Symbols, Time, Tarr and Tarkovsky Pt. 2/2

There was another thing I’d like to discuss, namely the question of time, Fred Kelemen (cameraman of Béla Tarr) mentioned. The Turin Horse contains 30 shots over a running time length of approximately 150 minutes, this means an average of 5 minutes per shot. Kelemen told he was exactly on the same wavelength as Tarr concerning the visuals of the movie. The length which sometimes is kept on a bit too is long, is also done so because then time itself (the passing of time) is made visible, to be grasped. He describes these moments as moments where ‘the screen looks back at you.’ In our daily activities we are not concerned with the passing of time, we don’t get a grasp of it (it just ‘flies by’ as is sometimes said). Thus for Kelemen and Tarr, cinema is a place where can you get a feeling of ‘pure time’, the feeling of genuinely time passing. Kelemen also mentioned it’s not perhaps something we should be happy about, or ‘like’ to be conscious of (because it can remind us of our mortality). While commercial cinema aims to elipse time, ‘having a good time,’ letting time fly by, Kelemen, Tarr (and among other probably, Tarkovsky and perhaps Antonioni) have different aims for the cinema, for instance reminding us of the passing of time (and our mortality). (See also this interesting interview with Béla Tarr concerning The Turin Horse and mortality http://filmkrant.nl/TS_oktober_2011/7279 [it's in dutch though] ).

Tarkovsky writes about almost exactly the same ideas in his book Sculpting in Time.  ”Time, printed in it’s factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art” (p. 63). This also relates back to the title of his book, and what he thinks he should do with cinema (sculpt time in certain ways, according a personal expression of the filmmaker). Because the camera always records concrete things, it is by way of these (factual forms) that cinema can grasp time. Cinema and music are perhaps in that sense the only two art forms whose main characteristic is time (cinema and music take place in the course of time passing).

Tarkovsky also has a clear view of why people go to the cinema (when they’re not going for entertainment), namely: “for time lost or spent or not yet had” (p. 63). Or, as the title of Proust’s famous book series suggests “In search of lost time.” He later adds to this that we go in search of lost time because a person “seeks to fill that spiritual vacuum which has formed as a result of the specific conditions of his modern existence: constant activity, curtailment of human contact and the materialist bent of modern education” (p. 83). This relates back to Kelemen, when he described that in everyday life we are not conscious of time, or time passing (because we are busy). Essential for Tarkovsky is then also this spiritual vacuum, as a result of modern society (which doesn’t let us contemplate or stand still by our existence, mortality). The need to be conscious of this or be concerned with it can be in a sense then perfectly be fulfilled for Tarr and Tarkovsky (as opposed to commercial cinema).

Source: Andrey Tarkovsky – Sculpting in time (Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair 2008).

Symbols, Time, Tarr and Tarkovsky Pt. 1/2

At the filmmuseum in Amsterdam they had a special screening of Béla Tarr’s new film, The Turin Horse. I had already seen the film at a press screening but this time they showed it with the cameraman, Fred Kelemen present. After the film there was a Q & A with Kelemen in which he made some interesting points. I want to discuss two points he made, and relate these points to things in Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, since he basically makes similar points.

Kelemen was asked by the interviewer about some things Tarr said about symbols, namely that Tarr denies using them. The interviewer was surprised Tarr said that in an interview but Kelemen found it perfectly reasonable. In The Turin Horse there are no symbols, Kelemen said, a potato is a potato. What Kelemen understands with a symbol is that something means something on it’s own (ie isolated, non-related to something else). Thus in that sense there is not really a ‘hidden meaning’ to be discovered, as though this film (or in general) is like a puzzle that can be ‘deciphered.’ This doesn’t mean though that interpreting is prohibited, according Kelemen you can create meaning with relating things to each other in the film. The big problem Kelemen (and others, as you will see) has with ‘symbols’ in the sense described above, is that there is only one way to interpret them. For instance, a white pidgeon means freedom, there is no other way to interpret something like that. Or a sign above an exit which symbolizes ‘emergency exit.’ It comes down to this: a symbol can only be interpreted in one way, and that obstructs thought, leaves less freedom to the viewer. On the other hand, for Kelemen, a metaphor is something which can be interpreted in different ways, and can encompass a broader space of meaning.

Tarkovsky quotes from Thomas Mann’s book The Magic Mountain in which he writes: “A spiritual phenomen is ‘significant’ precisely because it exceeds it’s own limits, serves as expression and symbol of something spiritually wider and more universal, an entire world of feelings and thoughts” (p. 104). This fits in precisely with what Kelemen and Tarr stand for. Neither of these filmmakers are interested in ‘symbols’, they are interested in creating something which can’t be definitely put into words. The consequence of this could also be called ‘abstraction’, there is not one meaning ‘hidden’ but it goes beyond every interpretation in that sense. Tarkovsky is interested in “the refusal even to hint at the kind of final (image) meaning that can be gradually deciphered like a charade” (p. 106). If it can be like that, art is very restricted, and can’t go beyond itself and reach a sphere which can’t be put into words (see also Cronenberg’s idea to “Show the unshowable, speak the unspeakable”).

“If you try to analyse Leonardo’s portrait [ http://bit.ly/rMSaBh , or Mona Lisa for that matter] separating it into it’s components [taking elements into isolation, 'symbols'], it will not work. At any rate it will explain nothing. For the emotional effect exercised on us by the woman in the picture is powerful precisely because it is impossible to find in her anything that we can definitely prefer, to single out any detail from the whole [...]. And so there opens up before us the possibility of interaction with infinity, for the great function of the artistic image is to be a kind of detector of infinity. [...] Masterpieces are ambivalent and allow for widely differing interpretations” (p. 108-109). Tarkovsky then, doesn’t also really subscribe to structuralism (reducing film or a text to a play of signs).

Source:

Andrey Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time (2008 version, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair).

Bergman and art

No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls - Ingmar Bergman

The power of Bergman lies mainly in two elements I think, from what I’ve seen in some of his films (Persona, Autumnsonate and Cries and Whispers). The first is, I think, the way his characters are. They seem real and true. In mostly Hollywoodfilms, characters are simple with good and or bad elements. In some way, Bergman’s characters ring extremely true to me. Yet the brilliant thing of Bergman is, that all his characters feel this way. So if for instance, we had a scene in which we get to understand one character’s point of view, then a moment later we understand another character’s point of view. The big thing is that all these characters speak the truth, none of the characters is ‘wrong.’ You can really imagine and place yourself in all these positions. I would say that this creates a complex and abstract atmosphere, a world with people where there are no easy answers. This in itself can be strong enough to create a discomforting and disenchanting effect on the viewer.

The second point, which is closely related to the first, concerns the quote at the beginning. Bergman notes here that film (I would say almost any art really) has the power to go deep down to ‘real emotions.’ I say here ‘real emotions’ because I would like to suggest it as opposed to ‘fake emotions’ (sentimentalistic, more on the surface emotions).* I would say that these ‘fake emotions’ surround us in everyday live, especially with all the commercials and hollywood movies which create these emotions in ‘easy spectacular’ ways (by music for example). ‘Real emotions’ are behind the surface of everyday live, which go beyond ‘fake emotions’ and are concerned with one could call the ‘soul.’ The surface of everyday lives in the three films I’ve mentioned, always explode to make room for the soul to be touched. I point to the scenes in which the characters really say what they feel, and how they for example despise each other etcetera. In Persona especially, Bibi Andersson her daily live with a husband is exposed as an attempt to cover a chaotic ‘real-life’ (ie, the soul) and ‘real emotions’. The way Bergman handles this material, especially as it reinforces the first point I made, is extraordinary and is what I think makes him so great.

Yet this isn’t only the case with Bergman. Dostoevsky for instance, is a writer who manages to create all his characters which such flair and truth. He also, is interested in the underlying emotions which almost only come to the fore through art. A play I saw, The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, also creates ‘true characters’ which expose their ‘real/underlying feelings.’ Yet these feelings are almost difficult and indescribable, though a good potential use from art.

 

* One can think of a rush while watching an action movie or sentimental melodramatic scene. This I would associate with ‘fake emotions.’

Freud’s Uncanny & Eyes Wide Shut

In this post I will address Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 movie, Eyes Wide Shut. I just read Freud’s Uncanny and although there is already a wonderful piece on it in relation to The Shining, I thought I would talk about in relation to Kubrick’s last film. (For Uncanny and The Shining see: http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id80.html ). In Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick comes perhaps nearest in all his films to achieve what Freud aimed for in his writing on the Uncanny. First I will argue in general some elements of uncanniness in EWS and then I will elaborate on it. In my conclusion I will do a suggestion as to why Kubrick was interested in using Uncanny (since he cited the essay while making The Shining).

The Uncanny (or: Das Unheimliche) is a feeling of unpleasantness or anxiety sometimes experienced by humans. He starts out his essay with saying that this feeling is not “always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.” In short I’d say, this is Freud’s attempt to define the Uncanny somewhat more thus to get closer to a concrete description of the feeling and in what circumstances it comes into being. He writes that a feeling of Uncanniness is also closely related to the idea of “a ‘double’ in every shape and degree, with persons, therefore, who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike.” This is especially the case in EWS, where the women all rather look-a-like and are almost interchangeable. The woman at the deathbed of her father looks almost like Alice in the way here hair is etc. Then who hasn’t had this feeling of questioning which girl is which, who died of an overdose in the newspaper etc? Furthermore there’s the “constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune.” Daytime or nighttime, Bill visits the same areas and same situations seem to occur. And think about the dream that Alice tells her husband, which is strangely familiar to Bill (having been at the mansion).

This brings me to where I think that EWS stands out in relation to Freud’s essay. Namely, in relation to the idea of a distinction between imagination and reality. Freud names other elements which can create a sense of uncanny, like dismembered limbs or when in daily life you notice the same numbers around you (or when you check the clock). He goes on to say that it’s very rare that it happens in real life, and it perhaps makes more sense in relation to art. Freud then distinguishes four worlds of representation that the story-teller can present to us. The first is the one with fairy-tales, where “the world of reality is left behind from the very start [...] all the elements so common in fairy-stories, can exert no uncanny influence here.” Think of the Thing (the hand) in The Addams Family series, which wouldn’t arouse any feeling of anxiety since we don’t believe the world created before is when we start to enter it. We don’t take the Addams family-world as related to our ‘real-world’ (daily life).

The second world of representation is a setting which “though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entites. We order our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and spectres as though their existence had the same validity in their world as our own has in the external world. And then in this case too we are spared all trace of the uncanny.” Freud here mentions an example like the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet. One could also think of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, where there is one scene in which Diane Keaton leaves the bed as a ghostlike appearance.

“The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. Everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. He can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality. He takes advantage of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness; he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility (3). There is one more means to improve his chances of success. He should keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the conditions he has selected for the world he writes about, or that he should cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point at all throughout the book (4).”

In the third world we catch the writer afterwards at fooling us or deceiving us. In the fourth world we can never be sure. This is precisely what happens in EWS, a representation of a world in which we can’t distinguish reality from the dream and don’t know where the imagination ends. Kubrick leaves all these questions open. It is also on this same level that Lynch, Bunuel and perhaps Cronenberg move. And Bergman, in Persona.

Finally as to why I think these ideas of Freud interested Kubrick. At the start of his essay Freud writes that aesthetics till then has mostly been concerned with feelings or objects that create feelings of a positive nature. They have mostly neglected “opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion.” This are precisely the feelings an artist should be concerned with I think. Kubrick is not interested in presenting us a fairy-tale world in which we can safely dwell without being disturbed. Through art we should be confronted and disturbed. Or as Zizek/Lacan would say: confront us with a lack, with something unharmonious.

 

Sources:

Freud’s Uncanny (1919): http://homepage.mac.com/allanmcnyc/textpdfs/freud1.pdf

Personal art

“The poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way it reveals the whole of human existence” – Arthur Schopenhauer

Through the poet (artist) taking something very particular from his life or around him, and articulating in a way that it is complete, accurate he reveals the whole of human existence. This is the vision of Schopenhauer on artists. Yet this seems to me some sort of strange quote. My recent (perhaps somewhat naïve) conception was that artists always directly had some power of expressing that which is universal, timeless and thus appeals to a lot people (in the sense that they look explicitly for the most universal element). Yet when I look at the most interesting filmmakers from the 20th century, they took the most personal, individual elements. Perhaps, by going ‘ deep’ into their own personas they rather paradoxically found some universal human element.

A group of film students made a short movie called “A Short Film About Dekalog”, after the Decalogue series made by Kieslowski. In this they had an interview with the filmmaker and they asked him questions about the series. Remarkably the student asked if he was concerned with ‘universal themes’ etcetera when making the series. Kieslowski denies very stubbornly, explaining that he just wanted to show the polish lives of the time as accurately as possible. Strange how it comes to resonate with other people (at least around Europe at the time).

The same counts for instance for the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr:

“I just wanted to make a movie about this guy who is walking up and down the village and has seen this whale. And, you know when we are working we don’t talk about any theoretical things. […] Mostly we [Tarr and his writer] just talk about life. How it’s going on the street. We never talk about theoretical things. We never talk about Chaos or existential things. We just talk about someone coming into the room and he wants something and the other guy who is sitting there doesn’t want these things. That’s all.”

Furthermore think of filmmakers such as Fellini, Bergman and Tarkovsky (perhaps the most explicit, obvious ones). Fellini made the film 8 ½ about a director having a ‘director’s block.’ Bergman wrote films about his own life events. This is not even to mention Tarkovsky. Another example is Buñuel, who reportedly filmed a few of his dreams, visions.

I have no problem at all with this conception, that capturing an individual’s life resonates in other people. I don’t for instance, think that it consequently means that the personal filmmakers are unoriginal or whatever (that they thus all make the same films). Yet I wonder about this somewhat paradoxical idea. We have an artist who specifically expresses his individuality yet at the same time it resonates in other people. How does this happen?

 

Sources:

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/tarr.html Tarr interview

A Short Film About Dekalog is found on the artifical eye DVD of ‘Dekalog – parts 6 to 10’ by Kryszstof Kieslowski

 

Notes regarding A History of Violence

Though there have been some excellent pieces on A History of Violence, I’d like to add some things to these observations.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399146/usercomments-1121 (more or less a mix of the other sources mentioned below).

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006610.html

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006484.html

I really don’t like summaries so I’d advice you to watch the film first before reading this blog. Very well, in short it’s a movie about a family who’s being threatened and the father, Tom Stall has to fight the bad guys.

The first part of the film is literally a bunch of cliches. The kid is the hero at the baseball field, there’s a bully at school, mother dresses as a cheerleader before she makes love to the father, the whole family over-the-top express their love for and care for the little daughter. In short they’re living the American dream, everything is fine, like in the movies. Yet the way Cronenberg deals with these things is not the usual way, it thus reaches a higher level of complexity. Though they’re living the dream, sometimes they’re aware of it and sometimes they’re not. Some laughs at the love-scene with the cheerleader, the father who denies being a hero (wants to have nothing to do with it) express this awareness.

The best example of this is in some of the dialogue (taken from imdb), where the brother confronts the bully:

“Jack Stall: Yeah, you’re right. I’m both little and a faggot. You got me dead to rights.
Bobby Jordan: Come on, chickenshit, let’s do this!
[He pushes Jack back against the locker booth]
Jack Stall: What would be the point? I mean, you win. You win, you win. You’ve established your, uh, alpha male standing; uh, you’ve established my unworthiness; but doing violence to me just seems
[clears throat]
Jack Stall: pointless and cruel. ”

Jack, the brother, is thus in this scene remarkably conscious of the cliched conventions around him. Yet later in the film he goes with the ‘flow’ calling his Dad a hero. Thus in the first part there’s this constant balancing between the filmic conventional and the ‘empirical reality’. But then the ‘bad guys’ get involved, typically the over-the-top gangsters with sunglasses and wearing tuxedo’s.

Then the real conflict of the film ensues: between the inside, family community (empirical reality) and the Outside, gangsters and movie conventions. The trick is that these are exchangeable. Just look at the very first shot of the films which tells us a lot concerning this point. It’s a long tracking shot sideways, across what looks like a movie (perhaps western) set. We have these cardboard houses and the credits layered over the image. At this point we’re really ‘watching’ a movie. Yet it becomes problematic when one of the bad guys, enters one of these houses and we follow him. We literally enter Inside, where a massacre occurred and where the guy shoots a little girl. This exposition tells us all about the rest of the film: Outside, filmic convention violently intruding the Inside. They’re almost inextricably connected.

The conflict is thus that Tom tries to remove the Outside of his property (most notably expressed in the scene where Tom goes outside on his veranda with a shotgun, very westernish). Yet the way he deals with the Outside, is by way of the “Outside” (these are thus exchangeable, connected and related to each other). He’s the most brutal, best killer of all. Thus the Outside is already also “Inside.” Though Tom tries to fight the bad guys, in three different major sequences (first, the guys at the restaurant, secondly Fogarty and his men at the their property, thirdly at the mansion). The resolution is rather dark, pessimistic, since everyone at the table silently ‘accepts’ this state of being, of the Outside fused with the Inside, the dream filmic reality with the ‘empirical real reality.’

And then there’s probably a lot more to say about this film, concerning the violent aspect etcetera. But I want mention one more thing, which is that it’s remarkable that the Outside is threatening, yes, but not really in a violent way. It’s always Tom (Inside) who takes action first, who shoots first. Furthermore it’s also Jack, the brother, who delivers the first punch to the stereotype bully. Yet I’m not so sure where Cronenberg wants to go with this…

To conclude:

“There is no such discrepancy between an Inside and an Outside in A History of Violence, largely because there is no uncontested, convincing, empirical reality from which we can clearly differentiate the fantasmatic elements; there is only a seamless tissue of fantasies. Of the family members in A History of Violence, by the end of the film, only the youngest child could plausibly not be aware that the family scene has always been a simulation.“ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/board/nest/174993496?p=2&d=176502766#176502766 (it’s also a girl who in the first scene is the only one who at the beginning survived the massacre).

Kieslowski and Kubrick

In this post I’d like to propose a relation, or connection between these two filmmakers.

It’s known that Kubrick liked Kieslowski “they [Kieslowski and his writer, Piesiewicz] have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what’s really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don’t realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.” http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0078.html

Yet this post will be more concerned with, as my professor phrased it, “Kieslowski is Tarkovsky-light.” Meaning, that Kieslowski was able to ‘bring’ Tarkovsky to the big audience. Kieslowski put metaphysical reflections (a la Tarkovsky) into a more concrete style, that the audience is used to. And this, I think is also what’s going on with Kubrick. Both filmmakers have been able to put a well amount of content into a fairly ‘acceptable’ form of film. But I don’t want to insinuate this made Kieslowski less good, or original. Also I don’t think that these filmmakers lost some of their spirit in ‘adapting’ to some bigger audience. A quote by Kubrick illustrates this:

“I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.”

Kubrick doesn’t seem to think of himself as a truly original mind. Though his style is very Kubrick-ish (in the sense that we can recognize his stamp as a filmauteur), it’s not really that his style is very different from classical hollywood cinema. He sometimes just let’s things play out in shot-reverse shots, uses wide shots etcetera. Also his most recognizable feature as a filmmaker, his famous tracking-out shots, are not very radical compared to some other filmmakers (see Tarkovsky, Tarr or Antonioni). Kieslowski is basically the same thing, his style isn’t very radical. He also let things play out in such ways (although he uses long-take shots sparingly, they are ‘acceptable’ I guess for the big audience) . Another important thing to note here is the tempo, rhythm of the shots, in most of their films it’s rather short (compared to Tarkovsky, Tarr or Antonioni). Thus even though Tarkovsky occasionally has his medium shot of someone talking, he stresses it to great lengths, thereby radicalizing the Hollywood style.

A consequence of this is that Kubrick and Kieslowski might be better-known with a greater audience, they might also be less-appreciated. For some films may appear as ‘too normal’, thereby diminishing the effect of some viewers wanting to look after what’s really going on in their movies. Another important issue is ofcourse, if their style is rather ‘normal’, why do I place these filmmakers above others? A main thing here is that they’re not that normal, they provide something more than most hollywood films. Kubrick at least challenges the viewer with certain gaps in the narrative, Kieslowski has this spiritual quality not found in such films. In other words, what perhaps ‘really’ separates these filmmakers from Classical Hollywoodstyle is their content.