Notes from a character

Chris Yeo Siew Hua turned me into a character in his debut feature In the House of Straw, so I feel it is my right to speak a little about the film.

First of all, I did not go to the audition. I saw my image (or my character's image) being taken from me (or my character) and given a life of its own. It is a peculiar form of heautoscopy, seeing one's own image on the screen. If that's not bad enough, Chris has made my character (or me) see his (or my) own image at a distance, 'performing' against his (my?) will.

But performance would always be central to a story about myths and archetypes. After all, our lives are live 'performances' of mythic structures already established long before we were born. The film poses a question about performance in relation to archetype by declaring, in an opening monologue, that we are about to see the story of the three little pigs. Then it attempts to bring in the cinematic medium as an answer to that question - how, by photographing what is essentially reality (or a representation of it, like the Eucharist actually transforming into the actual body and blood of Christ, transcending space and time), our 'real world' creates a parallel to these archetypes.

Of course, the film also knows that this creates its own set of problems. The amount of manipulation in this photographic reality (montage), for example, establishes this as a reality that only runs parallel to our own. The film acknowledges this by having me (or my character) question, in voiceover, the veracity of the reality in which I (or my character) dwell in. Manipulation becomes centerfold in this question, in this case, especially, when it comes down to time. My character is unable to turn back the minutes and seconds that the film has already run, even if he rewinds the tape - 'his actions would be in reverse but he would still be going forward in time.' This brings in a relation to the law of entropy (or the arrow of time) that always destroys and undoes whatever manipulation cinema might have (on its characters and its audience). Could we, at this point, already begin to see the problem of free will coming into play? Could we even say that this film is deeply Catholic?

The film attempts to answer these questions by having the whole mechanism break down, of course. My character comes to realize that everything is unchangeable, that even after we move away from childhood and play different roles, we are doomed to repeat the same archetypes over and over. His only answer to this is death, of course. He chooses to die (which in fact, poses another problem for free will), but only to return (a resurrection) to bring down the entire mechanism with him. In the midst of all these illusions, and illusions amidst illusions, there is the savant that knows the truth (my character's sister) - but isn't the audience the savant too? Hasn't the audience been a witness of the struggle between myth and reality, truth and lies? Maybe the conclusion to this is that the mechanism (cinema/myths) cannot survive; in fact it does at one point seem as if the film is deconstructing cinema so as to eventually reach that point. But the fact is that the mechanism has survived. It has survived in us, obviously. We are the living embodiments of myths and archetypes, and...cinema! Why else does my character's sister turn towards the camera at the end? It's a camaraderie between her and us; we too are characters.

More info on In the House of Straw

Thank you Lung Chieh for arguing.

On Tarkovsky's Mirror

Taking stock of 2008

I like making lists. Since I don't have a say over the mise-en-scène of my life, making lists of things would come close, at least, to taking stock of the year that has passed. If each film is an image, complete in its totality and indivisible by its parts, then making a list of films would be like montage. Like montage, what is excluded is always as important - if not more - than what is included; but this exclusion, this 'offscreen space', can only be alluded to and grasped at.

The films below are listed in the order of which I've seen them. Some of these films I encountered for the first time, some I've encountered before. They all mean something to me; they represent discoveries that have opened my eyes. Some of them made me discover filmmakers I've never known before; some made me discover things I've never known before about filmmakers I know. Some of them opened my eyes to things I never knew about cinema; some opened my eyes to things I never knew about myself.

Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, 1988)
Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996)
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940)
Inquietude (Manoel de Oliveira, 1998)
Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)
La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)
Broken Lullaby aka The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) + Hotel Monterey (Chantal Akerman, 1972)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)
Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Raúl Ruiz, 1979)
The Dangerous Thread of Things (Michelangelo Antonioni, 2004)
La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)
Maborosi (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995)
Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai, 1990)
Hurlevent (Jacques Rivette, 1985)
A Hen in the Wind (Yasujiro Ozu, 1948)
Shara (Naomi Kawase, 2003) + The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase, 2007)
La Belle (Kyun-dong Yeo, 2000)
Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)
He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)
Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988)
That Day, On the Beach (Edward Yang, 1983)
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-Wai, 2008)
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)
Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001)
The Intruder (Claire Denis, 2004)
The State of Things (Wim Wenders, 1982) + False Movement (Wim Wenders, 1975)
Violated Angels (Koji Wakamatsu, 1967)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
Plastic City (Nelson Yu Lik-Wai, 2008)
That Lady in Ermine (Ernst Lubitsch, 1948)
Life On Earth (Abderrahmane Sissako, 1998)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
Girl Shy (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1924)
Le Gai Savoir (Jean-Luc Godard, 1969)
Go Go Second Time Virgin (Koji Wakamatsu, 1969)
Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998)
In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007)

Every film by Jacques Rivette is a discovery.

A note on filmmaking

Halfway through Godard's Le Gai Savoir, I got really sleepy and decided to stop the film to take a nap. While sleeping, I dreamt of a story, I dreamt of many stories; I dreamt of the things that happened in real life, I dreamt of the things that never happened in real life. I dreamt of the things I wanted to happen in real life. When I wanted to wake, however, I couldn't. Trapped in my dream, I tried to pull my eyelids open, but the eyelids I pulled open were false eyelids, and the reality I awoke to was a false reality.

There I was, still in my room, in front of my TV, but it was still a dream. The images and sounds were overlapping, like in the films of Godard. In the false reality I awoke to, there was a French documentary about black magic in Malaysia. There were people talking (either from the television, or out of reality) in French, but the documentary wasn't supposed to be in French. I had to read the subtitles - which were in French - to understand the film. The French soundtrack continued, and I heard, at the same time, the busy sound of my roommate scratching his legs.

When I finally awoke to this reality (this reality where I'm typing this note; maybe it's yet another false reality), I felt like I could understand what Godard's films meant. The images and sounds that attack us daily trap us in a dream that we can't wake from - a dream that not only lacks a soul, but is ruled only by capitalist forces that seek to suppress in us any thought about their origin. Images and sounds are forms of imperialism. Hence, Godard's adventure to find a pure image/sound. But is there a pure - or true - image/sound? When I awoke, the last three words I heard from my dream were 'retrouver cette image.' I got up and repeated these three words to myself: 'Retrouver Cette Image.'

--5:11 PM 20 November 2008

On Kitano's editing

A revisiting of Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi made me realize several peculiarities. Kitano's style has been described as sharp, bare, minimalist. His editing might suggest otherwise. A minimalist filmmaker, such as Bresson, would pare his elements down to only the necessary; as such, Bresson prefers precision over expressiveness, singularity (close-ups, medium shots) over multitude (wide shots, cluttered art direction). Though Kitano eliminates most camera movement from his shots, the dictum of his camera is not specifiying or isolating (like Bresson), it is more akin to the camera of Hou Hsiao-Hsien in its all-encompassing capacity.

In this frame of reference, his shots often have a focal point, either a character or an object - usually directly facing the camera - although its distance to the camera might vary. Similarly, in his editing movement, this focal point wavers: it is inchoate, at times solidly present and at times invisible altogether. This can be seen most clearly in Kitano's character, Nishi, who contributes most of the film's violence. As an action hero, his presence is strangely minimal. An early fight scene shows him grabbing a pair of chopsticks, cuts to blood splatterd on the bar top, then cuts to the aftermath of the violence: the chopsticks have landed squarely in the eye of the attacker. Another fight scene shows him confronting two thugs in the parking lot; we first see him looking at the two goons, then we see only the shadow of the punches on the ground before the thug falls into frame, defeated.

In other words, action is often deflected. The editing in the film does not serve to pinpoint, to locate; it serves to diffuse and distract. The nature of Nishi himself seems to mirror this: laconic and emotionless, he is completely imperceptible - his personality and background has to be articulated by the supporting characters. Even though it is a film ostensibly about Nishi, the film seems to dwell considerably on its supporting characters who contribute little to the main narrative: the wheelchair-bound cop who spends his time painting to keep himself from suicide; the child of the Nishi's dead partner; the brassy owner of the scrapyard. Nishi is the inchoate center of the film, at times clearly visible (as during the flashback sequences or the occasional violent scenes where we actually see Nishi pulling punches) and at times completely not there.

On Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park does not express the psychology of its main character Alex, a teenage skateboarder who accidentally commits murder; the film embodies his psychology. If we see the film as a movement, it is a fractured, discontinuous, and fragmented one. It is a movement looking out, not an invitation to look inwards. As a film, it is self-consciously flat; both in its frontal shots of Alex and in its use of lenses to flatten the background and diminish deep space. In this way it does not treat Alex as an object - and camera (by proxy, the audience) as subject - the camera seeks to submerge itself in the face of Alex. The use of the full-frame aspect ratio (which favors close-ups and movement), as well as the sound design which is recorded extremely close to the actor and objects to pick up the sonorous sounds of their bodies even when they're not moving or talking, foreshortens the distance between screen and actors. The film is also interested in meta textures; its use of Super 8 footage reminds me of Japanese and Chinese painting, where paper texture is equally important in the value of a painting. In a sense, it deliberately creates a flatness both literally and metaphorically - the screen is reduced to the screen, the face reduced to a face.

The camera's relation to the characters (also, mise-en-scène) is not so much weak subjectivity as a submerged subjectivity, a subjective qua objective camera that does not merely record its character, Alex, but merges with him, influenced by his movements (as is the fragmented narrative of the film). Not only is the narrative also flatly constructed (no implied depth via psychological underpinnings of motive or reason), it also ignores the rules of causality. Scenes are repeated many times - sometimes out of context - and dialogue (direct speech) overlaps with voiceover (reported speech); these scenes, as in many Bresson films such as Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket, lose their narrative meaning; they become independent slivers of events, outside of time, that construct a whole. In short, nothing happens because. Things just happen.

But what is this whole that the film talks about? Is it the main character Alex? In a sense, yes, and no. Alex is not a solid, unwavering 'I'. He has no personality per se; he is constructed by his interactions with the people around him and the things that happen to him. He is a product of his relationships with people, the trends and fashions at the moment, the zeitgeist (like the Iraq War, mentioned in passing in the film) etc. He is intricately tied to every little thing that happens in the world. He is not his own person. The murder is significant because it shakes this false sense of ego and shatters the psychoanalytic mirror into tiny reflecting shards - we are all products of everything that is happening and that has happened up to this point of time, gathering and dissolving and never staying the same. This is the film's point of view and its most profound.

From the outset, Alex is a stereotype: he is a skater, he wears his hair long, he has his left ear pierced, he has a pretty girlfriend etc. But contrary to other American filmmakers, Van Sant doesn't use stereotypes as a shorthand; instead, as in his previous high school film Elephant, Van Sant uses these stereotypes as ciphers (just as he uses the faces of his characters, the premises of his films as ciphers). Being a stereotypical 'skater' does not define Alex at all; the essence of his being exists independently of these attributes. It is when his life begins to take on the attributes of his stereotype that reality is called into question. His pretty girlfriend, who has sex with him so that she can lose her virginity, calls her friend right after to tell her how it was everything she'd expected it to be. Their petty flirtations at the school locker play out like a badly scripted version of Gossip Girl and The Hills with stiffer acting. (Van Sant never cuts to a reverse shot to cover up the awkward pauses and rough intonations of his unprofessional cast; he chooses, instead, to rest on Alex's POV during the dialogue scenes.) Their lives are not a high school drama; they're what a high school drama should be.

Alex lives a stereotyped life, one that has already been institutionalized and glorified by the media. In a way, Alex represents the psyche of the 21st century teenager: with the global consciousness being fragmented by the internet and the movies, every emotion - love, sex, and death - has already been experienced for you. What does it mean then to experience things for the first time yourself?

This is just too good