Wojciech Has, or cinema before death

Nieciekawa Historia (107", 1983) by Wojciech Has

The theme of departure was already treated by Has in his Pożegnania (Partings, 1958) and Rozstanie (Farewell, 1961): the willed or fated separation from a lover, a milieu, a lifestyle... In Nieciekawa Historia (Uneventful Story), based on Chekhov's Boring Story, Has returns to his obsession with the non-event to explore the imperceptible fracture in a man's life, that moment which dislocates the perception of time, not instantly, but in its wake, so that the origin of the change is like a vanishing point in the perspective of memory.

Departures, farewells, the war, loss, and the death of another are turning points and points of no return marking human lives. The thought of one's own death, however, disturbs chronology, locating the impossible event both in the future, as something yet to come, and in the past, as something that has always accompanied one -- as a shadow. Nieciekawa Historia is, among other things, a portrayal of attitudes before death. A cinematic memento mori.

The movie opens with a long tracking shot of a bourgeois interior. The stillness of the furniture; the half-empty dining table with a silver tea set and an unfinished piece of cake on a porcelain plate; oil paintings hung on the walls covered with faded wallpaper; and the opening credits resembling gravestone inscriptions, evoke death and the denial of death. The accumulation of objects anchors their owner in life; at the same time, it is a burial hoard. The hour is "the dead of night," or rather those last minutes before the break of dawn when ghosts may yet come and go. The faint autumn twilight signals both birth and decline. The only thing that "stirs" in that calm is the clock. And then, an off-screen voice speaks:

If I were asked to name the essential element of my existence, I would answer without hesitation: sleeplessness.

The back-and-forth movement of the pendulum (wahadło) puns on the speaker's lack of hesitation (bez wahania, "without sway," that is "dead certain"), and suggests the contradiction between the measured (rhythmical and calculated) time and the relentless timelessness of insomnia. If death is an eternal sleep, sleeplessness is by no means its opposite. On the contrary, as described by the disembodied voice, it is an exercise in death. The waking of the insomniac is an impossible wake over his own corpse:

Notes from Festival du cinéma réel, part 2

L'Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung (66', France 1966) by Marcel Hanoun

On Saturday, March 27, Festival du cinéma réel devoted a day to L'Atelier du cinéaste: Marcel Hanoun à l'improviste, with the participation of the film maker. 

It is perhaps not a coincidence that, while the first part of my festival notes was devoted to the very last film I saw before leaving Paris, Susana de Sousa Dias's 48, the second part is going to evoke Marcel Hanoun's Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung. Made more than forty years apart, one as a document of experiences of political prisoners during the 48-year-long fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the other as a fictional record of an "authentic" trial of a Nazi criminal, the two films bear more than superficial resemblance. As Marcel Hanoun remarked after the screening, his intention -- already in 1966 -- was to forestall voyeurism. Both film makers are aware of the pleasure inherent in viewing images and, in creating what might be called the cinema of ethics, deliberately evacuate their film of images to give primacy to the spoken word.

The last statement is not, of course, entirely true.  . . .

Notes from Festival du cinéma réel, part 1

48 (93', Portugal 2009) by Susana de Sousa Dias

This film was awarded the Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel. Although such seal of approval is no guarantee of the quality of a work of art... this was one of the most moving, well-composed films I saw in the festival. 

A 1950s' police photo of a young woman appears on the screen. Black and white print faded into shades of brown and yellow. A solemn face looks straight ahead: not at the audience, but into the light of the projector shining like an interrogation lamp. A "mug shot" of a victim of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal. Soon, a voice begins to speak, recounting details of her imprisonment as they come to her mind, called forth by the photograph. The voice is calm; at times falters. Breathing can be heard, sometimes the sound of swallowed tears. The face on the screen gradually fades until the entire screen is flooded by grey luminosity. Silence. Breathing. Silence and darkness: de Sousa Dias is not afraid to explore those moments of waiting, risking the discomfort of the audience who, as if suddenly conscious of the two senses of captivity, begins to leave*.

Waiting, expectation. The voice may speak again: the story has not been exhausted. Speaking does not bring relief to the survivor; there is no catharsis in truth-telling. Retold, the torment is relived, and telling it now, like withstanding it then in silence, is a duty. There is no completing of the tale.

Out of the darkness of the mute screen, in the exact same place where the other has disappeared, another face emerges. . . .

Dot Dot Dash Dot . . -- .

Lloyd Newson's The Cost of Living was screened at Dot Dot Dash Dot, presented by Artsadmin Youth Board, alongside three shorts from new filmmakers.

The Cost of Living (2005) is based on a stage production by Lloyd Newson and DVD8 Physical Theatre. The film combines various choreographic techniques, from slapstick, pantomime, ballet, human puppetry, to natural rhythms of sexual intercourse. Through them, it succeeds at creating a language of gestures that is more expressive than the verbal commentary offered by various characters. On the side of words, we have a crude one-sided interview with Phoebe, the legless dancer, by a man with a video camera whose lens gets intrusively close to the interviewee's body, questioning the lump on the back of his head, his stumps, his view of life. The answer is an [imagined] group dance in which other dancers imitate the legless leader's movements. This vision is inaccessible to the video cameraman who expected a mere freak show.  . . .

Mortel Transfert

+ The truth of a work of art lies in what it reveals of itself.
-- Even unconsciously.
+ The way of the detective or the way of the psychoanalyst.
-- Each might elicit a confession and arouse the expectation of punishment.
+ Is each story already a story of a crime?
-- Each story is a transgression.
+ The difference between the cop and the shrink is that to the former a crime is a fundamental given, an indisputable fact, whereas the latter thinks of it as a symptom, a superficial manifestation of something hidden.
-- And yet: the crime may take place only after the fact, in the wake of the detection of a crime.
+ Spoken like a true psychoanalyst.
-- A mere observer.
+ Even the margin is a side taken.
-- A work of art seems, at first approach, an object contained within its bounds: the margin, the frame, the first and the last cut. Setting aside the preparatory sketch, the rough draft, the work appears as an unambiguous object.
+ Like a crime, ready to submit to analysis.
-- Yes, like a crime.
+ Only, as does crime, the object slips between one's fingers as soon as one attempts to grasp it.
-- Or it is the object that takes hold of whoever tries to grasp it.
+ The detective proceeds by asking well-aimed questions. The psychoanalyst remains silent. . . .

Kevin Everson retrospective

The films shown at the Centre Pompidou retrospective are quite recent, made between 2002 and 2009. Everson entitled the first cycle (May 13) of his retrospective Broad Daylight and Other Times. The title captures his principal obsession in these films: to show what Zinn calls "history of the people", focusing on the singular experience, often in its relation to reported news (which is the first attempt at writing "authoritative" history). According to (2007, 8'30'', 16mm, B&W), the longest film in the series, relates a number of events through repeated TV footage juxtaposed with the news anchor's report. While the images remain the same, the narrative changes: a tragic drowning of a "Negro man" in Roanoke county, turns out to have been a murder; an accidental fire caused by the explosion of a kerosene tank in an apartment building, which resulted in the death of a "Negro woman", turns out to have been an arson perpetrated by two white males. The video excerpts from news footage alternate with the quotidian gesture of an old man (perhaps the filmmaker's father) going out onto his porch to pick up his daily. We never see him unfold the paper or read the news, but the repetition of the gesture juxtaposed with the replayed TV newscast eloquently comments on the place of the news in one's life, on the construction of history and on personal memory.  . . .