Scott's Metaphysical Romances, Pt. 1

Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)

Many of our ideas about how cinema works and what a filmmaker is grow out of an idea of gesture and intention. This is understandable: in the 20th century, cinema brought some of the grandest gestures in history. And because for most of that century, the methods of production in wealthier countries (and by extension those whose films were most frequently seen, and therefore formed the foundations of film theory: the United States, Italy, France, Japan, the Soviet Union and Germany) involved a division of creative labor—a director would at best instruct an editor and, with a few notable exceptions, never operated a camera or a microphone—directing became a question of large gestures and instructions. In turn, we came to understand and attribute authorship in cinema based on obvious gestures. The theories that form the foundation of both filmmaking and film criticism concern themselves not with small or subjective properties, but with grand designs: montage, mise-en-scene, camera movement, framing. All of these things could be called the "obvious properties of style."

Cinephilia set itself aside from mere film-buffery by becoming the hunt for small moments and small films, things that appeared to exist outside the realm of obvious gesture. Criticism sought to explain the tracking shot; cinephilia looked for the meanings of drifting cigarette smoke, stray glances and apparent accidents, and to divine the patterns of hats, cars and donkeys.

Over the decades, the practice of filmmaking has changed. Though it's still rare for directors to act as their own cinematographers, it's common for them to operate the camera when they feel like it, especially during handheld shots.

It could be argued that the ongoing switch to working digitally has been more revolutionary in how it has changed the editing of films than in how it's affected the aesthetics of the image. Though most directors still use a professional for the job, director / editors are increasingly common and a director is more likely to take an active role in editing instead of just writing memos and putting together plans. In her recollection of working with the late Eric Rohmer for a recent issue of Senses of Cinema, Jackie Raynal writes that the director hired her as an editor because she was good with her hands; physical editing takes dexterity and skill. On the other hand, most people (and this includes directors) can learn the basics of Final Cut Pro in an afternoon. Editing has moved from the solitary, poorly-lit editing room to the Steenbeck and into comfortable multi-screen editing suites. Nonlinear editing gives decisions fluidity; it's no longer a question of cutting and splicing, but of composing and arranging. It enables more intuitive approaches. In big-budget productions, the approach to editing has increasingly shifted from the fulfillment of plans to the construction of scenes out of moments. The director, who was once defined by an iron will, must now also have a hunter's instinct.

Combined with the increased input directors have into the mixing of the sound in their films (which itself has gone from mono to stereo to surround), the control afforded by color correction and digital processing of the image and the fact that even productions shot on film stock use video replays to judge takes instead of waiting for the daillies, on the increasing prevalence of improvisation (which nowadays pretty much dominates American comedy, which was once the set domain of the screenwriter), multiple-camera set-ups and dozens of takes, it can be said that filmmaking operates on a more minute level now than ever before. The reign of the art director has ended, and the reign of color grader has begun. Though much of the way film is defined and judged is still based on grand gestures—on obvious stylistic propertie—the people making films have a greater than ever awareness and control of the small moments that had previously been the obsession of the cinephiles. In essence, filmmaking has caught up with cinephilia while outpacing commonly-accepted theory and criticism.

Part of the reason the Tony Scott movies of the 2000s are disliked by many—and intensely loved by others—is the total lack of "big" gestures in his current approach to directing. These movies consist entirely of small moments, off-the-cuff images, strung together into something massive yet lacking an "obvious" grand design. No big plans, just hidden smiles. This makes Scott a harder sell than similarly-concerned directors like Michael Mann, who anchors his intuitive moments to grand ones, or Claire Denis, who presents them as the directorial gestures that they are. The party line on Scott is that he's an "empty stylist," a man who makes "technically accomplished" and therefore insubstantial films with too much editing. On the one hand, I probably wouldn't be here defending Scott if his movies consisted of shots that ran for minutes instead of seconds; on the other hand, I wouldn't think they were worth defending if that were true.

You've probably figured this one out: I don't intend to brush off Scott's style, nor am I going to defend it as candy, as sugary, calorie-free style, as "pure color" or "style-for-the-sake-of-style-get-over-it-and-have-some-fun-why-don't-you." Scott's recent films are beautiful, but beauty is not a question of surfaces (contrary to the old saying, it's "prettiness" that's merely skin-deep). I am here to defend the substance and morality of Scott's recent films, and a defense of the recent Scott is, at its core, a defense of his editing: the jitters, the saccades, the 250 BPM intercutting, crashing and burning that are integral to the hidden-in-plain-view heart of Scott.

Scott's three great movies of the 2000s—Spy Game, Deja Vu and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3—are metaphysical romances, though only Deja Vu is a romance in conventional terms. Spy Game and Pelham can be summed up in the words in which Howard Hawks once described A Girl in Every Port: "'a love story between two men," an unerotic fraternity that borders on courtship, and which, described in terms of conventional romances, whether straight or gay, would make Spy Game a melancholy story of break-up and reconciliation and Pelham a sort of mutant screwball comedy, where two men start the film as strangers set against each other and develop mutual admiration by prying open one another's faults. This is fairly traditional Hawks Territory, but what's integral to Hawks is presence, which isn't just a question of two or more people occupying the same constructed (i.e. classically delineated) space, but the same frame, whereas the relationships between Brad Pitt and Robert Redford in Spy Game, Denzel Washington and Paula Patton in Deja Vu and Washington and John Travolta in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 all exist across canyons of physical space, narrative time and, most importantly, editing.

So here we leave Hawks Territory and enter the historical domain of Frank Borzage—yet Borzage's criss-crossing of space and time sprouts forth from classical ideas about both, and the love story in a movie like I've Always Loved You (the most Borzagean of titles: a sentence that includes the personal aspect of love while simultaneously painting it as something beyond time) is impossible without a firm grounding; love can't transcend nothing—to break through, you have to make a wall first. Borzage's reputation as a "transcendent romantic" is misleading—not only because it fails to encompass his varied work, but because it denies the tactile, fingertips-and-nostrils physicality of those films of his that are romances. Scott, however, is genuinely uninterested in both concrete reality and linear time—in the fabled "clear delineation of space" or the defined boundaries between scenes that are supposedly the mark of, respectively, good directors and dramatic construction.

The inter-title timestamps that periodically appear in Spy Game become an almost Miikean joke in a movie where action folds in on itself constantly (one of the ways in which, as Ben Sachs has pointed out, the film resembles Miike's Negotiator) and where personal history is fluid. Scott's greatest asset (both to himself and to cinema as a whole) is his ability to work on a molecular level. It goes without saying that these relationships, these marriages-through-montage that involve an editing so relentlessly paced (if it can be said to be paced at all, because at one point a beat becomes so quick that all you hear is a steady tone) that a flow of emotions or actions overpowers any sense of when or where something is taking place, mirror the relationship of an audience to a screen. Scott starts at the endpoint—the relationship between the image and the eye—and works backwards; it's no surprise that the time machine in Deja Vu suspiciously resembles an editing suite.

Some Initial Notes on White Material

Super-coherence 2: Denis slides White Material's chronology around, but, as in The Intruder, it's to clarify, not to artfully obscure. Time shifts as aspects / moments are pulled out, like someone pulling on a thread in order to untangle a knot (in this case, the brutal ending).

If it weren't for the folding of time -- if the narrative were more conventionally "straightforward," which isn't to say it would be straightforward at all, merely conventional -- the final act of violence would seem like one of those contrived accusatory enigmas Haneke specializes in.

White Material is more or less Denis doing Haneke: a privileged family-microcosm is destroyed by the bourgeois values (the ethical importance of preserving what one has earned) it holds on to.

But Denis is slier and more fluid, so instead of crescendoing to an event (as Haneke, ever the showman, always does), she starts with the central event and takes it apart piece by piece, object by object (and the objects do pile on, including a gold-plated lighter, a red currency bag, a purple robe, two motorcycles, a bottle of Fanta, a revolver and the ultimate symbol of Western decadence: Nicolas Duvauchelle's full-sleeve, full-color tattoo and the money, time and idleness it hints at).

***

"Coffee isn't worth dying for," or something along those lines is what Maurice the foreman says to Huppert before he speeds off on his motorcycle for safety.

Isabelle Huppert's character repeats again and again that the coffee plantation she refuses to leave is all she has left, and that abandoning it would represent the ultimate act of cowardice; Denis, in turn, shows, again and again, that the people who really have next to nothing (and don't think that it's a badge of honor) have already run away. Huppert is as entrenched in a fantasy as Duvauchelle and his child soldiers and tattoos.

Supercoherence, Revisited

[Spurred by a comment by Adrian Martin at Girish Shambu's blog, here's a revision -- maybe more accurately called a "re-writing" -- of an essay originally written for Tisch Film Review in 2008]

The Intruder (Claire Denis, 2004)

I would nominate The Intruder for the title of "most straightforward film ever made." Straightforward, in the sense that it has no pretenses, and that is not encumbered by anything: not by the usual patterns and models of framing, editing or just plain filmmaking, nor by traditions of narrative. The movie isn't structured along the lines through which we usually approach memory and experience. It passes over the "conscious" story, the way we think about our experiences, instead presenting a sequence of events and memories in the way we experience them. And it’s not concerned with who is experiencing what or why, or the usual delineations of character and time. It shows how a moment exists before we understand that it has occurred.

Since its raw material involves the filming of reality, cinema has always built itself and its structures on empiricism. But I believe that the reason we have movies is because our interests go beyond our senses. The camera is not an extension of the eye and the microphone doesn’t hear the world the way we do. At its heart, cinema is the idea of turning reality into a metaphor for itself.

The history of cinema begins with a complete unity of a plan and a moment (a single shot, a single idea), and then develops into increasingly complicated plans (casting orders, budgets, eventually screenplays) which in turn require systems (studio shooting, acting styles, crew hierarchies) for getting the fleeting -- "the moment of production," you could call it -- to conform to the plan. We invented directors after we invented something that needed directing, chief cameramen after we had plans that needed unity, editors when we had need for editing, movie actors when we invented something for them to act out. The holy plan-séquence was a way to maintain coherence between the moment of production and the finished film while also maintaining coherence with the original plan. The art of screenwriting, in its classical form, was the art of inventing structures strong enough to survive the ups and downs of the momentary.

But the defining trait of cinema as it moves into the 21st century is the relocation of coherence from the level of scenes to the level of moments -- the individual relationship between shots instead of the way those shots might be arranged to construct "dramatic action." We are discovering the molecular, maybe even the atomic level of cinema.

[Some short pieces, mostly recent, for Cine-File]

Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938)

[This Carné was being screened in a 35mm print with a lecture at the Film Studies Center]

The Hôtel du Nord is another of Marcel Carné's microcosms--spartan but not completely dingy, a place for those who are down-on-their-luck but aren't yet impoverished. It's close to the railroad, and seems to be located in a duller part of the city than Visconti's Le Notti Bianchi was set in.

Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont, who looks like a grown boy) and Renee (Annabella, who looks like a woman) check in. They've decided that double suicide is the next step their romance should take. Pierre chickens out, but not before he shoots Renee, who, rescued by a local pimp, lives. Pierre ends up in jail and the pimp ends up in love with Renee, who still loves her Pierre. It's got neither Jacques Prevert's screenwriting nor Jean Gabin's scowl -- yet Hôtel du Nord is Marcel Carné's finest film, because Carné's films are always measured by their endings (his direction being a question of execution, like Fassbinder's, in every sense of the word) and the conclusion of Hôtel du Nord is his most tragic, his truest, and his least forced. Gabin died at the end of Port of Shadows for no reason except a cruel fate (oh, all the terrible things Jacques Prevert characters had to suffer in the name of dramatic irony!). The death (and life) at the end of Hôtel du Nord seems to be the product of nothing more than human nature.

The Chaser (Na Hong-Jin, 2008)

[The film has a week-long run earlier this year]

The defining trait of most serial killer movies is the idea that serial killers are more interesting than the regular people chasing them. It's also often the problem with them, too. The investigators either become paper-thin dramatic foils for our beloved villains (who in turn become showcases for the idea that misanthropy is inherently charming) or have to be "troubled" (results may vary; William Petersen's Will Graham, in Manhunter, takes that characterization to its poetic extreme).

Hong-Jin Na's scenario for The Chaser is essentially based on giving the middle finger to that convention, as well as to the equally common ploy of making the killer's apprehension the film's climax. Here, the ex-cop-turned-pimp investigating the crimes is more interesting than the sorta boring dude he pursues and catches within the first 40 minutes. The guy even confesses. But the script doesn't let the investigators off easy: the confession's inadmissible, so for most of the rest of the movie, our pimp and his former colleagues have to scramble and find evidence (and a missing woman) before the 12 hours they're legally allowed to hold a suspect without evidence are up.

Besides a clever script - and the shot where Yun-seok Kim whacks a guy over the head with a folding chair - what The Chaser has to recommend it is its first half-hour, cut very quickly but almost never between the same takes. Every edit instead brings a new image - and not just of lowlifes, but low life. Too often in film, the criminal (under)world is a place in stasis. But The Chaser's Nighttown is a place where people actually live and work, like in a Yuzo Kawashima movie. None of that "it's hard out there for a pimp" nonsense - it's a hard world, period. Everybody here has pincers for hands. Na doesn't marvel, and it gives the film a criminal vigor.

Disengagement (Amos Gitai, 2007)

[This was written for Disengagement's screenings as part of EU Fest]

I recall a recent article about Klaus Schmidt, the man who started the dig at Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest known temple. Schmidt came to Turkey by following the notes of another archeologist who had visited Göbekli Tepe decades prior and decided not to investigate further. Arriving at the site, Schmidt looks around. He spots what he recognizes to be the remains of a limestone quarry, and realizes that a structure must be buried under the hill he’s standing on. At that moment, he understands why the earlier archeologist had left. He has a minute to make his decision: either he jots some notes in his journal and turns around, as the other man had done, or he can walk forward to investigate. If he does, he’ll spend the rest of his life digging into this hill. Sometime during the 1980s, Amos Gitai made that same decision: to dig up old and recent ruins using every technique available to him.

Disengagement was made in 2007, before the excellent One Day You'll Understand (which played at the Film Center last year) and Carmel (which hasn’t yet played in the city). It’s a film in two acts with a prologue. The prologue: a handsome Israeli man of French citizenship flirts with a Palestinian woman of Dutch citizenship aboard a train; both carry passports for countries they don’t belong to. Act one: the man is a policeman, taking leave in France before he must evict settlers from the West Bank. He’s there for the funeral of his adopted father, and he spends his time rejecting the desperate, kinda incestuous advances of his adopted sister and sitting around in a dilapidated mansion that alternately resembles the circus from Lola Montes and a war zone from Notre Musique. Act two: he returns to Israel and the sister comes with him, looking for a daughter she gave up for adoption, who now works as a schoolteacher in Gaza.

All of this is depicted with scientific accuracy. Or maybe that should read “poetic accuracy,” since the impulses of science and poetry are the same: to seek out terms with which to define our experience of the world.

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (Damien Chazelle, 2009)

[The film was screened as part of CIMM fest]

In the 1970s, Jacques Rivette took the chance meetings and unlikely coincidences of a Hollywood plot to their natural conclusions: paranoia. If you lived in a world where everyone was star-crossed and every encounter with a stranger served some purpose in a grand narrative, you'd be paranoid too. Whether he intends to or not (and since he's a graduate of Harvard's film department, it's safe to assume he's seen some Rivette), Damien Chazelle has started there and worked his way back, finding the giddy and the romantic in the most archetypal "Rivettian" images: endless rehearsals (here it's musicians instead of actors); actors and non-actors intermingling awkwardly; people groping their way around rooms, inspecting the mise-en-scene as if they can only see three feet in front of them; individuals communicating in stares and gestures as though language has failed them.

But these sorts of inversions are par for the course, because there's an element of gleeful perversity to Chazelle's debut, a reversal of values: it's a musical shot in black-and-white 16mm in Academy ratio (reportedly made with a camcorder strapped to the top of the Aaton to record sound), but with a crisp, digitally recorded score. The film has no dolly shots and no cranes, but it has a 90-piece orchestra. Dialogue is not Chazelle's strong suit; he mixes conversations as if they were crowd noise, as if the words his cast comes up with don't really matter. But when they start to sing, their voices are clear, and the strings soaring behind them are even clearer, as in the film's first true musical number: a single take with two tap dance routines that proves Chazelle knows how to use the lowly zoom better than any of its current crop of obsessive practitioners; that is, he doesn't need dollies. And when his characters don't speak, when their communication expresses itself solely through hands lightly touching others on a subway handrail, or through a cut between two faces, they're even clearer.

The Man From London (Bela Tarr, 2007)

[Written for the film's belated Chicago run last month]

By the late 2000s, we finally found a place for Bela Tarr movies. But maybe not for new Bela Tarr movies. When Facets finally put Satantango (1994) out on DVD in 2008, it was as heralded as The Man from London was ignored on the festival circuit.

Many have complained that the film is "style for the sake of style," as though cinema consists of something other than style and that a tracking shot represents less substance than dialogue. At this point, Tarr's style can't be separated from what he means to express: he isn't trying to bend the world to fit a set of techniques, but using those techniques (slow zooms, long takes, black-and-white film stock, post-synced sound) as a launching point for the creation of a world; every movement of the dolly establishes a new geography.

If you're gonna complain that the action of a Tarr is "unrealistically" slow, you might as well complain about the coincidences of a Hitchcock or the rapport police and thieves enjoy in a Mann. The film's soundtrack, which is as musique concrete as Play Time's, combines Mihaly Vig's synth strings with Tarkovsky's (or are they Fassbinder's? or maybe even Welles'?) post-synced voices. Yeah, sure, even the current version of the movie, re-dubbed following complaints about the voice-acting at Cannes, is as jarring in its mismatch of voices as an Americanized giallo. But that isn't a deficiency. There are no deficiencies in a movie where everything is intentional.

The Man from London's capriccio is a glum French port, populated with little lost men imported wholesale from the opening shot of Werckmeister Harmonies. Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), his jacket collar permanently turned up, operates a railroad switchyard by the docks. The half-hour opening sequence, a virtuoso example of Tarr's directing, has more than a little of De Palma's Snake Eyes to it: the first visible cut occurs roughly 13 1/2 minutes in, and this dialogue-less series of dollies, zoom-ins, zoom-outs, and measured movements of the camera crane creates a tiny universe of half-noticed intrigues and sleepy tension, introducing every mystery the remainder of the film unpacks, if not solves. There's a suitcase, a ship (as menacing as that ferry in The Ghost Writer) and a few men who hide in the shadows. Whatever you may think of the slow movement of the camera in The Man From London, you can never be completely sure where that camera will go. It restores mystery to mysteries. The wind, fog and rain, which always arrive on cue, may be fake, but its sense of wonder is genuine.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

[The film finally opened in Chicago at the beginning of 2010]

Claire Denis is the greatest director of our time. Every new film of hers provides sufficient evidence to prove that statement.

Let's take the case of 35 Shots of Rum, which isn't her newest film (that would be White Material), but the newest to screen in Chicago. 35 Shots is set, like her earlier Nenette & Boni, in a small world, one that consists largely of a handsome, quiet train operator approaching 50 (Alex Descas, who gets better with every gray hair) and his beautiful college student daughter (Mati Diop).

Crossing over their borders are three intruders: a neighbor (Gregoire Colin, almost as familiar a face in Denis' films as Descas) threatening to move away while playing out a sort of romance with the daughter; the train operator's on-and-off girlfriend (Nicole Dogue), a cab driver that he tries to keep at arm's length; and Rene (pensive Julieth Mars Toussaint), the train operator's melancholic ex-colleague. There are a few locations: two apartments in Paris, two bars, a balcony, a car, a classroom, a locker room, a train, an apartment in Hamburg. What Denis is able to make out of these elements isn't a lesson in economy, but the story of how the most mundane things (a For Sale sign, a blue door, two rice cookers, a cerulean table top, an iPod's white headphones, a bar's asparagus-colored walls, The Commodores' post-Lionel Richie hit "Nightshift") and gestures (half-hearted dancing, a kiss on the cheek, a lean, a glance) acquire meaning in our lives, and how, through that shared meaning, we come to understand one another.

Denis' previous non-documentary feature, The Intruder, is arguably the most revolutionary film since Playtime (which screens next month at the Film Center). It rediscovered of the world by divorcing itself from consciousness; it wasn't concerned with who was experiencing what or why, or the traditional delineations of character and time. 35 Shots of Rum rediscovers both character and time by showing us things that seem to lie outside both.

Key Images of 21st Century Cinema #2

35 Rhums (Claire Denis, 2008; photographed by Agnes Godard)

132 / 35

The movement and arrangement of elements (figures, images, bits of music, references, edits, lines of dialogue, everyday objects, stretches of time) in a Claire Denis film has no real precedent. The closest thing, I think, is the movement and arrangement of instrumental voices in a late Beethoven string quartet. 35 Rhums reminds me of the 3rd movement of the 15th. It's a film in A minor, both molto adagio and andante.