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

On Antonioni's American films

These notes contain spoilers that might mar the enjoyment of these films if you have not seen them. Unending thanks to the National Museum of Singapore for putting together a whoppingly extensive Antonioni retrospective, which has helped me understand many of his films in in their rightful context.

Both Zabriskie Point and The Passenger were distributed by MGM, so I'll make a gross generalization and group them together as Antonioni's 'American period,' even though The Passenger was made through foreign coin and shot in various parts of Africa and Europe. My grouping them together has more to do with their form, one that he flirts with briefly and subsequently abandons in his later films. Having just seen The Passenger for the first time today, it has struck me that both films represent a departure from the style Antonioni is famous for (what Pasolini hails as his 'obsessive framings').

Instead of the obsessive colors and elaborate mise en scène of his previous films up to Blow-Up, both films are 'looser,' in the sense that the camera is often taken off the tripod and tracks: the camera is often handheld in these films. Moreover, the actors have become less 'moving space' as in his other films, but rightful stars; though plot is still scarce in his American films, the actors ground the films with their presence. Long takes are abandoned in favor of short, quick cuts that convey blocks of information (most notably, the signboards in Zabriskie Point; and, for once in Antonioni's films, establishing shots, as found in The Passenger); for the first time, a conversation between two characters is punctuated by cuts, a Hollywood master shot/shot-reverse shot strategy; here, a cut is used to separate two blocks of information (unlike his other films, where the space between one shot and the next lies an entire world of implications), becoming somewhat similar to Pasolini's 'cinemes': the short, almost unruly shots that make up Pasolini's cinema. Because of this, movement (and therefore, space) is less emphasized; although landscapes still play an important role, they form a different relationship with the characters; through excessive medium-shots and long-shots, the characters are entirely plastered into their environment, forming an organic whole (instead of the dissonant whole in his previous films).

Most possibly, this style is used to reflect a growing social consciousness on Antonioni's part. The three films made during the 70's all contain overt elements of social commentary - Zabriskie Point about the '68 protests, Chung Kuo - Cina about Communist China, and The Passenger about the Western world's contribution to the horrific crimes committed in Africa. The characters in these films are hence inseparable from their geopolitical milieus, probably reflecting Antonioni's interest in an 'investigative reality' (ironically, one already debunked in Blow-Up). These short 'cinemes' serve to construct narratives much more coherent than any 60's Antonioni film (although to a lesser extent in Chung Kuo, whose sprawling narrative is made more abstract by its sheer ambition).

In terms of pace (what I gather as the speed at which new events occur in the plot), the 'American period' films are much sparser than his 60's output, although their new choppy style make them seem quicker as new information is delivered more rapidly. In fact, their narrative style reminds me of an American contemporary of Antonioni, Monte Hellman, specifically his two existentialist Westerns Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (is it merely the Jack Nicholson factor and the fact that they're all set in deserts?). The two Antonioni films do retain some auteur touches though, as in the wedding that Jack Nicholson witnesses in The Passenger, and the famous hallucinatory scene at Zabriskie Point (are the other couples who join in the lovemaking real? or are they just manifestations, metaphors of youthful love? I refuse to see any symbolism; to me, I only see one couple and that is Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin). But while the narrative events might be called 'Antonioni-esque,' the 'invisible' camera, unlike his usual 'felt' camera, is certainly not.

These newfound strategies unravel at the end of both his 'American period' films, of course. In a sense, the endings of both films represent a return from the particular (the personal, the local) to the infinite (the unknowable, the enigma, the void), a return that his earlier films suggest. Zabriskie Point ends with a series of explosions; first the resort house of Daria's boss, then explosions of general emblems of American middle-class culture - a refrigerator stocked with food, a television, a shelf of books etc. The explosions become slower and slower, until movement, again, is intensified. The infinite is suggested by particles separating from each other, as the frame zooms closer and closer with each explosion. The universe is un-created; the world goes back to originary chaos when matter still lay in primordial soup. The film abruptly cuts back to Daria, looking at the house, all quiet. She then drives away in the sunset, leaving us uncertain if it really happened or it was just a hallucination.

The Passenger famously ends with a virtuoso 7-minute long take that slowly brings the camera from the hotel room interior, floating away from Jack Nicholson's body on the bed, through a window grate into the exterior, then circles round to view Nicholson's corpse in the hotel room from outside. Meaning eventually gives way to pure form, a camera whose presence is readily 'felt'; it is the short, choppy cuts earlier in the film that truly emphasize the power of this sequence. Antonioni explains that he wanted the camera to resemble Nicholson dying. The result is almost Zen-like. Nicholson, who has been escaping from his life and reality so much so that he had to replace the life of someone else (creating a fiction for himself), is finally reconciling with the world around him through his death. In the face of death, life is pushed to the infinite, the precipice where life ends and death begins; it is almost as if Nicholson, who has been struggling to forge his identity separate from the world (running away from it), is merging with his environment; he becomes the dust created by the car, the shouts of the young boys playing soccer, the distinct trumpet solo coming from afar; he becomes total, the infinite, the universe. Is it merely a coincidence that the real last scene is also that of Maria Schneider getting into the car and driving off into the sunset?

The final shot of The Passenger

Notes on Blow-Up

Unlike many other Antonioni films that are mise-en-scène-based (positive space), Blow-Up is a montage-based film (negative space). The film's elusive diegesis directs perspective onto what is beyond the frame, the space between two edits. Onscreen narrative is not only unreliable, it is constantly attacked, contradicted and undermined by paradoxical dialogue and impossible scenarios. Characterization is thwarted by dialogue; characters often lie and contradict themselves (in both the first antique shop scene and the scene where David Hemmings talks to Vanessa Redgrave about his wife). The characters are not concrete; they are fluid, like flickering specters under the camera (one scene even has Redgrave vanishing mysteriously into the crowd; at the end Hemmings' figure fades into the green field). They do not have fixed identities - when we first see Hemmings, he is an undercover photojournalist; then he becomes an arrogant mod-fashion photographer who disregards a protest placard; then he becomes a detective trying to solve a murder mystery through his photographs.

Narrative is further complicated with incongruent scenarios. Similar to the aesthetic of horror films, impossible time or geography is introduced to question the normalcy of the diegesis. There is a fantastic instance of creative geography when Redgrave runs out of frame after her initial meeting with Hemmings, only to run into frame again, a few scenes later, at Hemmings' studio, as if no time has elapsed in between. When Hemmings asks her how she knew his address, she just shrugs it off. Logic as confined within the film is defied here; it is a logic that hints at forces greater than the film's diegesis. We see this again when Hemmings leaves a studio teeming with assistants and models only to return, a while later, to a completely empty studio. When the model at the rave exclaims 'I am in Paris!' how can we know for sure that the house Hemmings stumbles into is really in London and not actually in Paris?

The linear quality of montage allows for multiple realities (if we inspect his varying use of distances, POVs, and timings, it could even be said that every shot is a separate reality) to be laid alongside each other, subtly interacting within an open set of probabilities. The incongruous object is our guide to this dissonance: the discarded guitar neck creates a riot in the concert room, but is regarded as trash in the streets; Hemming's doppelganger mistakes Hemmings' car for his. The narrative is thus always collapsing upon itself, because these realities do not become a cogent whole. The whole's instability creates a series of blind fields that extend beyond the frame; in other words, the frame does not contain, it endlessly expands; what we see is always fading into what we cannot see, and vice versa.

At the same time, it can be said that Antonioni's aesthetic is distinctly Japanese. Symmetry is avoided whether in the contradictory plot construction or the off-center framing. The mise-en-scène, in particular, does not develop around human bodies (unlike classical Hollywood cinema, humans are not the locus of camera movements). The camera tracks to put human shapes at odd angles with the lines of the spaces they're in; the space in the sets are often offset with odd corners protruding out (getting in the way of characters' heads), dissected by screens and large beams that obscure and intrude into the characters' bodies. It is this asymmetry that does not allow for facile interpretations: the film can be about the unreliability of photographic reality and images (even cinematographic reality, since it's fundamentally anti-cinema), a social reflection on 60's mod London, an elegy to mortality etc., but it is always more. Talking about it is talking around it; these are merely the cultural (local) aspects that can be understood; the enigma, the impossibility of knowing, is what we really love.

Notes on the creative process

Hasty notes on filmmaking

i) Personal vision and reality

In The Man Who Left His Will on Film, the last footage of the filmmaker who committed suicide - shots of landscapes and scenery - is criticized by other filmmakers as bearing neither political nor artistic vision. But how does anyone graft themselves (their personality, their ideas, their politics etc.) into what is essentially captured objectively through the lens? Can one truly manipulate reality through an objective lens? The film asks the reverse of these questions - if reality can be manipulated to suit a personal will, how seriously should we take reality? In the film, politically-committed students shoot protests and demonstrations as documentaries of current rebellion. But this political reality is often confused with the protagonist's personal reality; eventually, neither realities seem real.

Yet, 'vision' is a relatively recent notion (and a fairly Western one at that too) and explains the crisis of authorship that plagued artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Art after Warhol conveniently ignores all the problematizations it was subjected, emerging as even more defiantly metaphysical and author-obsessed (a recent visit to the Whitney's Biennale only enforces this fact). That is why, to us, the filmmaker who commits suicide in The Man Who Left His Will on Film remains an enigma. His 'vision' is always absent; when the main characters Motoki and Yasuko try to retrace his footsteps, they only find a shadow of him constantly escaping them...

ii) Morality

Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool allows its characters to wander into real street protests at the end of the film, inevitably politicizing its earlier story of journalistic integrity. Yet, is it the documentary aspect that validates the fictional or vice versa? At the same time, it is because we know that the documentary footage is real (the threat of violence to actress Verna Bloom is extremely real) that we feel worried for Bloom's character. Should we then feel concerned for Lamberto Maggiorani, the star of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, because he was chosen for the fact that his life parallels that of his jobless and desperate character? Does this casting benefit De Sica (in making the audience feel for the character) or Maggiorani instead? Where is the conscience in all this?

At the same time, Shohei Imamura dramatizes a very real missing-person situation in his docudrama A Man Vanishes, using the real people involved in the case and letting them 'act' out their emotions for the camera. Imamura himself steps in front of the camera at the end of the film to ask the audience: are their emotions any less real because of their acting? Is truth revealed or obscured through the camera?

The camera imposes a machinistic volition onto the world that inevitably changes reality, neither tending toward truth nor toward the artist's intention. As Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer has proven, the act of placing a camera, choosing its location, leaving things in or out of the frame, deciding when to start and stop recording is a moral act in itself, because it affects the lives of the people in front of it. What is the responsibility of the filmmaker when confronted with this fact? Is it to ignore (as Jonathan Caouette in his iMovie life drama Tarnation) or to acknowledge as Rouch does? Is there an apolitical camera?

iii) Subject/object

It is inevitable that the filmmaker and the world enters into a subject-object relationship. It is the filmmaker (subject) who 'captures' the world (object) and shows it to an audience (subject) that apprehends the film (object). The filmmaker always wants something out of the world that the world has to involuntarily give up. In narrative cinema, this is made more complex with the introduction of other factors. It is not a reality that is extracted but a reality that is constructed (through syntactic structures).

In La Belle Noiseuse, the painter Edouard Frenhofer tries to find the quality that disturbs/pesters/irritates him out of his model Marianne. But there's a fundamental difference between pen and camera. The pen doesn't record an indecisive movement or stroke and, like the brush, has its own will - ink smudges and water flows. The camera, however, does not have its own will - it simply records. Where in painting, a stroke can ruin or make a masterpiece, a camera is forever slave to the reality (space-time) before it. Frenhofer tries to create 'a tactile painting'; aren't all filmmakers also trying to create 'a tactile reality'?

The fixed gaze is necessarily erotic. It expresses a desire to extract, to dominate, and to tame the object in the subject-object relationship (filmmaking, film viewing and film criticism are erotic ventures). If a wandering gaze does not have a fixed locus (the world, acentered), the fixed gaze (the frame) is one that assigns meaning/gives the world representation in one or more signs. The objects independently do not have meaning; it is the gaze that assigns them its importance and turns them into signs whose depths are to be read/understood/penetrated. The signs in cinema - by virtue of the frame - becomes almost an obsession; they are fetishized, assigned more 'truth' (or objective reality) than other linguistic signs. The need to extract their 'essence' - both on the filmmaker and on the viewer's part - indicates a violation, a change in its quality.

That is why, in The Man Who Left His Will on Film and many other Oshima films, sexual violence figures so much: Motoki rapes Yasuko to impose his will on her (just as filmmakers/viewers impose their wills on reality); Yasuko is raped in the end by random strangers when she tries to disrupt Motoki's rendition of objective reality. Similarly, in La Belle Noiseuse, Frenhofer puts Marianne in all manners of bizarre poses to extract a specific quality out of her. The result is a form of violation, as we can see in this exchange:

Liz: "First he wanted to paint me because he loved me, and then... Then because he loved me, he didn't want to paint me. It was me or painting, that's what he said."

Julienne: "I don't understand. It wasn't a question of life and death."

Liz: "Why not? They say when you're drowning you suddenly see all your life. All the forgotten memories. In a fraction of a second. Is it really possible to capture a whole life on the canvas of a painting? Just like that... with a few traces of paint. It seems unbelievable, but actually this is what Frenhofer was searching for."

Julienne: "You mean this is something shameless?"

Liz: "Yes that's it... shameless. It's not the flesh that's shameless, it's not the nudity...it's something else."

What the artist needs is to tame the untame-able (metaphysics, truth), film the unfilm-able (emotions, politics etc), bring himself to the extremes. But this creates a whole set of problems, issues with phemonenology, semiology and morality that the artist has to overcome.

What is the filmmaker's responsibility to the object then? Frenhofer's painting irrevocably changes Marianne, making her discover things she never knew about herself. Soon, the painting acquires an almost mystical quality, almost like an incantation that would change their reality. Cinema is an incantation too, only all the more potent since it uses space and time as its canvas. Filmmakers are almost involuntary in this creative process; Frenhofer mentions that it is not what he wants out of Marianne that is important, but what the painting wants out of both of them - they are merely involved in its own creation, and it is this letting go that most artists fear. Filmmakers have even less control over reality - the camera is even more objective than the pen - and so overcompensate by having many other functions (production design, sound design, acting). In spite of this, a film gives birth to its own reality.

Politics and Entertainment

I haven't been paying much attention to the rabid fan reviews of Iron Man online. But I was more than a little shocked to see the film's opening weekend gross reach over $100 million in the U.S. alone. Really? Iron Man? I was one of those who went to see it on its opening weekend, in a packed theatre filled with college students and more than a few overweight comic book fans. Did I enjoy it? I'm not sure. I think so, since I didn't doze off once. I could certainly appreciate it - its CGI was beautifully rendered, its pace was snappy. But its politics sit uneasily with me.

I'm not sure if any critic took up this issue, but it's not really a case of 'it's just a popcorn movie so chill the fuck out.' Iron Man is an overtly political popcorn movie; whether it is social relevance or propaganda, it is clever positioning nevertheless since its release coincides with the heat leading to the presidential elections. From the first scene, which begins in American-occupied Afghanistan, it puts itself right out there in the realm of current events; before the title is shown, there is already a 'beheading video' scene. Leslie Bibb's journalist role and her insistent questions on arms sales to 'terrorist nations' is an unsubtle jibe to the Bush administration. It is not that we are looking too much into the movie, the movie is so politically aware that it's alarming how everyone chooses to ignore all these politics just to be 'entertained.'

Hollywood, emblem of the capitalist system, does little to question its political conscience: anything that makes money goes, regardless of its politics. And so we see how, as the tide changes, Hollywood changes its politics accordingly. I won't comment on its current political inclinations, but Iron Man presents an extremely right-wing agenda that is, while critical of the current administration, conservative in many ways. It never questions American imperialism, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, implicitly assuming the stance that America is 'liberating' these countries from evil terrorists. Being American, it is natural for the film to protect its country's agendas (hence, like movies of old, it comes up with the simple equation: America = good, Foreign Other = bad), but these political problems are handled with such caricatures that it oversimplifies every issue. The terrorists are so vicious that they might as well be the grotesque xenomorphs in the Aliens series. Their ideology (thankfully Islam isn't mentioned here) is never stated; the simple fact that they are anti-America makes them threats that need to be exterminated.

Without the risk of being racist (at least the film portrays a 'good' Middle-Eastern in the beginning - ethnicities are fudged here, but let's give it the benefit of doubt), the film nevertheless gives us a village of innocent Afghans that need to be 'liberated' from evil terrorists, painting an altogether one-sided picture that is frankly no different from war propaganda movies. It is this extent of propaganda that makes me uneasy. If, even, the villain eventually shifts from the terrorists to an evil war profiteer in the end (ironically making capitalism the ultimate evil), it only goes to placate the bourgeois mentality of being just a little anti-establishment - the establishment here being the Evil Corporations that everyone hates (no matter that the movie itself was financed by several Evil Corporations).

The film definitely cannot be understood as anti-capitalist: the hero, Tony Stark, once was an amoral war profiteer, and is a huge capitalist himself. The filmmakers give him the best position to be in: although it must be said that he undergoes a 'character change' after his ordeal in Afghanistan, he nevertheless remains filthy rich. He can thus enjoy the best of both worlds, enjoying his wealth and luxury without a guilty conscience, because he is now a good guy fighting off evil for the sake of the world. It is in such scenarios that the film takes on Hollywood clichés by building an attractive reality that attempts to supercede the real world. How convenient it is that the superhero should live in a technologically sleek mansion with advanced gadgets (awesome!) and sleek cars (cool!), Hollywood's fantasy life exaggerated and updated for the digital age. It eliminates struggle of any sort, making girls want to be with him and boys want to be him. Exactly how can a film this shallow attempt to portray politics?

And speaking of gender stereotypes, this film puts Hollywood back 50 years in this respect, what with Gwyneth Paltrow's hapless but ever-supportive damsel and the air stewardesses that turn into strippers (though, I must admit, it was a ridiculously funny gag). Even the female soldier at the beginning is a deep-voiced butch. It is insufficient to say that the film appeals to teenage male comic book audience that fantasizes about being as rich and powerful (and also as noble) as Iron Man; treating this audience as stupid says much more on the part of the filmmakers than the audience - and it is alarming how people could swallow this wholesale.

Is Iron Man a bad movie? Certainly not, it is a lot better than many of the recent blockbusters by virtue of the fact that it actually is entertaining. But where does entertainment end and politics begin?

Andy Warhol's Screen Tests

Sometimes, late at night when I can't sleep, I'd put on my DVD of Andy Warhol's screen tests. I'd set the speed on my DVD player to simulate the 18 fps they're supposed to be projected at. Slowly, ghosts of people long past would flicker on, resurrected once more to gaze into our world from their world of embalmed time. Though Warhol certainly intended the flicker rate of film to be part of his aesthetic, I'm not sure he'd totally disapprove of video, which has made his images democratic, and endlessly reproductive. These people, some celebrities, some never known, can now be summoned into our living rooms over the world, looking over at our lives with a little curiosity, a little sadness.

The fact is, the superstitions of ancient Chinese and Japanese people were right all along - once our image is photographed, we are dead at the moment, our doppelgangers condemned to roam in a spirit netherworld. Looking at the faces in Andy Warhol's screen tests feels like visiting a graveyard; these lives from half a century ago, wrested out of time, waiting; a memory, preserved forever.

Springtime

The camellia is blooming so violently it doesn't know it's weeping.

The Problem of 'Japanese-ness' in Ozu

I've been writing a few posts, but none of them ended up being posted. This is a paper I wrote a while ago. I don't think it's very good; I was planning to improve on it somehow but I simply couldn't find the time to do so. For now I think I'll just post this version online for whoever's interested. For ease of formatting, I won't post the footnotes and bibliography.

---

The Problem of 'Japanese-ness' in Ozu

Ozu has long been regarded by countrymen and foreigners alike to be the most 'Japanese' of Japanese directors, and much criticism surrounding his work has proceeded along this line. Critics have seized upon a uniquely 'Japanese character' to explain and reconcile the strangeness of Ozu's style, defining in Ozu's work a stylistic rigor that sets it apart from classical filmmaking. From the outset, this presents three distinct problems: 1) it presumes the desire to graft a national identity on an invention that is distinctly Western (one has to keep in mind that when cinema was first introduced in the Meiji era, it was regarded as another exotic foreign invention like the streetcar, or the radio), an undertaking that would place cinema in the realm of hermeneutics; 2) it presupposes a national identity which, if it in fact exists, can only be traced to the surviving arts (Japanese theater, literature, music etc.; their class connotations should also be duly noted) that can only draw a tenuous, if not completely irrelevant, parallel to the different nature of cinema; 3) it accepts Ozu as an auteur, an individual responsible for artistic decisions in a body of work that can be, for that reason, homogenized and arranged. Without addressing these contentions, any criticism regarding the work of Ozu is unfounded.

Before challenging these contentions, one must take a brief detour through the history of cinema. Cinema arrived as the solution for the representational/presentational problem which was the nexus of visual art since French Impressionism. It can be seen as the logical continuation of a continuous drive toward greater realism in the visual arts which, according to André Bazin, "delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy." As such, it evolved along very specific lines of Western art, eventually codifying itself (with D.W. Griffith in Hollywood) to represent a totality of illusion that draws near to reality. Découpage such as the close-up, dissolve, fade out and transition grew to acquire a very specific set of meanings, developing alongside a complex system of rules and behavior (such as the 180° line) that served to carefully preserve this illusion.

The age-old Western dichotomy of the physical and metaphysical presents a similar dualism in cinema, just as in any Western art - the split between form and content. Just as Italian Renaissance artists constructed a total illusion of reality through specific geometric functions, the pioneers of cinema constructed their own sets of rules to create a cinematic reality. This makes the function of cinema, to express a story or idea, fundamentally Western; the divorce between form and content (especially of note is cinema's heavy emphasis on the latter, due no doubt to the need for entertainment demanded by the class it was appealing to - the majority of early cinema-goers were those who previously attended the vaudeville theater) undeniably shaped the form of cinema.

Film critic Noël Burch, whose own title of his study on Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema, reflects this form/content distance, proposes that class differences were inextricably linked to the development of cinema, a popular mass media. Drawing a parallel between the coming of talkies and the rise of attendance among the bourgeoisie class, Burch delineates a clear line between the interests of the proletariat (of whom silent cinema previously appealed to) and the bourgeoisie (who was interested in cinema as a continuation of theater, a more accepted art form). Arguing that popular theater forms, such as kabuki and bunraku, were well attended by the bourgeois class that came into dominance, he draws a similarity between silent Japanese cinema and these traditions.

Indeed, it is interesting to note the ways in which Japan adapted this Western invention. The benshi, a person who commentated on the film with its projection, was a uniquely Japanese feature and significant figure in the silent film era, sometimes attracting more audiences than a movie star would. These audiences would, at the beginning of the performance, call out his name in a manner that recalls a kabuki performance. Because of his presence, Burch argues, "a fragmentation of the representational gesture could not help but be produced." Heavily influenced by Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs, Burch sees in Japanese theater a transparent textuality that fragments the simultaneous 'texts' that, in the West, would constitute a cogent narrative diegesis. The benshi's commentary thus becomes "a reading of the diegesis which was thereby designated as such and which thereby ceased to function as diegesis and became what it had in fact never ceased to be, a field of signs. The most 'transparently' representational film, whether Western or Japanese, could not be read as transparent by Japanese spectators, because it was already being read as such before them, and had irrevocably lost its pristine transparency." The implication behind this is obvious - Burch has seen Japanese cinema (especially from the silent era) as a direct continuation of a long lineage of Japanese theatrical traditions.

Now this line of argument would not be salient, if not for the fact that there are many traits in Japanese cinema that seem to corroborate this (the negligence of the aforementioned Hollywood 'codes' could be seen as disregarding the need to construct a total reality). But assuming such a relation is immediately foregoing the hermeneutics that stand behind it. Assuming the collective aim of Japanese film directors was to continue their own Japanese tradition, - and whether or not this is true remains highly debatable - they would have to find cinematic equivalents for traditions such as the kabuki's hanamichi, the haiku and tanka's strict metric structure, and the renga's complex intertextuality and its unique linguistic features such as the kakekotoba (pivot word) and the makurakotoba (pillow word). Viewed in this perspective, it is then easy to see how Ozu's strict style could fall prey to these theoretical interpretations.

Albeit, it must be said that an ethnological reading of Japanese cinema is inevitable by nature of the medium. The photographic lens gives its images an un-challengeable objectivity that makes it fall prey to such easy readings. It plasters them to their surroundings (Japan); the language of the intertitles (Japanese) and their skin color and costumes betray the film by speaking for them even before they have spoken. To put it in another way, had there been no notion of Ozu being Japanese, had he been a writer and was writing in English about England instead, we would not look at his work with the a priori notion that there is something intrinsically Japanese about it. Takamura Kōtarō says, interestingly, that "Something made by a Japanese is in the end Japanese. It ends up being Japanese. It does, even if you don't mean to make it that way." This level of being 'Japanese', however, as David Bordwell argues, is so basic that "it must also have affected every Japanese filmmaker, every artist, indeed every individual in the culture." How then, can Ozu be more Japanese than other Japanese film directors?

The fundamental problem of such a statement is that a 'Japanese-ness,' a shared national identity for which Ozu is seen as the spokesman, is extremely hard to locate and define. In trying to explain away the exoticism of 'the other,' Western critics (and indeed, some Japanese critics) have turned to Japanese cultural traditions for the answer. Critics such as Donald Richie and Marvin Zeman have imposed (and here I must stress this term, as the evidence they present for it is slim at best) rhetoric forms used in Japanese poetry and literature such as mono no aware, yugen, wabi, and sabi, inadvertently contributing to the conception of Ozu as a very 'Japanese' filmmaker. Yet these terms themselves contain major problems that are ignored when conveniently employed.

The notion of these terms as aesthetic categories only arose during the Meiji era when Japan was confronted with a long-standing Western philosophy; it is through coming to terms with a foreign 'other' that Japan had to define its culture. Its methods are thus invariably linked to the West, either using Western aesthetic methods (the Japanese language has previously been insufficient for conceptual and theoretical thinking), or reacting to it (the notion of metaphysics is gradually rejected for a pre-Socratic model of non-dualism, creating the popular notion of Japanese culture as a Buddhist unity of the transcendental and the ephemeral). It is thus worth noting that Japanese aesthetic categories developed in relation to the West, and are not innocent products of a long-standing cultural tradition.

Promoting rhetoric forms in poetry and literature to the realm of aesthetic categories creates a major problem: rhetoric forms are native, but aesthetic categories are universal. Japanese aestheticians such as Ōnishi Yoshimori thus had to explain these in terms of an understandable ideology to the West. Okakura Kakuzo, with his influential work The Book of Tea, is another pertinent attempt at explaining Japanese culture to the West. But these thinkers, regardless of how close they come to universalizing the particular, inevitably leave out many other aspects and nuances that a universal principle cannot contain. In trying to unravel these myths to the West, they might have created and sold new myths that contribute to the West's (mis?) conception of Japan. Ōnishi, in particular, defines the new aesthetic category of aware as a 'world-weariness' that has since been picked up by many other Japanese writers and sold to Donald Richie as a simple notion (Donald Richie defines it as “a slightly sweet and sad quality as appreciated by an observer sensitive to the ephemeral nature of the existence; 'the pity of things'," somewhat conflating it with mujō.). Yet, we find in Motoori Norinaga's original text, an extremely complex and paradoxical meaning that is difficult to define. It is then, perhaps, the act of defining that shortens a concept's virility.

Applying such concepts to Ozu's films presents another major problem: these conventions, used in different art forms such as poetry and painting, can only serve as metaphors as best and should never be used literally. In explaining Ozu's films, critics often rely on such easy interpretations, in part because Ozu never comments on the meaning behind his eccentric stylistic choices. His direction of actors brings to mind the ceremonial quality of both nō and the tea ceremony; his empty still-life's seem to be as devoid as meaning as the post-modernist readings of the Japanese haiku (see Roland Barthes and Nishitani Keiji), or the mu in Japanese painting. Even Burch's use of the term 'pillow-shots' to describe Ozu's still-life's imply that Ozu borrowed directly from Japanese poetic techniques found in renga.

However, the assumption that Japanese film directors were naturally inspired by a heavy cultural tradition does not find much grounding in history. Although it has been mentioned that film directors formed communities like white-collar salary-men in the different film companies, there is little evidence to support the claim that they had consciously drawn on these conventions (though Mizoguchi later declared that he wanted to recreate the Japanese picture scroll format through cinematic terms). If considered through the lens of class differences, as Burch proposed, such Japanese cultural traditions might seem a little high-brow for an emerging medium whose popularity parallels that of the comic strip and serialized fiction more than the quiet refinement of nō and the tea ceremony. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that Ozu started making films in a milieu that was undergoing a sweep of modernization after the devastating Kantō earthquake of 1923. Hollywood films and new 'Western ways' were flooding Japan in a second wave of capitalism. Shochiku's studios, which were being rebuilt at the time, took as its model Hollywood modes of production to ensure a steady stream of films. Ozu's borrowing of Hollywood films as models for his early movies might thus be placed within the 'modernizing' urge of the milieu at the time, although this reason can only be partial and not completely satisfactory.

It is then, to Ozu’s later style that the critics turn to locate this ‘Japanese-ness.’ Often seen as essays on nostalgia and an acknowledgment on the mutability of the world, it is interesting to note the contradiction inherent in this equation. The world that his characters feel nostalgic for – the lost era of the 30s pre-war Japan – has never been portrayed favorably in Ozu's films of that period. Critics have then presumed a shift in Ozu’s style toward a more ‘Japanese’ outlook, dividing Ozu's work into 'periods,' where his style naturally came into ‘maturity.’

Yet, dealing with a notion as loose as 'Ozu's style' presents intrinsic problems. By tackling Ozu's body of work as a single entity, one is implying a coherency within an individual's output, an authorial responsibility that is consistent throughout. This theory in film, the auteur theory, is not without its challengers, especially considering the fact that Ozu was operating within a medium that is susceptible to many influences. Defining a single style that extends throughout is yet another act of metaphysics, pushing the particular (each film) toward a universal (a corpus of films), in the process eliminating (or, less drastically, dimming) the incongruencies that do not contribute to a 'theory.' This blind spot is often either taken as a granted or, in Noël Burch's book, explained away using value judgments (he dismisses the late films of Ozu as 'frozen academicism').

Ozu himself is no help in this matter. At times implying that his films are self-expression ("I hope to make films which clearly show my own self."), he also admits to submitting to commercialism (as, after Yoshida Kiju accuses him of pandering to young audiences in End of Summer (1961), Ozu muses, "After all, film directors are like prostitutes under a bridge, hiding their faces and calling customers."). Ozu himself is an unreliable 'text.' Preferring to talk through metaphors and riddles, he often sounds like a Zen master answering a student's question with a paradox. Indeed, his witty responses and Buddhist background has led many a scholar to draw easy interpretations between his biography and his work. But just as we can find many instances in Ozu's words to corroborate a conception of mu and mono no aware in his work, so too can we find many instances to contradict this. Ozu's words and lifestyle do not contribute in creating a uniform authorial personality strong enough to withstand a comparison between author and work. In any case, to devote more space to the auteur theory is perhaps both irrelevant and beyond the scope of this paper - David Bordwell has dealt with this at length in the context of Ozu.

The question of 'Japanese-ness' and a 'Japanese identity' becomes even more muddled here, when considering the extra-diegetic world created by Ozu's interviews and habits. If scholars are too quick to point out a 'Japanese-ness' in Ozu's films, Ozu too definitely corroborated in creating this illusion. Even without any knowledge of Ozu's Zen-like aphorisms ("I am like a tofu maker."), the similar seasonal titles of his later films - which may evoke a comparison with Japanese poetry conventions - and the number of films named after "Tokyo" definitely betray a certain self-awareness. The camera lens inevitably placed the films in a specifically Japanese milieu, but it is through this style of naming that Ozu emphasizes this milieu and brings this to the forefront. Whether or not there was a 'Japanese-ness' to be found, Ozu certainly wanted people to look for it. The titular similarities (not to mention the similarities in plot) construct an intertextuality that extends beyond a single film - according to Noda Kōgo, Ozu's frequent collaborator, the scriptwriting duo would go through previous screenplays for inspiration. It might have been Ozu's way of forcing the viewer to look at his work as a singular 'corpus.'

However, Ozu's work does not make such a reading easy at all; despite accusations of making the same film over and over again, a general survey of Ozu's films reveal many variations. Critics who compare his films to a Japanese aesthetics, including Donald Richie, often choose to ignore his early films, which borrowed heavily from Hollywood. Days of Youth (1929), Ozu's earliest surviving film, recalls both Harold Lloyd (Girl Shy [1924], A Sailor Made Man [1921]) and Ernst Lubitsch (The Marriage Circle [1924]); the Japanese New Wave film directors who accused Ozu of being conservative and feudalistic could not have been referring to his Hollywood-style gangster films Walk Cheerfully (1930) and Dragnet Girl (1933), which featured Japanese versions of 'hoods and dames.' A viewer used to the bourgeois families Ozu is famous for would be surprised by a late work like A Hen in the Wind (1948) with its uninhibited depiction of post-war squalor. Critics often deal with this problem by employing value judgments, considering only his work from Late Spring (1949), his 'mature style.' Even then, Ozu's early work is stylistically similar enough to be mistaken for anything other than an Ozu film - the framing that Burch wrongly calls 'flat' has already been present from Ozu's silent films onward; a device that Ozu uses to depict huge changes in emotion through cutaways such as the famous vase scene in Late Spring was already in place from The Lady and the Beard (1931). It is clear that Ozu did not significantly change his style of filmmaking, but merely approached different subject matter; this argument is insufficient as it chooses the aspects of Ozu's work it needs for its theoretical argument, and throws the rest away.

However, it is indeed undeniable that Ozu's films have changed from his early years to the later period of his life, but whether or not they have become more adept at portraying a 'Japanese' outlook on life is highly debatable. Even the films defined within Ozu's 'mature style' do not thrive as a homogeneous whole, defying such easy generalizations. Ozu is famous for his depiction of the dissolution of family in Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), but he also tackles themes like adultery in Early Spring (1956), marital issues in both Early Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), unwanted pregnancies and suicide in Tokyo Twilight (1957). Saying his films are all about a 'philosophy of acceptance' as Donald Richie has done is a gross simplification of his diverse style. In an extensive study done on the variations of Ozu's film style, Bordwell points out that both formally and thematically, Ozu often subverts the style he is famous for by setting up a set of intrinsic norms, only to undermine and contradict them to emphasize the dissonance. "Ozu's parametric play valorizes nuance...by posing problems, by asking that we search for principle that order such finesse." Yet, the overriding meaning that consists of these norms and their subversion remains elusive. "Not the least of Ozu's playfulness is to tease us with the possibility of a still broader unity that might enclose the entire dialectic; but it is a unity without closure, one that cannot be foreseen, one which we can only glimpse."

Ozu's style presents such a variety of incongruencies that defining his work as one singular style and figuring a philosophy behind it (such as what Burch, Richie, and Yoshida has done) falls into the danger of imposing one's own philosophy on a work. The 'meaning' of any one scene or shot is always equivocal and ambiguous; yet it does not foreclose the fact that Ozu intended the search for meaning to continue nonetheless. Ozu tries to construct a single body of work, but this body is fractured, irregular, and impossible to read.

Bordwell finds in Ozu's films documents about “everyday life,” an aspect which critics like Richie, Sato, Schrader almost unanimously agree on. If, indeed, Ozu sought to create reflections that faithfully reflected contemporary life, it is inevitable that we see a change in style and tone of his films. A hint of this could be found in a comment made earlier in his career, in 1933: “The Japanese life-styles are not appropriate for motion pictures at all. For example, when characters open a sliding door and enter a house, they have to sit down and take off their shoes. there are many interruptions and delays in their motions. therefore in Japanese films, such life-styles filled with interrupted actions, have to be modified to be suitable for the motion pictures. the actual Japanese lifestyle should become more cinematic." Instead of incorporating an abstract idea of 'Japanese-ness,' Ozu seemed more interested in creating a cinematic form that could suit the rhythm of Japanese life. Perhaps it is in such a statement, that one can begin to search for an answer to his idiosyncratic style.

if you listened carefully

Bruegel; The Harvesters

if you listened carefully
you might hear the beating of wings;
figures crouched low in wait --
the corn fields all silent,
and endless foxfires ceasing
in the cold country of this wild, wild night.

Year 2007 in movies (part 2)

5. Paprika

In our content-saturated world, media is our new religion, advertisements our new icons for veneration. Instead of images as sacred intermediaries to another reality, there is now a constant attack of images on our psyche that we don't pay much attention to. The result is a merging of reality. Where in the past, dreams become the repository for images that we see, now real life is so filled with these images that its quality has become almost dream-like without us noticing.

In Paprika, characters dive into billboards, jump through video camera lenses, merge into paintings of classical mythology. "Don't you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents, " says Paprika, the eponymous red-head girl who is the dream alter ego of the real life Dr. Atsuko (or is Atsuko the alter ego of Paprika? Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream is repeated several times in eerily sinister ways), in a conversation on the internet that is portrayed as being as real as reality. With animation, you never know which reality is real, because they are all unreal. The internet, TV, and perhaps more primitively, cinema, are all outlets where the world dreams collectively. Chuang Tzu's dream in our modern age is multiplied like endless reflections between two mirrors. Our realities have become so fractured and fragmented that the modern man is never just one person anymore; reality is not just blurred, the concept of reality is altogether irrelevant.

There is a sleep condition called 'lucid dreaming,' which refers to the state of being fully conscious while dreaming. While knowing that he is in a dream, the dreamer is in full control of his dream, becoming God temporarily, able to manipulate and mold reality to his wishes. From my own experiences, this is possible up to the point where the dream regains control of itself and imposes something extraordinary - often nightmarish - on the dreamer. That is the point where the dreamer tries to shake himself awake; but this is often difficult, and the dreamer is trapped inside his own nightmare, unable to escape. Satoshi Kon (and perhaps also novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui) must be familiar with this, because although it is often funny and exuberant, Paprika is also terrifying in this way. Although now, it can be said, our waking life has become our playground for lucid dreaming. We are all lucid dreamers; one day our reality will regain control, and we would be trapped in a nightmare of our own making.


4. The Duchess of Langeais (Don't Touch the Axe)

Getting to like a new filmmaker is just like learning a new language - it always seems incomprehensible and impenetrable at first, and after the initial awkwardness of learning a few words, you soon begin to know what to expect, and then subsequently you can just slip into it as comfortably as you would with other languages.

It is altogether humbling when a filmmaker who began his career more than 50 years ago, and who influenced countless of filmmakers, is still making films as powerful as this today. The Cahiers crowd glorified the power of mise-en-scène in their criticism, but none of them - none - has perfected the much-feted concept as well as Jacques Rivette. Rivette's films are each a palpable reality, at once enigmatic and oneiric, his figures move around the frame as corporeal entities in a dance with the camera.

Having seen Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress around the same time, I was naturally more immediately drawn to Breillat's acute psychological realism. Though both deal with sexual politics that play out like theater - the novels on which they are based on are the stages on which the drama is played - both films are as different as waking life and dream. It might be useful to compare both films to see the merit of Rivette's film - ultimately it will be Rivette's that haunts your mind. I will now try to find reasons for this.

Breillat's film gropes for (and grasps) the reality of the characters' games by depicting them with an accurate feel for the social and psychological milieu, due, in large part, to some dazzling acting by Asia Argento; in a sense, she locates the reality of the characters within the stage of the tragedy. Rivette's film, as many of his films do, strains for the reality that lies elsewhere, beyond psychology and society, perhaps in a realm of spirituality, or perhaps it is a realm that is not even spirituality anymore. Breillat's film locates the metaphysical through logic while Rivette's film is squarely located in the metaphysical. If Breillat's film, like Italian Renaissance art, uses precisely constructed geometric perspective, then Rivette's film is like the Flemish Renaissance, where perspective and space is intuitively felt. Breillat makes you understand the metaphysical, but Rivette makes you feel it.

To look at how Rivette does this would warrant a lot more words, and I'm probably the least qualified to do this, even more so when I've yet to see much of his important work (Out 1 and L'Amour Fou to say the least). There are two scenes in this film, however, that are perhaps the most affecting I've seen in cinema this past year, and they are worth pointing out. Both are pivotal scenes in the story, and what Rivette does with them using cinema is incredible. One is a scene in the middle of the film that marks its turning point. In Balzac's original novella, the scene is written with a frank brutality, a raw realism that makes it almost like rape; in Rivette's film, however, this becomes a scene that hovers on the edge of consciousness, still brutal and nightmarish, but at once immediately physical and oneiric at the same time. The other scene is the film's ending - a pan to emptiness, the horizon, like the 'dash' in writing, disappearing into infinity, into speechlessness and silence.

Jean-Luc Godard's Week End

To put it in Godard's own words, the only way to really talk about film is to make a film itself. What makes his work interesting is that it is never cinema, but cinema about cinema. And thus, writing about Week End, a film about films, not only seems redundant, but a little foolish as well.

Much as we would like to assume Week End provokes discussion, Godard throws a huge fuck-you in the face of his audience (faux-intellectuals like me) in the opening scenes. "ANAL-YSE," instructs a film title that interrupts a long 'erotic' (is anything truly erotic in Godard's films? Or does he reflect eroticism?) monologue that is shot in a restless one-take that frames and re-frames its characters.

This nihilistic satire is not without its own humor though. The many brawl scenes are played out with an outrageous physicality that borders on slapstick; the (in)famous long tracking shot that shows the couple stuck in a traffic jam from hell with animals, yachts, and picnicking people in line is pure cinematic grandiloquence (Godard supposedly did the scene, which included 300 tracks in total, just to piss off his producer); every character in the film is murderous, and always angry. One scene shows the couple, stranded from a car accident, wandering in the forest and meeting Emily Brontë and an unnamed philosopher, a pair antithetical to the couple, full of graces and gentility. Brontë, the only character in the film that still sees beauty in rhymes and riddles, is burnt alive by the impatient couple, when she wouldn't give them directions out of the forest. 'Isn't it cruel to burn a philosopher?' the husband asks the wife. 'What do we care? She's not real anyway.' 'You know,' replies the husband. 'We are little better than her.' The only advantage that these ugly characters have over her is the fact that Godard has made them the protagonists of the film, and like them or not, they are the ones we have to watch till the end; their superiority comes only by birth (if characters are mankind, and the filmmaker is God), hence theirs is a class struggle similar to reality.

Their consciousness of this relates the underlying class struggle in every movie, film noir, horror or otherwise. The only reason why other characters die in a serial killer movie is purely random coincidence designated by the author. Whether or not the main characters are worthy of survival means nothing but for the fact that they are picked by the hand of the author to carry the story to its conclusion (although certain types of films might conform to a discernible moral code: in slasher movies the sexually promiscuous die first; Hitchcock killed his main character halfway through in Psycho and we see how shocking this effect is, even though by the code, that character deserved to die). This altogether existentialist theme comes through, especially, because the two main characters in Week End are resolutely annoying.

As in many of Godard's 60s period films, these characters know fully well that they are characters in a film, and constantly address the camera or refer to themselves as unreal. But what is 'real' anyway, when our perception of ourselves is only the relationship between how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others perceiving us? Reality - by that term encompassing self and society - as we know it, is nothing but reflections of more reflections, endlessly refracting and changing its quality as it passes through people. Although the nature of film makes it a pseudo construct, it can be also said to be a reflection when the author means it to be. If film is also a reflection of a reflection, isn't it a reality too?

The husband's comment: 'We are little better than them' makes sense when seen in this light - they might be little better than the people that are killed off, but we (the audience) are little better than anyone else in the film too. Framing this in its meta-context, when we have characters that know their innate quality (that they are merely characters), they cease to be inferior to us. In fact, these characters might even be superior to us, because they know themselves, but we - whether as individuals or as a society - including the filmmaker himself, Jean-Luc Godard, do not know ourselves. We look at the film, and the film looks back at us in utter contempt and disgust.

The film does not look at this as an absolute truth though; like many meta-films, there is a deep distrust of itself as a film. A manipulation/exploitation/distortion of image-realities is always suspect in its many (intentional or unintentional) political implications. Being a film 'aware' of itself, being a film that in parts exposes the manipulation of images through images (which, although paradoxical, might be the best means; it reminds me of Haneke's experiment in Funny Games), Week End never allows empathy with actions. In this regard, it can appear surrealistic to some extents. A scene features a frustrated concert pianist playing Mozart on a grand piano in a farmyard - his audience: a few scattered people and a whole lot of heavy farming machinery. In one long take that sweeps across the farm as it travels, people are put on the same plane as the landscape; it seems as if the audience were the steel vehicles rather than the humans.

To Godard, it is not ironic that technology has wrested the power over the world from humanity's hands. One could not easily forget the melancholic image of the wrinkled ex-film noir super spy Lemmy Caution quietly contemplating a gregarious hydraulic machine in Godard's disillusioned, information/technology-saturated Germany Year 90 Nine Zero. The product of the industrial revolution and civilization's need for some form or progress (regardless of what form) has resulted in the dominance of tools (one of which is cinema). These tools are the same weapons wielded by the Western civilization for purposes of imperialist hegemony, out of which capitalism is unleashed. Machinery, war, genocide are all poisonous waste produced by civilization (which, for argumentative purposes, we'll consider as uniquely Western).

Undoubtedly, it is a gross simplification of a complex evolution which can only point to one solution - a naive ideal of socialism (which is how I see Godard's thought to have evolved). But Godard finds a strong metaphor to express this theory, in which J.G. Ballard, and later David Cronenberg found a kinship - the car crash. It is a culmination of Western progress, ambitions, and also every form of entropy that is thrown in the way. And so Week End is littered with terrific crashes and copious amounts of blood - or, as Godard puts it, 'red paint.'


The artificiality of the image does not condone its complicity; there is nothing more political than the image. Godard intercuts a series of politically correct tableaux mixing people of different races and classes with an intertitle that accuses photography of becoming 'FAUX-TOGRAPHIE.' The fact that reality can be arranged, manipulated into a coherent reality - that is able to prolong its temporal existence - makes the image propaganda, whether or not the image itself believes in its politics. If considered on all the implications an image can make in its reality, then one cannot take the image lightly - even the placement of African and Arab characters in the film becomes charged with political meaning. It is more than a little chilling that the call-to-arms uttered by these characters in the film are the exact ones that are still being uttered today, 40 years later. In using these characters as mouthpieces for a diatribe against the West's neglect of the 'Third World', it is inevitable that we reach the other pole of this politics instead. They are reduced to symbols; tools to serve another design (in this case, Godard's design). It is perhaps, then, only socialist enough that Godard treats all his characters and designs as pure symbols.

Perhaps influenced by the situationists at the time, the film acts as one to drive people out of the cinemas; to destroy the shaded environment - the cinema - in which audiences replace spectacle for the real world. In Godard's Le Petit Soldat 7 years ago, a character might have declared that 'photography is truth, hence cinema is truth 24 frames per second,' but that ideology only seems naive now. Cinema - especially the hyperreal form of the musical, as parodied toward the end of the film - becomes a form of idealism that will forever disappoint. Equally unattainable as the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity), the political ideals of the repressed 'Third World,' musical and fantasy scenes - albeit with politics more subtly shaded - are also doomed to be corrupted by the real world. Quoting Georges Perec in Masculin Féminin, a character sighs while watching a film, 'It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make... and secretly wanted to live.' If we attempt to replace this spectacle with reality, cinema will forever remain for us a disappointment. Hence, Godard's proclamation of 'FIN DE CINÉMA' at the end of the film is a call to subsume cinema with life, striving together for the ideal, and anticipating his purely political films with the Dziga Vertov Group.