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?