Mise-en-scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (Issue 2.1, Spring 2017)

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Editor’s Note

By Greg Chan, Editor-in-Chief

S

ome say that film is dead. If that is the case, then it must be enjoying an intriguing Afterlife.

At the recent meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in Chicago, I was struck by the breadth of film-centric sessions devoted to exciting new theories and scholarly approaches. Panels covered a range of topics: rereading of postwar auteurs; weird(ing) cinema; Asian American film historiography; body parts in performance; new documentary forms; and engaging indigeneity and settler colonialism, just to name a few. Complementing this were panels that seamlessly integrated film and media studies through a crossover topic— such as fandom, seriality, queerness or transmedia culture—along with a series of workshops on special interest topics, pedagogy, and open access scholarship. While this is just a snapshot of the 460 panels that spanned the five-day conference, it gives you a good idea of the robust state of the discipline, even in challenging times for research in the Humanities.

What is my takeaway from the SCMS conference, you might ask? Gathered with my colleagues from universities around the world, I felt certain that film studies are not only alive, but in a state of regeneration. By extension, so too is the Arts, which has the ability to create meaning and common ground through critical inquiry. It is a cultural force that resists homogenous views, sparks dialogue, and demonstrates how words matter. Robin Williams’s

Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society captures this sentiment best when he explains to his students, We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love – these are what we stay alive for.”

STEAM education has the power to move us forward.

For its part, MSJ continues to support Arts and Humanities scholarship through its commitment to the open-access model of publishing. I am pleased to announce that the journal is now included in EBSCO’s Film and Television Literature Index, which ensures that MSJ’s contributing authors will be able share their research with a much broader readership than was previously possible. The publication’s growth also includes a partnership with Moving Images Distribution, a non-profit organization specializing in Canadian social justice documentaries. Look for future issues of MSJ to feature reviews of Moving Images films plus interviews with Canadian filmmakers. One final announcement: the editorial team is supported by two new student interns, Kymberly Kuhnert (KPU History) and Mat Cruickshank (KPU Creative Writing). Welcome to the team, Kymberly and Mat.

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Expanding on MSJ’s interest in taking it one frame at a time, Issue 2.1 includes an interview with rising filmmakers Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht (The White King), a review of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and a multimodal feature on J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man by Brian Macaskill. To fully experience this interactive article, I recommend that you download the PDF and open it with Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat (Apple’s Preview will not work). The accompanying media will be accessible by clicking on it.

Finally, I would like to dedicate Issue 2.1 to the memory of Sue Ann Cairns, whose passion for Arts education will never be forgotten by her students and colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

June 2017

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Sue Ann Cairns

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Translating and Transforming J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man from Novel to Opera: an Ambling, Doubling, and Trippling Pursuit of the Opera’s Cinematographic Beginning Brian Macaskill John Carroll University

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man: a Novel interests itself in early (and so mostly French) instances of photography. In some ways the Coetzee text operates as though it were itself a verbal instantiation of this early photography (as later slowly but also not so slowly understood by early theorists of culture like Walter Benjamin and major poets like Paul Valéry, for instance): the product of machinery in one sense, the result of a finely tuned Coetzee assembly line subject to multiple acts of inspection (procedure resulting in twenty-five textual versions this time), but also the product of that which in photography exceeds mechanics, that which frees photography from bondage to documentary verisimilitude.

For Paul Rayment, the eponymous Slow Man and sometime migrant from France, the camera has always seemed “more a metaphysical than a mechanical device.” For Benjamin, photography can give access to an optical unconscious. For his part, Valéry came to believe that—by taking on much of the historical burden of verisimilitude—photography helped literature pursue its true paths, one being “the perfecting of language that constructs or expounds abstract thought,” and another being literary exploration of “all the variety of poetic patterns and resonances.” In order to express abstract thought, writes Valéry, “we avail ourselves of a whole visual [and auditory] rhetoric.”

Thinking thus in the concrete abstract, and doubling as some kind of migrant in another country his own, early—South African—childhood interest in the photographically visual, Coetzee, at this time already an Oldish, and therefore, Slowish Man, collaboratively recreates—by thematically and structurally re-doubling Samuel Beckett—the Slow Man novel as an opera for doubled actor-voices and dancers, supplemented especially in the beginning with cinematography by Wojciech Puś and— principal collaborative doubling—with the magnificent score of Belgian composer Nicholas Lens. In order to pay concrete attention to the abstract thought shaping the opera’s translation of Slow Man into new meanings, and by proceeding through a practice that pursues Nietzsche’s “slow reading,” this article follows in some detail the cinematography that begins a migration of images towards new, enriched, and revisited meaning in the opera. Along the way, references will be made to the most deeply engrained of Coetzee’s writerly antecedents, Samuel Beckett, and to work from Coetzee’s fellow artist and countryman, William Kentridge.

trippling n and adj.

1901 Field 9 Mar. 322/1 The [South African] Boer never rides his horse at the trot, but at a quick walk or canter, [at] a step peculiar to the country and called “trippling”, or, as we should style it, ambling.

—Oxford English Dictionary (OED) MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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In a clear sense, all reading is translation, just as all translation is criticism.

—J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point I think of myself as an artist making drawings, even when the charcoal is replaced by an ink word. […] The pen is a loaded weapon.

—William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons cartouche, n.

I.= French cartouche fem.

1. Mil. A roll or case of paper, parchment, etc., containing the charge of powder and shot for a gun or pistol; a cartridge.

—OED collodion, n.

A solution of gun-cotton in ether, forming a colourless gummy liquid, which dries rapidly in the air, owing to evaporation of the ether; used in photography for covering plates with a thin film, and in surgery for coating wounds, burns, etc.

—OED

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he South African Nobel laureate and luminary J.M. Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, is and is not a Boer, is and is not some sort of migrant guerilla-soldier, -artist, and -gardener. During the turn of the century Anglo-Boer War (1889-1902), which Rudyard Kipling famously called a dress-rehearsal for Armageddon, the two combatant sides extensively deployed horses (used for combat, especially by the Boers) and

Fig. 1: British war-cycle built for use on and off railway lines by the Royal Australian Cycle Corps. See also D.R. Maree.

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bicycles (mostly for dispatch and reconnaissance, though the British used bicycles in combat [Fig. 1 and Fig. 2]). As an avid cyclist, Coetzee is more at home on a bicycle than on a horse; but he does acknowledge as the Afrikaners’ “finest hour” their mostly horse-mounted anti-imperialist guerilla efforts during the Anglo-Boer War (Good Story 109), one result of which—as my first epigraph suggests—is to have made the trippling gait of the Boer

Fig. 2: The Boer Vrystaatse Rapportrijders. Images courtesy of The War Museum of the Boer Republics, Bloemfontein.

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

horse or boer-perd more widely noticed across the Anglophone world. And something of the guerilla boerperd ’s gait, peculiar and distinctive, reveals itself everywhere in Coetzee’s peculiar, distinctive, and singular writing, although Slow Man, his tenth or thirteenth novel (it all depends how one gaits the list, how one distinguishes between fiction and non-fiction), ‘in fact’ begins—and ends—with a bicycle and tricycle rather than with a horse.

Slow Man begins when Paul Rayment, its first and thus primary protagonist, is hit by a car while riding his bicycle along a road in his adopted Australian hometown of Adelaide. The collision becomes a serious matter—comes to constitute a death or neardeath experience—though Rayment regains on-site consciousness of the explosive event long enough to register “on a rose-pink screen that trembles like water each time he blinks and is therefore quite likely his own inner eyelid” (Coetzee 3) the sight and sound of a typewriter reproducing letters from its keyboard, by way of its cartouche (cartridge, or ribbon). Rayment sees and hears—“clack clack clack”—the familiar “Q-W-E-R-T-Y” mixed up with other letters that together more or less spell out the opposite of seriousness: Frivolity or Frivol.

Frivol is a noun used to designate a light-hearted event, especially a literary or cinematographic production; it is also a verb meaning to trifle, to behave frivolously, to frivol away money or time in the sense of spending either foolishly. In the hospital thereafter, unconscious during it all, Rayment has a leg amputated and will later stubbornly refuse an artificial limb, preferring the relative authenticity, for him, of crutches over a prosthetic body-supplement. Slow Man begins, then, with an explosive collision registered on the inside of a watery screen: a closed eyelid blindly shocked into seeing some part of the end.

Slow Man ends when Rayment, suffused by shame and ungracious thoughts, reluctantly accepts an alternate prosthesis to the one he has since the beginning refused. Towards the end of the novel he

is presented with a recumbent tricycle he will be able to pedal by hand. The tricycle has been custommade for him by family members of Marijana Jokić, his sometime nurse, originally from Croatia and the object of Rayment’s desire. Courtesy of free indirect style, we learn that “He has never ridden one before, but he dislikes recumbents instinctively, as he dislikes prostheses, as he dislikes all fakes” (255). Rayment’s initials are painted on the tricycle tubing. PR Express, the lettering reads; this, explains Rayment to Ljuba, the youngest Jokić child, will identify the rider as “‘P[aul] R[ayment] the rocket man’” who “can go very fast,” to which Ljuba responds, “‘You aren’t Rocket Man, you’re Slow Man!’” (258)—whence comes the novel’s title, which derives from other sources also. Some of these sources are unsurprisingly lodged in autobiographical circumstance: Coetzee’s biographer J.C. Kannemeyer writes, for instance, of a bicycling accident in which Coetzee broke a collar bone about a year before he began writing the novel, becoming for several months a slow writer forced to manipulate and play his computer keyboard with only one hand (583). According to Coetzee, whom Kannemeyer proceeds to record in this regard, the title supplements “the primary meaning of slow (as in to ride slowly)”; additionally, slow connotes: “slow as in ‘slow on the uptake,’ ‘slow to get the message,’ not very perceptive,” and, “the virtuous side of slowness,” as in Nietzsche’s insistence on being a philologist in the older sense of this term, which is to say “‘a teacher of slow reading’” (584).

Yet another inference synecdochically gestating in the title Slow Man, one mentioned neither by Coetzee nor his biographer, is a sense towards which I have from the beginning quite slowly been moving, albeit with some syntactical delay. The inference sounds itself into being as a thematic resonance slowly coming to animate a passion other than cycling that also links Coetzee to Rayment: their shared

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interest in the originally slow processes of photography. Photography is itself always figuratively prosthetic, a material procedure of capturing a record by productive means ineluctably tied to a dialectic of loss and survival. To be clear: like a prosthesis, a photograph axiomatically bears witness to that moment which has now been lost, and so, simultaneously, to that which—perhaps terribly—has survived. Since childhood, J.M. Coetzee has been interested in photography, the cinema, and photographic processes (he developed and printed his own pictures as a young photographer). Paul Rayment, who “tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words” (Coetzee 64), also once practiced photography, but the arrival and spread of colour made him abandon the practice in favour of collecting “first-generation photographs” (48), including some by Antoine Fauchery, whose albumen prints Rayment finds particularly compelling (175). Rayment’s passion for saving photographic incunabula (“most of them last [and unique] survivors”), a passion fueled by “fidelity to the photographs themselves” (65), encourages the reader to see that the titular “slowness” of the novel resonates also with the slow chemical processes of early photography: Rayment prefers the photographic slowness of old, a slowness thematically and ontologically embedded and embodied in the novel itself. Slow Man thus takes a special interest in early, mostly French, instances of photography: magical machine drawing made possible by typically slow chemicals. The novel operates as though it were itself a verbal instantiation of early photography as understood by Walter Benjamin or Paul Valéry: not only as the potentially explosive product of machinery and chemicals in one sense, the result of a finely tuned Coetzee assembly line subject to multiple acts of inspection (procedure resulting in twenty-five textual versions this time),1 but also a product analogous to that which in photography exceeds mechan-

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ics and chemistry, that which frees the arts in general—and potentially photography itself—from bondage to documentary verisimilitude. *** A novel’s title is never a name, but always a more or less graphic element that exceeds discursive reportage to make some abstract thing—an idea—quite concretely visible instead.2 *** A slow reading of Slow Man gradually and retrospectively reveals those thematics synecdochically embedded in its title and linked, for example, to the hybridization of Paul Rayment’s name. In Anglophone Australia, Rayment’s printed name visually resembles “payment” whereas in his native France it aurally resembles “vraiment ” (really, truly, actually, indeed [192]), which is indeed how it sounds in the opera; these name-words, especially the latter, connect to French verisimilitude, a now obsolete word that the French, leaving “verisimilitude” to the English, currently render as vraisemblance. These namewords thus end up linking Rayment and his novel to ideas about photography contemplated by Walter Benjamin and Paul Valéry—to mention only two more names—though the thinking certainly goes all the way back to Platonic reflection on shadow inscription or skiagraphia, one of the first names given to the photographic process by the inventor of the calotype process and photographic negative, William Henry Fox Talbot, English counterpart and contemporary of Louis Daguerre of daguerreotype fame. In the end, “photography”—that is, “light-writing” from Greek via French—won the battle of names.

For Rayment, the camera has always seemed “more a metaphysical than a mechanical device” (65). For Walter Benjamin, photography can give access to an “optical unconscious” (203). Paul Valéry believed that by taking on much of the historical bur-

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

den of verisimilitude, photography helped art (especially literary art) pursue its true paths, one being “the perfecting of language that constructs or expounds abstract thought,” and another being literary exploration of “all the variety of poetic patterns and resonances” (193). Pursuing the expression of abstract thought, Valéry further adds, “we avail ourselves of a whole visual [and, I would add, auditory] rhetoric” (197). Valéry has little doubt that literature constitutes an engagement with abstract thought, and that the arts assist one another in this engagement.

Likewise, Coetzee—literary heir to a narrative line inherited from Gustave Flaubert via James Joyce and Samuel Beckett—has little doubt that the years he “devoted” to Beckett “was time well spent”: “What one can learn from Beckett’s prose is a lesson one level more abstract than one can get from verse” (“Homage” 6). Thus thinking in the concrete abstract, and doubling or trippling as some kind of migrant in Australia his own, early, South African and part-Boer childhood interest in the visual, the photographic, and the cinematic, Coetzee collaboratively recreates the Slow Man novel as a narratively condensed opera that leaves much headroom for music.3 Already himself at this time an oldish or at least older (and hence slower, perhaps wiser) man, Coetzee opens the transformative operation to assistance from the other arts by thematically and structurally re-doubling Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot into an opera for doubled actor-voices and dancers, supplemented with cinematography by Wojciech Puś, and—this is the principal collaborative doubling— with the tripling score written for three principal voices by Belgian composer Nicholas Lens, who initially approached Coetzee about a possible collaboration on the basis of having been moved by the operatics of and in Coetzee’s Disgrace (Semenowicz 49).

Indeed, the Slow Man opera can be said to have translated into mixed media, integrally including film,

what Disgrace had already achieved in a single and singularly resonant textual exercise of narrative, performance, and musical phrasing.4 The Slow Man opera is astutely based on a narrow selection from the novel’s generous supply of material: the operatic performance limits itself to a single and singular but relatively minor episode in the novel, an episode now operatically recreated by a paired on-stage cast pared down to three singing characters and their dancing and/or cinematographic doubles: Paul Rayment, the novel’s first protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, the novel’s co-protagonist, familiar to readers from prior Coetzee narratives, and the blind Marijana, who is supported by an offstage female choir. As a result of this narrowed focus, the entire Jokić family is excluded from the opera except insofar as traces of Marijana Jokić nominally remain to buttress or to haunt the now central presence of an operatic and blind Marijana.

This Marijana is named Marianna in the novel, where Rayment thinks: “He [Rayment] says Marianna, she [Marianna] says Marianna, but it is not the same name. His Marianna is still coloured by Marijana” (105). The libretto is mostly taken verbatim from the novel, and accentuates the novel’s photo-resonance through its initial reliance on allusive cinematographic narrative in support of music and libretto.

Lens and Coetzee’s operatic Slow Man doubles, redoubles, and tripplingly triples musico-visual gestures in its narrative concentration and structural simplification. As so often happens in Coetzee’s thought and writing, the opera again puts to work the prescience of Samuel Beckett: not only by drawing on Beckett as a writer close to Coetzee’s heart, but also in its collaborative audio-visual constitution.

The opera is marked by and from its opening cinematographic frames, and by its structural skeleton, as a performative audio-visual event in collaborative pursuit of Beckett, and in pursuit of a novel itself shaped by Beckett as antecedent. (At their linguistic core, all Coetzee works are so shaped.) Beyond its MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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title, the “inside” of Coetzee’s novel begins—I repeat—with an external collision or explosive coming-together internally recorded by the clacking of a typewriter on “a rose-pink screen that trembles like water each time he blinks and is therefore quite likely his own inner eyelid”: “clack clack clack” goes the typewriter as lid collides with lid in a watery eye blink of opening and closing (3). Something analogous— albeit it in a scene first seen from the outside—explodes into being in the opening of Samuel Beckett’s only film, which begins with a closed eye (Fig. 3): strange seascape of wrinkled skin from the opening frames of a film for whose production Beckett crossed the Atlantic waters—his first and only such trip—in order to be on set for the filming.

Fig. 3: Early still shot of closed eyelid from Beckett’s Film.

The closed Beckettian eye opens out of its blink to a transformative explosion of awakening; but this is clearly neither a comfortable nor a comforting state (Fig. 4 and Fig. 5).

Following the computer-generated typewriting script of Slow Man: A Novel, and behaving in its genesis as if it were descended from Beckett’s Film, Lens and Coetzee’s Slow Man opera opens by Lens music and by camera lens to the image of a seeing eye cinematographically complicitous in its relationship to that which it sees: in this instance a cityscape seen from the sea by an eye—and of course by a firstperson pronominal “I”—in the process of arriving by sea to a new land, an eye and an I who together register the silhouette of an abstractly unfamiliar urban-landscape-city at the bottom of the projection screen and inversely mirrored at the top of the screen (Fig. 6).

This movingly beautiful and literally moving set of frames clearly signifies and viscerally feels as though it were a view participating in reciprocal exchange between inside and outside: between a projecting and viewing eye (in which cityscapes constitute lower and upper eyelids) and the sea and sky beyond the eye, which in turn seem to see what the eye

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Fig. 4: Film, in which the protagonist, played by Buster Keaton (Fig. 5), is doubled or “sundered” into two ostensibly separate instances of the same being: “object (O) and eye (E), the former in flight, the latter in pursuit” (Beckett 11); as happens also in a fugue. “It will not be clear until the end of film,” continues Beckett, “that pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self.”

Fig. 5: Buster Keaton in Film.

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

Fig. 6: Nicholas Lens and John M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2012).

sees from its watery migrant home. We see the eye see and see what the eye sees, though on this occasion we see with both our eyes what only one eye sees on screen. Shut first one eyelid, then quickly the other—no need for a patch of the sort Keaton wears in Film—and the already moving onscreen image moves again to the right or to the left, migrating from one place to another.

This sort of sight is defamiliarized sight, more or less unexceptionally artistic insight, and, as such, a privileged sight for artists generally and particularly speaking: witness the witness born by Coetzee’s fellow artist and countryman William Kentridge, who, like Coetzee (and like Nicholas Lens, for that matter) has risen to become a global phenomenon in the art world, but who—unlike Coetzee—has not left South Africa to live elsewhere in any definitive sense, has not himself migrated in such a way despite the literal and figurative migrations depicted in much of his work, much of which works by way of the filming into animation or migration of charcoal drawings that lead the eye here and there on a journey. In an iconic drawing from the film History of the Main Complaint (1996), for instance, Kentridge fixes for less than a second this familiarly defamiliarized sight

whereby we see the largely autobiographical Kentridge-male see what he sees even as, in the second or less, we also see a mirror image of him seeing it (Fig. 7) and are hereby reminded that, except in a mirror and then only imperfectly, we never exactly see ourselves seeing what we see. Excerpts from this magnificent early Kentridge film, on which Coetzee has astutely written (“History”), can be seen in a short U.S. Public Broadcasting Service Art: 21 sequence, accompanied by the sound, here and there, of some Kentridge commentary.

Fig. 7: Drawing from History of the Main Complaint, 1996. Charcoal and pastel on paper.

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Fig. 8: Title screen for Slow Man, the opera.

Then—but now looking back and again listening to the Lens and Coetzee opera in its musicocinematographic prelude—the opening eyelid slowly closes in a dilatory blink, and becomes a whirlpool of water that subsequently gives birth—Push!

Push!—to the synecdochic title: Slow Man (Fig. 8).

Titles are always synecdoches.

With the not so delayed and not so slow arrival of the title by dilatory blink, the opera has truly begun and will continue to be driven—for a while still—not only by its already-playing music, but also by more cinematography projected onto the proscenium screen after early cinematic onset of labour, parergon to eventual performance on stage: onset of labour, that is to say, from the very beginning.

The opening and closing eye, and the cityscape it sees and briefly allows us to see (Fig. 9), has vaguely promised to resemble a view of Adelaide from the ocean (as an arriving migrant might perhaps with

Fig. 10: Approaching Adelaide from the ocean.

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Fig. 9: Opening eye beginning, waterily, to close.

perhaps watery eye see it): complex and abstract promise wrought of and wrung from the seeming overlap of photographic image, verisimilitude, and truth; and from a desire to have the spectral mean, signify, and portend.

An audience member in the opera house—you, he, or I—might well want to see and thus to make some such meaning: after all, she almost certainly knows that the operatic production is connected by title to the novel, Slow Man, by J.M. Coetzee, and that J.M. and John M. Coetzee, librettist of the opera, are indeed the same person (albeit with a common South African surname). She probably knows Slow Man to be Coetzee’s first post-Nobel novel, his first “entirely” Australian novel, his possibly no-turningback-now migrant effort, his first novel since definitively migrating from South Africa to South Australia. Such an audience member (that would be most of us) might well want the scene to mean something;

Fig. 11: Still frame of what the opera eye sees (showing a resemblance to Fig. 10).

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

to mean something like: distant silhouette of Adelaide as it could possibly be seen by a watery eye crossing the oceans from Africa to Australia (Fig. 10), even as she, he, and we know that this is, in fact, unlikely to (“really”) be the case. Nevertheless, we register the opening as being pregnant with meanings in whose birth we want to assist.

And we probably want these images to mean at their abstract circumference of quite violent dilation and dilatation something concerning translation, migration, and transformation. Or, perhaps something more concrete: one who knows the Adelaide seacoast well—I do not—might want to see in the tall structure at the middle of the eyelid a resemblance to the silhouette of the Adelaide Brighton Cement factory (a concrete association if ever there were one), which, I am told, sticks out like a sore thumb when seen from the sea (Fig. 12). Those who know Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy might have other ideas. *** Slow Man the novel is replete with European migrants, among whom the originally French Paul Rayment is only the most central migrant and immediately one of the most immobile. As previously insinuated, Slow Man is also the novel of Coetzee’s emigration to Australia. Coetzee is politically and in economic terms neither a refugee nor an exile; he is not even a migrant in the twenty-first-century and currently crisis-ridden sense of that term.5 As a writer,

thinker, and academic, however, Coetzee has long practiced a kind of migrancy into exile, making writing his refuge and home no matter where he finds himself. Writing is for Coetzee a home in which— alongside Theodor Adorno and others (James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, say)—he has come to know that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Adorno 39). Much more could here be said about migrancy, exile, and music, though Adorno and Edward Said, in particular, have generously and movingly said their say, for which I thank them, returning as I do so to Said’s reminder that “exiles are aware of at least two” homes, and that “this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (186).6 Thinking neither of exile nor of migrancy on the particular occasion of an interview, Lens inclines towards the “universal” truth of music: voice “cannot lie” he says, albeit immediately he qualifies: “At least I can hear the difference when singers lie” (Semenowicz 52). Not saying more, myself, about exile, and music (or ‘universality’) for now, I amble onwards. In the beginning, especially, of the operatic Slow Man, the images move, migrate, and sing—migrant images moving, translating, and transforming from prior text to another kind of singing performance and critical epistemology—as they move, glide, and hobble over proscenium projections and,

Fig. 12: Left: Adelaide Brighton Cement factory as seen from the Port River Estuary; Right: approaching from the ocean, its silhouette would be horizontally reversed. Photographs courtesy of Simon Collinson.

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Fig. 13: William Kentridge. Porter Series: France divisée en 32 provinces (Shower Man), 2006. 248 x 341.6 cm. Tapestry weave with embroidery. Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio. Edition: 5 + 2 Artist’s proofs.

Image courtesy of the William Kentridge Studio. Click on the inset image to play an extract from Shadow Procession.

later, as real bodies wobble, glide, and dance across solid stage.

William Kentridge regularly invites us to see migration—often terrible, forced, and terribly violent migration—in his work (Fig. 13 and inset image).

We see migration—or better yet, we perhaps by some hermeneutic act of violence want to see migration—in the opening gestures of the Lens-Coetzee opera; and we more or less benignly want to see Adelaide in the sea-land-scape crafted by Wojciech Puś.

These are acts and desires fueled by our innate compulsion to make meaning (for better or for worse— and Coetzee knows, by apprehension shared with Elizabeth Costello in “The Problem of Evil,” that it can be for worse).

This is the kind of desire and capacity for making that so interests Kentridge, who regularly comments on the compulsion we mostly share to create meaningful concatenations from, say, scraps of loosely contiguous paper, in which we might begin to see a 10

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migration, more or less terrible, or perhaps a horse (Fig. 14 and Fig. 15) or, under some circumstances, a bicycle. As heirs to Beckett, Coetzee and Kentridge (who once was prevented from staging a puppet adaptation of Waiting for Godot [“Crocodile’s Mouth” 133]) know that the sense and nonsense we make is and is not actually there. “It takes an effort, a willful blindness,” writes Kentridge, to keep the images as black torn sheets of paper. To be more accurate, to see them only as torn sheets of paper. We see them as both, we are not fooled. The horse and the paper are both here. This is an unwilling suspension of disbelief. […] move the pieces of paper, adjust them, and the horse rears up in front of you.

(Six Drawing Lessons 18) We see the torn shreds of paper and we see a horse; see an eyelid and a cityscape; see Adelaide and not-Adelaide, all at some level nowadays a labour of pixels, tiny electronic moles: yes-no (ja-nee as the Boers and others say in Afrikaans).7 The framing operatic image is and is not a representation of Adelaide

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

seen from the sea as a migrant might see it. The footage is, in fact—and as a matter of verisimilitude—some sort of copy of Venice; but that hardly matters, because the ambiguous image-sequence transforms and translates Venice and not-Venice into migratory shards of meaning that coalesce around the idea of migration, where much is unknown, ambiguous, but often sharply ambiguous, always potentially hostile or dangerous, as Kentridge’s Shower Man (Fig. 13) horrifically shows in its (deceptively soft, probably mohair-woven) depiction of a man displayed against the backdrop of a map of France over which he inexorably moves eastward on a wheeled office chair connected to what can only be a deadly shower spraying Zyklon B.8 We see this horror by making sense of the image, and we variously feel the violent and painfully-mixed feelings of the meanings we have made. ***

Fig. 14: William Kentridge “Making a Horse,” Six Drawing Lessons (17).

Fig. 15: Click on the image (above) to play an extract from Making a Horse (part of the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008).

The operatic title shot, in all its richly indefinite, potential, and provisional semantics, is followed by a cinematographic sequence in which we see the anonymous and not so anonymous sea-sky-scape give way to the winding darkness of a master shot, slowly and oxymoronically hurtling down a country road; were it a Boer horse, a boer-perd, one might say of this master shot that it were trippling. It is not a Boer horse, but a sequence jerky enough to have been shot from horseback, or, more reasonably now, from a vehicle traversing a bumpy road. Car lights or impossibly bright bicycle lights skitter down a narrow road at night (most of us know of the bicycle accident from the novel, though our eyes tell us that this cannot be a bicycle: the light is too bright and too widely angled to have been produced by bicycle dynamo or battery).

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The road is so narrow it is difficult to say whether the surely not horse-drawn vehicle (car, improbable bicycle) is driving or cycling on the left-hand side of the road, or on the right: it could be the left. (Where am I? one asks oneself. Is this Australia [left-hand side of the road] or somewhere in Europe—Poland, perhaps [right-hand side of the road]?) In actual fact—fact gleaned from correspondence with the film-maker, Wojciech Puś—this is Portugal (right hand side of the road), made provisionally visible to us in a blurry set of images captured on black-andwhite infrared film in deliberately rough fashion.

But, still, the road is too narrow to tell for sure: all we know with some confidence is that we know ourselves to be moving, and that images are migrating.

Who, however, is driving? Provisionality in this context—again I follow Kentridge on provisionality in art—is linked to transformation, translation, and to

Fig. 16: Road from Slow Man master shot.

Fig. 18: Unidentifiable body part.

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the migration of images. The fingerprint or trace left by migration is not literal, but conceptual, and yet still material (more material than just digital: and more obviously vulnerable, therefore, to physical damage, to catastrophic collision).

The vehicle lights now and then illuminate reflective surfaces—road signs—while periodic street and other lights seem to flash, brightening and dimming like lambent owl eyes (Fig. 16) as we move past at indeterminate speed until the vehicle slows before the stone pillars of a gateway (Fig. 17), which will soon give way to a naked, unidentifiable, and blemished human body part up close (Fig. 18), really close up (it could be a knee, but the anatomy is all wrong), and to a close-up portrait-projection of Mark Doss, the bass-baritone singing the part of Paul Rayment: “Who did this?” Rayment meanwhile sings, echoing

Fig. 17: Stone gateway.

Fig. 19: Mark Doss singing the part of Paul Rayment, doubled onscreen (in pain).

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

a phrase familiar from the novel, while his magnified face on screen remains silent and mostly static, slowly opening and closing its mouth and eyes, slowly blinking and gasping, presumably in pain (Fig. 19).

And then, in daylight this time, arrives a segment of vertiginously spinning film footage that recreates through metonymic disorientation—this is surely pain, “the real thing” of which Rayment sings—the violent moment of impact when the car hits Rayment on his bicycle, or the after-effect of this impact: world turned upside down, spinning around. A little later—“Who did this to me?”—we see a stuttering, shuddering, shaking image of Rayment lying on the side of the road, bicycle in the background. Now the environment is more urban. “But the pills confuse my mind; they bring terror to my dreams” sings the embodied Rayment, while still other more and less out-of-focus images of trees and vegetation follow and migrate to a country road—not the same one as before—upon which falls light snow becoming fog / smoke, uncontained crematorium flames, and falling water; the latter later comes to resemble prodigious tears (Fig. 20).

This snow-water-fire, water or tear sequence resonates with the violence of the opening shots of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), where— in accordance with Marguerite Duras’s screenplay— the film slowly brings into being what, little by little, slowly become recognizable as pairs of naked arms and shoulders “in an embrace, and as if drenched with ashes, rain, dew, or sweat, whichever is preferred [comme on veut ]” (15). Accompanied by the contrapuntal sounds of Doss/Rayment returning again and again to the “terror” of his dreams, the cinematography bringing us to this terrifying point is itself saturated with what in a different context (a letter to director Francis Gerard about a screenplay for another of his novels) Coetzee enumerates as “the standard cinematic signs of nightmares: graininess, slow motion, loss of depth of field, unnatural colours (reds and browns, or even B&W)” (qtd. in Wittenberg 13).

This ensemble of incrementally terrifying scenes and signs ushers in another and even deeper terror: Rayment is alone. No family: “The door to the future is closed and locked,” he magnificently sings in rough, almost coarse tones. He is “unstrung,” to borrow a

Fig. 20: Ambiguous waterscape.

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Fig. 21: Close-up of Elizabeth Costello.

trope from Homer and from the novel that the opera translates. Alone, crippled, and childless, he is unstrung, unmanned, outmoded. In the novel, he thinks of himself as “a half-man, an after-man, like an after-image” (33-34); in the opera, he thinks in song of self-immolation “by some purely mental act,” if only mental act alone would suffice to get the job done (cf. the novel 12-13). The screen image of Mark Doss singing the part of Paul Rayment is replaced by close-up shots of Elizabeth Costello’s vividly-painted mouth (another nod to Beckett, this time to Not I [Fig. 21]). We see Costello on a balcony, a second story balcony, by the looks of it. Her embodied singing self, Lani Poulson, will enter on the forestage balcony, house left, opposite Mark Doss, and introduce herselves in song. “You came to me” she comes to disingenuously sing of and to Rayment and Doss. The phrase is repeated from the novel, where it occurs several times, and where as a result Rayment gets “tired of being told he came to this woman” (89). Onscreen in the opera, Costello’s mouth and eyes close and open, repeating Rayment’s projected facial gestures from earlier.9 The balcony scene becomes a field of wildflowers (“Push! Push!” sings Costello, as if commanding flowers to emerge in the same imperious way she will 14

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soon seek to extract something [a story?] from Rayment). In the novel, Rayment wonders to himself “Push? Push what? Push! is what you say to a woman in labour” (83). Then the field becomes a balcony again. Costello leaves the balcony and goes inside (Fig. 23 and Fig. 24). We see close-up images of her hands gesticulating (close-ups give us expressions singers cannot, and even if they could, those expressions would always stay invisible to us from so far; we are eavesdroppers, yes, but not exactly under the eaves—not that close to the subjects we overhear).

We see expressions and gestures on the screen that we would not ordinarily be able to see: we see Costello smiling and wiping her eyes, wiping away tears, perhaps, in the aural presence (grazioso e religioso) of the beguilingly gentle and astonishingly beautiful aria her physical counterpart is singing below, from the body:10 “Do you think you are the only man who, in

Fig. 22: Click on the image above to play an extract from the aria, “Do you think you are the only man.”

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

Fig. 23: Costello with close-up of hands (onscreen).

the autumn of his years, the late autumn, looks for true love?”

On the screen, the projected image of Costello in the apartment slowly turns upside down and rights itself—as has happened before (translation, violence, transformation). Shortly before the revolution is complete, Costello looks at her electronic tablet device on which we see a city, from above, if above still means anything. Which city? We hardly know anymore that we now know on what side of the road people drive their vehicles in this city, but we do: they drive on the left—graphic evidence supplied by Costello’s tablet makes it unequivocally so. This, it turns out, is a Google Maps satellite rendition of Adelaide, the city that has adopted both J.M. Coetzee and Paul Rayment, insofar as cities adopt anyone at all. We see a Google-simulation of this city. Then Costello walks to the balcony, and—this time—we seem to see what she sees; we almost see her see Rayment lying dead or half-dead on the side of the road.

Push—Push—Push. (“You must push the mortal envelope” Costello sings in the opera; “‘Push the mortal envelope’” she says to Rayment in the novel [83].) The framing prelude-envelope is being pushed open. Something new is about to be born: as usual, through a process modelled on and resulting in repetition more than resemblance. But there will be resemblance also, even though and perhaps even because the camera has helped free art from obeisance

Fig. 24: Costello smiling and wiping her eyes.

to verisimilitude; Valéry pointed this out (along with others, some of whom have previously been mentioned). Thinking from within the generation of intellectuals after Valéry, Maurice Blanchot—whose abstractly enigmatic writing makes him both Valéry’s heir and an antecedent to post-structuralism—capitalizes on the complicity between death and life, reminding us that resemblance is one of the transformative properties of art that, as such, belongs to art itself: “Resemblance is not a means of imitating life but of making it inaccessible, of establishing it in a double that is permanent and escapes from life.”

“Living figures,” Blanchot continues, are without resemblance. One must wait for the cadaverous appearance, the idealization by death and the eternalization of the end for a being to take on the great beauty that is its own resemblance, the truth of itself in a reflection.

A portrait—one came to perceive this little by little—does not resemble because it makes itself similar to a face; rather, the resemblance only begins and only exists with the portrait and in it alone; resemblance is the work of the portrait, its glory or its disgrace; resemblance is tied to the condition of a work, expressing the fact that the face is not there, that it is absent... (32) “Do you think you are the only man” rings for ears, true again; the projected image shows Lani Poulson, singing from down below the part of Elizabeth Costello, in close-up on the screen, mouth open, slowly closing, but mostly opening, opening and partially closing, blinking—the mirror image of MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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Mark Doss’s earlier projections. She (Costello) is coming for him (Rayment), her story-prey, who lies defenseless on the ground; she is circling openmouthed to swoop from her balcony onto his story, to ingest that story and make it part of her body. Her mouth closes, and her living body sings: “How did you feel as you tumbled through the air?”—“Tell me everything, justify yourself to me,” while projected images migrate to show an insect stuck on its back like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, struggling with legs flailing this way and that to right itself from a sticky plate that we surely want to be some kind of photographic plate. We read the legibility and violence of this moment in not only literary ways (Rayment is and is not the insect, as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis), but also as a repetition, revision, and rewriting playing itself out before our eyes and in memory, where it reminds us of other such moments, including, for example, the close-ups of trapped insects from Abismos de pasión that Luis Buñuel exploits in his adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, seeking by these and related means to emphasize the madness and cruelty of love in Brontë’s fictional world, to which, as he

Fig. 25: Insect trapped on a plate.

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famously insisted, his film remains more faithful and true than the William Wyler version does.

Costello, an internal viewer, is about to appropriate Rayment’s story—to make it hers, part of her body; as external viewers, or spectators at least more removed than she, we are about to appropriate this cinematographic image as something other than the hardly exceptional sight of an insect struggling on a sticky plate (Fig. 25). The insect-trapping plate that we come to appropriate as a photographic plate we would of course turn into a collodion wet plate, part of a photographic process that slowly came in the 1850s to replace the daguerreotype, earlier marvel that, in the words of its inventor, “is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself” (Daguerre 13).

Using the language of reproduction also, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake hails the new collodion, which she thinks superior to the albumen process so admired

by Paul Rayment in the Slow Man novel:

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

Gun-cotton—partly a French, partly a German discovery—is but a child in the annals of chemical science; and collodion, which is a solution of this compound in ether and alcohol, is its offspring. Its first great use was, as is well known, in the service of surgery; its second in that of photography. (51) Collodion is a syrupy solution of cellulose nitrate (gun-cotton) in a mixture of alcohol and ether to which an insect might well be attracted, and in which it will certainly get trapped, risking a slow death (all

death is slow), while the alcohol and ether quite rapidly evaporate.

The insect finally manages to turn itself upright and leaves the plate, though this hardly guarantees escape (“Push—Push—Push”: “tell me everything”).

The projection screen retracts up into the proscenium and the opera ‘proper,’ so to speak, begins with Rayment responding to Costello from the stage, singing “I felt sad” (Fig. 26 and Fig. 27). The opera has truly begun (has begun again, for the second

Fig. 26: Proscenium screen opening to reveal stage beyond.

Fig. 27: Paul Rayment doubled on stage.

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time). The proscenium projection screen is opening up a new and renewed space, a womb or cavity, a cartouche—in its grammatically feminine forms— ready to be reloaded with new munitions, ink, or mail, preparing for its next confinement, labour, and parturition: its next volley of missives.

This polysemantic and gendered word, cartouche, is semantically figured in its feminine form (it has a masculine form also) as a miniature coffin of paper: first and foremost as a roll or case, originally of paper or parchment that contains a charge of powder and shot for a potentially deadly weapon of some explosive sort—what we nowadays call a cartridge. (And, in French, also a carton of cigarettes.) A dangerous box in the first instance, but the box figures also by extension other cartridges more or less dangerous, perhaps even benign: cartridges of ink, say, or magnetic tape cartridges delivering music or computer software, or those cartridges at work in the pneumatic mail delivery systems that once upon a time facilitated invoice, receipt, and payment exchanges in large department stores, and that persist still as the means of exchanging paper and money in the drive-through teller lanes of banks and some other places of business. It is precisely this commercial instance that in the novel Rayment thinks of in his quite considerable retreat from digital photography, mobile phones, and the Internet.11 He finds his thoughts going “back to his childhood, to Ballarat in the days before the spread of [old-fashioned] telephones” (239); back to a time long before the advent of mobile telephones capable of taking pictures (which were beginning to emerge in 2000 when the narrative action takes place). He thinks of a time when people still wrote letters (“who writes letters nowadays?”): A memory comes back: a childhood visit to Paris, to the Galeries Lafayette; watching scraps of paper being screwed into cartouches and shot from one department to another along pneumatic tubes. […] What happened to them, all

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those silvery cartouches? Melted down, probably, for shell casings or guided missiles. (223) I stress the combative and military associations of the word cartouche at this point—its participation in a semantic network of authority bolstered by force with recourse to cruelty and other potentially malignant motivations—in order to suggest that the operatic reloading (of the novel) and its initial, largely cinematographic volley sharpens by concentration the characterization of Elizabeth Costello as a dangerous figure who, to some considerable degree, figures the dangers and risks of novel-writing and art-making.

Here again is William Kentridge, transcribed from the brief autobiographical commentary with which he supplements for release segments of History of the Main Complaint—(for access to an audio version of this record, see page 7): every artist [uses] other people’s pain—as well as their own—as raw material, so there is … certainly an appropriation of other people’s distress in the activity of being a writer or an artist; but there’s also something in the activity of … contemplating, depicting, and spending the time with [that distress], which, I hope—as an artist—redeems the activity from [being] one of simply exploitation and abuse.

The characterization of Costello as a dangerous figure is by no means absent from the novel, but has been brought to the foreground by the collaborative opening-gloss of the opera, in which film and music announce with quite brutal clarity a critical translation of what is to come next, contrapuntally anticipating even the ending toward which the operatic beginning leaps, an ending made more gentle in its conclusions by the violence of its beginning. While I agree with Lens when in interview he identifies Rayment as a sympathetic figure, I am less inclined than Lens to see the Costello-Rayment relationship as more or less benignly coercive, despite the cruelty

Translating and Transforming Slow Man

Costello displays (which display Lens acknowledges of her). For Lens, Rayment “agrees to become a character in the book Costello is going to write” and “voluntarily becomes her puppet”—all this as a response to the (fictional) fact of his accident (Semenowicz 51). The operatic beginning shows me a Costello more or less blindly driven by her clearly voracious appetite for story and story-appropriation, whatever the cost: even if, and perhaps precisely because, she is clearly as much appalled as she is titillated by what she sees from her balcony.

If not evil, Costello is at the very least very dangerous, the kind of dangerous person she recognizes herself to be in Coetzee’s “The Problem of Evil.”

Serious writers and other image-makers of consequence might regularly find themselves struggling on their backs with the sticky problem of evil, a struggle which they might thus also pass on to share with readers and audiences pursuing artistic anything-butfrivols. So, who drives the car? In the novel the answer is straightforward enough: “Wayne somethingor-other, Bright or Blight” (20). But the musical and thematic effects this play of names puts into performance is not especially straightforward, as the opera again shows. In the opera, the driver is not identified.

Perhaps, yes-no, in the opera at least, it is Costello who drives the car, a car with bright lights that comes to blight Rayment’s life and cycling days; Costello perhaps blindly drives the car, eyes closed, albeit not literally so, not so as a matter of verisimilitude.

Notes I thank Nicholas Lens and John Coetzee for permission to quote phrases from the libretto and for an aria excerpt, and the directors of the Malta Festival of Poznań for permission to reproduce stills. The extract from William Kentridge, Shadow Procession, is reproduced by permission from the DVD published together with William Kentridge, Five Themes, as is the extract from Making a Horse. Stills from Beckett’s Film appear courtesy of Milestone Film & Video.

1. Kannemeyer’s examination of the novel manuscript revealed “no fewer than twenty-five versions of the text” (583); his biography details Coetzee’s childhood interest in photography.

2. I comment at greater length on this property of the title in “Titular Space.”

3. The record of a sustained interest in cinematography is confirmed by Coetzee’s memoir-fictions, Boyhood (45), and Youth, in which directors of particular interest to a young Coetzee are named: Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, and Pasolini (48, 128, 154); and Satyajit Ray, in whose Apu Trilogy it is “the music above all that grips him” (93).

Elsewhere commenting on the import of film and photography to his work, Coetzee again mentions Godard (whose aim was “to liberate the sound track from the image”) and points also to films by Chris Marker and by Andrzej Munk that use voiceover alongside images to powerful effect and affect (Doubling 60).

4. In “Entr’acte” I have presented my sense of the operatic in Disgrace.

5. Coetzee’s voluntary migrations from South Africa to England and then to the United States, his forced departure from the United States in 1971, and his misgivings about the U.S. Immigration system are well known and well documented: see, for instance, Kannemeyer 193 ff., and Auster and Coetzee 74 ff.

6. I have thought about music, ethics, and exile in a triptych of essays that begins with “Fugal Musemathematics Track One, Point One.” 7. My thanks to Ivan Vladislavić, without whose A Labour of Moles, I might never have come to know that one of the collective nouns designating a group of moles is a “labour.” I exploit the yes-no expression in “Fugal Musemathematics Track Two.” 8. More on this horror in my “I am not Me” and “Breaking Silence.”

9. The quick entry of Elizabeth Costello into the opera (in the novel she appears only about a third of the way in) emphasizes what in the novel more slowly and complexly emerges as a struggle for narrative control. In the opera, the question of whose story this is—an issue quick with child—becomes emphatically pertinent by virtue of genreexpansion, and becomes more pointed by narrative compression; as a result, the question ties itself quite directly and immediately to the question already obliquely raised by the cinematographic prologue: who is driving the car?

10. Singing, that is, as one of those “nineteenth-century singers” who, according to JC from MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, “was trained to sing from the depths of her thorax (from her lungs, from her ‘heart’), bearing the head high,” although— given the circumstances unfolding—it is by no means certain that the operatic Costello is in good faith at this moment practicing “a mode of singing” that conveys “moral nobility” (131).

11. In published correspondence with Paul Auster, Coetzee wonders about contemporary fiction from which (contra the demands of verisimilitude) “twenty-first-century tools of communication

like the mobile phone are absent” (Here 219).

Rayment has an old, out-of-date computer without a modem. Having worked as a programmer in his younger days, Coetzee is no stranger to computers. While Coetzee initially used to write his drafts out by hand (often in exercise books like those Beckett used for Watt [Doubling 51]), he later began increasingly to prepare manuscripts by computer printout. Slow Man appears to be the first set of fiction drafts produced primarily by these latter means (Attwell xx-xxi).

Works Cited Abismos de pasión. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Tepeyac, 1953.

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. 1951. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott.

Verso, 2005.

Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-toFace with Time. Viking, 2015.

———. Youth. Viking, 2002.

Coetzee, J.M. and Arabella Kurtz. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. Harvill Secker, 2015.

Auster, Paul and J.M. Coetzee. Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011. Penguin, 2014.

Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé. “Daguerreotype.” c.

1837. Classic Essays on Photography. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg. Leete’s Island Books, 1980, pp. 1113.

Beckett, Samuel, screenwriter. Film. Directed by Alan Schneider. Milestone, 1965.

Duras, Marguerite, screenwriter. Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Translated by Richard Seaver. Grove, 1961.

———. Film: Complete Scenario / Illustrations / Production Shots. Grove, 1969.

———. Hiroshima mon amour: scenario et dialogue. Realization par Alain Resnais. Gallimard, 1960.

Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.”

1931. Translated by. P. Patton. Classic Essays on Photography. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg. Leete’s Island Books, 1980, pp.199-216.

Eastlake, Elizabeth. “Photography.” 1857. Classic Essays on Photography. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg.

Leete’s Island Books, 1980, pp. 40-68.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1971. Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP, 1997.

Film. Directed by Alan Schneider, Performance by Buster Keaton, Milestone, 1965.

Cameron, Dan. William Kentridge. Phaidon Press, 1999.

Hiroshima Mon Amour. Directed by Alain Resnais, Pathé, 1959.

Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. Viking, 1997.

Kannemeyer, J.C. J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Translated by Michiel Heyns. Scribe, 2012.

———. Diary of a Bad Year. Harvill Secker, 2007.

Kentridge, William. “The Crocodile’s Mouth (Extract).”

1997. William Kentridge, by Dan Cameron, et al.

Phaidon, 1999, pp. 132-139.

———. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Edited by David Attwell. Harvard UP, 1992.

———. “History of the Main Complaint.” William Kentridge,

by Dan Cameron et al. Phaidon Press, 1999, pp.

83-93.

———. “Homage.” The Threepenny Review, Vol. 53, 1993, pp. 5-7.

———. “The Problem of Evil.” Elizabeth Costello. Viking, 2003, pp. 156-182.

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———. Slow Man. Viking, 2005.

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———. Five Themes. Edited by Mark Rosenthal. Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and six other institutions between Mar. 14, 2009 and Fall 2011. Yale UP, 2009.

———. History of the Main Complaint. 35 mm film transferred to video, 1996. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and other locations.

Translating and Transforming Slow Man ———. Six Drawing Lessons: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 2012. Harvard UP, 2014.

Kentridge, William, and Rosalind C. Morris. That Which is Not Drawn: Conversations. Seagull, 2014.

Lens, Nicholas, composer. Slow Man. Opera. Libretto by John M. Coetzee. Directed by Maja Kleczewska, performances by Lani Poulson, Mark S. Doss, and Claron McFadden. Grand Theatre. Poznań, 5 July 2012.

Macaskill, Brian. “Breaking Silence with an Introductory Note on Beginning with, Sorting through, Building on, Dwelling in, and Approaching J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime.” Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an International Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp.

1-19.

———. “Entr’acte: Cannibalism, Semiophagy, and the Plunk-Plink-Plonk of Banjo Strings in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, vol. 42, 2013, pp. 137-181.

———. “Fugal Musemathematics Track One, Point One: J.M. Coetzee, Ethics, and Joycean Counterpoint.” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 158-175.

———. “Fugal Musemathematics Track Two: Leopold Bloom’s Fugal Fart and J.M. Coetzee’s Contrapuntally Gendered Practice of Meegevoel.” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol.

5, no.1-2, 2015, pp. 235-258.

———. “I am not Me, the Horse is not Mine, William Kentridge & J.M. Coetzee; or: Machines, Death, and Performance as Prelude to Reading Slow Man.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 58, no.

4, 2016, pp. 392-421.

———. “Titular Space in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime: A Maquette for a Portrait, or a Self-Portrait, of the Artist Finding his Feet.” Media Tropes, vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 114-143.

Maree, D.R. “Bicycles in the Anglo-Boer War of 18991902.” Military History Journal, vol. 4, no.1, 1997.

The South African Military History Society / Die Suid-Afrikaanse Krygshistoriese Vereniging. http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol041dm.html. Accessed 25 June 2016.

Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard UP, 2000.

Semenowicz, Dorota. “An Ordinary Man: an interview with Nicholas Lens.” Translated by Karolina Drejerska. Werkwinkel, vol. 7, no. 2, 2012, pp. 4953.

Slow Man. Opera. Composer Nicholas Lens. Libretto by John M. Coetzee. Directed by Maja Kleczewska, performances by Lani Poulson, Mark S. Doss, and Claron McFadden. Grand Theatre. Poznań, 5 July 2012.

Valéry, Paul. “The Centenary of Photography.” Classic Essays on Photography. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg.

Leete’s Island Books, 1980, pp. 192-198.

Vladislavić, Ivan. A Labour of Moles. Sylph, 2012.

Wittenberg, Hermann. Editor’s Introduction. Two Screenplays, by J.M. Coetzee. UCT Press, 2014, pp. 7-27.

Wuthering Heights. Directed by William Wyler. Goldwyn, 1939.

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One frame at a time

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Tabloids, Film Noir, and the Fragmentation of Form and Character in Double Indemnity and The Naked City Alex W. Bordino University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract: This article examines how the screen adaptation of a first-person narrative in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity results in the invocation of voiceover narration, which augments the sense of fatalism on the part of the characters and voyeurism on the part of the spectator. Additionally, Cain’s influence by popular tabloids of the late 1920s and early 1930s elucidates connections between the tabloid medium and film noir that have been understudied by scholars. A closer look at the tabloid-photographic work of Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and the noir adaptation of his photo book, Naked City, further illustrates this connection. The transmogrification of both Double Indemnity (1944) and The Naked City (1948) demonstrates how noir can often be described as a fragmentation of form and character—the medium itself is fragmented by the disassociation between image and sound tracks, a disassociation that mirrors the textual/photographic juxtaposition of tabloid journalism and the issues of verisimilitude that arise from it, and the noir protagonist is fragmented by both his existential dilemma and his inability to establish a connection with the reader/viewer.

T

he cultural history surrounding James M. Cain’s second novel, Double Indemnity, originally published in 1936, illustrates the dialogic nature of various texts and cultural histories across media. Through these particular histories and discourses, one uncovers how certain media influenced the indigenous American genres of hardboiled literature and film noir. What follows is an attempt to examine how Double Indemnity was constructed (the cultural progenitors that influenced James M. Cain’s novel) and reconstructed (the 1944 film adaptation by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder), with an emphasis on tabloid journalism as an important precursor to later noir texts. Additionally, The Naked City (1948) will be analyzed as a noir film, albeit of a different variety than Double Indemnity, produced by a tabloid journalist, Mark Hellinger, and

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partially adapted from the work of tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig (Weegee) and his photo book, Naked City (1945).

Scholars have often neglected the specific influence of tabloids on hard-boiled literature and film noir. For example, the Snyder-Gray murder trial, popularized in the tabloids from 1927 to 1928, clearly influenced the plots of Cain’s first two novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

Similarly, Weegee’s photographic work, published in various tabloids throughout the 1930s, presents an aesthetic of high-contrast, low-key lighting, mirroring the approach by many noir cinematographers in the 1940s and 1950s. As a medium comprised of both images and text, much like cinema’s amalgam of image and spoken dialogue, tabloid journalism obfuscates and fragments the verisimilitude pro-

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vided divergently by the indexical sign system of reproduced reality and the symbolic sign system of language (Pierce 239-240). A similar paradox occurs through the adaptation of hard-boiled literature to film noir. The first-person narrative structure that is definitive of hard-boiled literature intimately connects the reader with the protagonist’s thoughts. The screen adaptation process dismantles this relationship between the protagonist and the viewer. The motion picture is unable to present true first-person narration in the literary sense. Wilder and Chandler’s adaptation of Double Indemnity attempts to ameliorate this problem by constructing non-linear, voiceover narration as part of the storytelling mechanism, a formula that would later typify noir style. This establishes two tropes that become common noir characteristics—an augmented sense of fatalism as the pro-

a disassociation that mirrors the textual/photographic juxtaposition of tabloid journalism and the issues of verisimilitude that arise from it, and the noir protagonist is fragmented by both his existential dilemma—that is, his inability to remain alive (Double Indemnity) or his inability to exist in a real diegetic space (The Naked City)—as well as his inability to establish a connection with the voyeuristic viewer.

Origins: Constructing Double Indemnity Despite the optimism surrounding New Deal politics, as well as the moderate presence of the communist party in certain American circles, cultural historian Warren Susman indicates that the 1930s marked a time of political apathy (173). The hardboiled character, whose genesis began with the first publication of Black Mask magazine in 1923 and evolved far more substantially in the 1930s with the

Hard-boiled detectives…work independently and follow their own moral codes, which are not always entirely aligned with the law. tagonist’s voiceover occurs as a flashback, recapitulating events from a point in which the character is near death, and alienation on the part of the viewer who becomes more of a voyeur than the novel reader who identifies somewhat exclusively with the protagonist. The Naked City employs voiceover in a slightly different manner, as an omniscient voice-ofGod in the style of contemporary newsreels such as The March of Time (1935-1951). In this film, producer Mark Hellinger serves as God, and like Double Indemnity, the distinction between visual index and offscreen, netherworldly voice ruptures the diegesis.

Therefore, Double Indemnity and The Naked City, as texts descended from tabloid journalism, illustrate how noir can often be described as a fragmentation of form and character. The medium itself is fragmented by the disassociation between image and sound tracks,

literary works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and others, became the definitive embodiment of these cultural sentiments: ambivalence, alienation, and ideological apathy.

While film noir may have cultural influences contemporary to the 1940s and 1950s, and this becomes clear in later noir films that are more contemporaneously topical, such as Pickup on South Street (1953) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The earliest noir films seem most directly influenced by hard-boiled fiction, itself influenced by American culture of the 1920s and 1930s.

Hard-boiled detectives, such as Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade, are fundamentally different from their fictional predecessors, like C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. They are not associated with the law, but instead work independently and follow MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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their own moral codes, which are not always entirely aligned with the law. Noir scholar Robert Porfirio identifies how the classical detective shifted to the hard-boiled/noir protagonist: The pre-existential world of the classical detective was ordered and meaningful; social aberrations were temporary and quickly righted through the detective’s superior powers of deductive reasoning. A product of a rather smug Western society, such a world reflected a Victorian sense of order and a belief in the supremacy of science. The hard-boiled writers replaced this with a corrupt, chaotic world where the detective’s greatest asset was the sheer ability to survive with a shred of dignity. (90) Hard-boiled characters are generally difficult to define precisely. The term connotes a particular sense of emotional detachment, an exterior shell that seems impenetrable. These characters often feel alienated from society, or, perhaps more accurately, are disillusioned with society and willfully alienate themselves. However, hard-boiled characters are not altogether indifferent. In fact, with few exceptions, they are primarily motivated to action by some monetary concern—often not entirely conspicuous, as in Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, though frequently quite

obvious; for example, in Double Indemnity, the primary story arc for Walter Huff (Walter Neff in the film, played by Fred MacMurray) involves killing a man for money. Therefore, the hard-boiled character may act indifferently to his milieu, but nevertheless contentedly conforms to the dictates of capitalism.

In addressing the genre patterns of hard-boiled literature, Bethany Ogdon outlines what she refers to as “hard-boiled ideology,” which involves an antagonism between hyper-masculinity, generally represented in the male protagonist, and the Other, often represented by evil women (femme fatales), queer individuals, and/or minority groups (77). The male protagonist’s alienation is premised by his status as the only normal individual in the world he inhabits. Additional scholars have noted that the hardboiled character is not the world and the world is not him: “Such a reading draws attention to the paradoxically pervasive absence (emphasis added), in the ontological sense, of substance, morality and reality in the face of artifice and illusion” (Pettey 71). Porfirio applies this further to the film noir genre, which he claims is united by its protagonists’s existential attitudes, the formation of his/her own value system

Fig. 1: Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) seducing Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity (1944).

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distinct from social norms where the only real choice to be made is existence over nothingness (87). Existentialist absence is likewise aligned with the increase in mass culture during the 1930s, primarily the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the domestic sphere as well as the growth of Henry Luce’s Time and Life magazines. Mass culture often motivates the individual to generalize and stereotype certain groups as Other, in turn distancing herself or himself from those groups. According to Ogdon, the masses are associated with immigrants and are feminine by nature; that is, the “soft-boiled masses” must be rejected by the hard-boiled character who embodies the vestiges of pre-war, perhaps even pre-twentieth century, American masculinity (81-82). In fact, Pettey traces the origins of the term “hard-boiled” to World War I, as a way of identifying a particularly demanding superior officer (62). While the notion of Otherness is likely prevalent across Hollywood studio-era genres and not specific to hard-boiled narratives, it is nevertheless important to consider them in this light. In Double Indemnity, Mrs. Dietrichson (played by Barbara Stanwyck in the film), is villainized and Othered as the duplicitous femme fatale that coerces Huff/Neff to kill her husband (Fig. 1).

Moreover, the primary antagonist, claims manager Barton Keyes (played by Edward G. Robinson in the film), challenges Huff/Neff, arguably as a form of

Fig. 2: Walter Neff lighting Barton Keyes’s (Edward G. Robinson) cigar in Double Indemnity.

homosexual repression, thus stigmatizing Keyes as the queer Other. This is perhaps more evident in the film adaptation, particularly in the phallic nature of Keyes’s cigar, which Neff is always lighting for him (Fig. 2). The hard-boiled protagonist can thus be defined by an existential absence, which serves as a response to and criticism of mass culture readership and viewership, particularly the increasing feminization of such readership and viewership in the 1930s—tabloids were often targeted toward female audiences—as well as the increasing inclusion of various Othered groups. Hard-boiled characters are typically sexist, homophobic, and/or xenophobic, which seems to be a response to the “softboiledness” of mass culture. In other words, the hard-boiled male protagonist emerges to recover masculinity, albeit a form of masculinity that is not associated with patriarchy (he is often unmarried and challenges the institution of marriage), though he often fails.

It therefore seems warranted to draw a connection between the mass cultural product of tabloid journalism and the proliferation of hard-boiled characters in literature throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

But there is also a more explicit connection between tabloid popularity and film noir, as illustrated by Double Indemnity. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy West argue that the genesis of Double Indemnity stemmed from the Snyder-Gray murder trial in 1927-1928, popularized at the time by its abundant presence in tabloid newspapers such as the Daily News and Daily Mirror (“Multiple Indemnity” 212). Ruth Snyder, a housewife from Queens, N.Y., and her lover, corset salesman Henry Judd Gray, plotted to kill Snyder’s husband who, unbeknownst to him, possessed an accident insurance policy naming Ruth as the beneficiary. After committing the murder, their attempt to cover it up as a burglary failed, and both were tried and sentenced to death. The tabloid press closely covered the trial process, as the two extramarital lovers and murderous co-conspirators turned on each MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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serves as a “tracer-text” that later influences “culture-texts,” such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (Pelizzon and West, Tabloid Inc. 131).

Fig. 3: Headlines involving the Snyder-Gray murder trial in the Daily Mirror, 1927-1928.

other, one blaming the other for masterminding the murder (Fig. 3). The story was further popularized when Tom Howard of the Daily News rigged a small camera to his leg, hidden from view, and snapped a shot with an electric switch just as the executioner pulled the electric chair switch on Snyder. The Daily News published the shocking image on its front cover with the title “Dead!”

A similar narrative is invoked in Cain’s first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, as an extramarital affair leads to the murder of the victimized husband, a murder that is executed incompetently. Double Indemnity, released shortly after Postman, presents a far more striking parallel. In Cain’s text, as in Chandler and Wilder’s screen adaptation, the adulterous murderers, Walter Huff/Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson, plan to gain financially on an accident insurance settlement that would double based on the type of “accident” Phyllis’s husband encounters, a plan devised by Huff/Neff as an insurance salesman himself. Although they execute the murder almost impeccably, the couple is ultimately divided by deceit, much like Snyder and Gray. This real-life story, sensationalized and popularized by the tabloid press, 28

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Most Cain scholars agree that the author followed the Snyder-Gray story closely, despite his denial of the tabloids’ influence on his literary work (Pelizzon and West, “Multiple Indemnity” 225). It is likely that he sought to distance his work from tabloid journalism, which was perceived as trashy, low culture. Tabloids are perhaps more identifiable with magazine culture—coincidentally the source for many noir films such as Dark Passage (1947) and The Big Heat (1953), originally published in The Saturday Evening Post—than objective, social commentary journalism. The “tabloid” design resembled more of a square than the traditional broadside newspaper.

This design was intended for subway commuters, a working-class demographic who had little time for leisurely reading. Contrary to more prestigious newspapers, such as The New York Times, tabloids relied heavily on photography and visual imagery in both their advertising and reporting, assisting in the reader’s rapid consumption of information. The perception of tabloids as inferior journalism has led scholars of film noir and hard-boiled fiction to erroneously evade any connection between tabloid journalism and literature and film (212). But tabloids are an example of a medium that is both literary and a form of visual storytelling. The tabloid format often presented images in strips, relying heavily on images to be read in succession, creating a viewership distinct from journalistic traditions and ontologically similar to cinema. As Pelizzon and West claim, “Violating the supposed objectivity of news photography, the strip cinematizes Snyder and insists on her celebrity status, the performative aspects of her testimony, and the epic nature of her trial. It also implies, heavy-handedly, that the story is ready to be mobilized by Hollywood” (Tabloid Inc. 126). In fact, historians have argued that the increasing presence

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of visual media in advertising and journalism in the 1920s was intended to mimic earlier forms of silent cinema; that is, the construction of visual stories appealed to an American audience acclimated to motion picture storytelling (Brown 208). Additionally, tabloids frequently recycled stories and genres, much like the recyclability of Hollywood stories and genres. But film scholars have, for the most part, ignored this connection in favour of literary and other cultural influences.

Adaptation: Reconstructing Double Indemnity The first-person narrative invoked by Cain in Double Indemnity is a common storytelling device in hard-boiled fiction. Adapting first-person literary narratives to the motion picture screen, however, presents a challenge. Film scholar Dudley Andrew asserts that film operates “from perception toward signification, from external facts to interior motivations and consequences,” whereas literature functions antithetically; that is, from linguistic sign systems to perception (456). Therefore, the internal reflections of a protagonist in a novel are appropriate for that medium, but film is first and foremost a medium of material external facts, and viewer identification requires a certain degree of manipulation through the construction of various cinematic mechanisms. What we find in film noir adaptations, specifically, are attempts to adapt the nature of literary first-person narration to an entirely different medium, in turn disrupting traditional cinematic storytelling norms—for example, protagonist voiceovers narrated as non-linear flashbacks, as in Double Indemnity and many others, or the more disorderly attempt

by Robert Montgomery to adapt Chandler’s Lady in the Lake (1947) into a film consisting of exclusively first-person camera angles, a technique that is likewise employed temporarily in Dark Passage (1947).

Cain’s Double Indemnity is also narrated via flashback, but we do not discover this fact until the final chapter when Huff declares that he has spent the past five days recollecting the events described throughout

the previous chapters. The film adaptation alternatively begins at the end, as an injured Walter Neff begins to tell his story confessionally through Barton Keyes’s dictograph (Fig. 4). The confession is appropriately directed to Keyes, the patriarchal, and potentially queer, authority whom Neff has failed to transgress and, in turn, who must forgive Neff.

Voiceovers in noir films are commonly “confessional/investigative” by nature, embodying the Freudian notion of a “talking cure” as a means toward achieving truth through confession, often spoken to a patriarchal authority (Hollinger 244). The confessional form is an adaptation of the confessions that both Snyder and Gray provided in court, both attempts to reconsider past events in order to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing, both placing the weight of guilt on their partner (Pelizzon and West, Tabloid Inc. 134-135). Neff’s voiceover throughout the film is not only a mechanism functioning to adapt a first-person narrative cinematically, but also a reminder of Neff’s inevitable doom, a quality that is not necessarily present in the novel.

Genre scholar Thomas Schatz comments on the flashback structure in film noir as it “enhances the mood of futility and fatalism” (131). This is presented more catastrophically in Wilder’s later film,

Fig. 4: Neff’s confessional voiceover.

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Sunset Boulevard (1950), which begins with the ghostly voiceover of Joe Gillis (William Holden), a dead man whose body is seen lying face down in a pool. Fatalistic attitudes necessitate a sense of inescapability. In the film adaptation of Double Indemnity, Neff’s death occurs as he attempts to break free from the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company, unable to reach beyond the office’s confines (in the book, Huff does escape, though he finds himself in a figurative prison with Phyllis, the woman he loathes). Scholars point out that the confessional voiceover has an investigative function, as if the protagonist/narrator is unclear of his/her own past and needs to recall it to materialize the details that have led to her/his current, fatalistic situation (Turim 185). In a booklength study of the voiceover in film noir, J.P. Telotte addresses how noir voiceover flashbacks fail to achieve verisimilitude: The narrator, green gather, is trying to sort out, order, and locate some meaning in these prior events, although as he does so they seem to display a life of their own, as if possessing his voice and consciousness even as he seems to be, at this temporal remove, the source of their continued existence. In this paradox we begin to see the fundamental plight of the noir protagonist, who longs to possess and order the confusing pattern of his existence but who invariably finds himself possessed and determined by all manner of forces…It serves as a point of demarcation, gesturing in one direction toward a consciousness that stands outside of the images we view, distanced from them by the flow of words, and in another direction toward the world those words vividly conjure up. (41)

The role of the film viewer becomes more voyeuristic than the novel reader’s intimate association with the protagonist, thus alienating the viewer from the characters onscreen and distorting her/his psychological reference points (Borde and Chaumeton 24). The spectator is directly challenged to actively fill in the gaps created by the physical and psychological fragmentation posed by voiceover narration: Situated within these gaps and torn by this fragmentation, the spectator is placed in a position from which he or she judges between what is shown and the narrator’s account of it, attaining a distance from the narrative that allows for meaning to be perceived not as a static quantity to be passively grasped as the single ideologically “correct” position but rather as a battleground for competing perspectives. (Hollinger 247) The film viewer takes on a position of analysis through his/her voyeurism. Meaning is made, not just by the narrating protagonist and/or author, but by the voyeuristic spectator as well. It is therefore not surprising that noir films frequently invoke surreal, dream-like imagery and somewhat convoluted plots, emphasizing ambivalence over certainty, and as will be reasoned later, semi-documentary noirs like The Naked City even fit this mold to some degree.

Our distance from the characters augments our inability to understand their motives or whether they possess any volition in their moral decisions whatsoever. In Double Indemnity, the inevitable, fatalistic conclusion serves to portray a world in which choice is not a factor, much like a dream. This is a fundamentally different approach from the original text, which exists exclusively in the mind of Walter Huff.

…the flashback in film noir serves not as an accurate portrayal of past events but rather problematizes…representations of memory and the ability of film to represent historical events.

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Gender is also a factor in the adaptation from tabloids to noir. The Snyder-Gray case was a popular story for a predominantly female demographic, but Double Indemnity is a narrative designed for a male audience—one that romanticizes male autonomy and demonizes evil women. One explanation for this shift might be that tabloids relied heavily on melodrama, whereas noir later jettisoned melodrama in favour of hard-boiledness. Also, Snyder’s status as a working-class housewife reflected the typical tabloid demographic more so than her femme fatale counterpart, the upper middle class Phyllis Dietrichson.

And it likewise seems apparent that the tabloids focused on Snyder, not Gray, whereas Cain’s novel and the noir adaptation are narrated from the male perspective. According to Pelizzon and West, the Daily News focused more on Gray, contrary to other tabloids, but in a manner that positioned Gray as a protagonist/hero, consequently emphasizing Snyder and her depravity (Tabloid Inc. 130). It therefore seems plausible to assume that hard-boiled literature and film noir adapted from tabloids subverted and demonized women, and more generally, the feminization associated with modernity and mass culture.

Weegee and Naked City Another rather striking connection between tabloid journalism and film noir is the photojournalistic work of Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Weegee worked as a freelance photographer for several tabloid papers throughout the 1930s. In 1940, he was hired by the newly-formed, left-leaning daily newspaper PM, and by 1941, his work was being accepted by fine art institutions. The Photo League hosted a Weegee exhibit titled “Murder is My Business” (1941), and subsequently, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) included his work in its 1943 “Action Photography” exhibit (Lee, “Introduction” 10). Weegee’s exposure to both the working-class readership of tabloids and cultural elites led to the popularity of his 1945 photo book, Naked City. The book, containing 225 images photographed by Weegee throughout his career,

quickly became the highest selling photo book at the time (1). As art historian Richard Meyer claims, “Naked City aimed to appeal both to a museum-going audience—or, at least, to an audience impressed by the approval of a museum curator—and to a populist, ‘rye with a beer chaser’ readership” (40). The rights to the book were later purchased by film producer and ex-tabloid journalist Mark Hellinger for the 1948 film noir, The Naked City, which was later adapted into a popular television series in 1958. It is also likely that Weegee’s photographic aesthetic influenced noir cinematographers before Naked City was adapted to the screen. The retrospective cultural perception of Weegee as a proto-noir photographer is clear in the 1985 publication The Five Great Novels of James M. Cain, which features Weegee’s photograph “Corpse with Revolver” (1936) on the cover (Fig. 5).

Shooting primarily at night with a flashbulb to light his subjects, Weegee’s high contrast nightscapes

Fig. 5: Weegee (Arthur Fellig), “Corpse with Revolver” (1936) on the cover on The Five Great Novels of James M. Cain, published in 1985.

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parallel the visual aesthetic that would come to define film noir, dichotomizing light and darkness with hard shadows, a reflection of the morally ambiguous characters that inhabit both spaces. Photo historian Miles Orvell describes Weegee’s images as “a twodimensional photographic language in which the subtle gray tones of the fine print were eliminated by the habitual use of the harsh flash bulb, which furnished a simplified syntax of high contrasts that tended to flatten the space between the foreground and background and rob his figures of a more molded, three-dimensional light” (73-74). Although Weegee photographed late-night murder scenes and other real events that he uncovered with the help of a police radio, his images are conspicuously fabricated attempts to dramatize reality via uncanny com-

cultural function was in part to provide a kind of entertainment that was integral to the economy of the urban newspaper of the thirties and forties. (78) Indeed, the tabloid’s proclivity toward sensationalism—entertainment, not art, and certainly not objective reporting as promulgated in papers like The New York Times—appealed to its working-class audience as a form of escapism during the Great Depression.

This is complicated by the fact that Weegee worked for PM in the early 1940s, a paper that was tabloid by nature in its highly visual presentation but also represented an ideology. PM, for example, did not sell space to advertisers. As PM editor William McCleery once claimed, “We believe news photographs are not merely to be gaped at but also to be

[Weegee’s] images are conspicuously fabricated attempts to dramatize reality via uncanny compositions, high-contrast lighting, and staged settings. positions, high-contrast lighting, and staged settings, as the careful placement of the hat and gun in “Corpse with Revolver” indicates. Such aesthetic qualities align with the sensationalist ethos of tabloid journalism and are somewhat distinct from the documentary trends that define more socially bent photography of the 1930s. Orvell further describes Weegee’s images as an unadulterated voyeurism that both enacts and represents the act of looking. As such it stands almost as a rebuttal to the official culture of sympathy that characterized the culture of the New Deal, including the fiction and photography of social concern. In fact, Weegee operated as a kind of tour guide to New York, offering the privilege of looking at the bizarre world of urban misfortune and pathos without making any serious demands for involvement or action. Weegee served a world that was, indeed, growing tired of such demands, and his

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learned from” (qtd. in Lee, “Human Interest Stories” 70). Meyer describes PM as a paper that “tried to link the look and interests of other tabloids with the political, social, and economic issues that concerned the immigrant and working classes” (82). So, it is important to consider Weegee’s work, not as ideological per se, but certainly a bridge between the presumed binaries of high art/mass culture and tabloid entertainment/working-class politics, and this is evident in his treatment of working-class subjects, as well as his critical treatment of celebrities, in Naked City.

Weegee critiques mass culture by often appearing in his own images as the entertainer, and he unambiguously calls attention to the nature of celebrity culture. There is an entire chapter in Naked City devoted to Frank Sinatra, focusing on both the singer and his mass audience. Often Weegee juxtaposes

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Fig. 6: Weegee (Arthur Fellig), “Joy of Living,” in Naked City.

popular media with darker subject matter, as in Fig. 6, where a dead body is being covered with newspapers while a movie marquee in the background advertises “Irene Dunne in ‘Joy of Living,’” a musical, alongside Don’t Turn Them Loose, a 1936 crime film that would have been the B movie of this particular screening (89). The juxtaposition of the feature film’s title with the dead body is a rather emphatic form of irony. The use of newspapers to cover the body is equally striking in terms of self-reflexivity, with newspapers concealing the subject matter that Weegee’s form of journalism will inversely reveal in its naked form. The photo book contains numerous images that self-reference journalism, beginning with the first image, “Sunday Morning in Manhattan” (Fig. 7), depicting a stack of newspapers waiting to be distributed to the city’s readers (15). The highcontrast lighting suggests an ominous quality to the newspapers, troubling the viewer and creating a sense that the value of these objects is being questioned.

Fig. 7: Weegee, “Sunday Morning in Manhattan,” in Naked City.

Weegee received his name from colleagues at the Acme News Services. As Orvell notes, “Embracing the full implications of his name, Weegee was not merely a recorder of images, but a visionary, and he loved the appellation, spelled in his own way, that evoked the psychic powers of the Ouija board and testified to his ability to produce a shot of some ghastly event before anyone else knew about it” (72).

His personality, in many ways, embodies the infallibility of the hard-boiled protagonist, a literary character that would have been familiar to him in his earlier 1930s work, viewing the underworld “with a combination of cynicism and sentiment” (78). Like the hard-boiled protagonist, Weegee’s cynicism is often complimented by subtle hints of sympathy. For example, the caption “I cried when I took this picture” accompanies an image of a mother and daughter crying (Fig. 8) as they “look up hopelessly as another daughter and her young baby are burning to death in the top floor of the tenement” (Weegee 74).

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Fig. 8: Weegee: “I cried when I took this photo,” in Naked City.

Strand, in a review of Naked City for PM, once noted that the images “are an extraordinary amalgam of sardonic humour, resentment of injustice, pathos, and compassion tinged with bitterness” (qtd. in Meyer 41). Many tabloid photojournalists in the 1930s embodied Weegee’s hard-boiled persona, including PM photographer Skippy Adelman, whose life was detailed in “The Hardboiled School of Photography,” an article published by PM just prior to the release of Naked City (Pelizzon and West, “‘Good Stories’” 28). Weegee’s hard-boiled sensibility is present, not just in the content of his photographs, but also in his aesthetic qualities, such as the unique emphasis on darkness that bifurcates the images into visible space and invisible space, much like the existential fragmentation of Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, or perhaps more explicitly, in the case of Phillip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (1944), who is subsumed by a black pool that visually transforms the screen into nothingness.

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The image titled “This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there” is literally an unexposed black image (Weegee 229). Darkness is therefore associated with nothing happening, which, if we connect this to the rest of Weegee’s photographs in Naked City, defines shadows as spaces where nothing happens. What Weegee’s images provide then are the interesting parts of the city that reveal themselves nakedly. The spectator witnesses an incompleteness in a Weegee photograph, a fragmented sense of both the world and ourselves; our relationship to the darker side of life as well as our unstable relationship with the entertainer and his medium. Moreover, tabloid journalism, as a visual/textual storytelling medium conflates the subjective nature of photographic images with the objective reporting in the text, challenging the viewer/reader’s sense of verisimilitude. Pelizzon and West assert, “there must be equality and collaboration between text and image, yet the two media must be independent of one another” (“‘Good Stories’” 39).

Weegee’s treatment of image and text is self-consciously aware of this paradox: “The writing functions as ironic commentary on the represented actions, as if the world is captioning itself without the photographer needing to add any external text” (40).

Film noir embodies a similar self-reflexive sensibility, as a critical movement that conflates high art with sleazy, low-culture content. Film noir accepts Weegee’s aesthetic of fragmentation formulaically, both photographically in terms of light fragmentation (shadows) and through voiceover narrations (existential disjoint). Meyer, however, is skeptical of considering Weegee’s work in relation to hard-boiled literature and film noir as it removes Weegee’s images from their original context: “we have forcibly to remind ourselves that real, rather than fictional, deaths and disasters are recorded in Weegee’s photographs” (49). But this study focuses on The Naked City as an adapted text influenced by Weegee’s aesthetic as well as the tabloid sensibility. So it is, therefore, relevant

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to assess this film, and film noir more generally, in the context of the mass tabloid culture from which Weegee’s work emerges, is informed by, and critiques.

real events and shot on location, often invoked omniscient voiceover narrations that conflated the stylistic tendencies of the traditional narrative film with the style of the newsreel.

Hellinger and The Naked City The Naked City presents a text that rather explicitly draws from Weegee’s tabloid sensibility, as an adaptation, to some degree, of his photo book, but also serves to define a popular trend in noir style in the late 1940s. Paul Schrader distinguishes between three periods of the classical noir era. The second period, the “postwar realistic period,” from 19451949, sees a prevalence of docudrama noirs, often shot on location and mimicking styles invoked by newsreels (58-59). Double Indemnity bridges the postwar period with earlier noir films (59). Indeed, it is rather distinct from its noir contemporaries, and its tabloid influence does associate it with the journalistic, docudrama tendencies present in the postwar period. Louis De Rochemont, ex-newsreel filmmaker turned Hollywood producer, influenced and popularized this subgenre with the films The House on 92nd Street (1945), 13 Rue Madeleine (1946), and Boomerang! (1947). These films, usually based on

The Naked City elaborates on this postwar docudrama aesthetic. Shot primarily on location in New York City, an endeavour unique for a Hollywood film at the time, producer Mark Hellinger and director Jules Dassin had a certain degree of autonomy from the studio, in this case Universal, working under Hellinger Productions. The story follows rookie detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) and veteran Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald [Fig. 9]) as they investigate the death of a young woman.

Screenwriter Malvin Wald claims that the story was based on the unsolved murder of Broadway actress Dorothy (Dot) King in 1923 (140). Working for the Daily News in 1923, this was a story Hellinger himself covered and, like Double Indemnity, serves as a tabloid predecessor to a noir film. Wald convinced Hellinger to base the story on an old, unsolved New York Police Department (NYPD) murder case, to which Wald, as a Brooklyn native, was able to gain access

Fig. 9: Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) contemplating while gazing out at the naked city.

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(137). Wald had worked for the Army Motion Picture Unit and was influenced by documentaries like Pare Lorentz’s 1936 film The Plow that Broke the Plains (Kozloff 43). Hellinger’s original working title was Homicide before he purchased the rights to use Naked City from Weegee for $1,000 (Wald 144). The film is not an explicit adaptation of Weegee’s photo book, but rather, an original story based on a popular 1923 tabloid case, though it drew certain elements from Weegee’s work. Indeed, the straight documentary approach taken by The Plow that Broke the Plains, as well as the photographic work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s, is distinct from Weegee’s sensationalist tabloid aesthetic; what we find in the film adaptation of Naked City is an amalgam of both styles.

The voiceover narration that opens The Naked City comes from none other than Mark Hellinger, who self-reflexively identifies himself as the film’s producer as he verbally lists the credits. As Hellinger begins his narration, the camera voyeuristically surveys the city from an aerial, God-like distance, recalling Paul Strand and Charles Wheeler’s Manhatta

(1921). Strand was one of Lorentz’s cinematographers on The Plow that Broke the Plains, and Wald would have been familiar with and influenced by his work. Additionally, Wald’s co-writer on Naked City, Albert Maltz, was associated with Strand’s Frontier Films in the late 1930s and early 1940s (Campbell 148). Hellinger always speaks in the present tense, which is distinct from most noir voiceovers that serve as flashbacks to the past. This is more like newsreel narration, generally spoken in the present.

Additionally, the fact that Hellinger’s narration is not a historical account increases its truth-value, as his temporal experience of the events depicted are aligned with the viewer’s own. In other words, it is not constructed from a fallible memory, but instead he comments observationally in the moment, thus providing greater verisimilitude. The artifice is conspicuously present despite the observational techniques employed, a technique likely drawn from Weegee’s work. Unlike the typical voice-of-God commentaries in newsreels, Hellinger is an equal with the audience, not an authority. Hellinger provides “information as conversation, rather than as

Fig. 10: The denouement of The Naked City: Garzah (Ted de Corsia), on the run from the police, looks down at his pursuers from atop the Williamsburg Bridge, after Hellinger tells him, “Don’t lose your head.”

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authoritative commentary” (Kozloff 47). In fact, he often speaks directly to the characters. Later in the film, Hellinger tells Garzah, the killer, not to lose his head, sympathizing with him in a way that abolishes good and evil dichotomies (Fig. 10). However, Hellinger’s netherworldly presence bifurcates the diegesis from the non-diegesis. Although embodying the audience’s point of view in a sense, Hellinger is positioned distinctly from the audience as the film’s producer, which the viewer discovers at the outset.

Therefore, The Naked City self-reflexively clarifies the distinction between three spaces: the film’s diegesis, the space of production, and the space of reception.

We become alienated from the city’s inhabitants by our privileged position as voyeurs.

In the opening sequence, as the viewer voyeuristically moves about the city as the night shifts to early morning, we hear the thoughts of several characters as voiceovers, characters that we never see again in the film. The random internal monologue provides a voyeurism that goes beyond the visual realm.

Here the audience is able to cerebrally embody these characters. But it is not our individual volition that willfully enters the minds of these characters. It is Hellinger, the film’s producer, whose voice-ofGod presence conspicuously extracts this information for the viewer. The documentary mode is self-aware of its inability to achieve verisimilitude without intervention by some creator, much like Weegee’s presence in his photographic work.

is more aligned with the journalistic tradition of objectivity, along the lines of The New York Times than tabloid sensationalism. And this is a significant divergence from earlier noir films, which were far more fabricated in terms of visual style and character psychology. But The Naked City is quintessentially noir in its employment of Mark Hellinger’s voice-ofGod narration, which explicitly fragments the visual and aural fields, not merely the fragmentation between indexical materiality and the protagonist’s subjective perspective, but rather, an otherworldly fragmentation between Hellinger and the diegesis.

Drawing more so from Weegee’s photographic ideology than previous noir films, the film is emphatically self-critical. Superficially speaking, within the diegetic story, the proliferation of the murder story in the tabloid press echoes Weegee’s treatment of mass media and, consequently, implicates the cinema as a form of media that will continually recycle popular stories and never achieve objective verisimilitude. In order to achieve this degree of selfreflexivity, it is essential to employ the techniques of documentary realism in order to challenge them. As Telotte notes, “they appear to take no pains to hide the cinematic mechanism. Rather, in a reflexive tendency unusual for the era, they often acknowledge and even appropriate that mechanism as part of their realistic strategy” (134). Additionally, our awareness of the documentary mode makes us further aware of the contrived nature of classical film narrative (155). In other words, the everydayness that the opening of the film promulgates is not what the city’s nakedness reveals, but what it conceals. And even in attempting to reveal objectivity, there are still eight million stories in the naked

…it is essential to employ the techniques of documentary realism in order to challenge them.

Weegee begins his Naked City by claiming, “I caught the New Yorkers with their masks off” (11).

Hellinger makes a similar claim in the film, “This is the city as it is, hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup.” In many ways, however, this film seems distinct from Weegee’s Naked City. The film

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city, and this is only one of them, as Hellinger’s narration concludes the film. This is where I disagree with Joe Kember, who asserts, “Rather than being simply a reaction to popular fears concerning urban chaos, these texts therefore formalized, and made open play with, their audiences’ existing expertise in the practice of everyday life” (76). Firstly, this does not account for rural audiences unfamiliar with the terrain of New York or any modern, urban milieu.

Secondly, the title Naked City implies that something usually hidden will be revealed, something quite distinct from the expectation of everydayness. Kember further claims, “all of the Naked City texts imitated a kind of casual knowingness concerning structures of everyday life: an attitude that had long been prevalent not only within texts about the city, but also within the city itself” (83). The same issue occurs here. Weegee is not a photojournalist in the traditional sense of, for example, Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine, nor does he associate himself with the straight photography of Alfred Stieglitz, though he somewhat ironically includes a short segment on the aging and impoverished Stieglitz at the end of Naked City.

Weegee upends these traditions, not revealing the everydayness of urban life, but instead revealing the absurdity of documenting everyday life. Hellinger, Wald, and Dassin, in a similar vein, display the conventions of newsreel-style documentation in a manner that is highly sensationalized from the start.

Hellinger’s voiceover does not possess the formal qualities of a newsreel voiceover and is somewhat hyperbolic in his descriptions. Later, the film also challenges the institution of American journalism more directly as the treatment and exploitation by the press of this particular crime story is problematized.

Both PM and the Photo League were left-leaning models that influenced The Naked City. The film adaptation is somewhat leftist in a non-explicit way. It focuses on working-class heroes—the police—and problematizes the impoverished context within 38

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which Garzah must become a murderer, sympathizing with him to some degree. However, the film does not address the diversity and race that Weegee achieves in Naked City, where he devotes an entire chapter to the Black community in Harlem. Unlike Weegee’s voyeuristic, pluralistic amalgam of marginalized individuals in the city, the film adaptation is concerned primarily with one story, which pigeonholes it into the conventions of Hollywood storytelling. Nevertheless, film noir carries on the evolution of Weegee’s work, from tabloid photographer to intellectual/pedagogical tabloid photographer (PM) to artist (Photo League, MoMa, and Naked City), and this entails self-reflexively fragmenting form and character.

Film noir presents an interesting case study for genre scholars and is generally considered more of a film movement that later developed into a genre (Erickson 308). Despite the ongoing pervasiveness of contemporary neo-noir films, there is a distinction between such films and the original noir movement.

Film noir of the 1940s and 1950s serves as a transgressive artistic movement, challenging American values and disrupting traditional cinematic formulas, accomplishing this in some cases by intentionally fragmenting form and character. While this article focuses on the fragmentation of form (image/voiceover) and the fragmentation of character (fatalism and distance from the viewer), other modes of fragmentation exist in noir, such as the failure to perform resulting in physical disability (Neff’s phony act as a disabled Mr. Dietrichson illustrates the latter’s inability to survive while also foreshadowing Neff’s inevitable gunshot wound). It has been noted that fragmentation in film noir stems from, among other things, tabloid journalism. The emphasis here on the tabloid’s influence on film noir is not necessarily the definitive, exclusive cultural influence of noir, but rather one that may be overlooked as a lower form of culture. Additionally, the notion of fragmentation is not entirely unique to film noir. It could be argued

Alex W. Bordino

that all successful films possess characters that are fragmented to some degree. However, the fragmentation of form seems to be an exclusive quality within American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, a time period in which formulaic traditions were canonized and virtually always employed by all of the major studios. In other words, film noir was transgressive at a time when transgression was unpopular in American cinema. And although noir films are often perceived as a B-film genre, many were critically well received; Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1945, and The Naked City won two of its three nominated categories in 1949: Best Cinematography (William H. Daniels) and Best

Film Editing (Paul Weatherwax). Thus, noir’s transgressive acts, as influenced by cultural media perceived as inferior, were able to permeate more prestigious circles before being popularized by the French New Wave in the 1960s and American neonoir filmmakers from the 1970s to the present.

While defining film noir or any aesthetic movement may be a dubious endeavour, an assessment of noir as fragmentation seems to at least elucidate some of the genre’s fundamental tenets, while also indicating that it did in fact operate as a unique cinematic movement, transgressing hegemonic norms associated with traditional Hollywood formulas.

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Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. “From Concepts in Film Theory.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp.

452-461.

Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. “Towards a Definition of Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader, edited

by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1998, pp. 17-26.

Kember, Joe. “Child’s Play: Participation in Urban Space in Weegee’s, Dassin’s, and Debord’s Versions of Naked City.” Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities, edited by Rachel Carroll, Continuum, 2009, pp. 72-84.

Kozloff, Sarah. “‘The Voice of God’: Narration in The Naked City.” Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 4, Summer 1984, pp. 41-53.

Brown, Elspeth H. The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 18841929. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Lee, Anthony W. “Introduction.” Weegee and Naked City, edited by Anthony W. Lee, University of California Press, 2008, pp. 1-11.

Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930-1942. UMI Research Press, 1982.

–––. “Human Interest Stories.” Weegee and Naked City, edited by Anthony W. Lee, University of California Press, 2008, pp. 63-108.

Double Indemnity. Directed by Billy Wilder, performances

by Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson, Paramount Pictures, 1944.

Meyer, Richard W. “Learning from Low Culture.” Weegee and Naked City, edited by Anthony W. Lee, University of California Press, 2008, pp. 13-61.

Erickson, Glenn. “Kill Me Again: Movement becomes Genre.” Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and

The Naked City. Directed by Jules Dassin, performances

by Barry Fitzgerald and Howard Duff, Universal Pictures, 1948.

James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1998, pp. 307-332.

Hollinger, Karen. “Film Noir, Voice-over, and the Femme Fatale.” Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1998, pp. 243-260.

Ogdon, Bethany. “Hard-Boiled Ideology.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, 1992, pp. 71-87.

Orvell, Miles. After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries. University of Mississippi Press, 1995.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Sign.” Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by James MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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Tabloids, Film Noir and the Fragmentation of Form and Character Hoopes, The University of North Carolina Press, 1991, pp. 239-240.

Pelizzon, V. Penelope, and Nancy Martha West. “‘Good Stories’ from the Mean Streets: Weegee and HardBoiled Autobiography.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2004, pp. 20-50.

–––. “Multiple Indemnity: Film Noir, James M. Cain, and Adaptations of a Tabloid Case.” Narrative, vol.

13, no. 3, October 2005, pp. 211-237.

–––. Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives. The Ohio State University Press, 2010.

Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. McGraw Hill, 1981.

Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1998, pp. 53-64.

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Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of America in the Twentieth Century. 1973. Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003.

Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Tracey, Grant. “Film Noir and Samuel Fuller’s Tabloid Cinema: Red (Action), White (Exposition) and Blue (Romance).” Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1999, pp. 159-176.

Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film. Routledge, 1989.

Wald, Malvin. “Afterword.” The Naked City: A Screenplay, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Southern Illinois University Press, 1979.

Weegee. Naked City. 1945. Da Capo Press, 1975.

Interview: Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht

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JT: Yes, that’s why it’s so important that we AH: The other thing I’d say about film, which I don’t allow commerce to take away what is ultifind so incredible and that has always attracted me, mately one of the last remaining forms of free exis that a film can communicate things about other pression. I know it’s an expensive one where we cultures, nationalities, and histories, and it can sometimes have to assemble teams of a hundred transport you in a way no other medium really can.

I also It Fucan turshow e anyou d Pimages resenfrom tial aDfar-off ystopplace ia thand rough Apeople dolesto ceexpress nt Eyan esidea, : Jöand rg T ittelknow andit’s not the most efficient way of doing it. I know that you’re there – you’re inside it. For me, film is about Alex Helfrecht on The White King Trump can do it all in one tweet, but it is so essential cultural exchange and that’s hugely important to me P a u l R i s k e r for us to have this because if we just reduce everyto learn about other cultures, and in a way to inhabit thing to pure commerce and moneymaking, or when other places. I call Jörg “Eurotrash,” and I’m half he feature directorial debut of filmmakers Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht, The White King is an adaptation we reduce films to products, at that point we will lose American. I was raised in the Caribbean and France, of Hungarian novelist György Dragomán’s 2007 novel of the same name (Fig. 1). The film tells the story one of the very last forms of free speech that we and what the two of us have in common is that we of teenage boy Djata (Lorenzo Allchurch), whose life in his totalitarian homeland is disrupted following have. love international stories. When I’ve been to festihis father’s arrest in the opening scenes. This becomes a defining moment in the young boy’s life, the catalyst for vals, and when I’ve fallen in love with films, they PR: Unlike with other forms, free(Jonathan expresa chain of events that sees him and his mother (Agyness Deyn) ostracized.

Meanwhile, hisart grandparents have often for me been a celebration of other culcinemaDjata’s requires the level of collaboration Pryce and Fiona Shaw), loyal and respected members of the sion state,in establish choice to either rebel or contures. A recent example of this kind of exchange was you mention, which serves to define it as an form. when we were with the film at the Tallinn Black open or cosmopolitan form of expression. So the In 2011, Tittel and Helfrecht set up There their own Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. was production company, Oiffy, with producer Philip Munger. essence of film is unity, which both makes it Helfrecht, who was born in Oxford, U.K.,there. was raised such an atmosphere and celebration We in the Caribbean and France. After reading English at The special and offsets a divided modern world. watched some wonderful films from all over the AH: Definitely, and the experience of making it, world, with people from all over the world. Anyway, which is, of course, what every director learns to do that’s a huge draw for me.

– that’s the crux of it. When you are directing, you JT: What is interesting right now is that film and have all those people and you’re navigating that creart festivals, and the arts in general, are the last reativity with a team (Fig. 2). It’s not always straightmaining bastion of people from different nations to forward and it’s not always easy. We shot our film in coexist and celebrate one another. We are currently Hungary and neither of us spoke Hungarian. Of looking at a world where a lot of countries are becourse, the Hungarians are used to servicing produccoming more and more populist and are closing their tions and they have a phenomenal level of English. borders. It’s all pretty scary, and so whenever we go They are very professional and they work with Holto a film festival, it’s such a breath of fresh air to lywood as well as smaller films like ours, and indie think: Oh my God, we are part of a larger world. We are films. But the point is that there are cultural differpart of a larger thing, not just hatred and demagogy. So yes, ences. There are moments where you can put your cinema is a beautiful thing. foot in your mouth and say something rude without realizing it. So, it is not always straightforward unPR: Attending festivals, where I have interderstanding another culture when you are working acted with international filmmakers and critics, with different countries, but I do think it’s enriching, has acted as a consistent reminder of the vital even from the point of view of living. One of the importance of art. Whereas politics, economics, great things that filmmaking has to offer is that you and business are liable to suffocate our ability to have this potential to live a life that opens those connect and communicate, art promotes unity doors, you and Fig.coexistence.

1: From left to right: Alex Helfrecht, Jörg Tittel, and György Dragomá n shareand a moyou mentwill on thsee e sethings t of Thewhile White K ing (are 2016making ).

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University of London, she went on to train at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She directed 2+2+2 with actor Richard E. Grant and 1800 Acres with actress Cathy Tyson; in 2013, she adapted Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta – The Sun Also Rises for the West End stage. Helfrecht directed the short film Battle for Britain (2011) starring Julian Glover, which nurtured her collaborative relationship with Tittel, who wrote and acted in 2+2+2 and also produced and wrote the script for Battle of Britain. Born in Belgium, Tittel studied at New York University Tisch School of Arts and the Stella Adler Conservatory. Outside of filmmaking and the theatre, he worked as a video game designer and writer, and also wrote the graphic novel Ricky Rouse has a Gun, published in 2014.

The White King is a testament to the resolve of its filmmakers, who were told, “There’s no way you’ll ever get to make this film.” Tittel and Helfrecht are kindred spirits of cinema’s iconic dystopian protagonists, who in their creative resilience recall the adage, “Life imitating art.” Whether it be Anthony Perkins’s Josef. K in Orson Welles The Trial (1962), a man seeking clarification to a mysterious charge for which he is to stand trial, Eddie Constantine’s secret agent Lemmy Caution in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), or Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), these characters embody a determination and drive – a response to provocation that propels the narrative and drama forward, defining the story. The character of Djata possesses this same characteristic, challenging his mother and the propaganda of the state in his pursuit of truth.

The White King focuses on a single moment in the rise and fall of a totalitarian regime, its ambitions tempered to intertwine a coming of age story with the idea that the future is shaped in a single moment – here Djata is awakening to the reality of his world. In keeping with his fellow protagonists, the young boy repels the pressures of the adult world to shape his world view. In much the same way, the filmmakers repelled the cynicism of the naysayers with their determination for self-expression. And with Trump ushering in the era of ‘Fake News,’ Djata’s coming of age story conveys a more significant relevance through the organic interdependence of life and art.

One Friday evening in January, Tittel and Helfrecht spoke with Mise-en-Scène via Skype from their home about their interest in film as a cosmopolitan artistic medium, and film as part of the broader cultural whole. The conversation was not restricted to their dystopian adaptation; the filmmakers also discussed how the film fits into contemporary society and celebrated the idealistic ideology of film and art as a bastion behind which cultures can unify and coexist.

PR: Why a career in filmmaking? Was there an inspirational or defining moment?

AH: The first film I saw as a child was E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). I was three, so I am kind of giving away my age. Anyway, it blew my mind and I’ve seen the film twelve times, and I’ve always cried.

There have been a lot of films that have made a huge impression on me, such as Cabaret (1972). I love to tell stories and I love actors; I love film as much as I love theatre, but for different reasons. I wanted to work as a director in both mediums and I feel passionately that they can coexist. Jörg has discovered 42

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virtual reality (VR), which is a new thing altogether.

I would love to share a journey into VR with him too, because that presents even more opportunities.

JT: For me it was similar, whether it was the early Spielberg films or seeing Star Wars (1977) as a kid. I wanted to be Jabba the Hutt, which is odd, but I thought he was the coolest looking. I loved theatre as well, but for me it was mainly movies and games, which I’ve always wanted to make, and to combine them. So, when I met Alex, we combined movies, theatre, and games.

Interview: Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht

AH: The other thing I’d say about film, which I find so incredible and that has always attracted me, is that a film can communicate things about other cultures, nationalities, and histories, and it can transport you in a way no other medium really can.

It can show you images from a far-off place and you’re there – you’re inside it. For me, film is about cultural exchange and that’s hugely important to me to learn about other cultures, and in a way to inhabit other places. I call Jörg “Eurotrash,” and I’m half American. I was raised in the Caribbean and France, and what the two of us have in common is that we love international stories. When I’ve been to festivals, and when I’ve fallen in love with films, they have often for me been a celebration of other cultures. A recent example of this kind of exchange was when we were with the film at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. There was such an atmosphere and celebration there. We watched some wonderful films from all over the world, with people from all over the world. Anyway, that’s a huge draw for me.

JT: What is interesting right now is that film and art festivals, and the arts in general, are the last remaining bastion of people from different nations to coexist and celebrate one another. We are currently looking at a world where a lot of countries are becoming more and more populist and are closing their borders. It’s all pretty scary, and so whenever we go to a film festival, it’s such a breath of fresh air to think: Oh my God, we are part of a larger world. We are part of a larger thing, not just hatred and demagogy. So yes, cinema is a beautiful thing.

PR: Attending festivals, where I have interacted with international filmmakers and critics, has acted as a consistent reminder of the vital importance of art. Whereas politics, economics, and business are liable to suffocate our ability to connect and communicate, art promotes unity and coexistence.

JT: Yes, that’s why it’s so important that we don’t allow commerce to take away what is ultimately one of the last remaining forms of free expression. I know it’s an expensive one where we sometimes have to assemble teams of a hundred people to express an idea, and I also know it’s not the most efficient way of doing it. I know that Trump can do it all in one tweet, but it is so essential for us to have this because if we just reduce everything to pure commerce and moneymaking, or when we reduce films to products, at that point we will lose one of the very last forms of free speech that we have.

PR: Unlike with other art forms, free expression in cinema requires the level of collaboration you mention, which serves to define it as an open or cosmopolitan form of expression. So the essence of film is unity, which both makes it special and offsets a divided modern world.

AH: Definitely, and the experience of making it, which is, of course, what every director learns to do – that’s the crux of it. When you are directing, you have all those people and you’re navigating that creativity with a team (Fig. 2). It’s not always straightforward and it’s not always easy. We shot our film in Hungary and neither of us spoke Hungarian. Of course, the Hungarians are used to servicing productions and they have a phenomenal level of English.

They are very professional and they work with Hollywood as well as smaller films like ours, and indie films. But the point is that there are cultural differences. There are moments where you can put your foot in your mouth and say something rude without realizing it. So, it is not always straightforward understanding another culture when you are working with different countries, but I do think it’s enriching, even from the point of view of living. One of the great things that filmmaking has to offer is that you have this potential to live a life that opens those doors, and you will see things while you are making

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Fig. 2: Jörg Tittel “navigating the creativity” with his crew to “express an idea.”

a film that are incredibly striking. When we were living in Budapest making The White King, we were living on Andrássy Avenue with our two very small children at the time. Andrássy Avenue is the huge boulevard the Soviet tanks rolled down during the revolution and where they also hung people – from the trees that were under our window. And the House of Terror that was both the Gestapo and the Soviet prison was only a block away. So those kinds of things strike you. And of course, they were also building a wall to keep the immigrants out.

JT: We were a month away from shooting the film when we learned they were building that wall to keep all the Syrians out. We never felt that we were making something so important; that was not the point. We realized this was relevant, and we were making something about what we were feeling right now, and that people are possibly going through again. Very often, you have moments where you go: “Oh my God, why are we doing this for a living?” It takes us back to the question of why film? There are

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moments where you really doubt it; moments where you can feel: Why don’t I just get a regular job? This is craziness! You are so often banging your head against the wall of many egos and other people, but then you realize: Well, maybe I am saying something that might just touch one or two, or five people that matter out there, but through this film, they will then have a way to communicate something deeply to others. And when you do that, you have already made your job worthwhile.

AH: In Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), the fantastic documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed attempt to adapt and film Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel, Dune, Jodorowsky was saying that if one person or a hundred people, or a hundred thousand people see the film, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day you are compelled by the story – it’s like a vocation. You are dedicated and you make it, and you can’t worry too much. And also, Susanne Bier, who we saw speaking the other day – a wonderful female director of the television miniseries, The Night Manager (2016), and other great films – was

Interview: Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht

saying that you can’t go in to please everyone. You have to be true to yourself and your vision, and we really tried to do that with The White King. Of course, it is a political film, but the big challenge of the film is that everything is told from the point of view of the twelve-year-old, and so everything happens through his eyes. We had to be brave and bold enough to cut away from Jonathan Pryce, and while the audience would maybe want to know more at times, you can’t betray the idea that it’s all from this boy’s point of view (Fig. 3).

JT: We didn’t want the audience to know any more than the boy would know. To put the audience in that situation might be frustrating to some viewers, because things aren’t nicely contextualized, and then explained through expositional dialogue – wrapped up in a neat bow at the end of the film. But for good or for bad, that is for audiences to decide.

We wanted the audience to feel as a twelve-year-old would feel when adults and the people he trusts and believes in are taken away from him. Or when the whole world of adults that he should be able to rely on have gone bonkers. That is not a comfortable feeling and it’s one that doesn’t give you a whole lot of answers, but it’s one that will certainly give you some feelings.

PR: I recall a story a friend told me about his two young nephews. There was a strange sound coming from the radiators, and he told them it was a ghost in the pipes. Whereas the younger one believed him, the older one dismissed it as silliness. He noted how suddenly his older nephew had grown up, losing that childlike imagination. In The White King, Djata has been told stories that have nurtured his impression of the world, and gradually we see him begin to discover the harsh reality contained within the stories. One of the powerful aspects of the film is how you employ fantasy, storytelling, and perception to emphasize the process of growing up.

AH: It’s exactly right, and the child in the film was born long after the revolution – thirty years ago.

That means he just accepts life – how it is and whatever is presented to him. He just accepts it. He doesn’t see the CCTV cameras because they are part of the furniture. You also feel this very strongly in the novel; the idea that the apparatus of the regime and the history of the regime, and all the baggage that comes with it are pushed to the periphery. They are very much around the edge because what the novel and the film focus on is the emotional journey of this boy, and how he and everyone around him

Fig. 3: The need for courage to choose the point of view that will not “betray the idea” at the film’s heart.

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behaves – ordinary people in an ordinary world under this blanket of oppression. And going back to his naivety, the interesting thing about the boy in the book is that he’s almost a combination of your friend’s two boys. Every scene of the film is connected to the profound love that Djata has for his father – that’s the glue between all of the episodes in the film. While he has this naïve belief, the way Lorenzo [Allchurch] plays the scene at the beginning, which I think is quite brilliant, he knows that the guys who turn up and take his father away are bad news – he’s not so naïve. It’s this interesting combination of innocence and understanding, but of course the catalyst is the father being taken away, and then as you said, he begins to see the world for what it really is. He begins to see through not only the propaganda, but to see through everything.

JT: I think we are all going through this phase right now because we are suddenly living in a world where the “adults,” the authorities we have been told to trust and have actually trusted over the years, have either gone mad or have been taken away from us.

The European Union, Obama, and a lot of liberal governments have suddenly been replaced or dangerously undermined by populists and demagogues. And suddenly it’s hard to know what to be-

lieve anymore. Fake news, post truth, this idea of actually not knowing what’s real and where we stand anymore really makes one feel a bit like Djata – confused, lost, and angry, but about to grow and wake up…hopefully..

AH: But I think the essential story of the film, and I think you understand it completely, is this idea to look at the boy at the beginning – that innocent face – and then look at him at the end – he’s determined. There is a transformation, and for me, that is the kind of story that interests me. Story is about how a character changes and that may not be everyone’s idea of story. A lot of people that watch a genre film, for example, expect a great deal of plot, and perhaps, people would anticipate that there’s going to be this huge uprising. Well, I think what we’re trying to do is subtler than that. There is a feeling of hope at the end. I would like to think there is, but I do think the boy changes. He goes from the younger child you told me about who is naïve to the older child somehow. It’s the coming of age that’s slow burn.

JT: It is, and people will hopefully see that not only does the boy change, but so do his actions. Subtle as they may be, they are also gradually changing the world around him. Just like every child will only

Fig. 4: The absence of truth and the transformation of Lorenzo’s face from innocence to determination.

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Interview: Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht

make so much of an impact for his age, he will grow, as will society around him, but the people that he has encountered in the film will have also been changed.

And for certain events towards the end of the film, I think we are seeing the roots of hope, and also perhaps the roots of a future uprising, a revolution.

AH: But the demand of the film is that you do have to commit to being with him. You have to jump in with Djata and you have to commit, as the film commits, to seeing it all through his eyes. That’s the challenge of the film.

PR: In conversation with Charlotte Chandler, Billy Wilder expressed uncertainty as to whether Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine’s romance would last beyond the end credits of The Apartment (1960). Wilder infers that there is the life before and after the film; the film itself is only a chapter. As opposed to trying to tell an expansive story in The White King, you focus on a moment or a chapter of a country’s life story, which echoes ideas of the life span of a story.

AH: By the way, we love The Apartment.

JT: It’s in my top three films of all time. I don’t think there’s a film that combines comedy and drama, and also oddly enough, it’s also quite sci-fi if you think about it. The way he was portraying the corporate world and foreshadowing future employment in that big open office space was not typical for the time. So Wilder was already doing a social critique and that tower they are working in is, in some ways, actually quite dystopian. Such an amazing film!

AH: I think a lot of people might view our film and say, “Well, you’re setting us up for a franchise.

You’re trying to be a franchise movie,” which is not the case. Just as the book does, we would hope that you would ask questions. We were true to the ending of the book, which was so motivating – it moved me and it made me think. But we knew the ending was not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but there was no other ending that we could have done for this film. It would have been disingenuous to wrap everything up in a neat little box. And as Jörg said a few months ago, there is no Jennifer Lawrence in real life that is going to come and save the day from an evil regime. Life is much more complex than that, and Dragomán’s book is much more complex than that,

Fig. 5: Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960).

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and I hope the film is. It’s a risk you take in terms of audience expectations and we are living in a formulaic society in many ways. But it would be wonderful if the audience dreamed of what would happen after the film ended.

JT: I know we are living in, as Alex said, a formulaic society, but I think we live in a very binary society where we are conditioned to either friend or unfriend, like or dislike. You look at the way people rate films online in forums; they will either give it ten or they’ll give it one out of ten, because why should there be any stuff in the middle? But this film doesn’t have a binary structure, and it also doesn’t have a binary resolution. There’s no conflict and then resolution. As we said, it is part of a life and it tells part of a chapter in a life because I believe that if a character is winning all the battles for you in the film, then you will not fight them yourself in life. I believe the films that have moved Alex and I are those films that aren’t truly resolved, because those films then inspire you to want to finish the job for them.

PR: Speaking with Carol Morley for The Falling (2014), she explained: “You take it ninety percent of the way, and it is the audience that finishes it. So the audience by bringing themselves: their experiences, opinions, and everything else to a film is what completes it.”

And if the audience are the ones that complete it, does it follow that there is a transfer in ownership?

AH: Well I’ll tell you that process is very difficult for me because the film is so early on its journey. We premiered at Edinburgh and then the international premiere was at Tallinn, and they were very different audiences. It was very interesting to see how the film played in Eastern Europe as well as the U.K. – there were positives and negatives in both. Anyway, the point is, for me, that it’s very difficult because I come from the theatre, where directing a play, it goes into previews, which is effectively your editing suite. You face the audience and you’ll see that what you are doing in a scene is just not working – it’s hitting a

Fig. 6: Creating a vision for a future audience: Alex Helfrecht directs Agyness Deyn and Lorenzo Allchurch.

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Interview: Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht

brick wall. So you do your editing there with the audience in mind because you are trying to put forward a vision, and you need to make sure it’s clear, and it’s coming through (Fig. 6). They are a sounding board and then you get it right, and the press night that follows is when you get the critical reaction. Then the audience are there and you instantly know if it’s working – are the seats in the theatre filling up or not? Of course, I’ve had both experiences, and it’s much clearer, but the weird thing with film, and what I’m particularly struggling with, is that handover. It’s very hard and the process of finishing a film is more convoluted, and then getting it to its audience, especially with a small indie. It takes much longer and I found that to be difficult.

sold, and that feeling can be quite crippling and debilitating. If you think about the commercial result of the film, our next projects will be far more clearly delineated in terms of what the genre will be. The White King is not a film that you can easily fit into either one genre or category, or even one target audience.

JT: I also think the commercial pressures of a film don’t make you think about the story, the emotions, and the philosophy behind the film. I mean that’s always the danger, but you think about what this is going to be sold as and how is it going to be

I agree with you Alex, but at the same time I think one thing we have also realized, largely through conversation like the one we are having with you, as well as ‘regular audience’ members, is that they made us understand again what we’d made. They confirmed to us what we’d always set out to make and

AH: I think every filmmaker should get the chance to make a film like that.

JT: We had the first-time filmmaker bonus, where basically everyone assumed we couldn’t make it, so they let us make it [laughs]. Literally everyone said, “There’s no way you’ll ever get to make this film.” So with the second one we’ll see.

Fig. 7: A snapshot of a collaborative moment between co-directors Alex Helfrecht and Jörg Tittel on their dystopian marathon.

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then forgot in the process of bringing it to the market – talking to sales people, distributors, and marketing. You sort of lose track of what you’ve made.

You are not only reminding us of it, you are suddenly reinforcing and also allowing us to better understand what we’ve made. So yes, there’s definitely a dialogue there that is essential.

PR: I spoke with filmmaker Christoph Behl, who remarked: “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: This has been like a really long marathon.

All in all, with this one, it has been five years (Fig. 7).

We did other things in between. Jörg did Ricky Rouse has a Gun, a very successful graphic novel, and I directed an adaptation of Hemingway in the West End of London. But it has still been five years and that’s a long time. And there were life events that happened in a time span like this, such as the birth of our second child. Our first child was barely two when we got the rights and now she’s much older.

So things do transform you and those milestones are tied up with the stages of the film; that makes it even more special. I think, in terms of how it changes, anyone that trains for a marathon will tell you it is not all pleasant. There is relief and euphoria at the end, and there’s gratification when you see it working on an audience. But obviously, there are moments where it’s so hard. It’s not working down in the mine; it’s a different kind of hard, but it’s still hard. I think you have to learn to be tough and that’s difficult because I don’t feel very tough...you do have to toughen up.

JT: The strange thing about this as well, and we touched upon it earlier, does anyone need this? Why am I doing this? I should go to Syria and help people in hospitals. I should help people in the U.K. that are standing in lines trying to get food, increasingly large lines with people that can’t even afford bread.

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AH: There are moments when you think: At best, all I am making is entertainment.

JT: And then you have some people saying, “Well you’re the one that decided to be a filmmaker.

You could have chosen to do something else.” Everyone chooses to do what they do.

AH: To a degree.

JT: To a degree. But whether someone chooses to become a super successful hedge fund manager, they choose that. They decide to stay in that position.

We are doing it because it is all we know what to do, and whether we do it well is for other people to judge.

AH: But you realize that you do one, give it your best shot, and then your goal is to do the next one.

And the reason is because you have to do it. You have to try and lay the other stuff aside, but it’s definitely transformative. You have to take a lot of knocks, but of course, it’s a very privileged career to get into. When I see films of other filmmakers that I love, especially unusual films, or films that I wouldn’t see in a commercial capacity, that just fills me with great joy and it’s the same with theatre.

PR: The difficulty for any film or work of art now is that the response will be a product of a reactive society. If society strays too far away from a habit to take the time to contemplate, the arts, including film, will suffer. Or rather, noncommercial film will suffer.

AH: I think the point is that we are living in a culture where, as Jörg says, we are so binary, but it is so opinion based. You’ve got to have an opinion about everything, and everybody thinks that their opinion is valid, but it’s not necessarily. I wouldn’t go and ask people in the street if I needed brain surgery. It’s not that I’m an elitist because I’m not. I just think that we’re in this society where we’ve got Facebook and all of this social media that is willing us to have an opinion. Donald Trump tweets, people

Interview: Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht

have an opinion. It’s all about opinion sharing rather than experiencing something, and then standing back and going on the journey to understand. Maybe we are all too quick to feel that we need to vocalize an opinion rather than just experience a piece of music, a piece of art, or a film.

JT: And our film refuses to give you that opinion or feed you a message. It just doesn’t say that this is how it is, this is what happened, and this is the solution to the problem. Because there are no easy solutions. Not in a world like this. Certainly not in a world of conflict, dictatorship, and a demography of hatred and fear. There are no easy solutions. We are living in a world like this right now and you tell me one solution that’s going to make Great Britain feel

united again, not just within itself, but also with Europe and the world at large. There is none. There is no easy solution. We have gone down a tunnel filled with hatred and lies that we are not going to be able to get out of so easily. But hopefully we can all reconcile, and more importantly, we can all understand that love and family are ultimately the most important centres within a world that is in chaos.

■ For video extras from this interview, visit Mise-enscène on YouTube.

Works Cited Helfrecht, Alex and Jörg Tittel, directors. The White King.

Performances by Lorenzo Allchurch, Jonathan Pryce, and Agyness Deyn, Oiffy, 2016.

Risker, Paul. Interview with Carol Morley. Starburst Magazine, 24 Apr. 2015. http://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/interviews/11818-carol-morley-the-falling. Accessed 3 Jan. 2017.

---. Interview with Christoph Behl. FrightFest Gore in the Store, 24 Apr. 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150912050635/http://www.fri ghtfest.co.uk/Frightfestwebfeatures/frightfestdirect.html. Accessed 3 Jan. 2017.

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Imposition to Sight: Visual Technique in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs

by Derek Dubois Rhode Island College

F

ilmmaker M. Night Shyamalan rose to prominence in the late nineties crafting thoughtful, psychological portraits of characters on the fringes of the supernatural, but his filmography has garnered an increasingly divisive relationship with critics and audiences over the past two decades (Foundas 2013). Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) initially debuted to mixed reviews and has largely been ignored in the general discourse of film criticism. While at times Signs can be a clunky, overly-stylized film with rigid dialogue that borders on stilted, it is simultaneously a thrilling family drama buried within the Sci-Fi alien invasion genre. Signs features richly cinematic visual sequences, and as filmmakers tend to establish a film’s stylistic techniques and motifs within the first act, this analysis

Fig. 1: The opening title establishes the light versus dark theme.

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will largely focus on the opening sequence of the film. I will contend that Shyamalan understands the signs and signifiers of suspense in visual storytelling and that Signs employs the motif of hindered sight to wonderful effect by synthesizing a subjective, spectatorial experience.

Signs begins in silence – a lone, discordant violin cues the fade-in of a single directional light source.

This orb of light gradates into darkness at the edges of the frame and contrasts against the stark black credits. The elegiac violin resonates in time, rhythmically, with the dynamic light source dimming as a dying flashlight would. This title sequence (Fig. 1) is a consistent barrage of alternating light and dark – a self-reflexive reminder of film projection. Ultimately, the opening imagery presented by Shyamalan in the first few scenes of Signs establishes the film’s motif and develops the theme of light versus dark.

Light, here – and commonly, in art and literature – signifies the dawning knowledge and understanding that comes from learning (enlightenment), which is a well-trod theme reaching as far back as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Narratively, Signs’ principal characters have to reconcile the impossible in a diegesis

Derek Dubois

that posits a world where malevolent aliens invade Earth. As James Newton Howard’s score crescendos into a Bernard Herrmann-inspired symphony, Shyamalan plays with the audience’s expectations like Hitchcock plays his proverbial piano.

Narratively, Signs adheres very closely to the goaloriented structure of Classical Hollywood Cinema (Bordwell 107). The film’s protagonist, Reverend Graham Hess, has abolished his belief in God after a terrible accident left his wife dead. Hess lives on acres of farmland with his brother Merrill, a failed professional baseball player, and his two precocious children. The events that transpire in the film challenge Graham to rise to the role of protector and seek closure to the grief that ails him. However, in a purely stylistic approach – divorcing the narrative, momentarily – Shyamalan plays with tropes that do not present images clearly for the sake of spectator understanding. In this way, the film occasionally subverts the continuity editing tenets that dictate the clarity of story as the salient aspect of Classical Hollywood structure. Instead, Shyamalan often works to

design shots and compositions that intentionally hinder the viewing of key elements. He deliberately chooses spatial relationships that challenge or outright deny a full understanding of the clear picture.

At the start of the film, Merrill startles awake alone in the darkened bedroom. He tours the house, completing rounds like a security guard, and Shyamalan’s manipulation of mise-en-scène adds layers to the storytelling through an abundance of impactful visuals. The opening sequence is wordless and scoreless allowing the ambient sound of his brother Graham’s wake-up routine to lull the audience into makeshift calm. The sparse sounds of Graham’s footsteps and breathing emphasize his alienation.

The walls are worn and grey and there is an overall lack of warm light. The farmhouse does not strike spectators as being particularly inviting from these early scenes. The most telling shot is a static that frames the bathroom doorway just left of centre (Fig. 2). The frame is devoid of human figures (the audio track features the sound of Graham urinating offscreen). The emptiness of the frame leads the

Fig. 2: Quiet morning in the Hess house; there is an indication of a crucifix having been removed from wall.

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Fig. 3: Avoidance of eye-contact as characters observe key information that viewers are denied.

viewer to scan the composition for salient information: why is Shyamalan lingering on this moment?

Careful viewers will observe the subtle discoloration on the wall in the shape of a crucifix that had once hung in place.

A piercing scream cuts through the somber opening. Graham and Merrill tear outside, and for the first time, dialogue is spoken, sparsely. Merrill asks, “Where are they?” The loaded question alludes to a lot more than just the missing children. The Hess children scream from deep within the cornfields and the men charge after them through towering stalks. Graham eventually finds his son staring off into the distance (Fig. 3). There is no point-ofview shot to orient us to the object of his gaze. They speak to each other without making eye contact; this is another component of the motif on broken sightlines. Many conversations within Signs occur with a significant lack of eye contact between the conversing parties. This technique is off-putting, since these characters are consistently addressing offscreen space and thereby violating the audience’s ability to utilize eye-line matching techniques for clear spatial organization. Additionally, because of the lack of eye

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contact, communication slows, as does the pace of the drama. The characters speak methodically; they choose their words carefully. Something else in offscreen space is often vying for their attention. The boy points, his father follows, and slowly Shyamalan’s camera tracks backwards through the stalks until spilling out into a large area of trampled corn.

For the duration of this particular scene, Shyamalan resists providing an establishing shot. Spectators are subjected to a series of close-ups edited at a glacial pace. Viewers focus on the wandering eyes of Graham Hess as dogs bark ferociously in the background, ratcheting up the tension. His boots crunch softly on the corn. Finally, the camera tracks backwards into a very long shot that foregrounds two German Shepherds barking at the sky. Finally, Shyamalan presents us with a bird’s-eye-view of the cropcircle. For the first time, viewers get a clear sense of space observing the majesty of the near-perfect circle trampled in the middle of a cornfield. The family stands in the centre, walled-in and helpless, and the journey of exploration begins (Fig. 4).

Throughout Signs there are a number of obstacles that prevent both characters and spectators from

Derek Dubois

Fig. 4: The Hess family walled in by the cornfield.

fully seeing the clear picture. This denial of visual material inhibits character growth and also fundamentally enhances the suspense of the film by further delaying the resolution of expectations. Corn mazes, flashlight beams in darkness, television static, children at a birthday party on a home video, Graham struggling to see what is on the other side of a pantry door: all of these moments underpin major sequences throughout the film where vision is impaired and the corresponding knowledge to be gained is withheld briefly. Additionally, Shyamalan frames Signs with intermingled flashbacks to the night of the accident that claimed the life of Graham’s wife. Interestingly, the flashback presented to viewers is the same each time, but grows clearer to the viewer as each subsequent “pass” fills in more information. Scholar Michael Sofair writes that these flashbacks are to be “explained as distortions appearing to, if not produced by, Graham’s confused perspective” (56). I would argue further that his inability to find catharsis drives Shyamalan’s decision to

deprive spectators of this information via the film’s formal organization, which inspires great subjectivity.

In his seminal text, The Imaginary Signifier (apropos for a film called Signs), Christian Metz writes: …the point is to gamble simultaneously on the excitation of desire and its non-fulfilment (which is its opposite and yet favours it), by the infinite variations made possible precisely by the studios’ technique on the exact emplacement of the boundary that bars the look, that puts an end to the ‘seen’, that inaugurates the downward (or upward) tilt into the dark, towards the unseen, the guessed-at. The frame and its displacements (that determine the emplacement) are in themselves forms of ‘suspense’… (77) Here Metz makes a case for how erotic subject matter is handled in studio films, but the techniques described lend themselves to how Shyamalan designs the visual structure of Signs. By imposing deliberate obstacles to sight lines – for viewers and characters

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within the diegesis – he synthesizes a gesturing towards the unseen and generates significant suspense.

Shyamalan’s opening sequence introduces the film expertly. It conveys the sense of fear and mystery that will drive the central narrative. Shyamalan develops the core story through visual cues rather than using dialogue to push it forward. Along the way, Signs will have moments of goosebump-inducing terror (the climax in the darkened basement as

Works Cited Bordwell, David. Poetics of Cinema. Routledge, 2008.

Foundas, Scott. (2013). “Film Review: ‘After Earth.’”

Variety, May 29, 2013, http://variety.com/ 2013/film/reviews/after-earth-film-review-anasty-planet-1200489562. Accessed October 9, 2016.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Indiana UP, 1982.

Plato. “The Allegory of the Cave.” Republic. Penguin, 1974.

Shyamalan, M. Night, director. Signs. Touchstone Pictures, 2002.

Sofair, Michael. “Signs.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, 2004, pp. 56-63.

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Merrill’s son suffers a debilitating asthma attack) and moments that border on laughable (“Swing Away, Merrill”). Still, when writers or directors are as focused on utilizing the visual elements of film form to generate meaning in their pictures as M. Night Shyamalan, it becomes a pleasurable experience to unpack a film’s layers and deepen our understanding of its complexity.

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Critics Are Not Afraid of Rotterdam, Critics Are Afraid of Rotterdam’s Ghosts Festival Report: International Film Festival Rotterdam January 25 – February 5, 2017 URL: https://iffr.com/en

Review by Rohan Berry Crickmar University of St. Andrews Rotterdam in January can be a cold place to come and commune with the cinema screen. The large, open space of the Schouwburgplein, in front of the Pathé multiplex cinema that forms one of the major screen hubs for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), could easily leave one thinking of emptiness and desolation. The pockmarked steel platform paving exaggerated each of my steps away from the festival’s ‘silverscreens’ with a hollow, metallic echo, as if a shadow trod carefully and cautiously behind me. Having left my final screening – the second event of a Joost Rekveld retrospective – I found myself momentarily stalled upon that slippery steel surface, my breath coldly condensing in circular formation, as if someone stood close to my shoulder, reciprocally exhaling. Turning around to once more face the cinema, and the De Doelen festival hubs beyond it, I saw there was nothing between myself and those screens. Yet I knew that what I apprehended in that moment of looking was an animate absence, as if the IFFR’s selection of films this year had somehow reconfigured the structure of my eyeballs to more keenly discern the significance of in-between spaces.

Maybe it was something to do with the colder weather. Or maybe it was a vertiginous aftereffect of the global political landscape at the start of 2017.

Whatever it was, my return to Rotterdam for another year of IFFR discoveries was accompanied by a pronounced spinal tremor and an unnerving chill in the

air. Algernon Blackwood could not have composed an uncannier atmosphere.

The overarching theme of this year’s festival, “Parallax Views,” explicitly asked the festival audience to consider the programmed films from more than one point of view. In the current political climate, discourses have become increasingly polarized. IFFR 2017 wanted to create a critical space in which a plurality of cinematic vistas could emerge to help deepen a sense of dialogue in these times of blustering monologue. In essence, the same thing may be portrayed from multiple perspectives, and thus the festival programme seemed particularly alive to those films that encouraged a wide variety of engagements. This attentiveness toward an evolving critical interaction with as wide a selection of films as possible has long convinced me that, of the major international film festivals, Rotterdam is the most consistently stimulating.

This year’s program explicitly tackled issues of diversity and representation in the “Black Rebels” subsection of films categorized thematically under “Perspectives 2017.” This subsection aired Barry Jenkins’s little-seen 2008 debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy. It also included awards-season fare with the same director’s Moonlight (2016) and Jeff Nichols’s Loving (2016). However, it was in the invocation of the late, great African-American writer James Baldwin that the idea of a ghostly presence running through this year’s programme first came to my attention. Mike Hoolboom’s short film, Identification (2017), showcased Baldwin’s last visit to his father, and explored complex societal attitudes toward race and racism. Baldwin then resurfaced even more explicitly in the retrospective screening of Horace Ové’s debut documentary, Baldwin’s Nigger (1968), a long-form interview with the writer (Fig. 1), as he is interrogated about issues of race and the black experience by comedian and political activist Dick Gregory. What is most remarkable about this 1968 film is

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Rohan Berry Crickmar

Fig. 1: Baldwin's Nigger (1968).

that it plays out in front of a predominantly black British audience, something that was rare for the time period (and may even still be considered a rarity).

Baldwin’s presence at the centre of “Black Rebels” focused my attention upon a common element among the strongest films at this year’s IFFR. I discovered that the best festival films had some kind of spectral absence haunting the edges of the frame, asking the viewer to look, and then look again. I have never before come across such a concentrated selection of films that consistently asked me to reconsider and recontextualize what I was watching, as I was watching it.

Foremost among these films were the challenging and profoundly haunted and haunting road movies of the “Bright Future” features, Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts (2017) and Sexy Durga (2017), both of which walked away with awards. The former film, an uncompromising Chinese experimental documentary from artist and

Fig. 2: Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts (2017).

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activist Rong Guang Rong, examined the 2015 group suicide of five young children in a rural village in the Chinese province of Guizhou (Fig. 2). Initially, Rong intended to make a documentary that investigated the social conditions that had compelled these children to take such desperate measures; however, on arriving in the province, Rong was arrested, intimidated, and had his existing footage seized. The resulting film attempts to navigate these seemingly insurmountable difficulties, finding increasingly poetic ways of approaching both the original subject and the problems of making a film on that subject. I found Rong’s creation of an all-pervasive atmosphere of fear and uncertainty particularly striking. At first, the film appears incoherent, but as sections repeat and the extent of interference in the filmmaking process becomes apparent, Rong cedes control of his film to the ghostly presences of the dead children. The camera becomes less compelled by documentarian inquiry than by childlike fascination and horror. It made for an engaging and deeply unsettling meditation on neglect, cruelty, and authority that deserves to find a wider audience.

By comparison, Sexy Durga was a more conventional feature film, yet its road movie format set in motion an unnerving trip into the worst and most threatening aspects of Indian chauvinism. This third feature film from Malayalam director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan has a fascinating production history, which may explain the film’s relentless narrative momentum. Sasidharan drafted an outline for the film, setting it in the strongly patriarchal southern Indian region of Kerala. From this outline, the director then acquired minimal production funds and put together a wholly improvised series of narrative sequences that were shot over the course of one night. These improvisational elements are interspersed with footage of a Hindu Thaipusam festival involving the religious practice of body mortification and piercing.

It eerily reminded me of all the lurid headlines about physical and sexual abuse of women by men that

Festival Review: Rotterdam’s Ghosts

have come out of India in recent years. The eponymous female character, travelling at night with her male partner, draws the unwanted and insistent attentions of multiple males, all of whom eventually prove themselves to be sinister and threatening. Patriarchal privilege and hierarchy are built into the oppressive nature of the Indian state; though the predatory sexual advances of the various men require the couple to seek aid from the authorities, the encounter with police creates an even more chilling scene.

The festival footage that informs moments at the start and finish of the film complicates the gender politics further by showing the supplicatory nature of Hindi-Indian masculinity when presented with the woman as goddess, the woman as an object of awe and worship. Sexy Durga was a bold and divisive choice as the winner of the festival’s main competition award, the Hivos Tiger. However, I fully endorse this decision, as there is undeniable breakout potential for this film with the right marketing and distribution.

The haunted and haunting qualities of the program were further explored through films that trained the viewer in particular ways of seeing. William Oldroyd’s wonderful directorial debut, Lady Macbeth (2016), relocated Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Russian novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, from Siberia to Northumberland, England. The film adaptation of the novel seems well suited to Oldroyd’s background in theatre and opera, as it had been adapted into an opera in 1934 and into a film in 1962 by the legendary Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, who passed away in late 2016. Remarkably, Oldroyd migrates the source text by focusing upon its potential to challenge and disrupt particularly rigid Victorian societal gender divisions, and offers new insights into the racial diversity of nineteenth-century Britain. The film benefits from a tremendous central turn by Florence Pugh (The Falling [2014]), who plays Katherine, a young woman forced into a society marriage with a cold and distant Northumbrian industrialist and landowner.

Fig. 3: Leading actress Florence Pugh as Katherine in Lady Macbeth (2016).

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The opening shots of the film establish an oppressive, panopticon-like domestic sphere that is dominated by masculinities, even when no men are present. Katherine is shown to be truly self-possessed and self-aware, as evidenced by the looks she gives that go beyond the stifling restrictions of the fixed frame. As Katherine locks her gaze on points beyond the camera – and the frame in which the camera fixes her – her look implicitly challenges the domestic circumstances that seek to imprison her (Fig. 3). Her gaze clearly reflects the multifarious ways in which this domestic female body is itself looked upon, not only by the dominant male figures of the society, but also the female figures, who inadvertently become avatars for male control and jealousy. This kind of film, with its confident innovations in cinematic subjectivity and bold articulation of colonial counter narratives, makes me believe that British filmmaking could be on the cusp of a creative renaissance.

Another form of haunting emerged within the unlikely context of a New York City comedy about a family of African-American women. Stella Meghie’s 2016 feature debut Jean of the Joneses bre athed fresh air into a nearly exhausted subgenre. Taking the New York conversational relationship comedies of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach as a template, Canadian filmmaker Meghie gives viewers a relatively unusual film experience, namely a comedy about solidly middle-class African-American women. Jean (Taylour Paige) is a published author in her thirties, who comes from a family of seemingly high-achieving women. Struggling to complete her second book as her relationship with her filmmaker partner Jeremiah (Francois Arnaud) falls apart, she finds herself wallowing in self-pity and moving through the homes of her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother, all of whom have nothing but criticism to offer her. Even within such a conventional, if exceptionally well-written, comedy of manners, I found myself confronted by the ghostly. Oddly, a 60

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film filled with so much vibrant back-and-forth bickering, is, at its core, a film about absence and omission. When Jean finally connects this absence to a forgotten family figure, it forces out a series of painful truths that are both very honestly tackled and provide much of the humour in the latter half of the film. Meghie’s film not only gives a screen presence to middle-class African-American women, but also manages to further empower her characters by giving us an African-American femininity divorced from patriarchal structuring. As a result, I find myself curious to see how the director will navigate the adaptation of romantic bestseller Everything, Everything, to be released in 2017.

The middle-class African-American metropolitan experience contrasted a more tenuous African migrant existence at the economic sharp end in a forgotten corner of Europe. Migratory African presences stalk the peripheries of Elene Naveriani’s I Am Truly a Drop of Sun on Earth (2017), a Swiss production set in the director’s home city of Tbilisi, Georgia. The film focuses upon peripheral migrant experiences within the capital city of a nation that is still living in the divisive shadow of Cold War era ideas of ‘east’ and ‘west.’ Naveriani portrays Tbilisi as a city caught between the remnants of an ugly Soviet past and the crude capitalist reimaginings of American-led ‘westernism.’ This short, carefully crafted debut feature tells a story of interstitial existences. April (Khatia Nozadze) is a prostitute, who at the start of the film has just spent the night in jail.

Back on the outside, she accepts a dare to sleep with a young Nigerian immigrant, Dije (Daniel Antony Onwuka), who finds himself stuck in a rut after mistakenly settling in the country of Georgia, thinking it was Georgia in the United States (Fig. 4). Both characters are viewed as pariahs by the society that surrounds them. April finds the majority of her clients among the business, criminal, and political elites that frequent the exclusive hotels and nightclubs of the city centre, while Dije works as a low-paid labourer

Festival Review: Rotterdam’s Ghosts

Fig. 4: Leading actor Daniel Antony as Dije in I Am Truly a Drop of Sun on Earth (2017).

on the various building developments around Tbilisi, as well as a vendor and delivery man in the local marketplace. The film, shot in black and white, captures the disparities of capitalist development and its central characters who demonstrate that the ‘pariah’ is an essential part of this development. Naveriani confrontationally details the hostilities and suspicions faced by these two characters within the society they inhabit, yet delicately complements this with a focus upon April and Dije’s gradual intimacy. In the end, it makes for a meditative exploration of ‘nowhere’ spaces and the peripheral existences trapped within them. The credits contain the tragic detail that the film is explicitly a haunted document, as the lead actor Onwuka passed away shortly after filming was completed.

Perhaps the best film of the festival was also the first film I saw. All the Cities of the North (2016) marks the feature debut of Bosnian-born filmmaker Dane Komljen (Fig. 5). It is a film about utopias, intimacy, love, and cohabitation. Watching it slowly, gently, and intently weave its way through a history of dis-

ap-

peared spaces from Lagos to Brasilia to Montenegro gave me an initial sense of the festival’s focus on ghostly programming.

In the film, an abandoned holiday complex on the Montenegrin/Albanian border developed by a communist Yugoslav construction firm, Energoprojekt, becomes home to two men. This same construction firm was also responsible for helping to develop the sprawling infrastructure around the Lagos International Trade Fair complex built in Nigeria in the mid-1970s; the film attempts to weave together an exploration of repurposed spaces through Energoprojekt’s work on these sites. Both the holiday complex and the International Trade Fair buildings have barely served the purpose for which they were initially designed, and have since been co-opted and refashioned by local populations. The two men lead a quiet, idyllic life, tending to livestock, gardening, berry-picking, and performing general maintenance and making structural improvements to the buildings of the complex. The film depicts a surprising and compelling intimacy between the two characters. I have never before seen a film that is so atten-

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Fig. 5: All the Cities of the North (2016).

tive to the ways in which physical contact communicates genuine feelings of love. Even the arrival of a third man – the director himself – cannot upset the blissful equilibrium that these men have established.

Komljen plays a version of himself, a documentarian chronicling the quiet lives of these two men. His presence disrupts their intimacy; however, where a lesser film would have wrung easy drama and tension from this scenario, this film offers a different idea. Komljen’s character is not an external source of disruption and chaos, but rather, an opportunity for the men to examine how their community of two may adapt to the accommodation of more people.

Despite this impressively optimistic depiction of a utopic vision for humanity, the film is still infused with the fear of absence. Detours into the lost community of the workers’ village that was submerged under a lake on the completion of the construction work that founded the city of Brasilia – a subject of a documentary film by Komljen – emphasizes a sense of loss that is felt when the human scale is overwhelmed by the grand designs of progress.

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There are also underlying hints of elegy in the allegorical aspects of the film vis-a-vis the dissolution and fragmentation of the Yugoslav state. The new nationalisms of the Balkans have yet to rediscover the commonalities of that earlier era, and the bleakest elements of this film suggest that they may never do so. The critical, questing spirits of Jean-Luc Godard, Simone Weil, and new-wave Serbian musician Vlada Divljan also impose themselves upon Komljen’s conception of a world of utopic spaces long since lost to humanity. The bulk of the voiceover narrative directly quotes these sources, whilst the late Divljan’s cult band Idoli play over the end credits, with their track Ime Da Da, a song that explores just how people can make a world that is mutually meaningful. What is clear is that Komljen has given us a minor masterpiece that does all that it can to approach ‘the other’ as something other than a stranger, a phantom, or a haunting figment of our imagination.

From the mainstream comic sensibilities of Jean of the Joneses through to the askew horror stylings of Sexy Durga, this year’s IFFR seems to have found

Festival Review: Rotterdam’s Ghosts

films that are possessed of something more than the mundane reworkings of genre and trope that bedevil so much of contemporary independent and mainstream cinema. This is an account of just a handful of films that found something of interest in interstitial spaces, where character and place could be examined from unique and unusual vantage points.

Despite this predominance of unusual perspectives – the parallax views of the festival’s programming theme – an uncanny aspect crept into so many of these cinematic encounters. So much of the content of these films was familiar: a literary adaptation, an

investigative documentary, a longform interview, a social comedy, and a road movie. Yet each film found a way to reinvigorate and refresh these elements. Their unique viewpoints are predicated around an examination of something lost, something that has slid out of view or has become obscured. The manner in which the eye is drawn to cinematic spaces in which absence ghosts close to presence, was what made this year’s theme so rewarding.

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Works Cited All the Cities of the North. Directed by Dane Komljen, performances by Dane Komljen, Boban Kaludjer, and Boris Isakovic, Dart Film, 2016.

Baldwin’s Nigger. Directed by Horace Ové, Infilms, 1968.

Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts. Directed by Rong Guang Rong, Zajia Lab, 2017.

I Am Truly a Drop of Sun on Earth. Directed by Elene Naverian, performances by Khatia Nozadze and Daniel Antony Onwuka, Alva Film, 2017.

Identification. Directed by Mike Hoolboom, 2017.

International Film Festival Rotterdam. “Parallax Views,” https://iffr.com/en/2017/programme-sections/parallax-views.

Jean of the Joneses. Directed by Stella Meghie, performances by Taylour Paige, François Arnaud, and Sherri Shepherd, Circle Blue Films, 2016.

Lady MacBeth. Directed by William Oldroyd, performance by Florence Pugh, Sixty Six Pictures, 2017.

Loving. Directed by Jeff Nichols, Raindog Films, 2016.

Medicine for Melancholy. Directed by Barry Jenkins, Strike Anywhere, 2008.

Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, A24, 2016.

Sexy Durga. Directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, NiV Art Movies, 2017.

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