Interviews

tion. Curiosity is the reason for many of my decisions. It’s why my films seem to be eclectic. They tell very different stories – period, contemporary, historical or psychological dramas, political films. So it is not that I have one subject. And if I must choose one, it would probably be a very existential subject of identity – what we are doing on this planet and who we are. Of course this is some kind of ontological or philosophical quest, which does not necessarily translate to the story itself in a simple way.

PR: The prominence of the past in your cinema is apparent, as well as characters living under and trying to survive oppression.

AH: Well the past is not the past to me, and what happened is a part of the present. Most of my historical films are as relevant as the contemporary ones – sometimes more relevant. Sometimes you need this distance from the current events to see the deeper truth. And I am not making these films about the distant past, I am making the films about human nature, and I don’t think this changes too much – it goes by waves. We can see now for example that the events from the thirties or the events from before the First World War have become very relevant. Everybody feels that there is some sort of a repetition and the same dangers we lived through in the twentieth century are rising again. So it is not only to remind people and to educate people about the past, it is to show what from the past is still present. And for me the Second World War never ended. What we are living now is a second stage of the Second World War, or maybe even the First World War. The main subject of humanity is the struggle inside of human nature. Humanity can be cruel and hateful, is easily self-destructive and the culture tries to fight those elements so deeply present inside human nature. It is some kind of eternal struggle between good and evil, and this struggle happens inside of man. It never ends (Fig. 2).

PR: Over the course of your career, how has your perspective on the craft of filmmaking and storytelling itself changed?

AH: I did change a bit, but also the perception of the cinema changed and the expectations about complexity of the storytelling did as well. When I started, the cinema was more open, experimental, and ambitious, freer in some way. The search for the new language, for the new narrative tools had been wider than today, and the audience responded largely. Today we practically have two quite opposite branches. One is commercial, following conventional rules and another is made more for the festivals than for the wider audience. The films of the middle, the kind of cinema which is allowed to touch complicated issues in an attractive and accessible way, practically disappeared. And it was the kind of cinema where I felt at home. So cinema changed, but one thing didn’t change for me. I am always doing my films thinking about the audience. I want to make some impact on the people and I need their feedback.

Fig. 2: The “eternal struggle between good and evil” that Holland says “happens inside of man” is externalized in Burning Bush(2013).

PR: Considering your need for feedback, do you perceive the audience to be the ones that complete the film, and does this translate to a transfer of ownership?

AH: Yeah, it is the case, I think, because the cinema is a very special medium. Before it was celluloid tape closed in the metal boxes, and now it is in the hard drive with some content inside. But they’re only useless objects, before people see this content on the screen. So the audience is this last magical chain in the process of moviemaking. Without them a film doesn’t exist, really. Different filmmakers have different ambitions, different expectations. I am – for example – not interested in making movies for everybody. I can imagine a quite limited audience for my movie and I never was thinking of reaching, every time, millions and millions of people. I feel satisfaction if I see that at least some amount of people is responding to what I am telling. But that is my perspective as a filmmaker – the perspective of the producer and the distributor must be different. I always tried, when making the movies, to keep them limited in terms of the budget spending to have the maximal amount of freedom.

PR: A film, when it plays for its contemporary audience, will differ for each individual, and then the social angsts and preoccupations of the future audience will potentially redefine it further. Could we assert that a film is not permanent and unchangeable?

AH: It is, of course, dynamic. Today – with the Internet – we have endless ways to distribute films. But we don’t have this religious respect for film history that we did before. So the films that do not immediately make a point disappear in this enormous quantity of content. And the film that doesn’t have some immediate success when released rarely can reappear as some kind of later discovery. It happens, but it is rare, and it’s why there is such a fight to reach the audience in this very moment, just after the movie is ready. Fortunately, we still have different audiences that have different sensibilities and a different perspective. I will give you an example. Pawe! Pawlikowski’s Ida, which was released first in Poland and had very limited success, was some months later released in France (Fig. 3). And even without a huge promotion, it found five times the audience [in that country] than in its native Poland. So practically at the same time, different audiences can be hungry for different kinds of movies. There is fortunately something extremely capricious and dynamic in the reception of a film because if not, the formula would be even stronger and everything would be made according to the numbers. And because the release of every movie is some kind of Russian Roulette, we can still try things that are different and risky.

PR: Across the decades, the feel of film has changed. For example, the American gangster film of the 1940s has a different feel to the gangster film of the 1970s onwards. Do you believe this shift is caused by more than technological developments, and may reflect a changing aesthetic?

AH: I think it is something that is more mystical – a mystery that is included in the particular film, and which doesn’t age. The technology of course ages, but not so much. And it means when you are watching the films from the sixties or seventies, even from the thirties and forties, you don’t see the technological barrier, which doesn’t impede you from following the storytelling in a satisfactory way. Of course, some films age and some films don’t. It has happened that the films considered in their time as

Fig. 3: Pawe! Pawlikowski’s Ida.

minor films have come back after years as very powerful. And of course you have the films that have the momentum at the time of release and watched after few years, lost their attraction. The reasons why it happens are – in my opinion – present in the tissue of the moviemaking – in this mix of artistic honesty and the mystery. It is also is why I am so frustrated when I am a member of the jury at festivals. I’ll sometimes accept it because it’s the game we have to play in order to promote the films. But several times it happened to me that I was watching a film and I wasn’t too impressed by it. And afterwards, I watched it another time and I still didn’t like it. Then one day I watched it for the third time and I found it to suddenly be extremely moving and powerful. So even my own perspective can change depending on the moment in my life or the moment of the day, and how I feel. Of course, I can judge some exterior quality of the storytelling, construction and the acting – it is a part of the craft and I can judge the craft. But when judging the inner quality of film, I can be very mistaken.

PR: I watched a film recently and came away with a certain impression, and upon speaking with the filmmaker discovered we shared the same thoughts. But on a repeat viewing my perspective changed, which led me to ask the question as to whether we truly ever understand a film, or whether any understanding is only a momentary one? Is one of the intriguing aspects of film and art more broadly that it is volatile and we lack a true understanding of the experience on an emotional, sensual, or even mystical level?

AH: In this sense every viewer is completing the film in his own way. Film is not like a novel which you can read, put down, and afterwards reread. Film you mostly watch in real time, and so your feelings are in real time. There are a lot of physiological things that can change your perception – you feel tired, you feel nauseous or you want to pee. And I remember this experience with Angry Harvest, my first film after I left Poland (Fig. 4). It was a very low budget film shot in West Berlin with a lot of difficulties. Afterwards it made it to the Montreal and New York Film Festivals, and then it was nominated for an Oscar. So the film unexpectedly helped my career and it helped my international career to some extent. When we were shooting the film we had a problem with the main actress who had been discouraged by the producer, who had not found her to be attractive enough. We only had twenty days to shoot, and for the first half of this period, she was extremely

stressed. So when I was cutting the film I wasn’t sure if her performance was strong enough, and if she had done everything she could to make this character lively and powerful. And at the premiere in Montreal, I was there watching the film with the main actor in the huge screening theatre with two thousand people. I was afraid that this chamber movie would disappear on such a big screen. Anyway, we’d been watching it and suddenly I had this very strong impression that the actress was just fantastic. I told the fellow actor I had the impression that she was acting very well today, and he answered that it was also his impression. So even such a change in perception of the elements of the film can change the perception, depending, for example, on the audience in the screening room.

PR: Is the fascination with the creation of film, art or music due to the fact that artists must learn a language which never fully reveals its secrets to us, but the artist can’t help but pursue these secrets?

Fig. 4: Leading actress Elisabeth Trissenaar as Rosa Eckart in Holland’s AngryHarvest(1985).

Fig. 5: Holland contemplates film production while on set.

AH: Film language on one level is complicated because it’s multi-functional, and you are using very different tools. The technical issues are very important and the human issue is even more important – what other people, the writers, actors, crew, and audience bring to the film (Fig. 5). But at the same time it is quite a simple medium, in that you have to play some kind of game with the viewers, and this game is also to build the curiosity and keep the attention. And the tools you are using to play this game are quite primitive in some way. So the most exciting thing is if you can forget those primitive tools and find some kind of freedom, go against the rules.

PR: Your use of music is striking and it recalls film director Terrence Davies’ remark to me: “Great music does not tell you what to feel; it merely prepares you for it, and that’s what’s really difficult. And when that is done, it’s just magic.” Would you agree? Do you approach music as a means to create emotion, to tell people how to feel? Or are you trying to use it in a subtler way?

AH: I certainly don’t like the use of the music when you tell people what to feel or what to expect. It means it is illustrative music, which for me is quite boring and counterproductive. If you need the music to tell the story, why are you telling the story on film in the first place? Music is a part of storytelling, another voice in the fabric of narration, and reinforces the emotions for sure. It means that, even if it is not melodramatic, music, especially sentimental, emotional, or sweet music – whatever kind of music it is – the combination of the sound and image creates an emotional conclusion. If you don’t need emotions then maybe you don’t need the music. For me the cinema is the creation of emotions, and again I am not speaking in terms of sentimentality or melo-

Fig. 6: Holland using her intuition to construct and balance her tools on the set of GameCount.

drama, but about creating some kind of strong experience. This experience is created by the different elements of the storytelling, of the filmmaking. And the music is a part of that. Sometimes you need it and sometimes you don’t. I like it if the use of the music is as spare as possible because I think that the overusing of the music actually kills the emotion. The music present all the time is irritating to me, but this is, of course, a question of my personal taste.

PR: There can also be value in cutting the dialogue and sound momentarily, as silence offers the audience interludes to contemplate what they have seen. This permits an engagement with the film without information being directed at them through dialogue.

AH: Yes, but I don’t think that you have to make that opposition of silence against sound, silence against music, or silence against dialogue. The filmmaking/storytelling is to construct and balance the tools that you have to create something in which the composition is as powerful as possible. Some filmmakers don’t need music at all, and some don’t need the dialogue, and others need the dialogue all the time. It doesn’t mean that one cinema is better than another – it just means that we have different styles. I am not a director making statements about what cinema is and what it is not. This is not something that interests me and I like the diversity of voices.

PR: Is it the job of critics, academics, and scholars to state the meaning of a film, to interpret the work of filmmakers and to say what cinema is?

AH: I think that if I start following critics’ expectations I could make films that would be interesting for you, but at the same time, I am afraid that they would in some way be born dead. You need a certain amount of spontaneity and intuition to do something that is alive... I don’t like conceptual art (Fig. 6).

PR: There is a belief amongst filmmakers that three versions of the script exist – the script that is written, the script that is shot and the script that is edited. Is this a belief you would share? Does the

script evolve – the completed film being the final stage of that evolutionary journey?

AH: Yeah, it is always a bit like with a sculpture. It’s like the famous sentence of Michelangelo when he said he had the piece of marble and the sculpture is inside and he has just to find it. So the filmmaking process is also a search for the form appropriate for this particular story, but we don’t know it completely before starting, of course. We have some intuitions, we have some vague concepts, we are making some decisions from the very beginning, but till the end, we don’t know the emotional impact of the film. Now I am finishing the editing of my last film and we are changing things every day, which changes the rhythm of the film and some of the emotional balance. I still feel that we didn’t achieve the ideal form for this particular story and we are still in search. If you don’t have exterior restrictions (deadline, money, etc.) you can go forever.

PR: Is it in the editing that you find the film? And looking back over your career, are you content with your body of work? Or have you had to embrace compromise – accepting the final release as being as close to what you wanted as possible?

AH: Mostly, when I am looking back, I don’t regret. If I am watching my films, after years, which I rarely am doing, but it sometimes happens for some reason, I am looking at them like one looks at their grown up children. Some are more beautiful than others, some are maybe ugly, but they are still my children. And so I don’t feel that I have to interfere with them. Most of them are aging pretty well, which is maybe because they have pretty classical storytelling. Most of my films I can watch after years. Of course they are not perfect. And I see their mistakes, but it’s the part of the journey.

PR: German filmmaker Christoph Behl remarked to me, “You are evolving, and after the film, you are not the same person as you were before.” Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the creative process?

AH: Yeah, it is like a life experience making a film. It means there is a contest against yourself as well as positioning yourself against the rock of impossibilities and failures. And at the same time you can penetrate some subject much deeper than you can in real life. There are a lot of things happening during the film and it needs an incredible amount of energy from you. And this energy is sometimes spent on nothing, meaning that it is not coming back, and so you don’t receive the feedback, which fully charges your batteries again. So it can cost you a big chunk of life, which you are losing in the film, and it is something that is afterwards floating outside of yourself. So every film is a real experience and a real change, and a real vital risk.

Works Cited

Holland, Agnieszka, director. Angry Harvest. Admiral, Central Cinema Company Film (CCC), 1985. --. Burning Bush. HBO Europe, 2013. Pawlikowski, Paweł, director. Ida. Opus Film, Phoenix Film Investment, 2013. Risker, Paul. Interview with Christoph Behl. FrightFest

Gore in the Store, 24 Apr. 2015. --. “The Struggle Toward Beauty: Terence Davies on the Road to Sunset Song.” Film International, 18 May 2016, filmint.nu/?p=18327. Accessed 15 Jul. 2016.

The Sight of Unseen Things: Cinephilic Privileging and the Movement of Wind in TheEclipse

by David Scott Diffrient Colorado State University

more sympathetic viewers, who see this final scene’s evocation of absence and presence, alienation and community, engagement and disinterest, mystery and melancholia, as a sign of the artist’s sensitivity to the modern cityscape’s many contradictions. In the span of seven dialogue-free minutes, the camera pans, tilts, and tracks to reveal often overn award-winning high-water mark of European art cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film The Eclipse (L’Eclisse) was theatrically released at a time when the Italian auA looked aspects of everyday life: quotidian spaces sparsely populated by real-life inhabitants of the EUR, but noticeably devoid of the two people whose planned rendezvous has been conspicuously teur’s international prestige was increasing, withheld. Such withholding on Antonioni’s part — following screenings of L’Avventura (The Ad- his decision not to show Vittoria and Piero convergventure, 1960) and La Notte (The Night, 1961) at the ing like magnets at the end (each one part of a dyad

Cannes and Berlin film festivals, respectively. It was of mutual attraction and romantic longing) — might also a time when stateside cinephilia was entering a at first frustrate viewer expectations. However, as stage of maturation and reflection, thanks in part to suggested by the many critics who have already lavthe efforts of Andrew Sarris, who that same year ished attention on this final sequence, it ultimately published “Notes on the Auteur Theory” in a winter contributes to the cinephilic pleasure experienced by issue of Film Culture (Mast and Cohen 660). For those audiences who are attuned to the rhythms of many fledgling cinephiles who first encountered The the city and to the lives of its anonymous pedestri-

Eclipse upon its original run in art-house venues such ans. Spectatorial fascination is thus ironically linked as New York’s Little Carnegie Theatre only to return to the inconclusiveness of this conclusion, which to it, fetishistically, in subsequent years, the film’s strangely satisfies by virtue of its empty density, its cacelebrated payoff occurs at the very end, during an pacity to signify fullness in a virtual void. extended, wordless dénouement that paradoxically Described by the director in interviews as a withholds an anticipated narrative event: the meeting “decomposition of things” (Samuels), this contembetween the drifting protagonist Vittoria (Monica plative coda “possesses an ordered, descriptive logic,

Vitti) and her new lover, a handsome stockbroker the order of disestablishment,” according to Seynamed Piero (Alain Delon). Visually pivoting on the mour Chatman, one of the many theorists to have various details of an empty street corner in the heart examined The Eclipse as an example of high-modernof the Esposizione Universale Roma (a residential ist cinema (82). In Chatman’s and other writers’ asand business district simply known as the EUR), this sessments of the film, an inordinate amount of atslowly unfolding montage, comprised of forty-four tention is given to its final scene, comprised of “peshots, epitomizes Antonioni’s aesthetic preoccupa- ripheral synecdoches,” including a pile of bricks and tions and perhaps lends credence to Sarris’s descrip- other building materials at a construction site, straw tion of the Italian master’s work as “Antoniennui.” mats draped over partially exposed scaffolding, a

That which is experienced by some audiences as a leaking barrel of water at the corner of a wooden prolonged inducement of tedium and banality regis- fence, a sprinkler system, and an assembly of beckters as something quite extraordinary in the minds of oning trees, their branches swaying in the breeze.

These synecdochal objects, Chatman states, “invite us to look for the central components” (82), the two missing characters who are there but not there, presently absent. However, this privileging of what is assumed to be the most profound and disquieting section of The Eclipse has peripheralized — or pushed to the margins — other, earlier moments that are equally deserving of our attention. Indeed, the underlying enigma of the film, related to its ambiguous title (which points “everywhere and nowhere at once,” according to Peter Brunette [166n1]), is lent additional shadings when those other, less fetishized scenes are revealed to have been “eclipsed” in the minds of cinephiles by the final seven minutes.

Although Brunette informs us that the film’s title refers to an actual solar eclipse “that Antonioni went to Florence to film” (166) but ultimately left out of the finished work, several critics have grappled with its various connotations in light of The Eclipse’s thematic emphasis on the concealment of real emotions, the dissolution of the Italian bourgeoisie, and the disintegration of meaning as well as personal relationships in spaces that are festooned with American commodities and driven by mechanized routines (Kovács 96-98; Arrowsmith). If we accept the general definition of the term “eclipse” as an astronomical event that involves the temporary concealment of a celestial object which has passed into the shadow of another heavenly body, then perhaps we can expand its metaphorical suggestiveness as a marker of the way that the critical privileging of one particular scene in a motion picture necessarily entails a kind of convenient “covering up” or suppression of other scenes. Briefly, I wish to further expand this notion of an eclipse, construing it as a “natural event” that is something of an anomaly; an outof-the-ordinary occurrence that is accounted for in nature and which can be explained through scientific discourse, but which disturbs the normal state of affairs and momentarily alters the world, thrusting us into an enlightening darkness. Specifically, I shift the critical focus to two other scenes in The Eclipse in which Antonioni’s predilection for combining abstract and concrete forms is on view. Those scenes, besides demonstrating the filmmaker’s synthesizing tendencies, further highlight some of the ontological characteristics of the motion picture medium, which even at its most “still” is riddled with movement; in particular, the movement of the wind — an omnipresent but oft-ignored part of the cinematic image.

As a filmmaker with a background in documentary but predisposed to a compositionally expressionistic, rigorous ordering of the world, Antonioni understood the challenges involved in lending nature an unnatural form, in placing the unpredictable rhythms and unplanned movements of daily life into a meticulously conceived mise-en-scène — one that, to some viewers, might appear airless or even lifeless. “Airless,” however, is not a word that I would use to describe The Eclipse, a film in which the wind actively participates, like an invisible yet palpably felt protagonist, no less present (or absent) than Vittoria or Piero. Indeed, the two scenes that I wish to point toward — the two epiphanic moments that precede the film’s coda and anticipate its uncanny juxtapositions — each revolve around the flow of air, a circulatory current that is at once contained yet unconstrained in its capacity to register the motion picture medium’s unique attributes. If, as Alex C. Purves has stated, the motion picture camera has a “special ability to reveal things that were previously unremarkable to the human eye” (325), then the presence of wind in these moments suggests that there is more to mise-en-scène than meets the eye.

The first moment occurs during the film’s opening scene, a lengthy, early-morning encounter between two people whose relationship is not immediately discernible upon initial viewing. Running twelve minutes, this introduction to Vittoria and her soon-to-be-ex-lover, Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), plays out entirely indoors, within the latter’s claustrophobic apartment looking out onto a mushroom-