Le Cinéma Braque

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The Ghosts of Indonesia’s New Order: Joko Anwar, Ayu Utami and Aesthetics of Being Haunted in the Reformasi.

In May of 1998, as a result of mounting popular dissent, growing violence, and a complete loss of soft power throughout the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia’s military dictator President Suharto stepped down after 31 years of control over the incredibly young nation. One month earlier, Ayu Utami’s first novel Saman was published. In a time of massive political upheaval, there was a simultaneous upheaval occurring in the world of Indonesian literature. Saman was only published as a result of its success in the Jakarta Arts Council’s Novel Competition, and upon release to the general public the book proved a literary sensation, though not solely of a celebratory variety. The novel’s prose is often described as “sensuous” or “poetic” or “rich”... though I suspect that, more frequently, readers are responding to Utami’s bluntness. The book is incredibly frank in its discussions of sex and sexuality. The novel’s namesake, Saman, is a Catholic priest whose sexual desires and explorations occur in tandem with his working class anti-colonial political awakenings. The book also features young women fantasizing about their plans to lose their virginities, and a mentally disabled character having sex with anyone who will permit it. 

The sex took up most of the discussions of the book at the time of its release. However, there is a brief section, less than a single chapter, that is the standout section of the entire novel. A flashback to Saman’s childhood in a Sumatran oil town. This episode changes from a poetic realist novel into a folktale. Saman’s childhood is rendered as the types of ghost stories that have filled out the vast majority of legends, myth, children’s stories and cautionary tales found in every corner of every island in the archipelago. This traditional folktale style is jarring, both in terms of the content of the story and the prose used to tell it. The language is mythic. The sentences are short. The most mystical component of the entire novel is rendered with a complete bluntness. There is less sensuality here… but rather a straightforward accounting. This is the episode that seems to have the least amount of “poetry” in its prose. This is the one rendered merely as straightforward, documentary fact. 

I have roughly translated this section of Utami’s novel. I highly recommend reading the whole book as it is truly excellent, and there is an English translation by Pamela Allen available. The translation linked above and in screenshots below is mine, and not representative of Allen’s, which I have not read. I have also abridged a few things and added a couple notes for the sake of clarity of the folkloric elements. 

This episode of the novel, as an incongruity, interacts in very interesting ways with the rest of the book. However, I find it to be an incredibly effective short horror story in its own right. Even more interesting, is how much this specific story seems to mirror a work by another major Indonesian Gen-X artist, Joko Anwar. When I first made this connection I was more amused than anything else. At first glance, these two people could not be more dissimilar. One famous for his commitment to horror films, the other an investigative journalist and literary fiction writer tied to the contemporary development of feminist perspectives in Indonesian art and culture. However, by separating Utami’s ghost story from the rest of her novel we can approach both Utami and Anwar through the lens of Indonesian Horror in the reformation era (or reformasi). 

While Utami quickly became one of the figures to illustrate the seismic shift in literature during the reformasi, Joko Anwar is, in many ways, an analogue to her for the film industry. Saman is noted for its willingness to engage bluntly with social taboos of the era. Anwar first made a name for himself, not as a key figure in Indonesian horror, but as the screenwriter for Arisan! (aka The Gathering) Nia Dinata’s 2003 comedy of manners. Much like Utami’s novel, this is a film that became a focal point for discussion due to its engaging taboos through its depiction of homosexual relationships, women contending with sexless marriages, and the introduction of a (now omnipresent) trope featuring the mixture of English and Jakarta slang as an indication of class, one that is employed as overtly, simply, and subtextually as a posh accent in classical British films. Utami’s novel was seen as the figurehead for a new literary movement dubbed, somewhat pejoratively, as “Sastra Wangi” or “Fragrant Literature”. Arisan! in conjunction with the previous year’s Ada Apa Dengan Cinta (or What’s Up With Cinta?) ushered in an era of boundary pushing in regards to integrating depiction of social taboos, class critique, and an overall more direct tone when engaging with bildungsroman or comedies of manners. It is hard to imagine films like Riri Riza’s 3 Hari Untuk Selamanya (3 Days Until Eternity) or Kamila Andini’s Yuni without either Utami’s novel or Anwar’s screenplay as precursors.

3 Days Until Eternity

However, most interesting to me are the films that overtly carried over the most popular elements of Suharto’s dictatorship (most commonly referred to as the New Order). From 1950-1965 Indonesian film was subject to censorship, but also engaged more directly with the kind of social observation and critique that foresees novels like Saman and films like Arisan!. Usmar Ismail, one of the most heralded directors of the era wrote directly of his admiration for Italian Neo-Realism, and Bachtiar Siagian crafted a career based upon human observation and recognition of the class divisions that remained in place as remnants of the colonial system from which Indonesia had only recently emerged. Notably, during these years, the Indonesian Communist Party had effectively lobbied the government to ban American films from Indonesian cinemas. This led to a sort of self-imposed bubble in which, theoretically, Indonesian film had an opportunity to develop in its own manner to express a uniquely Indonesian perspective with minimized outside aesthetic and ideological influence. The project was cut short by the coup of 1965 and Suharto seizing power. Suharto removed the American film ban, encouraged a great deal of international economic collaboration within the film industry, and oversaw a censorship board with a different set of concerns and values than in the first 15 years of the new nation’s film industry. 

From this milieu rose the Indonesian exploitation film. Many of which became cult classics, even abroad, and are now being rediscovered on blu-ray and streaming by American horror fans. Films like the iconic filmography of Suzzanna, such as Ratu Ilmu Hitam (The Queen of Black Magic), or Sundelbolong seemed to have an easier time getting past the censors than many films in the earlier tradition. These films were not taken seriously by academics until relatively recently. Salim Said, who wrote the iconic history of Indonesian film Shadows on the Silver Screen, barely referenced these works despite their consistent ability to draw audiences, only briefly mentioning the phenomena with the phrase “in this era there were also many trashy films produced.” These “trashy films” are notable, in part, because of their ability to make the censors look the other way. There are probably three primary reasons for this: The first is simply that the New Order regime was much more comfortable with graphic depictions of violence than they were with uncomfortable social issues that they felt could potentially undermine the “ideal society” they were building. The second is that the economic power of these movies (particularly as an export) was undeniable, and the New Order regime, above all else, respected economic power (which is why Suharto was so weakened by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.) Finally, these films were largely adaptations of traditional Indonesian folk tales. From a nationalistic perspective, all questionable content was in service of building up the national cultural identity, and maintaining the traditional stories that had been passed down through generations.  Ironically, the aesthetics of exploitation, which only arose in Indonesia after the New Order era began, can be directly tied to American and Western European forms. So while the tales themselves maintain the traditional Indonesian cultural elements, the films feel right at home when viewed amongst western exploitation classics like Cannibal Holocaust, Bay of Blood, or Blacula. 

This brings us back to Joko Anwar, who began directing after the massive financial success of Arisan! and slowly transitioned his own work into the realm of horror with a specific focus on convincing Rapi Films (the original producer of so many Indonesian Exploitation films) to give him the rights to remake Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1980 film Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave). After years of producing genre work to convince the company that he was capable of making a serviceable remake, he accomplished his task in 2017 with his own Pengabdi Setan (this time most frequently translated as a plural Satan’s Slaves). The film was a critical and commercial hit, leading to more opportunities within the realm of horror. Anwar’s career has proven to be uniquely successful in the international market when compared to other major Indonesian horror filmmakers, and he has continued to re-make exploitation films of the New Order, and traditional Indonesian Folktales. He wrote the script for Kimo Stamboel’s remake of Queen of Black Magic, and the 2025 film Legenda Kelam Malin Kundang (literally “The Dark Legend of Malin Kundang” but released in English as Smothered) which is based upon one of the most famous folktales from the Island of Sumatra. He directed a remake of Lilik Sudjio’s Gundala which was perhaps less an exploitation film than simply a “trashy film” as Salim Said would say, and the original work Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (literally Woman of Hellish Land, released internationally as Impetigore) which utilizes Wayang Kulit, or traditional Indonesian puppet theater as a mystical force of evil. 

Queen of Black Magic (1981) and The Queen of Black Magic (2019)

The fact that Anwar has continued the tradition of Indonesian ghost stories and exploitation films is not strange. He and Ayu Utami are both Gen X artists… children of the New Order, both adults by the time Suharto stepped down, both too young to have developed in the 15 years of unlimited potential post-revolution. They grew up steeped in Western and American media culture, imported en-mass, they grew up with the exploitation aesthetics as the primary aesthetics of many traditional folktales and ghost stories, and they grew up under a repressive regime that limited the frank discussions of many social issues they could easily observe occurring around themselves. This milieu seems to have led them both to a very specific lens through which they engage with their own traditional ghost stories. 

The ghost episode in Utami’s Saman maps so well onto Anwar’s re-make of Satan’s Slaves, despite the differences in artistic intention, and despite the differences in art forms, possibly as a direct result of the social environment curated by Suharto’s New Order regime leading to the reformasi-era artists desire to re-tell their childhood stories in a manner that was publicly unavailable their entire childhoods. Utami focuses on religious minorities in her story (something Anwar has also done, when he played a priest in the film Ave Maryam) and introduces specifically a layer of moral ambiguity that does not seem to exist on the textual level in the exploitation films of the New Order. In her book Indonesian Cinema: Framing The New Order, Krishna Sen argues that with a single exception (Sjumandjaya’s Si Mamad) every film produced within the New Order era adheres to the same basic structure of following a character from an ordered life, through a period of disorder, then finally back to orderliness again (sometimes through great sacrifice). This is easily observed in the original Satan’s Slave. An agnostic family living a relatively stable life begins experiencing hauntings and attacks from the undead after the death of the mother. Through these hauntings and attacks, the family falls into chaos and disarray. However, after finding their way back to prayer through the help of an Islamic scholar, they are able to defeat the evil forces through the power of Allah. Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves does not accomplish the same structural cleanliness, and the textual approach to the shining light of Islam is much more ambiguous. 

After the death of the mother, the family’s neighbor, Ustad, gathers the local muslims to attend a prayer for her soul. This is depicted with a group of older men sitting in a circle chanting the shahadah in unison. Their voices are rhythmically aligned perfectly, but all of different pitches and timbres, and so creates a mildly satanic sonic impression not too dissimilar from the chants of the Satanic cult that Rini discovers by playing her mother’s record in reverse. Anwar’s film is much more skeptical of universal answers. The original Satan’s Slave shows that the ghosts, demons, and pocong can all be defeated through the light of Islam (much the way the black magic wielding dukun is defeated in The Queen of Black Magic, or the way that Suzzanna’s Alisa is finally freed from her vengeful ghost form at the end of Sundelbolong. Anwar’s Satan’s slaves presents Islam as a structured system of belief that is capable of great repression. In the original Queen of Black Magic there’s a powerful sequence in which a young Islamic theologian is praying, and while lost in his prayers, he remains almost supernaturally impervious to the attacks from the dukun using black magic in an attempt to kill him. In Satan’s Slaves Rini attempts to pray away the ghosts, only to be attacked by a spirit imitating her mother. She tries to run away, only for the cloth of her abaya to trap her with the ghost. The power of prayer is not only futile here, it’s actually an additional impediment. 

While the family of Anwar’s film is not above turning to religion in a time of desperation, they are simply grasping towards anything that appears to provide answers. However, as Anwar likely experienced firsthand, those claiming to have all the answers are the ones who should arouse the most suspicion. The ghost of the New Order regime presents itself in this postmodern skepticism. 

Both Utami’s ghost story and Anwar’s film deal with infertility and a mother’s sin. Both seem to suggest a deal with supernatural entities in order to conceive. And both mothers condemn their family to suffer consequences of their supernatural pact. Utami’s story is the more subjective of the two, being largely from the point of view of Wis, who is a child throughout the events depicted. There is an argument to be made that we are experiencing a child’s attempt to come to terms with his mother’s affair. In Satan’s Slaves the children are faced with the reality that their mother was repeatedly impregnated by people other than their father. Both horror tales are about the loss of dignity and respect for the children’s mother. Utami’s fable ends with Wis slapping his own mother and shifting his loyalties towards his father. Satan’s slaves ends with the family starting a new life away from the home they had lived in with their mother. 

In Anwar’s script for the re-make of The Queen of Black Magic we watch a similar recontextualization take place. The family must come to terms with the culpability of their father in the mistreatment of Murni. When they realize they are being tortured for the sins of their father they cry out “we didn’t know anything about this.” Murni turns, almost into the lens of the camera and states “but not knowing is also a sin.” This feels like an essential refrain of the reformasi. For Gen X Indonesians, growing up in the wake of genocide that killed around 1 million fellow Indonesians, largely carried out by citizen paramilitary organizations and allowed through the tacit consent of the rest of the population, the question of “what did your dad do in the past?” must be incredibly pressing, if also taboo. Utami and Anwar don’t rest solely on the sins of the father trope. They look towards the mothers as well. Utami’s text is complicated with a subtle feminist undercurrent that suggests a more complicated inner life for Wis’s mother than we can access from his childish perspective. Anwar too weaves prejudice into his narrative. The mother, before fame, was considered a poor match for her husband and her value seems to arise from her breeding capacity. If not knowing what happened in the past is a sin, what of the women who remained in place throughout the sin, knowing, maybe participating, because the social structures in which they found themselves provided such few options that they chose what they determined to be the only path forward for them? When we learn about our mothers' sins, how harshly do we condemn them? This preoccupation with the past is one of the defining features of Anwar’s horror output. It is equally prevalent in his film Siksa Kabur (Grave Torture) which is split into two parts, focusing on the protagonist siblings’ childhood, then the impacts of their childhood in their lives as adults. Utami’s novel starts in 1997, then proceeds to move back and forth through time, almost implying that history isn’t just continuous, but concurrent. What happened didn’t only lead to this moment, it informs this moment. Not always in ways that are healthy or pleasant. Intergenerational trauma constantly presents itself. The most omnipresent ghost in both of these stories is the specter of the New Order regime.

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Divine Intervention: Elia Suleiman’s Symbolic Approach to a Distinctively Political Narrative

I moved to Palestine in 2018 having never been there before. I had never been to the middle-east before. I had very little familiarity with Islam. I did as much research as I could before moving there, but was given very little lead-time. So despite my best efforts, I arrived very much tainted with ignorance and unchallenged prejudices. I learned a tiny bit of Arabic (the wrong dialect) and familiarized myself with the basics of the conflict with Israel. Then, in the middle of the night, I arrived at the Tel-Aviv airport, slipped into an Arab taxi, crossed the threshold into the West Bank having never seen Israel by day, and into a tiny dormitory in the village of Abu Dis, just on the other side of the massive Apartheid wall on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

I learned, very quickly, that Abu Dis is about a mile or two from Ma’ale Adumim, an Israeli settlement. It’s the largest settlement in the West Bank. It is surrounded with walls and armed guards. The inhabitants fall into two groups: extremists who believe all the land in the West Bank is their god-given right, and ignorant bourgeoise who don’t even really realize they are in the West Bank, but simply a suburb of Jerusalem. This second group often cause more problems than the first one.

A few months before my arrival in Abu Dis, a settler from Ma’ale Adumim accidentally made a wrong turn, left the security of his settlement behind, and wound up in the village of Al Azarea. This is an area of the West Bank where neither the Palestinian Authority has a presence, nor the Israeli military. It’s the Wild West. Or Wild West Bank. The settler was noticed relatively quickly, and chased by the locals. Realizing his mistake, he fled through unknown roads, finally ending up in front of the dormitory I would eventually move to. The Palestinian locals surrounded his car with flaming dumpsters, broke his windows and attempted to extract and execute the man. I don’t know how long the incident lasted, but eventually the Israeli military stormed into the area, tear gassed everyone and brought the settler back to safety.

This was a terrifying story to learn of only two or three days into my commitment to making Abu Dis my new home. I’m a Germanic American foreigner. One of only two that I knew about in town. What’s to protect me from being mistaken as a settler? Am I a colonizer here to scrape away the dregs of the culture and land these people have been struggling to protect for 70 years? Not too long after, I was told I was safe because I didn’t dress like a settler. You can tell from the outfit. Settlers have the long curls on their head, the tassels at their hips, beards, black hats and vests. I was clearly just a foreigner, which isn’t the same thing.

In Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) we begin with a scene eerily familiar to the one that occurred outside my eventual home in Abu Dis, but with a single major variation. The locals are chasing the settler, easily identifiable by his striking attire, though his clothing is not the clothing of religious orthodoxy; it is distinctively agnostic. He is dressed as Santa Claus.

This film elevates Santa Claus, the innocuous symbol of Christmastime for all religions, to that of a colonial settler. A figure so hated that a wrong turn in the West Bank could prove fatal. A figure which immediately conjures the erasure of their culture, the murder of their children, and the expulsion of their friends and family from their homeland for nearly a century. It is interesting to approach this creative decision from the perspective of an American, because the closest cultural connection I have is the common refrain by religious dogmatics in America when confronted with non-religious symbols throughout the month of December. “Happy Holidays” draws the ire of many of my neighbors here. You’ll not be hard pressed to find yard signs that say “Merry Christmas Spoken Here”.

Isn’t Santa Claus the ultimate “Happy Holidays?” He, by his very nature, takes the Christ out of Christmas, as the popular refrain goes. He can sell you a Coca-Cola for the holidays regardless of your personal beliefs. Christmas is a time for presents. He shifts the entire narrative of the holiday towards the act of giving (or possibly receiving) rather than the birth of Christ.

How does this relate to Palestine and Israeli settlers? For those of us who were raised Christian, it’s hard to separate the birth of Christ with the town of Bethlehem. Bethlehem is located in the West Bank, on the other side of the Israeli separation wall. The people of Bethlehem live under military occupation. Bethlehem is also home to Dheisheh refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. It is filled with families of those who were displaced by the Israelis when they took over Palestine in 1948. Removing the Christ from Christmas is also removing Palestine from Christmas. It is the erasure of its historical and cultural significance. It is cultural colonialism. Just as the settlers steal the land from the Palestinians, and claim that it was always theirs… so too does capitalism extricate the political, social, and historical realities from that land and the holiday associated with it. A Santa Claus costume is indeed the garb of a settler. He is colonizing the mind of the world, utilizing the resources he finds most useful and erasing the narratives he finds politically inconvenient.

From this uncomfortable equation, we get our opening images of the film. Something familiar: a group of children chasing Santa Claus. But they are not after his presents. They are after him (as the knife jutting out of his chest reveals.) Moreover, they are after the narrative he has co-opted. He needs to be extinguished so they can make an attempt at reclaiming their history, their culture, and their land. All this… and we haven’t even reached the opening credits yet.

It is with this that Suleiman indicates to the audience the mode within which he is working. He tells a single narrative, but one that feels like a series of disparate vignettes à la Roy Andersson. He is telling us that the apparent incongruity is not as it seems. He is also showing us that in Palestine, everything is political. Every Palestinian’s existence has been so thoroughly politicized that simple absurd images cannot help but become pregnant with subversive meaning. If you choose to remain blind to the politics, you can. You may even find much to enjoy in the comically deadpan mise-en-scène of the film. However, Suleiman offers an indictment of these audience members as well.

A young French tourist approaches an Israeli policeman looking for directions. The policeman doesn’t know the way, and so he enlists the help of his Palestinian prisoner from the back of the van. Bound and with a blindfold over his eyes, the Palestinian offers three clear ways for her to get to Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There are two ways to read the scene. Both reveal the political anger brewing just below the droll surface of the gag. The first is simply that the Palestinian knows this land so well that he can give you directions while blindfolded. While the Israeli cop has no idea where to go. He is a foreigner here too. He may have political and military authority, but he is not truly of this land, while his prisoner is.

The second interpretation is the indictment of the apolitical audience member. We can visit Israel as tourists (or visit this film as a sort of cinematic tourist) gaze at the wonderful architecture, eat the food, enjoy the beaches and the lovely weather, all while turning a blind eye to the near century of racist exploitation, disenfranchisement, and genocide occurring right in front of us. It'd be all too obvious if we’d bother to simply engage beyond our own immediate pleasure and convenience.

Both of these interpretations are effective. Both are true. But the tourist is the one who allows this to continue indefinitely. She witnesses injustice and chooses comfort. The Israeli is blind to the irony of his evil. He thinks this is his land. The foreigner has the benefit of an objective vantage point, and remains aloof. So who is the real villain here?

Suleiman has combined the aesthetics of Jacques Tati with a uniquely Palestinian political fervor and sense of subversion. The film needs to be read as the synthesis of both of these elements.

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Anthony Bourdain and the Importance of Passive Heroes

The death of Anthony Bourdain has left a significant gap in the American culture, one which I do not believe will be filled with any real haste. The news of his death to those unfamiliar with his work may have appeared to have been greatly exaggerated, as to the scope and influence his life had. However, upon pouring over all the beautiful words I've found the opposite to be true, that few people have earnestly reflected upon the fact that Bourdain's output of work was an oasis in the desert of mainstream american pop-culture in a time when the country seems to be in a freefall towards a very dark future. Re-watching episodes of No Reservations or Parts Unknown in the days following his suicide has cast his persona in a slightly different light. What I was struck by most was his silence. Bourdain does not speak a lot on camera. Sure he narrates the show, provides historical context, even a stray opinion or two. There's never been an argument that he was without a strong personality. Bourdain is far from a neutral party in any situation. However, when in Armenia, on one of his last aired episodes before his death, he focuses the camera on groups of people that he is situated within, and on the Armenians who do most of the talking. If Bourdain is speaking, he's asking questions.

This, I believe, is one of the key elements of Bourdain's work that is nearly absent from all other aspects of modern american audio-visual output. I teach film editing to college Freshman. One of the most difficult things for a college Freshman to edit is a dialogue sequence. If you give them a healthy amount of scene coverage of a conversation, 90% of first time editors will give you a cut that looks something like this: Wide shot of entire room. Actor A begins to speak. Cut to Close Up of actor A. Actor A finishes their line. Cut to Close Up of Actor B. Actor B speaks their line. Cut to Close Up of Actor A. Actor A speaks their line... etc. This shouldn't be surprising. Because in America, we are conditioned to view scenes as a hierarchy. There are protagonists, who are of the most value. And there are scene stealers... who can be temporarily of more value than protagonists. Whoever is speaking, is of the most value. Whoever is making their voice heard, must by extension, deserve to be seen. This is the inherent value system almost all American Freshman film students have as they begin their journey. There is no hint that maybe a character who says little, or nothing at all, could be a protagonist, or the focus of a scene. Or that possibly no individual person is the single focus of a scene. The idea of trying to show a community, or a culture rather than an individual is a completely foreign concept. This is why Anthony Bourdain's television series were so unique. They radically insisted on committing wholeheartedly to an aesthetic and moral ideology that was completely antithetical to all other media being produced, as well as to the basic structures of our society. It feels anachronistic.

Bourdain's character as presented through his various television series reminds me first of Allan Gray, the protagonist in Carl Theodore Dreyer's 1932 German film Vampyr. When viewed in a modern context the most striking aspect of this film is the hero's passivity. The story doesn't revolve around him at all. In fact, he spends most of the first half of the film simply staring through windows where the story unfolds to other characters. Depending on which version of the movie you saw, he may even not have much of a role beyond mere observation in the ultimate killing of the titular vampire. I find myself wondering what a passive, but certainly not an apathetic, character says about a film and about the culture at large which produces such a film. Permitting myself to wax poetic a moment, if dreams are the gateway to the psyche, and our films are the collective dreams of a culture, perhaps the characterizations we present and propagate are direct manifestations of the ways in which we see ourselves or wish to be. If that is so, then Vampyr says something which feels very beautiful and perfectly contradictory to what was happening in Europe and particularly Germany in the 1930s, just as Bourdain says something beautiful and contradictory to America in 2018.

Allan Gray is a passive character throughout much of Vampyr, but also wholly empathetic to the problems of the small town he has only just wandered into. He has no ties, no family, no place in the greater horror arc of the film. Compare this to any modern American horror film with a supernatural plot. For example Hereditary, in the end, is about the reincarnation of a Satanic deity. One of the lead characters is the literal rebirth of this demon, while the other is the demon's desired host body. These characters are focused upon in the film solely because they are of instrumental importance to the plot at hand (both in terms of filmmaking, and in the conspiracy within the story.) They learn what they learn, and choose their actions based upon the ways in which the knowledge gleaned will help them, and the actions taken may save them. As an audience member, sure, I empathize with their actions. I would likely behave similarly if placed into such a fantastic situation. However, Allan Gray is not the heir apparent of his film's vampire. He is not engaged to a woman involved in a secret cult. He is a traveler who showed up in a small town during a time of distress, and observed what happened. Not to save himself, but because knowledge has inherent value. Empathy with what others are going through is as important as self-preservation. Allan Gray is a collectivist hero, because he is focused on things outside of himself. As was Anthony Bourdain.

In the Haiti episode of No Reservations Bourdain sees himself as an active participant in helping with the world's problems, if only in a small way. He buys food for a group of people who are going hungry, and accidentally incites a small riot. He recognizes the individual desire for heroism has effects, often negative, on others. He articulates this to the audience, and this lesson informs his more passive approach to travel in the future episodes he produces. Heroism for the individual, however well intentioned, is often terrorism for those outside the individual per-view. Thus observation can be of greater value than action, especially if one is unaware of the potential repercussions of an action. Another point that comes from several of the Haitians who are given the opportunity to speak during this episode: Haiti must be re-built by Haitians. Foreigners cannot do it, because they don't really know what the fallout of their aid might be, and in the end, they’re not the ones who must deal with that fallout.

In the previously mentioned Armenia episode of Parts Unknown Bourdain seeks to learn about Armenian identity, and their fight for recognition and the recognition of the genocide which taints their past. He is not Armenian, he has no stake in this ongoing controversy, but he knows there is value in witnessing those who do. In listening to them. In being an empathetic presence who genuinely cares what your problems are, however distant and foreign to himself those problems may be. America is a culture famous for its rugged individualism, and in 2018 we seem to have hit the critical mass of how far that can be taken before any sense of humanity is lost for good. Bourdain was a radical in his complete shunning of this perspective. As was Vampyr in 1932 Germany. What came next in Germany was ugly. What comes next in America will likely not be pretty. Vampyr was released to boos in Berlin in 1932. Which ultimately led in the re-editing of the film, with one change in particular, the more active role of Allan Gray in the overall plot of the hunting and killing of the Vampire, doing significant damage to cohesion of the characterization. Bourdain committed suicide in Strasbourg on June 8th 2018 leaving a gap for genuine empathetic passivity. We're left with heroes who are only gathering information and traveling the world for individualized reasonings. For personal gain, for love, for a vendetta, for fun. No one is listening anymore, everyone is talking. Those who don't talk don't get a close-up. This means the impetus for empathy and intellectual engagement is not on our heroes anymore. It is on us. The audience members. Those in Germany in 1932 were not up for that task. I truly hope that we are.

[lecinemabraque]

In Praise of Contradiction and Ambivalence

I think it can be said without much controversy that the key component of dramaturgy is tension. In cinema, there are two different kinds of tension to be exploited: Narrative Tension and Aesthetic Tension. Narrative Tension is most often used (unsurprisingly) in narrative cinema, whereas Aesthetic Tension is most often utilized in experimental works, however both modes of filmmaking thrive on their ability to cultivate some sense of tension.

I think it can be said with perhaps a bit more controversy that tension is often built through dialectics. This is essentially the basis of most contemporary Hollywood filmmaking; at its most obvious we have a protagonist (thesis) struggling against their antagonist (antithesis) and through the struggle they grow as a character into something else (synthesis). This is a very crude and basic interpretation of a methodology for building Narrative Tension, but crude and basic methodologies do seem to be the current status quo in Hollywood cinema. Wouldn't it be interesting though to break away from a pure reliance on Narrative Tension within the cinematic form? What if narrative cinema utilized the Aesthetic Tensions most commonly associated with experimental films to tell a narrative? And what if the narrative moved away from crude dialectics for Narrative Tension and found another way to create something tense and engaging?

This is where contradiction becomes a fascinating idea within the world of contemporary cinema. I would argue (I'm sure with a great deal of controversy) that contradiction provides an ability to create tension that would revitalize the form of narrative filmmaking. Think of contradiction like a tightrope walk. We have two poles opposite each other, with a wire tied to both of them. The greater the distance between these two poles, the greater the tension on the wire and thus the greater the number of possibilities for the tightrope walker. With enough tension, he may even be able to juggle while riding a unicycle across the wire. Now instead of merely progressing a protagonist towards some sort of growth based upon their struggles against an antagonist the characters are free to do anything. They can live real lives. They don't necessarily have to struggle, they can struggle without necessarily evolving. The narrative tension comes from the contradictions inherent in the narrative.

This could then be taken further by exploiting Aesthetic Tensions. Perhaps the most ideal examples of this comes from Tsai Ming-Liang's films The Hole and The Wayward Cloud.What makes these films unique in Tsai's oeuvre, and indeed the whole of contemporary cinema, is these two films unique ability to push a narrative via the calculated usage of Aesthetic tension. Tsai's filmmaking style rests in the tradition of Chantal Ackerman, he creates narratives about existing. Deleuze's concept of the Time-Image dominates his approach. Tsai allows characters to lay on the ground smoking a cigarette, just existing without any particular purpose from moment to moment. He will sit on these moments of nothingness for a profound length of time which can seem never ending to new viewers. He relishes extended periods of nothingness, and thus can highlight the profound amount of time a human life is spent just existing without particular focus. However, both The Hole and The Wayward Cloud feature five musical numbers which punctuate the film. These moments (and only these moments) follow the traditional montage rules you would expect from Hollywood cinema. The songs are big, cartoonish, fast paced, and adherent to Deleuze's concept of the Motion-Image... in direct contradiction of the aesthetic established for the majority of these films (and indeed the rest of Tsai's back catalogue.)

The contradictory nature of these musical numbers is highlighted even farther as they primarily exist as standalone scenes outside the standard narrative context of the story. The characters don't start singing within a scene, instead the scene ends there is a hard cut to the characters, usually in a location that does not feature in the rest of the film, in theatrical cartoonish costumes, and the number does not directly address any characters or plot elements from the rest of the film. When the song ends we cut back to our standard, hyper-real aesthetic with people dressed as to expected in contemporary Taiwan and minimal interruption to the sequence of time. The film continues on as if nothing had happened. One could conceivably cut all the musical numbers from the films and create a single cohesive film that makes sense within the context of the rest of Tsai's body of work. To do this however would neuter the films of their unique tension which makes them major milestones of his filmography. These films are particularly unique because Tsai utilizes both a subtle Narrative Tension and an overt Aesthetic Tension. Even more unique is that Tsai isn't using traditional tension which is bred from dialectics, but a new tension bred from contradiction. This difference is subtle yet profound, because tension that contradiction breeds has a distinct quality to it which is still highly under-experienced and under-utilized in cinema: ambivalence.

                       Contradictory aesthetics in Tsai Ming Liang’s The Hole…

                                       … and in The Wayward Cloud. 

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.” These were the words of Alain Robbe-Grillet when describing his approach to the movement of the French New Novel, and it is a quote that I believe has been proven true in the years since his seminal novel Jealousy. However, this goes beyond simple form and into the tone that is cultivated by that form. People are comfortable with both narrative and aesthetic tension to some degree as long the tension is the traditional dialectical tension that dominates not just Hollywood cinema, but cinema the world over. However, the ambivalent tension cultivated by a contradictory methodology of creating both Aesthetic and Narrative Tension leaves people feeling confused, unsure, indecisive and lost – All the typical feelings one would expect to experience at the hands of ambivalence. This is taken as a lack of tone rather than a distinct tone in and of itself because dialectical tension is the consecrated form.

But cinema, to me, is two things: the celebration of the human experience, and the exploration of the possible. Since feelings of ambivalence, and all the confused feelings it breeds, are a valid part of the human experience they are valid feelings to express and instill in cinema. And Tsai Ming-Liang's films show that is indeed possible to express these feelings with a contradictory approach to both narrative and aesthetic. Since it is possible, I'd love to see it explored more. I'd like to see this methodology explored until the form of contradiction is consecrated, and the Ambivalent Tension bred from contradiction no longer feels like the absence of form or tone, but the expression of a unique and valid component of the human experience.

[lecinemabraque]

Balzacian Realism and Brechtian Expressionism: A Taxonomy of Cinematic Staging

Henry James argued in 1905 that while Charles Dickens came the closest of any other writers, he was unable to achieve a depth of characterization on par with that of Honoré de Balzac. James said explicitly that “Balzac’s portraiture of people is his strongest gift, and it is so strong that it easily distances all competition.”1 Characterization is so loosely defined within the world of dramaturgy, that this is a difficult claim to substantiate. However, since the sentiment was shared by the likes of Emile Zola, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Freidrich Engels, we can make a safely conservative assumption that there is indeed some precedent to the claim that Balzac's characterizations are of significant merit. This strength is perhaps most easily demonstrated in a short group scene from Père Goriot. 2

Goriot, Mademoiselle Michonneu, and Poiret all came downstairs together. As the six guests and their hostess said good morning to each other and sat down to table ten o'clock struck and Eugene's step was heard outside. The student greeted the other lodgers and sat down beside old Goriot. 

“I've just had an odd adventure.” He said, helping himself generously to mutton and cutting a slice of bread which Madame Vauquer kept her eyes fixed on as she silently estimated its size. 

“This gentleman is just the sort to have an adventure.” Vautrin said to Poiret. Mademoiselle Taillefer glanced shyly at the young student. 

“Tell us your adventure.” Ordered Madame Vauqeur.

This scene is striking in its subtlety. Within the world of Hollywood plot structure, a scene like this very likely should not exist, or at very least would not be considered of particular importance. Scenes which do not not progress the protagonist towards a single goal, counteract what Raul Ruiz calls Hollywood's “Central Conflict Theory”. 3  Clearly the meat of the scene lies within the story of the adventure which Eugene is about to recount. However what Balzac does is set the stage for the roles that each of the characters in this scene will come to play later in the story. Each character's relationship to each other and their future actions can all be traced back to small moments such as this. Madame Vauquer has already revealed her miserliness in her hawk-like guarding of how much “free” bread each character takes. Taillefer exposes herself as a passive and lovestruck girl who will be easily used as a pawn for political gain. And Eugene, who comes in with an air of naieveté, sits next to the outcast Goriot whom he will become protector of, he doesn't notice the watchful eye of Vauquer or the wistful glance of Taillefer, and through his aloofness sets into motion a series of events that will drag all of them into a conspiracy and reveal their true natures to each other and themselves.

All this is expressed through movement, location, timing and eye lines. Balzac doesn't utilize his power as an omniscient third person narrator, nor is most of the important information relayed through direct dialogue or even conscious actions. This is essentially blocking. I would argue that Balzac's sense of blocking is what leaves readers with such full-fledged characterizations. He is keenly aware of the layout of every space, and where each character rests and moves within it. This makes him unique in the world of literature, and the lessons of this can be translated easily into a medium more directly reliant on blocking: narrative cinema.

Narrative cinema in 2016, leaves us with the ability to utilize seemingly limitless tools to convey a story and express feelings, ideas, concepts, rhythms, etc. (and I distinguish the year because many of these tools are relatively new to the world of narrative cinema). We can use sound, which in turn allows us the convenience of capturing people conversing or the subtle ring of a pin drop. We have color palettes, we have camera movements, we have digital recorders which allow us to record in real time, without any edits, completely bypassing the necessity for montage. However, what is arguably the most potent tool at a director's hand is one of the oldest, reaching back through theater and even into works of literature, as has been noted. That is staging. David Bordwell states that “representational cinema, like figurative painting, relies on perspective projection, that infamous optical pyramid inscribed into the lens and on the camera. The filmmaker who wishes to tell a story is obliged to pursue pictorial strategies. He or she narrates visually, and in this project the deployment of figures in space is critical.”4

Let's complicate things further by insisting on a taxonomy of this critical deployment of figures in space. Certainly, every narrative filmmaker working with human actors must deal with the need to deploy his actors in space (and I would add: time). However, this is general, and to really understand the depths, and strengths of a filmmaker's style we would want to know how they are deployed. Perhaps more importantly than how, we could ask “to what end”? One way to approach this is the Balzacian method from above, simply translated to cinema. This would be rooted in literary realism. The placement of the actors, the way they move, their motivations, all must be firmly rooted in the “reality” of the scene in which they find themselves. A man confronting his wife over his suspicion that she's having an affair would not result in pirouettes or one of the characters circling the other like a shark while atop the Golden Gate Bridge. More than likely, it would occur in a bedroom or at kitchen table. The movements themselves would likely occur on a small intimate scale, as we are dealing with two people who have spent years in close proximity to each other.

This sensibility, however, does not remove the director's authorship over a scene or his ability to editorialize. As exemplified in the excerpt from Balzac, the editorialization must fit seamlessly into the natural environment of the characters, but by slyly positioning them, one can reveal pertinent aspects of the characters' temperaments and psychology or comment on the actions themselves. In this domestic drama I have invented, a realist of the Balzacian sensibility might be inclined to set the confrontation at a dining table with a vase of flowers as the centerpiece. This placement could be exploited to reinforce the emotional separation the two characters are experiencing in spite of the close quarters the reality dictates. This type of blocking, so focused on subtlety and minutia will have the effect of emphasizing minor gestures and details. If the wife in this scene were to suddenly relent to the husband's questions, and move the flower vase to the side of the table at the exact moment she decides to tell him the truth, we are left with gargantuan implications of a small movement, that realistically, is what would (or could) occur in this type of scenario.

Of filmmakers who exemplify this Balzacian sense of staging, Eric Rohmer is one of the most strictly adherent. Rohmer's My Night At Maud's was the third episode of his “Six Moral Tales” and his first critical and financial success. The broad narrative strokes of the film are essentially the same as the rest of the moral tales: a man with a strict moral code is drawn to a woman who epitomizes his ideal mate. However, before successfully wooing her, he is tempted by a woman who seems to be the exact opposite of his ideals. Forced to make a decision, he makes the obvious choice: the first, idealized, woman. The titular Maud is the temptress in this film, a divorced, atheist, bonne vivante. A majority of the film takes place in her apartment where the devout Catholic man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is forced to spend the night.

The real climax of the film is in the sequence in which Trintignant tries to find a way to sleep comfortably, while resisting temptation (a temptation that could very well be unfounded, as Maud has given no indication that she is attracted to the man). There is a small series of gestures and movements and actions which betray the entire theme of the film as well as crucial components of these two characters' personalities. The sequence is as follows: Trintignant wanders to the far wall of the room to turn off the light. (Fig. 1) He turns around and heads back towards the chair that he intends to sleep on and Maud's bed, which she has offered to share with him. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

He stops, noticing something off putting: Maude has just removed her shirt.(Fig. 3) He focuses his attention back towards the chair, awkwardly wraps himself in a fur blanket like a burrito, and sits down, visibly uncomfortable with his feet up on the coffee table and his arms folded across his chest like a pouting child. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Maude watches him, and wryly calls him an idiot. (Fig. 5) At this insult he gives in, makes his way over to the bed, and lays down on top of the covers still wrapped in his burrito, despite Maud's claim that he'll be cold. (Fig. 6)

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

The staging of this scene, while more intimate than the communal breakfast, is staged with the very same sensibility that Balzac utilized in Père Goriot. We are able to infer truths about the characters through their actions, and their placement within the room. There is nothing artificial about the way in which the characters move. Though the blocking is indeed revelatory it is not expressionistic. This is “realism” at its peak.

It is important to note, that unlike Balzac's literature, unlike the theater, the camera here plays an extremely important role. The staging itself must work in conjunction with the placement of the camera. This is the additional element that separates representational cinema from figurative painting. Rohmer, the perpetual realist, is a master of seamlessly integrating his camera into his blocking, which is surprisingly rare. In Hollywood, the shots are designed to provide the most possibilities for an editor. The shots in this scene are profoundly rigid. It is highly unlikely there were other angles of this scene that were not used, (this is for financial reasons just as much as creative ones).

The tension of the scene is based around a single decision. There is a physical threshold within the room, between the man's chair and Maud's bed. The man's reluctance to cross that threshold is exemplified in the staging of the scene, but also in the photography. The camera is placed directly on the threshold that the man is hesitating to cross. So, we are forced to look at either him or her. One person per shot. Back and forth, the camera cuts like a ping pong ball... until the decision. Earlier I noted that this realist staging style magnifies small movements (like moving the vase of flowers during an argument at a dining room table). This scene is no exception. When the man crosses the threshold from his chair over to Maud's bed, the movement is magnified. Rohmer doubles down on this magnification by moving the camera into a two shot. The only time we see the threshold between the chair and bed is as the man is crossing it. This also provides the benefit of allowing us to see both characters in the frame simultaneously for the first time. Where as the reluctance was marked by a physical distance from each other, reinforced with separate frames. The consequences of the decision is marked by a nearness to each other, reinforced by a single shared frame.

This integration of the camera into the blocking is where the Cinema of cinema lies. The ability to naturally reinforce the power of movements and actions which do not appear bizarre or unordinary from the context of our daily lives provides us with the means to more wholly appreciate what the staging of the scene tells us, even if it's not necessarily on a wholly conscious level. The man's big to-do about wrapping himself in the blanket and sitting down in a position he will clearly not be able to sleep in, reveals something to us about his moral code, full of absolutes. It is largely a show. Something he puts on to feel safe or superior. He knows deep down, that the world cannot be understood through absolutes and his idealized sensibilities can't hold up when truly tested, but he retains them nonetheless. He needs to show people how serious he is, just as he needs to show Maude how seriously he intends to sleep separately from her. Her mocking aloofness, shows us that she sees through it all. She calls him an idiot, and he, found out, gives up the act (at least partially) and accepts his moral gray area for the night. His constant moving back and forth displays his struggle to stay true to his unrealistic sense of morality. All the while she stays in one spot, in the end it is he who crosses the threshold over to her side.

The alternative to this would be to avoid realism altogether. Instead of Balzac's literary realism, one could approach the moving of his figures in space and time with Brecht's sense of Epic Theater. This does not mean that the film cannot be experienced on the level of what is “real” or that it must be avant-garde. But rather than moving our characters in accordance to how people would move in real life, we can move them according to the way that their emotions and psychology are moving on the inside. Externalize the interior. We can call it Brechtian expressionism.

This method of staging is the preferred technique of Andrzej Zulawski. In his 1981 film Possession which is essentially an emotional horror film about the emotional trauma wrought from a divorce, he utilizes this sense of expressionistic staging to it's logical extremes. In this film, our earlier realist, hypothetical confrontation between husband and wife is realized with staggeringly different results. We begin at what could be the emotional height of Balzacian realism, with the husband and wife sitting in a manner which renders them unable to look at each other. (Fig. 7)

Fig. 7

From here the scene progresses, and as the husband (played by Sam Neil) realizes that his wife will not be coming home he lashes out physically, knocking some glasses and bottles off the table. (Fig. 8)

Fig. 8

This leads to Isabelle Adjani's character to attempt to leave, where she is pursued by Neil. She tosses all the restaurant's chairs onto the ground behind her and he stumbles over them trying to continue their violent conversation. (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9

However this is an emotionally charged scene. This could be chalked up simply to high melodrama rather than a sort of Brechtian expressionism. This is where a scene will not do justice… it is the culmination of the entire film, the constant nervous energy flowing through the actors that never allows the audience a chance to breathe, to revel in a brief moment of stasis, that creates the overall feelings of dread, anxiety, and hopelessness.

One of the quietest scenes in the movie, is one in which Sam Neil employs a private eye to follow his wife. In this scene both Neil and the P.I. Twist absent-mindedly in their chairs, in opposite directions, syncopating with each other. It carries on for a few minutes like nails on a chalkboard. (Figs. 10-11)

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Zulwaski also exploits the use of his camera, as an added component of his blocking. However, unlike Rohmer, rather than utilizing it as a way of showcasing the staging, it mimics it. The camera runs forward from a wide angle into an extreme close-up. It spins in circles around the characters. It travels up and down flights of buildings. It is every bit as filled with rage, fear, and anxiety as the performers in front of it. Sometimes the camera moves frantically as a method of tracking the movements of the actors, sometimes it seems to move independently almost as if it could smash into someone and completely take down the entire scene with it. This is the very essence of Brecht's distancing effect and here it infects all components of the film. The actors must dodge and weave to avoid physical contact with the camera. The threat of violence is tangible. The emotions are genuinely felt, the movements are pure hyperbole, and it is through them that we can see the internal.

These different staging techniques are connected in their basic roots. They consist of placing and moving the performers in a way which emphasizes the connection/relationship between them and their environment. Raul Ruiz states that “the actor has been thought of as an island. But the islands are connected. There is commerce between them. There is peace or war”.5 This is the central goal of cinematic staging. To express or emphasize these connections between islands. David Bordwell argues in his On The History of Film Style that staging within depth is a key aspect of understanding film style, and one of the most overlooked.6 This taxonomy of modes of staging aims to lead towards a path of recognizing, and analyzing the major stylistic component that the director is most immediately involved in. One of these techniques, based in literary realism aims to emphasize the connection between islands by magnifying the small, and shocking us with something genuine and real. Zizek points out in The Fright of Real Tears that Krystoff Kiezlovsky, when incorporating documentary footage in his earlier realist work, filmed a woman crying, he was profoundly moved to the point of extreme discomfort. The rest of his career, beyond this early period, the staging is very clearly in line with what I am calling Brechtian expressionism.7 These are the decisions, both stylistic and moral, that must be made by the filmmaker. Do we revel in the real and magnify tears... or do we express them externally, through movements more akin to a type of dance? I don't believe there is an answer, but I do believe the ability to distinguish these modes does a great deal in the way of understanding and analyzing a director's craft.

1James, Henry. The Question of Our Speech; The Lesson of Balzac; Two Lectures. Boston. Houghton, Mifflin. 1905

2Balzac, Honoré de. Old Goriot. London. Penguin Books. 1951

3Ruiz, Raul. Poetics of Cinema 1. Paris. Dit Voir. 2004

4Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University of California Press, 2005. 238.

5Ruiz, Raul. Poetics of Cinema 2. Paris. Dit Voir. 2007

6Bordwell, David. On The History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 158

7Zizek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory. London. BFI Publishing. 2001.

Bibliography

Balzac, Honoré de. Old Goriot. London. Penguin Books. 1951 Bordwell, David. On The History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University of California Press, 2005.

Brecht, Bertolt, and Eric Bentley. 1961. “On Chinese Acting”. The Tulane Drama Review 6 (1). The MIT Press: 130–36.

Burgin, Victor. Possessive, Pensive, and Possessed. The Remembered Film. Reaktion Books LTD. 2006 

James, Henry. The Question of Our Speech; The Lesson of Balzac; Two Lectures. Boston. Houghton,Mifflin. 1905

Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second. London: Reaktion, 2006.

Ruiz, Raul. Poetics of Cinema 1. Paris. Dit Voir. 2004

Ruiz, Raul. Poetics of Cinema 2. Paris. Dit Voir. 2007

Zizek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory. London. BFI Publishing. 2001.

Possession. Directed by Andrzej Zulawski. 1981. Anchor Bay. 2000. DVD.

My Night At Maud's. Directed by Eric Rohmer. 1969. Criterion Collection. 2006. DVD.

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The High/Low Distinction as Dialectic in Andrzej Zulawski's L'Amour Braque

In 2012 at BAMcinématek in New York was the first ever American retrospective for Andrzej Zulawski, dubiously titled Hysterical Excess: Discovering Andrzej Zulawski. Zulawski was a filmmaker so visceral and pointed he was banned from making films in his native poland, and spent decades working in a sort of cinematic exile in France and Germany. He discovered or revitalized the careers of Isabelle Adjani, Sophie Marceau, and Valerie Kapisky. His 1981 film Posession wound up on the UK censor's list of “video nasties”, effectively turning it into a black market pot of gold. How then, after such a distinctively long and controversial career, could we be just “discovering” Zulawski 41 years after his powerful debut?

Perhaps the answer comes from the ambivalence his films breed, and the ambiguity that comes from this. Zulawski has no qualms about imbuing his most horrific and daunting moments with slapstick humor or undercutting his lighter moments with psychological anguish or abuse. These narrative and formal contradictions bleed through into his theoretical aims. Zulawski's films could be both described as art and trash cinema. It could be difficult to categorize, if one insists on a singular categorization. Zulawski himself commented on this cultural penchant: “...people have this curious tendency when dealing with art or so-called art that they become rigid: With them, it has to be either this or that. In their opinion, you can't mix Thomas Mann with Franz Kafka. But in my opinion, this would make a very powerful and seductive proposition for the future of literature. They want to keep the serious things apart from the vulgar and the frivolous etc. And they're wrong!”1

1 Ferroni Brigade. Beginnings Are Useless: A Conversation with Andrzej Zulawski. Mubi Notebook. March 12, 2012.

Zulawski's complete rejection of the high/low art distinction has the unfortunate repercussion of his films languishing for decades without finding their audience, but it does position him as a unique filmmaker throughout the history of cinema. The ambivalence towards the inherent value judgements associated with the distinctions of high and low art becomes an ideal lens through which we can begin to parse meaning from his films. Perhaps none more explicitly than in 1985's L'Amour Braque.2

2 L'Amour Braque, DVD, directed by Andrzej Zulawski (1985; Paris, France: Mondo Vision, 2009).

The irony of trying to break apart the world of cinema into high cinema and low cinema, is that the medium as a whole was originally cast aside as a low art form. It is, and always has been, intended to be a popular art form, and was indeed very successful right from the beginning. It was great for scaring the audience at the sight of a train hurtling towards them. The cinemas drew a lower, rowdier caliber of audience than the theater. It was viewed as unable to hold a candle to serious art like literature. One could view this distinction as a sort of ground zero for the entire high/low debate as it pertains to cinema, which is why it is the best aspect to approach first when looking for the ambivalence presented in Zulawski's work. L'Amour Braque is an adaption of Fydor Dostoyevski's The Idiot, but more than merely adapting his novel, or mining it for material with which to make a film, Zulawski credits Dostoyevski as a screenwriter, thus lowering Dostoyevsky's writing to the level of the cinema (or some would say even lower, as the screenwriter is stereotypically viewed as the poor working shlub never achieving the respect he deserves).

Another perspective on this bold decision would be to say that Zulawski positions himself as Dostoyevsky's colleague. They are both working together, the russian writer's scenario and the polish director's mise-en-scene coming together to create the final whole, which is the film. For the film to work, one must accept this collaboration whole-heartedly, not as an homage to a great novel, for that is the way in which Zulawski assumes it will be taken. He is no more bastardizing Dostoyevsky's text, than Dostoyevsky was bastardizing the life of Christ with his novel in the first place, and this conceit is what allows St. Petersburg in the 1800s to become Paris in the mid 1980s. It allows government bureaucracy to become the shady dealings between a criminal underworld and the political elite. The film exists in the debt of a canonical literary giant, and in spite of him... reaching not only towards the academics and scholars a typical modern day adaptation of this material would attract, but the masses just looking to see some sex and violence, to be entertained (in essence, the very types of people Dostoyevsky was writing for when The Idiot was first published as a serial, before he had become immortalized and his novels were elevated to the pinnacle of great literature.) This leaves us with a complete hybrid of high and low... oddly enough this doesn't just plateau somewhere in the middle, this is not ambiguity, but pure ambivalence, bouncing like a tennis ball from one extreme to the other and wholeheartedly embracing both.

Now, after 130 years of dominating mass culture the argument for cinema as an inherently lower art form is not as prevalent, and the high/low debate seems to have been absorbed by the different schools of thought within the world of film scholarship and has even bled out into the general public's understanding of the medium. There are high-brow films and low-brow films. My family will not watch any films I suggest, because they know I will choose something much too high-brow for them to be entertained, whereas I am often met with incredulity among cinephiles when championing something like Meet Joe Black or Vanilla Sky because without even watching these films, this group of people understand that these are inherently low-brow films (Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in their prime can serve no purpose other than attracting the young female audience members of course.)

What this should reveal, is the profound subjectivity attached to the specific high/low debate being waged within the world of contemporary cinema. It depends largely upon political persuasion, familiarity with the history of the medium, and the breadth of the viewers' interest in different subject matters. In the mid 20th century, André Bazin made an attempt to ignore the high/low debate altogether and merely classify the opposing values of filmmakers and critics. David Bordwell outlines these values in his book On the History of Film Style. “...Bazin's dialectical history of style far surpasses its Standard Version predecessors. Furthermore, his synoptic scheme created a more discriminating and comprehensive version of the new story. Now the international history of a silent film harbored two tendencies. Either a filmmaker sought to overcome the realism of the medium through expressive artifice and stylization, or the filmmaker sought to enhance the realistic capacities of film by recording and revealing concrete actuality. “3 (Emphasis is mine).

3 David Bordwell. On The History of Film Style. Harvard University Press. 1997. 68.

Wherever we want to assign the label of “high” or “low” among these two tendencies is irrelevant, especially within the context of Zulawski's militant ambivalence. Just at it applies to the ancient high/low debate of medium, it can be applied to the more modern and more subjective high/low debate on the approach to realism. The general consensus on realism is that it lies on a spectrum, opposite of formalism. This is a naïve understanding of realism, and one which L'Amour Braque clearly rejects. Zulwaski understands that realism can be achieved through formalism and vice versa. Zulawski will actively seek to overcome the inherent “realism” of his photographic medium through largely his sense of staging. What in the traditional western cinematic canon would be approached with a Stanislavskian methodology of staging and performance (at least since the 1950s) with an emphasis on the face and inner psychology of the characters, here is approached like modern dance, pushing the psychology outward.

At the climax of L'Amour Braque when Sophie Marceau's Marie (standing in for The Idiot's Nastasia Filipovina) comes to the realization of just how far she has fallen from grace, dropping almost to the depths of her mother, she gives a monologue, in a single take, photographed through a wide angle lens. This is the pinnacle of what André Breton referred to as enhancing the realism of the medium, that is, avoidance of montage. Zulawski, in a film which has bombarded its audience with a montage approach to cinema, stops here and allows time and space to exist uninterrupted, refusing to interfere with a scissors and demanding we experience this performance as it occurs.

However, Zulawski turns this approach to realism on its head. We are now 80% of the way through the film. The heavy formalist aesthetic of montage by this point is taken as the “real”, at least within the world of this story. So, the sudden rigid adherence to time and space feels constructed. We don't feel we are experiencing it naturally, but that the world has been constructed for us to experience it this way. This is formalism through realism.

Marceau's performance is the exact opposite. She delivers her monologue not with the pensive approach towards this type psychological realization typical of cinema acting, but with a series of violent convulsions. Her lines are shouted at full volume in between gasps for air, draining them of all traditional emotive capacity, and rendering them a mere physical activity. (fig. 1-3)

This is realism through formalism. Nothing about the movement, the volume, or the line delivery is realistic in a traditional sense (in life or cinema) but pushing the expressive capabilities of the film's staging to an extreme that at first glance doesn't even appear logical, forces a visceral reaction on the viewer. We have to take the physical expression of mental anguish in place of the verbal.

Which is high form and which is low? This could be debated, but both are there. Is realism the pinnacle of high cinema as Bazin would claim? It is being used here, even if it is being used to the extent that it now subverts realism. Is formalism still low cinema, even if it's pushed into the type of empathy towards humanity typically associated with realism? These are the ambiguities presented in the current understanding of cinema when confronted with the blatant ambivalence towards the distinctions that Zulawski presents us with. His cinema is a dialectical one, in which every idea, aesthetic conceit, and value is attacked, leaving us with something new, which is greatly alienating.

This alienation effect, is something also borrowed from a “higher” art form, the theater, and twisted for Zulwaski's own purposes. Bertolt Brecht wrote about “various attempts to act in such a manner that the spectator is prevented from feeling his way into the characters.”4 However, the performances in Zulawski's films alienate precisely to help the spectator feel his way into the characters. One is forced to recognize the irrationality in the behaviors being presented, and to put the “acceptance or rejection of the characters' words in the conscious realm” as Brecht states, but analogously to put the acceptance or rejections of a characters emotions, actions and very being in the subconscious realm that Brecht claims should be avoided. Zulawski doesn't reject the subconscious realm as a lower realm, exactly the way he doesn't relegate cinema or formalism to a lower echelon of culture. He utilizes and compartmentalizes everything making the viewing of his films a challenging whole body workout of sorts. His films fire on all canons simultaneously, and expect the viewer to engage with all of them and wallow in the contradictions and ambivalence.

4 Brecht, Bertolt, and Eric Bentley. 1961. “On Chinese Acting”. The Tulane Drama Review 6 (1).

Bibliography

Brecht, Bertolt, and Eric Bentley. 1961. “On Chinese Acting”. The Tulane Drama Review 6 (1). The MIT Press: 130–36.

David Bordwell. On The History of Film Style. Harvard University Press. 1997. Ferroni Brigade. Beginnings Are Useless: A Conversation with Andrzej Zulawski. Mubi Notebook.

March 12, 2012. L'Amour Braque, DVD, directed by Andrzej Zulawski (1985; Paris, France: Mondo Vision, 2009).

[lecinemabraque]

The Evocative Power of Blocking : Possession

I recently watched Andrzej Zulawski's Possession and at first didn’t know how to respond to it. However, there was one aspect of it which jumped out at me almost instantly: the blocking.

I think blocking is often overlooked when analyzing a director’s capabilities. However, a compelling director can convey a fantastic amount of information to the audience just by moving his actors in the right way. A sparse film can be profound or completely vapid depending on the way a director blocks a scene. That is why the films of Tsai Ming-Liang are so powerful and one of the many reasons why Refn's Only God Forgives was unforgivingly hollow. Tsai can block a scene. Refn can't. However, Possession is not a sparse film. It is an overwhelmingly dense film. In spite of the film's density it is the blocking more than any other aspects of the film, which left me in awe of Zulawski’s capabilities.

The building of anxiety and tension is paramount to the success of a film like this. Possession is almost working within genre conventions here. Almost. There aren't any traditional horror scares (at least not at first) and so Zuluavski must create the feeling of dread and unease through other means. The main way Possession achieves this goal is through the blocking. Zulawski creates a tension by filling nearly every frame with excessive amounts of nervous energy. Everyone (and everything) is constantly moving about aimlessly, giving in to some nervous tick, standing in each other’s way, shifting their weight, twisting their chairs, rocking back and forth.

This tension begins almost instantly when Sam Neill’s character exits his car and puts down his bags, then promptly picks them back up unsure of what he wants to do, before finally putting them down again.

Should he hug his wife? Continue into his home? Get back in the cab? Already we have that anxious feeling you get when you try to talk to someone who refuses to sit down and talk at your same level, and we haven’t even heard the first line.

This is about as subtle and tame as the blocking gets. The intensity builds from there, just as all the other aspects of the film do as well. Seemingly banal moments are always injected with a sense unease from constant movement. Such as Neill pacing with phone while inquiring to Margit as to his wife’s whereabouts.

Or the most obvious one. Neill constantly rocking back and forth in a chair while having a conversation with his wife. The camera’s focus shifting violently to match his movements.

Or a more subtle one which got under my skin the most. When Neill speaks with the P.I. about following his wife. They both twist their chairs left and right. The conversation is banal enough, but the slight twisting of the chairs, off sync from each other, is a near chinese water torture moment for me personally.

In the rare moments where there isn’t some frenetic type of movement in front of the camera, Zulawski compensates by moving the camera itself in hyperactive manner (though this often happens with the movements as well.) As in the early scene when Neill presents his report to his employers. Everyone is sitting still enough in a calm, sterile room. However, the camera runs laps around them.

In a film like this, where emotions are dialed way beyond anything resembling acceptable levels, where the dissolution of a marriage is slowly destroying a young child and will inevitably and literally bring about the apocalypse, there is no reason to even attempt to "remain calm."

[lecinemabraque]

Philosophy is Dead: The Turin Horse

I finally watched The Turin Horse recently. I had been meaning to get around to it for a long time. After seeing Damnation, which just didn’t really click with me, I think I may have have subconsciously lowered The Turin Horse’s priority level in my viewing schedule. However, the movie really worked for me. The last couple nights I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I never seemed to ever drift fully into sleep. I would kind of doze off, still thinking about it, only to quickly be aroused by my own thoughts and immediately struggle to try to fall back asleep.

The film was in many ways similar to Jeanne Dielman. It shows the overwhelming claustrophobia of a daily routine. How just making it through the basic chores necessary to live can be almost unbearable. It could become impossible to accomplish anything more, let alone find a way to assign some sort of meaning to our lives. But beyond that, it also had a significant underlying theme about class systems and a certain ease of life which allows us to become intellectuals.

Nietzsche had the luxury of being destroyed by his own philosophy. He had the luxury of feeling sympathy for the beaten horse. However, when that very horse is your livelihood and the ability to make it through life is barely possible and completely reliant upon that animal’s compliance, the abstract philosophies sort of fade away. Sometimes the harsh realities of the world nullify philosophy. Even if it was coming from the “right” place. 

There is a Louis C.K. joke in which he talks about the fact that he doesn’t believe in hitting his children, even though his mother used to hit him. He notes that the difference is that he is wealthy and his mother wasn’t. She couldn’t afford the luxury of the moral high ground. She was tired and needed the most immediately effective option available. The same concept applies to the farmer’s situation with the horse. In neither C.K.‘s joke nor in Béla Tarr’s film is this a justification. It is simply revealing that life is more complicated than our philosophies allow for. 

The final aspect of the film which mystifies me are the meta-cinematic elements. The film is a bleak, pessimistic, and starkly final film. It is in many ways an antithesis to the slight beacons of hope offered in his earlier films. It is a film about giving up. Which is exactly what Tarr has done. He’s given up making films. The horse quits working, eating, and living. The girl eventually gives up living. Even the earth appears to have given up. Life is over. The sun refuses to shine, lamps refuse to light, water wells refuse to give water. Tarr refuses to make more movies. There is nothing left to say. Philosophy is dead. Cinema is over. They’ve been snuffed out by what Tarr calls “the heaviness of human existence.” All that remains is existing in a void of meaninglessness. However, even that seems nearly finished.