Of time and discovery

Tarkovsky's films are, as everybody knows, about time. What time? The time it takes to wait, to take something in, to wait for something to appear because there is no telling when it might. Better yet: the time it takes for the character and the viewer to understand that what they are waiting for has changed between the beginning of a shot and the end. The time it takes to move from a character (i.e. a variable) to a landscape (i.e. a thought), to let the viewer take in the landscape (whether a meadow or a cathedral), and to move back to the character taking in the landscape as a new element in his (rarely her) problem. Which is why his camera movements are rarely about mapping out a space, and often about revealing a character's discovery of a space. And the difference between revealing (the work of the camera) and discovering (the work of the character) is the difference between looking at a character and looking with a character. In Tarkovsky's films, the camera is in almost complete control, and its work is to seize the instant of discovery, of understanding, of appearance. A camera slowly overtakes a character, pushing him out the right side of the frame, only to let him reappear on the left side of the frame at the end of the camera movement. What has changed? The character has now seen. Seen what? That is the question at the centre of every single one of Tarkovsky's films.

Programming notes

This year is my final year at university, leaving me with little time to do anything but study (theoretically: the lure of film-watching is often hard to resist). However, one thing I have thankfully found time for is film programming at our local film society. Having been mostly learning the ropes in my first term, I haven't exactly had time to really think through what programming means, and in which new ways it forces one to think about films. Is any film programmed an endorsement? Are we saying we think it is a good film, or only that it is one worth watching for reasons that might not be related to quality per se? How does one pair films? For that last question, one of my ideals has been Brad Stevens's comments on his ideal double bill of Inland Empire+Céline et Julie vont en bateau, but how possible is that kind of fusion in practice on a regular basis?

Anyway, these are thoughts I need to sort out for myself. I do intend to do that, as I raelly do think that however small the scale I'm doing it on, I really should be using my programming to question and enrich some of my critical positions and a prioris.
In the meantime, however, and since I've written shamefully little in the past few months on this blog, here are the blurbs I wrote for films which were shown and I supported (I have tried not to let marketing interfere too much with criticism, but a certain measure of hyping has been inevitable):



The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

Kurosawa remains famous, especially outside Japan, for his historical epics; yet his contemporary works are often equally stunning, and one of the best windows into the transormations Japan went through following World War Two. With The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa delivers both one of the greatest post-noirs ever and one of the most atypical.

Taking its subject matter from one of the countless corruption scandals that has mired Japanese political life since 1945, The Bad Sleep Well follows a real estate bribery case as it unravels from within. It opens with a breath-taking twenty-minute wedding ceremony that presents social systems as contractual arrangements with no place for individuality, an extraordinary feat of mise-en-scène that uses splendid Scope framings to illustrate power relations between all the main characters while giving us only the barest hints as to where the actual narrative will go. Incorporating elements of noir (high-contrast black and white, a view of society as fundamentally corrupt) and modernism (as in l'Avventura and Psycho, it takes a while to understand who the main characters will be), the film even anticipates many of the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (The Conversation, The Parallax View) in its presentation of impersonal power relations where corruption is not a moral conundrum but a system. In the implacability of its progression as in the total mastery of its directing, it stands as one of the most under-rated monuments of its author and the genre he was working in.

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Without a doubt the most (in)famous of the many Italian exploitation films of the 1970s, Cannibal Holocaust is also one of the best. Mixing the usual violent and erotic elements required to put bums on seats with an equally important but less acknowledged political focus, it is a ferocious satire of the media, and a forerunner of many trends in horror cinema, from Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield.

From the opening, where a reporter's speech about places on Earth that still live as if in the stone age, with survival of the fittest as the only rule, plays over images of downtown Manhattan, it becomes clear that the film has more on its agenda than just shocks. It is split in two parts, the first of which sees an anthropologist going into the Amazon jungle to look for four documentary film-makers who vanished without a trace after attempting to film a tribe of cannibals deep inside the “Green Inferno”. This sequence sets up all the archetypes of the exploitation film (civilized whites going into the jungle and encountering evil savages), archetypes the film will spend the remaining half deconstructing. As the anthropologist discovers the team's footage, it becomes clear that any image of savagery the film might have offered possesses its mirror in the horrors the young American film-makers committed. Both deconstruction of media reporting, arresting blood-and-guts spectacle, and comment on Western colonialism more generally, Cannibal Holocaust remains a milestone of exploitation cinema.

Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

It says something about our awareness of world cinema that two of Sokurov's greatest films, Days of Eclipse and The Second Circle, are unavailable in this country. Mother and Son, however, is. A major achievement by anyone's standards, it is one of the most original films of the 90s.

Annointed by Tarkovsky as his heir, Sokurov shares many characteristics with the master: a measured sense of time pushed almost to the point of stasis, a deep mysticism that finds expression in languid shots of nature, and an almost mythological view of the Russian people. Mother and Son, which brings these traits to their aesthetic culmination, details the last few days that a son spends with his mother before she dies. The two enjoy each other's company, delve into the past, and take walks in the fields to admire nature one last time. Sokurov's use of distorting lenses transforms his characters into icons, and the painterly visions of nature he gives us here are among the most gorgeous landscape shots ever committed to film. The moments of contemplation add up to reveal an undercurrent of muted grief, and as the film unfolds, its' silent epiphanies gain a cumulative impact unlike anything else in current cinema. A quietly devastating masterpiece.

Scribblings on A Wife Confesses

-Jonathan Rosenbaum has repeatedly linked Masumura to Ray, Fuller, Aldrich and Tashlin, but after seeing this film, it is impossible not to be reminded that he initially worked as Antonioni's assistant. The treatment of love as a momentary reprieve against pervasive alienation (of which loneliness and imposed interdependence are only two different forms), the impossibility of it lasting due to moral requirements which are only social requirements in disguise... Without necessarily aiming for it, Masumura has made one of the few films that does not require a point of view. He posits subjectivity as never quite within reach but always slightly beside the point. What matters is not full understanding of, or identification with, any one person's emotions, but what goes on between two clashing subjectivities. He does this using a method of which the Japanese are the masters: the human face is always on the verge of vanishing, at the very limit of being discernable.






-Again, Jonathan Rosenbaum: " It’s a courtroom thriller about a young widow who’s being tried for her part in the death of her abusive older husband while they were mountain climbing, and it hinges on the haunting question of what she was thinking when she made the split-second decision to cut the rope connecting the two of them."
And again, I think he's only partly right. For he loses sight of the many, many ways in which Masumura is always making us refocus on something else: while the trial goes on, the question of guilt is not examined directly, but under the aspect of emotion: are the two in love? For the viewer, the wife's share of guilt in her husband's death (who is presented in a deeply unsympathetic way, which only increases the effect) is a secondary consequence of that fundamental question. When the verdict is announced, Masumura cuts short the judge's announcement and has it pronounced by a bored journalist who leaves the room. The story then seems to focus on the two lovers' relationship, but this is precisely when th issue of guilt becomes central.
If in doubt, consider this image,

and consider the fact that the soundtrack to it is not the sound of the waves, but a music strongly suggesting anxiety.

In fact, from the very start, it becomes clear through framing that the film will be as much about the lovers being apart as about them being together:




Masumura never lets us fall in love with any of the two lovers.



-In this film, Masumura pays back his hommage to Oshima, who had defended him in the fifties. Some of the shots could be straight out of Cruel Tales of Youth:

In fact, one of the elements that make the film so incredibly fertile is its point at the center of so many movements: one of the many films under heavy influence by the European art cinema of the 50s (Cronaca di un amore); one of the pinnacles of the Japanese studio system (Daiei); one of the greatest examples anywhere of a film made inside the system, against the system; an aesthetic inquiry into the work of the emerging generation of new waves, throughout the world but especially in Japan... Anyone even remotely interested in how Japanese culture changed in the 1950s-60s will have to come to terms with this nexus.

"Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted."

(here)

These few images, from John Gianvito's Vapor Trail (Clark), are part of a montage which is one of the many inserted in the film as part of its dialectic between history and the present. Gianvito's approach is particularly enriching in that not only does it avoid a linear vision of history and narration, it also, as a consequence of this, points out the multiplicity and intricacy of causes behind any one situation.

But in this particular case, it does something else, too. The montage of pictures of American soldiers fighting, or ready to fight, belongs to one of the two archetypes of war photography (the other one being that of the dead bodies). What remains off-screen in both cases is the other side (the enemy firing back ; the soldier who killed the victim) as an active agent, interacting in the same sphere and time frame as the subject being photographed. Gianvito, by inscribing this sequence in his dialectic of present (oral narratives) and history (narratives based on documents), enables a similar dialectic to take place between the images being shown and what their off-screen (hors-champ) reality is : he extends the simple frame of the picture and includes the present reality of the Philippines as the direct but un-represented off-screen space of those marines, a deployment through not only space (the other side of the war line) but also time.

Critique: "reconstructions of the internal logic of ideas, deductions of the intellectual and sociological conditions of their possibility, withering exposures of their inconsistencies and omissions."

Here.

Advertising

Having thought about it a bit recently after a conversation with a friend, it's slightly more clear to me why La Haine seems so tepid in comparison to Ma 6-t va Crack-er, and equally why La Haine is by far the more popular of the two (the fact that Richet's film is banned and therefore unavailable obviously also plays a role), and the more easily sanctioned one (has any self-respecting french middle-class liberal person not seen La Haine by the age of 25?).
It's not enough to say that La Haine is just a sociological speadsheet that simply announces trouble ("Jusqu'ici tout va bien": for how much longer?) while Ma 6-t va Crack-er actively calls for revolution. The more fundamental difference lies in how the two films approach their audiences in relation to what they ask of them. Kassovitz strives to make the banlieues into a subject of discussion, to make us sympathize with the "racaille", to show that they live in conditions which no-one should have to accept, in a phrase (with all the solemnity implied by the italics): to make us understand these people. Its point-of-view is exterior, that of a sociological tourist, designed to enable bourgeois viewers to approach these "problems" disguised as characters. Its impulse is to translate the "racaille" for a non-banlieue audience. As such, there is nothing antagonistic about its position: it seeks acknowledgement and approval from what it theoretically criticizes. If we, as a middle-class left-wing audience, have grown to like these characters, then his mission will have been done (the good old "why can't we all just get along?" solution to all social woes). The film critic who called its aesthetic that of advertising (in Panic, which I've talked about on this blog before) is doubly right: beyond advertising itself as a film (black-and-white as a cachet of "art", the socially significant theme...), it is also, fundamentally, an ad for its subject. It sells the banlieue as a subject of conversation, and its inhabitants as a phenomenon that needs the (non-banlieue) audience's sympathy.
Ma 6-t..., on the other hand, refuses to seek approval. Its defiance (sometimes heavy-handed, as in the slow travelling shot onto the police badge) is one that doesn't look for acknowledgement but demands it. Its characters talk of politics in terms of their own powerlessness rather than in terms of metaphors. Richet is aware that the middle-class viewers so impressed by La Haine are part of the sociological order he is fighting, and as such, he sees no need to humor them. Ma 6-t va Crack-er does not seduce: it fights, and on its own terms.