kagablog

Les hautes solitudes
In keeping with the vast majority of the films of its writer/director, Philippe Garrel, Les hautes solitudes (1974) is an intensely personal experience. A film in which characters thrown together in empty rooms stung by silence drift between fleeting glances, reacting or not reacting as the case may be to what is said, what isn’t said, and everything in-between. It is, as one might expect given its technical presentation, a fairly impenetrable work, though one that we’re free to carry with us; ruminating on each tattered scene as we gather up our thoughts like raindrops, either during the experience of viewing or afterwards, and inevitably projecting our own thoughts and feelings (or personal preconceptions) onto the images, or its central characters, who remain vague and elusive; indistinguishable from the actors who play them and whose faces dominate each single-shot close-up composition, used throughout to establish a story – or a sense of narrative that exists between sleep and nothing – to reveal a sense of the great loneliness that the title of the film so perfectly describes.

Although the intentions of Les hautes solitudes remain unclear, obscured by the closeness of the compositions or the complete lack of any kind of conventional soundtrack to make explicit those stolen moments of thought, we can at least take the film to be a kind of silent-study of its three individual characters; the actresses Jean Seberg and Tina Aumont, and the singer and musician Nico, whose decade-long relationship with Garrel has become a spectre that haunts the very framework of his cinema, stretching as far back as her earliest appearance in the abstract, esoteric drama The Inner Scar (La cicatrice intérieure, 1972), to the recollections of her spirit and the void left in her absence in films like Emergency Kisses (Les baisers de secours, 1989) or I Don’t Hear the Guitar Any More (J’entends plus la guitar, 1991).

In Les hautes solitudes, it is Nico’s face that we see first, slumped in a kind of morose contemplation as the images flicker with a Murnau-like intensity, as the antique quality of the composition reminds us, subconsciously, of the world of Faust (1926) or Nosferatu (1922); suggesting that feeling of the supernatural, gothic and severe, or of a nocturnal underworld devoid of time and place. As was the case with Garrel’s earlier silent film, Le révélateur (1968), there is that sense of a world in which life has stopped dead; where we witness these characters interacting, thinking – the expressions on their faces telling a story in the loosest possible sense – but they, like us, are still waiting; waiting for something (anything) to happen. Good or bad, we don’t quite know, but there is a continual feeling that the world around them has fallen away, leaving only the four-walls, floors and ceilings of the apartment, the empty street bellow and those other spaces, rubble and mirrors, that seem to be beyond our basic comprehension.

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:

Nosferatu directed by F.W. Murnau, 1922:

Le révélateur directed by Philippe Garrel, 1968:

In this sense, the film becomes a sort of ghost story in which the inability of one character to relate to another character is conveyed through the intensity of those exhausting compositions of actors attempting to express thoughts and emotions – or the basic human need to a feel a part of something meaningful or substantial – but silenced, literally, by Garrel’s particular filmmaking approach. By removing the soundtrack completely, so that not even a musical score or a drone of ambient white-noise can block out our own thoughts (either on the subject of the film, or our thoughts in general), Garrel makes the breakdown in communication between his four central characters – the three women and the actor Laurent Terzieff – all the more palpable; as lips move and the eyes dart back and forth from one side of the frame to another in a parody of conversation while the scene remains silent. The words literally cannot express the complexity of the emotions felt or experienced by these four lead protagonists, just as they fail to fully express our own relationship with them or with the film in question.

We never know if these actors are playing characters, or instead playing themselves, or even if their relationships extend beyond the actual beginning and end of the drama. Such questions remain on our mind throughout the film, as we watch these dramas play-out in bedrooms and kitchens, filled with looks and smiles which could be genuine – as in developing naturally from the drama and the interactions of the characters – or could be a cheat, as in those stolen moments, taken between takes and continuing the often Brechtian, deconstructive aspect that Garrel employs throughout. The accumulative effect of these images is eventually closer to the avant-garde of Stan Brakhage than the cinema of Vigo or Jean Eusrache, as the film becomes an installation piece, just there, in front of us, but beyond a reasonable grasp.

It is an impossible film to really pin-down and explain what is what without the benefit of further reading; with each reaction or spontaneous smile following a scene of full-face emotion disarming us, throwing our interpretations into confusion, leading to greater questions, thoughts and misunderstandings, etcetera. At certain points it seems like a depressing film, as Seberg, still beautiful, but quite clearly a world-away from the lively young girl of Bonjour Tristesse (1958) or À bout de souffle (1960), breaks down in tears and is comforted by Aumont, who reminds us of what a great and expressive actress she was away from the dull exploitation of films like Torso (I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale/Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence, 1973) or The Howl (L’urlo, 1970). However, at other times the mood is playful, as we sense some of the fun and the frivolity of this collective of likeminded individuals, friends and collaborators, producing a film, a personal and to some extents private work (as Garrel’s work often seems to be), in the solitude of a rented apartment building.

Despite such moments, which could very easily be another example of Garrel’s deconstruction of the film, allowing shots to run further than the moment of the cut – or the way in which the whole thing becomes about the process of filmmaking itself – it is the gloom and the inability of the characters to communicate that we eventually come back to. A haunted film in many respects, in which characters are introduced, either slumbering or on the precipice of sleep (Nico and Seberg) or instead gazing into windows or pools of mirrored reflections (Aumont and Terzieff); or where the high-contrast black and white and the fragmented framing of images, as half-lit faces, hands and arms, expressions hidden, either by the characters themselves or by the doorways that get in the way of the action as we intrude, silently, upon the scene, becomes yet another barrier.

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:

Beyond this, we’re left with Seberg’s face, which dominates the film, full of expression, even if the ability to plainly express in words seems to be beyond her. The fact that Seberg would be dead by the end of the decade, just three months shy of her 41st birthday, gives the film an added sense of tragedy that may not have been the intention. And when we take into consideration the early deaths of Nico (1938-1988) and Aumont (1946-2006), the idea of a ghost story, or a haunted film, becomes all the more concrete. Such ideas become manifest when combined with the cinematography, the sparseness of the locations and the feeling that time has become a mere affectation. From the first appearance of Seberg seven-minutes into the film, tossing and turning in bed and appearing to eventually fall asleep (in real-time) before a fade to black implies the passage between night and day, the narrative seems suspended, as moments pass, but with no real urgency, nothing to move along to besides the same old rooms and faces.

As a study for Serberg, or of Seberg, the film is absolutely riveting, as we watch with complete fascination the bombardment of emotions, or facial expressions, of acting at its most naked and unrefined, being projected as Garrel cuts in and out of these blurred relationships, where each look to the camera, beyond the camera, to the empty spaces that mock us with their vacant austerity, reminding us of the windows where life should be. Can we take hope from that penultimate shot, which lasts for several minutes and shows Seberg, bathed in glowing light and buried beneath an attractive sunhat, as she coyly expresses a range of conflicted facial expressions as if putting on an audition (for Garrel, and by extension the audience), or is the hope destroyed by the final plunging retreat into backlit melancholia? A silhouetted pose, cigarette smoke and “Les hautes solitudes”, as Seberg returns to the darkness, away from the bright white light that filters in through the bedroom window; away from the fantasy ideal of what could have been, or should have been, if only things had been different.

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:

The End… by Nico, 1974:

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:

It is that particular presentation of characters in a state of trance, fearfully in danger, which makes it impossible not to be reminded of Nico’s music; with the mood and tone reflecting songs like ‘Innocent and Vain’ or ‘Frozen Warnings’, or the lyrical reflections of ‘Afraid’; as her voice, an aching monotone, reassures us, but also hold the mirror to the heartbreaking line “you are beautiful and you are alone.” Such associations are impossible to ignore given the intensity of these two individuals and their relationship, which dominated a period of creativity that resulted in the conception of great music and great cinema (and the spaces between the two). Let’s not forget that a colour-tinted still of the film even featured on the cover of Nico’s album The End (1973), or that Garrel originally intended to use segments of Nico’s music as a soundtrack to the film, before Seberg suggested that the images remain silent.

As the film ends we’re left with as many questions as when it began; basic questions, like who are these people and what do they want? What were the intentions of the filmmaker? What role does the supposed influence of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (first published, 1888) have on the world of the film or the development of its narrative? …And so on. The only thing we’re really sure of is Seberg’s brilliance and Garrel’s genius, creating a film that is entirely dependent on the interpretations of the audience, as we project our own thoughts and feelings in an attempt to understand these characters and their complex interrelationships. In introducing his own work, Nietzsche wrote that “In order to understand the book, one must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of harshness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion.” “Let us look one another in the face.” These words, which resonate on a monumental level when watching the reactions of these three no-longer-with us cult-icons, could just as easily be the introduction to Garrel’s intensely personal film.

this article first published here: http://lightsinthedusk.blogspot.com/2009/07/les-hautes-solitudes.html

DEAR KAGABLOG READERS,

THEO ANGELOPOULOS WAS MURDERED TODAY WEDNESDAY 25th, 2012 IN ATHENS. IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT !

I WANT TO REMIND YOU SOME WORDS I WROTE ABOUT HIM AND KAGANOF IN 2003 (9 years ago) INSTEAD OF ONE MORE NECROLOGY.

“Le cinéaste sud-africain Ian Kerkhof – Aryan Kaganof est le meilleur représentant de la contre-culture cinématographique d’aujourd’hui. Il est le géant du cinéma nouveau. Si ses films n’ont pas été encore projetés à Cannes, c’est parce qu’ils n’ont rien à voir avec l’auteurisme arriéré et presque nécrophile des cinéastes médiocres comme Angelopoulos”.

FIRST APPEARED HERE IN 2003 : http://www.cineastes.net/textes/andronis-kerkhof2.html

DIONYSOS ANDRONIS

Thursday, January 26th, 2012 by Christopher McMichael

This Friday communities around the Cape will march from Athlone stadium to Rondebosch commons for a three day ‘occupation’. The aim is a public space to discuss solutions to a range of issues: housing, rent arrears, evictions, political corruption and the ongoing segregation in the city.

The chosen site is loaded with historical symbolism. Used once as a military camp by colonial authorities, it was racially integrated before the mass erasures of the Group Areas act. Now a public space in name only, fenced off and unapproachable. The community groups that have chosen the commons are asserting the right to reclaim public space in a city that, even more so than the rest of the country, is deeply segregated by race and class.

Despite using the Occupy name, the initiative predates events in the US. And contrary to the idea that this is about disaffected middle class hipsters looking for something to do on the weekend, it is driven by civic groups and backyarder associations from some of the poorest areas on the peninsula.

Even if the commons is a pseudo-public space (for now) it remains a site where ordinary people are constitutionally guaranteed the right to gather and talk. But the City of Cape Town has behaved like other urban authorities throughout the country when dealing with political gatherings of this nature. Firstly, despite being given ample notification of the event, city officials refused authorization. Ignoring the Regulations of Gathering events which puts the onus of consultation with organizers on state officials, mayoral representatives axed an arranged meeting because some of the community delegates were “15 to 30 minutes late’’.

This petulant refusal to do their job was accompanied by attempts at pre-emptive criminalization. Completing her Darth Vader-like transformation from firebrand activist to Empress Zille’s chief flunkey, Patricia de Lille has claimed the commons occupation is a prelude to a land invasion.

At a City Council meeting this week she called the occupation an “apparent” invasion whose “agents of destruction will not be allowed to succeed.”

The subtext is come the weekend these “cowards” will be met with arrests and an officially authorized clampdown. So much then for an “inclusive” and “caring” Mother City.

This has been accompanied by scaremongering that protestors are planning to destroy the local environment. The “Friend of Rhondebosch Commons” have called for calm: “While the intention of the organisers may be construed as confrontational, we are appealing to community members to act with restraint and let the City of Cape Town, SAPS and other role players deal with the situation.” Of course, the call to act with restraint begs the question of what kind of vigilante tactics the “Rosebank Neighbourhood Watch” have been up to?

In fact it is the local government (and possibly a white upper middle class neighbourhood watch) who are being confrontational. The organisers have even invited De Lille to attend the Summit but it now seems most likely that what was intended as a peaceful protest will be met with a police clampdown. Alas this reaction will once again be construed as the DA resorting to type and falling back into its tested pattern of appealing to its mostly white, privileged electorate. Invoking fearmongering claims about “land invasions” as subliminal code for the swart gevaar. Behind this draconian and hysterical response is the fear that public space will be used to highlight the fact that Cape Town is still one of the most unequal cities in the world, seated at the foot of one the most unequal countries in the world.

We need experiments, such as the Summit, to drag these issues of race and class into the public sphere. Without it South Africa will continue to replicate draconian state tactics and re-elect bullshit politicians who pander to people’s worst prejudices.

As events of the last year, from Egypt to the woefully under-reported Occupy Nigeria, demonstrate we are living at a time of profound contestation of the hollowing out of public life. It is at the level of urban space where economic elites and their willing political “stakeholders” are being challenged. The real “occupation” doesn’t occur at events like the Summit, it is in the texture of everyday life. Occupation by a bellicose political culture of fear, occupation by a decrepit and morally bankrupt economic system, occupation by overbearing security systems and occupation by a consumer culture that bombards us with inescapable imagery of the desirable.

first published here: http://www.mahala.co.za/reality/take-back-the-common/

CINEMATIC EXPRESSIONS OF THE ANIMA—Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World (2000)

Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World was prepared for the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, is only six minutes long, and purports to offer a founding myth on cinema itself. It was chosen by Vincent Canby of The New York Times as one of the 10 best films of the year 2000, surely a first for a film so short.

As Wikipedia summarizes the plot: Two brothers, mortician Nikolai and actor Osip (playing Christ in a Passion Play), love the same woman—scientist Anna, who studies the earth’s core, or the “heart of the world.” Anna discovers that the world is in danger. In order to save it, she must choose between the brothers, and finally decides on a rich industrialist, Akmatov. As a result, the very heart of the world has a heart attack. Realizing what she has done, she strangles Akmatov and enters the earth’s core, replacing the failed heart with her own. The world is then saved by the new message, Kino.

Kino, of course, is Russian for “cinema” and is, likewise, the root of the word “kinetic”, an adjective completely appropriate to Maddin’s “founding myth on cinema.” Maddin deliberately references and parodies soviet montage cinema of the 1920s, German Expressionism of the 1920s, and silent melodrama film. He cites Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and La Fin du monde (1931), which likewise employs an end-of-world scenario with tension between two brothers (a scientist and a Christ figure). Mark Peranson describes Maddin’s short as a “Soviet-constructivist-cum-sci-fi head rush … shot out of an Uzi of inspiration.” His City Pages cohort Rob Nelson describes it as a “six-minute music-video-cum-Eisensteinian-sci-fi-workout.” Hyphenated descriptions abound to situate Maddin’s mash-up of styles and techniques.

Beebe—cognizant of the “workout”—reminds us that he specifically chose to screen The Heart of the World because it privileges image over narrative. He encourages us to let the images of the film wash over us and stresses that watching movies is good training in “image sense.”

State scientist Anna (Leslie Bais) is the anima of Maddin’s The Heart of the World. Anima is, indeed, the archetype at the heart of filmmaking itself. Proposing that we watch the film three times to sift out and strengthen reactions (or as one IMdb user wrly phrased it: “watch, rinse, repeat”), Beebe asks us after the first screening for an adjective to describe our reactions. Several come up—agitated, melodramatic, frenetic, exaggerated, paniced, pressured, frantic, intense, visceral—all of which, Beebe offers, would be adequate to describe the anima. The film colonizes the body with somatized sensations, underscoring that the anima is a maddening urgency from within. Freudians don’t much like the anima; for them it’s the infantile psyche, hysterical. Many men would rather develop a strong persona than develop their anima. Rather than carefully dismantling defenses, they would rather shore up the persona.

I mention that one of the images that most struck me was the silent film convention of the aperture, the iris, as a means of access to the film’s events. Beebe quotes Wim Wenders’ comment that “film is seeing” and appends that the anima is seeing film with the anima eye. Whose eye is looking out from the screen? Is it Anna’s as she looks into the machine that allows her to see the disconcerting and cephalopodic heart of the world? He thinks so.

Anna, however, is not an anima personal to Guy Maddin but more what James Hillman has described as the anima mundi: the soul of the world or culture’s soul. Looking at her as she announces her dire predictions (“triple-checked”) channeled through Soviet agitprop conventions, she exemplies what happens when one is caught in the grip of the anima; a kind of propagandistic impulse; a propaganda suffused with idealism; an idealistic urgency to save the world. There is this redemptive quality to the anima and, Beebe wonders if we identify with the anima when we wish redemption?

Beebe reiterates that The Heart of the World is a founding myth about how movies are made. It’s heraldic, announcing the triumph of a new world order through cinema. And it details the historicity of the process by which cinema achieves integrity. Anima is implicated in the development of integrity. At the beginning of the film Anna is in love with two brothers: Nikolai (Shaun Balbar), the mortician-engineer, and Osip (Caelum Vatnsdal), the actor playing Jesus who is likewise suffering a Messianic complex. Both brothers are stricken by Anna’s beauty and battle for her attention. When Anna pronounces the grim fate of the world, they compete for a solution.

Beebe suggests Nikolai, the mortician, represents cinema’s initial murderous gaze, the original impulse to document and record through film, freezing (killing) things in time, nailing bodies in coffins (commensurate to finishing films up and putting them “in the can”). Osip, in his guise as Jesus, adopts the opposite position, representing a cinema that is a spiritual experience where bodies are resurrected and freed from their coffins. As an aside, Beebe admits to becoming “hot” at horatory cinema meant to exhort; cinema’s popular usage to push spiritual agendas. Clearly, both approaches are fraught with peril and neither—in Maddin’s film—serve to save the heart of the world. One rages forward with cold-hearted progress; the other performs miracles through reverse footage. One of my favorite images is the horror on Nikolai’s face when he witnesses Osip’s resurrected corpses. In a way, their opposing approaches negate each other.

Then along comes the dark horse contender, a lustful industrialist named Akmatov (Greg Klymkiw), who seduces and sways Anna with his chest of gold coins. She swoons and is taken by him on their honeymoon. One IMdb user describes Akmatov as a “plutocrat”, which—though it was not discussed at the seminar—is an intriguing mythic reference for me, in the sense that “Pluto” (aka Hades), is a Lord of Abduction (as in the Persephone myth) who as King of the Underworld has access to the mineral wealth—veins of gold and sparkling gemstones—beneath the surface of the earth. Though Dr. Beebe claims it’s gold coins that are being shoveled into Akmatov’s phallic cannon, I’m not convinced and can’t quite tell from the film itself; they look more to me like diamonds and chunks of coal, in turn. Either way, gold or diamonds, they suggest underworld wealth. If the marriage of Hades and Persephone is, indeed, a configuration of a woman’s marriage initiation, is it any wonder that a diamond ring set in gold is used to seal the contract?

Why would Anna choose the aggressive Industrialist? Does she really choose, or does she simply succumb? In the face of an assertive will, Beebe suggests, the anima can retreat into a vegetative state, much like the story of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne and her winsome smile over the shoulder as she transforms into an inaccessible laurel tree.

Unfortunately, by choosing Akmatov, the world suffers a seismic heart attack. This heartquake (earthquake?) jolts Anna back into conscious action, reminding her that her true mission is to save the world. She strangles Akmatov and sacrifices herself to become the world’s heart transplant. By this act the world is reborn as cinema and is shown projected onto the hearts of the world’s inhabitants.

There’s a lot to tease out here. First, as a style of cinema—in contrast to Nikolai’s documentary approach and Osip’s horatory approach—Akmatov represents commercial cinema, Hollywood as we know it today, where the bottom line rules even as expensive movies are made about how bad money is. One could say that—because the movie industry is anima-driven—it is money-crazy. And therein lies the anima’s dilemma. Just as Luis Buñuel vociferously detested Nicholas Ray’s dinner party assertion that each movie he makes must cost more than the one he’s just finished in order to remain a successful filmmaker, the temptation of financing must either be resisted or finagled in order for the integrity of creative vision to exist. Film is for the realization of an integrity of vision. This aligns with James Hillman’s thesis in Thought of the Heart and Soul of the World, wherein the “thought of the heart” is understood as the capacity to imagine truly. In The Heart of the World, Maddin pleads a case for visionary filmmaking; his kind of filmmaking.

Anna has to kill her strange bedfellow the Industrialist in order to overcome her sellout and to return to her mission. Anna becomes an imagemaking faculty. She becomes a radiant star. When the anima is integrated, it becomes a function, hopefully a broadened transcendent function. This references the idea that the anima is also fate; that the anima is trying to live out her own fate. Anima integration is more believable in those who can be vulnerable. Anima starts out as an almost ridiculously-hyped subjectivity. If the anima is integrated, a balanced subjectivity becomes possible.

keep reading this article here: http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2008/03/cinematic-expressions-of-animaguy.html

stellenbosch, wednesday 25 january 2012

sometimes there is a void, memoirs of an outsider
published by penguin
2011

The post-mortem image: Peter Greenaway’s documentary Death in the Seine and writing the history of a corpse

Authors: C. David Bertolini
DOI: 10.1386/sdf.1.3.279_1

Keywords
documentary, Greenaway, Paris, Deleuze, Žižek, death

Abstract
This article explores Peter Greenaway’s film, Death in the Seine, as a relationship between the act of documentation, the document in-itself, and the implicit conflict between reality, memories and records. The film documents events during post-revolution France through the observations by two mortuary attendants named Bouille and Daude whose notes list those who drowned in the Seine. The facts that comprise the film come from the work of the historian Richard Cobb who painstakingly researched the contents of the eighteenth-century French mortuary log. Death in the Seine relies on actual facts, but simultaneously questions the viability of their truth-claims. The truth-claims reflect an emerging conflict between history and the fragile objective technologies used to document and organize events. I demonstrate how the film directly challenges truth-claims through the medium of remembering – writing, filming and recollection – and to understand their implications I will examine them through the lens of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. I will situate what I call the ‘post-mortem image’ (the image of the immediate dead) within the broader context of the social-symbolic network of documentation.

the abstract first published here: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=6644/

If you approach a viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev as you would an ordinary film, you are bound to be frustrated and disappointed. You may have difficulty following the “plot,” and you’ll probably find it slow paced and terribly long (205 minutes). There’s a couple of scenes that are action packed and violent and another with a lot of nudity, so even the most entertainment-addicted viewer will acknowledge “a few good scenes,” but will still walk out cursing. Tarkovsky is not for everyone. All Tarkovsky films are beautiful to look at, but only some are thematically interesting – in my opinion. This one is both gorgeous and thematically powerful and cogent.

I might suggest that a Tarkovsky film is a bit like one of those series of frescoes that together depict some Biblical story, but, in this instance, viewers don’t already have familiarity with the story, the first time through. It takes a lot of concentration and analysis to piece together the story from the set of largely independent painterly vignettes that Tarkovsky provides. If we applied the same critical standard here that we use in critiquing conventional films, we might conclude that it has a weakness in its script because it lacks narrative clarity. Tarkovsky obviously intends his viewers to have to work hard intellectually while watching one of his films, so it’s certainly not in the category of an inadvertent flaw. If you’re prepared to watch this film as a series of fresco-like vignettes, understanding that you have to extract some of the elements of the narrative for yourself, you’ll discover that Andrei Rublev is, indeed, the cinematic masterpiece that many critics claim it to be.

Historical Background: Andrei Tarkovsky is often described as a cinematic poet and was, in fact, the son of poet Arseni Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky made just seven feature films over a career spanning twenty-seven years. His debut feature film was My Name is Ivan (1962). Andrei Roublev (1966), just his second full-length film, is ranked by many critics among the top-ten most important films of all time. Movie lovers are very fortunate that the film even exists today, much less in the form of the stellar Criterion release of the original director’s cut, which hadn’t been seen since the film’s original screening in Moscow in 1966. Tarkovsky first submitted the proposal for a film on the life of painter Andrei Rublev to a Soviet studio in 1961 and worked on the script with co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky for more than two years. (The script was nicknamed “The Three Andreis” since the title character and both co-authors were all named Andrei.) After the first showing, it was censored and shelved by the Soviets, presumably because of nudity, religious elements, and the depiction of a repressive relationship between a totalitarian government and ordinary Russian people. The film was expressly sought for competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969, where it received its first public and competitive screenings and was promptly awarded the FIPRESCI Award, which is what Cannes calls its award for “best cinematography.” Even with that recognition, the Soviets stalled the film’s general release until 1971, and, even then, with some segments excised. Western distributors sliced out additional footage in at attempt to trim the film down to a length more consistent with the tastes of Western audiences. Happily, criterion has given us the original director’s cut, letting us see Tarkovsky’s original conception.

The Story: Andrei Rublev is composed of seven chapters plus a prologue and a epilogue. The prologue, entitled “Flying”, immediately establishes the mystical or existential character of the film’s focus. A man climbs aboard a hot-air balloon perched atop a tower as the peasants below struggle to detach the moorings (while some other peasants try to prevent the launch, fearing what might result from this bizarre excursion into the unknown). The man (and the camera) is suddenly aloft, with the man exulting, “I’m flying.” We see what he sees: a dreary tapestry of rivers passing through barren fields, a flock of lambs on the run, and dumbfounded spectators, far below. Finally the balloon and would be aviator come crashing back to earth. We see the “carcass” of the balloon throbbing, as if in death throes. Immediately, the film cuts to a picture of a lone horse rolling on its back, then rising, shaking itself, and gracefully prancing away.

The first chapter is entitled “The Jester, Summer 1400.” Three monks are embarking on a journey to Moscow. One asks another whether Moscow doesn’t already have enough painters without them. One of the three is named Danil Cherny (Nikolai Grinko). Another is the title character, Andrei Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn). Another man, trying to discourage them from leaving, demands to know who will paint the icons if they leave. Rublev was a famous painter of religious icons. The film now cuts to a cabin-like dwelling where the men of a village have gathered for a performance by a jester (Rolan Bykov). This is the most comedic part of the film as the jester gives a spirited and ribald performance about a Boyar who, having shaved his beard, is no longer recognized by his wife. The three monks arrive at the end of the jester’s performance, seeking shelter from a downpour. Shortly thereafter, soldiers arrive to apprehend the jester. Jesters, in the fifteenth century were subject to arrest because their free expression was viewed as politically dangerous and sacrilegious. It is suspected that one of the monks had denounced him to the authorities.

A monk named Kirill (Ivan Lapikov), in the second chapter (“Theophanes the Greek, 1405-6″), is envious of Rublev’s natural talent. Kirill has traveled to Moscow to meet with an artist, Theophanes the Greek, who has been assigned the job of painting the interior of a cathedral under renovation. Theophanes is in desperate need of qualified help and wants to hire Kirill on the spot. Kirill, however, wants a messenger sent to the monastery to announce that he, Kirill, is requested expressly by Theophanes to help with the painting of the cathedral. Kirill apparently has a need to have his selection witnessed by his fellow monks, especially Rublev, of whom he is envious. A messenger is duly sent by Theophanes, but to request Rublev instead. Theophanes has apparently surmised that Kirill has some unresolved issues relating to vanity. Andrei leaves for Moscow with two fellow monks, who are to serve as aides. While traveling, the monks talk philosophy and religion, as monks are wont to do, and Andrei reveals his vision of The Passion, which is duly enacted as he imagines it.

As they proceed to Moscow, the trio of monks encounter a pagan ceremony on St. John’s Eve (“The Holiday”) in progress, entailing nudity, debauchery, and fornication. They’re having a good old time – in a stream and in the misty woods. Rublev finds himself watching, in spite of himself and his holy vows, especially when one voluptuous woman, Marfa, nestles down with her lover in the woods, just a few feet from where Rublev is standing and hoping to be inconspicuous. So distracted is he, that he even fails to notice, initially, that he has walked into a campfire and his robe has caught fire. Now spotted by the revelers, Rublev is subdued and tied to a cross. Marfa, the sensuous pagan woman, comes to his rescue, demanding to know why he believes love is a sin. She drops her robe and forces a passionate kiss onto his lips before untying him. It’s all he can do to flee from temptation. Later, he sees the pagans being persecuted for no better reason than their failure to believe in one god.

In Chapter Four, “The Last Judgment,” Rublev struggles with “artist’s block.” He can’t bring himself to paint, after the terrible instances of torture he has seen and the destabilizing affect that the gentle simplicity and hedonism of the pagans has had on his psyche. He’s staring to wonder if his pious Christianity isn’t just a bit too hypocritical. Grand Prince (Yuri Nazarov), for whom Rublev is painting, has also hired some stonecutters to refinish the cathedral’s exterior. When the stonecutters have finished the job, they mention that their next job is for the Grand Prince’s brother and that the brother has purchased an even better type of stone for his cathedral. This doesn’t sit well with the Grand Prince. As soon as the stonecutters leave, he sends a group of soldiers after them and has their eyes put out in the woods. White paint seeps out of a bottle into the stream.

Chapter Five, “The Raid, Autumn 1408,” is the most violent and action-packed scene. The Grand Prince’s brother, and rival, has hired a Tartar horde, under the leadership of Tartar Khan (Bolot Bejshenaliyev), to lay waste to his brother’s city, Vladimir. This segment is filled with murders, torture, rapes, cruelty to animals, and all the most vicious aspects of human nature, in excruciating detail. We see people being speared and one having boiling water poured down his throat. During the mayhem, Rublev sees a tarter abducting a young mute Russian woman, Durochka (Irma Raush), planning to take her upstairs to rape her. In a fit of rage, Rublev kills the abductor with an ax. By way of penance, Rublev takes responsibility for the mute girl, takes a vow of silence, and determines never to paint again.

In the brief Chapter Six (“The Charity, Winter 1412″), Kirill returns to the monastery, begging for re-admittance. Later, he confesses his feelings of envy to Andrei and admits that he was the one who denounced the jester. A group of Tartars arrive at the monastery and one takes a shine to Durochka and she to him. She rides off with him to become his eighth wife!

The final Chapter, “The Bell, 1423-1424″), finds Andrei Rublev pretty much in the background as an observer, maintaining his vow of silence. The victorious Princely brother wants to atone for killing his brother and the townspeople of Vladimir by commissioning a massive bell, but the master bell-maker has died. His teenage son, Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev), claims that his father revealed his secrets to him just before his death. He thus becomes supervisor of a team of laborers, all a good deal older than himself, who must cast the giant bell. Their lives are on the line. If the bell fails ring, they’ll all be beheaded. Although the boy’s father never actually made him privy to his methods, the boy has apparently picked up enough along the way to ensure success. Andrei, who watches the successful testing of the bell, chooses to view the favorable outcome as a miracle or, at least, a confirmation of the triumph of art over the perversity of human nature. Andrei decides he’ll give up his vow of silence and returns to the Trinity Monastery with Boriska. There, Rublev will paint his famous “Holy Trinity” and Boriska will cast bells. Afterall, it was Boriska’s great bell and the purity of its tone that reawakened Rublev’s will to paint.

The epilogue escorts us, for the first time, through a close-up view of some of Rublev’s work. Now, suddenly, for the first time, the film shifts to brilliant color, as if to highlight the transcendent nature of Rublev’s art.

Themes: The prologue establishes immediately that this film is about mankind’s attempt to transcend its corporeal and earthbound existence, to escape physically and spiritually into the cosmos. It is a film about the search for the unknown, with all of the juxtaposition of danger against exultation inherent in such an endeavor. It makes no difference in this respect that the experiment ended badly. It is the search for transcendent understanding that is ennobling, whatever the outcome.

Andrei Rublev is also a film that reaffirms the significance of art as the vehicle by which mankind elevates itself above an otherwise beastly and brutal nature. Art is inherently the search for meanings beyond violence, conquest, envy, greed, and lust. Life in medieval Russia was bleak indeed, with the horrors of famine, the plague, Tartar raids, and the tyranny of the Russia aristocracy. Art and religion shared the task of providing people with some sense of higher purpose as solace for their suffering. Andrei Rublev experiences spiritual angst, due in part to the horrors he observes. He is a wanderer, in this film, in both the physical sense and the spiritual sense – in search of meaning. The film can also be seen as allegorical of Tarkovsky’s own search for meaning through art.

Production Values: The script of Andrei Rublev does not follow typical narrative logic. Little is explained overtly and it is often difficult to tie the pieces together as a linear storyline. Instead, the seven vignettes plus the prologue and epilogue are like nine frescoes tied together poetically and thematically. Rublev, as a character, is not a conventional protagonist, either. In some of the segments, he is no more than a peripheral character – a by-stander. Viewers are to identify with him not as a protagonist but as our observer – our eyes and ears. Rublev’s state of mind is consequent to the events that he witnesses. We share both his experiences and his psychological responses.

For a film about a painter, it is perhaps surprising that this one withholds any illustration of either his art or his working as an artist until the color epilogue. Instead, we are exposed continuously to Tarkovsky’s gorgeous, starkly black-and-white, cinematographic artwork. The photography is really what is most special about any Tarkovsky film. Tarkovsky’s so-called “transcendental style” has antecedents in the work of Eisenstein, Bergman, Murnau, and Dreyer.

The emphasis in Tarkovsky’s approach to cinematography is on exploring spaces, layering of the field of vision, landscapes, and mise-en-scène. He uses long graceful tracking shot to wend his camera through an architectural space so that the viewer becomes intimate with it. The landscapes are used as dramatic counterpoint to the story elements occurring in the foreground. Oftentimes we see movement in a scene in both the foreground and the background. The camera peers through windows or door arches to transition from one event to another. Oftentimes, Tarkovsky keeps his camera still and uses intricate choreography to move the dramatic events in front of his lens. Fog and smoke, feathers and snow add luster and atmosphere to various scenes. The scene of the pagan ritual is a marvel of mood and mystery. Tarkovsky’s mastery of cinematographic artistry is simply unparalleled.

Montage and editing tricks are of minimal importance in a Tarkovsky film, but from time to time he juxtaposes images in a startlingly creative way. A horse rolling in the mud becomes emblematic of the death throes of a balloonist. Aerial images following a shot of the corpse of a swan link the death of the swan back to the crash of the balloonist. Paint spilled into a stream suddenly reappears downstream in a later segment of the film. This is a film that you could justify watching solely for the photography, without even following the story.

Bottom-Line: If you’re interested in filmmaking as art – as opposed to merely being entertained – you won’t want to miss this film. It is one of the finest examples extant of film as visual art.

this article first published here: http://www.epinions.com/review/mvie_mu-1032790/content_163791015556?sb=1

sometimes there is a void, memoirs of an outsider
published by penguin
2011

The Grandmother reviewed by Tim Maloney

Tim Maloney teaches film at California State University, Fullerton.

The Grandmother (1970 USA 34 mins)

Prod, Dir, Scr, Phot, Anim: David Lynch Mus: Tractor Sound: Alan R. Splet

Cast: Richard White, Dorothy McGinnis, Virginia Maitland, Robert Chadwick

When David Lynch began filming The Grandmother he was still a painter exploring the possibilities of film rather than a filmmaker per se. His previous shorts, Six Figures Getting Sick (1966) and The Alphabet (1968) last under five minutes in total, and the former was part of a mixed-media installation included in a gallery show. The Grandmother, then, is Lynch’s first major film in terms of length, style, and choice of material.

Describing the events of the film elicits more questions than answers, and this seems to be part of its design.

The story of the film is something along these lines. Mom and Dad wriggle up from the ground. They rut like animals, and their Boy is born from the ground in much the same way as they were. The Boy is neither understood nor loved, and his dog-like parents bark his name at him: Mutt! The Boy is incontinent, and his father beats him for it, rubbing the unfortunate child’s face in the bright yellow stain on the bed. Unhappy, the Boy finds a seed, plants it on a bed, waters, waits, and a Grandmother sprouts out to love and comfort him.

At a particularly difficult family dinner the Boy flees his enraged drunken father and goes to the Grandmother’s welcoming embrace. He fantasises about executing his parents by crushing them. He and the Grandmother spend some time poking each other with their index fingers, then she enables him to grow into some kind of dribbling cartoon flower. Sadly, the Grandmother whistles herself to death, and the Boy is despondent. The last image is troubling and difficult to describe, suggesting the Boy has somehow killed himself.

Of course this description says almost nothing about the experience of watching the film.

Lynch’s films have often been compared to dreams, and The Grandmother doesn’t do anything to disprove that reading. There is no dialogue, save the word “Mutt” grunted by the parents. There seems to be a law of cause and effect at work here, but the mechanisms by which the causes lead to the effects is obscured. For example, consider the scene after the Boy “kills” his parents. There is a cut to the bed, it fills with yellow paint until it overflows the room. The next shot shows what seems to be some kind of animated aquifer filling with yellow liquid; next, a long white plank, and the animated Boy falling off it, into the urine aquifer, splashing out yellow clouds; next, hoses puff up the animated father and mother until rods burst them.

These things follow one another, certainly, but not because anyone ever expected them to. And their enigmatic presentation – the reduction of parent-child relationships to simple gestures, juxtapositions of bodies and understated movements – has led some to indulge in Freudian analyses of the film, writing about symbolic Father-killings and the Mother’s embrace and rejection of the Boy in terms of Oedipal Complexes, and so on. To be sure, these images do convey some kind of primitive emotion. It is murky and hard-to-define, but it is there, accomplished through the images rather than through dialogue or some chamber-room drama. As such, one might first let the images and sounds of this presentation flow over him or her, and not work terribly hard to assign logic or “meaning” to any of the proceedings.

Lynch claims his interest in film stems from the desire to see his paintings move (1), and The Grandmother is full of painterly qualities and concerns, particularly in the use of a reduced colour palette. The walls and furniture are painted black, and the Boy is dressed in a black and white tuxedo. All of the actors wear pancake make-up, with only a trace of red lipstick on the mouth. When Mom and Dad are onscreen Lynch includes green and red in the frame – both on Mom’s dress and on the furniture of the dining room. There is more colour contrast in scenes which show a bright blue sky with the yellow sun and moon. This yellow colour acts as a visual accent in the Boy’s bedroom, where the bright stain on the bed sheets is the central focus. Black-and-white footage, with its greatest possible colour reduction, is interspersed, most notably in the death of the Grandmother.

A possible visual antecedent for the film could be Francis Bacon, whose 1954 painting “Figure with Meat” has precisely the same black background, limned with white, as The Grandmother’s set. And the shots of Lynch’s Boy, in the midst of being punished, frozen in time, his mouth an open, dark hole, screaming for entirely too long, recall Bacon’s “Screaming Pope” (1952). Precedents for Lynch’s filmmaking choices include, perhaps, the pixilated people of Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952), the cryptic, cabalistic cut-outs of Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic (1962), and Maya Deren’s dreamlike Meshes in the Afternoon (1943). It’s reasonable to suspect the young art student Lynch attended these films with interest, as they would have been readily available and part of most art-school curricula at the time.

The Grandmother is also Lynch’s first collaboration with Alan Splet, his sound designer through to Blue Velvet (1986). Splet’s sound design adds to the dreamlike quality of the film. Some sounds synch to on-screen activities (voices, the rustling of leaves), but there are far more purely atmospheric sounds – such as hisses and rhythmic noises, gloomy German-influenced electronic music (2).

Even Lynch’s latest features, Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), show the same tendency to abandon classic storytelling guidelines and formulas in favour of a visual, sonic, emotional climax. The most remarkable moments in his films are the ones in which the viewer is somehow panicked and uneasy, carried along by the sounds and pictures that cannot be easily described. But the feeling remains, and the experience is unforgettable.
Endnotes

This comment, and others, are derived from the interviews contained on the most recent DVD of Lynch’s shorts, available from his own website. As of 2002, which is admittedly some time later than The Grandmother’s production schedule, Lynch still seems unable to put any of the motivations and artistic underpinnings of any of his projects into words. For that we are relieved; if he were able, he would probably write essays and not make films.
It is particularly helpful to think of bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, Faust and Cluster as comparisons. Lynch credits his soundtrack to “Tractor”. No information is available about this group, and a likely speculation is that it is really Lynch and Splet.

this article first published here: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/the-grandmother/