Vir Heroicus Sublimis, and Me

One of the things I had marked down to do in New York, was to finally see, in the flesh, Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis.  Man, Heroic and Sublime.  This is one of my paintings.  I have read about this painting.  I have written about this painting.  I have pored over prints of this painting, comparing the various shades of glossy art-book orange and trying to imagine what that orange might actually be.  I have wondered about the quality of the paint – are there visible strokes?  Or is it smooth and flat?  I have thought about the purpose of the zips – those five bold slashes that divide the canvas.  I have bored people at parties talking about this painting.  Most of all, I have pondered the affect of this painting.  When faced with it, is the experience really sublime?

Jean-Francois Lyotard, who wrote a lot about Newman’s work when exploring his own understanding of the sublime noted,

What distinguishes the work of Newman from the corpus of the ‘avant-gardes’, and especially from that of American ‘abstract expressionism’ is not the fact that it is obsessed with the question of time – an obsession shared by many painters – but the fact that it gives an unexpected answer to that question: its answer is that time is the picture itself.

Time is the picture itself. What a curious and engaging conclusion.  For Lyotard, time in Newman’s work is immeasurable.  Nothing we see relates to a quantifiable, clock driven version of time.  There is no narrative, no beginning and end.  There is just the painting itself – the colour, the depth, the horizonless expanse.  To stand in front of such a work is to allow the tick-tock workings of daily life to evaporate.  It is to experience a time that is.

Despite his work’s formal characteristics, the rigorous classicism of their composition, Newman was fascinated by the idea of time in painting.  ‘The concern with space bores me.  I insist on my experiences of sensations in time – not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time.’  There are stories of Newman sitting for hours with his paintings, communing with them until they revealed themselves.  He was also hell-bent on painting as a form of communication, rather than statement.  In 1945, in an essay titled ‘The Plasmic Image’, he attempted to outline the basis for a new art, where ‘the shapes and colours act as symbols to [elicit] sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist’s vision.’  The new painting was also an act of sharing ideas:

Just as mathematics is a language that gives shape to thought, so the new painter feels that abstract art is not something to love for itself, but is a language to be used to project important visual ideas.  In this way, abstract art can become personal, charged with emotion and capable of giving shape to the highest human insight, instead of creating plastic objects, objective shapes which can be contemplated only for themselves because they exist between narrow limits of extension.

For Newman, everything was a dialogue, the act of painting, the act of writing, the act of looking.  He was a generous artist, always striving to provoke a conversation between painting and viewer.  This might be one of the reasons I like him.  There is nothing inward looking about Newman’s paintings – they are like gentle Socratic philosophers, wanting to stop you for a discussion, to ask questions of you and have you ask questions back.  They want to challenge you to think more deeply about all sorts of things.  Life, death, joy, sadness and why you’re rushing so fast to see everything, when you know that if you go too fast you won’t see anything.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis lives at MoMa.  It stretches along a wall beside a passageway that joins two galleries of Twentieth Century art.  People enter the room right beside it.  Many do not look at it; they are headed, armed with their cameras, for the works they recognize.  This suits me.  I am here for Vir Heroicus Sublimis, and I intend to give it the one thing it asks of me: time.

The painting is big, but not quite as big as I had imagined it.  This is poor visualization on my part – the works dimensions, 242.2 x 541.7 cm, are no secret.  It’s just that in the vast reaches of MoMa the canvas is surrounded by white, while in the photos of its first showing, it was part of Newman’s second solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, it covers an entire wall.  Newman conceived of it like this, the painting filling the wall so that the bottom of the canvas was at your feet and the colour spread out around you.  Looking at the work was to be an encounter, ‘It’s no different really,’ he wrote, ‘from meeting another person.’  There is a photo taken at the opening of this show, of Newman, Jackson Pollock and Tony Smith sitting beside Vir Heroicus Sublimis.  They are no more than a foot away from it.  Accompanying the show was a statement: ‘There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance.  The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.’

Vir Heroicus Sublimis is both lively and still.  It is lively, because there is something very much alive about Newman’s paint.  There is the colour, the warmth of the orange and the intensity of the red, and there is the decisiveness of the zips, slicing through the picture like a knife through a peach.  It is still, because as Lyotard observed, to really look at it requires you to stop.  To stop thinking about which room of the gallery you’re going to go to next, if you’ve seen everything on your list and whether it’s time for lunch.  I stopped because I was determined to stop, although around me the gallery was a blur of frenetic shutter release.  And after a few minutes of feeling like I was in everyone’s way, the noise of the gallery faded and the zips leapt and shimmered on the surface of the expanse.  They shifted, they switched places – it was impossible to pin them down.  It was surprising and I wasn’t sure whether to trust it.  Part of me thought I might have willed the sensation of being pulled into the painting, because after reading so much about the sublimity of Newman’s work, not to be moved would feel like being cheated.  But standing in front of this canvas, close enough so that the colour spread to fill my peripheral vision, the painting did have an extraordinary presence.  For Newman, painting and art-making were linked to spirituality, and for him, standing in front of a work of art is like worship.  You enter a place that is still, and in that stillness a movement begins.

Three Monkeys

There is nothing more disorienting than a film that turns on its head everything you have been expecting to see.  After reading the reviews, I thought Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2007) was going to be a bleak, arty picture with plenty of moody storm clouds and silent agony.  I was prepared to be bored – I wasn’t prepared to be scared.

After hitting a man on a lonely road one night, Servet (Ercan Kesal), an up and coming politician enlists his employee Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl) to take the fall.  It’s election time, and Servet doesn’t want a scandal.  Eyüp accepts the promise of a payment and goes to jail.  However, his son Ismail (Ahmet Rıfat Şungar) is in trouble – coming home after a bloody fight, Ismail bullies his mother into asking for the money in advance, while Eyüp is still in jail.  Hacer (Hatice Aslan) gets the money, and begins an affair with Servet.  Eyüp gets out of jail, and Servet dumps Hacer.  Ismail kills Servet, and Eyüp becomes the mirror of Servet, offering a migrant waiter a payout to take the blame for the murder.  Yes, it’s uplifting stuff.

About a third of the way through the film, the hot-headed Ismail slumps on his bed.  He suspects Hacer is having an affair.  Pushed to the edge of the frame, he sulks, and the desaturated room broods with him.  Outside, the midday sun is bright, the contrast making the sliver of world going on through the open doorway nothing but a small rectangle of light.  Then through this haze of sunshine, the outline of a small black figure emerges.  The figure has thin spindly legs and twig like arms, like the little stick boy.  I’m terrified of the little stick boy.

I watched this shadowy figure move slowly toward the room.  My arms prickled.  I said to Cadillac, ‘what’s that over there?’  It was eerie, the way horror movies desperately want to be, but usually fail because the audience, wanting to be frightened, is expecting too much.  The body was too small to simply be an adult in the distance, it was definitely a child’s body, but so far there hadn’t been any children in the film.  The little silhouette, distorted into a thin bony shape by the shallow focus, crept closer.  Ismail was gazing at the doorway through half open eyes.  ‘Maybe he’s dreaming, it must be a dream.’  I said, needing to make noise.  And then in a sudden cut a huge child’s face filled the screen, eyes ringed with bruised purple, droplets of water dripping from his ghostly, sallow skin.  ‘Brother?’ he croaked…and then he was gone.

Describing the scene now, it doesn’t seem nearly as surprising as it was, that first time.  The moment was so affective simply because I hadn’t been expecting it.  It was a truly uncanny moment, where what appeared familiar and predictable, the slow measured pace of an art house film, suddenly switched into something unknown. Freud wrote that for many, the feeling of the uncanny is most felt in ‘relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.’  The strangeness of seeing a body that was once filled with life, stilled, is disturbing because it doesn’t seem right.  In turn, once we grow used to the stillness, it is disturbing if the dead body suddenly whirrs into action.  Thus ghosts, being simultaneously dead and alive, are terrifying because they challenge both states.  Here, the film not only shows us a ghost, it also becomes a metaphorical ghost by transforming into a completely different kind of film.  The jolt is brilliantly affective, because the film leaps so suddenly into a different gear that it takes your body a while to catch up with it.

Asuman Suner has noted that Ceylan’s early films tend to position the home as a site of the uncanny, and in Three Monkeys, the uncanny home becomes the heart of the film.  Ceylan shows Istanbul as a place that represents both the ideal of home – a place of comfort and belonging – and the reality of home – a place of discomfort and loneliness.  For Can Eskinazi, ‘Three Monkeys is a peculiarly nationalistic eulogy, because what lies at the heart of this nationalism isn’t pride in national identity, but rather a quintessentially humanistic stance. It’s a recognition of the people’s ambivalence and failings, and a tribute to their endurance in the face of the human condition’ (Film Comment: May/June 2009) and I’m inclined to agree that Three Monkeys is a film that explores both being Turkish and being human.

The film presents characters who struggle with the pressures of living in a growing, flowing city, in a country whose national identity has been the source of an intense and contradictory upheaval.  For the lower middle class characters, Eyüp, Hacer and Ismail, integration into a rigorously secular and suddenly westernized world has no doubt created a sense of being out of place.  The sensation of the uncanny is a physical one – it leaves your body feeling unsure of its movements, you move awkwardly through motions that once felt natural and smooth.  It’s as if when ideology suddenly shifts, the soul is left behind, creating a gap and a sense of displacement.  This is why the moments of surprise in Three Monkeys are so brilliant.  They conjure up a magical cinematic experience by transferring the character’s shock into our bodies.

Claire’s Knee

Watching an Eric Rohmer film is, for me, like spending the afternoon in the company of a soulmate.  His worldview gently reinforces and complements my own and his good humour puts me at ease.  It’s so refreshing and relaxing to watch a Rohmer film.  It isn’t just the beautiful settings, the boating and the lazing about in the company of friends – it’s the warmth and lightness that his films have.  His characters are flawed, but they are always hopeful, optimistic and, even when they’re being practical or cynical, romantic. 

Claire’s Knee (1970) is one of the six moral tales.  The ‘morals’ here are rather fluid – in each film a man is tempted to stray but chooses not to, however, they all seem to be having plenty of other affairs, so the films are hardly promotions of fidelity.  In Claire’s Knee, Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a man ‘between the ages of 35 and 40’ we’re told, is holidaying by a lake.  There he meets a sixteen year old girl, Laura (Beatrice Romand), who develops a bit of a crush on him.  Laura is the kind of outspoken, glinty-eyed young woman I love, and she spouts a fair bit of dross that could quite easily have fallen out of my mouth at that age.  Like this:

I was born to be unhappy.  But no, I won’t be unhappy.  I’m very happy.  I only think of positive things.  People are unhappy because they want to be.  When I feel down, I think about how there are happy times, and that crying does no good anyway.  I think about how marvelous it is to be here, and how much fun I’m going to have.  Having fun is being alive.  For instance, today I’m very happy.  Tomorrow I may be sad.

Oh yes, there’s a certain amount of prescient wisdom there, but Rohmer perfectly captures that youthful desire to have a philosophy of life that you can lean on, one that somehow represents you.  Laura says all this with a rather naughty smile of course, in a bid to both define herself and dazzle Jerome with her precocity.  In the same scene she observes that Jerome’s fiancée is rather hard, cold looking, and that she expected him to be with someone warmer.  Ah, the naive bravado, it’s lovely.

 

Jerome isn’t interested in Laura, but toys with her for the amusement of his friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu), who is trying to write a short story about an older man who becomes infatuated with a young woman.  The cliche of all this isn’t lost on Aurora, at one point she observes, ‘It’s already been told.’  However, when Laura’s step-sister Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) arrives, Jerome finds she ‘disturbs him’.  Claire is a sunny blonde who shares none of Laura’s interest in older men.  She is in love with the arrogant Gilles (Gerard Falconetti), who treats her rather disrespectfully, but who she won’t leave.  Of course, nothing happens – Jerome obsesses over Claire’s knee ‘the most vulnerable part of her body’, and eventually dissipates his desire by stroking it. 

Claire’s Knee gives us an ensemble of complex people who are in turn, pleasant and unpleasant, oblivious and wise.  Jerome isn’t really someone I’d want to spend my holiday with, but while he can be a bit pretentious, he isn’t cruel and he makes some sage observations about relationships.  Rohmer’s shooting style allows the characters to reveal themselves through their actions and conversations.  His camera observes them from a respectful distance, empathizing without taking any one side.  There is plenty of space around them, and at no point are you locked into an enforced relationship with Rohmer’s characters – they sit comfortably in the frame, they come and go, and so can your gaze.  There is always enough in each shot for you to choose what you’re going to look at.

It’s an incredibly freeing watching experience – the mise-en-scene is simple, and the light sparkles.  Rohmer’s love of cinema is clear.  Every shot is infused with a joy that celebrates both life, and the cinema as a way of exploring it.

Quiet City

I love getting parcels in the mail.  Last week I arrived home from hanging in Sydney with these girls, to find this waiting for me in the letterbox.  I’d been looking forward to seeing Quiet City (Aaron Katz, 2007) for a while.  I usually love films described as ‘painterly’, and I also love films about New York.  Quiet City didn’t disappoint, although neither did it entirely fulfill my expectations.  The premise is a Before Sunrise-like one, two strangers meet at a subway station and spend the next 24 hours getting to know one another while travelling the streets of Brooklyn.  It’s not, thankfully, a romance, although the way it’s shot is quite romantic.

The first image you see is a red sky, with the top of a crane jutting up into the frame in the left hand corner.  The film is connected by a string of these contemplative landscapes, and it’s hard to say whether it’s Jamie and Charlie, or the city that is the real main character.  Katz is from Portland, and there is something about the way he imagines New York that makes you see it through Jamie’s eyes.  The wonder of being in a strange new city for the first time and stumbling through it in unexpected ways is present in every lingering shot of the rooftops, the skies, the traffic signals and the trains.  It’s a lovely way to experience place in film.

Katz’s aesthetic is an idyllic one.  Halfway through the film Jamie and Charlie kill time in Prospect park.  The sun is just beginning to dip, and the camera is set at a low angle, catching the pale orange disc of the sun flaring across the frame.  The light cuts into the figures with that hazy afternoon glow that reminds me of after-school hours.  As some of you know, I love lens flare.  My honours thesis was mostly about how awesome lens flare is, and I once shot about ten minutes of nothing but lens flare – light streaming through the sky with the tops of trees glowing silhouettes.

I’ve been noticing that lens flare is becoming more and more popular.  In recent animations, like Wall E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), it has even been drawn in – a technical ‘accident’ carefully put into a film where this particular error couldn’t possibly occur.  Young, so-hot-right-now photographers like Ryan McGinley (sorry, Cadillac) are using it, and it’s popping up in ads and editorial spreads all over the place.  It’s a painterly way of using light, and as digital technology makes photography and film sharper, with truer colours and more accurate light capture, perhaps we want to pull away into something more emotive, more suggestive of memories and hopes.  The diffuse light quality of the flare makes images seem more immediate and more personal.  The glow suggests the intimacy of the home movie, and the overexposure creates washed out colours like the ones in family photos from the 1970’s.  It’s a strange pre-empting of nostalgia, the flare giving a shot the feeling of a memory before it actually becomes one.

It’s the way my generation see our childhood memories, and for people born in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, this dreamy aesthetic represents an era they just missed.  But why all this desire to make now into a premature then?  Maybe that’s just it – a lingering in childhood, a desire for that innocent time when life was a string of yellow afternoons in the park.

Wonder Boys

It seems that a lot of people I know have been having a bumpy time lately. Cadillac would say it’s the planets. He has a lot of faith in the planets. In any case, moody skies are a good excuse to curl up with a hot cup of tea and yes – a comfort film. I’ve had different comfort films at different times, but there are a few I just can’t stop watching. One of my favourites is Wonder Boys, a quirky academic dramedy directed by Curtis Hanson. Originally a novel by Michael Chabon, the best thing about this film is its wordy, quotable script.

Wonder Boys is a many-limbed story, with bit-parts and sub-plots galore. Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is a novelist who teaches creative writing while trying to complete his second novel, a family saga that has somehow written itself into a sprawling, unwieldy mess. It’s Wordfest, the university’s annual writing festival, and his ever-hopeful editor Crabtree (Robert Downey Jnr) has come to attend the festivities and check up on the book. Of course, the weekend takes one wrong turn after another, as any semblance of order unravels in the wake of the film’s irrepressible characters. There is Grady’s precocious but emo student James Leer (Tobey Maguire), his mistress and Vice Chancellor of the University (Frances McDormand), the doe-eyed Hannah (Katie Holmes), who rents a room in Grady’s house and has ‘published two stories in the Paris Review’, and a host of minor characters including Q (Rip Torn) a famous bestselling author who begins his lecture at Wordfest with the announcement: ‘I…am a writer.’ Yes, yes, yes. For much of the time Grady gets about in a fuzzy pink dressing gown that’s so visceral I can smell its soapy, sweaty scent. There’s a lot of rain, a university with sandstone buildings, creative writing classes, typewriters, a transvestite with a cowhide tuba case, an earthy, damp glasshouse and a pair of red cowboy boots.

Wonder Boys the film still feels a bit like a novel, but it works. The minor characters support the main players by engaging them in surprising conversations and escapades. It’s thick with funny, insightful dialogue, and a wry stream of narration provided by Grady. He describes his own inner space with a mixture of warmth and irony and that belies his fear that he may well have lost his talent. On the one hand the film is about talent, success, ageing, and becoming comfortable with oneself, but what makes Wonder Boys so enjoyable is that it’s also about telling stories. Each character tells the others their story of themselves, and the others respond by editing and re-writing this story. The master of this is James Leer, who compulsively creates new lives for himself, detailing events as though he is both a character and his own author. Like Grady, he narrates his actions. As he is hauled drunk out of a Wordfest lecture, he describes the scene. ‘They were going to the men’s room’ he reports, as Crabtree and a pudgy faced boy heave him through the foyer, ‘but, would they make it in time?’ As each new tale is revealed to be out of sync with the seeable reality, James emerges as a commentator on the way we all ease the awkwardness of our lives by transforming them into tales, both tall and true.

Let the Right One In

Yes, more vampires. Let the Right One In opens with a gentle sweep of snow cascading across the right half of the screen, while the credits scroll silently on the left.  It’s a captivating start to a film that is far more wistful and far less bloody than I was expecting.

Late one night, Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves into the apartment next door to Oskar’s (Kare Hedebrant).  Oskar, engrossed in enacting vengeful fantasies on the boys that bully him at school doesn’t notice, but a few days later they meet in the courtyard.  After observing that Eli smells funny (she’s hungry and in desperate need of blood), Oskar lends her his Rubicks cube.  Finding commonality in their loneliness, the two become friends.  This courtyard, surrounded by apartments on all sides is reminiscent of the housing complex in Kieslowski’s Decalogue, but here the buildings are clean and well maintained.  The snow is constantly fresh and the interiors are furnished in polished birch and coloured plastics.  People stay indoors.  There’s a close, small town feel about the place, but with the vast stretches of snow and sky, it’s also strangely airy.

 

The story is more about friendship, connecting, and dealing with bullies than vampires, but both elements are wedded together nicely – the final scene is both chilling and fantastic.  Oskar is an outsider because he is quiet and effeminate, while Eli is on the outside because she is a vampire, but both share the frustration of being disconnected. Despite her necessary murderous tendencies, Eli is a sweet vampire – it’s the group of boys who bully Oskar at school who are threatening.  While Eli acts on her need for food, the bullies plan and carry out their violence purely for the pleasure of seeing Oskar in pain, and their schemes to trap and hurt him are exacting in their orchestration.  The boys go about their cruelty with an unsettling naivety – here, it’s innocence that is dangerous.

 

I would’ve liked to see more of Eli’s relationship with her ‘father’ Hakan (Per Ragner), a man who lives with her and acts as a blood collector until he is caught in a bungled blood run.  Apparently, Hakan is developed in far more creepy and interesting ways in the original book, so it looks like I’ve got some nighttime reading to look forward to.  Also only touched on in the film is Oskar’s relationship with his father.  I thought the friend who Oskar seems to distrust might have been his father’s lover, but the interwebs inform me I’m mistaken.  Oskar’s father it seems, is an alcoholic who quickly forgets about Oskar when his friend arrives for a drink.

Let the Right One In is a beautiful looking film – in addition to all the snow, cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytemer uses the rule of thirds to compose most of his shots, creating still, balanced frames that are a joy to watch.  I loved the way the beginning and the end are linked by a shot of Oskar putting his hand against the window, leaving a warm print.  It’s just how the film presses gently into your eyes, leaving a faint but undeniable mark.

Climates

It’s hot.  The sun is painfully bright, and the sound of flies is thick and close.  We watch Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) watching her lover Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) photograph some ruins in Kas, a holiday destination in the south of Turkey.  Despite the open landscape the atmosphere is oppressive.  Bahar is bored.  She yawns leaning into a crumbling column.  Isa’s shutter clicks.  Bahar wanders over to him and hugs him.  He asks, ‘Are you bored?’ ‘No,’ she replies.  She walks up the hill and sits down.  In a long still shot, the camera watches her.  Her expressions shift.  Isa, looking too hard through the lens, stumbles.  Bahar’s gaze softens momentarily and she smiles, but in a heartbeat she is stony, and in the next, she begins crying, a tear sliding over her cheek.  The first non-digetic sounds – a Scarlatti piano sonata – that are later revealed to be digetic sounds from the following scene, kick in and the film cuts to the titles.

 

This opening six minutes is made up of ten still shots.  This uncomfortable stillness characterises the image and narrative flow in Climates (2006).  The long takes, and the disorienting trick of having the sound from a scene bleed well into the space of the previous one draws attention to the apparatus in a way that places the audience at distance, while at the same time, the flattening of space (a quality of the digital camera) and the use of extreme close ups create a feeling of suffocating closeness. In an interview with Sight and Sound’s Nick James, Ceylan observes, ‘Static shots excite me and they’re always in my films because I feel a disconnection from reality.  People are lonely in life, and in relationships between men and women you feel this even more.  This is the most tragic aspect of life, this melancholy: nothing else seems to be worth making a film about.’  The heaviness is unbearable, and riveting.

In his second cinema book, The Time Image, Deleuze points out that in post World War II cinema, characters were suddenly struck down with a restless malaise that caused them to drift aimlessly through the film.  ‘some characters, caught in pure optical and sound situations, find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip. […]  They are given over to something intolerable which is simply their everydayness itself’.  The bounteousness of his everyday is precisely Isa’s problem.  His life is a series of selfish actions.  He breaks up with Bahar because he feels bored, but then spends the second half of the film trying to convince her to come back.  He is working on a thesis he cannot finish, he takes more and more photographs, aimlessly looking for something he can’t put his finger on.  He wallows in the past, obsessively photographing ruins and seeking out former lovers.  Isa cannot stop moving – he goes from one place to another, taking then almost immediately discarding – but his life is stuck, and at the end of the film he is no nearer to feeling satisfied than he was at the beginning. 

 

His internal floundering is reflected in the way the landscapes he photographs always threaten to swallow him up.  In one long, wide shot he walks through the snowy countryside, almost obliterated by the flakes and the space around him.  In another he stands on a bridge under a thick grey sky, the weight of the clouds pushing down into the bottom half of the screen.  The cutting too, jumps with an excess of energy.  Whole events are elided.  When Isa breaks up with Bahar, he we see him sitting on the beach watching her swim, while going over what he is going to say in his head.  He repeats the lines, adjusting them a few times, and then the film jump cuts abruptly to Bahar sitting beside him.  He has broken up with her, and we have missed it.  The final scene between Isa and Bahar cuts together in an even more surprising way.  Bahar comes to see Isa in his hotel room as he has invited her earlier in the day.  She appears to fall asleep, and we are given a strange series of extreme close up shots of Bahar’s hair.  The images are disembodied, the zoom so tight individual strands of hair are clear.  At one point, Isa’s hand appears, at another Bahar’s eyes are open and she looks out from the lower left corner of the screen.  It’s disorienting and eerie and plays like a set of dream images or the scattered thoughts of an unstable mind.

I could go on about the explosive tears and the crumbling green walls of the apartments in Istanbul, but that would be giving away all the beauty and bewilderment.  Climates is not an easy film, but watching it is time well spent.

Boulder-Brooklyn

In two weeks time I am going to New York.  In New York, I am going to visit The Filmmakers Cooperative, and buy this collection of short experimental films by Joel Schlemovitz.

I started university as an experimental filmmaker.  I like classically structured films, but for me then, they were like lawyers.  The mere thought of making one was physically, mentally and financially intimidating.  Experimental film on the other hand, was like a warm, exuberant aunt.  It was immediate and accessible, all you needed were your ideas and a camera – and if you didn’t have a camera, someone else’s offcuts and a sharp object to scratch into the emulsion would do.  The footage could be assembled in ways that didn’t necessarily follow a plot and shots could be cut together according to theme, shape, colour, duration, to the rhythm of a song or the movement of the traffic on the M5.  During those three years, I created an array of short, curious pictures, some on video, some on film, some hand drawn and painted.  My reels were awkward, but it was a way in – I made films.

In 1962 Jonas Mekas and the other members of The New American Cinema Group wrote in their manifesto, ‘We believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression.  We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen.’  Mekas wanted films made with a greater proportion of love than money to be available to their audience, but in the 1960’s he couldn’t have imagined the accessibility the internet would bring.  The manifesto urges America to lead the way in ‘initiating the program of free passage of films from country to country’.  Fifty years later, the whole world has your film at their fingertips as soon as you upload it to Vimeo.  Sure, there is a lot of stuff out there, but if you’re looking for it you can find it, and there are ways of advertising too – just post a link to your film on your twitter feed, and bookmark it on delicious.  

 

You can watch one of the films from the Joel Schlemovitz DVD, Boulder-Brooklyn, here.  To create Boulder-Brooklyn Joel shot footage of Brooklyn on a roll of 16mm, and then sent it to Nicole Kocshmann in Boulder.  She shot footage of Boulder on the same roll of film, creating a sandwiching of the two places.  The images are unexpected and at times quite striking.  It’s a kind of overlapping, dancing exquisite corpse.  There is a moment where a waterfall cascades out of the top of a bridge, the images magically coming together to make a strange and joyous fountain.  Boulder-Brooklyn is a lovely conflation of the city and the country, with the waterfalls of Boulder shimmering over the streets of New York.  It’s a nice reversal of the initial layering that takes place when a city is built over, on top of and into the landscape.

Funny Ha Ha

Most of my friends are sick of hearing me talk about Andrew Bujalski, so now dear readers, it’s your turn.  Andrew Bujalski makes the kind of films I would like to make.  They’re funny, low-fi and at the same time beautifully shot, with hand held cameras and a spare composition style reminiscent of Eric Rohmer.  His characters meander, fumbling with endless possibilities, not quite sure what to do with all that privilege their college educations have afforded them.  Their problems are problems of the heart, of communication, of trying to articulate their desires, of trying to be honest with one another while finding that in order to be kind, it’s easier to lie.

 

Funny Ha Ha (2002) was Bujalski’s first feature.  Marnie is 23 and making stumbling steps at life after college.  She is in love with Alex (Christian Rudder), but Alex isn’t in love with her.  The film begins with Marnie stumbling into a tattoo parlour, although she has no idea what kind of tattoo she wants.  She has been fired from her job, and takes up a temping position, where she meets Mitchell (Andrew Bujalski) a nice boy without much self-esteem, who immediately falls in love with her.  They fall into a stilted friendship, while Alex gets married to his ex-girlfriend Nina (Vanessa Bertozzi), and Dave (Myles Paige) who has a seemingly stable and loving relationship with Rachel (Jennifer Schaper), also finds himself attracted to Marnie.

While this sounds like the stock synopsis for the twenty-something relationship indie, Funny Ha Ha differentiates itself through its wandering dialogue and understated performances.  The characters are awkward and daggy, they dress as people I know really dress – in holey t-shirts, ill-fitting jeans, and worn down sneakers.  They have messy hair, and look just as unpolished when they dress up for work or a party.  Their conversations are stilted, and the jokes that are made to dampen the awkwardness of relating never quite succeed in filling in the lulls.  The acting is spare, with most of the emotion passed on through the flickering facial expressions and hand gestures.  Shot on 16mm, the grainy, high contrast qualities of the film stock mirror the uncomfortable period of becoming the characters are living through.

 

Time in Funny Ha Ha goes slowly.  Marnie’s life unfolds in a series of unprepared moments as she struggles to find out where it is she fits.  It’s not that she doesn’t know her own feelings, she just doesn’t know how to articulate or act on them.  Mitchell tries to act by pursuing Marnie even though he realizes she isn’t interested, resulting in a frustrating stalemate of a friendship.  In one scene Mitchell attempts to break the pace of the stagnant afternoon by throwing a bottle of beer off the balcony into the courtyard below, but the ensuing argument fails to illuminate the real source of tension and quickly trails off, leaving everything as vague as it was before.  In almost every situation, the characters find their emotions blanked with politeness, and avoidance assists in keeping the peace.  When Marnie runs into the recently married Alex and Nina in the supermarket, they fall into a banal conversation about eggplant, sidestepping Marnie’s obvious unease.  While their inner desires are exploding, outwardly the characters are stuck, paralysed by social niceties and too much choice.  This is reflected in the editing.  Interstitial time skips forward, in the gaps between the jump cuts hours, days or weeks have passed, but during the scenes time lags, and a few minutes can seem like hours.  It’s both a reflection of how the pace of life feels when you’re in your early twenties, and an assault on the speed and structure of Hollywood cinema. 

 

The film ends as it begins, in media res, with Marnie and Alex having lunch together in a park and making fun of a pair of nerdy boys playing frisbee.  It’s a truthful ending – life never presents conclusions like films often do.  Relationships and careers drift, successes come in unexpected ways, joys are fleeting and often missed, and all we can do is to just keep doing.

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

Today I wished Edward Said were alive.  Browsing through the responses of those the New York Times calls ‘Middle East Experts’, to Obama’s speech in Cairo yesterday, I found myself wondering what Said would have to say about it all.  Primarily the subject of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and Obama’s assertion that both sides have equal rights over the territory.  Obama is in a position of having to walk a very fine line here as he expresses the desire for a peaceful resolution where both sides feel satisfied.  As someone outside the conflict, I think he is right in taking a bi-partisan position, and I think that as much as he could, he did.  There has been some unease in the blogosphere that in calling for a two state resolution Obama is unaware of the Palestinians premier occupation of the land, and consequently some questioning of his ability to fully understand the conflict.  What all this throws up for me is the question of communication and understanding between two parties, between different nations, races, languages and cultures, and the possibility or impossibility of finding common ground.

  

In his book The Differend, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that there is a point at which no understanding between two opposing parties can be made – a place where their language (and by language he means not only verbal language but cultural/experiential/historical language) is so different that communication cannot happen.  This he terms the differend.  He illustrates with an example of court trials where for some reason or other, the plaintiff is asked to provide evidence which by it’s very nature cannot be given, thereby taking away the rights of the plaintiff to defend himself against the charges.  He writes, ‘I would call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.’  He presents as examples having ‘to prove rape in a language and culture that has no conception of what this could be’ or ‘to be asked to provide physical evidence of the absolute destruction of something’.  Guantanamo is a good example of the differend - where those judging are so far removed from those being judged in language and ideology that there is no possibility of discussion or reply, where the tortured cannot produce evidence of their torture, and cannot produce evidence of their innocence for those who accuse them of crimes, whose crimes are hazy and indistinct rather than quantifiable acts.  Thus the judged are silenced and the whole system operates on hearsay and conjecture.

I often wonder if Lyotard is right about the differend, and, if such a degree of miscommunication does exist, can it ever be bridged?  Furthermore, can cinema play a part in bridging the differend?

Tsai Ming-Liang’s first film shot in his homeland, Malaysia, is the enigmatic I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2003).  I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is banned in Malaysia, presumably for its depiction of its poverty stricken protagonists – at least one of whom is an illegal immigrant – who live in a vast unfinished mall in the middle of KL.  The mall, like its inhabitants, is a remnant of the Asian economic crisis.  The three main characters speak different languages and have different sexualities, yet find a common bond in their displacement.

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is a strange film.  Like Liang’s previous films it is punctuated by long still shots where the characters are overwhelmed by the space around them, and slightly surreal imagery; like the shot at the end of the film where the three protagonists float on a tattered mattress on the lake that has formed in the centre of the abandoned mall.  There is a scene where one of the men sits fishing in this lake – although there can’t be any fish in it – quietly being, unperturbed by the stasis.  There is no internal existential crisis here, it is the world outside the mall that questions these characters existence.

Liang’s narrative structure reflects the lives of his characters.  There is very little dialogue, after all, the characters have no common verbal language, and no concrete plot.  Instead the film is a string of scenes marked by stasis and silence.  This style makes the film an equivalent of its subjects, an abject citizen of the film world, relegated to the festival circuit where it can be seen and applauded by those who have made it their business to watch such discomforting sights from the safe distance of their cinema seats.

But still, as Malaysia attempts to conceal the image of its scattered poor by banning the film, I think its very presence pulls them into the light.  Does this narrow the gap between two incompatible modes of living?  I don’t know.  It’s a tenuous proposition, but because I am a hopeful, naïve person who lives a comfortable middle class life and thus is at liberty to believe in the power of art, I like to think it might.