SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 6 | REPETITION by Screen Machine

MARCH 2014

ISSUE 6

“REPETITION”

MAR 2014

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

IN MEMORY OF PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN Screen Machine writers pay tribute to the actor’s artistry on p.5

ESSAYS REPETITION AS PEJORATIVE by Andrew Gilbert Despite its negative connotations, many filmmakers use repetition to represent character stasis, p.13

MOMENTARY REPETITION: APPROACHING THE CINEMATOGRAPH by Anders Furze What GIFs can tell us about cinema and how they can be used in film criticism. p.20

REVIEWS Melanie Ashe on INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS on p.27 Aaron Cutler on HARD TO BE A GOD on p.29

CONTRIBUTORS Melanie Ashe completed her Honours in Film and Television at Monash University in 2012. Her writing has appeared in Peephole Journal and Australian Film Blog. Aaron Cutler lives in São Paulo with his wife and collaborator, the artist Mariana Shellard. He keeps a film criticism site, The Moviegoer, at aaroncutler.tumblr.com. Anders Furze is a graduate student in The University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism. You can find him on Twitter at @AndersFurze. Andrew Gilbert is working on his PhD at the University of Kansas, where he studies online film cultures and cinephilia. His writing has also appeared in film and feminism journal cléo. He blogs at kinodrome.tumblr.com. Rebecca Harkins-Cross is the film editor for The Big Issue and a theatre critic for The Age. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals across Australia, and has twice been awarded by the Australian Film Critics Association. Find her online at rebeccaharkinscross.com. Elliott Logan (reviews editor) is a PhD student at the University of Queensland. Brad Nguyen (editor and illustrator) is an Honours student at Monash University. His writing has appeared in Senses of Cinema, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Overland, and he blogs at inalldirections.tumblr.com. Elizabeth J. Stigler is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept. at the University of Kansas. Her dissertation explores the production, consumption, and national significance of American comfort food. Huw Walmsley-Evans (essays editor) is a Brisbane-based film critic and academic and holds a doctorate in film, media, and cultural studies from the University of Queensland. His research examines film criticism as a cultural institution. He can be found at @hWalmsleyEvans. This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

FROM THE EDITOR

his sixth edition of Screen Machine is on the theme of “repetition.” At its most fundamental level, film is repetition. The very apparatus of the cinema is predicated on repetition. Film, and subsequent technologies, work by the fast repetition of identically sized frames, with our eyes scanning for the variations. The illusion of motion in “motion pictures” works through this repetition. Moreover, at the level of appreciation and meaning,

repetition is something we are trained to be attuned to as critics. Whatever a film has to say, repetition is one of the primary methods by which it can be said and understood. Within a work, repetition, along with the presence or absence of variation, is one of the first things we look for when attempting to make sense of filmmakers’ choices. Beyond the boundaries of the individual film, we compare films to one another and draw conclusions from the repetitions we discover. Repetitions in theme

! or style between the discrete films of the one filmmaker are perceived as the signature of authorship, and become attributable as that filmmaker’s “concerns.” Repetitions of style between the films of two different filmmakers, depending on the esteem we hold for each party, might be chalked up to either homage or theft, or the unfolding terms of an ongoing conversation. We call enduring, ongoing repetitions of narrative and iconography between films “genres.” When we speak of television series as “serial” or “episodic” we are drawing distinctions between different opportunities for repetition and variation, and for our understanding and judgement of them in a wider context. When a show is aired again after its initial showing, we literally call it a “repeat.” Films and TV shows are often repetitions of an existing work through a different medium, sometimes through the same medium. We often find this kind of repetition, “the remake,” dubious, or, perhaps less often, exalt what we consider a brilliant variation.

its repetition becomes a form of mythmaking. A particular example comes to mind: George Stevens’s Shane (1953). In Shane Alan Ladd’s titular character is a weary gunslinger who rides in to an Arcadian valley and settles down to honest farmwork and domestic bliss with a homesteading family. Or at least he would were the valley not threated by an ambitious cattle rancher who wants to drive the homesteaders off their land and monopolise it. “Shane” is the name on everyone’s lips: not least those of the husband, wife, and boy that constitute the family that has adopted Shane, and who have both collectively and individually fallen in love with him. Shane represents an entire epoch of the American experience: the Wild West, and the individualistic, violent masculinity this entails. When “Shane” is uttered, it is a signifier of not only Shane the man, but of this way of being in the world that he embodies, and that is suddenly outmoded as the West is settled and “civilised”. Shane is desperate to renounce his old ways and live in this new West, but circumstances require Shane to take up arms once again. Ultimately Shane sacrifices his chance to live in this world so that others may. Shane is such a potent symbol, leaden with further significance with every utterance of his name. When the boy, Joey, calls to Shane as he rides away, having done what he must, never to

f all these ways in which repetition can be considered in relation to screen media, my thoughts personally turn to a particular kind of usage in film, producing a particular kind of cinephilic reverie. I think of those instances where a certain phrase, motif, or object is so central to a film that

! return, it is his and our understanding that as magnificent and seductive as Shane is, his way can no longer be ours. It’s a message that would have been crystal clear to an audience of returned servicemen transitioning from the armed upheaval of the Roosevelt/Truman war years to the civil domestication of the Eisenhower years, the suburbs acting as the new frontier for homesteading. But this is a fairly cerebral, socio-cultural explanation of Shane, and the film is so powerful because it doesn’t explicate these themes in the matter of fact way I have. Everything it needs to say is said through Shane, and more specifically, said through “Shane”1; the loaded ways in which this signifier is uttered by a women, by honest white-hatted farming men and black-hatted anti-competitive, anti-social

varmints, and most importantly by a boy who wants the latter but needs the former: “Shane! Shane! Come back!... Bye Shane!” In this issue Anders Furze and Andrew Gilbert offer their takes on this theme of repetition. Anders writes on the cinemagraph, a kind of GIF that sees a mostly still image partially animated with minor, repeated movement. They are a means of highlighting and endlessly extending visual moments— which are minor in scale but rich in meaning—in existing films. Andrew, meanwhile, explores what it means when we discuss the repetitiveness of a film in a critical context, noting that when it comes to mainstream release films such as Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the term is almost always used pejoratively. Also in the issue we have reviews of recent films Hard to be a God and Inside Llewyn Davis, written by Aaron Cutler and Melanie Ashe respectively. Finally, Screen Machine writers were asked to contribute their reminiscences of the screen performances of Philip Seymour Hoffman for a special tribute feature. While it is endlessly sad that Hoffman will not make further contributions to the screen, here we find solace and meaning in collective repetition, through watching and through writing, of his great work.

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Someone has distilled every utterance of “Shane” in Shane in to one video. This gives you some sense of the centrality of “Shane” to Shane, and of the range of intonations with which “Shane” is spoken. The video’s comments plays to the tendency of some to regard the repetitions of “Shane” as comical, and indeed this effect is heightened with the various “Shanes” decontextualized as they are here. Regarding the use of “Shane” in Shane as comical is a further example of what Andrew Gilbert identifies in his essay as the tendency to take repetitiveness in a mass-market film to be erroneous, rather than proceeding on the basis that the text knows what it’s doing.

IN MEMORY OF PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN Screen Machine writers pay tribute to the late actor’s artistry.

master’s voice and could not see him, the isolated voice “acquired authority and surplus meaning by virtue of the fact that its source was concealed; it seemed to become omnipresent and omnipotent.” But revealing the source would run the risk of dissipating that authority, much like how the wizard of Oz is revealed to be merely a poor old huckster. Of the many weapons in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting arsenal, his voice acquired a special significance. The very funny parody trailer for Spike Jonze’s Her in which Scarlett Johansson’s dialogue is replaced with Hoffman’s voice using lines of dialogue from several of his

THE MASTER (2012)

laden Dolar’s book A Voice and Nothing More recounts how the philosopher Pythagorus insisted on teaching his disciples from behind a curtain for the first five years of their education. Because the pupils only had access to their

films is a kind of odd tribute to this fact. But what made Hoffman a real genius as a performer was not that he had a commanding voice but how he played the authority of the voice against the frailty of the human body. Hoffman was given the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this dialectic in The Master in which he played a man desiring to be worshipped as a religious leader, a man who knows that achieving this goal requires tapping into the seductive power of the voice. Like Pythagorus, Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is often present in the film as only a voice. We hear the controlled meter of Dodd on some lecture tapes that Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell listens to (“Man… is not… an animal.”). We hear him as a voice at the other end of a phone-call in a dream sequence late in the movie. And much of the strange power of the one-on-one scenes between Dodd and Freddie—for example, the processing scene—is owed to the fact that Dodd’s dialogue often comes from off-camera while we almost always see Freddie saying his dialogue. (It’s also significant that the film plays Dodd against a man that speaks in an unintelligible mumble.) The heartache of this performance comes when we see Dodd, those moments when Hoffman shows him losing control of his voice, when the voice can no longer cover for Dodd’s pathetic humanity. The iconic expletive uttered at the uptown party of one of Dodd’s

benefactors is a memorable moment not just because of the inspired pairing of the word “pig” with “fuck” but because just as we hear Dodd’s voice explode, we see his face implode from shame and the knowledge that his comfy relationship with New York’s elite has come to an end. Seeing in a single moment, in a few synchronised acting gestures, the gap between the image a man wishes to project of himself and his ability to live up to it epitomises the generosity of Hoffman’s acting method. Through his skill as a performer, he insisted that his characters were, to paraphrase Lancaster Dodd, above all only human. BN

JACK GOES BOATING (2010)

ixteen. Drama camp. Each of us was to improvise a performance wherein we express the “essence” of a notable figure. I choose Philip Seymour Hoffman. I mime his high school track-running career and his drug addiction, I pretend to be Philip Seymour Hoffman pretending to be Truman Capote. Nobody gets it. When I tell them

who I am, only the teacher understands. She looks at me with a smile, says, “Really interesting choice. You relate to the idea of a successful but … unconventional leading man, don’t you?” The implication of her rhetorical question—that I, too, am unconventional—stings me for days. Twenty-four. Melbourne. I watch Jack Goes Boating, which Hoffman both directed and appears in. It is very much in the well-made-American-indie tradition, and he gives the kind of performance the Americans like to refer to as “honest.” I realise when it finishes that the character of Jack is a doppelganger for the Philip Seymour Hoffman who my drama teacher and I created at sixteen. The pitifully unconventional leading man. It’s there in the way Jack repeats the word “no,” extending it into a “naaow” every single time. It’s apparent in the way Jack falters in the pool, very seriously, very tentatively swimming for the first time in his life. But most of all, the doppelganger lurks in his final gesture. The way Jack walks with the woman he has been wooing, turns and very briefly, for maybe three seconds, smiles unassumingly at the camera, before turning away. This final gesture is so slight and yet it is underscored by an abrupt cancellation of the diegetic sound. It’s Jack, it’s Hoffman, it’s me at sixteen — all of us knowing that we’ve earned the right to relax, smile even, if

only for an instant. AF

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 (2006)

hilip Seymour Hoffman will undoubtedly be remembered for his iconic roles in prestige Oscar films and auteurist masterpieces, but more numerous were the bit parts. In these roles Hoffman was frequently more memorable then the film itself. His performances in these minor films deserve our attention during this period of collective mourning, including his work in blockbuster franchise films. He appeared in only two, both times in a supporting role overshadowed by the films’ stars: Mission: Impossible III and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. His arch villain Owen Davian from the former is among his more peculiar roles, but it has all the markings of a classic Hoffman performance. Like Brando or Cagney it reveals Hoffman as a kinetic physical performer, even at his most restrained. His sociopathic brutality is conveyed not through his yelling and gesticulating (which he does marvelously), but in his silent

expressions; in his gaze. Hoffman brought depth and menace to a generic stock villain—the kind that yells, “kill them all”—transforming him into a figure whose motivations and moral complexity are as deep as his leading roles in Capote and The Master. This accomplishment is no small feat, as the script provides very little for us to understand of Davian, making the character truly an invention of Hoffman’s. We never quite figure out who this Davian is, but with the smallest gesture and mere utterance of a single word Hoffman conveys that he is dangerous — physically as well as ideologically. Cinematic history is filled with cheap bad guys and overdone performances, but in economical screen time, in a lacklustre installment of an uneven franchise, Hoffman delivers one of his most accomplished performances. AG

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008) “I don’t feel good.”

hese are the first words spoken by Caden Cotard, the neurotic theatre director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York, which fall on the indifferent ears of his soon-tovamoose wife. It’s a fitting introduction to a character that spends his entire life convinced he’s on the precipice of death. Caden may be a tortured genius, as lonely as they come, yet there’s a self-absorption to his sadness too. Hoffman’s preternatural ability to transform his entire physicality sees him hunched and shuffling, his skin translucent and flaky, always a little moist around the eyes. Where many of Hoffman’s other characters express their anger in eruptions of blind fury, Caden’s frustration is subsumed into bodily maladies: bleeding gums, epileptic fits, twitching limbs. He spends decades on the verge of tears; when Samantha Morton's Hazel takes him home, he can’t

fuck her but weeps on her shoulder instead. The burden of geniusdom is largely Caden’s affliction. When awarded a MacArthur Grant, it throws him into creative turmoil. No longer content with directing half-baked productions of Death of a Salesman, it’s his chance to say something deep and profound and real. He must sum up what it means to be human: "It's the beginning of thought. It's the truth not yet spoken. It's what a man feels like when he's been clocked in the jaw.” What Caden makes (or rather never makes) is a sprawling opus, forever in development. Over time he builds a full-scale model of New York City in a warehouse, an absurd play on the Shakespearean adage that “all the world’s a stage,” the cast spending their entire lives in rehearsal for Caden’s masterwork. In dizzying layers of meta-textuality, the director must hire actors to play him—and actors to play the actors who play him—as their work and lives get chaotically intertwined. On the one hand Cotard represents the impossibility of the artist’s quest to sum up existence in all its complexity. His tragedy is that of the obsessive who cannot be satisfied. But his art also inures him from life, placing a barrier between himself and his experiences by immediately transposing each lived moment into his play—to the point that when Tom Noonan's Sammy commits suicide, the long-time

actor who plays him, Caden only feels the irritation of finding a replacement. Time becomes distended, moments constantly repeating and looping to the point that it’s difficult to tell the real from its representation. Sammy’s replacement, played by Diane Weist, easily sums up her character’s motivation when Caden himself can’t see it: "Caden Cotard is a man already dead. He lives in a half world between stasis and anti stasis, time is concentrated and chronology confused.” Conjuring augurs of Hoffman’s passing, Caden is an artist obsessed by what trace he’ll leave behind. Instead he finds his life is an artwork always in progress, the perfect title for which remains elusive. RHC

DOUBT (2008)

“W

hat do you do when you’re not sure?” begins Philip Seymour Hoffman’s opening monologue as Father Flynn in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. Indeed, uncertainty and

suspicion are key components of this super charged drama, which pits tradition against modernity and evidence against emotion. Proving yet again to be a master of his craft, Hoffman’s Flynn was teeming with compassion and warmth; characteristics that made contending with his purported indecency even more difficult. More importantly than convincing audiences that Flynn was an innocent man, Hoffman succeeded in convincing us that we cannot be sure either way. Hoffman expertly balanced empathy for a man caught in the crosshairs of a witch-hunt with suspicion for a powerful, emotionally charged potential abuser. The beauty of this film is its ability to exploit the murky, grey area of unknowing; the space between what you know about someone and what you think you know. In the light of the recent tragedy many people have been quick to condemn Hoffman for his drug addiction, claiming that he made the choice to die. This form of black and white judgment is precisely what Hoffman’s Flynn cautioned against: “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” Just as viewers are never certain of Flynn’s guilt or innocence, so we will never be certain about the private struggles of Hoffman’s personal life. We are left in a perpetual state of doubt where we must draw our own conclusions and continue on our own paths. Father Flynn’s departing monologue

states, “There is a wind behind every one of us that takes us through our lives. We never see it. We can’t command it. We don’t even know its purpose.” And while we may never understand why Hoffman’s wind whisked him away so early, we will always have films, like Doubt, to remember him by. EJS

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

he also late-and-muchmissed Melbourne radio personality Richard Marsland once described Philip Seymour Hoffman as having appeared in “every second film of the 90s”. There are actors who worked more over the same period, but this sense of his ubiquity endures. He was everywhere that mattered, in every sense that a film can matter. From smash hit popcorn films like Twister and Scent of a Woman, to a straight literary adaptation like The Talented Mr Ripley, or the work of emerging auteurs reshaping the American “independent” cinema such as Todd Solondz and Paul Thomas Anderson, he was everywhere

you’d want to be. By the time they made The Big Lebowski in the late 90s the Coen Brothers were already masters of their craft, having made three certifiably great films since starting out in the mid 80s: Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and Fargo. For film artists so concerned with tone, with a form of characterisation that walks the line between the banal and the hysterical, with words and their potential meanings, Philip Seymour Hoffman was a shoe-in to contribute to one of their worlds. The wonder is that it only happened the once. After The Dude has his rug peed on in a case of mistaken identity, he is encouraged to seek compensation from the intended recipient of the befowlment: a Pasadena millionaire who shares his legal name. But before The Dude can put his case to the “big” Lebowski he is treated to an office tour from Brandt (Hoffman), Lebowski’s personal assistant. Brandt isn’t trying to intimidate The Dude here, he genuinely believes that his boss’s “various, civic… uhh” are impressive. He conducts—or attempts to conduct—this tour with gusto, adding appropriate verbal and gestural weight to his description of the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers (“inner-city children of promise”) and supplying extra information on the plaques and photographs so that their full significance can be understood. The Dude’s inappropriate (by

Brandt’s standards) reactions to, and interactions with, these objects sees Brandt more and more flustered. He reaches levels of social embarrassment hitherto only observed in the British. This reaches its crescendo in the next scene where the “big” Lebowski’s wife, the lascivious “Bunny”, offers to give The Dude head for money. Brandt’s attempt to move past this unsurpassable transgression with knowing laughter and the phrase “That’s marvellous” is one of the moments in a film that is a litany of equally surprising and quotable moments. Philip Seymour Hoffman acquits himself as well as anyone who appears in The Big Lebowski. This seems a backhanded compliment if one at all, but everyone in The Big Lebowski is as good as they’ve ever been, contributing to a perfectly realised film that works in absolutely every respect. Each scene, every interaction, works on its own dramatic terms, and as a contribution to a completely integrated whole. If you cared to make a film like that you wanted Philip Seymour Hoffman to be part of it. HWE HOFFMAN ON TELEVISION

hilip Seymour Hoffman's death gives new urgency to the need to write in appreciation of his work. His actual loss from the world must sadly amplify the need to preserve our sense of the value of

his life that continues on film. In important ways, the loss of Hoffmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life is a private one, a fact that has in too many ugly instances been ignored. To those who knew Hoffman personally, his death will be a hurt the depth and character of which it is not our place to imagine or entertain. I knew of him only as a man whose gift was to incarnate fictional human individuals onscreen as well and with as much power as anyone else who has attempted the feat. We, and those who come after us, are privileged that so much of his acting was realised on film. (By all accounts he was also a formidable stage actor, but those performances are of course lost to time, lingering only in the dissipating memories of those lucky enough to have beheld them.) So his lasting film performances should not be cause for mourning insofar as they continue testifying to the magnificent achievements of his short life. It thus seems obvious, but also perhaps necessary, to say that his loss as a public rather than as a private figure lies in what we can only imagine of the work he was unable to do. Our sense of this unrealised potential is most heavily carried home by the fact that Hoffman had committed to future acting work in television series. We are all lucky to live in a time when the rich opportunities that television allows for fine acting are better appreciated than at any earlier moment, a fact of which we were

sadly reminded by the death of James Gandolfini only last year, whose film performances were impressive, but whose television role as Tony Soprano was undeniably his towering achievement, and a monument of recent American art. Upon considering the fact of Hoffman's unrealised television work, I was struck by how many of his roles were arresting supporting characters in films of wildly fluctuating overall value (from Patch Adams through Scent of a Woman to The Talented Mr. Ripley and Boogie Nights). Through their compression, these roles exemplify his capacity to evoke, in short durations of screen time, deep worlds of rich human life, both in the personalities of his characters, and in the offscreen histories of their lives that he made so fascinating. Television would have provided a particularly hospitable home for acting as good and selfless as his, and he would have furnished it as he did the house of film, leaving it all the richer for his stay. EL

Andrew Gilbert

REPETITION AS PEJORATIVE Despite its negative connotations, many filmmakers deliberately use repetition to represent character stasis.

o call a film repetitive is to call a film broken; it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do or it isn’t doing it very well. There are exceptions: criticizing certain movies for being repetitive can expose you as culturally illiterate. If you dismiss Jeanne Dielman for such a reason you’ll indelibly out yourself as a philistine. To complain that Pat O’Neill’s films are repetitive simply proves that you are operating with limited cultural knowledge.1 For the sake of this quandary I am interested in narrative films, genre films: the

ones you can see in almost any theater. While I have no interest in policing the boundaries of narrative and experimental cinema, I want to explore repetition within what is colloquially understood as mainstream cinema and how the critical act of deploying repetitive is almost exclusively a deprecatory label. To brand a narrative feature film as repetitive is to call into question its very ability to tell a story visually. In regard to film criticism repetition has many submeanings. It is rarely just an acknowledgement that scenes or actions or statements occur more than is necessary. Repetition as a critical object takes on new meanings with regard to the

This is not to imply that all avantgarde works are worth sitting through.

context in which it is applied. A handful of critics may all agree that a given film is repetitive, but what is meant by that repetition is specific to individual critique. Different films (and different types of films) produce a spectrum of meanings for repetition as pejorative. In order to explore these meanings without forcing them into taxonomic categories, I will evoke the framework of Borges: “I will, in the following paragraphs, cast aside all strict and logical schemas, and amass a pile of examples.”2

continuity. Repeated actions and phrases also build rhythms and motifs that construct meaning within a film. Repetition is the taproot of cinematic experience. Auerbach speaks to the role that progression plays in cinematic history as well as the narrative mechanics of a given film. Films, like automobiles or cellphones, operate more smoothly and efficiently than those that preceded them. Such a reading (one that Auerbach may not authorize) feeds into larger, dare I say hegemonic, attitudes toward films as products that perform specific functions. What was once a cutting edge silent film chase sequence is now tediously repetitive—operating at a metabolism that requires conditioning to appreciate. This mentality of inevitable obsolescence is not unlike the attitude that views older works as ‘primitive’ and clunky. Consider Andrei Tarkovsky, who viewed the majority of silent cinema as a “prelude” to “real film-making.”4 What I wish to draw from these considerations is not that some people view old films as repetitive (archaic), but that narratives of historical progress also enable the critique of failed or broken attempts at contemporary filmmaking. A repetitive contemporary film is treated like a technically unsophisticated or naïve echo of a

onathan Auerbach3 argues that repetition is part of the genetic make-up of the cinema as various types of repetition occur simultaneously on formal and thematic levels. Looking specifically at narrative repetition, Auerbach pinpoints its historical role in developing narrative coherence. The audience(s) is subjected to the same thing over and over, but each time it’s a little different. It is this imperceptible variation within repetition that constitutes

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality” in Selected NonFictions. 3 Jonathan Auerbach, “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. See also Raymond Bellour, “Cine-Repetitions” in Screen, Vol. 20, No. 2.

Tom Lasica, “Tarkovsky’s Choice,” Sight and Sound, Vol. 3, No. 3.

bygone era, where audiences were more easily entertained by belabored techniques.

experiences. Consider the disconnection between the popular success and critical receptions of films like Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, Zack Synder’s Man of Steel, or the Wachowski’s sibling’s maligned Matrix sequels, which helped launch the age of the blockbuster franchise. These films created massive fan bases that translated into huge profits, yet were harshly assessed for delaying the necessary narrative beats in favor of repetitious action sequences. Here I do not wish to erect a mutually exclusive set of tastes (dismissing critic and accepting fan), but rather to interject a possible mode of engaging with these films that is mostly absent from the critical discourses on them. Adrian Martin argues against the critical position of considering films that are ‘great’ only in their totality:

he action film is a unique site to examine negative uses of repetition, particularly because it belongs to a grouping of genres considered to have low cultural status by many journalist critics (romantic and teen comedies, non-art house horror). These films adhere to specific narrative beats, which are typically the same type of confrontation or spectacle, with growing complexity and raised stakes. These are progressive narratives where protagonists overcome basic weaknesses in order to become the person they were meant to be. This is the modus operandi of the contemporary blockbuster action film. When these films become repetitive, it is because this progressive arc is interrupted. This interruption, if it is viewed negatively, is seen as an indulgence of sorts, wherein the filmmakers are distracted by their personal interest in special effects or widening the detailed universe of their films beyond narrative necessity. This critical position needs to be qualified: one of the reasons genre films are unique is because of their built-in audience. Critical perception does not need to overlap with the fan base that the modern blockbuster has, one that exhibits a desire for longer, even repetitive cinematic

Canons favour an organic aesthetics - they valorise whole, entire films as perfect objects. This leaves no room for imperfect films, or brilliant bits or fragments of films. And we all know there are many films that are great for just ten minutes, maybe just for one scene.5

The negative critical appraisal narrative films for being

Adrian Martin, “Light my Fire: the Geology and Geography of Film Canons,” presentation at Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, 20 April 2001.

repetitive suggests a preoccupation with aesthetic consistency and a sense of narrative perfection; all lean, no fat. A repetitive film fails to achieve this status of consideration; it is not a serious film. I do not wish to dismiss detractors of these action films (I found Man of Steel unbearable), rather, films such as The Hobbit may yield more fruitful critical engagement if one approaches them as rambling examples of termite art,6 rather than mere repetitious failures. Here, repetitive precludes alternative readings of the film.

conclusions that are anchored by repetition. Wolf is simultaneously considered excessive and indulgent—a complaint that is applied to the film and its makers in equal measure. It is invoked as a signpost to call into question Scorsese’s ability to construct a work of clear vision, to distance himself from his subject matter, and to articulate a critical voice. This later point suggests that Scorsese is actively promoting the attitudes on screen, as his proximity to the events makes him unable to assess them clearly. Deep social anxieties and political positions are imbedded in the critique of repetition in this particular film. Like the critiques of extended action cinema, the most common conceit is that the repetitive elements of Wolf are the result of an accident. Like criticisms of Peter Jackson or the Wachowski’s, Scorsese is questioned for lingering too long on trivial details that may interest him, but ultimately detract from the finished product. That is to say, their films are bloated with sequences that are read as personal indulgences, such as cool fight scenes or cocaine freak-outs, but their inclusion is to the detriment of aesthetic wholeness. This interpretation is dependent upon a reading of the filmmaker, which suggests that their inability to kill their darlings (excise unneeded material) is a result of artistic myopia, and not a deliberate choice to effect mood

he critical stakes are considerably higher for prestige pictures. Consider the critical reception of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). It has no lack of high profile supporters, but it’s the spectrum of detractors that interest me. A survey of unfavorable reviews of Wolf illustrates that the central point of contention is that the film repeats itself ad nauseam: scenes of raucous parties and drug-induced screaming occur, for some one time too many, for others many times too many. The interpretations of this narrative failure are varied and used to draw a handful of different critical

Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” 1962.

or pacing. This erasure of intentionality is crucial to the argument of director failure. This model presupposes a pass/fail rubric wherein these films fail to meet the minimum requirement of acceptable narrative cinema. While keenly written negative reviews of Wolf exist in journalistic circles, it’s safe to say that the majority of them are totalizing in their condemnation of the films and their makers. To reiterate Martin’s point, such a form of criticism emphasizes aesthetic wholeness as the lynchpin of great cinema.

scheming ceases to render any individual moment as romanticized; they are decentered by not having a privileged place within the film. It is instead the backdrop of this micro-universe, which is the very root of the ethical condemnations hurled against it. One can compare these detractions to likeminded attacks on recent films about consumer culture (The Bling Ring, The Canyons, The Great Gatsby, Spring Breakers) — all decried for being immoral by way of repetition. Within this paradigm repetition signifies endorsement. It is here in this type of narrative that we may discover peculiar reasons for what passes and fails the test of craftsmanship. Because Wolf lacks a clearly articulated moral center and depicts acts of opulent immorality combined with a lack of narrative progress it crosses the uncanny valley and ceases to be an acceptable narrative film (for some). But this criticism is contingent upon the manner in which repetition is visually structured. The swathe of narrative films that are centered on a character in stasis is seemingly at its peak in the current moment. One only has to look at the torrent of sad-sack dramedies to get a sense of what I mean: from the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg films to the bromances of Judd Apatow to the diffuse catch-all term that Mumblecore has become. These films frequently depict

t the heart of this matter is an almost purely formal question: what is the “best” way to visualize total character stasis? Wolf, like Goodfellas and Casino, is ultimately about a character that never changes. The protagonists are given countless opportunities to save or redeem themselves, but ignore every one of them. They are prisoners of hubris. Within this framework it is possible to view Wolf as a deliberately repetitive film wherein the monotony becomes a political choice that visualizes moral stasis and diminishing returns on visual pleasure. One of the films undeniable strengths is its ability to visualize its cloistered world, where the decadence of its masculine party culture is de rigueur. The visualization of drugs, sex, and

protagonists who make the same mistakes endlessly, but typically show a hint of change in the final moments. The relative or phenomenal success of these films hinges on this character component being transparent— and it doesn’t hurt that they almost never reach the three-hour running time of Wolf. But there is an overwhelming sense of progress in these narratives and the repetitive failures of their heroes are mediated through a carefully constructed sense of escalation and resolution, which almost always translates into a successfully received film. This is true even for films like Shaun of the Dead or The World’s End, which arguably don’t redeem their central characters, but rather reconfigure their living arrangements. In this way, stasis is good only in so far as the audience does not have to share in the stasis. There is a certain distance that must be observed, wherein the audiences can clearly see the stagnation of the protagonist, but are not forced to experience it. When a film like Wolf erases this invisible barrier, the audiences not only witness stasis, but endure it. They are forced to live through repetitive moments in real time, rather than viewing a synopsized version through comedic montage.

Husbands (1970); a film that was condemned upon its release for being monotonous, underdeveloped, and repetitive. Many of Cassavetes’ most ardent admirers dismissed it. While it had its proponents, the attacks on Husbands echo those of Wolf, and with good reason. Husbands forces the audience to relentlessly experience its character’s emotional and psychological stasis, watching helplessly as they miss opportunities for growth and redemption and aimlessly reproduce the same calamities for over two hours. This critical reaction illustrates that films like Husbands and Wolf are not simply disliked for reasons of personal taste, nor are they viewed as unfortunate missteps in their director’s illustrious careers. They are (more often than not) condemned outright by their detractors. In the case of these two films, with the rare exception of a few critics, repetition is given a moral component: these are not just failed films, they are immoral and reprehensible. But is it enough to understand these criticisms as a visceral rejection of the intended effects of the filmmakers? For that we have to consider what these types of repetitive films do. Husbands and Wolf actively resist narratives of individual progress. Progressive films visualize the repetition of mistakes through an escalation of events with the exponential raising of stakes. They move

classic exemplar of this critical fate can be found in John Cassavetes’

toward a climactic moment of truth that cures its hero’s flaws by allowing them to see what they are and who they could become. It’s a tried and true structure that has produced some great films, such as the bulk of Wes Anderson’s work, particularly The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. In fact, these tropes are so central to narrative dramatic storytelling that it is nearly impossible to consider these conventions within the confines of single genre. A divergent strain of filmmaking, here exemplified by Cassavetes and Scorsese, employ the same narrative tropes and structures, but depict a world where change and redemption are not guaranteed and where life does not follow an arc or a path. Even escalation is limited to its sequences, which do not directly carry over to those that follow. Instead the effect is cumulative. Existence in these films is by its very nature repetitive: each event—no matter how grandiose—quickly fades into the murky past. Characters do not learn from mistakes because they are too invested in the immediate present, making their lives a fog that the characters must stumble through.

both journalistic criticism and narrative storytelling. As it stands, repetition on its own is a weak critical term; it’s broad and often reveals little more than the critic’s individual tastes in narrative film viewing. To engage in a discussion about narrative repetition reveals certain attitudes towards spectatorship and filmmaking, even criticism as a whole. The critical fates of the films I’ve described reveal a widespread obsession with narrative perfection, as articulated by Martin, and raise infinitely more complex issues about the politics of film viewership. This is not to suggest that films are never repetitive and should not be criticized for it. Rather, that repetition is often code for larger cultural anxieties and political concerns that involve the films, directors, fans, and critics, in a polemical struggle over cinematic meaning and function. If I could suggest an alternative critical position, it is not to deny when films are repetitive, but to consider other factors beyond narrative efficiency in their evaluation.

hese threads cannot so easily be tied together as there is no final word on repetition as a critical pejorative in narrative mainstream cinema. These examples point toward larger discussions on taste, distinction, and the function of

Anders Furze

MOMENTARY REPETITION: APPROACHING THE CINEMATOGRAPH What GIFs can tell us about cinema and how they can be used in film criticism.

ake, as an example, the cinemagraph from The 400 Blows subtitled “Oh, I lie now and then. Sometimes I tell the truth and they still wouldn’t believe me, so I prefer to lie.”1 The static frame shows Antoine reclining on a lounge, a copy of a book entitled "Balzac" in his left hand. The right hand moves and Antoine takes a drag from a cigarette. It disappears behind the book for a second, then reappears above it, Antoine tapping the ashes onto the pillow behind him. His lower body stays

entirely still, it is only his face, his eyes, his hand that move, slightly, almost forcefully. His face shifts ever so slightly to the left before he inhales. The whole thing takes no more than twenty seconds, though the subtle scale of the gestures makes it feel much longer. Head tilt. Drag. Tap. Repeat. As long as there are screens and an internet, Antoine will be smoking. Repetition is built into the very foundations of the cinemagraph. A particular use of the gif format, cinemagraphs have been described as “somewhere between a photo and a video, a piece of artwork that seeks to

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perfectly capture a fleeting moment in time.”2 This definition alludes to the intersection of the kinetic and the stationary that has resulted in this hybrid form of representation. Arguably the most well-known use of the cinemagraph is in the works of photographers Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, who have trademarked the term and employ the form for the purposes of fashion photography.3 Self-professed “gif aficionado”4 Gustaf Mantel has taken the same approach and applied to to films. His site, If We Don’t, Remember Me (IWDRM),5 describes itself as a “gallery of living movie stills.” Mantel’s site is populated by static images from movies containing within them isolated elements of movement. It is hosted on Tumblr, a social media platform built around the ability of users to “reblog,” or re-appropriate bits of content from other bloggers, who have reblogged it from others. Repetition is built into the very foundations of Tumblr.

such repetitions, three external and three internal. Though writing decades ago, these repetitions can be transformed into a remarkably useful framework for analyzing the cinemagraphs of IWDRM. The first of Bellour’s external repetitions relevant to IWDRM concerns the duplication of the film reel. Films are screened on “a printed text, the identity of which, ideally, is repeated absolutely unchanged.”6 Bellour also recognises that “screening conditions, on the other hand, are infinitely variable” and so two copies of the exact same film can differ markedly. Of course, Bellour’s approach relies on the existence of a strip of film, a property intrinsic to cinema at the time he was writing but currently rapidly facing obsolescence. However he seems to anticipate technological change, recognising the “transformation of the medium” that occurs when films are screened on television, for example. Regardless of whether a physical strip of film exists when a film is screened, the metaphor is still vital to our understanding, and discussion, of films. This idea of material repetition cannot be repeated when applied to the virtual environment within which IWDRM exists, and so must be transformed. There is an

epetition is also, according to film theorist Raymond Bellour, built into the foundations of cinema. In "CineRepetitions," Bellour outlines six

Elizabeth Flock, “Cinemagraphs: What It Looks Like When A Photo Moves,” The Washington Post, 12 July 2011. 3 See Cinemagraphs.com. 4 Twitter page here. 5 Website here.

6 Raymond Bellour, “CineRepetitions,” Screen, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1979.

important distinction to be made here regarding the ability to repeat: whereas the repetition of the film strip is the “very moment of its material destruction,” as Bellour writes, digitally produced images can be repeated infinitely with no material deterioration. Even DVDs eventually wear, but these cinemagraphs can conceivably repeat themselves forever. Antoine will be smoking for a long time to come, and no longer does he require the context of the rest of the film to do so. His act of smoking has been reblogged a total of 5,815 times as of the time of writing,7 the moment ricocheting into innumerably varied contexts. The first of Bellour’s repetitions that he considers internal “pertains to the very body of the film, to its most elementary and paradoxical level: that of the single frame.” Once again, Bellour applies his concept to the physical properties of the film strip itself. The ultimate significance of the concept, he argues, is that "through the smallest to the largest differences between photograms, the repetition of the successive frames thus carries the coming to being of the film." The thousands of single frames that constitute a film are ever so slight variations on the frames that came before them. This interplay between repetition and difference is what

See IWDRM's archive page here.

constitutes the essence of a film’s “moving” images. This is a concept particularly relevant to the cinemagraphs of IWDRM. These gifs play with their source films on the most basic level — that of the frame. The cinemagraph subtitled “I’m not afraid of death but I am afraid of murder,”8 taken from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, extends the temporal unity of the sequence almost to its limits. Harry Caul sits at a window, head bowed, methodically tapping his finger eleven times before briefly looking up. The gesture is extended into a running time far beyond that of the source film. Whilst the environment in which he resides is static, isolated aspects of Caul’s body move, these movements eventually repeating. Repetition and movement in this cinemagraph do not occur as differences from frame to frame, as they do in the film The Conversation, but within the frame itself. The second of Bellour’s internal repetitions pertains to alternation. He codifies alternation into five essential elements: alternating between objective and subjective shots; shot-reverse shot; scales of framing; static vs. moving shots; and narrative distribution between shots. One on level these concepts rely on cuts and a moving camera, and are thus not applicable the static shots of

IWDRM. Yet they work well as an analogy from which we can draw our own ideas about repetition and gifs. The alternation between the static and moving elements of the frame is the very foundation of the cinemagraph. One gesture towards an analytiscal framework for these cinemagraphs is that whichever element (static or moving) dominates the frame, that is the element being marginalised by the cinemagraph as a whole. The eye of the cinemagraph’s viewer is not drawn to movement for movement’s sake, but only if it is in contrast to the static nature of the shot surrounding it, and vice versa. Take as an example the cinemagraph subtitled “And the eye in the sky is watching us all,”9 taken from Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995). Ace Rothstein is frozen, the only movement on his body being his eyes. The reflection of the casino floor, on the other hand, is full of flashing lights and moving figures. This is in contrast to the aforementioned cinemagraph taken from The 400 Blows. In the cinemagraph from Casino the allseeing nature of Ace Rothstein’s character is emphasised by the gif’s privileging of what he sees and his act of seeing, these being the only elements of the frame that are moving. In the latter cinemagraph, Antoine’s act of

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smoking is the moving element, thus it is this gesture that is emphasised. We draw particular conclusions as viewers of cinemagraphs based on the interplay between movement and stasis. Another example can be found in the cinemagraph subtitled “The dead only know one thing: it’s better to be alive,”10 taken from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Fourteen soldiers continuously do exercises while Pvt. Pyle and Sgt. Hartman are stationary, the former with his thumb in his mouth. The contrast of their frozen bodies with the kinetic exercise of the soldiers exercising focuses our attention on his infantile gesture. The pack of soldiers has been successfully conditioned for military life yet Pyle stubbornly holds out, interestingly places on the same side of the movement/stasis binary as the drill sergeant. Not only do these cinemagraphs embed this concept of alternation, certain ones do so self-consciously. Take the cinemagraph subtitled “Los Angeles. November 2019, Part II (I, III).”11 A static shot of the city as it appears in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner at night, there are three elements repeated, in quick succession: a flame bursts up from a chimney, then another, before a lightning bolt flashes. All

10 11

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the while one flame quietly flickers, while several others are frozen. This juxtaposition between the static flames and the flame which moves makes us fully aware we are watching neither a film still nor a video, but a cinemagraph. Repetition is also key to how the gifs of IWDRM are displayed and received. As mentioned before, a fundamental element of the Tumblr platform is the ability to reblog, or repeat, content. Conventionally, the number of times an item is reblogged is listed next to that item. Yet this information is removed from the IWDRM homepage, an act that obscures the site’s own repetitious popularity. Not only are the cinemagraphs of IWDRM built on repetition, they can also be seen as an attempt to answer the still relevant theoretical problem posed by Raymond Bellour in 1975. With "The Unattainable Text," he outlines the difficulty for the nascent film studies discipline to properly analyse film when it can only do so with the medium of print.12 Cinematic quotations are far from true quotations insofar as they appear in printed essays or online journals that seek to replicate the experience of reading printed journals. Bellour notes that film stills cannot

accurately re-present Christian Metz’s five codes of cinematic expression, these being phonetic sound, written titles, musical sound, noises and a moving photographic image. Nevertheless, Bellour notes that through the replication process of film stills, “there remains the image and with it, right or wrongly, the essential.” Despite the loss of movement, using stills opens up “the textuality of a film just at the moment it interrupts its unfolding.” If one works through Bellour’s argument backwards the extent of the problem with using film stills becomes clear: not only do stills not reproduce movement, but they privilege the image as the “essential” component of film to the detriment of Metz’s four other codes. This is where the cinemagraph can potentially be employed within the traditional format of the essay. Gifs are becoming a more popular form of film quotation in online film journals (see, for instance, previous issues of this very journal). The usefulness of cinemagraphs in film studies can be seen in two IWDRM gifs. First there is the post subtitled “How’s Richie?...I don’t know. I can’t tell,”13 taken from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum stands outside the recovery room,

Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text” in The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

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her eyes closed. After an interminable amount of time, so long that if one were not anticipating movement one would assume it to be a still, she opens her eyes, staring directly at us. The depth of emotion expressed in a solitary flicker of Margot’s eyes is a powerful visual argument against the critical position that Wes Anderson’s films are “surface-level” or “ironic.” Consider also the cinemagraph subtitled “Gee, I wish I had one of those doomsday machines.”14 In an excerpt from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), George C Scott’s face morphs from an exaggerated quizzical look to a dismissive one and back again, the full force of his performance connected through movement in a new way that neither a film still nor video excerpt could convey. These two examples show that the cinemagraph can be utilised particularly effectively to draw attention to gestures made by actors in films, or aspects of the mise-en-scene. Yet they also expose the form’s greatest weakness. Unlike other gifs, the cinemagraph relies on a stationary camera so that what you are viewing is a still image with isolated aspects moving. Thus what is depicted is privileged over how it is depicted. The movement of the camera, the editing of shots- such

aspects of cinema are ignored by the cinemagraph. Take, as the final example, the cinemagraph from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), titled “Take it easy and avoid excitement.”15 Movement fills the frame: the cogs onscreen are eternally moving. Underneath the cinemagraph there is another subtitle, this one not italicised. “This is the final update for the time being. Thank you and goodbye!” That’s the thing about repetition, after a while it gets creatively exhausting. The IWDRM archive is testament to this, showing that cinemagraphs were uploaded at a rate of one a day at its height of popularity to one a month and eventually, in January 2014, one final moving frame. And yet these fleeting moments of photogenie continue to live on, gaining the odd reblog here and there. For as long as there are screens and an internet, there will exist these hybridised extracts from films, of which repetition constitutes the distinguishing mark.

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REVIEWS BEING LLEWYN DAVIS Review of “Inside Llweyn Davis” by Melanie Ashe

best thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is this finality, only delivered in the final moments, as Llewyn is sprawled out, having just been punched by a stranger. Until this moment, the meandering plot has not resembled anything like a cause and effect narrative structure. The Coen brothers achieve this duality perfectly, satisfying the sticklers of tight narrative closure, but only doing so within the very last seconds, leaving the bulk of the minutes to a quiet, subtle mediation of Llewyn’s character. In between the film’s symmetrical structure, we explore and evaluate the contradictions, motivations, and context of Llewyn’s experience. The crimes of which Llewyn could be accused unfold shortly after the opening sequence. We soon find out that Llewyn is a struggling folk musician, without a home, without money, always asking for favours, and someone who is always imposing on the good will and space of his friends. Sometimes, Llewyn seems like a complete arse, scorning the company of those who support him, self-righteously declaring around town that "I’m a professional," for example when when asked to play for his friends at a dinner party. He regards his more successful folk friends as inauthentic and "careerist." When he needs money his sister asks

man walks into a bar and gets punched. Why? This is a riddle posed in the opening minutes of Inside Llewyn Davis, when our title character is inexplicably assaulted by a stranger outside the bar he was performing in. The plot meanders forwards from this assault without narrative explanation, or at least until the closing moments, when Llewyn is again punched outside a bar he was performing in. This repetition isn’t two separate beatings, but rather the same event, displayed twice. The result is a riff on a Kafkaesque trial, in which the story slowly unravels the nature of Llewyn Davis’ crime, and the audience is finally left to consider whether or not he is deserving of punishment. The

him, why not work? His answer: "Quit showbiz? You mean, just exist?" Day to day reality without artistic expression is not a possibility for Llewyn. Yet despite Llewyn’s attempt to paint his life of "showbiz" as one that transcends mere ordinary existence, it is precisely such everyday existence that his film unfolds. The lone figure at odds with the world around them is familiar territory for the Coen brothers, who have developed a reputation for delivering the "most consistent existential American cinema" of contemporary times.1 Despite the diverse range of films in their oeuvre, all of the Coens’ central characters are outsiders, existing on the periphery of society, unable to conform—sometimes deliberately, sometimes not—to whatever social norms or smaller customs of the family (Mattie Ross of True Grit), the workforce ("The Dude" in The Big Lebowski), or the law, to name a few. All of these films explore the struggle towards non-conformity for these characters, who all strive for some kind of personal independence. In Llewyn Davis, this struggle is reflected in Llewyn’s daily existence, as he slowly trudges from one situation to the next, in search of critical recognition but never finding success. Yet it is when Llewyn is

committing himself to a performance that he becomes the protagonist he strives to be. The opening shot of the film captures him in close up in a dark and smoky interior, his eyes closed. The shot focuses on his figure as the only thing that is illuminated in the bar. In this moment, Llewyn Davis seems like the successful star in a biopic about a famous musician. The gaze of the camera in this scene is almost solipsistic. While this is an illusion that is immediately broken as the camera cuts away to a wider angle that shows the bar, it represents Llewyn how he may appear, if he existed outside of social realities of every day existence. Similarly, personal elements of the plot become incidental where they might have been monumental turning points in some other narrative. In one scene, Llewyn finds out that he has a two old kid he didn’t know about. In another played down sequence, Llewyn casually tells Jean that he loves her. "Come on!" she says, before the scene cuts away. These events seem to simply float about within the plot but accumulatively add to a building sense of Llewyn’s emotional fatigue and despair. By the final moments of the film, the circular and repetitive structure of works to build up a sense of déjà vu, a kind of Groundhog Day reality where Llewyn is forced to review his dismal life situation, over and over. Yet rather than insisting on a

Michael Koresky, “New York State of Mind,” Reverse Shot, No. 33.

condemning review of Llewyn’s character, the film seems to offer a more subtle analysis. Rather than offering his life up for trial, the film’s circularity could be metaphorically referring to the repetetiveness of Llewyn’s life, and so offers an access point into Llewyn’s inner psyche. A scene in which Llewyn goes to play a song for Bud Grossman, the owner of a Chicago record label, suggests such a reading. "OK," Grossman agrees, "play me something from Inside Llewyn Davis." Grossman is of course referring to Davis’ debut LP of the same name. Here, the camera glides towards the album art that shows Llewyn leaning on a doorway. He looks pensive and introspective, but he remains emotionally closed. In this way, the film extends a difficult empathic gesture on empathy, inviting us to put ourselves in Llewyn’s shoes. !

A ROAD THROUGH MUDDY PATHS Review of “Hard to Be a God” by Aaron Cutler

Writer’s note: It is easy while watching Hard to be a God to lose track of the film’s plot, whose details I have therefore chosen to discuss freely. Readers wishing to avoid spoilers should flee now. But it is defined—the action’s order, And the road’s end can not be sealed. I am one, hypocrisy’s all over… To cross life is not to cross a field. —from Boris Pasternak’s poem “Hamlet” (translated by Yevgeny Bonver), recited by Don Rumata to his followers in Hard to be a God.

he new film Hard to be a God begins with people traversing a muddy field as a narrator tells how a human scientist has come to study life on a planet called Arkanar that looks very similar to Earth, but whose progress is roughly 800 years

behind. Soon after he arrived in Arkanar’s medieval realm (with no hope for a Renaissance in sight), the scientist invented for himself the role of the nobleman Don Rumata, a leader for the peasants of the capital city (also called Arkanar) to follow. They have done better than that, and anointed him a god, the 105 yearold illegitimate heir to the local deity Goran. “Don Rumata” has accordingly decided to keep a distance from his people. Upon learning that an invading army led by the monstrous Don Reba is approaching the city, he initially commits to rescuing those he believes deserve saving—most especially the portly and sage Dr. Budakh—without involving himself any further. However, Rumata changes his mind as he sees the soldiers continually pillaging Arkanar and slaughtering and raping its people, until he goes mad and kills as many of the invaders as he can before dying himself. An epilogue then shows a group of peasants who have survived the slaughter playing music and crossing a field. The late Russian filmmaker Aleksei German (pronounced with a hard “g”) adapted his last film from the 1964 novel Hard to be a God, co-authored by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as one of several of their science-fiction novels that also included Roadside Picnic (1971), the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979). While the Strugatsky brothers’

book carefully laid out the logistics of its alternate world, German (who had been born in 1938 in Leningrad as the son of a prominent writer) was more concerned with filming a reality that looked like the past and was close to the present. The filmmaker envisioned his film’s story to be—like the plots of his other four solo directorial efforts, all of which were also literary adaptations set in time periods other than the present—a close allegory for life in contemporary Russia, and had done so ever since he first read the Strugatskys’ book shortly after its initial publication. Nearly forty years later, German told an interviewer during Hard to be a God’s shoot that his film was a tale “almost but not quite science fiction” about the choices that one has to make upon bearing witness to murder This second film adaptation of the novel (following a 1989 Western European version directed by Peter Fleischmann) was, in fact, originally planned as Aleksei German’s solo directorial debut nearly fifty years prior; the filmmaker had even assembled his crew on location in what was then Czechoslovakia before the Russian military’s invasion of Prague in August 1968 disrupted the shoot and led to the film’s then-permanent cancellation for fear that it would reflect the reallife invasion too closely. German finally returned to shoot the film (which he had temporarily retitled The History of the Arkanar

Massacre) in the Czech Republic in 2000, and spent the rest of his life working on it. The 75 year-old filmmaker died of heart failure in February 2013 before completing the edit, which was ultimately finished by his wife and careerlong collaborator Svetlana Karmalita in tandem with his filmmaker son, Aleksei German, Jr. With that said, any viewer who has previously seen a German film (all of which have been recently touring the world in 35mm prints after years of Western unavailability) will immediately recognise its author’s mark. Like his prior great works such as My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) and Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), Hard to be a God unfolds with a carnival atmosphere inside a black-andwhite world. A male narrator briefly sets up the action as characters fill an empty landscape, after which context seemingly drops out, and one follows from up-close the development of an epic, ongoing movement that—like history— focuses on a high and sometimes seemingly random number of individuals before eventually discarding them all. Bald men and fat women enter and exit freely throughout long, tightly framed scenes in which the camera roams unmoored from any one character’s perspective in favor of catching sudden, compelling gestures that continue to linger in mind long after dropping out of sight.

This approach leads to moments of poetic surprise as well as of brutal shock, befitting German’s interest in showing how the initial dream of Communism turned into a much harsher reality. Hard to be a God, like all his films, focuses on a historical trauma in order to show his nation’s ongoing condition. Regardless of the spectacle German’s films survey—whether the starvations and purges motivated by social advancement in the 1930s (Ivan Lapshin), the efforts of common Russians to endure World War II and rebuild their lives following it (1971’s Trial on the Road and 1976’s Twenty Days Without War), or the anti-Semitic deportations that occurred before and after Stalin’s death (Khrustalyov)—the films are consistently earthy, showing muddy fields made wet with rain as civilians stumble happily through them, and with blood as soldiers appear to arbitrarily shoot and abandon people who they will not protect. The sheer difficulty a viewer sometimes faces in following what’s happening as the chases mount reflects the condition of many of German’s characters, for whom solid order easily dissolves into chaos, and who run in an effort to survive. German’s people—whether peasants or low-level infantrymen—are ruled by their potential murderers and told to be happy with their lot; in Hard to be a God, the fear of death has even been outlawed as heresy.

Throughout the film, characters continually warn each other not to be heretical, or even remind themselves that they are being so, expressing concern about profaning the sacred amidst constant reminders of life on Earth. In nearly every scene rain pours upon ground that was once solid but has now turned into sludge, mirroring the widely varied physical types of people that release fluids regularly throughout the film. As Don Rumata (played by the wolfish Leonid Yarmolnik, who has largely worked as a television actor) struts among his Arkanian servants, sometimes guzzling from a wine goblet or kissing a woman’s bare breast, they spew vomit and urine and feces, belch freely, and drool beyond his control. The absurdity of seeing and hearing all these excretions— which even drives characters to sometimes break the fourth wall for commentary—keeps with the spirit of the source novel, yet these flying fluids and solids give much more visceral reminders of the human body’s status as physical object on film than they probably could in any book.2 Over time, a viewer gets used to the mess. We grow so accustomed to seeing and hearing objects soar from

people’s bodies that once soldiers begin tearing out guts and ripping off heads, curiosity about the technical aspects of what’s happening seems like a more natural reaction than does shock. This shift has ontological implications, turning life from a spiritual essence into just a physical thing to be granted or seized. The residents of Arkanar value their new god precisely because they believe that he has the power to choose between leaving and taking life, an impression that Don Rumata has maintained through shows of force such as accurate and nonfatal duels, in which he always wounds but never kills his opponents. A romantic subplot between Rumata and an Arkanian woman, important in the book, has been minimized in the film, reducing the woman (played by Laura Pitskhelauri with urgent hope for Rumata’s protection) to a figure pulled and pushed aside. This god strives, to the best extent that one likely can here, to keep his body intact and all to himself. The challenges of doing so help lead Don Rumata (whose human name, Anton, has been omitted from the film) to speak the film’s title aloud at a few different points, usually in selfjustification. We might wonder what else makes being a god so difficult. A reason could be the enormous responsibility, or lack thereof, he faces in determining the fate of others; one of the film’s most haunting moments shows a

The critic Olaf Möller helpfully discusses the relationship between book and film in Issue 57 of Cinema Scope.

fugitive Arkanian woman urging her deformed son to tell people that he got his cleft lip in an accident, after which he turns fullfaced to the camera to show what God has given him. They are two among many of the film’s characters who, from a desire to escape their own mortality, place false hope in deities. Dr. Budakh (a pop-eyed, short Yevgeni Gerchakov) says that if he were a god he wouldn’t have urinary problems, a remark he makes to Don Rumata while pissing and then immediately retracts for being heretic; we later see the naked Budakh being led off in chains by enemy soldiers who have captured him, and who relish the thought of how easy it is to plug a man’s breathing holes with tar. Don Rumata, like any god, can at best only save some people, and only temporarily. In real life, Aleksei German viewed authority through multiple layers of cynicism. He faced struggles during his life both as a Russian citizen and as a Russian artist, with three of his films nationally censored prior to Perestroika; additionally, German loathed Russian anti-Semitism, and, in a lifelong act of provocation, publicly self-identified as Jewish (despite being of unclear ancestry). His reasons were decidedly cultural and not religious. The priests wandering throughout the film reflect German’s distrust of organized religion by clearly being in league with Don Reba (Aleksandr

Chutko) and preaching people away from Don Rumata, who grows so frustrated with his burden of leadership that he beseeches the Creator above him to destroy Arkanar altogether. One need only open the Bible to witness God’s power to wipe out multitudes. Yet however apocalyptic German’s films may be, they always close with survivors. Don Rumata’s wish is not fulfilled. His own death— granted peacefully, as he collapses in a quiet moment by a stream—comes after he has slain many, and even dictated his legacy to a writer. It then dissolves into the sight of a field through which a cart passes with a group of variously shaped peasants playing music and jabbering. Arkanar lives on beyond its gods, who can kill some, even many, but not all of its people. The cart travels into the distance with the small group still talking, and, for the moment, in command of their circumstances. They are free to continue to burp, fart, shit, piss, and puke. Thanks to Evgeny Gusyatinskiy for research help.