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Rambling Free-association on Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

Based on notes from when watching the film:
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Twentynine Palms is a fine film — a great film even. I am not sure where it ranks in Bruno Dumont’s filmography, however. I get the sense L’Humantie is by and large his best film, and may very well be regarded as his masterpiece in future times — it is hard to say just yet, or if he will ever earn such high marks retrospectively. Twentynine Palms is a significant film nonetheless that builds on Dumont’s familiar themes. I read many reviews, but I have not seen many people talking about the important things going on here. The film, like his others, are treatises on moral philosophy first and foremost. It is full of marvelous nuance — something which I should not conceal that I have a great penchant for. Whereas L’Humantie studied the latent inhumanity (thus humanity?) in us all, Twentynine Palms is more concerned with the latent evil in relationships. Yet, both films do not just explore unexplainable acts of appalling violence, but the silent violence in the everyday moments of intimacy and the mundane.

A fine example is when Katia asks David, “What are you thinking?” — A common question some of us might find ourselves asking our partners in moments of intimacy, but the perplexed rationalist male rejoins with impatient dismissal. His coldness causes her to cry. He puts on the image that he is being completely rational, but his rationality is no doubt used as a shield to avoid opening up to her. Indeed, he perhaps perceives the question to be silly, but that is beside the point. The seemingly random question is more than a question. The answer to the question is less important than the intimacy that it concerns. He nonetheless feels obliged to critique her semantics. He does something similar at the restaurant and later in the film when they hit the dog. We see the rationalism of the male overtaking more intuitive sensibilities. He is bound by grammar and syntax even though meaning and feeling sometimes go beyond verbal language. As a result, he is, in a sense, dehumanizing outlets of emotion, and thus, decidedly cold. On the other end, Katia’s vice is her solipsism. Her love is so immense, and her regarding reasonable dialogue as trivial so pervasive, that she isolates the rules of the external world from her own feelings. She takes such great offense when he looks at another woman in a diner that she does not allow “rules” and “customs” of society suggesting that men just happen to look simply out of habit and nothing more to be a satisfying excuse. It takes more than just reasonable arguments to placate her. At one end, both of these characters are extreme gender stereotypes, but at the same rate they serve marvelously for a nuanced study of modern moral behavior in relationships.

There is also the sense of love as a form of intoxication or chemical madness. That is, rather than the romanticized notion of some transcendental direct connection to ineffable meaning that we often attribute to it, the film makes the indictment, along with its critique of morality and humanity, that love is little more than chemical fluctuations. This is underscored by the animalism and violence in their sex and arguments, and the silliness and game-like behavior of their breakups and makeups. It puts all of the superficiality and melodramatic histrionics of their relationship at the forefront.

A slight critique of American society is evident with the product placement/commercialism, rude behavior, and vacancy — and certainly comparisons are to be drawn to Antonioni’s Zabriskie’s Point — but I find it all rather muted in the film. The jabs are there, but nothing is pronounced enough to be in favor of a serious critical dialogue. The long takes, opaque photography, soft pastels, and drab, capacious framing, however, creates an interesting look that positions the vacancy of their external environment in contrast to their insular egocentricism. It is as though they are the only people in the world that exist, which suggests that their relationship is a kind of masochism in its own right.

There have been comments about character history and the unexplainable violent behavior in the conclusion. This, again, I think, plays into the film’s broader theme. The film seems to suggest that we cannot “know other minds” in the Cartesian sense. This relates to the film’s theme of solipsism. In the same way that Katia is rebuffed for her inquiry on the thoughts of her significant other, which is principally the root of almost all their arguments throughout the film — that is, miscommunication — there is no real explanation for her internalism or his rationalism; the motives of the rapists; or the dimension of his psychosis in the end. This is why the trope concerning the “thin line between love and hate” is not satisfactory in assessing the themes of the film or the central problem with their relationship. It is not that there exists some thin line between love and hate, which is inherently blurred due to the abstract nature of its metaphysical essence, but more that love can become a kind of hate due to the limits of our connection to each other. We physically put ourselves inside of each other and yet often still feel the distance; the distance leads to anxiety; the anxiety leads to malice. In the end, it is not that he blames her per se, but that he goes mad by reveling in his own isolation from the world. He is repulsed that she can even fathom to express care for him when she cannot know what he has just endured. There is a fascinating moment of irony in the beginning of the film when he alleges that he has never seen her pee, but yet, we, the spectators, see her pee the first time we meet her as his back is turned. There is so much impenetrable privacy to the individual that it seems no matter how close we want to get to each other there is still such great distance, mystery, and isolation that can lead to elusive behavior — or at least, perhaps, in Dumont’s worldview.

If Bergman is something of a psychological realist, I find that Dumont is something of a behavioral realist (or at least attempts to be). Some herald him as the second coming of Bresson and Dreyer, which is probably a bar already set unfairly too high. He put off many with his pointed opposition to the latter two’s theses on our human nature so he falls more into the camp and likes of say Stanley Kubrick or Béla Tarr in terms of his conclusions, but his approach could certainly be described as Bressonian.

Sátántangó (Imported)

The Destruction of Narrative and the Development of Spatiotemporal Dynamics

Sátántangó is at once a deconstruction of narrative conventions of past and a bold exploration of new possibilities in the filmic medium. Tarr has cited John Cassavetes as an important influence particularly in his earlier socialist-realism documentary work (1), but the influence of Cassavetes’ cinema-verite style aesthetic can be found in Tarr’s later expressionistic work as well. The difference, however, is that Tarr uses dreamlike music, black & white photography, elliptical and acrobatic camera techniques, and absurdist and surrealist behavior to add an undeniable style to the film. In this sense, he is no longer operating in the naturalistic mode of Cassavetes. What he takes away from Cassavetes is not his naturalism, but his sociological and verity approach to capturing individuals in their environment. The combination of this stylism and realism results in a unique, surrealistic cinematic universe all its own. This is augmented by his extended-takes and camera-work, which gives the sense of continuity and vast space in his world. Béla Tarr’s central technique revolves around the use of trance-like repetition via the ubiquitous three-to-four note musical score matched by character action, whether it be in the seemingly endless dance numbers or the general behavioral malaise of the everyday mundane life in a post-Communist village left to ruin. In Sátántangó , the dance numbers, much like with his films Werckmeister harmóniák and Damnation, emphasize isolation and despair to the point of tedium,  and a tedium, perhaps, of no return. For Tarr, a true sense of this isolation cannot be grasped without extended duration to the extreme. He poses questions such as: How do you measure a shot? What is good cinema? Tarr would extend his shots into infinity if he could, but instead, he chooses a mere 7 hours. (He describes the 11-minute shot-length limit of standard 35 mm film as a form of censorship.) (2) In fact, Tarr is not even sure it is correct to call what he does cinema, as he is not interested in conveying a single point or story, but rather in painting reality and life in terms of the moments that very often most define them — consciously emphasizing the elements he perceives to be lost and undervalued in contemporary cinema. The long take, in particular, captures the things modern cinema often throws out in favor of something more immediate and tangible. Tarr is precisely interested in these moments of tedium, isolation, motion, space, nature, and duration in their eternity; the intention here is certainly self-reflexive in part, but the function is pointed more toward a meta-communication in elucidating these neglected impurities and purifying them (3) — as for Tarr, they say much more about humanity and reality than we initially take them.

As consequence, traditional characterization is considerably marginalized. It it is not the case, however, that his characters are of little concern, but that they are mirrored, or rather, understood via these larger elements that are more pronounced. He circumvents conventional narrative to emphasize motion, setting, and repetition; thus underscoring the relationship characters have with each other and their surroundings. In another way of saying it, his concern is a totalist one: a complete philosophical look at the world. This purification of the neglected elements represent the central focus on which to underscore theme — not in spite of character, but that which necessarily entails the individual. As such, the interaction between environment and character is central to Tarr’s cinema, and it translates these themes accordingly. The miserablist scenery is often just signifying the presence of their disaffection, but there is a larger element at play here. Tarr is also invoking a film noir theme of an inevitable fatalist world that swallows individuals. This is not depicted as through common characterization, but through his interpolation of the character within their environment. This is what partially constitutes his solipsism: an insular universe that is inescapable and alienating. We can see all throughout Béla Tarr’s universe the domineering presence of the environment. An obvious example, as Tony McKibbin of Senses of Cinema points out, is Tarr’s use of rain. The narrator at the beginning and ending of the film informs us of the dreadful autumn raining season that is forthcoming. The rain is part of a natural milieu that, not only visually contributes to the mucky landscape of an already desolate location — in which we see in one scene the water clouding the view of the voyeur-doctor’s window and muddying the pig’s drab surroundings — but it is also an image of violent material invasion. The author writes, “In Damnation (1988) and Sátántangó (1994) the notion of being outdoors is deeply uninviting, as if a trip along the road is like crossing the surface of the moon. Thus Tarr’s world is often focused on half-lit interiors, showing us characters banging doors shut against the elements.” (4) We see this at the end of Sátántangó as the doctor sets out on a laborious journey across the farm, hunched over in a rain coat and shoe gazing so as to avoid the seemingly perpetual fall of rain. Surprisingly, the author omits the most obvious example in Werckmeister harmóniák when the composer, who, formerly secluded to his own isolation, sets out on what seems to be an extraordinarily taxing and endless journey to see the whale where — instead of rain — motion is emphasized in the threat of repetition. In many ways, Tarr is the flip side of the coin to Terrence Malick — rather than sensualist individuals who feel the need to touch and connect with nature — we have individuals who loathe and retreat from nature. Its oppressive capacity confines them to closed-spaces and half-lit interiors, where Tarr’s camera moves hermetically as the claustrophobic framing and masterful chiaroscuro provides a shadowed veil for his characters to escape into — isolated in placating solitude — and lost in a void.

The Collapse of Belief, and the Loss of Order

The content of his world is decidedly abject. The bleak, dank environs is populated by morose denizens that relish in their own isolation and despair. Tarr, in this sense, is inviting us into his Golgotha — a repugnant demonic universe of ennui and amorality. The self-absorption of the characters mirrors Tarkovsky’s cinematic, insular world. In this manner, his cinema is technically symbolic of the solipsism of his characters. Yet, what separates Tarr’s solipsism and his themes of absurdity and minimalist despair from, say, Samuel Beckett, or even the pre-existentialism of Dostoevsky, is that Tarr explores the theme through a new lens — a lens that can only be afforded to that of the filmmaker — which gives rise to a whole host of themes that Tarr is specifically concerned with: The problem and/or source of evil, the possibility of the good, and the collapse of meaning. Instead of narrative or human characters, the main elements of his films are time, motion, music, and location. He is also probing into something of a specific sociological relevance; the Cassavetes-influenced focus on a world that is not so distant from a collapsed Communist commune or dilapidated village. If we explore his cinema through this perspective, we can see Tarr takes on another theme then — the exploration of ideological pretensions. That is to say, the metaphysical ruminations in Werckmeister harmóniák and the latter half of Sátántangó do not simply represent suggestive ambiguities to mount a free-play “open text” interpretation of his cinema, but reflect the vain, moribund, and axiomatically divested monologues espoused by characters who believe in competing orders and structures about the ontology of the world. His cinema, more than anything else, is about a self-perceived ontological crises. In Sátántangó, the long-awaited stranger represents a kind of Christ-like savior figure for the people as they await in their despair, superficially and complacently affirmed by a tenuous faith so to justify their self-pitying. We learn, however, their mysterious false-prophet has his own greedy agenda. We see later in the film two police officers that are indifferent to the cold inhumanity of their actions by virtue of their self-assuring and self-perpetuating status of authority. Then we see, in a marvelous scene, the devastating descent of a young girl into self-destruction, but even she affords herself naive rationalizations for her suffering, telling us — as the narrator details in a haunting monologue — that nature, the world, and the cosmos are all dependent on her and she on them. In Tarr’s internalist cinema, all his characters have self-confined metaphysical explanations about the world so as to cope with their suffering; but yet, as he eventually shows us, it is the very conflict and failings of these belief systems that has led to their suffering. Notions such as God — as for the almost too benevolent protagonist of Werckmeister harmóniák – the political systems of control and manipulation on behalf of the Prince and authorities in Werckmeister harmóniák and Sátántangó, the greed of self-interested opportunists, and the quasi-philosophical ramblings of the village occupants, fail to accommodate a consistent way of life for all humanity.

The Connection to the Essence

Tarr’s stance, however, cannot be reduced to mere relativism or an unqualified nihilism. His cinema is thoroughly pessimistic, dark, and damning, but he offers an approach to the competing metaphysics of his films in his phenomenological and sociological attitude toward human behavior and their interrelations with one another. This can be found most evidently when a man-made political ideology at the end of Werckmeister harmóniák has driven his characters to anarchy, and as they advance deeper into the spaces of destruction, they are left stunned at the sight of a naked old man in all his fragility. Perhaps we could talk about Levinas’ behaviorist moral philosophy of the “human face” in this case, as it is only in a decided recognition of the Other do these characters have access to one another’s humanity. Throughout Sátántangó and Werckmeister harmóniák, we are often presented with visuals of individuals that are isolated; an isolation which often leads to abject amoral behavior — such as the screaming and senseless children, the animal abuse of a young girl, or the voyeurism of an enclosed, drunkard old man. The alcohol, no question, makes things worse. In the moments of ostensible social unity in the extended dance number sequences in Damnation and Sátántangó, it would seem, that at least at some times, these people unite and experience a form of happiness. Yet, the alcohol only keeps them separated. Tarr’s cinema is similar to Sharunas Bartas in that, without communication with others, not only is collective meaning lost, but personal meaning is lost as well. As McKibbin notes, Bartas’ cinema is “autistic” in a way, in that individuals have little communication with one another at all. As a result, they are relegated to alienation and irrational behavior. The behavior is irrational because it is meaningless; it is simply sensory-stimulus response reaction to the environment where people are reduced, or dehumanized, to their most animalistic impulses. There is nothing for these individuals to meaningfully value so as to have reason to behave otherwise. In Tarr’s world, there is still a grasp on belief systems, but they are fleeting grasps, and on the brink of collapse due to their failure in stabilizing. The alcohol, then, prevents any active cognitive interaction with others, and reduces them to sensual states of hedonism where they merely utilize the presence of persons for dance and sensual pleasure, but while not truly recognizing one another as individuals existing apart from their psychological selves. In their sober states, they struggle to maintain this recognition of the Other, as the townspeople in Sátántangó in another moment of apparent narrative hope unite, or at least, endeavor to unite around the death of the young girl, but there is a palpable sense that their efforts are in vain, in the same way the fragile man of Werckmeister harmóniák is only a sign of the ontological remnants of the past, signaling the possibility of yet another failed system of belief.

We have here, then, in concert with the threat of repetition and environmental loathing, the Alice in Wonderland metaphor: individuals swallowed and engulfed by their bizarre surroundings. This would explain Tarr’s citation of Pieter Breughel as one of his biggest influences. (5) Breughel’s canvases are covered with landscapes populated by dwelling collectives. Tarr is often reluctant to admit to symbolism in his films (6), but we can see Sátántangó as an entire metaphor for this idea of a suffocating, insular world. The film’s structure is modeled after the steps of a tango. It is divided into twelve chapters, where six of them show progression in the story and the other six in flashback. We realize throughout the film that the pretensions of progress are dubious. We eventually lose grasp on any progression of time (pace Beckett — and perhaps, a touch of Proust). The theme here, however, is also part of a grander governing theme. It is this notion of recurrence that subjugates and oppresses the profligate inhabitants of his films. Tarr’s cinema is ultimately one of resignation. We can see this in literalist terms with the townspeople’s drunken dances in the bars. They dance for hours on in, but with a hedonistic hell between them, thus separating them from meaning. This suggests, then, the seeming moments of hope (the arrival of the “savior” in Sátántangó, the naked man in Werckmeister harmóniák, the declared love of the protagonist in Damnation — representing, in a loose sense, perhaps, religious faith, morality, and love respectively) are remnants and elements of the cycle; groundwork for yet another failed possibility. This idea of recurrence (a Nietzschean dialectic?) coupled with the Alice theme of oppression emphasizes a self-contained solipsist cinema of dejected resignation and unrelenting repetition — or an eternal tango with Satan.

Endnotes:

1. Fergus Daly and Maximilian Le Cain, “Waiting For The Prince — an interview
with Béla Tarr”, Senses of Cinema, 2001.
2.  Richard Williams, “Deep waters”, The Guardian, April 2003.
3. Phil Ballard, “In Search of Truth — Béla Tarr interviewed”, Kinoeye, March 2004.
4. Tony McKibbin, “Cinema of Damnation: Negative Capabilities in Contemporary Central and Eastern European Film”, Senses of Cinema, 2004.
5.  Fergus Daly and Maximilian Le Cain, “Waiting For The Prince — an interview with Béla Tarr”, Senses of Cinema, 2001.
6. Ibid.

Ephemerality and Alienation: Reflections on Antonioni’s L’Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Avventura — the first film in what would be later known as his ‘alienation trilogy’ — is perhaps the most groundbreaking example of the modernist filmmaker’s avant-garde technique. The film also marks his introduction into the international film scene, establishing him well among the pantheon of vanguard auteurs of the early 60s. It is only with the third film, L’Eclisse, however, that Antonioni’s aesthetic is fully realized to its most challenging and difficult extremes. Antonioni separated himself from the Italian neorealism tradition that preceded him, and by taking similar social themes and applying them to an experimental aesthetic, Antonioni was able to explore issues concerning modern love, identity, morality, social determinism, and the will of the individual struggling to make sense of traditional societal bindings of old and new. Thus, the philosophical content of his text lies heavily within his aesthetic.

The first thing one may notice of L’Eclisse is that it plays out much like a science fiction film. The anxiety and ambience that is created by the music, long takes, and discordant narrative paints a reality that seems to be an exaggeration of our own. Where Bergman’s visual expressionism emphasized the internal psychology of his characters, Antonioni makes use of the austere distancing of his motionless camera to alienate his. In this light, the theme of alienation takes on its homonymic word meanings as reality seems to surface as a foreign planet that is merely being explored by human visitors, or as Vittoria pleads, “I feel like a foreigner.” The stillness of the camera emphasizes the still lifelessness of the buildings, terrain and image — illustrating a static preexisting city where characters are merely allowed to visit and observe. This is exemplified by Antonioni’s pictorial interest in unique corporate architecture. The buildings are towering monoliths standing as their own character entities, and through Antonioni’s wide-angle lens camera, we see amplified scenery of pervasive architecture as tiny beings marginally move in the low foreground. This imagery is not used for mere formal purposes, but his aesthetic, no doubt, is primarily a visual one. The imagistic contrasts, background, and environment — or the visual — defines essentially all we need to know about these characters. The lack of any true dramatic movement by the camera in particular represents the lack of emotional connection between them. Therefore, the motion of the camera, that is, the technique, defines the character as much as the content or even what is actually framed within the image itself. Dialogue is important to the character development insofar as it represents what they are capable of speaking, but as Antonioni’s cinema is more about lack of spoken communication between individuals, it is left to up the visual to show what they are incapable of expressing themselves. Thus, a dialectic here is important, but less important is a cogent story, exposition, storytelling, or conventional narrative. Antonioni is not concerned with these things. Instead, he exemplifies the dynamics of spatiality and temporality in a pure pictorialism as dispossessed characters are separated from others against an exacting and dominating backdrop. Yet, the city is not only a cinematic expression of their symbolic alienation, but is a literal creation of their moral desperation and material fetishism.

Antonioni employs a Marxist critique similar to his predecessors and contemporary socialist realists such as Ken Loach, but at the same time, Antonioni critiques this position by exploring the individual’s place in society with sympathy to inevitabilities and reluctance to engage in traditional neorealist idealism. The stock market crash displayed in one of the film’s most spectacular scenes showcases Antonioni’s critique of post-war capitalistic material society — yet, interdependent individuals are still largely at the center of the cinematic stage, despite their surface greed and immoral connection with each other.

In Antonioni’s world, sex is not intimate, special, or romantic — but everything that is the opposite. The only human connection is one of a mutually amoral nature, but even in a world of despair, isolation, and emotional alienation from others, the common human experience is shared. Riccardo’s lack of compassion, much like Sandro’s infidelity in L’Avventura, does not represent a mere moral misgiving, but a reaction to the fabric of abject duplicity interwoven in a mechanized, post-industrial world. Similarly, Piero wants genuine love, but he is unable to break his obsession with the demands of his dehumanizing vocation. Consequently, Vitti finds herself separated from human understanding as she discountenances indigenous Africans and African culture in a demoralizing game of reprehensible parody, leading to a startlingly poignant moment of bourgeois shame and representing a post-war former Italian Empire still plagued by corporate giants and elitist class perceptions.

After the release of L’Avventura, the bold aesthetic risks Antonioni took with the film received so much criticism the filmmakers were booed at the initial Cannes Film Festival premiere (where, after much controversy, the film also subsequently won the critics’ top prize and would top the AFI poll of the greatest films two years later). The massive failure of the initial Cannes showing ultimately left Monica Vitti walking out in tears. The New York Times wrote a frustrated review debunking the film, with critic Bosley Crowther writing, “L’Avventura… is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have got lost.” (1) The critic is surely referring to Antonioni’s innovative risks in ignoring conventional Hollywood match-cutting by cutting a scene sparsely after extended takes, leaving many images inconclusively disconnected from one another, and ultimately breaking down significant narrative understanding between the previous image and the next. In L’Eclisse, Antonioni raises the bar and dares to frustrate audiences once again in his almost complete disregard for the central story. L’Eclisse’s central protagonist, Vittoria, as played by the luminous Monica Vitti, walks vapid industrial streets as a member of the vacuous bourgeois class doomed to ennui, malaise, and alienation from her society. Antonioni’s camera conveys this alone through intense use of still wide shots, back-dropped by dissonant music, silence, and modern architecture — leaving only Vitti’s character on the screen as a single moving entity, effectively showcasing an ephemeral world that engulfs individuals in a kind of inescapable transient intermittence that prevents them from truly inhabiting the city, and instead, only allows them to pass by, disconnected from reality and meaning. It is through this sort of imagery that Antonioni’s metaphor is revealed: as the city eclipses the life of humanity, the materialist consumer eclipses the heart. Likewise, just as the 60’s pop music is abruptly interrupted by sinister Stravinsky-esque atonal music in the opening titles, so to is the narrative journey of our two protagonists completely abandoned as it dissipates from the screen in the midst of their search for romance. This sort of aimless despair of non-story narrative demise culminates in the film’s breathtaking final 8 minute sequence, in which, none of the lead characters are present on the screen, and the city becomes its own singular and authoritarian oppressive entity.

Endnotes:

1. Bowsley Crowther, “Screen:  ‘L’Avventura’: Film by Michelangelo Antonioni Opens”, New York Times, 1961. Here.

Capturing the Moment: Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar Wai’s latest film My Blueberry Nights finds the director moving further into the postmodern territory already marked earlier in his career by the erratic and chic Chungking Express. It is interesting, and perhaps, rather telling that Kar Wai has chosen his American English-language debut as the film to eschew narrative convention more than any of his previous films. With In The Mood for Love, it had seemed the director was becoming more reliant on narrative rather than less – while, conversely, the unofficial sequel, 2046, adopted the former’s aesthetics, but did away with the emphasis on narrative. The curious shift left many critics bemused over his intentions, and as a result, felt it safe to conclude the latter must have been an unfocused, but interesting failure. Yet, the director’s decision to continue the trend of 2046 with My Blueberry Nights, rather than invoking the success of the conservative narrative of his unanimous masterpiece In The Mood for Love – suggests the filmmaker is interested in moving into new terrain.

My Blueberry Nights centers on a relationship that is sparked by the late-night diner encounters of two love-sick New York tweenty-somethings. The film loosely follows the development of their relationship, though while showing no reluctance to diverge into tangential subplots, such as lingering on the unrequited love between a melancholic, drunk cop and his impetuous wife. Of course, such inconsequential narrative deviations serve less to form a cohesive sequence of events than to represent the daily encounters of Elizabeth’s foray into the heartland of Americana, where she frequently finds herself engaging with those who share her sense of disillusionment with love and relationships. Norah Jones is excellent here, but her character is an enigmatic and elusive one, leaving the burden of her performance to rely heavily on nuance and subtlety. Despite the film’s defocused narrative-structure, she handles her character with a compelling confidence, wielding a naive, but passionate determination and wistful yearning with every glance.

Wong Kar Wai is a decidedly romantic filmmaker. He views modern alienation and loneliness through the lens of ephemeral relationships and emotional longing where meaningful connections with others are perceived as fleeting, expirable, and most of all, intangible, but yet, nonetheless, perpetually needed. This sense of disconcerted awareness puts the characters in such a position that they are hesitant to get too close to others, allowing love to exist only at arms-length, but as they simultaneously long to be closer.

More than anyone else, Wong Kar Wai frequently reminds of Michelangelo Antonioni. It seems the two filmmakers share much of the same aesthetic ideas, but where they diverge is with Antonioni’s ubiquitous political subtext. Kar Wai’s cinema is not directly political, but there is something to be said about his presentation of being with others in a modern world. In this respect, Kar Wai is similar to Hsiao-Hsien Hou as he cooly but eloquently observes the trends and changes of society. The difference between this style of filmmaking to Antonioni’s modernism, however, is the lack of any real normative or critical rigor. Kar Wai’s cinema is more subdued, at times even reticent, and instead, favors little more than a descriptive observation of a contemporary social sentiment. There is no real suggestion or implication of societal error. This can be seen with In The Mood for Love. We are presented with historical social codes of etiquette and identity, images of sociopolitical events, and protagonists stricken with romantic angst, but a critique of society never quite arises; instead, what is offered is something more along the lines of a meditative pondering into the nature of society, and the way individuals are defined, understood, and confined within their time, setting, and political milieu. This, perhaps, represents most plainly the move from the more politically conscious modernist aesthetic of the 60s to a new, unstable postmodern aesthetic.

This notion of an apolitical, observational gaze can be found most immediately just in the manner of Kar Wai’s camera operations. His camera is sufficiently curious, but removed, while often peering through cluttered windows, perforated structures, cracks between walls, or other inanimate objects that seem to block any clear line of sight to the characters. This implies the sense of a third-person spectator — or cinematic voyeurism — where we are watching characters from a clandenstine distance. Yet, his technique here is not purely static and objective, as he filters these angles through a burnished long lens, capturing rich, lavish textures with smothering close-ups. In Antonioni’s Il Deserto rosso, Monica Vitti’s character is suffering from an ontological crisis as she is trapped in a mechanized wasteland populated by profligate individuals. It was Antonioni’s first film in color, and the first time he used a telephoto lens. What is most significant about this film is his technical shift away from the more distant observer of the previous films in his alienation trilogy, and his use of the camera to emphasize the environment in a new way.

He used the perspective distortion of the telephoto lens to frame Vitti’s character in flattened, cluttered space, and the lens’ soft focus and shallow depth to capture a blur around her, depicting a sense of anxious isolation and malaise. The result is something of a dissonant cinematic tone poem. Kar Wai appropriates a similar technique so as to emphasize character isolation, using long lenses in this film rather than his typical preference for wide-angle lenses, and staying true to his own style, he uses impressionistic and romantic visuals to underscore the emotional longing of his characters. Indeed – much like Antonioni, Wong Kar Wai seems to be making the indictment that “Eros is sick” for a modern world.

It is perhaps of no coincidence that the most capacious setting in Nights is the arid desert landscape seen on Elizabeth’s and Leslie’s liberating ride to Vegas. Kar Wai’s cinema is notorious for closed spaces, cluttered mise-en-scene, distorted perspective, and shallow depth of field, but such a treatment is not afforded to the vast desert of Nevada. The visual here is consistent with the thematic content of the narrative’s casual development. Elizabeth and Leslie ride together in a moment of liberating freedom, without any present adherence to obligations or the pains of romantic longing and loneliness. Yet, this freedom is only fleeting and momentary – just as the lack of stability in their lives. It seems in Kar Wai’s cinema characters are always moving and traveling, constantly in the shuffle of temporal moments, always in the midst of transition, and endlessly in search of changing their present places. His characters are restless, and enamored with the dream or idea of greener pastures and self-renewal. The distraction of traveling offers a temporary sense of solace and progression, but the pretense is soon revealed for what it is, and the comfort is found to be tenuous. In the midst of all the traveling in Kar Wai’s films, however, there always seems to be a character that wrestles with the stationary. In Chungking Express, a cop has a fling with a flight attendant as she comes and goes in and out of his life, while a restaurant clerk who loves the cop, but is discontent with her life, has dreams of moving to California as the song California Dreamin’ by the Mamas & The Papas is played pervasively throughout the film. Similarly, in My Blueberry Nights, Jude Law’s character lets the woman he loves flee from his life, twice, and awaits her return. He collects keys left to him by partners on the way out of their relationships, which are symbols of the stationary. He aestheticizes the keys and fears leaving his diner. His philosophy abides by a story he was told once that he had a better chance at encountering a lost one by remaining in the same place. His fixation on stasis is a self-delusion, however. He is, in truth, infatuated with the moment, the moment of love that he shared with others, and is fearful of change, transition, and progress, as he has never accepted the reality of the moment lost. Ergo, his grasp on the moment is as fleeting as Elizabeth’s, who quickly moved from NY in search of self-renewal out west.

Wong Kar Wai’s cinema also brings to mind the widely noted influence of Jean-Luc Godard. Kar Wai’s use of editing is often essential to his aesthetic. In Nights, he uses a delayed shutter speed, often as doors are opening and closing, where individuals are coming and going, or at other times just to capture the moment. The effect seems to add a blurred, poetic rhythm to the film, where the moment is cherished and accentuated, as it is the moment that is ever-so precious to these characters, and, indeed, to this particular auteur. In critic Ed Gonzalez’s largely negative review of the film for Slant Magazine, he writes: “Every shot is painstakingly thought out, but less emphasis is placed on the human face than on the surfaces that reflect it and the objects that obscure it.” (1) Gonzalez is onto something as he observes, in what I believe to be, Kar Wai’s canvas of individuals blurred by distorted time, cluttered camera angles, impressionistic visuals, and temporal staccato jumps – a cinema that swallows, mixes, and releases them – representing a visually symbolic loneliness and longing, and ultimately fleshing out a cinema of ornamented pictorialism.

Endnotes:
1. Ed Gonzalez, “My Blueberry Nights”, Slant Magazine, 2008. Here

Cinematographic Technique in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura

Antonioni’s breakthrough masterpiece, L’Avventura, paints an austere picture of late modernity. If Stanley Cavell is correct to say that the cinematic apparatus delineates a world that transcends beyond the framed canvas of the traditional painted image (that is, we wonder what goes on beyond what we can see), Antonioni, at least superficially, does well to affirm that theory. In what seemingly begins as a mystery in search of a missing girl, Antonioni shifts his narrative in Rivette fashion by reframing his camera’s interest on a tale of troubled love when the woman’s fiancé matches up with her best friend; but yet all the while, Anna, the missing girl, never strays far from the spectator’s mind, and haunts the film’s central couple as a lingering burden of moral responsibility. Although, at one end, Antonioni’s ambivalent narrative construction plays into Cavell’s concept of an inclusive cinematic world in its own right, the auteur, on the other end, provides images that come closer to an artist’s masterful brush strokes than a filmmaker’s curious, cinematic gaze. In some respects, Antonioni’s camera is curious, but it is not one of a traditionally moving curiosity – instead, his camera is distant, still, and removed, and allows the beautiful Italian landscape to be pronounced through his wide-angle lens. He does this by capturing most of these images with still long shots rather than emphasizing cinematic montage or a hermetically moving camera so as to create the sense of motion in time.

Conversely, as it is often observed of Antonioni’s cinema, each shot of L’Avventura could be free-framed and appreciated as a work of art in its own right; thus, we might say, Antonioni meets Cavell’s extended frame with blurred edges rather than finite or infinite limits. It is important for Antonioni to manifest his imagery in such a still pictorialism so that he may complement the vacuous empty spaces of the terrain where his characters are often trapped or lost in a repressive foreground. The film’s central location for which it spends the better half of the first act is a perfect example of this austere imagery. As the search party backtracks frantically, the island itself emerges as a massive barren, desolate body, and as Gregory Solman of Senses of Cinema observes, a metaphor arises and lingers throughout the film – the “critique of men” living as “barren islands” – that is, ennui-traversing individuals that are spiritually, emotionally, and morally vacant. (1)

Antonioni humanizes his characters in a particularly grim fashion. Sandro and Caudia both long for something pure and authentic, but find themselves lost in a superficial, bourgeois reality that ultimately denies them a moral compass; where no longer can their identity be satisfied by traditional morals, and they are relegated to an existential malaise. Antonioni underscored this idea at the Cannes premiere when he famously  declared to the world that “Eros is sick.” In his film, individuals struggle to make sense of themselves, searching for meaning and love in a world that has changed and continues to change before their eyes. Yet, Antonioni’s mastery lies in his ability to bring out the visual manifestation of their angst through his revolutionary technique rather than through traditional literary narrative mechanics. Philosopher and film scholar Gilles Deleuze writes, “It is noticeable that Antonioni’s objective images, which impersonally follow a becoming, that is, a development of consequences in a story, none the less are subject to rapid breaks, interpolations and ‘infinitesimal injections of a-temporality’.” (2) These “objective images,” “rapid breaks,” “interpolations,” and “infinitesimal injections of a-temporality” not only exist as a modernist’s self-reflexive expression and progressivism, but communicates, augments, and enrichens the fabric of the dramatic narrative detailing the existential alienation of Antonioni’s characters. In effect, these devices of temporal breaks, long takes, and objective distance become metaphorically synonymous with notions such as disillusionment, ennui, and despair, respectively. In both the presence and absence of narrative action, the meaning presents itself to us, and through this method, Antonioni has created through his cinema an eerie world and language (or for Deleuze, an a priori pre-language) of his own. If filmmaking has decided barriers and form, then Antonioni transcends.

Endnotes:
1. Gregory Solman, “L’Avventura”, Senses of Cinema, 2004.
2. Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta. (London: The Athlone Press, 1989.). Italics added by me.