Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 10, March 2001
Daniel Frampton
The Way that Movements Speak
London Film Report, 31 March
2001 This text is simply a report on some
new film releases in London, England. Considering all the
film reviews littering the world, and considering the title
of our salon-journal, I thought it would be interesting to
approach 'reviewing' in a less conventional way. Thus this
report is a personal impression of the 'thinking' of the
films' formal actions (movement, framing, colours, shifts,
etc.), rather than a full-on interpretation of the films'
more obvious subjects. The idea, the 'filmosophy',
is to ask what the images and sounds are 'saying'. The
larger argument is that film writing around the world can
easily stand a little promoting of the worth of form, and
that these notes can simply be added to available synopses,
and other, more plot-driven interpretations. The fact that
these partial and impressionistic notes are fairly
contingent on a viewing of the films under consideration is
one reason to go and see them (if you can). This text looks at a couple of films
by the Hungarian director Béla Tarr, and an award
winning film about a Russian woman and her son in a small
English seaside town. _Damnation_ features a love triangle,
and is set in a small Hungarian town where the people seem
stuck, and drenched under incessant rain. The film feels the
repetitive world of its characters from the start, drifting
slowly back from the drone of endless mine carts swinging
their way up a hill. The film backs through a window to
reveal its central character, Karrer, watching the scene,
providing the impetus for the film's attention and
concentration on the carts. The film settles behind his head
(not for the first time). It is his experience that seems to
fuel the image-thinking of the film. The industrial town where this story
takes place is shown in empty frosted greys. Some films
think in colour, some films believe that their characters
lead lives without colour; not so much black and white as
lightgrey and darkgrey. The fog becomes the sadness of the
town, all-pervading, and not even sex can seem to relieve
the gloom (even the privacy of the home cannot escape the
setting, the repetition). The film returns to spaces like a
film-loop, glued by ambient tones (and the sniffles of
scavenging dogs). And it is quite beautiful: pulling back
from the mine carts in a later moment, the film slides
through the window slats to find Karrer, this time not
staring, but making love to the woman he has pursued. And
there is a nice Madonna and child and football image; and
the lilting music, and seemingly never-ending dancing in the
latter part of the film, offer a melancholic escape that
uplifts as it soothes. At London's National
Film Theatre, in an on-stage
interview with Jonathan Romney, Béla Tarr talked of
his aim to get away from 'story', to reveal the way that
locations 'have their own faces' -- there being a 'logic' in
a 'certain kind of space'. This is in line with his belief
that film should reveal 'presence' (rather than pat meanings
through allegories or symbols, which are 'so far from the
genre of film'). For Tarr film is a simple, concrete,
primitive, limited, definite language (this 'definiteness'
recalling Godard's words that we should replace vague ideas
with clear images), and the filmgoer is a 'more mature
partner' of the film, who Tarr hopes will leave the cinema a
'different person'. Tarr's most recent film, _Werckmeister
Harmonies_, might be said to attempt 'political images'
(political thinking in images) via the moving, gliding,
linking image. The film virtually consists of these
long gliding thoughts ('long takes', or 'sequence-shots' in
traditional, technicist film language) that travel the
length of streets, or caress interiors like a supernatural
cat (we may even imagine the edit shifts ourselves:
remembering a scene we feel sure there must have been some
sort of shift cut -- but there wasn't, we're just so used to
having them). Time, its direct image, is given again and
again. First of all these lengthy thoughts
seem to want to reveal and think a phenomenology, or a truer
humanism. These are no longer 'long takes', but thinkings of
the human 'gaplessness' of experience -- we don't edit
experience and the film wants to show this: following the
lead character Janos as he surveys the whale, or keeping
endless pace with Mr Eszter and Janos as they walk side by
side (their faces bobbing in front of us for a relative
eternity). But most interestingly, this kind of
thinking physicalises relationships between characters (the
film wants us to *feel* this physicality). The most
beautiful example in _Werckmeister Harmonies_ occurs in the
main square of the town, where visiting showmen have brought
an enormous stuffed whale. The townsmen (seemingly *all* the
men of the town) stand around in loose groups, perhaps
waiting for work, or simply there to keep warm by fires. At
this point the film begins to tour the faces of the men,
tenaciously, almost impertinently, gliding from one cold
furrowed brow to another: here the film seems to be asking
the men something, demanding a response, forcing a
realisation perhaps. Each time the film settles on another
face, the pause seems to reveal a 'questioning' nature to
the film's thinking. Thus the film not only connects each
man to the other, but politicises this linkage -- the film
is joining the men together and asking something of them (to
wake up, to revolt, to *move*). And so later the film is able to lead
(floating at the front) the silent and powerful sight of
hundreds of townsmen marching on the hospital to vent their
anger (released by the catalyst of the whale?). The innocent
are driven mad ('nothing matters, nothing counts' we hear),
and so, wordlessly (leaving their actions to images), they
trash each hospital room, only to reach a melancholic
recognition of futility. Most interestingly, _Damnation_ might
be seen as a thinking of stasis and movement (or growth), a
film that thinks through these 'ideas' with images. This can
be the political stasis of the town (and especially its men)
and the movement that the film brings to it (surveys it
with). It can be the head that stares and the film which
investigates. It can be the seated Karrer and Sebestyen and
the dancing townsfolk -- where the cloakroom woman talks of
dance, and 'the way that movements speak'. That melancholy breads boredom breads
non-movement is actualised by the movement-thinking of the
film. While characters sit and drink the film is almost
always restless. Even small changes in angles force the
filmgoer to actively keep a character in the centre of their
sight. The film simply, subtlely, makes us see the stasis
all the more *because* of this movement. The still is
revealed by the 'our' forced movement. (The film does hold
still sometimes, especially on the woman at the centre of
the love triangle -- holds still like the attentions of her
lovers.) Importantly, the film thinks a pure
relationship between the town and the characters. Karrer's
scenes are almost always begun without him: the film will
slide in from an industrial setting, or even from close to a
building, to 'introduce' him. The link is not made
graphically, but *affectively*, through the movement of film
and the movement of our memory (seeing him after some
setting, we 'remember' the setting while now following him
-- the setting and the man become mixed). In fact the film holds itself very
close to the buildings of the town, often caressing their
rough concrete like a forced love affair -- the film tries
to find beauty *within* the town. The image of rain washing
over this concrete at the film's close comes near to
'becoming' this industrial beauty. At the end all may be summed-up in
dog-eared and earth-bound metaphors of damnation, but the
questions and ideas of the film are not reduced to or
closed-off by these ends. By turns boring and mesmeric,
_Damnation_ may frighten some with its drifting narrative --
you may either lose yourself in its 'time' or become simply
impatient -- but it is, at least, thoughtful. Finally, _Last Resort_ was recently
released to rave reviews in the UK. The film concerns a
Russian woman and her son who arrive in the UK and are
'held' a small English seaside town while their application
for asylum is processed. Their life is (thought) rough,
through an image that is alive with grain. The film also
knows when to shake and worry -- and is most unsettled when
she, our heroine, is unsettled. The film physically,
thoughtfully, reacts to its characters' emotions (which
resembles the empathic, close thinking of _Rosetta_), and
only seems to move when the woman does. The film concentrates on faces and
immediate locale, and at only one or two important points
shifts scale: when the woman is driven from the airport to
the seaside town to be 'held', and when she and her son and
her new friend 'escape'. Each time the imposing vista is
introduced by the film, is allowed by the film to reduce the
characters. The film also feels an openness for sound,
allowing voices and interruptions to mount and fill (like
the image). Sometimes the film image searches close to eyes,
as if it were trying to catch an 'inside' to the characters.
(The fine recent London film _The Low Down_ had a similar
humane thinking, scanning bodies and touches, edges and
glimpses, reactive to human movement -- the film searching
for knowledge about its two lovers.) The most beautiful thinking arrives
with naturally filled images, fractured and busy without
obscuring emotion or character: faces doubled in half
reflections through glass, eyes framed with fire or sea,
bodies masked by fruit machines or bright lights. This loads
the image with 'information' and makes us work to direct our
attention (and feeds possible second viewings). _The Double
Life of Venonique_ thought similarly. The ending becomes a celluloid-Turner,
with sea and blur and bodies and image-grain gliding and
melting into a melancholic grey-blue. _Last Resort_ (a film
that opens and closes with its main characters facing us,
but moving backwards) is open thinking, tender feeling,
human-political image-thought -- here surfaces are as
important as depths, and (when the woman is seated on a
bench under a street light on a harsh cold night) the tales
of immigrants are perhaps given a single, beautiful
thought-image: a small warm face that glows in the corner of
a cold blue frame. University of London,
England Filmography _Damnation_ (_Karhozat_), directed by
Béla Tarr, 1987. Hungary, black and white, 116mins,
1.85ratio. UK release date: 30 March 2001 (Artificial
Eye). _Double Life of Veronique_, directed
by Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991. _Last Resort_, directed by Pawel
Pawlikowski, 2000. Great Britain, colour, 75mins. UK release
date: 16 March, 2001 (Artificial Eye). _The Low Down_, directed by Jamie
Thraves, 1999. _Rosetta_, directed by Luc and
Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 1999. _Werckmeister Harmonies_
(_Werckmeister harmoniak_), directed by Béla Tarr,
2000. Hungary, Black and White, 145mins. Shown at the
National Film Theatre, London, 26 March 2001. Copyright © Daniel Frampton
2001 Daniel Frampton, 'The Way that
Movements Speak: London Film Report, 31 March 2001',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 10, March 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n10frampton>.
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