I Know Where I’m Going!

                    “Have you been there?”        —————-       ”Often! In my dreams.”

Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) knows where she’s going. She wants to marry a man and she marches north to reach him. But the great, unexpected thing about Powell and Pressburger is that she didn’t quite know where she was going. She ended up somewhere else, perfectly happy, driven by her feelings rather than by an abstract figure demanding her from offscreen.

I Know Where I’m Going! comprises one of my earliest film viewing memories. I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw it but I remember almost nothing of it specifically, except for a lady in an ocelot-print hat and, later, her skipping across Caledonian hillsides.

Watching it now, very likely more than fifteen years after my first and only viewing, every single shot is striking me as familiar. There is something remarkable about that, and obviously this film had such an effect on me as to imprint my memory in this way. Why is this? There are certain films which I have seen more recently and have less memory of. Films which I cannot remember having seen until a moment quite far in, when my memory triggers. And even though I can be quite sure I’ve seen something, my cognizance might be limited.

This is what cinema does. It affects the viewer in ways that may not register, definitely, obviously, but bury themselves deeply as part of memory. Stories and cinematic experience can become part of our own experience. It’s as though we lived through something that we experienced through the screen. And these moments can be just as important as those we live through with our bodies. Our bodies are imperative to our viewing of film, to our envelopment in another world, our presence within that world, and our relationship to characters.  Daniel Frampton writes:

For Munsterberg the film-world is a complete transfiguration of the real world. Film moves away from reality, and towards the mind. It is the mind that creates this transfiguration, recreating the world in its own form. Film should therefore be seen as its own imagination (even when it initally looks normal and realistic).

And it is its own imagination. In this case, with I Know Where I’m Going!, it had become a separate part of my memory. The film existed distinctly in my mind rather than my reality, and yet, free of temporality, it was able to reinvent itself in my reality. But the thing about the cinema is that it can blend with our reality, through sound, image and sensation. Just like dreams.

Barbara Stanwyck again

“Personal relationships, even ones of the greatest love and passion, that you think will last forever, those fade. They can’t stay the same, but it’s looking like Double Indemnity is forever. What we put on the screen in the end, that was what counted.”

Thanks Barbara Stanwyck. Way to be depressing at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Stereotypes

So, I have come to a realisation, and something has reached a point of solace in my mind that has, for a long time, been up in the air. I realised this when reading a blogger response to Red Dog - the blogger claimed that it had too many stererotyped characters (the outback okker, etc.) which detracted from the overall scenescape of the film.

Now this kind of thing I find objectionable. In a film, it is impossible to give every single character (particularly if there is a periphery, which in most cases, there is) an in depth character development. Auxiliary (and lesser) characters will inevitably be drawn as stererotypes, almost as caricatures, because what other choice is there? There is often no time or opportunity to explore a template extra beyond surface value.

And the thing that we all know about stereotpyical creations is that they do actually exist. There is method behind the madness. There is substance there, reality. I realised this particularly when I though about Red Dog - I have met vulgar, aggressive, seemingly heartless drunks with little intellect. They do exist. And when one meets them , in passing – which is how the spectator (and, by assumption, the lead character/s) does meet them – nothing much is revealed beyond this surface personality. Which is fine, because often, in what we see of people in the outback, they don’t have anything beyond that. As passersby, we often only see that one level of personality. In the cinema, it’s the same deal.

Rainbows

“I don’t know why but when it rains, it rains on me. The sky just opens and when it rains it pours. And I look up and a rainbow appears like a smile from heaven, and darling I can’t help thinking that smile is yours.”

There is something great and wonderful about life that I have just realised. Rainbows are truly splendiferous, magical things. When I was a kid, rainbows were great, but they became so clouded by the apocryphal story of the troll (or was it a leprechaun?) and the pot of gold, that it was as though the actual rainbow didn’t even enter into the equation any more. I would notice a rainbow and immediately think to the myth. The image, the reality, was secondary.

My strongest memory of a rainbow was on one of my birthdays (unfortunately the year specifics have blurred into each each, and probably the separate days too, although I can still remember piecemeal celebrations). I was playing tennis at Blackburn Tennis Club and, being late December (and not Christmas day, and the 1990s), the weather was perfect. The sky was a rich expanse of blue, without a cloud to be seen. But as I reached up to lobby a ball over the net I saw a rainbow in the sky — against all odds, as it had not rained for days, or weeks, or however long. At least not that day, and the rain and sunshine meeting was the only way for a rainbow appear. Still is, to my knowledge. Needless to say, as a rather precocious child, I believed that rainbow appeared just for me, on my birthday, regardless of its earthly/natural presence. And this only added to my growing sense of abandon towards rainbows: now I had my own special memory, they no longer mattered.

But in the last few weeks, where Melbourne has experienced quite a few rainbows (and double rainbows!), I have developed a newfound respect for them. No, respect is not the right word. It is something beyond appreciation. For the phenomenon of a shooting arch of a multicoloured spectrum across the sky is not an unimpressive one. At least to the unscientifically minded, like me, as I have no idea really how light and air and other things work……clearly. But, rainbows truly are great. I promise to appreciate them forever more.

Day will become night. And the night will be at the end.

At the Melbourne International Film Festival’s screening of Béla Tarr’s long anticipated The Turin Horse last night, a false start made everybody nervous. The first screening of the film, several days prior, was strewn with mistakes and mood-breakers, in a film where mood is possibly the most important element. About fifteen minutes behind schedule, The Turin Horse began, albiet a little out of line with the screen, not reaching its frame, with the border of the print projection visible. While at first this really irked me, so much so that I was tempted to leave as it was impeding my involvement in the film space, I began to appreciate it as a constant reminder that 35mm was being projected onto a screen. It is still worthy of something that needs appreciating. And this quote, which I have chosen as the title, while a bleak prophecy, could also describe the experience of MIFF-going. Think about it.

The films of Béla Tarr are all about affect (or at least I’ve deduced this from the three I’ve seen: this one, Man From London, and Damnation). The Turin Horse, almost free of dialogue, has nothing within its text to distract from it. We watch their faces, their environment, and nothing more. Some people might call this boring but really, the emotional pull from the screen is so intense that it’s impossible to think about anything else, let alone feel bored. The affective resonance is so powerful that even though I had considered leaving early to go to sleep,  I could not tear myself out of the cineworld.

The father in The Turin Horse had an incredible face. So many contours, wrinkles, so much experience and hardship and melancholy all contained in a single face. And with so many slow camera movements, along with stillness, there was so much time to look at every single part of it. With a bung eye, he always seemed to be looking back at us as we looked at him. It was eerie, of course, but there was an element of sympathy too. As he first eats a potato, the wild, primeval energy he puts into it communicates all we need to know about him. When I first saw this six weeks ago, I wrote that this act of eating a potato communicated everything there was to him, as well. But now I must reconsider. There is the depth of a lifetime beyond his eyes, which we can only imagine, if we must. Yet Tarr does draw us close to the father through sound, using the effect of his eating as well as the diegetic soundscape of the gale, and the constant flickering of the fire, pulls us sensorially closer to him.

Later in the film, when the daughter heads outside to the well, the wind is absolutely filling the soundscape. A problem; the well is dry, she sticks her head in (via the camera), the sound of wind is quelled, and returns as the camera pulls out into the open. Regardless of the immense technical difficulty of a movement like this, which as part of a long take has followed the ‘action’ from inside the house to the well, this is an amazing thing to see on film.

When the father eats a potato, I could feel how hot it was, fresh from a pot of boiling water and burning his hands and mouth. This is how I react to hot food, and I know exactly how he feels. And how the woman feels, for that matter. I felt it too, at that moment.

As something of a narrative marker in The Turin Horse, a man comes to visit to buy some palinka. He gives a hearty monologue about the destuction of the town, the world and humanity. It seems at first over the top, out of hand, but really, it is the world that’s out of hand. The pattern of humanity: touch, acquire, debase. Or acquire, touch, debase. There is no God or gods, no good or bad, the world won’t get any better because the one big change that we get has already come. This is an onslaught, but it’s honest. 

At one point, the daughter washes her father’s white shirt and hangs it up to dry. For more than a few moments it occupies the entire frame, and this frame is held for so long I began to make out a face in its creases. Whether this was intended or just in my mind, or whether others saw it too, I don’t know. But it meant something to me. This woman’s face, like her fathers, was so expressive, so full of experience. She was lonely, of course, as she was pretty much all alone. This is mirrored by the woman’s face framed by the window, the house and in turn the camera frame as she sits inside, trapped, both figuratively and literally. And while it seems as though she and her father are alone, there are other faces, other signifiers of familiarity and comfort. The face in the shirt, faces in the interior walls, faces in the door of the stable.

When things begin to behave out of order, as Nietzsche’s when understanding of the world is broken down, even the smaller things begin to change. On the fourth day, the man has two shots of palinka, then chugs from the bottle. The camera rests on the table, Palinka dripping down the side, not abiding by order. And the world follows. The visitor’s warning is legitimated, although also overcome. He claimed that there was to be a big change in the world, but it had already come. A mysteriously unaggressive gypsy, belonging to a group who terrorised the father and daughter, gave the woman a book. She recited a chapter whose ominous prose portented the end of the world: “Day will become night, and the night will be at the end.” On the fifth day, the gale prevents them from moving on to an imagined better place. They arrive home, and darkness falls. The lamps cannot be lit although full of fluid. Even the embers go out. The horse will not eat or drink. On the sixth day, the stove fire has gone out, and even the simplest act of boiling a potato cannot be achieved. This couple’s means to existence has expired. 

While we know it is over, as the narrator tells us, the cinematographic illustration of this desperation is poignant and precise. The horse was left alone in darkness, helpless, all but deprived of agency. The father and daughter are left in the darkness, without fire, without access to the outside. The gale is over, and there is not even the crackling sound of the fire to fill the space. There is nothing left. 

Regular Béla Tarr composer Mihály Víg has written a harrowing score both upsetting and magestic, which definitely brings the film a grandeur that may otherwise have been missing. Another gripe I had with the MIFF screening last night was that it was not particularly loud enough – whether this had to do with my position in the cinema, the somewhat lack of confidence in the projection room, or an altered memory of my first viewing, I’m not sure, but I can say that I definitely expected the soundtrack to more intensely fill my sphere of sonic reception. Nevertheless,  and it is always an absolute pleasure to view Tarr’s chiaroscuro, immaculate slow camera, pulling and tracking, affective faces, sound and image. And with this grandesque symphony I was filled with joy and a deep sadness again, continually overwhelmed by its existence. Thank you, world.

Beyoncé Run the World!

There is a lot of stuff going around lately about Beyoncé, and her really incredible song (and clip) for Run the World (Girls). And, the thing that got me really excited, which was her performance in honour of receiving the Billboard Millenium Award. With both the clip and the live act, the whole scope of each performance is spectacular. There is sumptous cinematography, impressive kinetic movement, hundreds of (real or simulated) powerful women in command of their bodies, and let’s be frank, fantastic clothing. This should be enough to impress almost anybody.

But with the criticism of Beyoncé such as that found in this article, I am reminded of why this trend to “review” through gonzo-criticism can discredit not only the writer, but also harm to subject as well. Through ignorance and, as it seems to me, bitter criticism just for the sake of making an argument, this article denounces Beyoncé’s empowerment and simultaneously administers potential damage to the whole concept of Girl Power.

I just have to start off by mentioning the petty and slightly insolent accusation that Beyoncé rips off other artists’ work, with specific reference to the similarity between her video clip and the photography of Pieter Hugo. Sure, it seems very possible that Beyoncé’s director Francis Lawrence was conceptually guided by the work of Hugo, but to claim that Lawrence’s design of plastering the columns of an underpass with posters is an imitation, is just too petty. I think the author needs to check out a real underpass some time.

There is an incredibly huge different between cinema and film art, and still photography. And while there does seem to be a similarity between the video clip for Run the World (Girls) and Hugo’s work, I have not done enough research to see whether the critic’s claims are substantiated. I can say that to assume Beyonce might have just gone along with someone else’s idea, while clearly just using this assumption to then make an argument, is hypocritical and very bad practice.

The comparison between Beyoncé’s performance at the Billboard Awards, and the 2010 performance of Italian artist Lorella Cuccarini, is pretty shallow. Sure, some visuals are similar, but never identical as the writer claims. Isn’t this just indicative of a trend? Kanye West (Power, Runaway)  has gaudy makeup, huge wings, birds, columns, powerful animals symmetry, yada yada yada. It happens all the time, and yeah, influences are global.

I might be biased. I love Beyoncé, and she changed the way I see music. Sure, she’s music royalty, she’s (I’m assuming) worth millions, and she’s married to Jay-Z, but she has put herself out there for a huge part of her life and makes people know that it’s okay to do so. When this writer is  worried about what her actions are “telling little girls”, the point is completely blindsided. Beyoncé is doing what she loves, and she makes other people happy. Certainly me, and a whole lot of other people too, of all ages. When people see art, which is such a huge, influenced and intertextual discipline, prudishness only hampers experience. Let’s share.

Always Barbara Stanwyck

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

From Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck, by Ella Smith:

Forty Guns (filming in 1957) would be Stanwyck’s last movie until she began Walk on the Wild Side in 1961. Asked by the San Francisco Examiner (while she was starring in The Big Valley) why she had done no films during those four years, Stanwyck replied: “Because noody asked me. They don’t normally write parts for women my age because America is now a country of youth.”

Speaking of the kind of films Hollywood had made prior to this, Barbara Stanwyck said:

Something is gone. They were beautiful, romantic films, not as stark and realistic as today’s and I loved doing and watching them. Now we’ve matured and moved on. The past belongs to the past. But don’t get me wrong. Just because I’m over 50 doesn’t mean I’m dead or in a wheelchair. I go with these new trends and enjoy them and respect them for their own values.

Sounds familiar.

Alain Resnais at the MC

Slow, awesome, distant and personal images fill the cinema of Alain Resnais. His films concern the unreliability of memory and the sadness that comes with the loss of the past. In time, past and present, in remembering and forgetting, everyone feels a heartache.

In April and May, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will screen six features as part of their retrospective tribute to Alain Resnais. The exemplar of French filmmaking is still working today (his most recent film, Wild Grass, released in 2009), but this season will focus on the director’s earlier works, made in a time when the world was having troubles of a different kind. A key member of what was dubbed the “Left Bank Group” of filmmakers, including Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, and Chris Marker (all of whom have been featured at the Cinémathèque in recent years), Resnais was also at the forefront of another seminal moment of French cinema, the French New Wave. Amongst such contemporaries as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Resnais is an unforgettable master in the French landscape and an important precursor to modern cinema.

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais’ first feature released in 1959, opens with images of a loving couple in intimate embrace. Their bodies juxtaposed with images of Hiroshima landscape, Resnais brings the spectator out of the temporal space of the film, and into a time from its past. While physically connected, they doubt each other’s memories and it is only through images of history that the audience is directed to the truth. These disjunctive recollections, where spaces are depicted as empty, sparse, bare and impersonal, highlight how memories are entirely personal impressions that can, painfully, be removed from experience. Using these images—are they flashbacks or facets of imagination?—Resnais ties in the concept that the cinema can legitimately become an experience.

His cinema is slow, measured, and always passionate. Films are marked by long takes and tracking shots, long shots and abstract close ups. They are made with a haunting stillness and strange silences. We can be certain that no dialogue will be a waste of breath.

Temporal disjunction as a key element is explored throughout Resnais’ films, and is presented in a dignified cinematic form that allows for an affective connection to film. Resnais broaches a subject which is surely familiar to all of us; the inability to thoroughly repress memories of pain. The present always relates to the past; but in Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) the two are literally indistinguishable. This rarely screened cinematic treat, perhaps the most obscure of the season, screens on the same night as his most successful film outside of France, Stavisky… (1974). Along with La Guerre Est Finie (1966), these films express another of Resnais’ raisons d’être; a poignant sadness toward the state of revolutionary politics.

The final night of the season, in bittersweet farewell to Resnais, are his second and third features which are also two of his most temporally discrete. Last Year At Marienbad (1961) gained momentum for Resnais, winning international awards and puzzling critics and audiences with its imaginative, dislocated temporal organisation. Like Hiroshima Mon Amour, it had to be screened out of competition at Cannes, but ended up being awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Shot on location at several grand French châteaux, Resnais emphasises the ambiguity of subjectivity, and again, confirms the way insecurities can translate from the present into the past, and vice versa. This is an incredible film, and as Resnais haunts his characters with memories from their past lives, Marienbad becomes as stunningly hypnotic as it is ambiguous. Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963), which deals with the relationship of a family in the aftermath of the Algerian war, is Resnais’ first feature length colour film, and takes advantage of this by making vivid colours an occasional, and very memorable, occurrence. The discordance between the memories of two French survivors, twenty years after they had an affair, continues the theme of repression and denial in painful memories.

The cinema of Resnais is always elegant and often elegiac. The men are handsome and the women consistently beautiful. All of the features screened in this retrospective were made after Resnais had established his talent at documentary cinema. In addition to several shorts which will be featured at the Melbourne Cinémathèque, he made Night and Fog (1955), telling a story of the Holocaust over images of abandoned concentration camps. The austerity of colour in Night and Fog is a just and delicate recognition of the horrors of war, and a cautious pleading against any further. Perhaps, all of this can be attributed to the encouragement he received with the success of his very first 35mm short Van Gogh, which won him an Academy Award in 1948. More than sixty years later, Melbourne is very privileged to be presented with this collection of his works. In response to a line spoken by Emmanuelle Riva’s character in Hiroshima Mon Amour—“forgetting will begin with our eyes”—see Alain Resnais on the big screen and he won’t be forgotten.

Oh, poor Rita

Miss Sadie Thompson (Curtis Bernhardt, 1953) is a strange looking film, released in 3D but watched on a television at home attributing to it a distorted glare, an unwelcome hypercolour. This was the case with quite a lot of 1950s musicals, especially Hawaiian or ‘exotic’ films. So naturally, I assumed it was going to be a harmless sort of musical comedy, like a Betty Grable or one of the more bland Doris Day pictures.

It was however, I can safely say, entirely unlike anything I expected. A prostitute, Sadie Thompson (Rita Hayworth) had been censored into a nightclub singer with a hazy past, although she was actually accused of being a prostitute by a (non-denominational) evangelist and criticised for her choices. This religious preacher declares that there is no such thing as moral belief or forgiveness, that instead there is right and wrong, good and evil, and that’s that. Now this is not unheard of. But then he rapes Sadie after convincing her to try and amend her “sins” because, as he says, she’s still filthy. I know this kind of thing happens ALL THE TIME and I’ve seen it before, yada yada, but it never ceases to disgust and enrage me. And then, Sadie is pissed (as I would be, too), declares all men to be the same (“thugs”), and momentarily resorts to being a “nightclub singer.”

But the most hardcore thing about Miss Sadie Thompson is that this evangelical prick commits suicide after raping her, and then he is forgiven. Some other dude rants off some stuff about how people aren’t perfect, you can’t expect someone to always and unfailingly practice what they preach. But this complicates everything because the man is being forgiven precisely for what he criticised in the first place – moral grey area.

In conclusion: sometimes macho bravado can really piss me off. And it’s International Women’s Day too! Dudes, just back off.

Failure of the Will

In this, my perhaps unfortunate and insensitively named blog post, I’d like to direct my thoughts to Leni Riefenstahl regarding her memoirs.

The New York Times, in 1993, called The Sieve of Time: The Memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl one of the most notable books of the year. And it was. It should not be discounted as extremely important and definitely containing some important personal accounts of an extremely complex historical period. But, it contains no factual information that can tie it to the rest of history as it has been reported. There is no background information given as to why why certain things might be happening. For example, a man in her staff for the film Olympia is suddenly fired. Riefenstahl does absolutely nothing to explain this occurence, and only laments over Joseph Goebbels personal vendetta against her for spurning his love. It’s true, all discerning readers would know the reason already, but in a book of such magnitude and historical relevance it would be helpful and without doubt of interest to be presented with such facts and decisions.

For example, in relation to the above event, it would have been great to read something like this (taken from Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood, one of my favourite books):

A year earlier in April 1933, the Nazi ban on Jews in the German motion picture industry had been extended to non-German employees from Hollwood when the Reichsfilmkammer demanded the removal of “every Jewish film man employed in all of the American film offices and branches.”

As far as I can tell from the copy I am reading, this version of Riefenstahl’s memoirs was not translated from the German by an external party but written by herself. And it is so terribly written. Bland, each story has a subtitle which stalls the stories unnecessarily, adjectives are picked as though from a thesaurus, names interchanged methodically. I cannot read for more than a few pages before my brain can no longer hold interest.

Sorry Leni, but I cannot keep going. I give up on your memoirs.