SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 1 | ON REALISM by Screen Machine

JULY 2012

ISSUE 1

“ON REALISM”

JULY 2012

ABOUT THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS on p.1 FROM THE EDITOR on p.2

ESSAYS WES IS HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE RECEPTION by Huw Walmsley-Evans Why critics who complain that Wes Anderson’s films are overlymannered are missing the point. p.4

THERE’S A STORM COMING!: JEFF NICHOLS’ SCHIZOPHRENIC REALISM by Louis Sheedy How “Take Shelter” asks us to question the reality of film. p.21

FRAGMENTS AND FLUX: THE NEW REALITY OF VIDEO, THEN AND NOW by Phil Coldiron On the masterpieces made possible by working with video. p.13

STRANGER THAN FICTION by Brad Nguyen In defence of realist aesthetics, including a discussion of Frederick Wiseman’s work and “Game of Thrones.” p.28

REVIEWS Daniel Fairfax on SLEEPING BEAUTY and HAIL on p.34 Andrew Gilbert on THE TURIN HORSE on p.39 Elliott Logan on LE HAVRE on p.41 Rebecca Harkins-Cross on MELANCHOLIA on p.44 James R. Douglas on CHRONICLE on p.47

CONTRIBUTORS Phil Coldiron is a writer and programmer living in Brooklyn. James Douglas is a Melbourne-based writer, critic and sometimes blogger for Meanjin and Meanland. Find him at @anthroJRD. Daniel Fairfax is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Andrew Gilbert studied film at Columbia College and is currently based in Chicago, working on his Masters in Gender Studies. His favorite film is Robocop. Rebecca Harkins-Cross is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue, Crikey and Senses of Cinema. You can find her online at rebeccaharkinscross.com. Elliott Logan is a Masters student at the University of Queensland. Brad Nguyen is the editor of Screen Machine and an Honours student at Monash University. Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng is a poet and artist living in Melbourne. Louise Sheedy is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne and the President of the Melbourne Cinémathèque. Huw Walmsley-Evans is a film critic and doctoral candidate in Film, Media and Cultural Studies based in Brisbane. His research examines film criticism as a cultural institution at the beginning of the 21st century.

This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

FROM THE EDITOR

creen Machine starts again without anything so impressive as a polemical statement about unified aims and objectives. Nothing as enticing as Comolli and Narboniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.â&#x20AC;? This is more or less due to practical concerns: when we started going about advertising writing opportunities, we asked only that

applicants express an interest in cinema and left-wing politics. The reality, of course, is that everyone has a different idea of what a politics of the left might be and what this all has to do with cinema. Our gambit is that this pluralism will work to our advantage. Perhaps later down the road we will have a more narrowly-defined approach.

Maybe not. What we can promise is that what you read in Screen Machine will be passionate and engaged. If there is one unifying factor amongst us, it is our faith that cinema means something, that cinema is more than merely escapism and entertainment and that through it we can better come to grips with the world. Screen Machine started as a blog about cinema, updated regularly every couple of days, and we should state here that part of the motivation for Screen Machine’s rebirth as a periodical online publication is to respond to the difficulties encountered during that period: the enslavement to the commercial distribution sche-dule, the need to maintain web presence, the compulsion to quickly blast out a coherent opinion in the interests of relevancy. Screen Machine starts again so that we can say “no” to these pressures. There is no shortage of film commentary on the Internet and we have no intention of becoming part of the white noise. Screen Machine will be published once every two months: what we discuss won’t be “timely” but it will be considered, hopefully provocative, always essential. Why “realism” as the topic of Screen Machine’s first issue? It is well-known that since at least the late sixties, realism, as a descriptor of films, has not been able to be evoked by serious critics without a self-conscious roll of the eye. Students of cinema today are well-versed in the

lesson: all films are constructs, all films are manipulations of reality. But what does this mean politically today? A certain timidity, perhaps. The French philosopher Alain Badiou has remarked that our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

The question becomes: how to avoid the self-congratulatory deconstructions and relativist evasions of rejecting reality without reverting to a naive realism? Under what conditions are we willing to engage reality and deploy the notion of realism? This issue consists of four essays and five film reviews. The essayists have been asked to engage the issue of realism directly whereas the reviewers were given freedom to write about whatever they wanted. As it turned out, more than a couple of the reviews in this issue of Screen Machine deal with the rocky relationship between cinema and reality. We hope you are entertained and provoked. —Brad Nguyen

Huw Walmsley Evans

WES IS HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE RECEPTION Critics who accuse Wes Anderson’s films of being “artificial” or “contrived” miss how the unique style of his films reflects characters for whom artifice and contrivance are a central part of their reality.

hose familiar with the backcatalogue of (live action) Wes Anderson films will know what to expect from his sixth, Moonrise Kingdom. The meticulous art direction, character “uniforms,” dialogue rhythms, muted performances, themes of familial discord and self-destructive obsession, tracking shots, wide-angle lenses, slow motion endings (I could go on) are all well-established elements of the Anderson world. So consistent is the Anderson

aesthetic that the director's departure in this new film from the Futura font we have come to associate him with became a talking point upon the release of the film's trailer. We have certain expectations as viewers of Anderson's films, but then again I have certain expectations as a reader of Anderson's reviews. These are no less characterised by familiar tropes, and divergence from any of these is far more startling to me than Anderson's new font.

I turned to Variety for the first word on the film proper. Peter Debruge's effort did not disappoint. In fact, in the onesentence abstract-summary of the review we see the abiding journalistic-critical reception of Anderson's films perfectly distilled into just 18 words: “while no less twee than Wes Anderson's earlier pictures, 'Moonrise Kingdom' supplies a poignant metaphor of adolescence itself.”1 Debruge proceeds to further articulate the supposedly competing forces at the heart of an Anderson film: “a universally appealing tale of teenage romance cuts through the smug eccentricity and heightened artificiality with which Anderson has allowed himself to be pigeonholed.” And then again, a paragraph later: “the love story reads loud and clear, charming those not put off by all the production's potentially distracting ornamentation.” Each of these examples voices the same complaint: there are some real, valuable characters and emotions to be found in this film, but they are obscured by all the artifice. Forgive me if I seem cynical in my dismissal of Debruge's take on the film; it's just that I've heard it all before. In his Variety review of The Royal Tenenbaums, Todd McCarthy chided Anderson for his “brittle, highly artificial style

that constricts character and emotional development.”2 In 2007 David Amsden wrote in New York Magazine that The Royal Tenenbaums was “a little too curious with its curiosities” and that The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was a “beautiful failure, a study of style stripped of substance.”3 Other critics have couched their distaste for Anderson in an argument that he betrayed the promise of his early films Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) through an increasing preoccupation with artifice. On the occasion of the release of The Life Aquatic in 2004 the New York Times's A.O. Scott retrospectively marked The Royal Tenenbaums as the beginning of Anderson's slide “into preciousness.”4 Were we to perform a keyword search for a review of an Anderson film, “contrived,” “artificial,” “mannered,” “confected,” “stylised,” and “smug” would each stand in effectively for the director's surname. No matter how these critiques are framed, they are unified in their view of Anderson as having failed a test of realism. These critiques see Anderson's

2 Todd McCarthy, "The Royal Tenenbaums" (review), Variety, 4 October 2001. 3 David Amsden, "The Life Obsessive With Wes Anderson," New York Magazine, 24 September 2007. 4 A.O. Scott, "A Seagoing Showcase of Human Collectibles," The New York Times, 10 December 2004.

Peter Debruge, "Moonrise Kingdom" (review), Variety, 16 May 2012.

increasing self-confidence and maturation as an artist, and the accompanying crystallisation of his sensibility and aesthetic, as a devolution. As such these critiques are best viewed as symptomatic of normative understandings of realism within the journalistic sphere of film criticism. They certainly cannot be read as genuine engagements with Anderson as an artist.

between cultures and between individuals within a culture. Here Eagleton cites Bertolt Brecht, who located realism in the “work's effects,” rather than “whether it recalled something familiar”. In this sense “one person's realism is another's fantasy.” In light of such complications, Eagleton claims that Artistic Realism, then, cannot mean “represents the world as it is,” but rather “represents it in accordance with conventional real-life modes of representing it.” But there are a variety of such modes in any culture [...].

COMPLICATING REALISM

n his review of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Terry Eagleton makes several points about how realism is conventionally understood that help to explain the journalisticcritical reception of Anderson's films. He first notes that the terms “unrealistic” and “non-realist” are often conflated, although they relate to very distinct concepts. He distinguishes them thus: “you can have a work of art which is non-realist in the sense of being non-representational, yet which paints a convincing picture of the world.”5 This distinction is evidently not observed in those reviews that struggle to reconcile Anderson's “non-realist” aesthetics with his attempts to portray a “realistic” world. Concepts of realism are also highly subjective, varying

Deborah J. Thomas' formal analysis of Rushmore catalogues the ways in which Anderson's formal techniques can distance audiences accustomed to conventional mimesis. These include “extensive use of wideangled lenses” and “high or low angled shots” which can “create spatial and perspective distortions” and “lend a slight surrealistic effect to characters; creating ironic exaggerations or minor distortion of features that resist the verisimilitude of realist modes of representation.”6 Furthermore, “disorientating bird's-eye or overhead camera angles” and jump cuts “create a momentary dislocation, both

Deborah J. Thomas, "Framing the ‘Melancomic’: Character, Aesthetics and Affect in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore," New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2012.

Terry Eagleton, "Pork Chops and Pineapples," London Review of Books, 23 October 2003.

temporally and spatially, from the diegesis.” Finally she observes instances where “characters are framed by a long telephoto lens, creating a shallow depth of field and a flattened aesthetic.” In terms of performance, too, Anderson's films break with mimetic norms: “minimalism and precision of actor movement,” “gesture in relation to the camera's field of vision,” “deadpan or impassive facial expressions” and “a relative sparsity of dialogue enunciated with 'flat' vocal intonations” are all to be found in Rushmore. However, these distancing “Brechtian” performance techniques are contrasted with “shifts into a more naturalistic mode” that creates “a play between empathy and distance [...]soliciting an unstable and paradoxical range of emotional responses in the spectator towards both character and text.” Ultimately, says Thomas, Anderson's formal qualities evident in Rushmore “challenge the greater certainties offered by… the realist aesthetic.” In his article examining mimesis in the films of Anderson, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, André Crous presents a scene from The Life Aquatic as an example of Anderson's “playful refusal of strict mimesis.”7 As

Zissou traverses his ship, the Belafonte, “the camera pulls back to reveal the entirety of the model ship, cut open to show the interior.” For Crous this recalls a moment from Godard's Tout va bien, but with a difference: the effect on the viewer is not one of shock or confusion, in the vein of modernist filmmakers like Godard. Anderson doesn't seek to estrange the viewer, but reveals the artifice of his production in a way that serves to conflate his own film with the films inside the narrative - a postmodernist gesture instead of a modernist one.

Postmodernism is a vital framework for understanding the nature of the stories Anderson tells. Anderson's cinema is very concerned with mimesis and its problematics. As Eagleton states, “represenationalism has its limits” and for the modernists “these are resolvable only by irony — by representing and pointing to the limits of your representation in the same gesture.” Postmodernism begins for Eagleton at the point where “we come to realise that reality itself is now a kind of fiction, a matter of image, virtual wealth, fabricated personalities, mediadriven events, political spectaculars and the spin-doctor as artist.”

André Crous, "True and False: New Realities in the Films of Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman," Acta Universitatis

Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2010.

WHEN FORM AND CONTENT DESERVE EACH OTHER

playwright/actor Max Fischer; The Royal Tenenbaums' playwright Margot Tenenbaum; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou's titular wildlife documentarian, or The Darjeeling Limited's short story writer Jack Whitman. I will focus here on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and its author-character, for he is in most need of critical rehabilitation. Zissou is a world famous oceanographer and the star of the once-lauded series of documentaries The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson's film of the same name opens with Zissou exhibiting his latest documentary at an Italian film festival, where it is received coolly by an audience that questions its authenticity and relevance. The community at large has become disillusioned with Zissou and his films. Even the sensationalism and emotiveness of his First Mate and oldest friend Esteban being eaten by a shark fails to stir a response. In the question and answer session following the screening, Zissou is asked by an audience member whether it was a deliberate choice not to include footage of the “Jaguar Shark” that ate Esteban. His response, “No, I dropped the camera,” is met with a chuckle from the audience. Zissou turns to the host of the Q&A session and, off-microphone, asks, “Why are they laughing?” Here we see a serious disconnect between Zissou's non-ironic reading of his own creative work and that of the audience. When

ar from indulgent flourishes that distract from the “real” emotion of Anderson's films, Anderson's formal choices match perfectly with his narratives and characters. We begin to understand this once we begin to understand the nature of Anderson's authorship and that of his characters. Anderson's films might seem artificial, contrived and mannered, but this is highly appropriate to stories about characters who are deeply concerned with artifice, contrivance, and mannerism. These are, after all, real human traits and impulses. Shouldn't films about self-conscious authors be self-reflexive about their authorship? Anderson's films are Russian dolls of authorship, with Anderson authoring characters who are themselves authors of creative work. Authorship is a framework applicable to all of Anderson's characters; we might think of Dignan in Bottle Rocket and his 75 Year Plan, writing a script for his life decades into the future; or Royal Tenenbaum, contriving scenarios and blocking the actors in his life so that they move and interact in ways that please him. But most of Anderson's films (Bottle Rocket is perhaps the exception) contain at least one character (usually more than one) who is an actual author of a substantial text that features in the film. We can think of Rushmore's

Zissou states that he intends to hunt down and kill the Jaguar Shark on his next voyage the audience is disturbed and baffled; Zissou has truly lost touch. Two new additions to Zissou's crew on Adventure No. 12: the Jaguar Shark (Part 2) are representative of the audience he has alienated. Jane WinsletRichardson is a heavily pregnant journalist covering the voyage for the Oceanographic Explorer and Ned Plimpton is a pilot with Air Kentuky who believes that Zissou may be his father. Although Zissou was a childhood hero to both Jane and Ned, the Zissou they meet falls far short of their expectations. Jane requires a positive role model as she contemplates life as a single mother, while Ned craves the father he never had. Zissou is initially lecherous and selfabsorbed, viewing Jane as a public relations opportunity and prospective sexual conquest, while it soon becomes apparent that Zissou enjoys the idea of having a son more than the realities of fatherhood. Rather than fulfilling the roles that Jane and Ned require of him, Zissou casts the pair into the filmic roles that perpetuate his own celebrity persona. As always Zissou is in the hero role, while Jane becomes a love interest and chronicler of Zissou's glory. Ned is slotted into a sidekick role, an aspiring Steve Zissou with whom he can share a “relationship sub-plot.” The line between fiction and

reality has become problematically blurred in Zissou's world as he attempts to perpetuate his self-authored persona. Zissou's contrived documentaries cannot accommodate the nuances of character that Jane and Ned require of him. Anderson himself refers to Zissou as a character who “has to get in touch with his own humanity, his own past, to strip away some of the layers of identity that he has created for himself.”8 Only by learning to subsume his own desires in favour of the emotional needs of others does Zissou grow beyond his two-dimensional film persona. Incrementally over the course of the film, Zissou comes to appreciate Jane's value beyond the carnal, and Ned proves a more important male role model to Zissou than Zissou could have ever been for Ned. Zissou's process of maturation is completed in the film's emotional climax, when he finally confronts the Jaguar Shark. The resultant film of the expedition, which screens at the same festival a year on, earns Zissou the top prize. Jane's article on Zissou, which makes no attempt to hide his foibles, makes the front page. Zissou's personal and professional redemptions coincide when his creative work is stretched to accommodate genuine emotion and renewed passion for his

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou audio commentary, 2004.

work. Like Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou features an author main character, lacking in maturity, who finds redemption only when he tempers his creativity with the emotional needs of others. Unlike Max Fischer (whose plays are always a great success), Steve Zissou's crisis is artistic as much as personal. The fact that Zissou's work suffers as a result of his self regarding insularity represents a strengthening of Anderson's resolve that emotional engagement is more important than the author's creative vision. Ironically, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film in which an author main character is accused of artifice, and resurrects his art through emotional reconnection, was itself accused of being highly artificial with little emotional resonance.

Anderson's reality is palatable or not: “irony and affect/s are intensely subjective modes of recognition, mediated by various cultural and social factors, which vary from individual to individual.” Put simply, “an ironic tone can immediately divide audiences between those who manage to comprehend the nuances of meaning and those who don't.” Certainly this is true for the broader filmgoing audience, but the critical complaints against Anderson seem to be more institutionally bound, rather than occurring on a case-by-case, critic-by-critic basis. “Realism” problems with Anderson, it should be noted, are limited to journalistic-review criticism and critics, while essayistic (or cinephilic) film criticism, and academic film criticism, have no such concerns. Were we to observe the common distinction between “review” (consumer report) and “criticism” (long form essays, articles, books) then we could say that Anderson has always received mixed reviews and excellent criticism. That would be a neat way of putting it, but I don't regard reviews as undeserving of the name “criticism.” It is, however, important to make a distinction between the expectations at work in reviews compared to other criticisms, as treatments of Anderson's films indicate a significant divide. While there are reviewing critics who champion Anderson, they do

CHOOSE YOUR CRITICISM, CHOOSE YOUR CRITIQUE

aving suggested that the journalistic-critical reception of Anderson misses the point entirely when it complains about “realism” in relation to his work, it only remains to offer some explanations as to why these complaints exist and endure. Deborah J. Thomas concludes her study by considering the various receptions of Anderson's work. She suggests that the “subjectivity of the spectator” ultimately determines whether

so labouring under the weight of the opinions of their colleagues. In 2007, Peter Travers dedicated the first paragraph of his review of The Darjeeling Limited to refuting the idea that Anderson's stylistic and thematic “obsessions” are problematic.9 This year, Andrew O'Hehir's piece on Moonrise Kingdom was less a review of that film and more a treatise on why the “realism” complaints against Anderson should be retired:

interrogate, whereas reviews have very little choice in what they critique. Long-form criticism of Anderson, therefore, is more likely to be written by his partisans. This explains the positive longform reception of Anderson, but not his middling reviews. Tom O'Regan usefully distinguishes between separate film critic “personas” which are partly characterised by their attention to separate “publics.” The “cinephile” persona is addressed to “a public for whom the cinema is a goal in itself — an internally conceived politics of the ‘film world.’”11 Some reviewers may be cinephiles, but film reviewing is not a cinephilic comportment. Reviewers tend to answer to a very different public with very different expectations. In his philosophical treatise On Criticism, Noël Carroll distinguishes between two schemes within which the critic might evaluate an artwork.12 If she is considering an artwork's “success value” then she is considering what has been achieved artistically through the work. If she is considering an artwork's “reception value” then she is considering what value the audience can derive from experiencing the artwork.

here's what I reject completely: the idea that the artificiality or hyperrealism (a better word, I think) of Anderson's worlds which is admittedly cranked up pretty high here - is fundamentally pretentious and insincere, or that it reflects some kind of “kidult” refusal of grown-up emotion.10

These aberrant reviews are indicative of just how established the prevailing discourse is. Meanwhile, critics writing in essayistic and academic journals such as Film Comment, Sight and Sound and Cinema Journal have no such concerns. Partly, of course, this has to do with the differing industrial conditions of review and longform criticisms. Essayists and academics largely choose their own object to

Peter Travers, "The Darjeeling Limited" (review), Rolling Stone, 26 October 2007. 10 Andrew O'Hehir, "Moonrise Kingdom: Wes Anderson’s mid-‘60s love story," Salon, 24 May 2012.

11 Tom O'Regan, Australian National Cinema, London: Routledge, 1996. 12 Nöel Carroll, On Criticism, New York: Routledge, 2009.

“Success value,” then, is what longform criticism of Anderson, addressed to a public concerned with “cinematic” values, finds in his work. Through this lens we see Anderson's diversions from mimetic convention as consistent with themes and narratives concerned with the nature of authorship (to name but one of his “successes”). “Reception value,” meanwhile, is what reviewers take into account when describing a film to a less politically coherent public. Through this lens, Anderson's films might be viewed as an unfamiliar experience that could potentially leave you cold. Is it any wonder that his reviews, at best, come with a disclaimer? Happily, Moonrise Kingdom is enjoying the best reviews of any Anderson film to date. However, these positive reviews (apart from brave departures such as O'Hehir's) do nothing to counter the received wisdom regarding Anderson's shortcomings. Claudia Puig tells us that this is Anderson's best since Rushmore because “it has none of the self-conscious smugness of The Life Aquatic or the empty eccentricity of The Royal Tenenbaums.”13 If he cares about such things Anderson will hope in future for more “success” and less “reception,” but at this point it seems like it will always be more of the same from

Anderson's empty, confected, meaningless reviews.

Claudia Puig (2012), "Gaze upon an enchanting Moonrise Kingdom," USA Today, 24 May 2012.

Phil Coldiron

FRAGMENTS AND FLUX: THE NEW REALITY OF VIDEO, THEN AND NOW An account of the aesthetic possibilities opened up by the cheapness of video, including a discussion of Gina Telaroli’s “Traveling Light,” Sylvain George’s “Qu’ils reposent en révolte,” and Carlos Reygadas’ “Este es mi Reino.”

1. WE MUST CEASE MOURNING THAT WHICH WILL NEVER DIE

“DCP Classics”—has suddenly made everyone a materialist. Not since the structuralists of the seventies, who certainly had far less in the way of cultural visibility, has there been such concern for the stuff of cinema. Perhaps if there had been throughout the 20th century we’d still have the thousands of films lost to the value of the nickel in their nitrate. The outcry in support of celluloid has taken two

t’s funny how the impending murder of 35mm by the cold, clinical hands of Digital Cinema Package (DCP)—the latter has already seen two series this year in New York expressly devoted to convincing viewers of its superiority: Film Forum’s “This Is DCP” and Lincoln Center’s

film.1 Rather, the point is that it must be possible to appreciate film for its merits without fetishizing it to such an extent that it blinds us to the unique qualities afforded by shooting on video. Film will find ways to live on. Its beauty is such that the cultists will never let it disappear entirely. What it’s time for is a more thorough understanding of video qua video; as not only a rich format on its own terms, but as a philosophical approach to cinema, a road to a new cinematic realism.

views, one looking toward the past, the other the future. The former is nostalgic, a lament for the loss of culturally derived values, the textural beauty of 35mm or 16mm film, the lived history carried in every scratched, faded print still kicking around the repertory circuit. The latter is preventative, an urgent warning that film will prove easier to preserve than comparably volatile digital files, swarms of ones and zeros threatening to delete themselves at any moment. Digital has surely received sufficient praise for its democratizing capacities—put bluntly, that it’s significantly cheaper than film—but it’s nonetheless always been viewed as an inferior alternative. It’s there front and center in the battle to save 35mm, but it’s also implicit in the language of the camera companies who sell their products with claims that are constantly in terms of celluloid: “Now with greater latitude than 35mm!” The point here isn’t to disparage 35mm or 16mm (or small gauge) film. My life would no doubt be poorer had I never experienced the red of Gene Tierney’s lipstick in a nitrate print of Leave Her to Heaven, or the shimmering green of the Seine at night in The Devil, Probably, or every moment of the half-dozen works by Josef von Sternberg I’ve had the good fortune to see on

2. THE FLUX OF REALITY Celluloid translates the language of life into the language of money. —Alberto Grifi

he history of cinema has a curious way of suppressing certain films until the moment when they can be fully appreciated. Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli’s recently revived 1975 feature Anna is one such film.2 Shot mainly in 1972 on analog tape, and briefly exhibited on 16mm via a transfer process of

1 And this is to say nothing of the avant-garde: May Fuji continue to produce 16mm for the rest of Nathaniel Dorsky’s days and may venues keep their projectors in good order to show them! 2 Currently on tour following its debut at Rotterdam in a new digital restoration courtesy of the Cineteca Nazionale and Cineteca di Bologna.

the tinkerer Grifi’s own devising, it’s fitting that it now returns in digital form, completing a circle of video that underscores its dependence on the medium. It’s a film driven by two of the central impulses of its era — on the one hand, activist commitment; on the other, institutional critique. What sets Grifi and Sarchielli apart from Jean Rouch, Allan King or Frederick Wiseman3 is that the institution under examination is their own activist engagement — in this, their film most closely resembles the lost footage shot by Masao Adachi during his years in Palestine, or the films of the Group Dziga Vertov if they had filmed themselves engaging in revolutionary violence in between discussing it. Grifi and Sarchielli’s activism is less violent, but no less ideologically conflicted. They have taken in 16year-old Anna, a drug-addicted and very pregnant girl living on the streets of Rome in a square by

Sarchielli’s apartment. With her mane of blonde hair and soft features perched directly between innocence and guile, she’s very much a star, and the tension between exploiting her as such and aiding her as the lost youth she is pushes and pulls the film into its jagged, elongated form. What is the dream of video? At the basic level, it’s the one that we all know: to be free from the burden of money. But this isn’t a case of simply having, or not having, the finances to shoot a film, not “I will make my film as such, or, I will make my film as such and save tens of thousands of dollars by not shooting on film.” It’s the freedom to remove oneself from the structures of funding that decide what is and isn’t worthy of existing in a film — the freedom of content. It’s the aesthetic openness afforded by divorcing the relationship between time and money. Grifi’s condemnation of celluloid is the negative image of his praise for video, which allows shooting to maintain a direct temporal relation to its subject without thought for the cost of the stock being exposed, or the logistics of transporting the material bulk associated with film, its own financial concern. The whole of Anna, the result of such considerations, is directed toward the maximum expression of reality. But this reality holds no pretense to being a whole itself. It is perpetually under construction — the irresolvable, eternal flux of relationships between characters,

Rouch’s tremendous sensitivity was for the gap between the societies, or between fragments of a society (though in its reflexivity his Jaguar is one of Anna’s key models). King remains the chief chronicler of the individual in society; his films are the purest expression of the weight of this arrangement on personal relationships. Wiseman, who integrates himself most fully into the space of his subjects, is forever intrigued by the narratives that institutions build to hide their reality: In this, he’s perhaps the greatest director of American fictions.

between documentary and fiction, duration and the moment, compassion and exploitation, distance and proximity. Anna is a realist film insofar as it locates its mise-en-scène in these fluxes: an anxious, unstable space with one eye on an unattainable Real and the other on the duration of the world.

whether it’s the directors’ belief in their own moral justification or the self-righteousness of a young American whose fury stems from the conviction that all these young Italian radicals are ineffective because they’re too scared of their parents. Conversely, the recreations are documents of the process of working over the material of imagination. They exist as series of repetitions, rehearsals for scenes in a movie that will never be shot. As Sarchielli sits at a kitchen table and Anna rummages through the icebox, searching for dinner in a moment of mock domesticity, he repeatedly prompts her to ask what a hamburger is. Leaving aside the content, every formal element of the scene—their affectedly casual delivery of the dialogue, the over-pronounced gestures (a yawn, or the way that Anna leans against the icebox), the cramped blocking that would never last more than a few seconds outside of a fiction— points towards its construction, which does nothing to diminish the reality of the relationship between Anna and Sarchielli which manifests itself at every instant. In this scene, the most overtly false passage of the film’s nearly four hours, there is the full weight of the truth: his desire to infantilize the girl and selfconsciously position himself as a savior (teaching her such basic facts as what a hamburger is), as he provides her with a situation that is undoubtedly preferable to what came before, is met with her

Godard says that it is necessary to know what [the characters] were before being placed in the picture, and will be after … This is very difficult, because it is not enough to eliminate fiction, in favor of a crude reality which would lead us back all the more to presents which pass. On the contrary, it is necessary to move toward a limit, to make the limit of before the film and after it pass into the film and to grasp in the character the limit that he himself steps over in order to enter the film and leave it, to enter into the fiction as into a present which is inseparable from its before and after. —Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image.

Anna is composed primarily of three groups of images: the direct image of events involving Anna as they occur for the first time; recreations of events involving Anna that were not filmed; and discussions among groups of young people—many of them radicals—in the café where Sarchielli and Anna first met. This is not a game of sorting fiction and documentary; fiction congeals in the documentary, in the stories individuals tell inside and out,

laughter, the sense that she is aware and annoyed and appreciative. It is a scene, as is every other, done under the then emancipatory logic of video, the logic of the rewind, the untethered duration. It is in this that Grifi and Sarchielli have achieved “a present which is inseparable from its before and after.” If we can imagine these scenes playing out on film— certainly none of them push duration to Andy Warhol’s limits, or visual freedom to Michael Snow’s—that is no argument against the centrality of video as a conceptual approach: Anna’s realism is defined by its relationship to time as flux, freed from the anchor of the ledger, the fixed value of the film frame. The new restoration, which is being presented digitally, maintains an important artifact from the original transfer from video to 16mm: as characters move they leave behind faint traces, ghostly outlines — the present is doubled as a smear of time on the past’s future. In these moments the soul of video bares itself in all its freedom.

arrived at the dawn of a medium with an aesthetic precision that could not be understood because everyone else was still working out the rules of the game. Certainly there were fellow travelers in video from the beginning—Godard, Nam June Paik, Owen Land (whose remarkable Box Theory pushes videographic repetition to its conceptual limit)—and too many notable explorers to mention over the last three decades. Nonetheless, by 1982, Serge Daney could already assert that video was “a way of seeing images in the future perfect tense … [whose] present tendency is in the direction of control.”4 Just a decade into its life, video was already subsumed into the structure of capital, a tool to perfect the image before money was pumped into it. From here it mutated further into the basis of television, an aesthetic fact given extensive consideration by Daney in the pages of Libération during the Gulf War, most notably in “Montage Obligatory,” one of the central texts of Daney’s thought. It is here that he spells out his distinction between the visual (“the optical verification of a purely technical operation … without reverse shot, it lacks nothing”) and the image which “always takes place at the border of two force fields … [It] is meant to bear witness to a certain

3. THE RETURN OF THE IMAGE (THREE EXAMPLES) There was never so much talk about the “power of the image” until it ceased having any. —Serge Daney, "Montage Obligatory" [1997] Rouge, 2006.

nna, like the films of Epstein in the 1920s,

Serge Daney, “One from the Heart,” Framework, No. 32/33, 1986.

otherness; and although it always has a hard core, it always lacks something. The image is always more and less than itself.” The visual is the process by which structures of power—the state, and the corporations frequently indistinguishable from it—mutate the aesthetic possibility of the video image into the true record of a false reality (false because it presents itself as complete when it is anything but). As Daney says, “[i]t tells the truth and informs absolutely,” but “about the stock market … not about life.”

indeed very much in line with the visual5), her second point is critical. What follows are three very brief examples of work being made today under the logic of video that are indeed truly realist, works of images rather than the visual: TRAVELING LIGHT directed by Gina Telaroli 2012

concept as old as the movies: the train journey. Telaroli’s short film 4’8 ½”, comprised entirely of reedited train scenes from across the history of cinema, showed her exceptional sensitivity for the formal qualities of train-bound footage and allowed her to build a sensible, convincing argument for the unique spatial reality of the train — a coherent, continuous space with a stable of gestures as well-defined as that of the kitchen, the bedroom, or the stadium. Traveling Light places her inside such a space and, like Godard in the first section of Film Socialisme, she uses an approach based on a 1:1 shot-to-scene ratio where every shot becomes a reverse shot onto the reality of the train in both its specificity and its vast psychic existence. This varied approach (one shot looks down the aisle of an empty car as

DONAL FOREMAN: For this year’s Sight and Sound end of year poll, you listed Occupy Wall Street’s livestream feed as one of your cinematic highlights of the year … My concern is that most of what is produced is limited to forms that are journalistic or even pseudocommercial — there seems to be a predominance of what Serge Daney called the Visual as opposed to the Image. NICOLE BRENEZ: On the contrary, the proliferation of images seems to me to be a wonderful phenomenon: more images and films in line with standardized forms, of course, but also more formal, visual, and logistical innovations. — "L'art le plus politique: Nicole Brenez with Donal Foreman," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2012.

Though Brenez has perhaps dodged the question here (for the video stream in question is

5 A reconsideration of the visual after 9/11 would be its own investigation into realism today, but that would require its own essay.

light strobes through the windows, recalling Serene Velocity (1970); another looks out the rear window onto a sepia landscape and invokes the earliest days of cinema) follows the train’s journey to completion (the hard center) while rendering its space as an open question. This question is simple; it only asks us to consider where we locate ourselves in looking (orientation toward the subject) and seeing (orientation toward the object). To struggle against the visual world one has to first understand their point of view.

sadness, disgust, fear, etc.—that muddle the relationship between the personal and the political. Anyone can shoot a strong image—this is the logic of the visual, which believes that a few strong images are all that is needed—but the importance of George’s work lies in his willingness, like Telaroli’s, to force a reconsideration of seeing by shooting everything that so many ignore. George shoots a raid and the protest that counters it like anyone else (though perhaps his eye for detail is a bit better), but when he follows the cops as they detain a group of underage immigrants and prepare to force them on a bus out of the country, he captures a moment when one cop looks straight into the camera, astonished that anyone is filming this, when all the glamour and spectacle of the event has dissipated. Here it is precisely the logic of video6 that allows George to achieve Daney’s obligatory montage: the editing-in of that which is absent from the official image.

QU'ILS REPOSENT EN RÉVOLTE directed by Sylvain George 2010

group of sans papiers sit around a fire in a shanty town, taking turns searing their fingers on a heated screw; they’re removing their fingerprints, extricating themselves from a system that simultaneously has no use for them and controls their fate. Though George shows their disfigured fingers, hatched with crisscross scars that stand between the authorities and their identities, he returns to the image of the screw itself. The image of their fingers, with its painful, outraged humanism, has become the film’s most visible icon, but it’s the screw that defines George’s approach: it is the object which brings to light the entire system, stripped bare of the cloud of subjectivities—anger,

ESTE ES MI REINO

6 The officer, like the screw, could have been shot on film and the image itself would have been no different (George himself as included both 8mm and 16mm in his film L’Impossible). Rather, what’s crucial here is the extension beyond the realm of signifiers into the land of signifieds in all its conflicts and complexity.

directed by Carlos Reygadas 2010

minutes. As Rossellini once said of Chaplin, this is the film of a free man, and it’s this freedom that allows Reygadas to reach the heights of realism; the concise, coherent presentation of reality in the full scope of its conflicts and contradictions. Of course, with this years’s Post Tenebras Lux, he’s back to 35mm,8 the perfect opportunity to show again that video is an approach as much as a medium.

riting in Cinema Scope,7 Raya Martin (a director who has a number of films that could easily occupy this space) praised Reygadas for fulfilling the highest calling of the filmmaker: to “ensure that the paying audience gets to see onscreen what they encounter as soon as they leave the cinema.” Este es mi Reino, like the work of Harmony Korine, deploys analog video for expressive means that are the equal of any recent achievement in film or high definition video. It is, as with the scene from Anna discussed above, a perfect contrivance: Reygadas has invited dozens of Mexicans, from landed aristocrats to impoverished laborers, to a party in the country where they eat, drink, dance, and sing as chaos slowly overwhelms the rigidly maintained class distinctions. Amidst the fevered orange flames that engulf its final moments comes the realization that the film’s power derives mainly from the fact that it cost little more than whatever was spent on the party (a fact that also applies to Martin’s recent masterwork, The Great Cinema Party (2012)), from the moral freedom offered by video to chase follies like fitting an entire society into one field and twelve

8 The opening and closing of his Stellet Licht (2007)—time-lapse visions of sunrise and sunset captured in rich blacks, reds, and purples—are among the great film images of recent years: the forward movement of time condensed into every second, the iconic quality of every frame the confirmation of a moral commitment to the beauty of truth.

Raya Martin, “Carlos Reygadas,” Cinema Scope, No. 50, p. 56, 2012.

Louise Sheedy

THERE’S A STORM COMING!: JEFF NICHOLS’ SCHIZOPHRENIC REALISM Jeff Nichols’ “Take Shelter” invites the audience to question not only the sanity of its main protagonist but also the realism of the film itself.

n the current advertising campaign for Campbell’s soup products, celebrity chef Manu Fieldel speaks to camera openly of his disdain for the climate of celebrity chefs cashing in on their fame: “A lot of chefs these days are selling out. It’s really getting ridiculous. Me? I would never do that. But I am happy to recommend the best stock.” His admonishment is flanked in advertising; he wears a

Campbell’s cap, shirt, the wall behind him is covered in branded cans and signs. A dog jumps up on his lap. “Down, Campbell,” he says before jumping into a heavily branded Campbell’s car. The joke is clear: Manu has sold out. But he admits it, and sells the stock anyway. It’s upfront, honest and of course, real, just like Campbell’s Real Stock. Such self-reflexivity, or calling attention to a text as a text, was

once championed by the theory and practice of the French New Wave, Godard in particular, and accelerated in the aftermath of the political and social chaos of May ‘68. It was used to intentionally smash the proverbial fourth wall of film and was part of an arsenal of “distanciation” techniques, Bertolt Brecht’s term describing, amongst other things, the desire to compel the spectator to step outside the narrative frame and look towards the social production of the play/film. It was an explicitly Marxist assault on the false consciousness of everyday cultural production and was used to upset the mimesis of classical realism by revealing the political mechanisms of this production — a realism that had nothing to do with representing the world “as it is” but unmaking the world as it seemed. 50 years later this once revered strategy of modernist filmmaking is now the ultimate in commercial realism: a stamp of authenticity and a sign of “genuine” regard for the customer, in effect saying “We know you’re too smart to fall for cheesy television advertising ... and smart people like Campbell’s Real Soups and Stocks.” The evolution of the technique from lefty film tool to advertising standard? shows just how slippery the notions of realism and antirealism are. In the words of documentary theorist Bill Nichols: "The comfortably accepted realism of one generation seems like artifice to the next. New strategies must constantly be

fabricated to re-present ‘things as they are’ and still others to contest this very representation.”1 What I would like to draw attention to for the purposes of this essay is the recurring issue of democracy, that is, the charge that anti-realist forms which unglue narrative cohesion, no matter what their leftist credentials, are only truly readable by those with an intellectual background and as such are inherently elitist. Such was the charge that fuelled Stalin’s attacks on Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema in the 1930s, certain leftist attacks on Godard in the late-sixties and beyond and continued in a generalised and ongoing critique of contemporary art and experimental cinema today. Deliberately operating outside the mainstream, these forms intentionally confound and as such must remain out of reach for all but those steeped in art or film theory, forever subject to accusations of preaching to the choir. However, as Manu has kindly demonstrated, some techniques that were once considered avant garde are now, generations later, happily subsumed into mainstream Hollywood product. Eisenstein’s frenetic, rhythmic editing, for example, is now a mainstay of both action cinema and the pop

1 Bill Nichols, "The Voice of Documentary," in Movies and Methods: Volume 2, B. Nichols (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

music video. In other words, techniques originally designed to shock and to undo traditional modes of seeing and reading become what they once tried to undo. Once absorbed into the mainstream, we read these cinematic techniques easily, automatically and, because of this automatism, our conscious selves are sutured into the landscape of the narrative and that critical distance that Eisenstein, Brecht and Godard prized so highly is compromised as the spectator is no longer consciously piecing the blocks of meaning together. Is it possible, then, for a critical cinema to straddle the drafty abyss between mainstream and experimental cinema without compromising the politics of their project? Jeff Nichol’s Take Shelter, released by Sony Pictures Classics to critical acclaim last year, suggests that it is.

reader. "Reality" is defined by the text itself in which characters and events occur. Classical realism respects the rules of continuity, linear narrative and cinematic time and space and could describe any number of Hollywood films. It may not be realistic for twenty-somethings to be living in huge apartments in the middle of Manhattan, but if set up by the film’s narrative parameters, we accept things as they are shown for the sake of the narrative. In contrast, “Brechtian realism,” as I have mentioned above, can be seen as anti-realist in terms of its relation to classical realism but realist in terms of its desire to uncover the political realities that can be obscured by standard modes of representation. I lay these out as Nichols’ negotiation of all three types of realism in Take Shelter forms the crux of the film’s political and dramatic success.

t may be helpful at this point to distinguish between three types of realism. “Social realism” concerns both the subject matter and the form of the text. It focuses on the realities of the everyday existence of the poor and working classes and is delivered through techniques which respect narrative cohesion, with escapism as the enemy. Think Walker Evans or Roberto Rosselini. "Classical realism," on the other hand, is best defined not through subject matter, but through the relationship between the subject of the text and the

ake Shelter’s Curtis is a good man, with a good life. He lives happily with his small family in a country town somewhere in the American Midwest. He works hard in construction with his best friend, he gently dotes on his young hearing-impaired daughter and he shares a loving friendship with his wife. Gradually, however, something starts to tug at the seams of Curtis’s contented normality. Visions of environmental chaos and violent attacks on him and his family begin to invade his dream and

waking life. Curtis is either a prophet or experiencing psychosis and the stress of both possibilities is taking its toll on him and his young family, a toll which gathers apocalyptic momentum right up until the film’s unsettling and astonishing final scene. The film’s working class American setting is devoid of the kind of Hollywood (or socialist, for that matter) romanticism that such a bosom would normally invite. If you haven’t seen the film you could be forgiven for cringing at the above description of Curtis’ “good life” but thanks to Nichols’ script, direction and Michael Shannon’s phenomenal performance as Curtis, the life and lifestyle of the little family are carefully realistic representations of contemporary small town America, an America in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis. Financial concerns are voiced and alluded to throughout the film, from the held shot of a gas meter clicking away as Curtis fills up his truck to scripted interventions continuously referring to the “hard times” America has fallen on. Curtis’ ambitious/maniacal project of building a storm shelter is met with concern from his local banker, his brother and, of course, his wife who repeatedly warn him of spending beyond his means, jeopardising his family’s well being in the process. Take Shelter is an anxious film in every sense, but, although financial unease is the least “dramatic” form of anxiety in the film, it

pervades nonetheless. Its sober presence forms a counter to the hysterics that run alongside it and quietly feeds the political guts of the film. The more overt manifestation of anxiety comes from Nichol’s continuous manipulation of the relationship between the audience and Curtis. ‘Reality’ is unsettled from the opening scene: Curtis is outside the front of his house, he looks out across the plains and farms beyond his front yard towards particularly ominous storm clouds on the horizon. It starts to rain and Curtis’ outstretched hand becomes dappled with a brown, oily substance. We see his puzzled face and then a sudden cut shows Curtis in the shower, the water forming a match-onaction which strangely links the two scenes but unsettles at the same time. We want to see Curtis telling someone, acting on what he has just seen, but the mundane image of him going about his morning duties and then casually eating breakfast with his family soon after becomes the thin slice of a wedge between the viewer and film; we start asking it questions.

olin McCabe’s seminal “Realism and the Cinema” article published by Screen in 1974 set up two interrelated propositions about the classical realist text that are quite handy when looking at Nichol’s approach to narrative in Take Shelter. First, the classical

realist text cannot deal with the real as contradictory. Second, that this type of realism positions the reader/spectator in a relationship aligned with a meta (or dominant) reality set up by the work. In other words, there can be competing perspectives within a film that are often contradictory, however there is always a frame of reference by which to measure this perspective and judge its veracity. Because we are encouraged to align ourselves with this meta discourse, we automatically subsume its version of an objective reality in order to make sense of the film, a sublimation riddled with political problems if that reality assumes an a-historical heterosexist/white/JudeoChristian/capitalist perspective. These problems characterised much of the leftist film theory of the 1970s and were the reason its adherents championed Brechtian approaches that would stall an uncritical absorption of the prevailing ideology. It is easy to see how Nichols upsets the classical realist paradigm by carefully playing with both our identification with Curtis and by denying his audience any kind of concrete reality through which to make sense of his actions.

Integrating dreamscapes into classical narrative is hardly a recent invention but it is rare in popular Hollywood cinema for the lines to be so thoroughly blurred, let alone for this haziness to take up the majority of the narrative. The scene that follows the one mentioned above sees his wife in the backyard of their house, also looking concerned at the horizon with similarly ominous clouds. She is seeing a storm too and so the next scene, in which Curtis is in the backyard watching a storm roll in until his dog breaks free from his leash and tries to chew his arm off, can’t be distinguished as a dream until a jolting cut shows us Curtis waking up in a sweat. To complicate things further, the pain from the dog’s bite troubles him for the rest of the day. This oscillation continues throughout the film and the only constant is the uneasy score, which pervades even the most mundane of scenes. A short pan across a bar of men having afterwork drinks for example, is laced with the same anxious chords that accompany Curtis’ nightmare in which his wife wants to kill him. This disorientation provides the thrill of the thriller and is thus the key to the film’s ability to bridge the divide between mainstream and experimental cinemas; we start to enjoy the game. Although the frame of reference, the meta-language of “reality” that would normally ensure the film’s cohesion, is almost obliterated by Nichols’ narrative games, he leaves

ichols’ assault on classical realism is brutal in its sneakiness. There is no warning or visible entry point into Curtis’ visions, the cutting, framing, and for the most part, lighting, remain the same.

morsels of sobriety on which to rest our reason momentarily. Most of these are provided through the depiction of his wife, Samantha, whose increasing worry about Curtis’ actions make the strongest case that what we are seeing is a man falling prey to the early stages of schizophrenia. Nichols creates a kind of reflexivity in the way he treats his audience, inviting them to look closely at his filmmaking in order to glean clues which are going to explain or naturalise the supernatural occurrences in the film. To make sense of the story, the spectator needs one foot on either side of the narrative frame and as things progress, we are encouraged to feel like the line between reality and fantasy is becoming clearer until, finally, Curtis and Samantha sit opposite a psychiatrist prescribing physical distance from the dreaded storm shelter, and there is talk of a mental facility. The scene that follows however, puts all the meaning gathered from the film so far on its head, the rug of comprehension ripped out from under us, thrown outside, and set on fire. If the film ended in the psychiatrist’s office, there is enough content from the social realist foundation to warrant a political reading of the film. If pressed, you could read Curtis’ visions as a metaphor for either environmental or financial catastrophe, even apocalypse. But if safely tied to an ending which both shuts these visions down as

psychological symptoms and assures the audience that everything is going to be OK in the end, the metaphor would be fairly weak; the politics, watery. But it doesn’t end there of course. The final few minutes of the film see the family at the beach and the horizon again fills with terrifying clouds. Curtis’ daughter begins signing the word for storm and Samantha appears on the balcony behind Curtis, stunned. They meet eyes, she nods, confirming that she sees it too. Naturally, because of the games Nichols has been playing with his audience this scene could be taken as just another of Curtis’ nightmares but I believe there’s enough there, in the timing, the structure and its jarring existence next to the scene with the psychiatrist, to suggest that the storm has been real all along. But this conclusion sits uneasily after things seemed so neatly tied up and is clearly intended to baffle. If taken as “real” then Curtis is a prophet. But this is such a fantastic notion after the sober fauxconclusion that it is easier to think of his visions in terms of allegory, making Curtis a metaphor for a contemporary rhetorical climate littered with warnings of the end of the world (as we know it). Nichols’ play with realism thus makes our anxious and incredulous relationship to Curtis and his perspective feed back into that metaphor. In effect, our uneasy relationship with the film’s reality mimicking an uneasy wrestle between the collective

First World guilt over fucking up the world and the stoic belief that the analysts are cuckoo. However you read the ending, the conclusion is likely to be anything but reassuring. As such, buoyed by its experiments with form, Take Shelter succeeds in painting a frighteningly disjointed yet accessible picture of the cultural and economic climate of contemporary America, a definitively politicized critique that demands, to be dragged out of the cinema and debated in the (ideally) warm light of day.

Brad Nguyen

STRANGER THAN FICTION We may be suspicious when art claims to be impartially observing reality. Yet, TV shows such as “The Wire” or films such as “Zodiac,” show us the potential for passive observation to lead us to new ideas and perspectives.

uring their review of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 film Biutiful, on the (indefinitely postponed) television show Ebert Presents: At the Movies, there is a telling exchange between cohosts Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky that neatly illustrates the ideological positions of their critical approaches. In discussing the film’s gritty aesthetic, Lemire admires, “And you can, like, touch the squalor. It’s very vivid, but enough after a while.” With a happy sarcasm, Vishnevetsky

counters, “It’s such an aestheticised squalor. I mean, those Chinese sweat shops are so lovingly production-designed.”1 Thus, the two co-hosts neatly perform their designated roles: Lemire plays the part of the bourgeois film reviewer, concerned with the entertainment value and realism of films. Vishnevetsky, on the other hand, plays the part of the knowing, cynical film critic, unfooled by

Transcript of "Review: Biutiful," Ebert Presents: At the Movies, 2010.

thought-out world of the dominant ideology. Cinema is one of the languages through which the world communicates itself to itself. They constitute its ideology for they reproduce the world as it is experienced when filtered through the ideology.

Iñárritu’s attempts to convince his audience with dirt and shaky camerawork. Vishnevetsky is, consciously or not, giving voice to the valuable lesson learned from the film critics and literary theorists of the sixties: that reality is not neutral. Roland Barthes, in his 1968 essay “The Reality Effect,” observed that apparently superfluous description in novels have an actual function: “just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all they do—without saying so—is signify it … [These details] finally say nothing but this: we are the real.” In other words, when an author invokes realism they are really only deploying the illusion of “telling it like it is.” A year later, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni would express a similar idea in their Cahiers du Cinema editorial “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”2:

What Barthes, Comolli and Narboni are essentially arguing is that the aesthetic of realism forces the audience to give up their critical agency. Realism is a false assertion that the text merely shows its audience “what is” without any ulterior motive. As Phil Coldiron reminds us elsewhere in this issue, realism in this sense may be alternatively described in terms of Serge Daney’s category of the “visual”: “The visual is the optical verification of a procedure of power (technological, political, advertising or military power). A procedure which calls for no other commentary than ‘reception perfect, AOK.’”3

“[R]eality” is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology. Seen in this light, the classic theory of cinema that the camera is an impartial instrument which grasps, or rather is impregnated by, the world in its “concrete reality” is an eminently reactionary one. What the camera in fact registers is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, un-

he pernicious effects of realism are still evident today. Young writers are constantly driven to submit to its logic when they receive the idiotic advice to “write what you know.” Far from suggesting some fidelity to authenticity, the injunction to “write what you know” in fact only discourages young writers from transcending the limits of what they know so

Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, "Cinema/Ideology/ Criticism” [1969], in Film Theory and Criticism, L. Braudy & M. Cohen (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Serge Daney, "Before and After the Image" [1991].

far. In other words, to “write what you know” is to unconsciously write what you don’t know as if it is known, paving over the cracks and fissures of lived experience. You can see this problem play out in the way that the 25-year-old Lena Dunham responded to charges that her television series Girls, by not including any nonwhite characters, was racist:

the “culture industry”). This “blind spot” (the inability to see racial segregation) is not at all indicative of inauthenticity — rather, the problem is that this blind spot is constitutive of how Lena Dunham experiences reality. What Girls suffers from, then, is too much reality and a deficit of critical perspectives through which to analyse the ideological structure of that reality.

This show isn’t supposed to feel exclusionary. It’s supposed to feel honest, and it’s supposed to feel true to many aspects of my experience … If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like—not that the experience of an AfricanAmerican girl and a white girl are drastically different—but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to.4

et part of me wants to resist “Cinema/Ideology/ Criticism”. When Comolli and Narboni argue, “What the camera in fact registers is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out world of the dominant ideology,” what they are arguing is that cinema, in order to be a progressive force, must overcome itself; that the act of seeing, without any kind of modernist aesthetic intervention, is basically a conservative function. What this statement doesn’t allow for is the power of an image in and of itself. In his writing on cinema, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze maintains a great faith in images and the power of cinema. Take his description of Rossellini’s Europe 51, the 1952 Italian neorealist film starring Ingrid Bergman:

Let’s not speculate here over whether the show is or is not an accurate portrayal of the racial makeup of Dunham’s social circles. If we can take her at her word, what strikes us is how the so-called liberal center of the United States, the multicultural melting pot that is New York City, could be so violently segregated that a young white woman can live happily without interacting with any non-white people (and don’t forget that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath inhabits that particularly enlightened world of

Europe 51 shows a bourgeois woman who, following the death of her child, crosses various spaces and experiences the tenement, the slum and the factory (“I thought I was seeing

"Lena Dunham Addresses Criticism Aimed at 'Girls,'" NPR, 2012.

convicts”). Her glances relinquish the practical function of a mistress of a house who arranges things and beings, and pass through every state of an internal vision, affliction, compassion, love, happiness, acceptance, extending to the psychiatric hospital where she is locked up at the end of a new trial of Joan of Arc: she sees, she has learnt to see.5

towards dark shelters …

In other words, a truly materialist cinema is not constricted by reality but, rather, is in a position to conjure up an infinite number of visions. Perhaps, then, we should create two categories of realism: the first would be a Barthesian realism where the effects of reality have the single function of signifying the authenticity of the text; the second would be a Deleuzian realism where material reality is deployed in the creative process of producing new ideas. The distinction between these two realisms is key to understanding the debate over how to understand the films of Frederick Wiseman who has resisted being labelled as a creator of “direct cinema”:

It is through this situation of pure “seeing” (the ideal of cinema), as opposed to the habitual “responding” of her old bourgeois life, that Ingrid Bergman undergoes a radical transformation into a saint. The importance of Italian neorealism for Deleuze is not bound up in notions of “authenticity” as it is for Scorsese in his pretty boring documentary on Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy (“This was real life!”). To “see” is to be struck by the ambiguity of an image, its excess or potential. The key difference between Deleuze and Comolli/Narboni is that Comolli/Narboni conceive of reality as something to destroy whereas for Deleuze, reality is the wellspring of creativity:

What I try to do is edit the films so that they will have a dramatic structure, that is why I object to some extent to the term observational cinema or cinema verité, because observational cinema to me at least connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another and that is not true.6

The heroine of Europe 51 sees certain features of the factory, and thinks she is seeing convicts… She could have seized on other features, and had a different vision: the workers entry, the call of the siren, I thought I saw condemned survivors, running

Wiseman makes documentaries about institutions, eschewing standard documentary techniques such as voiceover, title cards or interviews. There is

6 Kaleem Aftab & Alexandra Weltz, "Fred Wiseman," Film West, Issue 40, 2000.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 [1985], London: Continuum, 2005.

never an obvious narrative arc in the film; many of the scenes capture a banal everyday activity rather than a notable event. But the scenes have a cumulative effect, gradually building a particular image of the institution, a sense of the way it functions and the relations of power it puts in place. In 2010’s Boxing Gym, for example, endless scenes of people skipping rope, punching bags, conversing and sparring slowly build into an image: Wiseman creates a vision of an inclusive, egalitarian utopia made possible through shared participation in a regime of discipline. This is in stark opposition to the violent clichés usually associated with boxing. It is likely Wiseman’s eschewal of obvious authorial commentary that has led his films to be labelled as direct cinema. Wiseman’s own description of his process seems torn between an idea of direct cinema (he denies any influence over the events that take place in front of the camera) and its opposite (the choice of what to shoot and how to edit constituting “manipulations” by the filmmaker). But perhaps we should call Wiseman a realist filmmaker in the Deleuzian sense: it is through the act of “seeing” reality that Wiseman offers up truly surprising images. He shows us that a boxing gym is a utopia the same way that Ingrid Bergman sees that a factory is a prison. One of the happier developments of mainstream cinema has been the infiltration of

more-or-less Wiseman-esque aesthetics into television. By this, I mean only that we have seen in the last decade and a half a number of shows that are less about characters and more concerned with showing us a world. HBO, in particular, has brought us prisons (Oz), mafia families (The Sopranos), a 19th century frontier town (Deadwood) and, notably, an entire city (The Wire). The shift from building a character arc to constructing a world, while still obeying the need to “convince the audience,” brought a new materialism to television that rendered surprising images: in The Sopranos, for example, the emotional strain of being a mafia boss pushes Tony into therapy while in The Wire we learned that policemen are often more concerned with boosting their performance stats and protecting their paychecks than they are with law and order. The same realist aesthetic even applies to a full-blown work of fantasy such as Game of Thrones, an adaptation of the Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novel series by George R. R. Martin. The series, set in a Middle-earthish kingdom in which several powerful families plot their way to the throne, is characterised by its large network of characters, cynical view of human relations and its (relatively, of course) convincing world-building. Just as Marx writes in The German Ideology, “The premises from which we begin are … the real

ways. I was just fascinated by the facts, and I would use as little psychology and invention as I could.7

individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live,” so does Game of Thrones start with the premise that its characters hunger for food and desire for sex. In one extraordinary scene from season two, the young King Joffrey, who has plunged his kingdom into war, is attacked with manure by a mob of peasants suffering from famine. Joffrey has a hot temper and orders his guards to kill them all and the scene quickly transforms into something like a Romero film with the angry proleteriat literally tearing limbs off members of the city’s elite (“I thought I saw zombies”). Compare this to the world of Tolkien which, despite its painstakingly mapped out history, seems devoid of any real social antagonism beyond the cliché of good versus evil. In a discussion of David Fincher’s Zodiac, Olivier Assayas remarked, “This is a narrative that is determined by facts, by the randomness, the twists and turns of time and history and fate.” It was this aspect of Zodiac that inspired Assayas’ epic mini-series Carlos, about the infamous terrorist:

Remember that Assayas is a former writer for Cahiers du Cinema and it’s remarkable how far the sentiment of these remarks is from Comolli and Narboni’s “reality is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology.” Perhaps this shift is a sign of the times; perhaps we are like Tars Tarkas in John Carter who wants to believe that “something new can come into this world”. To believe this means to renew our faith in reality and its creative potential; to affirm the world rather than negate it.

In the film I made there’s very little psychology … because I believe that accumulating facts ends up drawing a portrait. It doesn’t give simple answers, but it gives complexity. Fact is fascinating. It’s extraordinary, it’s stuff you wouldn’t dream inventing. It has so many intricacies, it moves in such crazy

7 Alison Willmore, "Olivier Assayas talks ‘Zodiac,’ his new film ‘Carlos’ and ‘what real life is about,’" IFC, 15 June 2010.

REVIEWS ONTOLOGIES OF THE AUSTRALIAN CINEMA Review of “Sleeping Beauty” and “Hail” by Daniel Fairfax

different philosophies of the cinema, and of the relation between image and reality which is its foundation. The contrast between the two images is, I dare say, ontological in nature. In the first image, 13 minutes into the film, we see Emily Browning (as Lucy, the film’s protagonist) making a call from a telephone booth (Figure 1, p.6). Already, of course, the idea of a 20-year-old phoning someone from a booth is at least a little quaint, if not rather outmoded. But this is not what brought my attention to this shot. In fact, far more than the porcelain-skinned Browning with a receiver in her ear in the foreground, it was the contemporary, glass-dominated structure splayed across the image’s background which so arrested my gaze. This building was well-known to me.1

he two films in question— Sleeping Beauty by Julia Leigh and Hail by Amiel Courtin-Wilson—are both Australian productions, they were both directed by filmmakers making their feature fiction debuts, and they both scored high-profile appearances on the international film festival circuit (screening at Cannes and Venice respectively). Beyond this, however, they have nothing in common; an aesthetic chasm separates the two works. To illustrate this difference, I have selected a single screenshot from each film, and it will be my claim that these two images not only indicate two different paths forward for Australian film, but that they also represent two

1 How uncanny is that frisson of delight we experience when—during even the most uninspiring, mundane of films—we recognise streets, edifices or landscapes with which we are familiar in real-life. Suddenly, a shot which up to then had been considered in an abstract, detached fashion, conceived of as no more than a geometry of spatial frames through which the film’s characters weave their bodies, is suffused with a remarkable density. What were once no more than hollowed-out façades before the camera instantly become

Figure 1 The idea of a 20-year-old phoning someone from a booth is at least a little quaint. The building we see is, in fact, the newly-constructed Law Building on the University of Sydneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main campus. The pedestrianised boulevard before it is Eastern Avenue, the main thoroughfare for students making their way from one part of campus to another. Over the course of eight years, on and off, I studied at this institution, completing both an undergraduate and a graduate degree within its environs. This boulevard is thus thoroughly, even excessively, imprinted on my mind. My feet have trod every square metre of its expanse on

innumerable occasions, and I was able to witness its marked transformation over the last decade into the area which Leigh chose to film. That she should shoot here is not in the least surprising: Lucy is signalled in the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s script as a university student living in Sydney. Everything about the resulting image, however, struck me as repugnant, odious and detestable. As I attempted to discern the source of my visceral aversion to this shot, I focused more and more on the disconcerting presence of the telephone booth. On every level conceivable, this booth did not belong within the frame. For a start, I knew that, in reality, no such phone booth existed in this location. Public phones are sprinkled around campus, but at this particular site they are categorically absent. For the

three-dimensional, they acquire depth and weight in our minds; to them are appended unique histories, associations with various moments in our lives are forged which irrepressibly wash over us when we are confronted with their image on the screen. They have, in a word, an aura.

needs of the film, then, a booth was purposefully installed, with a temporary shelf-life no longer than the few hours needed for the requisite takes to be shot, before it would be dismantled, leaving the area behind without a trace. Why should this bother me, when nothing could be more commonly practised in the cinema? Ever since Méliès, filmmakers have thought nothing of altering their surrounding reality in order to suit the visual needs of the desired image. Surely Julia Leigh is not committing a cardinal sin in following this tradition, and in a much less flagrant manner than many of her confrères? Maybe I am just over-reacting, as a result of my acute prior knowledge of the filming location. Maybe. But let’s take a closer look at the phone booth itself. With its grey, metallic frame, free of any adornment save a green sign with the word “phone” neutrally placed on its top, this booth bears no resemblance to any public telephone that has ever been in use in the city of Sydney. To all those alerted, like me, to the irreality of a phone booth standing in the given locale, is thus added the entire population of Australia’s largest city, aware that what they are watching bears no relationship to their own experience of making calls from public telephones, and is instead a generic prop, whose only cousins are to be found on the backlots of film studios. But on an even more fundamental level,

Leigh evinces contempt for any notion of a connection to a world existing independently of her film. The phone booth’s position is, simply put, preposterous. Rather than on a corner, or to one side of the thoroughfare, it is inserted in the middle of the boulevard, a glaring obstacle to the throngs of pedestrians who will cross its path over the course of a day. No phone booth would ever be situated where Leigh has placed it for the purposes of her film, and the attentive spectator should consider the very idea of one existing there as an insult to their intelligence. Of course, Leigh and her supporters—which, as we all know, number Jane Campion among them—will counter that this is all by design, that she is deliberately striving to concoct a sense of artificiality and detachment, even estrangement, as befits the story she is purveying. Reports indeed surfaced of Leigh’s painstaking control over every aspect of the filmmaking process, tyrannically preventing the slightest intrusion of anything which did not conform to her express aesthetic intentions. In some quarters, such meticulous craftsmanship would be lauded. For me, however, Leigh’s approach denudes her images of anything to do with the cinematic, leaving nothing behind but a sterile, aseptic husk of a film. Call this hidebound Bazinism if you will, but inherent to the cinema is a profound, direct relationship with the chaos and

volatility of the world as it exists. The mark of the great, truly cinematic auteurs—whether shooting on location or in a studio, it matters not—is not to seek an untrammelled mastery over material reality, but to struggle with it, and to draw profit from this struggle, to allow their films to benefit from the unpredictable incident, the chance occurrence, the random event. The unconscious twitch of an actor’s brow, the unanticipated glint of light reflecting from an onscreen prop, or the spontaneous grace of a leaf blowing across the frame: these moments form the magic of the cinema. And it is this which is so unmistakably absent from Leigh’s film. The novelistcum-filmmaker has, in truth, still not made the transition to the cinema; with Sleeping Beauty, she is still creating literature. As a counterpoint to this, I will offer my second image, from near the end of Hail (Figure 2). In spite of lasting barely a couple of seconds, this shot was one of the

major talking points of the film during its run through the festival circuit over the past twelve months. A horse carcass hurtles towards the ground, with the film camera spiralling in tandem with it, able to imprint a few metres of precious Super-16 film with images of the remarkable event. Ina Q&A session following the film’s screening at Rotterdam, Courtin-Wilson revealed the extraordinary measures undertaken to capture the shot. More than 20% of the film’s half-million dollar budget went towards the necessarily clandestine enterprise, and options were explored in numerous countries across several continents. Stymied, however, by the fact that throwing a dead horse out of an aeroplane is illegal just about anywhere, the crew eventually found a solution close to home, in regional Australia. A shady pilot was hired to deposit the corpse (according to the filmmaker, he was initially under the impression the horse would be alive, and even then

Figure 2 All, in this shot, was contingency. The take could not be repeated.

was OK with the plan!), a patch of land was cleared to take the fall, and a camera was loaded and strapped to a skydiving cameraman to capture the event. Granted, the scene’s filming raises all sorts of ethical questions, but the result is one of the most astonishing moments of cinema I have seen in the last few years. Upon encountering the shot at the Rotterdam film festival, I was so moved by the image as to declare that I would willingly trade it for everything else made by every other Australian filmmaker working today.2 I still stand by this claim. We can only marvel at the poetic sensibility which drove CourtinWilson to devise such a composition, used to symbolise, if I can permit myself a reductive interpretation of such an enigmatic motif, the precipitous downfall of Danny, the film’s protagonist. But more than this, we can only be awestruck at the miracle before our eyes. All, in this shot, was contingency: a dead horse was flung out of a plane several thousand metres above the earth, a camera plunged after it; everything else was out of the director’s hands. The take could not be repeated. Only fate would decide what kind of images it would yield. Finally, the most miraculous aspect of this shot was utterly

unforeseen: the splattering of a couple of drops of brown liquid on the screen. This is, CourtinWilson assured me in a private conversation, the horse’s own blood, seeping out of its corpse as it reached terminal velocity, speckles of which, by freak chance, landed on the camera lens itself. I could not help but recall a similar image in Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God, when a raft on which the soldiers travel is so tossed about by the tumultuous Amazon that, here too, the camera lens is splashed with its waves. The affinity is not, I would hazard, an arbitrary one, for what better way is there to define CourtinWilson’s philosophy towards filmmaking than with the Herzogian notion of “ecstatic truth,” which, in his famous “Minnesota declaration” the German filmmaker defined claimed was a “deeper stratum of truth” than the “merely superficial truth” of accountants, and, which, mysterious and elusive, can be reached “only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation.”3 The boundary between screen and pro-filmic reality, usually so ironclad, is here blurred, permeated, transgressed. It is almost as if the horse’s flesh itself had been stamped onto the celluloid. Regardless of how carefully composed and staged it is, Leigh’s image is lifeless,

See Daniel Fairfax, "The Cinema Leads Me There," Senses of Cinema, Issue 62, 2012.

Werner Herzog, "Minnesota Declaration," 1999.

empty, the antithesis of the cinema. The almost-imperceptible horse blood in CourtinWilson’s image, on the other hand, is cinema.

the world. Slavoj Žižek has claimed that cinema can imagine the end of the world, but not the end of capitalism. It is possible to invert his statement in regards to The Turin Horse. It is not Tarr or codirector Ágnes Hranitzky who lack the imagination to see beyond contemporary systems of oppression, but rather it is the subjects of their film whose inability or refusal (it’s uncertain which) to react to their situation is the source of the film’s tragedy and farce. The daily routines of a cabdriver and his daughter (who works as a domestic slave to this brutish patriarch) are mulled over by the camera, tracking and observing how their existence and struggle are indistinguishable. And no matter what happens to them, they continue on. It is only the horse that resists its situation by refusing to obey the commands of his master. Structurally it echoes the methodical repetition of Jeanne Dielman, but whereas Dielman steadily unravels because the world around her remains unchanging, the universe of The Turin Horse unravels around the cabdriver because he (the cabdriver) remains static. But this universe is not monochromatic; creeping around the periphery are various figures that find ways to resist (or at least react) to their environment, and in the process sabotage any one-note reading of the film as allegorical of the “human condition.” Immediately from the outset,

THE BEGINNING IS NIGH Review of “The Turin Horse” by Andrew Gilbert

éla Tarr is often dubbed a miserablist filmmaker, a status that denies both his absurdist humor and tenuous hope for humanity. Yet it remains understandable why Tarr is unable to escape his critical fate as the drab monotony of The Turin Horse borders on the absurd and whatever optimism is present is tucked into the margins of his compositions, obscured by the hopelessness of the everyday. Yet, while his worlds are static, change is possible even when all seems lost. The Turin Horse is a film about hope masquerading as a period piece about the end of

the film is framed by a curious detail that lives in every shot while remaining light-years away from anything we actually see onscreen. The narrator informs us, over total darkness, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s passionate defense of the titular horse and his subsequent decent into madness. A masterstroke, Tarr thus impregnates every stark image with the awareness of civilization: of the city Turin, of philosophy, of lived realities other than dreary peasant exploitation. Tarr thus creates a powerful contradiction that we must trouble through; an emotional response to cruelty and the daily realities that gave rise to such cruelty. It isn’t enough to take sides—to understand the cabdriver’s violence or to claim Nietzsche’s moral high ground— because the realities of their divergent experiences remain unchallenged. But the film itself focuses on this lower class universe, which is further expanded by the intrusion of others into the cabdriver’s home. In one section, a band of gypsies arrives to drink from the cabdriver’s well, to which he responds by banishing them. Strangely aware of the changing climate—the possible end of times—the gypsies maintain a certain joie de vivre even in the face of poverty and bigotry. While these travelers most likely see their share of suffering, they carry with them a compassion for their company, for books and culture, and, most noticeably, a

care for their workhorse, which is immaculate compared to the titular animal that the cabdriver keeps locked in total darkness when not working (a darkness that echoes the fate of our stubborn subjects). These marginal figures help to emphasize Tarr’s preoccupation with multiple intersecting systems of oppression. In this way, the film functions as a framework where various forms of domination come into contact — sometimes contradicting, but never overshadowing the others. In The Turin Horse it isn’t enough to haul out the old Marxist slogans and be done with it. While capitalist class domination underlies much of the film, the realities of sexism, racism and the exploitation of nature are always onscreen to be observed. While these political complexities have long been of interest to Tarr, it is here with his late style, together with the efforts of cameraman Fred Kelemen, that he gives them expression through the least amount of elements. From the opening shot we bare witness as a man driving a horsedrawn cab is transformed into a whirlwind of power dynamics, mapping out the social terrain that will be explored for the remaining duration of the work, all through the ethereal movements of Kelemen’s camera and bolstered by the hypnotic rhythms of Mihály Víg’s score, the combination of which gives the film the disorienting sensation of being at once symbolic and literal.

Tarr achieves a vision, comparable to Žižek’s, that frames capitalist domination as a global force that appears universal through the particularity of its situation. While Tarr’s film is a tale of exploitation that appears universal, it is strangely distant in that we can learn from and be moved by it, but it is not entirely our story. What’s striking is that Tarr deliberately excludes any institutions that keep these systems in place—no police, no politicians, no pressures from a community of rubberneckers— the world of The Turin Horse is running on fumes, existing by rote. Yet we must be careful in our judgment of these characters: Tarr is not making a case that revolution is easy or that the cabdriver can just pick himself up by his bootstraps or that his daughter could simply shrug off patriarchal constraints. Regardless, the question emerges: what are they waiting for? What, exactly, is holding them (or us) back? It becomes a Sisyphean effort to avoid change. Žižek, turning to Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, wrote, “one does not wait for the ‘ripe’ objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become ‘ripe’ for revolution through the political struggle itself.”4 As darkness envelops our unwitting subjects we realize that it may be too late for them, but not for

everyone in the universe of The Turin Horse, and maybe not for its audience. CAPTURING OPTIMISM IN THE WORLD ON FILM Review of “Le Havre” by Elliott Logan

onsidering one of the final moments of Le Havre opens up a view to the movie’s significant handling of optimism. The ageing shoeshine Marcel—whose unlawful refuge of African asylum seeker Idrissa has driven the movie’s plot—briefly pauses with his wife, Arletty, on their way home from hospital, where Arletty has miraculously recovered from what was presumed to be a terminal medical condition. Standing in the decrepit alleyway near their modest home, the couple, with their faces glowing in the emerging sunlight, look up and

Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2010.

together admire the blooming flowers of a tree. This sight had previously gone unnoticed by both Marcel and the camera on his earlier, heavier walk to the hospital, where he (and we) expected to find Arletty’s dead body. In the context of a miraculous renewal of human life and its possibilities, the blooming of these flowers, in concert with the sun’s emergence from behind a cloud, finds sympathy with the changed moods of Marcel and Arletty. We are thus given good reason to treat this orchestration of coincidence as an expressive design: a stylistic effect intended to convey the characters’ newly brightened states of feeling. To treat this moment as purely expressive, however, would be to misunderstand Le Havre’s difficult handling of optimism, which is so important to the movie’s meaning. To treat this event in the film’s world as only an expressive effect of the film—that is, an event designed to convey and make easily graspable the psychological dispositions of its characters—risks missing a less obvious, but more meaningful aspect of the moment: how the film’s view of the flower’s bloom could be understood as a material effect of the characters’ discovery, at this moment, of a not easily available optimistic perspective on their world. This understanding is possible if we see the moment in relation to similar instances in the movie that stage a liberating communion between people. These con-

nections give rise to a sense of optimism that is discovered in and transforms the oppressive situations that so often, in film and in the world, encourage those distrusts and doubts that threaten to drive people apart. One of the most compelling of these scenes unfolds when the police inspector Monet, who is relentlessly pursuing Idrissa and Marcel, walks into the bar Marcel frequents as a lovingly tolerated charity case. Embodying the state’s power with his black trench coat and gloves and his unmoving face, he is immediately placed apart from the small community of friends—the grocer, the baker, and the bartender, Claire—that coheres around Marcel’s illegal care of Idrissa. Upon Monet’s entrance, Claire and her customers turn their attention from each other to his dark intrusion. Monet’s presence has the same effect upon the room’s small space as it does in the world outside its walls: the welcoming air of Claire’s bar is choked and stopped off. A cut moves our attention from Monet’s imposition at the doorway to Claire’s reaction behind the bar. We see her take a stand: assuming an aggressive stillness, she withdraws from Monet her customary hospitality. Our faith in Claire’s righteously courageous opposition to the policeman reaches its peak when she breaks the brittle silence brought over the room: “Leave,” she says. But, now, the scene turns. The cut

back to the doorway reveals Claire’s few customers slink out the door as the police officer steps into the room, where he removes his black gloves and relaxes into warm conversation with Claire. Their conversation continually re-affirms their capacity to be kind to each other, despite the potential of their shared past—Monet imprisoned Claire’s husband—to foster mutual animosity. Rather than reinforcing our prejudice of Monet, Claire’s gesture transforms the bar into a space of even more intimate familiarity, one that allows Monet to disclose those aspects of his self that had so far been disguised. Its achievement is to show how Claire’s faith in Monet’s better possibilities as a human being is crucial to his ability to realise them before both her and us in this moment. Claire’s public gesture that realises her optimistic way of seeing people creates a space for new possibilities of who Monet can be to her, and who she can be to Monet. The moment transforms our sense of what it is possible for these characters to be within their social roles. In another moment, Marcel and a relative of Idrissa’s imprisoned in a detention centre together perform a gesture that temporarily disrupts the oppressive dynamic within the detention centre’s walls. Marcel gains access to this man by claiming to be his brother, which in this context of bureaucratic separation asks us to consider

how we measure our relations. They meet in a featureless room with no view to an outside world for the first and last time before the held man will be deported. Each stranger uses his final moment with the other to reach across the grey table that separates them and clasp the other’s hand. The transmission of their connection to each other through the contact between their skins is an event that denies the surrounding structure of power its capacity to impose a difference and distance between them that threatens their shared dignity. Each man’s realisation of his hope and belief—of his optimism— creates an event visible in the world to be captured by the camera. In these brief moments of fleeting community, Le Havre does not use the camera’s view to transform the world into an optimistic vision. It does not conjure blooming flowers and emerging sunlight to express lightened states of private feeling, but discovers their existence by cleaving to its characters’ changed modes of attention. It captures on film how optimism and faith, realised through public action in the difficult human struggle against despair and disbelief, create and keep in sight visions of a better world.

ACHING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD Review of “Melancholia” by Rebecca Harkins-Cross

her psyche yearns for. “Life on Earth is evil,” spits the newlywed Justine (Kirsten Dunst) as doomsday draws near. “Nobody will miss it.” Justine does not fit the mould of von Trier’s martyred heroines, despite most of the film being dedicated to her suffering. His earlier films centred around female protagonists brutalised by a callous and mercenary world, all “idealists” whom the director claims to identify with5: the childlike Bess of Breaking the Waves who, after her husband’s life-threatening accident, goes to masochistic extremes to assuage her guilt and make him better; immigrant worker Selma in Dancer in the Dark, chewed up and spat out by the factory she slaves in and betrayed by the one friend she shares her secrets with; perhaps most wretched is Grace in Dogville, her vulnerability exploited by a whole village, who is eventually fettered to fulfil the townsfolk’s every desire in exchange for their “hospitality.” Indeed, the doctor’s diagnosis at Bess’ inquest could well apply to any of von Trier’s leading ladies: “the deceased was suffering from being good.” In Melancholia, however, Justine’s torture comes from the inside. She typifies the Freudian melancholic, a pathological patient whose obsessive mourn-

ead birds rain from the sky. A flaxen-haired bride flees through the woods, weighed down by her ragged gown and spools of grey yarn that ensnare her limbs. A mother holds her son to her breast, sinking into a golf green that dissolves beneath her feet. A lone horse falls. Locusts fly. The cosmic collision draws closer, and the wistful refrain of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” plays on. One of the most striking sequences in recent cinema, this series of slow-motion tableaux serves as the overture to Melancholia, the latest offering from Denmark’s enfant terrible Lars von Trier. This apocalyptic sequence, so rich in biblical fury, reveals the course of the proceeding narrative: the end of the world is presented as a fait accompli, albeit a sublime one. In von Trier’s universe, the melancholic is a soothsayer who is rewarded with the obliteration

5 Caroline Bainbridge, The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

ing for a lost object is internalised as a loss within the self. For Freud, the condition is characterized by

is overshadowed by the film’s portentous opening. The film begins as a comedy of manners, the young couple arriving hours late to their reception after the limousine gets stuck on a tight bend. But as the fog of Justine’s depression descends over the course of the evening, her condition undermines the illusion of matrimonial bliss and turns the capitalistic excesses of the wedding into farce. The lavish reception takes place at Justine’s sister Claire’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) country mansion, which her “filthy rich” husband John (Keifer Sutherland) insistently reminds everyone he paid for. Despite this milieu’s grandiose interiors and palatial grounds, however, it increasingly becomes a site of claustrophobia for the depressed bride. She spends most of her wedding night trying to escape—bathing, sleeping, fleeing in a golf buggy, later mounting a teenage boy in the bunkers and telling her boss exactly how loathsome she thinks he is—but she is forever being dragged back by one of the wellmeaning revellers. Her condition allows her to see the ceremony as the charade it truly is. When Michael finally leaves, she is not despondent but resigned: “What did you expect?” Much like Justine’s depression, the approach of the rogue planet Melancholia (which the second half of the film is dedicated to) serves to disrupt the bourgeois illusion of the characters’ existence. Claire invites the

profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance and a reduction in the sense of self, expressed in self-recrimination and selfdirected insults, intensifying into the delusory expectation of punishment.6

Unlike the “normal” process of mourning, what exactly the melancholic has lost is opaque. The melancholic narcissistically identifies their ego with the lost object, “deriving a sadistic satisfaction from that suffering.” But in Freud’s conception, this condition is not all anguish - the melancholic is also granted a clarity that allows them to “grasp … the truth more keenly than others who are not melancholic.” Indeed, Justine is endowed with the sagacity that von Trier’s guileless women have lacked, seeing the world for the merciless cesspit that, in von Trier’s universe, it always turns out to be. Like the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde, whose dirge hangs like a shroud over Melancholia, Justine and Michael’s (Alexander Skarsgård) wedding

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917], On Murder, Mourning, and Melancholia. London: Penguin, 2005.

crumpled Justine to stay with her family, but any attempts to revive her sister are in vain. When Claire tries to rouse Justine with her favourite meal, meatloaf, Justine can only sob, “it tastes like ash,” and retire again. Von Trier’s melancholic, like Freud’s, has foresight of the imminent fire and brimstone. “I know things,” she tells the terrified Claire. “Life is only on earth, and not for long … There’s no point grieving.” Melancholia is set in a recognisable America, but like all von Trier’s films, it is an America of the director’s imagining. The depression-era Dogville was merely an outline chalked out on a stage, whose reality the audience had to piece together from images of history and pop culture; the unnamed backwater of Dancer in the Dark was the make-believe of musical fan Selma, where townsfolk would break into song and dance in even the most miserable of circumstances; even the woodlands of Antichrist were straight out of the horror tradition, taking place in an isolated cabin where the ravages of nature could play out to their most brutal extreme. In Melancholia, the dream of America is that of capitalism, which is rendered meaningless in the face of Melancholia’s impending annihilation. Justine’s condition allows her see through this fantasy and take pleasure in its dissolution: America is evil and its day of judgement nigh.

As the planet draws nearer to Earth, Justine gains strength while everyone else falls apart — Claire buys suicide pills, John is in denial and their young son Leo (Cameron Spurr) is bewildered, while “Auntie Steelbreaker” is comforted by the chaos. Claire spies her moonbathing in the impending planet’s glow, naked and stroking her breasts, rapturous in the face of sure death. For this destruction is the melancholic’s wish fulfilment writ large — a literalisation of the selfrecrimination that she redirects against the world and the punishment she longs for. Yet Justine is not entirely nihilistic. While she delights in undoing Claire’s illusions, Justine indulges her nephew’s fantasies of building a magic cave that will protect them. In Justine’s conception, it is only the Earth’s destruction that will offer Leo redemption. After all that suffering, obliteration brings with it ecstatic relief. As Melancholia hurtles forward to consume them all, Justine, for once, is calm and ready. Only Lars von Trier could make the end of the world look this serene. When the apocalypse comes, he’ll be smiling.

A NEW VERSION OF LIFE IS AVAILABLE. DO YOU WANT TO UPDATE NOW? Review of “Chronicle” by James R. Douglas

consumerism is demarcated by class. Upgrades are a decadent conflation of utility and luxury, and they exist first and foremost for those with the means to make aesthetic choices about how their lives are lived, meaning the wealthy. The relationship of the classes to their technology is a division between functionality and aestheticisation; the unupgraded tech of the poor is merely functional, a means to life itself, while the upgraded tech of the bourgeois is a means to aesthetic pleasure. In Josh Trank’s Chronicle this consumerist logic is articulated through the current blockbuster trope du jour, the superhero origin story. Three high school students discover a myste— rious glowing crystalline object, and subsequently develop telekinetic abilities — the ability to move objects with their minds and, eventually, cause themselves to lift off into flight. Sophomoric fun ensues. But one of the trio, Andrew—the poor one—is mentally destabilised by his new powers. Violence erupts, and he must be put down. The film itself belongs to that faddish new class of “upgraded” Hollywood aesthetics, the found footage film. This is the style in which the narrative is conveyed through intra-diegetic camerawork; camcorders, CCTV, mobile phones existing within the scene. In this case Andrew is both our antihero and our camera man, sending various DVs and mobile devices floating around himself in

ontemporary consumerism is marked by planned obsolescence. Our devices, our phones, our computers, our social medias, go through an endless and artificial progression of updates. Software becomes outdated. Hardware becomes outmoded. Upgrades are required in order to stay current. The logic of the upgrade is deeply embedded in our capitalism. It’s the reason why your iPhone probably won’t last more than three years, and thus is the reason why the gross revenue of Apple as of January this year is more than the GDP of 105 countries, including Slovenia.7 But this logic is fundamentally exclusionary. Upgrades are for those with the means to procure them. And so the realm of

Scott Austin, ‘Apple by the Numbers,’ Digits, 2012.

telekinetic orbits. In Chronicle’s consumerist logic, Andrew’s burgeoning supervillainy is implicitly tied to his poverty. His difficult socioeconomic circumstances, and his social neuroses derived thereof, resign him to existing outside the bourgeois cycle of planned obsolescence and upgrade: he cannot afford our metaphorical iPhone 4S. Given access to the superpowers, the “upgrade,” that are the commonwealth of his middle class brethren, he loses himself in class dysmorphia, and can only destroy himself and others. Chronicle tracks Andrew’s disastrous journey up the social ladder through the various recording devices he uses to document his life and through the varying levels of social capital encoded within these. Act One is told largely through a primitive old video camera purchased by Andrew. His father is an injured, alcoholic exfireman on a disability pension; his mother is chronically ill, and her medicine is a drain on their slim financial resources. The camera, when discovered by the father, is viewed as a financial extravagance, requiring violent retribution. This violence, in fact, is the impetus for Andrew’s self-documentation, by recording his father’s alcoholic rages, he hopes to secure himself against them. This is the relationship of the poor to technology: one of survival. Act Two is filmed through a

brand new and superior camera, gifted to Andrew by his cousin Matt (who is also a recipient of superpowers). This is the golden time. Andrew exults in his new powers, and in the companionship they afford him with his Matt, and the third of the trio, Steve. His “upgrade” has turned him into a de facto bourgeois. His self-documentation is no longer only for survival but for fun, and the film turns to the aesthetic joys of their superpowers: the flying; the pranks; the newfound strength; the social adoration they accrue. But Andrew is out of his depth. Even the new camera is literally beyond his financial means. The social neuroses encoded into him by his poverty only cause his destabilisation in this bourgeois environment. After securing his new social capital through a telekenesis-assisted magic show, he is invited to a high school party at a classmate’s mansion, where he is the toast of his peers and the sexual target of a cute girl. This is the narrative peak of the American teen movie: nerd/freak becomes popular, loses V-Plates. But Andrew blows it. He gets drunk and spews all over the girl, humiliating himself. In the emotional stress that follows, Andrew accidentally causes the death of Steve, who had worked the hardest to socially advance him. Excluded again from the bourgeois social realm, Andrew develops a troubled understanding of his place in the class

hierarchy. He comes to believe he is an “apex predator” with a natural right of dominance over the rest of society. With his mother’s health and finances deteriorating, Andrew takes to robbery to acquire funds for her medicine. An gas station heist goes wrong and he is disfigured and burnt in an explosion. Informed in the hospital that his mother has died, Andrew commences a superpowered rampage through Seattle’s business district, and is stopped only by the lethal intervention of his privileged cousin Matt, who symbolically takes up the mantle of bourgeois protector and subdues the deranged class interloper. His second camera having been destroyed in the gas station explosion, Andrew obtains the means to film his rampage by theft, telekinetically wrenching mobile devices, tablets and smartphones out of the hands of outraged bystanders. This is the climax of his class dysmorphia; believing he can obviate his own disadvantages and secure advancement up the social ladder by force. Chronicle ceases to offer narrative motivation for Andrew filming himself. His selfdocumentation no longer proceeds according to any logic, of survival or aestheticization or otherwise, but is an insane perpetuation of a behavioural pattern he is no longer able to break. The story of the poor man who, through luck or trickery,

essays advancement into the bourgeois realm only to find his path blocked, is a familiar one (from Titanic at least, one would think). If the bourgeois are good at anything, it is identifying and excluding the Other. Chronicle’s novelty is in mating that story to the meritocratic superhero narrative. Spiderman and Superman, orphans and outcasts both, are the prototypical bootstrappers, overcoming their tragic origins to become beloved heroes. Why does Andrew fail? Why does Chronicle want him to fail? In Chronicle’s logic, superpowers are the natural right, by wealth and privilege, of the bourgeois, and are explicitly beyond the means, material and psychological, of the poor. Upgrades are for the upper class. Powers are for the privileged. Although it is clear-eyed about the cycle of poverty and the difficulties of surmounting class barriers, by mating this “realism” to the emotional force of the superhero myth, it both exposes and perpetuates our class divisions. Chronicle’s articulation of our capitalist logic is a double-edged sword.