood runs through Käutner’s veins as does through Ophüls’, Welles’, and Visconti’s, all of whom mastered the use of a fluently mobile camera that caresses a lavish mise-en-scène. 

Like the historical epics of Visconti and Welles, Käutner’s mise-en-scène is rich and full-bodied. His use of deep focus and deeper planes in compositions emphasize the precise set design and the use of light. The strong contrasts in lighting bring film-noir aesthetics to mind. After the telling ballet performance, Fee’s face is buried in the darkness of dim light in her father’s car as though she was already sinking into the lower depths of her mind. In an earlier scene, John is seen sitting in a car while a line of shadow cuts his face in half as if possessed by doubt and uncertainty. Käutner’s camera caresses the deep kingdom of shadows which settles in the space of light as the past in the bright daylight of the present. Unlike Welles’ well-known habit of revealing ceilings in Citizen Kane (1941) with the use of low-angle shots, Käutner often uses high-angle shots of the family’s grand house, creating an impression of surveillance hanging from the roof, of a space where everyone is the potential target of observation. It is an atmosphere of fear which is often used in film adaptations of Hamlet because the play functions heavily on the drama of secrets, observation, and revelation -- think of the impressive mirror hall scene in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), for example. Like Welles and Visconti, Käutner moves his camera a lot and in a multitude of ways. It tracks horizontally and in depth, often narrowing the framing by tracking toward a character, as well as pans and zooms, creating occasional interruptions to a more traditionally realist cinematic aesthetics (which is something Visconti really mastered in his later work). A similar juxtaposition of traditional realism and modern surrealism takes place in the soundtrack as Käutner uses both a lot of silence and non-diegetic jazz and percussion which enhance an ominous atmosphere of anticipation. 

The use of zoom especially might at first glance feel like a flaw in an otherwise smooth aesthetics, but Käutner’s fashion of using it is really clever and insightful in the whole of the film. When John’s uncle, or Fee’s father, dies by accident as John slams the bathroom door to his face, people gather around the scene of the crime. As the screen space fills with characters, the camera zooms to Fee on a deeper plane, showing her face petrified by terror, thus separating her into her private space of insanity. A track-forward might create a similar impression of separation, but by using the “surreal” zoom, it is as if narrative identified with Fee’s experience. When John tells his friend how the ghost of his late father called him, when he was still at Harvard, to tell him that his brother has murdered him, the flashback scene is executed without diegetic sounds and in one sequence shot which first zooms rapidly in John and then zooms out to a full shot of the space of his student dorm. In both cases, the zoom is used to enhance an impression of displacement and strangeness. In contrast, the use of the track-forward or the dolly shot gives a more natural or realist impression of lavishness. Such is the case with the dolly shot where the camera follows the deranged Fee wandering in the greenhouse behind its tainted glasses. 

When it comes to questions of narrative, identification, and focalization, one shot in particular deserves closer attention. In addition to the recounting of the phone call John received from the ghost of his late father, there are some flashbacks in the film; they are used when John reads his father’s notebook which he finds in a secret safe in their house, which means that the film’s general third person narrative occasionally focalizes into John’s perspective (or his father’s through him). Besides perceptual focalization (or “ocularization”), there is psychological focalization present in the narrative since the information of the narrative regarding the fictive events is throughout limited to John’s cognitive perspective. The one shot in particular I am talking about occurs toward the beginning of the film when John looks out the window to the industrial area of Ruhr owned by his affluent family. As John looks out the window, facing away from the camera, the camera tracks slowly behind and past him to the view opened by the window. When the frame coincides with that of the window, a cut takes place to a vertiginous montage of the Nazi period in the area. Here, Käutner’s narrative takes a step to the ambiguous zone between the subjective and the objective, or the zone of cinematic free indirect discourse: it is as if the “cinematic narrator” was seeing the unfolding view through John’s perspective while not embracing it fully, perhaps providing visual material that John never saw himself but also in such a vague order that John’s distance to them remains articulated. Already the slow track-forward is, in a sense, both a focalized point of view shot and not. This peculiar scene is all about John’s associations (his own family with the fascist atrocities, or himself with the patricide, as well as the heavy industry with fascism), but it is also about a collective flashback and national self-reflection; looking to the present to see the past it inevitably carries within. 

Thus the social nuances of the film are at times apparent. There is also, however, more subtle innuendo about the connections between fascism and the heavy industry, much subtler than those in Visconti’s masterpiece The Damned (1969), for example, and dealt with more distance and tranquility than in the satirical Wir Wunderkinder (1958) by Kurt Hoffmann. Both films take the German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 50′s under study and imply connections between capitalism and fascism. Guilt and doubt are integral themes to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in The Rest Is Silence Käutner deals with them both particularly (John’s doubt and guilt for the past and himself) and generally (the guilt of the postwar nation and the doubt or uncertainty about its national identity). A quasi-existentialist reading of Hamlet and Käutner’s treatise might enable a combination of the two aspects. 

Hamlet’s doubt and uncertainty concern murder and death. Hamlet is unsure about the identity of his father’s killer at first and even more unsure about his will to avenge at second. He wonders whether “to be or not to be”, whether to lie down to die or to fight against the inevitable. In Käutner’s film, the theme of death is treated mainly by developing a flower motif. Fee tells John that flowers die when they blossom. To her, this process of death is beautiful and a delight to watch. She compares the cutting of flowers to murder, and, after her father’s death, she is seen cutting her flowers in the greenhouse. In the end of the film, John briefly encounters the deranged Fee who asks John to come and see her flowers only to recall that they have already died. Yet, she points out, there is nothing sad about this because “there is nothing special about death.” The analogy to killing flowers works as an understated expression of the characters’ emotions for the dying that is happening around them. Fee’s description of flowers dying by means of blossoming thus also works as a meditation on man’s dying by means of being, man’s tortured being-toward-death which inevitably characterizes their existence. To exist is to die. The lack of anything special in death might be a comfort to Fee, but it is also an existential disappointment to John who is forced to realize that the killing of his father’s murderer means nothing just like the death of his father. War or no war, they are all going to die in the lonely emptiness of stark Ruhr. And the rest is nothingness.

Like Hamlet, John calls the opportunity of staging a fictive murder in his ballet an error of style. Unlike Hamlet, he does not pick up a skull to reflect on the mortality of man, but he falls into an open grave, a morbid accident which turns into a funny photo for the next day’s newspapers. These might just be the only traces of humor in Käutner’s dark-toned film. Its atmosphere is serious, meditative, and melancholic. While consistent in its gloomy mood, the film, following Shakespeare, obviously concerns conflicts, and that is why Hardy Krüger’s performance as John is such an apt one. His performance captures both calm moderation and restless impatience. Krüger embraces the conflict of certainty and doubt tearing the essence of the character apart by embodying certainty in his own uncertainty in his performance.

The Rest Is Silence concludes in a sublime shot where the camera tracks slowly backward from John as the deranged Fee’s car leaves the screen space and John continues to amble away. The rest is not history but, in the famous last words of Horace after the death of Hamlet, silence; the rest is doubt, uncertainty, and death for one and all. At the same time, however, the film leaves one filled with excitement for a more or less lost treasure which, perhaps, had to die a little in order to become something.

#Der Rest ist Schweigen #The Rest Is Silence #Helmut Käutner #1950's #German

[essenceoffilm]

Paradise Lost

The sign of a bad film is that it reduces to the text, be it screenplay or a piece of written fiction as source material. The sign of a good film is conversely its irreducibility to the text. Rather than just showing what happens or telling a tale, it is sometimes more appropriate to depict what happens or to depict a tale. For it is depiction, both visual and auditory, which is the primal means of cinema, whereas writing is of literature, song is of opera, rhyme is of poetry, and molding is of sculpture. The depiction of something can, however, as it often does in the case of cinema, manifest traces of all these means. In its depiction of a tale or merely the way things are, cinema can use words in dialogue or narration, cinema can use song and music in score or construction of milieu, and, above all, cinema can sculpt. Not only does one say in Tarkovskyan terms that cinema is sculpting in time but also that it sculpts time in the process. “Time is the material,” says Atom Egoyan [1] whose magnum opus, the eerie, enigmatic, and utterly unforgettable The Sweet Hereafter (1997) is celebrating its 20th anniversary this May since it competed for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

Embracing the idea of time as the most vital material of cinema, Egoyan does not, of course, limit himself to the notion of cinematic sculpture. His most critically acclaimed film is also based on a novel, which it seems to have surpassed in more than one way (judging from a handful of reviews [2] since I have not read the Russell Banks novel of the same name myself), it makes use of both popular and folk music to a large extent, and it takes an allegorical framework from the poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. But no one in their right mind could accuse writer-director Atom Egoyan for theft, borrowing, or lack of originality because it is precisely the blending of different means which makes The Sweet Hereafter the best film Egoyan has ever made. It is this unique combination which allows him to do what he does best: study the human experience of loss, desire, and obsession by sculpting in time and space, both of which are the primary characteristics of human experience.

The depicted tale in The Sweet Hereafter is undeniably special but it is anything but complex. It is a story about a small Canadian town where most of the children have been lost in a tragic school bus accident whose sole survivors are the childless school bus driver Dolores and Nicole, an adolescent crippled by the crash, a girl who dreams of becoming a rock star while her father, her musical benefactor, has also become her incestuous lover. Arriving to the town is a lawyer, played by Ian Holm, carrying his own burden of loss, who wishes to file a class action lawsuit with the townspeople against the bus company or anyone looking like a potential embodiment of guilt. The lawyer manages to rally up the townspeople, but during the last day of hearing for the lawsuit, Nicole surprises both the lawyer and her father by concocting a lie that destroys all possibilities for such a lawsuit: she claims that Dolores was driving too fast.

Had someone told me this story beforehand, I might have been, at best, slightly curious but would have expected nothing more than a visual book about people crying and overcoming grief. Fortunately, I had no prior knowledge of the film when I sat in front of the film screen three years ago and witnessed The Sweet Hereafter unfold in a screening at my local cinématheque. The important thing to notice is that the film was not what I expected because, to my mind, it is precisely the unexpected which characterizes the film throughout. Based on the above synopsis, one might expect a linear story where one first sees the townspeople before the accident, then sees the accident, and finally sees its aftermath. One might also expect a film utilizing a flashback structure, showing first the aftermath and then the accident as well as the events prior to it. One might even expect a quasi-Antonionian film where the accident would be shown at the very beginning after which the film delved into its post-impact on the community rather than studying the events before it. None of these expectations are true of Egoyan’s film, however. Having its kindred spirits in the great modernists, Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter breaks up Banks’ linear story structure and presents all the temporal levels simultaneously, tightly tied together, in an insightful fashion blending simultaneity and succession. 

Egoyan had already mastered this kind of narration in his earlier film Exotica (1994), whose commercial success, new to Egoyan back in the day, enabled him to make his dream project, but a deeper raison d’être is found for it in The Sweet Hereafter. The reasons for the functionality of such narration in The Sweet Hereafter are quite simple. While Egoyan has always had an eye for an all-encompassing narration that embraces multiple temporal paths at once ever since the very first shots of his debut Next of Kin (1984), never before The Sweet Hereafter did he find a core strong enough to hold the diverging paths together, to cut their wings from flying too far, so to speak. This core is the emotion attached to the central event in the film’s story world (the school bus accident), but specific attention should be placed on the choice of words here: it is not the event itself that is the unifying core of the film but the emotion attached to the event; and it is this emotion that is articulated by Egoyan’s use of cinematic means.

Style as an Articulation of Loss

The emotion which Egoyan’s cinematic style articulates is, first and foremost, the emotion of loss. There is a lot to be said about all of the cinematic means utilized by Egoyan, but the best way to grasp Egoyan’s style in The Sweet Hereafter as a whole is perhaps the attempt to characterize them in general terms. From cinematography and editing to mise-en-scène and music, Egoyan’s cinematic style creates a serene aesthetics of tranquility which both exemplifies and expresses the human experience of loss. 

Above all, perhaps, the strikingly beautiful cinematography enhances a serenity and an enchantingly calm mood in The Sweet Hereafter. The camera moves slowly and the shots are, at times, strikingly long in duration. A long take, shot with a slowly tracking camera, starts the film as we see a wooden surface which turns out to be the floor of a summer cottage where a family of three is enjoying the bliss of their mutual existence. This is followed by another long take inside a car going through a car wash. In a later scene, there is a sequence shot introducing the character of Allison who sits next to the lawyer on a plane two years after the failed lawsuit. In a peculiar point of view shot, the camera tracks down the body of Dolores’ handicapped husband as the lawyer’s eye lingers on the man’s perished bodily existence. During the hearing of Dolores, the camera tracks slowly around the large table, reaching its target of Dolores in long medium shot. A similarly slow tracking shot recurs when Nicole is being heard: the camera slowly embraces all the characters one by one in the space and then goes by each one once more before switching to a calmly accelerating montage at the point when Nicole concocts the climactic lie, a pause to a dance, a denial of riches from those who do not believe in accidents.  

In terms of camera movement in The Sweet Hereafter, the recurring upward movement of the camera turns into a visual motif. As the children arrive at the fair in a scene whose temporal distance to the accident remains unclear, the camera tilts up to a Ferris wheel. As the bus is curling in the narrow roads of the snowy landscape, the camera tracks to the sky in a beautiful aerial shot working as a shift to the airplane in a later temporal level where the lawyer and Allison are discussing. As Dolores breaks down after talking with the lawyer, the camera slowly tilts up to reveal a wall filled with the pictures of the deceased children above her solitude. As the lawyer’s wife lifts up Zoe, their daughter, in a field, the camera tilts up toward the sky. As Nicole shares a moment of incestuous romance with her father in a candlelit barn, the camera moves steadily upward in an eerie crane shot. In all of these examples, movement is a form of visual poetry. It is a line of temporal sculpture. It articulates something beyond words. It might bring depth or myth to the scenes but also challenge the characters in their self-constructed spaces of strange safety. In this sense, movement can articulate loss: it is as if the camera took departure from something that could no longer be retained, leaving those lost moments in their elusive distance. In the third example of the camera tilting to the pictures of the children on Dolores’ wall, this thematic dimension is emphasized by a striking use of rack focus as the pictures escape from the camera’s field of focus into an unknown realm beyond our reach. 

If camera movement and optics are used to articulate the theme of loss in emphasizing the temporal distance between the different temporal levels, then juxtaposition of different shot scales is used to highlight spatial distance between different spatial locations. One of the first visual memories a spectator might recall from The Sweet Hereafter is its relentless use of breathtaking aerial shots of the school bus driving in the snowy landscape as if on a pre-determined path to destruction. Such large shot scales characterize the film throughout from the long shot of the lawyer walking from the house of one of the parents to his car to the long shot of Nicole leaving from Billy’s place to her father’s car about to take her to their secret place of incestuous love. Despite Egoyan’s emphasis on the distance between the camera and the character in these large shot scales, there are also some cases of intimacy between the camera and the character in extreme close-ups. There are two such cases and both feature close-ups of the mouth. One of these is a close-up of the mouth of Nicole’s father after he has witnessed his daughter concocting the lie, but for reasons of length emphasis shall be put on the other case. 

It concerns one of the many phone calls the lawyer exchanges with his drug-addict daughter who is always calling for money from her father. The scene begins with a long shot of the lawyer standing by the damaged school bus after an intense confrontation with Billy, a parent who lost both his children in the accident after losing his wife some years before the accident. As the lawyer answers his phone, there is a cut to a long shot of the lawyer’s daughter, Zoe standing in a phone booth in the middle of multiple highways in an unnamed city. This is followed by a medium close-up of the lawyer from which there is a cut to a full shot of Zoe in the phone booth. Another medium close-up of the lawyer and then a long medium shot of Zoe. Yet another medium close-up of the lawyer and then a surprising cut to a close-up of Zoe as a baby in a point of view shot from the lawyer’s perspective in another temporal level. Then a return to the medium close-up of the lawyer. The scene concludes with two shots: first an extreme close-up of Zoe’s eyes but then the camera tilts slowly to her mouth, second an extreme close-up of the lawyer’s mouth but then the camera tilts slowly to his eyes. 

There are many things to notice about Egoyan’s stylistic choices in this scene. The surprising cut to the flashback, which has been explained in an earlier scene where the lawyer told Allison how Zoe once came close to death when bitten by a spider as a child, occurs as Zoe gets angry, complaining how her father never believes her. The cut signifies distance between father and daughter. In an earlier scene, the lawyer told Billy about his daughter, saying that “something terrible has taken our children away,” referring to both the accident and his daughter’s condition. During this phone call, it is as if he escaped to the past, perhaps in part hoping for his daughter’s premature death so she could be better encapsulated in the unreal innocence of childhood, a perverse pleasure he might believe the town’s parents enjoy. Another thing to notice is the use of the same medium close-up of the lawyer throughout, while there is a continuous, analytical development of shot scales from larger to smaller in Zoe’s case. This is typical because the environment she is in has to be established for the spectator, but it also enhances the distance between the two characters. The final thing to notice is the juxtaposition of the two last extreme close-ups which are set against the two establishing long shots at the beginning of the scene. The camera movement in these shots is reverse: first downward and then upward. It further enhances the intimacy, on the one hand, and the distance, on the other, between the characters. During the moving extreme close-up of Zoe’s face she tells her father that she can hear him breathing to which her father responds that he can hear her breathing as well. As Zoe starts breaking down and says that she is afraid, there is a cut to the mobile extreme close-up of the lawyer’s face. While the camera lingers on his mouth, he says: “I love you Zoe.” As the camera starts tilting upward, he continues: “I’ll soon be there. I’ll take care of you, Zoe. No matter what happens, I’ll take care of you.” The poignancy of these lines lies in the fact that they are left echoing in the void since they receive no response from Zoe. What is more, she is never seen again in the film, but the latest temporal level in the film, that is, the flight two years after the accident, ensures us that nothing has changed since the lawyer is travelling to another clinic to see his daughter. Their distance remains insurmountable despite access to such technological achievements as telephones and airplanes. 

By visually treating the themes of distance and intimacy in such a complex fashion, Egoyan is able to articulate loss by cinematic means. The lawyer has lost the connection to his daughter and can only have these ironic instances of connection through the airplane and the telephone which is a paradoxical device that both connects and separates people. This paradoxical nature is also captured in the use of shot scales and camera movement in the scene analyzed above. The characters are very far away from each other both spatially and emotionally which is enhanced by the different shot scales used to depict them in their respective spaces. The two final shots ironically both bring them together since the shots are in the same scale and pull them apart since the camera movement is reverse: the upward movement from the lawyer’s mouth to his petrified gaze as he mechanically delivers the lines to Zoe’s corresponding silence emphasizes their unresolved distance. 

Given that Egoyan’s bravura is the aesthetic combination of different means, it is no surprise that his stylistic program in his magnum opus does not stop at the brilliant use of the camera. In fact, The Sweet Hereafter could be appreciated merely for its beautiful, lyrical mise-en-scène. Egoyan constructs spaces which vary from warm indoor spaces to cold outdoor spaces of gorgeous mountain landscapes in winter. The most striking visual conflict is experienced between the two temporal levels farthest from one another in chronological order: the sterile space of the airplane and the ethereal warmth of the summer cottage in the lawyer’s flashback, partly in the real past, partly in a fantasy of the past. Egoyan’s mellow, full-bodied mise-en-scène is characterized by strong yet pale colors with the color blue as peculiarly dominating from the bluish car wash and the club lights next to the phone booth from where Zoe first calls her father to the snow in the winter dusk, Nicole’s clothes and the curtains, the blanket, and the door in her new room after the crash. 

Egoyan’s use of color, light, and space further articulate the theme of loss. The dominating color blue, characteristic of the entire atmosphere of the film, is the color of coldness and innocence, it is the color of melancholy, it is the nostalgic and romantic color of sweetness that is challenged, for one, by the bright redness of the blanket Nicole wraps herself into before sharing an intimate moment with her father in the candlelit barn. When the lawyer first arrives to town, he meets a couple who own the town motel in order to inquire who he should try to rally up for the lawsuit. In other words, he needs help to separate “the good people” from “the bad people”. The husband’s chips-munching behavior in the scene already underlines his arrogance and self-indulgence while he is trying to critique others for their actions. Egoyan yet further emphasizes the irony of such an attempt at separation by having the lawyer move to a different space to answer his drug-addicted daughter’s phone call while the motel-owning couple is left to argue on a deeper plane who of the townspeople are “the bad people”. In terms of lighting, Egoyan’s style is most apparent in the unforgettable ending of the film where a quick flash of bright light emerges before Nicole standing by a window. The peculiar thing about this device is not only its self-awareness, almost turning the spectator away from the diegetic world, but the fact that the scene takes place before the accident. Yet this succession is only diegetic; in the poetic space Egoyan has created, there is no such succession. Thus the flash of light appears as a cut, a cut to the sweetness that Nicole, among others, is about to lose. 

In addition to more elusive elements of light and color, an integral role in Egoyan’s mise-en-scène is played, of course, by the school bus. The school bus is first seen in the film when the lawyer exits his car in the car wash as he seems to be stuck. When he exits the car wash, he ends up in Billy’s apartment from whose window he can see the damaged school bus by the road. Accompanied by eerie screams of the children from an off-screen space, and obviously from a diegetically earlier temporal level, the school bus becomes a symbol for a paradise lost, for the loss of sweetness in a fragile world created by its fragile inhabitants whose world can be cut open by a flash of bright light. 

Besides cinematography and mise-en-scène, Egoyan’s masterpiece of blending material is unforgettable precisely due to its breathtaking use of music composed by Mychael Danna who is also responsible for the alluring music of Exotica. Danna’s music is simultaneously flamboyant and utterly tender, a seeming paradox that is born from the juxtaposition of the lighter sound of the flute and the heavier sounds of the other instruments. The music is thematic, since it is associated with The Pied Piper of Hamelin read by Nicole, but above all alienating. When Egoyan uses the music with the shots depicting the last journey of the school bus, the music does not work as a paraphrase (in the sense that it would accompany the diegetic events) nor does it really identify the spectator with the depicted events. On the contrary, Danna’s music seems to alienate the spectator, working as a higher level of discourse as if mythologizing the diegetic event of the accident. It brings the event forth, it puts it on an unreal pedestal of cosmic tragedy which shakes the core foundations of the townspeople’s fragile universe. It is important to notice that while Danna’s music does not accompany neither does it counterpoint. While music that sounds Eastern seems quite unfit for an ordinary Canadian town in the middle of nowhere, it does not feel to create a striking counterpoint to the diegetic events either (in the sense that it would be joyful while the events were sorrowful, for instance). The music shares something in mood to the diegetic events. They share a metaphysical bond. In this sense, Danna’s music used by Egoyan could be characterized as creating a parallel dimension, a parallel level of discourse which attains commentary contact with the diegetic world without fully fitting into it or fully opposing it either. 

In addition to Danna’s Armenian flute music, Egoyan also uses popular music mainly sung by Canadian singer/actress Sarah Polley who plays the role of Nicole. This music is both diegetic, in the sense that Nicole really sings in the story world (at the fair in the beginning, for one), and non-diegetic, in the sense that the songs do not always directly belong to the story world. In general, however, it seems best to say that the use of the music in The Sweet Hereafter cannot be entirely appreciated by these kinds of categories. For example, when the song “Courage” is heard sung by Polley as Nicole’s father is taking his daughter to the hearing, there is no one in the story world singing the song, but at the same time it is as if Nicole -- or some higher level of discourse connecting to her -- was expressing her emotions. This becomes even more convincing when considering the fact that Nicole has just pointed out to her father how she is “a wheelchair girl now” and how it is “hard to pretend that” she is “a beautiful rock star,” a poignant reminder of the father’s guilt for his abuse of his daughter. Although the songs sung by Polley do not feel as contradictory to the milieu of the story world as Danna’s Armenian flute music, they too seem not to accompany or to counterpoint the diegetic events. Rather they too create a parallel, commentary dimension to the events witnessed by the camera as if enriching the experience. They serve as a reminder of something being lost, the lack of a primordial sense of connection.

As such, Egoyan’s style in The Sweet Hereafter articulates and expresses the human experience of loss by cinematic means. From the distance and movement of the camera as well as the juxtaposition of different shot scales and choices in editing to use of light, color, and music, Egoyan depicts a tale of loss, how the spatio-temporal human experience always entails a loss of something. At the beginning of this section it was mentioned that not only does Egoyan’s style express but also exemplify the experience of loss. This has become evident through the above analysis of the style of the film. Egoyan’s style bears a similar fragmentary quality and a sense of disconnection as his narration. The large shot scales and the complex compositions utilizing depth and many planes simultaneously coerce the spectator into experiencing loss: one must choose the objects of one’s visual and auditory attention in the process of which one loses something. As a result, according to Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri, the spectator becomes aware of the process of meaning making since meanings are not passive, enclosed and stable but, on the contrary, active and transient [3]. In this sense, already on the level of style in the sense of consistent use of cinematic means, Egoyan’s film exemplifies the experience of loss which is further elaborated by the fragmentary structure of his narration. 

Fragmented Narration as a Shattered Mirror of Loss

As said above, it is the unexpected that characterizes Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. If Danna’s music is at the very least surprising in the context of this particular story and the beginning shot of a wooden surface developing into a breathtaking sight of a dormant family on the floor of their summer cottage manages to catch the spectator off guard, so to speak, Egoyan’s narration as a whole in the film is even more challenging. Since it is challenging, it also draws the spectator’s attention to itself and as such becomes self-aware instead of being transparent in the classical sense of cinematic narration. I would argue, once again, that one remembers the film precisely for the way its story is told rather than the story itself: while one might certainly recall the school bus accident, the several interconnected stories fade in memory at the expense of the unique mode of narration. Like Egoyan’s cinematic means, so does his narration both express and exemplify the experience of loss.

It is time, as one of the two primal features of human experience, which is the material to Egoyan’s cinema, and narration, of course, is a temporal process of narrating something. Despite the fragmentary structure of narration in The Sweet Hereafter, its use of different temporal levels can be analyzed in distinct parts quite easily. In chronological order, there are five temporal levels. First, there is the summer when the lawyer’s daughter Zoe was bitten by a spider and her father had to rush her to the hospital, being constantly on the verge of cutting her throat open in case it would swell up. This includes the first shot in the film, the flashback shots when the lawyer tells of the incident to Allison as well as the cuts to these shots in some other scenes with the lawyer (as in the scene analyzed above with the lawyer’s last phone call with Zoe). Second, there is the time before the accident which contains the scenes at the fair, the night before the accident when Nicole reads The Pied Piper of Hamelin to Billy’s kids while Billy visits her secret lover at the motel after which Nicole is taken to the candlelit barn by her father. Third, there is the day of the accident (sometime in 1995). This contains the accident, the brief scene with Billy experiencing its aftermath as his children among others are put in body bags, and the final voyage of the school bus leading to the accident. Fourth, there is the time after the accident. This includes the scenes where the lawyer interviews the townspeople trying to rally them up for the lawsuit, the scenes with Nicole in the wheelchair at home and during the hearing. Fifth, there is the time two years after the accident (identified as the year 1997). This includes the scenes at the airplane where the lawyer talks with Allison, Zoe’s childhood friend, as well as the scene at the airport where the lawyer encounters Dolores, now working as the bus driver at the airport. 

Relations between events within these distinguishable temporal levels may be themselves complex, but even more so with regards to the relations between the temporal levels. In a fashion reminiscent of avant-garde narration or lack of any narration, The Sweet Hereafter begins with an ambiguous blending of three different levels: first there is a shot of the lawyer’s family in their summer cottage (the first level), then there is a shot of the lawyer in the car wash having a telephone call with his daughter (the fourth level), and then a scene at the fair where Nicole is practicing with her band (the second level). The first time spectator has no idea what is going on and what the connections between these levels are. While the first scene can be dismissed as a vague event somewhere in the past, a background image for the opening credits, the scene at the fair remains of sheer ambiguity with regards to its temporal relation to the other diegetic events on the second level as well as to the other levels. 

It is this ambiguity that lies at the core of Egoyan’s complex narration which operates essentially with the unexpected. For this peculiar opening is anything but exceptional in the whole of the film. Narration does have diegetic information regarding the events of the story world, but it communicates this information quite slowly to the spectator. Many informative gaps are left with regards to the temporal relations but also the content of the shots: the incestuous relationship between Nicole and her father is merely hinted at with one scene without any dialogue. It is this ambiguity which both expresses and exemplifies the experience of loss: the loss of an epistemic connection coincides with the loss of an existential connection. 

A similar ambiguity can be noticed when trying to categorize the kind of narration in The Sweet Hereafter. First, one might try to categorize focalization in the film. While the film has no single narrator, Nicole does seem to gain an important position as her voice prevails on the soundtrack as voice-over. This begins with her reading The Pied Piper of Hamelin to Billy’s children, but towards the end especially her voice takes a stronger position as an intra-diegetic narrator when, as the lawyer sees Dolores at the airport, she says: 

As you see her, two years later, I wonder if you realize something. I wonder if you understand that all of us - Dolores, me, the children who survived, the children who didn't - that we're all citizens of a different town now. A place with its own special rules and its own special laws. A town of people living in the sweet hereafter.

The way how Nicole articulates feelings of loss in this phrase deserves its own essay, but here it suffices to notice that she gains a higher place with regards to narration than any other character. Taking into consideration that she also represents a challenge to the lawyer and her father, who have sometimes been interpreted as an embodiment of a simpler, classical cause-and-effect narrative [4], this narrative device once again expresses and exemplifies the experience of loss; it is the loss of control over events. The lawyer proclaims that “there is no such thing as an accident” and believes that “something terrible has happened that has taken our children away from us,” but in contrast to Nicole’s melancholic acceptance of “the sweet hereafter”, the lawyer’s beliefs fall flat and merely represent an attempt to escape loss. The lawyer, Nicole’s father, and most of the townspeople try to find a reason for the accident, which coincides with an unconscious pursuit for a raison d’être for their existence, but Nicole denies them of this possibility in a similar manner as Egoyan’s narration denies the audience of a clear, classically structured plot, a stable meaning as an illusory reflection of the audience’s meaningful life. Instead, the audience is forced to stare at a shattered mirror, a poignant picture of their meaningless existence. 

In addition to focalization, or the kinship between narration and the character of Nicole, one could, secondly, try to categorize Egoyan’s narration with the notions of diegetic and mimetic narration. Mainly used in literature theory, the two notions distinguish narration that merely shows what happens without drawing much attention to the act of showing (mimetic narration) and narration that tells what happens, making it more or less explicit that it is being told to someone by someone (diegetic narration). Cinema is the epitome of mimetic narration since it usually shows us things rather than tells them. This is not very true of The Sweet Hereafter, however. Narration lingers on not showing the central event of the story world, that is, the school bus accident, many things are left open, and, above all, the whole film draws attention to its narrative structure due to its peculiarity: it is as if someone was telling this tale to us, though it remains unclear who this someone is; the reason for this ambiguity is that someone is not telling us a tale but depicting it. It is noteworthy that this attention to structure does not draw the spectator away from the story world or hinder the spectator’s potential interest for the characters; Egoyan himself has noticed how he finally discovered an emotional core strong enough not to drive the spectator away from his non-linearly structured films [5]. 

It is generally thought in literature theory that the so-called free indirect discourse situates itself between diegetic and mimetic narration, which is the case in The Sweet Hereafter as well. While its narration could be characterized as diegetic, it also uses free indirect discourse especially in the quick cut to Zoe’s face in the first temporal level in the scene analyzed above where the lawyer has his last phone call with Zoe as well as in the scene where Billy experiences the horror of the school bus accident, witnessing a paradise sinking down to the bottom of an icy lake. Towards the end of this scene, there is a low-angle shot of Billy which is followed by a cut to a close-up of a body bag. The important thing to notice is that Billy is quite far from the scene of the accident. He is on the hill, whereas the body bags are located closer to the icy lake. It is as if the cut focalized into Billy’s perspective without really focalizing into it. This peculiar form of narration is known as free indirect discourse: saying, thinking, or narrating something through someone without embracing their perspective completely. It is even more striking that this scene is followed by a confusing cut to the shot of the lawyer’s family (which the first time spectator does not yet know to be the lawyer’s family) at their summer cottage before the lawyer goes on to tell about the incident to Allison. The juxtaposition of these two tragedies at the center of the film emphasizes the experience of loss. They remain unclear tragedies without clear focalization, as though escaping beyond our reach.

Another essential example of free indirect discourse in Egoyan’s narration in The Sweet Hereafter is the scene where the lawyer is interviewing Dolores, the school bus driver. As Dolores begins to tell about the day of the accident to the lawyer, there is a shift from the fourth level to the third level. At first glance, it might feel as if narration focalized into Dolores’ perspective since she is talking about the event, but the aerial shots as well as the scene with Billy analyzed above challenge this interpretation. The “flashback”, if it can even be called that, is motivated objectively, and narration in these scenes is better grasped as free indirect discourse. The Sweet Hereafter has an ambiguous narration to it which alternates between different perspectives as well as the lack of intra-diegetic perspectives in a fashion which both expresses and exemplifies the experience of loss: narration mythologizes the central event of the accident and creates both distance and intimacy to it. 

A narrative device of paramount importance and worthy of specific attention in The Sweet Hereafter is, of course, the use of the Robert Browning poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. As off-screen voice-over narration, the poem is first heard in the scene where Nicole’s father takes her to the candlelit barn. Nicole reads the part “one was lame / and could not dance the whole of the way” of the poem and repeats it in the beginning of the scene of the hearing towards the end of the film. The notion of “being lame” is associated not only with Nicole’s physical handicap due to the accident but also with her mental suffering due to incest. Thus her frustration for not being able to “dance the whole of the way” with others -- the townspeople with the lawsuit, on the one hand, and the children to death, on the other -- expresses loss. At the end of the latter scene, Nicole’s reading surpasses the poem and its lyrical form merges with her personal account of the events in voice-over: “As you see her, two years later...” The poem serves as an allegorical framework in which the lawyer represents the pied piper who summons the townspeople by his side, but it also expresses the experience of loss. It emerges as a mythological explanation for the accident, as an allegory for the “something terrible” that has taken the children away from the townspeople. Steven Dillon writes aptly that it

serves as a kind of myth or anti-myth for why all the children are away, for ‘why’ the children have been killed in the bus crash. As the children vanish into the sweet hereafter, the overheard poem serves as a kind of relentlessly unsatisfactory aesthetic explanation. Nicole uses the poem to read to sleep two children who will be killed; she holds the book over legs that will soon be crippled. The rhymes of the poem are clever, even soothing; the lines of the poem are strangely appropriate to the visual context; but the suffering is not diminished, not at all. The poetry takes us into impossible worlds, but worlds which do not help us escape. This lyricism is neither idyllic nor utopian. [6] 

A narrative theme, so to speak, which comes up again and again when discussing narration in The Sweet Hereafter is, of course, time. There are different temporal levels in the film, the way how narration occurs in time influences the way one categorizes it, and the temporal relations between the different narrative elements play their part in the process of making meaning. In most of Egoyan’s films, specific emphasis is placed on the way how temporality constitutes subjectivity of character and how this constitution emerges temporally. In Exotica, an enigmatic web of different temporal levels creates a slowly unfolding revelation of the protagonist’s wounded subjectivity; in Family Viewing (1987), a man tries to re-constitute himself by erasing filmed footage of his past and replacing it with homemade pornography; in the beginning of Next of Kin, two parallel temporal levels compensate one another in articulating the protagonist’s loss of identity and his change of identity. In kindred spirit to Marcel Proust, Egoyan does not in The Sweet Hereafter try to do this either by taking a long period of time and several events or by portraying temporal chain of events in a linear, chronological fashion. By excluding these options, Egoyan embraces an aesthetic strategy, in philosophical proximity to Proust and other modernists, in which he takes individual moments that in connection to others slowly uncover the characters’ subjectivity; these individual moments are joined together -- their wings are cut in order to prevent them flying too far away -- by the emotion of loss attached to the central event, a temporal nexus for the scattered temporal levels. What is more, Egoyan’s reliance on non-linear and fragmentary narration emphasizes the lived dimension of time as the past, the present, and the future merge together as if in an existential epiphany where simultaneity and succession were blended as one. 

Given the more or less formal approach of Egoyan’s cinema, specific attention should be placed on the rhythm of his narration. Dillon quite aptly notices that The Sweet Hereafter is more poetic than prose-like, despite having its source material in the latter [7]. This is not a mere analogy, which might find its inspiration from Egoyan’s insightful use of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which is not featured in Banks’ novel, but a profound observation of the depth of Egoyan’s work. The Sweet Hereafter is a poetic film because its narration operates on the basis of images and associations rather than the laws of cause and effect. The shot with the lawyer looking at the damaged school bus as off-screen screams of the children are heard is followed by a cut to the scene where the children arrive at the fair some time before the accident. In this particular transition, it is not really the lawyer performing the association, as noted above in characterizing Egoyan’s narration as free indirect discourse, but narration performs the association partially through him. There is a serenely flowing rhythm at work in the film, a rhythm which ties different temporal levels together on the basis of the human experience of loss. This is evident also towards the end of the film where a fluent montage sequence covers a wide range of events and temporal levels: as Nicole’s voice-over is heard on the soundtrack, first the lawyer sees Dolores at the airport, which is then followed by a cut to another scene where Billy walks away from the damaged school bus which is now being carried away after the failed lawsuit, and then a cut takes us to the fair as the camera tilts from the Ferris wheel to Nicole in blue as she is looking up, which is followed by a cut to a shot of the outer side of another amusement park ride, and, finally, the sequence concludes with Nicole’s voice-over reaching its end as we see her closing the book and walking away from the children’s beds to a window where a brief flash of light emerges before her, possibly from the headlights of her father’s car.

This montage sequence is a pivotal moment for a film, a beautiful sealing conclusion, but, above all, an exemplification of the film’s rhythm. While Nicole’s voice-over talks about the townspeople now “living in the sweet hereafter” where everything is “strange and new,” the images seen do not belong solely to the third and fourth temporal levels, that is, the levels after the school bus accident. Egoyan’s relentless tendency to merge the levels together lies at the core of the film’s rhythm, a rhythm where images do not seem to clearly follow one another but seem to coalesce. If Andrei Tarkovsky is right in claiming that the rhythm of the film always reflects the director’s perception of time [8], then Egoyan’s reflects a phenomenological notion of subjective time-consciousness where the mental processes comprehending the width of presence, in the sense that the present moment contains more than what is immediately and presently given, merge simultaneity and succession into complementary notions. Like Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter ends with a seemingly random moment in the past (though in the latter case its dramatic significance is far clearer) which is, due to Egoyan’s peculiar rhythm and his perception of time, elevated into a moment of epiphany, a moment of the deepest kind of truth, the primordial truth of disclosure which is not experienced in court hearings. 

It is also but one example of many instances where narration was as if halted. Since Egoyan’s narration flows as a serene stream of images and associations, narration in the traditional sense (telling a tale in a temporal process) becomes halted and challenged. These moments where narration in the traditional sense becomes halted are analogous to kinds of ellipsis. The surrealist scene where Nicole goes to the candlelit barn with her father lacks any dialogue or any form of narrative explanation since the voice-over reading of The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Nicole in another temporal level seems to have no apparent connection to the diegetic events in the screen space. As such, narration becomes halted. In a similar fashion, the final montage sequence analyzed above lacks narration in the traditional sense, consisting of a rhythm with its own special rules and laws. Another instance is the brilliant cut from the scene of the school bus accident to a slowly spinning high-angle, aerial shot of the lawyer’s family sleeping on the floor of their summer cottage. At first, this cut startles the spectator. It might have a seemingly soothing function as it takes narration away from an emotionally difficult subject matter, while it also alienates the spectator from the story world as narration clearly becomes self-aware at this point (meaning that the spectator pays attention to the editing contrary to the dogmas of classical transparent film narration), but this soothing turns out to be extremely transitory since the cut works as a transition to the scene where the lawyer tells about his own accident in the past where his daughter was about to die. There is only an emotional connection between these two scenes of accident, but since their connection is never articulated by any character, the cut between them remains a moment which halts narration in the traditional sense. Since the film goes along, narrating its way as it was supposed to, this might prove nothing but that Egoyan is not interested in narration in the traditional sense; his films are narrative but on another level. 

Like Egoyan’s style in The Sweet Hereafter, so his narration both expresses and exemplifies the human experience of loss. The examples above of narration in the traditional sense becoming halted show how narration exemplifies loss in its loss of diegetic information. In the scene where Nicole concocts the climactic lie, narration is unable to point to any psychological motives in the character delineation of Nicole as to why she lied, though the editing (the cut from a medium close-up of Nicole’s face to an extreme close-up of her father’s mouth) accompanied by the off-screen voice-over reading of The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Nicole might implicitly suggest something. In the cut from the scene of the accident to the slowly spinning aerial shot, there is also a sense of narration losing control; it does not know how to cope with the accident nor does it at the moment provide the spectator with any insight as to why the image is being shown. In the final montage, finally, narration loses information about what happens afterwards and, accompanied by Nicole’s reading, as though spins to a space-time travel of the temporal levels, ending with the scene of the night before the day of the accident. 

When it comes to narration exemplifying the experience of loss, several commentators have supported these claims above. To Patricia Gruben, Egoyan’s narration in The Sweet Hereafter by calling images such as the spinning aerial shot “fetishized images” which “are detached from the narrative, interrupting and displacing the dramatic trajectory of the story” [9]. Similarly, May and Ferri highlight how “The Sweet Hereafter is a collective of narratives that intersect and interrupt one another” [10]. According to them, “the film’s multiperspectival narrative structure resists the causal explanation and neat closure that the lawyer, the community, and even the viewing audience might desire.” [11]. Contrasting Egoyan’s film with Banks’ novel, Dillon has also emphasized how the film manages to embrace the theme of the lack of explanation better than the more conventional narrative-wise novel: “although the novel is founded on the crushing lack of explanation surrounding the accident, it might be said that the very form of the novel, in its presentation and manner of telling, refutes its own metaphysical pessimism. The book is its own ferocious lawyer, and creates a world, after all, with no accidents of narrative, but only accidents of event.” [12]. Dillon hits hard to the core by talking about “accidents of narrative” because that is precisely what has been described here: the film’s narration exemplifies the themes of the film and as such embraces them more completely. The lack of explanation prevalent in the diegetic world is also prevalent on the level of narration as it is coerced into finding its epistemic capabilities to be limited because the objects of its epistemic acts are themselves ambiguous. 

Egoyan’s narration in The Sweet Hereafter is fragmentary and as such expressive and exemplificatory of the human experience of loss. Despite its fragmentary, elusive, and challenging nature, it does not estrange the spectator from the work of fiction. While the narration might be alienating, it is not alienating to the extent that the spectator loses their interest. In fact, Egoyan’s earlier films might have shown signs of such estrangement: all of his films from Next of Kin to Calendar (1993) present a surrealist narration which often does not form a clear-cut whole. Even though Exotica, the film preceding The Sweet Hereafter in Egoyan’s oeuvre, was not only a critical success but also a commercial hit, the latter was probably merely due to its erotic aspects and the possibility of watching it as an “erotic thriller”. The reason for the success of Egoyan’s narration in The Sweet Hereafter has been explained by the strength of character delineation and a clear central event in the story world [13]. Furthermore, it has been emphasized in this essay that the decisive factor in the film’s success is the strength of the emotion attached to the central event and to the characters involved in it. This is the emotion of loss. When all pieces of the film fall perfectly together with regards to this one theme, it doesn’t really matter for the average movie-goer whether they can identify with the characters. The film as a whole is the character one is most interested in. 

The Many Meanings of Loss

Given that Egoyan’s cinematic style and narration in The Sweet Hereafter articulate, express, and exemplify loss, it seems appropriate to take a closer look at precisely what this loss is. Many have associated political meanings to the film’s style and narration, but upon viewing the film itself these meanings are conspicuous only by their absence. In the context of Egoyan’s style and narration, the film seems to be much better than a political analysis of the society. It is something much more universal as poetry, following Aristotle’s notion, always should be. It is a universal expression of the human experience of loss which is strongly a temporal experience; not only in the sense of temporality since all experience is temporal but also in the sense of the experience and subjective sense of temporality. The experience of loss cannot be comprehended without addressing time and, as seems appropriate in the present context, neither can time be comprehended without addressing loss.

The political interpretations of The Sweet Hereafter derive from a feminist reading. To May and Ferri, the film allows the spectator to become aware of subject formation and narratives of the subordinated (the woman, the handicapped) [14]. According to them, the character of Nicole represents a figure who opposes the social subordination by males which is reflected by the lawyer’s and the community’s hunger for a clear, cause-and-effect narrative of reality without accidents. Similarly Katherine Weese argues that as the lawyer tries concocting a cause-and-effect narrative of the accident and Nicole’s father tries to acquire financial gain for the loss of his sexy rock-star daughter, Nicole “sees a way to write herself out of both narratives” [15]. To Weese, Nicole represents a feminine perspective that threatens the masculine way of looking at things. 

With all due respect to these scholars and their papers, it seems legitimate to challenge their unnecessary feminist interpretations of the film. In creating a naive, black-and-white distinction between feminine and masculine perspectives, the writers seem to fall to the precisely objective point of view they themselves are criticizing; that is, the objective point of view to the distinction between the two perspectives -- as if there were such a perspective. It is also noteworthy to add that the director-writer of the film is a male, let alone the fact that the author of the book is a man, both of whom, according to this interpretation, do not seem to share a characteristically masculine perspective. In addition, while the writers are right when they say that the lawyer does not believe in accidents, but rather claims that “something terrible has happened that has taken our children away”, wanting to find an embodiment for that “something,” they seem to ignore that all the town’s women (with the exception of Nicole) are ready to join the lawyer’s quest of finding out the “truth” as well. In fact, the only person besides Nicole who does not seem to believe in the lawyer’s quest is a male character, that is, Billy, a very typical male character, one might add, with his truck, mustache, and average Joe clothing. In one scene, Billy asks his mistress, the wife of the motel-owning couple, “do you believe that?” regarding the lawyer’s suggestion that either the bus or the fence by the road was faulty, to which she answers “I have to”. Later in the scene, she starts concocting her own cause-and-effect narrative by asking Billy why did he give the shirt of his deceased wife to Nicole, who wore it during the day of the accident, believing that such an act might have supernaturally caused the accident. 

No one in their right mind should deduce from this that Egoyan’s film is criticizing the female character in the scene. On the contrary, The Sweet Hereafter seems very indifferent to gender. Although there might be no apolitical nor asexual spaces in any absolute sense in cinema (or in human social reality), and it is true that sexuality is an essential theme in Egoyan’s cinema, it still seems plainly unnecessary to locate gender into a film which seems to be about something else. I was, in fact, fairly surprised when I discovered that it was precisely the perspective of gender which was most dominant in academic articles written on the film. Fewer articles have been written regarding the film’s style and narration as such, a lack which this essay has been trying to compensate.

To my mind, The Sweet Hereafter can be appreciated merely by looking at its style and narration, but it is also true that the spectator often has a need to see meaning in the “what” as well as the “how” of the films they see. It might be argued that such meaning making is also the function of art in general. Therefore, there is absolutely no need to throw the notion of interpretation out the window, but see Egoyan’s film as a universal treatise on the experience of loss which is both expressed and exemplified by his style and narration. It should be added that there is no need to make the false claim that the above sections would have been free from interpretation. If anything, The Sweet Hereafter might prove how such a separation in the absolute sense is impossible.

An integral theme in the whole of Egoyan’s oeuvre is obsession. This obsession, I believe, is born from the experience of loss. When Egoyan’s characters feel that they lose control in reality, they start to create their own worlds where they have control once again. It is the fragility of these private worlds which Egoyan studies in his cinema. In The Sweet Hereafter, it is, of course, the accident which makes the people lose control and it is the clear cause-and-effect narrative of the accident which gives them an illusory feeling of control. Typically for Egoyan, their obsession shows itself in the form of photographic media. Dolores, the childless school bus driver, tells the lawyer how she used to see the children by the road as “berries waiting to be plucked,” berries to “put in my basket”. They are like berries, perfect, harmless creatures who she collects to the bus-basket of her artificial family which lasts for a daily bus journey. This pattern of behavior allows Dolores to believe in a clearly functioning, perfect world of harmony where she is in control. After the accident, she clearly repeats this pattern in collecting all of the children as photographs on her wall as if berries hanging from a tree. To the lawyer, on the other hand, the school bus turns into the concrete embodiment of the incident which he goes to secretly videotape in the night. The bus, and the accident for that matter, thus turns into a tangible, manageable object of research, a fetishized object of his mediate gaze. This scene is probably the scene which most clearly echoes Egoyan’s earlier films where people are obsessed with filming and looking at videotapes to achieve a control over their existence from the protagonist of Next of Kin who looks at the videotapes of another family’s therapy session to the woman in The Adjuster (1991) who records pornographic scenes on screen with her camera and Calendar where Egoyan himself plays a character obsessed with taking perfect photographs of Armenian churches at the expense of destroying his relationship. 

Another interesting instance of trying to maintain the sense of control in The Sweet Hereafter is the character of Billy and his habit of driving behind the school bus to wave at his children sitting at its backseat. “Billy loved to see his kids in the bus,” Dolores explains to the lawyer. “It comforted him,” she claims. It is of special interest here that Billy is never seen with his children in the film. They are seen running toward the camera in an eerie shot, which can be interpreted as Billy’s flashback at the scene of the accident, and they are seen talking with Nicole as she reads to them. When Billy is driving behind the bus as it is about to crash, he is separated from a direct contact to them by two images or screens, if you will: the windshield of his car and the rear window of the school bus. The presence of these screens enhances the distance between the characters and the fetishist connotations entailed in the distance. Billy, as well as the other adult characters in the film, fetishizes his children into something pure and innocent that cannot be lost. Patricia Gruben has associated these themes with a psychoanalytic interpretation of the film: the adults try to gain a primal connection that has been lost and cannot be retrieved by mythologizing their children. Gruben writes that:

Three Egoyan films from the 1990s -- Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Felicia’s Journey (1999) -- are driven by the longing of adults to penetrate the veil of child-hood and return to a state of remembered or imagined innocence. In each film, an adult, tortured by the pain of a life isolated from human contact, reaches out to a child or child-substitute for emotional intimacy. In each case, however, the longing is unfulfilled because the child is a surrogate for an earlier, more primal relationship that has ended in estrangement or death. Connected to this death, sometimes even the cause of it, the adult is psychically paralyzed, unable to atone or grieve and move on. [16] 

The characters’ obsession to keep things in control shows itself in their relentless desire to turn reality into something tangible. While Egoyan does not condemn his characters in the least, his films often do portray people who are unable to let go of grief. Billy has not been able to stop grieving over his wife. The lawyer has been “divided into two parts” ever since the spider accident with Zoe. Neither of them are never seen in the same space with their children because there is no connection; they have lost it. It is this unsolved paradox of loss and control which lies at the core of this inability. In the end, Nicole becomes a fetishized object through which the lawyer among others tries to achieve control and the lost primal connection to childhood, but such a connection is denied from him; not only because of Nicole’s lie but also because of its utter impossibility. 

What is being lost by the characters is best grasped as sweetness. Although the film’s title quite clearly comes from Nicole’s voice-over monologue in the final montage sequence, which suggests that the townspeople are now living in “the sweet hereafter”, the title can also be seen to emphasize the lost sweetness of the idealized past. The sweetness of their life in the material hereafter is bittersweet: they are haunted by loss but they can also enjoy the idealized sweetness of the past unlike the lawyer who is reminded of its unreal, idealized nature by his daughter’s constant problems. Thus The Sweet Hereafter is a tale of the loss of imagined sweetness. The past appears as idyllic, but it is also constantly implied that the sweetness of the past might not have been real. The degraded school bus is the symbol for the harsh reality in its damaged, rusted shape, the symbol for the destruction of sweetness that never really existed. As Nicole closes The Pied Piper of Hamelin, shuts the lights, and walks away from the children, she, too, steps into the world of the sweet hereafter, the world of the dead which is characterized by the absence of sweetness. 

The reason why psychoanalytic and political readings of the film ought to be avoided, or considered unnecessary at least, is that even as a treatise on the experience of loss, The Sweet Hereafter is not a film about something particular. It is a film about the universal. It has an epic ethos which puts a relatively small incident into vast proportions. The Sweet Hereafter is like a gorgeous mural or a hypnotic symphony which tells about the greatest things of all: the loss of paradise, the fall of man and his banishment from the garden of Eden, the suicide of young Werther, and the death of us all. This alteration in proportion is due to Egoyan’s style and narration. Distance, duration, and movement in cinematography, color, light, and composition in mise-en-scène, and music, voice-over, and montage articulate the experience of loss. It is further expressed and exemplified by fragmented narration which coalesces several temporal levels together, bears epistemic ambiguity, focalizes into multiple perspectives without embracing any particular perspective, and halts narration in the traditional sense. In brief, the central event in the film becomes something larger than it is due to the expressed emotion attached to it. The interaction between the story world and the higher levels of discourse gives birth to a full-bodied, rich, and original epic of loss. 

Although all human experience is temporal, the experience of loss is temporal in a peculiar sense. It is temporal in the sense that it is born from a reflection on the difference between temporal levels rather than just the passive, pre-reflective processes of anticipation and remembrance which characterize human experience. To Martin Heidegger, time is born from the experience of the distance between the present moment and the future moment of one’s death. In the same way one could argue that loss is born from the experience of the distance between the moment before loss, the moment of loss, and the moment after, all of which, essentially, coalesce in The Sweet Hereafter. While the experience of loss requires time, time seems to always entail loss: it is not possible for one to exist without always losing a moment, a chance, an alternative path, another set of possible outcomes. In both Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan presents a non-classical view of time and reality in which first the distinction between simultaneity and succession is obfuscated and second the reality itself is uncovered as ambiguous. The present either vanishes entirely and is replaced by the process of becoming or, alternatively, the present covers everything in time. In the former case, there is nothing but the process of becoming; reality is in a constant state of flowing as Heraclitus thought. The width of the presence -- the horizontal co-existence of the past, the present, and the future -- equals this process of becoming. As a result, reality itself becomes something ambiguous; rather than just saving the notion of ambiguity to human perception of reality, Egoyan’s ambitious project of articulating, expressing, and exemplifying the experience of loss seems to disclose reality as ambiguous in itself. This might, however, only be due to the fact that in the Egoyan universe there is no distinction between reality in itself, human perception, and what might be called the human reality.

If time is “the very foundation of cinema,” [17] as Andrei Tarkovsky argues, then Egoyan ventures into the essence of film. The Sweet Hereafter might be many things -- a beautiful parable, an elegy of grief, an epic of loss, an intellectually intriguing work of art, a moving tale, an example of original narration and cinematic intuition -- but it is perhaps, above all, an expression of the great powers and capabilities of the seventh art. Never coming close to the mere act of telling a tale, the film always reflects on itself and rather depicts a tale. It is this depiction, or sculpting in time, where lie the deepest truths of cinema. In synthesis of different forms of art (music, written fiction, poetry), cinema exceeds the mere act of combination and becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. The Sweet Hereafter never reduces into the text which is, at least, a sign of it being a good film.

When Nicole walks away from Billy’s children in the final scene of The Sweet Hereafter, executed with one long take, she steps out of the world of childhood onto the verge of a new world of destruction, which is also the moment when Egoyan’s film does something that escapes words and is completely unexpected. Rather than ending the film with the latest temporal level, perhaps showing the people overcoming their grief or learning to live with it, Egoyan has an essentially cinematic stroke of genius in returning to the night before the accident. Not a romantic flashback to the age of innocence, this decision comes across rather as a flash of the absence of sweetness, as an anticipation of things to come. As Nicole walks farther from the children, she stops by the window. In a brief moment, a bright light flashes before her, presumably from the car of her father who is coming to take her away to their secret place of incestuous love. Egoyan is able to charge extreme amount of emotion to this simple, mundane moment which becomes something surreal, something above the everyday level of things. It is as if the final shot carried grief for something that had not yet happened. It is a moment of temporal width, a moment when reality becomes and shows its vague depth. The past has become a part of the future and vice versa. The brief flash of light is as though a symbol for the suffering to come; it is a sign of death; it is the flash of the sweet hereafter. It is something irreducible and inexplicable. A message from the art of light. It is something truly cinematic and very worthy of anniversary celebration. 

Notes:

[1] Atom Egoyan says this in the documentary Formulas for Seduction: the Cinema of Atom Egoyan (1999). The documentary, which is really weak as a whole (read: I am not recommending it), is available in the Artificial Eye Atom Egoyan Blu-Ray Box Set.

[2] See Dillon 2003, especially.

[3] May & Ferri 2002, 133-5. 

[4] See Dillon 2003 and Weese 2002.

[5] Egoyan makes such a self-reflective observation in this interview. 

[6] Dillon 2003, 228.

[7] Ibid. 227. 

[8] Tarkovsky 1986, 121.

[9] Gruben 2007, 267. 

[10] May & Ferri 2002, 132.

[11] Ibid. 133. 

[12] Dillon 2003, 228. 

[13] Gruben 2007, 271. 

[14] May & Ferri 2002, 135-6.

[15] Weese 2002, 69. 

[16] Gruben 2007, 249.

[17] Tarkovsky 1986, 119. 

References:

Dillon, Steven. 2003. “Lyricism and accident in The ‘Sweet Hereafter’ (Russell Banks, Atom Egoyan)”. Literature-Film Quarterly 31(3), p. 227-230.

Gruben, Patricia. 2007. “Look but Don’t Touch: Visual and Tactile Desire in Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Felicia’s Journey”. In Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan. Edited by Jennifer Lise Burwell and Monique Tschofen. Waterloo, Ont: WLU Press, p. 249-273.

May, Vivian M.; Ferri, Beth A. 2002. “’I’m a Wheelchair Girl Now’: Abjection, Intersectionality, and Subjectivity in Atom Egoyan’s ‘The Sweet Hereafter’”. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 30(1/2), 131-150.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1986. Sculpting in Time. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 

Weese, Katherine. 2002. "Family Stories: Gender and Discourse in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter". Narrative, 10(1), p- 69-90. 

#The Sweet Hereafter #Atom Egoyan #1990's #Canadian

[essenceoffilm]

Leaving the Summer Behind

While it is a true pleasure to discover something new in the rich history of cinema, there always lurks a danger when it comes to evaluating these novel discoveries. The danger is due to the fact that one is usually more easily lured by the enchantment of exoticism, the allure of the unknown, than the ordinariness of the familiar. This Spring proved to include one of the most interesting program series in years for the Finnish film archive: a series of West-German films from the 1950′s curated by the film critic Olaf Möller who is insanely familiar with the blind spots of film history. Perhaps telling of the oblivion surrounding the era is that I had seen only one film from it prior to the series [1]. I was able to catch eleven films out of the fourteen films of the series [2], which surely makes me less than a connoisseur of the period, but provides me with enough information to prefer one film over another (I think) in a fashion cleared from the diversions of exoticism (I hope). The two films I was most fascinated by were Helmut Käutner’s The Rest Is Silence (1959, Der Rest ist Schweigen) and Harald Braun’s The Last Summer (1954, Der letzte Sommer). Discussion on the former shall be postponed and the latter shall be tackled now. The Last Summer is less well-known than Käutner’s semi-classic; it is, in fact, incredibly unknown outside Germany, though it is available on YouTube in poor quality, to the extent that it has less than 20 ratings on IMDb and that this is the first post on this site with the tags of the film’s title and its director both of whom are, however, very worthy of attention. 

Based on a novel by Ricarda Huch, The Last Summer tells the story about a young man, Rikola Valbo (played by Hardy Krüger) arriving to a small fictional town by train in order to assassinate the president just roughly two weeks before the next election. Aided by his partner-in-crime Gawan, Rikola sabotages a bridge which the president is about to cross in his car. As the girl who Rikola has met earlier, Jessika (played by Liselotte Pulver) approaches from the other side of the bridge, Rikola waves at her to warn her which is simultaneously seen as a sign directed to the president whose car is approaching from the opposite side. As the president exits his car and comes to Rikola, Gawan escapes from his hideout under the bridge, but Rikola is mistakenly perceived by the president as his savior which makes Rikola the-son-he-never-had for him. When Rikola moves to the president’s residence, he finds out that Jessika is the president’s daughter. Rikola is torn by a dilemma: his obligation toward Gawan and the mission, his budding romance with Jessika, and his ever-growing understanding for the president. His dilemma deepens as Gawan is killed by the president’s guards during an intense sequence of duck hunting. Rikola struggles between the options to assassinate and not to assassinate, but ends up letting go of the mission as well as his relationship with Jessika. 

Reasons for the film’s worthiness to my mind are plenty. Its exquisite functionality comes down essentially to a fluent stylistic program, great acting by Krüger and Pulver especially, and polished dramaturgy where all that is not necessary has been excluded. The milieu is a fictional village whose gorgeous mountains, lakes, and landscapes remind one of Switzerland. There is a surreal quality to this milieu as the townspeople gather around big speakers from where the president’s voice emerges to proclaim political truths. In a word, the film has a tone and a mood like no other.

Braun’s precise and detailed mise-en-scène in The Last Summer creates the setting for a layered utilization of both deeper and shallower planes in beautiful dynamic compositions. The classical three-point-lighting is soft, giving an impression of the Sun gently shining in the summer sky on the space inhabited by the characters as well as the Moon lightly shining in the dusk. The editing rhythm is calm, and the camera moves as it follows the characters. Besides such following shots, camera movement also occurs often when the camera tracks forward to the characters, compressing the framing as well as the atmosphere, or backward from the characters, expanding the framing and amplifying the characters’ embeddedness to the environment. Changes to the consistent stylistic program include a canned camera angle when Rikola reveals his original intentions of assassination to Jessika, thus emphasizing the dramatic effect: something is about to break in a way that cannot be fixed. Another is the way how Braun leaves the camera to linger on an empty space for a brief moment after Rikola leaves the railway station where he went after the above revelation and where he encountered the grief-stricken wife of Gawan. The accusing gaze of the wife directed to Rikola is utterly stirring in the film’s only (to the best of my knowledge) point of view shot. It is convincing enough to convince Rikola to consider the assassination once more, though he gives it up again after talking with the president, as well as to convince the spectator of the utilization of the cinematic device which would seem contradictory to the stylistic consistency of the film. 

In addition to guilt, integral themes concern the moral and political questions which arise from the conversations between Rikola and the president. In one of his speeches through the speakers, the president divides the politicians into two groups: those who believe in change and those who believe in preservation. Rikola represents the former, that is, liberalism, while the president does the latter, that is, conservatism, though he might wish to see himself in a middle ground between such opposites. In one of their conversations, Rikola demands in a nearly Rousseauesque fashion that a leader ought to govern for the people, whereas the president puts emphasis on the mission of helping the people. Both notions could have their paternalistic connotations, but surprisingly enough Rikola seems to lie more into this direction in his quasi-enlightenment faith in the general will à la Rousseau. In the great finale, where Rikola returns to the president’s residence, which he left after revealing his plan of assassination to Jessika, to try to avenge Gawan’s death, the president manages to make Rikola give up his bullets which he shoots into the cold solitude of the moonlit night. The president manages to do this by claiming that violence can be just as well a form of weakness as it can of strength. He considers Rikola’s solutions and the thought processes behind them to be simple and naive. In a powerful speech, he proclaims that it is much more difficult to still have faith in humanity after all one has been through, adding that he himself does, nonetheless. 

There are many ways to interpret this ending, I believe. First, it could be seen as reactionary. One could argue that Braun shows signs of reactionary thought before the radical 60′s as the youth dreaming of social change have to give up on their naive dreams on the threshold of maturity. This interpretation could, in fact, be wider when it comes to the German cinema of the 50′s and as such explain why the era was buried after the Oberhausen manifesto of 1962 changed German cinema for good. Second, the ending could be seen as pessimistic. One could argue that Braun portrays the president as a manipulating figure who succeeds in deceiving Rikola to give up his ideals which are a threat to his established republican power. On the level of explicit meaning, perhaps the first interpretation seems more appropriate, emphasizing an uplifting moral, but on the level of implicit meaning, many questions are left open with regards to the president and his potential tyranny. For one, why were Rikola and his associates so keen on assassinating him had he not done anything wrong? Why does he proclaim his political messages through speakers rather than talking to the people of his nation directly, something that is never seen in the film? Third, the ending could be seen as a mutual synthesis where Rikola leaves extreme radicalism and violence behind, but where his presence has also provoked a reconsideration of social values in the president’s family: we see, for example, that Jessika begins to question the moral entitlement of the privileged position of her presidential family. 

Braun’s film refuses to give easy answers which makes it an exception in political cinema of the time. Few comparisons come to mind when it comes to films of the 50′s which tackled such complex social questions in such a layered fashion. Though quite a different film, Kazan’s Face in the Crowd (1957) does come close. It is interesting to compare Braun’s The Last Summer with two films in particular. In the program series I saw, it was screened right after Falk Harnack’s Der 20. Juli (1955), which is one of the many films about the famous Operation Valkyrie, the attempt of high German officials to assassinate Adolf Hitler during WWII. In Harnack’s film, the assassination, of course, fails, but the film ends with an uplifting, nearly spiritual note where the attempt in itself is felt as something vital. In Braun’s film, on the other hand, the assassination does not fail, but it is abandoned due to a more or less ambiguous change of heart. As the above discussion might point out, Braun’s film comes across surprisingly as more pessimistic. The other comparison I would like to draw is a peculiar one, that is, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) which ends with the phoenix-like ideological reawakening of a young woman who fantasizes a political mass destruction. The film famously ends in a montage where the American capitalist society blows up to pieces followed by a serene shot of a sunset accompanied by Roy Orbison’s song “So Young”. In both Zabriskie Point and The Last Summer, there is at play an intriguing undertone which gives a melancholic if not pessimistic touch to the seemingly happy end; it is a pessimism for the death of dreams as well as the loss of youth. If the protagonist of Zabriskie Point wakes up, the protagonist of The Last Summer might fall asleep, but regardless both films share a similar darker undertone as if saying that neither really mattered.

In order to appreciate this undertone, it might be beneficial to take a closer look at the film’s two last shots. The first of these is a dynamic shot where the camera tracks slowly forward to Rikola’s face as he stands by the open door of the president’s residence after deciding to give up on the assassination plan. Next to his face is a window’s curtain waving due to a mild breeze as if concealing him into the tranquility of dreams. The second of these shots, that is, the final shot of the film, is a static shot, a long shot, where Rikola is seen crossing the bridge almost as a mere silhouette due to nightfall. The bridge is, of course, the same bridge where Rikola and Gawan tried to kill the president but failed and thus established the relationship Rikola subsequently developed with the president. Another bridge is seen during the opening credits of the film as Rikola arrives to the town by train. This feeling of arrival and beginning surely ties into the final shot, thus working as a narrative seal, but it most obviously associates with the key scene where Rikola and Gawan attempt to assassinate the president. The failure is due to Rikola’s unconscious (or subconscious, your choice) desire not to kill which manifests itself as his love for Jessika, a token of his respect for humanity which eventually prevents him from killing the president even when he has a gun targeted straight to the man’s head during the intense duck hunting sequence. The bridge is the place where new connections emerge. The accolades granted to Rikola by the president are but the first seeds of his ever-growing guilt. This guilt is, in part, due to the double meaning of the place: something new begins there while something utterly different was supposed to begin. It is an ambiguous place of both failure and success.

Now the question arises: what does the crossing of the bridge in the end mean? One answer, in line with the first interpretation presented above, is that Rikola outdoes himself and crosses the gulf of his own naive radicalism. Another, in line with the third interpretation, is that Rikola steps into the middle ground between liberalism and conservatism where the president proclaims to reside in. Finally, in line with the second pessimistic interpretation, one could argue that Rikola’s gesture of crossing the bridge is nearly suicidal, an identification with destruction and oblivion. He has, after all, just lost everything: the budding intellectual connection to the president, his friend Gawan and the respect of Gawan’s wife, his self-respect for that matter, and, of course, the love of his life, Jessika who simply cannot get over the fact that Rikola was planning the assassination of her father while their romance was starting to blossom. The act of crossing the bridge is the act of leaving. Rikola leaves the town, and in that sense everything, behind. Perhaps he goes back to the university where he is studying law. He returns from his summer vacation. He leaves this one summer behind, a summer which was, of course, something more than any other summer; it was, just as grim as it sounds, the last summer. 

When it comes to the subject matter and especially the milieu of The Last Summer, the film could be seen as a critical comment on the genre of Heimatfilm. Heimatfilme were a series of films produced in Germany from the late 40′s to the late 60′s which were characterized by sentimentality, conservative values, and formulaic love triangle narratives where a “good boy” wins the girl from a “bad boy”. Many national cinemas have showed signs of a similar genre, modified for the characteristics of that nation, which bloomed around the same time, but Heimatfilm might be the best known internationally, perhaps due to ridicule, perhaps due to critical commentary. What is interesting about The Last Summer with regards to the genre of Heimatfilm is that the group of the Oberhausen manifesto as well as the New German Cinema, which took shape around that group essentially, criticized Heimatfilme very strongly and some of their films have been seen as taking a critical stance toward Heimatfilme. Now, both of those groups are also responsible for the oblivion surrounding the era of postwar German cinema in general in a fashion similar to the way French New Wave buried the postwar French cinéma de qualité under its own innovation. I would not be surprised if Braun’s The Last Summer had dropped into the category of Heimatfilm in the eyes of the new German filmmakers, but the intriguing thing is that The Last Summer is essentially a very subtle and mature criticism of Heimatfilm and its lack of moral ambiguity. The film addresses profound moral as well as romantic or human questions which become more complex than those in Heimatfilme, but this address takes place in a similarly idyllic environment which thus, in a sense, is elevated into a higher level of critical discourse. 

Already by its very title, Braun’s The Last Summer seems to declare opposition toward Heimatfilm, or homeland films of the summer. It is about leaving the summer behind in the sense that the summer captures not only Heimatfilm but also youth, naivety of dreams, and perhaps even a radical or reformative ideology. Like in Zabriskie Point, there is something deeply melancholic about this departure from the summer of dreams, the faith in humanity, which seems to have something to do with aging and death. It is as if The Last Summer came across as the summer film to end all summer films whose summers might never have really existed in the first place. 

Notes:

[1] This is Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene (1951)

[2] These are, in chronological order, Der letzte Sommer (1954, Braun), So war der deutsche Landser (1955, Baumeister), Der 20. Juli (1955, Harnack), Das dritte Geschlecht (1957, Harlan), Wir Wunderkinder (1958, Hoffmann), Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1958, Thiele), Rose Bernd (1958, Staudte), Der Rest ist Schweigen (1959, Käutner), Am Galgen hängt die Liebe (1960, Zbonek), Kirmes (1960, Staudte), and Das Spukschloss im Spessart (1960, Hoffmann). 

#Der letzte Sommer #The Last Summer #Harald Braun #1950's #German