Where the Stress Falls

Thinking About Marienbad Again

Criterion's new edition of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad gave me the occasion to revisit the film, at a point in time when I was already hoping to do so. I've always seen Marienbad as one of the most unique of cinematic experiences; it makes viewers entirely conscious of the process of cinema while allowing them simultaneously to surrender to its larger mysteries, and, despite all the films since 1961 that imitate or parody it and the seemingly endless debates about it in print and online, the film still confounds and impresses. The final word on Last Year at Marienbad will certainly never exist. The couple might have met a year before, as the man, generically named X, insists; or they might not have, and each part of their history is a construct, a lie in an elaborate game of seduction. They might have had an affair the previous year, but, then, as Alain Robbe-Grillet's screenplay implies, he might have forced himself on her and raped her, and the woman, simply named A, could be repressing her memory of the trauma. "It was probably not by force," X says in recollection, "but only you know." Alternately, the figures who inhabit the film's baroque hotel might all be dead, caught in a way-station between this life and the next, "frozen, silent figures," as X says in voice-over," long dead no doubt." Or, referring to their previous encounter, X tells A, "I told you that you looked alive. Your response was simply to laugh."

Resnais' audience at the 1961 Venice Film Festival laughed out loud, actually, mocking the film, but that was because they initially misunderstood it. By the final shot, they all sat in what Resnais later called "religious silence." The film's opening act has always amused me too, although the reasons are entirely different. At about eleven minutes into the film, Resnais tried to sneak in Delphine Seyrig, placing her in the far right side of the frame. She stood perfectly still, making the opposite of the grand entrance:

Seyrig was one of the most enigmatic and alluring of European cinema's actresses of that generation; she could hardly be considered inconspicuous in any shot, including that one. The same might be said (well, the conspicuousness, not the allure) of Alfred Hitchock, whose figure appears roughly one minute later, hiding, apparently, on the right side of the frame in a wide shot down one of the hotel's corridors. Resnais meant that as an amusing visual reference to the man who had so deeply influenced both him and Robbe-Grillet. And, then, throughout the rest of the film, Resnais inserted numerous visual puzzles, some of which are quite complex and demanding, such as this one:

Here, X stands next to a doorway while a couple, seen in the mirror to the right, argues. The camera pans closer to the mirror and, when it pans back to the left, X is gone. The couple exit the room through the doorway, two other hotel guests enter, the camera tracks back into an adjacent room, and X appears, unexpectedly, next to a different mirror:

X then turns and walks towards the previous room and passes by the arguing couple, who originally had exited into the opposite room:

Perhaps the couple double-backed; perhaps the events here occur in some odd, reverse, asynchronous order; perhaps they occur simultaneously. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet make no apparent preference for any of these options. This is the experience of Marienbad: repeated sequences, long takes that begin with characters in one place and end with the same characters elsewhere, eyeline shots that don't match, ones that do, and no identifiable suggestion of the veracity of one sequence over the other.

As much as Last Year at Marienbad confounds the viewing experience, to a great degree it confounds conventional film criticism even more. Explaining the structure, the breaking of narrative conventions, the film's influence on European cinema across the last century, all seems a bit old-hat now. Why the film is challenging is a more interesting question. As Robert Kolker remarked some quarter of a century ago, perhaps Marienbad isn't inherently difficult but only seems so because "our expectations about narrative continuity are based only upon what movies have told us to expect." Resnais himself would have agreed. He states in an interview on Criterion's new DVD that the film is nothing more than "a simple love story" and, despite the lack of clear chronology, "we'd fully respected the laws of dramatic structure in force ever since the ancient Greeks." Of course, his approach gave critics all sorts of fits. "The fact that Resnais tells stories and experiments with form," Jonathan Rosenbaum once explained, "expels him from the avant-garde and mainstream alike." In other words, he's difficult to classify, as is this film. Contrary to Resnais' description (and to that of Mark Polizotti, who wrote an essay accompanying Criterion's edition), the plot is "simple" only at the most basic level; beyond that, the complexities accrue, like objects in a hoarder's room. M might be A's husband, but there is no proof of this. Perhaps she has a husband, perhaps a lover, or both. Perhaps she was in Marienbad, but maybe it was Frederiksbad. Who can say? Maybe A, concinved that X's story about their affair is true, leaves with him at the film's end, but didn't M already shoot her dead?

Chronology is a particular "problem" in Resnais' early films. For Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the streets of Nevers, where she grew up, become in her mind the streets of Hiroshima and vice versa. The past becomes the present; the "flashback" as a critical term loses all definition. In Last Year at Marienbad, X and A haunt hallways and rooms, view gardens and statues, play games, and talk in repetitious, maddening fashion because time has the same abstract, amorphous quality. The seduction could be happening right now or a year before, shown in the film not as flashbacks but as representations of what these characters see in their own minds' eyes. When X enters A's room and walks towards the bed, while A, in her white gown, retreats, the question arises: is this happening, is it a memory, or is it imagined? Whichever it might be, Last Year at Marienbad breaks down the typical distinctions critics and viewers make between past and present, beginning and end, the structure of a story and our "objective" understanding of it; it renders these distinctions insufficient, even obsolete. It becomes a film not about events across time, but about the subjective experience of them, the individual point-of-view, the subconscious, and it therefore requires new terminology, new ways of thinking about film.

This subjectivity makes Marienbad confounding in another dimension: it undermines the old charge that the film is a cold intellectual exercise, impenetrable, devoid of emotion. In reality, the film surveys, to borrow a phrase from the author of The Wasteland, "memory and desire", illustrating the experience of the former failing while the latter overwhelms. For all of its amusing parlor tricks, its oddly varied repetitions, Last Year at Marienbad is a nightmare of a film, not about remembering a possible past, but about the terrors of forgetting. Seyrig's A struggles to recall her previous rendezvous with X, realizing she has no recollection of it. X seems certain, but even then his memory begins to fail. Troubled, he proclaims, "no, no ... it wasn't by force," as if the proclamation itself would negate a possible transgression, eliminate the past altogether, make their affair in the present real (or make the present livable). X and A fear losing the ability to tell the difference between the present and the past, to place themselves within the passage of time. That, and not the question of the reality of their previous encounter, is the central subject of Last Year at Marienbad, and Resnais' great ingenuity lay most in fashioning a form of cinema that forced his audience to fear losing their ability as well.

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Note: I've recently joined the group at Filmwell, a film-based web site, and I've cross-posted this essay there. I'll be writing for Filmwell from time to time, and will either cross-post things here or, in the least, will announce any new posts that appear there.

Sources:
Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford, 1983), p. 156.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Alain Renais and MELO" in Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley, 1995), p. 192.

Reconsidering Godard

Jean-Luc Godard has been enjoying a minor renaissance. Since 2005, two new, thorough biographies have appeared; Colin McCabe's Godard (2005) evaluates the director's life and work through his seventieth birthday while Richard Brody, in Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (2008), examines the films individually and chronologically, chapter by chapter. In addition, a group of critics and scholars collaborated on a critical reassessment in the book For Ever Godard, published in 2007. Last year, a new 35 mm print of Godard's Vivre sa vie appeared, and Criterion released a remastered edition of Pierrot le fou. All of this suggests that critical interest in Godard is as sharp as ever, and I welcome the interest; Godard's work forms the foundation of my own experience of the cinema, and as the conversation about his work expands, that foundation only strengthens. I have to admit, though, to mixed feelings about the books, particularly the biographies, each of which seemed to promise more critical and aesthetic analysis than either offered, and yet I credit my reinvigorated interest in several of Godard's films to their appearance. Brody's commentary, for example, on Vivre sa vie had me revisiting the film for the first time in a while, and I realized, once again, how notable the film's achievements are: Godard's breaking of conventional rules of style and narrative, his use of literary and textual references, the film's inevitable course into philosophical dialogue, its thematically relevant but entirely self-conscious cinematic allusions, and cinematographer Raoul Coutard's adept use of natural light. The opening sequence still seems fresh; Godard reveals only the backs of Anna Karina's and Andre Labarthe's heads, even though they're central characters engaged in an important conversation. As Vivre sa vie nears its final acts, Karina and philosopher Brice Parain discuss the philosophy of language, and then, in a subsequent sequence, the film momentarily exchanges printed subtitles for characters' speech. But I was struck most by the film's sense of irony and its tragedy. Karina talks about responsibility, freedom, and individual action, and yet she is thrown by need and circumstance into a life of prostitution, becoming the victim of a capitalist culture that trades bodies as commodities and that forces people in need to fend for themselves, even if doing so entails forms of involuntary servitude.

Vivre sa vie is a portrait in tableaux, not a polemic, and Godard's efforts at explicit political commentary would really arrive only years later, beginning with Weekend (1967). Yet, while its suggestions about commodification and capitalism form only an undercurrent, they are nevertheless fairly insistent. This is why I'm mystified by Brody's statement that "the film is constructed as a cautionary tale of the wages of infidelity" (p. 139). At the movie's heart lies a montage of Karina meeting men in hotel rooms while her pimp, heard in voice-over, explains the rules of the profession; the film shifts into pseudo-documentary here, becomes almost clinical, as if to clarify both its intent and its underlying concern. While Karina's fortunes might have been different had she not abandoned her lover at the film's beginning, Godard's target, if he has one, is material culture, not a personal impulse.

In Praise of Love, which I revisited this week as well, bears more similarities with Vivre sa vie than the forty years between them might suggest: Godard's passion for Paris' landscape, his keen sense of visual composition, his mastery of the very medium of film (here, black-and-white film and color video), the characteristic literary and cinematic allusions, and Godard's sensitivity to tragedy, ranging in this case from love and suicide to war, genocide, and daily survival. But this Godard -- McCabe's seventy-year-old auteur -- is more blatantly polemical than his younger self; the film's anti-Americanism and repeated statements about the United States' lack of history come across loudly and clearly, particularly as the film shifts in its second half into a diatribe about a fictional Hollywood corporation's decision to purchase the story of former French Resistance fighters for a film to be directed by Stephen Spielberg. This act, Godard, implies, is nothing more than cultural and historical co-optation. He also makes the tenuous suggestion that modern capitalism, which drives Hollywood, "colonizes" (as Sight and Sound put it) the way Nazism once did and that capitalism, therefore, also demands fierce resistance. Some of Godard's claims, spoken by his characters, ring fairly hollow, and his anti-Americanism belies the passion he once had for American culture, Hollywood B-movies, and American genre films. But In Praise of Love, like Vivre sa vie, has something provocative to say about the commodifying nature of a purely capitalist culture, which has forced an aging couple to sell their story of the Resistance to save their property and has transformed Hollywood, an institution that once inspired Godard to revolutionary acts of movie-making, into an imperialist entity. And, to be honest, the film's aesthetics, and its humanism, make these ideas quite palatable. The beauty of Godard's black-and-white images, the long takes on people's faces, the melancholic musical refrain heard repeatedly throughout the film, the close-ups on personal objects, the observation of daily Parisian life, the shots of lone individuals, or lovers, on street benches suggest that anger is not the only underlying emotion in this film. In Praise of Love is a much warmer, more personal work than some of Godard's previous films and seems centered on a sincere concern about what impersonal economic systems can do to people, on the importance of history and personal memory, on the need for individuals and entire cultures to form and understand their own identities.

El Orfanato, Part 3

This is the third, and final, installment ... some additional thoughts about this film and one potential of cinema.

When Bayona's El Orfanato appeared in the fall of 2007, some critics and reviewers likened it to Alejandro Amenabár's The Others (2001). Although the two films diverge significantly in their thematic and narrative material, they bear certain similarities: both are ghost stories, both involve children, both are set in large homes, and the filmmakers themselves rely on similar old-fashioned techniques. But the films' greatest similarity actually lies far beneath their surface elements, lingering at a level that transforms these films into more than just well-crafted supernatural thrillers. The Others illuminates patterns of grief, obsession, illness, and trauma, all borne by a family longing for a modicum of peacefulness. Grace's (Nicole Kidman's) husband was apparently killed, or went missing, during the Second World War; Grace herself carries the burden of a strict, literal religious interpretation of events; her children carry a far greater burden, that of a potentially deadly disease; and the family as a whole has several traumatic experiences, not the least of which is a the final revelation of the "others" who inhabit their home. El Orfanato, likewise, has larger concerns, some of which I mentioned in part 1 of this series: motherhood, reality and the imagination, separation, loss, and suffering. The film also deals with the power of memory and the lingering experiences of childhood. In this sense, and in others, Anthony Lane is correct; the film's ultimate effect is not one of fright, but of melancholy. Laura's fond memories of her childhood lead her back to the orphanage in which she grew up, partly as a way to cope with the difficulties of her adult life, with the sick child she is raising, and with a marriage that has definitely had better days. Simón's disappearance, which forms the central plot of this film, triggers a deeper connection with her past, and, suddenly, the objects and games of her childhood, as well as seemingly lost memories of old friends, take on a new, strange vitality. As Bayona himself mentioned in an interview, El Orfanato is partly about regression, about Laura's psychological return to her childhood. This collision between past and present make it difficult for  her to make sense of all that is happening in her home; it increases the suffering she feels for her lost child. Oddly enough, this collision also becomes the foundation of hope, as Laura becomes convinced that the solution to the terrifying mystery she's facing might lie somewhere within the orphanage itself and its past secrets. But the conviction itself is complex, double-edged, creating an obsession that tears apart her family and reveals truths for which Laura is unprepared.  When reading the script, Geraldine Chaplin alluded to the film's thematic concerns by nothing that El Orfanato is about the "cruelty of hope."

All of this leads me to a larger point, at the risk of a little sanctimony: like The Others, El Orfanato is a humanistic film. Through its methods and its visceral effects, it illustrates the ethical, empathic potential of cinema, the ability of film, like other narrative arts, to open us up to experience of others. Essentially, it reminded me why I watch movies in the first place.

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Previously:
El Orfanato, Part 2
El Orfanato, Part 1

The remarks by Bayona and Chaplin appear in this informative interview at Greencine. One caveat: if you haven't seen the film, I'd recommend waiting to read the interview; Bayona himself includes some major spoilers.

El Orfanato, Part 2

In this installment, I offer a variety of observations about Bayona's film, his methods, and some of the film's  implications (to be honest, I had a little difficulty fitting all of this into a single, coherent piece,  so I'm formatting things here a bit differently). I do refer to developments in the film as a way to illustrate larger points, but I try to avoid major plot spoilers.

*To an extent, Bayona's El Orfanato has expanded my notions of cinema, which is surprising for a film relatively traditional in form and style and one directed at a mainstream audience. I typically find more formally experimental films, the work of modernist directors, films that create aesthetic distance, or films that challenge long-held standards to be more effective or instructive; but El Orfanato nicely illustrates how the standard methods and tropes of the supernatural thriller, the ghost story, even the family drama, can deliver a potent cinematic experience: this film has an engrossing narrative, a coherent visual style (more on that in a moment), and some devastating revelations.

*I've seen few films in recent years that have compelled me as much as El Orfanato to rethink repeatedly what I've seen on screen (including the ultimate usefulness of one particularly disturbing image) and to revisit a film solely to reconsider its emotional and existential implications.

*Part of this film's effectiveness relies on one of its central challenges: working through the double meaning inherent in nearly everything Laura encounters in the orphanage. The supernatural causes of her son's disappearance, the presence of ghosts, the troubling discoveries that mount upon one another might be entirely real, or they might be figments of Laura's increasingly deceptive imagination; or they might be both. Bayona continually provides evidence and confirmation for all three possibilities. If I contend that most of the events were only imagined, then I have to confront opposing evidence (how does Simón know as much as he does about the other children?). On the other hand, if I contend that all is real, then I have to grapple with the relatively mundane explanations for some of the story's mysteries.

*In its frustration of rational explanation, El Orfanato reminds me of Jonathan Glazer's Birth, an under-appreciated film about a widow who believes that her late husband's soul has returned in the body of a ten-year-old boy. Just when I think I've discovered the precise difference between reality and the imagination, I realize, as with Birth, that I might not have figured it all out. El Orfanato is a wonderful reminder that the experience of a film is not the same as that of solving a geometric proof, and viewers shouldn't expect it to be; there can be an odd pleasantness sometimes in uncertainty, although, as both Birth and El Orfanato suggest, not knowing something is, itself, potentially a form of sorrow.

*Bayona also frustrates the rationalism of his main character, particularly through a deep-seated psychological and emotional response: Laura's separation from her son and her desire to find him trigger the collapse of her rationality (despite Carlos' protestations about what's really going on), which, in turn, makes additional supernatural events seem entirely plausible to her.

*In terms of visual language, Bayona's talent lies in synthesis, in using existing methods carefully and thoughtfully. During a meeting of a bereavement support group, a woman on the far side of the room begins telling Laura about her experiences with her own child. Instead of cutting to this woman (as I expected he would do), Bayona slowly tracks towards her; the other people in the room gradually fall outside the frame until the woman, and her story, take center stage. This technique allows her testimony to seep in and reverberate against Laura's own struggles to find Simón.

*Earlier in the film, in a beautifully composed shot (I like the depth of field here), Bayona employs standard foreshadowing by revealing a key in Laura's hand, after she's locked away information about Simón. Certainly, the key will come into play again, particularly as an object in a children's game.

*In a potentially ominous moment, Bayona frames Laura from well above ground, the camera peering down at her as she crosses from the house to the shed. The shot here intensifies the viewer's anticipation of what is to come.

*Interestingly, though, Bayona eventually follows this sequence with an effective variation on a standard technique. Once Laura is inside the shed, he zooms towards her, as she turns to look at something offscreen. Normally (as in earlier sequences and also in other horror films), such motion augments the viewer's fear and then ends with a shock, but, this time around, it leads to the discovery of a simple, apparently innocent object.  Only when Laura connects this object in her memory with earlier events is she able to make more important and disturbing discoveries.

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Previously:
El Orfanato, Part 1

El Orfanato, Part 1

Note: this is the first in a series of posts about Juan Antonio Bayona's debut feature film, El Orfanato (2007). I've avoided plot spoilers. Future posts will focus on images and on several of the film's implications.

In 2005, in The New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane drew a distinction between violence and suffering; certain filmmakers revel in the former without understanding the latter. I've been thinking about this distinction lately, particularly in relation to my ongoing attempts to understand the horror genre and also in relation to Girish's recent post about his own struggles. Horror is a peculiar genre; in its excesses and methods it breaks down, as Girish notes, the aesthetic distance between the viewer and the viewed, ushering in more immediate, unimpeded visceral reactions, a climate of fear, a convulsion of fright or discomfort. Within the larger culture, as I've mentioned in an earlier post and in the discussion at Girish's, this aesthetic breakdown has attendant issues, not the least of which is a potential transgression from more immediate experiences to something more nefarious, to an entrenched tendency within this culture to be stimulated at a superficial level by images of violence and death. In Lane's distinction, the absence of pathos makes all the difference. Or, as Susan Sontag once remarked about science fiction films, failing to enter authentically into someone else's feelings leaves one only with sheer spectacle.

Juan Antonio Bayona's sorrowful ghost story, El Orfanato (The Orphanage), is so traditional and restrained that it hardly merits the appellation of "horror film". Bayona almost exclusively employs old-fashioned techniques, including bumps in the night, slamming doors, creaks and booms, darkness, swelling music, and panning shots that reveal characters in unexpected places within the frame. But the film is frightening and unsettling enough to raise similar kinds of questions about the purposes of certain kinds of film, about the differences between violence and suffering, between spectacle and empathy. It also compounds these issues by directly involving the illnesses and disappearance of children, so that even with its minimal amounts of violence (if "violence" is even the correct term) the film treads some potentially dangerous waters. This subject matter alone didn't keep me from the film; I'm in agreement with Girish that the process of engaging the arts necessitates opening up one's self to a variety of experiences and sensations (and the film's reception among some critics whose work I respect only piqued my interest).  But the wariness was there. By the film's closing minutes, I realized I was prepared for the wrong thing; I hardly expected this film's strong pathetic impact and its effects on my understanding of narrative, style, and genre.

Given Bayona's rookie status and his reliance on conventional methods, some critics were bound to suggest that the film is inherently time-worn, to point out that Bayona and his screenwriter, Sergio Sanchez, quote liberally from older films (which they do, though, to their credit, their influences are largely literary). To borrow from Lane again (in this case, his perceptive review of the film), Bayona seems beholden to the "near-pedantic wish to make the details lock and hold -- which by tradition marks out the débutant." He structures El Orfanato with the proficiency and acumen of a watchmaker. The film's exposition is steady, its shocks carefully spread out; the transitions across the "acts" are relatively seamless; the characters, images, tropes, and clues all connect in one fashion or another. The film "is constructed," as Lane writes, "like a long, intricate session of hide-and-seek, littered with tactile clues -- a doorknob, a rag doll, an ice-cream wrapper, a trail of seashells." Bayona's foremost talent is for creating tension. In one of the film's more dramatic moments, he robs the film stock of its color, envisioning a séance through the cold, blank greenness of closed-circuit television monitors (the medium is nicely played by Geraldine Chaplin, the famous actor's daughter). In a pivotal moment late in the film, Bayona alternates between close-ups and long shots, carefully building fear by limiting what the audience, and his main character, Laura (Belén Rueda), can see. This sequence is particularly potent because it associates with Laura's memories and her desire to solve a mystery; despite a strong fear of the unexpected, I was entirely alert to the screen simply out of sympathy.

Bayona's cinematographer, Oscar Faura, is also on his debut feature here; together, the two employ a relatively conventional visual language, but Faura's photography contains some beautiful images: a wide shot of Laura and her adopted son, Simón (Roger Princep), crossing a beach on their way to a seaside cave, a close-up of a map on a wall as the camera tracks a series of pins while it also shifts its focal plane, the close-up of a key in the palm of Laura's hand. Rueda's performance as Laura bears the same kind of craftsmanship, the same kind of attention to detail and nuance. Her performance would be mesmerizing even with the sound entirely off. For she conveys her fears and feelings through the tenseness in her shoulders, the movement in her eyes, the lines of her mouth, her posture, and her facial expressions; concerned curiosity appears in the simple movement of her brow, while, in her eyes, I could sense the process of Laura searching her thoughts and then realizing something. It is somewhat of a testament to Rueda's proficiency as an actress that, during moments in which she shares the frame with other actors, I had difficulty looking at anyone else.

Given the film's carefully orchestrated moments of terror and its ghost story, my initial experience centered on the basic mysteries of the plot, on my own struggles with the film's sense of discomfort. But El Orfanato rises above this initial experience by being about, and achieving, much more. As a ghost story, a supernatural thriller, a horror film, and a drama, it traces all of its subjects in a number of inter-connected elements and situations, including Simón's imaginary friends, a mother's devotion to her child, allusions to Peter Pan, a husband's dismissal of the supernatural, Laura's attempt to reclaim some of her past, figures who reemerge from that past, the implication that Laura might be imagining things, the challenges faced by orphans who bear various physical or mental disabilities. With all this, El Orfanato becomes a film about childhood, about motherhood, about memories and the collision between past and present; it becomes a film about retribution, about illness, about the relevance of fables; about the differences between reality and the imagination, about madness in the face of loss; about rationalism and separation and life and death; most of all, it is about suffering. That is this melancholic film's ultimate mark of distinction.

Climates

The first six minutes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2006 film, Climates, are nearly silent, save for the hushed, ambient sounds as a couple walk through the ruins of a Roman temple: a pair of sandals grating against the dirt, the buzzing of flies and whistling of birds, the shallow, arrhythmic breathing of a young woman named Bahar, as she sits on an embankment and begins to weep, while her lover, a university professor named Isa, takes photos for his art history class. Ceylan eschews dialogue through most of the opening sequence because he's intent on establishing the couple's emotional situation through image and metaphor. The first shots of Bahar, which open the film, announce her boredom and frustration, and the ensuing close-ups of her weeping declare her sadness, her despair, and her recognition that their relationship is decaying, much like the ancient structure that stands before them.

To an extent, Ceylan emulates director Michelangelo Antonioni here, one reason, among many, why Climates has been on my radar for some time. Antonioni often foregrounded his characters against imposing architecture to convey their existential anxiety and relied on visual compositions instead of explanatory dialogue to create his narratives. Ceylan employs a similar approach, but he is hardly an imitator; not only does architecture figure prominently only once in this film, but Ceylan is clearly a proficient craftsman in his own right: he balances tone well, employs music minimally to great effect, prefers an observational style composed of relatively static takes, and unobtrusively situates his characters in their environments (as he does in his previous film, Distant, in which modern luxuries such as televisions, answering machines, and the internet exacerbate people's difficulty connecting with each other). In Climates, Ceylan reveals the status of his characters' relationship by their position in the frame, something Antonioni did, but Ceylan is less forceful and more elegiac. In the opening sequence, the Roman columns obstruct Isa's and Bahar's views and block them off from each other. During the couple's visit to the seaside resort of Kas, Bahar sits outside on a balcony, Isa lies indoors on a small bed, while a doorway looking out onto the Mediterranean separates them. When the two sit apart on a beach, a sailboat, off in the distance, moves slowly across the space between them.

As such sequences readily suggest, Climates is partly about encroaching isolation and separation, about the growing distance between two people in a doomed relationship. But on a more precise level, the film centers on the enduring ambivalence that results from separation; parting is not sweet sorrow, but a prolonged, painful exercise full of compromises, equivocations, lies, advances, and regressions. Confident declarations of independence result in tears or misguided behavior; Bahar's facade of fortitude only momentarily masks her inner emotional turmoil, which manifests itself in private; Isa dishonestly pleads with Bahar for another chance; the statement that "it's too late" is followed by a late-night rendezvous. Ceylan varies the Antonionian theme of isolation by shading his characters in a different way, suggesting that within the increasing isolation between two people exists the understandable urge to resist, to shore the relationship against its inevitable ruin.

In the process, Ceylan reveals himself to be a particularly skilled interpreter of human motivations. Isa is condescending, patronizing, and prone to sexual and moral indiscretions, a man of common failings and the central cause of the break-up; he has difficulty accepting Bahar on her own emotional terms, carries on an illicit affair, and, though driven partly by nostalgia for the way things once were, is almost immune to Bahar's emotional olive branch, which he dismisses in the cold, dark corner of a hotel room.  A conversation about dreams and an overdue moment of connection turns into a perfunctory discussion about work schedules and airplane departures, and Ceylan uses the otherwise uneventful dialogue in this hotel-room scene to suggest how weak and self-serving Isa really is. Climates is an unflattering but nuanced portrait of a deeply limited man.

Ceylan traces the collapse of their relationship, as the title implies, across changing seasons and climates.  The difficulties begin in the summer, and the separation continues through a cold, rainy autumn. The final collapse arrives, appropriately, in the dead of winter. Along the way, Ceylan alters the color palette thematically, beginning with a warm, golden amber:

And then shifting to a much cooler look of muted blues and grays:

But, then, he shifts the color palette again with the stark, whitened image of Bahar in the snow:

The dead of winter, the snow's symbolic burial of the past; and, echoing the close-ups of Bahar in the film's opening frames, the images here emphasize how people interested in ruins sometimes unfortunately create their own.

TIFF 2007, Part 2: The Man from London

Bela Tarr's The Man from London is among my favorite films from this year's TIFF. Its formal properties are readily evident, including the bravura, twelve-minute opening point-of-view shot that moves up the bow of a ship, back and forth across docks, and then over to a train as it departs, all the while shady characters move about in the frame. The pitch blackness of the night seethes; by the visual tone alone, I could tell this is a noir film, or in the least a variation on the genre. Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), the lead character, witnesses a crime, acquires a large sum of money, and has the chance to change his life until the nihilism of the world and of the dreary sea-port in which he lives seal his fate and turn potential resolutions into resignations. Around the relatively linear plot, Tarr weaves lengthy takes, crawling panning shots, stark contrasts in his black-and-white palette (there seems to be very little gray here, in more ways than one), and the "heaviest" close-ups I've seen. Essentially, he robs noir cinema of its momentum and characteristic plot-centered intensity and, in doing so, actually augments its spiritual aesthetic. The intently languid visual style, the stretched-out form, underscore the moral, existential darkness, provide the film's moral shape and feel. Maloin exists in a cycle of stagnant emptiness, and then falls into the abyss of wrongdoing and guilt, and Tarr's slow, lengthy approach exacerbates these states of being.

The imagery is almost ridiculously beautiful: a tracking shot of Maloin walking away from the suspended glass-and-wood "cave" from which he watches the harbor at night, the overexposed light bursting through a bedroom window, just before Maloin's wife (Tilda Swinton), in silhouette, closes the shutters. To a degree, noir films are an exaggeration of environment, behavior, and dialogue, but, with Tarr's imagery, the genre, and even cinema itself, take on a heavy illusory quality. When Maloin sits at a bar while a man plays pool nearby, the voices on the soundtrack made me think, momentarily, that the two were conversing. Tarr's panning shot in the scene eventually reveals that the conversation actually involves two other men in an adjacent room. When the camera pans back to the bar, Maloin is, unexpectedly, sitting somewhere else, in a different portion of the frame. Before the screening, Tarr told the audience to trust their eyes, and I suspect he had such illusions and dissociations in mind. One of the film's apparent dissociations occurs in the gap between Swinton's overdubbed Hungarian dialogue and the movement of her lips; some viewers I spoke with found this to be a distraction, but in my mind it added to the feeling of illusion. Illusion, artifice, the created image: more than any other film I saw at TIFF, The Man from London made me constantly aware of the medium of film.

I was perhaps taken aback most by Tarr's precision, by his sense of rhythm. He begins or ends a shot and has characters enter and exit the frame at exactly those moments that reveal something about a character's experiences or feelings, that move the plot one plodding step forward, that place a vital punctuation mark on a visual statement: a panning shot that ends with a moment of joy as men dance in the bar; a lengthy close-up of a woman that conveys her struggles with loss and dignity; metaphorical imagery throughout that suggest changes in Maloin's destiny. The craftsmanship seemed seamless and, honestly, left me amazed, sitting after the house lights went up, trying to amass what I had just seen.

Descending

Under normal circumstances, the thought of endorsing a horror film gives me pause, especially if my endorsement seems to apply, by extension, to the genre as a whole. I admit I'm not an avid fan; my distance is largely a matter of sensibility, but also because I find the genre's course in recent years into graphic splatter films troubling, affixed as it is to the spectacle of torture and killing, marred, by and large, by a lack of emotional sophistication, and illustrative, I believe, of inadequate responses within our culture to violence, death, and aggression (1). Historically, horror films have dealt (sometimes deftly) with external threats, evil forces, the unknown or supernatural, but whether or not they help us illuminate our primal impulses or reinforce them is an open question. I certainly don't think their popular appeal is entirely neutral; images wield remarkable power, and within every genre, every creative trend, lies larger cultural implications.

My distance from the genre actually (and somewhat obversely) explains my occasional admiration for some its more notable exponents, which stand out, especially these days, like bright statistical outlays. Some of these films might now be deemed "old-fashioned"; more than mere shock treatments, they harbor a conceptual proficiency and a relatively incisive treatment of human situations. Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) has its memorable moments of telekinetic terror, but it impresses most with is keen observations of social ostracism, the confusions of puberty, the specter of religious monism, the social and emotional constrictions of middle-class culture. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) works like a perfectly calibrated clock, winding its way, gradually, to midnight, until the darkness of the unknown, the supernatural, of people's willingness to sacrifice others for their own aggrandizement, takes hold. Alejandro Amenabar's The Others (2001) employs stock ghost-story elements, such as slamming doors and other eerie noises, but turns a potential genre exercise into a melancholic fable about the oppressiveness of disease, the indelibility of loss, the horror of war, and the strictures of religious obsession.

I wouldn't place Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) on the same plane as these films, but it is an exception to the general status quo. Six women have traveled from the United Kingdom for a spelunking expedition into the caverns of the Appalachian Mountains, a ritualistic exercise not only for post-modern female bonding but for emotional expurgation, as Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) continues to suffer from a life-altering trauma that befell her a year prior and that Marshall portrays almost too efficiently early in the film (he employs a vantage point that makes viewers feel entirely helpless). Once inside the caves, which are fairly wondrous, the terrors begin: first, as spatial and psychological assaults, when the women tunnel through passageways, climb across wide chasms, and begin to fear that their only apparent exit has closed; second, as physical assaults, after hostile subterranean creatures emerge from the uncharted caves. But the violence, which is brutal and unremitting, is never exploitative, never pure spectacle. It is usually not madly meted out by one human against another (as it is in some contemporary slasher films), is motivated primarily by natural instinct or human error, and, most of all, serves the film's larger emotional themes (2). And the six women are not the conventionally meek, objectified stereotypes common to the genre. Marshall has made them smart, skilled, athletic; Sam's (MyAnna Buring's) crossing of a cavern roof at a dramatic moment affords her the kind of power typically reserved for male characters and recalls Ellen Ripley's resourcefulness in Ridley Scott's Alien.

The film's harsher critics have argued that the women are barely distinguishable from one another, but I suspect these critics might have relied too heavily on common situational, narrative differences and on distinctions usually delineated by back stories or conveniently elaborated traits. Here, the differences are largely emotional and temperamental. Beth (Alex Reid), perhaps Marshall's most sympathetic character, is kind, thoughtful, and intelligent, comforting Sarah in moments of crisis, and, later, eliciting this dark film's most emotionally thematic word: "sorry." The obviously but not emptily named Juno (Natalie Mendoza) is full of contradictory impulses. She is a brash leader and a coward, a loyal friend and a traitor, a woman ultimately unable to acknowledge the dishonest acts she commits, not because she is malicious, but because she is, quite simply, flawed. Her intentions are simultaneously pure and misguided, as intentions often are; she brought her friends into the unmapped caves for their own glory, to be the first to discover and name them, to give Sarah the opportunity to feel and live again, but her clouded judgment only brings disaster (3).

The Descent marks the descent, the disintegration, of a friendship. Sarah and Juno might never have been that close, but the ties that once bound them fray in the caves as they drift apart and become victims of the common human frailties of misunderstanding, self-interest, and carelessness. Marshall conveys their differences in simple, brief shots of Juno's unspoken response to Sarah quoting an epigram, of Juno's telling glances at the other women, of Sarah's decision to walk away when Juno apologizes for an earlier failure. Marshall also uses the humanoid assailants for similar ends. They certainly bear a degree of unbelievability, but they are very much like creatures in a Victorian novel, simultaneously real and metaphorical, the emblems of the predatory, base emotions separating these women; they tend to strike, after all, at crucial moments of discord. Marshall is taking us down, deep down, into the primal muck, the dark abyss, into the violent fissures within human relationships, into paranoia, claustrophobia, anxiety, and rage. And, visually, he conveys this human darkness through long, wide shots of cave passages, dipping the entire frame in blackness, save the narrow area lit by a head-lamp or a flashlight:

Using a wide-angle lens, Marshall and his cinematographer, Sam McCurdy, create a palpable sense of downward movement (the literal becoming figurative), as in this shot where one of the women (barely discernible about one-third of the way down) enters the mouth of the cave:

Marshall also makes the most of tight, enclosed spaces:

If the passageway in the image above resembles a womb, or even an egg, the symbolism is hardly accidental. The imagery of the caverns is decidedly primal, even sexual: narrow passageways, phallic stalactites, the various, violent scenes of impalement. And if a purely psychological reading in this manner seems excessive or unwarranted or, more like it, a bit too easy, in the least the womb-like cave is the quintessential environment in which base emotions emerge and then conquer, where a transformation, a re-birth, into something more primal occurs. Sarah's grief, her rage at the injustices meted out to her, have been present for a year, but have been subdued. Way below the controls of civilization, they unleash themselves. The Descent traverses her long, downward spiral into madness.

Marshall clearly has his cinematic antecedents right; he pays homage (often through direct visual quotation) to John Boorman's Deliverance for its emphasis on terrors in the wilderness, and to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now for their emphasis on the journey into psychological and emotional madness. Perhaps the film's closest affinity is with Scott's Alien for its reliance on physical space and environment and its similarly brilliant use of set design. Marshall's symbolic, cultural acumen is perhaps most impressive, though; the cave, historically, has served as the cultural emblem of human nature, as the location of female power and transformation, as the source of "dark knowledge" (4). These significations reverberate through the caverns of these mountains, and, if the final frames of the original U.K. ending of The Descent are any indication, Sarah is literally and metaphorically miles beyond the woman she once was.

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(1) In her essay "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag argued that science-fiction films (particularly those of the immediate post-WW2 era) represent "an inadequate response to the terrors that inflict people's consciousness." I think that some of her conclusions apply equally well to horror films, especially this observation: "Science fiction films are one of the purest forms of spectacle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone's feelings."  Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster," collected in American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate (New York, 2006), pp. 316-329.

(2) Here, I have to resort to description (the violence serves larger purposes) instead of concrete examples because I'd prefer not to rely on major plot spoilers . Usually, I think film analysis really requires specific references, but The Descent is so tightly wound, its experience so predicated upon its surprises, that I think it's best to refrain from openly discussing certain parts of the plot.

(3) Marshall establishes the temperamental differences between Beth and Juno in an early scene in a hospital. He shoots Juno in close-up and then goes wide to observe her actions, drawing out a significant difference in emotional behavior: one woman stays, another flees. While Marshall seems enamored of the conventions of the horror genre (cheap shocks, gore), he's also fully cognizant of its limitations, and I think his relatively nuanced portrait of the lead female characters helps him to transcend those limitations.

(4) See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), especially chapter three, "The Parables of the Cave."

See the comments section for some further thoughts on writing about this film and my experience of it.