The Watermelon Man (1970) A Film by Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles' The Watermelon Man, or, When Brechtian Cinema Goes Bad, is a demented domestic parable that plays like a left-wing sitcom stretched to feature length. Its premise - that of an outspoken bigot whose skin turns black overnight - echoes the simple-minded modern-day comedies of Tyler Perry. These are films that operate under the banal understanding that in order to confront societal inequities one must face them head-on with silly, speculative plots that draw glaring attention to human differences. As a result, they do less to alleviate unfair prejudices than they do to reinforce them, getting across only the vague notion that "things must change" rather than offering up any suggestions or providing any insight into the complexity of such a topic. The Watermelon Man's leading concern is the segregation of Negroes in American society, particularly among the bourgeois white population, so it confronts this situation in the bluntest, most obvious manner: it converts a member from the latter majority to the former minority to give him a taste of the other side, to "teach him a lesson". It's a shame that for its distanced social critique and conscious aesthetic of irritation this falls under the umbrella of Brechtian cinema, otherwise a socially and politically productive form, because Van Peebles only recycles the already prevailing climate of prejudice in late sixties American suburbia with the pedestrian suggestion that it's wrong.

In order to cushion his critique in a polarizing black or white dynamic (literally), Van Peebles villanizes the white folk, lifting the guise of economic prosperity to reveal scheming, heartless individuals beneath. Late in the film, main character Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) is confronted by a group of white neighbors who offer him $40,000, then $50,000, then eventually $100,000 to move out for fear that his presence will sabotage the morale of the neighborhood. To remove this supposed parasite from their meticulously contained lives, no price is too high. Elsewhere, this caricature of a white predator is no less pronounced: hordes of townsfolk crowd around Gerber insisting he's a thief with no visible evidence, a white women sleeps with him on the basis of his exotic blackness, and worst, his own wife loses faith in him at the expense of their love and mutual need for each other. All of these scenarios offer variations on the typical manifestations of white supremacy, each over-the-top and unconvincing in their own right. What's more, Van Peebles posits Gerber's transformation as a process of self-actualization. Though Gerber first interprets his black skin as a punishing comeuppance for his rude, unfiltered behavior in the beginning, his blackness eventually resolves itself as a return to a superior moral primitivism, a notion Van Peebles suggests is only alive among the African American race. It's as if the film is governed by the idea that Negroes must teach the white majority to rethink their values, that otherwise the white majority as a whole is doomed to rot in moral and spiritual decay. Sure, some of Van Peebles' observations are correct and worthy of consideration, but not on the kind of cosmic level he employs to launch his indictment.



Before going further, it's important to acknowledge that The Watermelon Man is decidedly not after understatement. It wants to attack loudly, and it doesn't take any measures to disguise it. One might uphold that social problems such as that of racism in 60's and 70's America can only float to the surface of the collective conscience through broad, angry gestures, and to that I tenuously agree. But if this means simplifying social structures so extremely that they cease to feel practical in context of the real world, I think that's a failure that invites hyperbole and caricature rather than measured considerations. Van Peebles is direct and unsubtle in his drawing attention to the negligible values that are assigned to color in society by sporadically adorning the screen with arbitrary filters (red, green, blue, yellow), for seemingly no other motivation than to reinforce what little bearing it has on the narrative, and by extension, on people, or perhaps also to send another shatter through the already dilapidated fourth wall. When Gerber first wakes up black, this device is employed to absurd extent. Staring at a mirror (or more to the point, a glass wall), he shrieks and wimpers while Van Peebles cuts back again and again to his initial outburst of shock, blasted through a gyrating color wheel. Gerber's rubbing his nose on the cinema screen itself, literally prying at the audience to understand his "predicament". In the process, Van Peebles is screaming at the audience with a combination of his disjunctive editing, his overpowering atonal score, and the sheer absurdity of the spectacle.

At a certain point, The Watermelon Man accomplishes a lulling, inoffensive state of redundancy and overstatement. Its points - or in this case, its absolutes - have been sledgehammered home, so the only remaining diversion is to watch this allegorical instrument pass through a deterministic trajectory from impish asshole to moralizing beast of burden, which all culminates in Van Peebles' grotesque money shot of a shirtless Gerber posed in freeze-frame with a spear in a self-defense class. Despite its jolting stylistic qualities, which are ostensibly at one with grand statements, this kind of cinema paradoxically works best when it's not pinned down to a single strand of criticism, when it offers up a slew of fascinating social issues and finds abstract, associative patterns within them. Take Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a film Van Peebles could have learned a thing or two from, which mines the new, unsettling parallels between modernization, consumerism, and prostitution in 60's France through a similarly in-your-face aesthetic. The Watermelon Man is not thoughtful cinema but rather trite sloganeering, no matter the good, egalitarian intentions at its core.

Ne Change Rien (2009) A Film by Pedro Costa

(This review is referring to a screening at the Harvard Film Archive after which Costa himself spoke.)

"I don't like documentaries. No one likes documentaries."
Pedro Costa

They say great artists don't know how to talk about their work. Or so the cliché goes. Pedro Costa reinvigorates this understanding; not only does he ponderously ramble on about matters somewhat tangential to those inquired about (which must partially be attributed to the language barrier), but in many instances he seems to present notions that contradict or complicate the ostensible motivations and ideologies present onscreen. When Costa half-jokes about a universal distaste for documentaries, one gets the sense that he's referring to a didactic, dry form that he does not concern himself with. That much is clear. However, this offhand comment comes moments before an extended monologue about what he perceives to be a widespread disillusionment with the pleasures of fictional world-building, a lack of ability for contemporary audiences to invest in narratives with the same sense of wonderment and awe that cinema-goers did in the early 1900's. All of this is curious when placed in context of the film in question, his latest venture into the vast gray area between narrative and documentary, Ne Change Rien. Nine out of ten viewers unaware of the exacting cinematic practice of Pedro Costa would call this a documentary, perhaps even an insipid, perplexing one at that, and that same sample would likely agree that Costa had no intentions of creating a skewed kind of "vampire story". This pro-fiction babble is destabilizing coming from a director whose very films seem disillusioned by narratives, fixated as they are on worlds where all stories seem to have evaporated and there is little more to do than tirelessly investigate the strange tendencies of surfaces and people.

But to temporarily decipher Costa's charming hypocrisies, it's at least important to realize that he transforms what is superficially a music documentary into something else entirely, an utterly distinct piece of pure cinema that has a tendency to oppose everything a standard film about music would do. Its central aim is Parisian actress Jeanne Balibar - whose secondary musical career Costa turns his camera towards here - as she alternates between rehearsals with her eponymous trance/lounge/pop group in their preparation for an LP and her work as a singer for a theater production of Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole. The particulars of this documentation (song titles, names of fellow performers, even the name of the stage production she's involved in) are left unclear in the film, meaning it's certainly not fulfilling as a traditional documentary whose primary goal is to enlighten and inform viewers. It's closer to a film like Ossos, seemingly his most fictionalized Lisbon portrait, where details are scattered and obscured in an attempt to facilitate an enigmatic story delivery. Because Costa creates a longing for details within the viewer through his deliberately incomplete or unexplored segments, a tension is established not entirely unlike that in a narrative film.

Usually this tension is made explicit in the fragmented presentation of individual scenes, where Costa lets his camera linger on a static frame of one performer, or in some extreme cases, just the neck of a guitar in the shadows, while the rest of the music occurs offscreen in an imagined space. If one of the chief concerns of a music doc is to capture the collaborative magic of music-making, Costa subverts it by refusing to show the band in mutual engagement. Yet at the same time, his employment of a mono soundtrack (he only used one microphone, usually beside the camera) is an attempt to harness a greater sense of togetherness. Here the tension between the visual separation and the sonic singularity makes for an odd and disconcerting hybrid, confusing the viewer but also encouraging imagination. What's more, it approximates the phenomenon of multitrack recording, where performers are literally disconnected in a studio but joined in the headphone output. In one revealing scene, Costa shows a sound-blocked booth where Balibar is singing, and it is only when he cuts away to the musicians in the adjacent room that we realize an entire song is being played, as Balibar's intimate, mellow singing gives way to a fuller, more manufactured group sound. Moments like these potently convey the manipulation of the studio recording craft and feel like uncomfortable invasions of privacy.



If the film tails off about halfway through and never fully recovers, it's because its main subject is essentially uninteresting. I realize that this may be a minority viewpoint and that several people have expressed great enthusiasm for Balibar's artistry. I also realize that her unflinching stoicism is deeply in line with the rest of Costa's work, in which figures exists like shadows in an otherwise concrete world. But her enormous ambivalence and, quite frankly, lack of sufficient musical talent became rather off-putting at a certain point. It's as if the music doesn't grow organically from her, like she's endlessly going through the motions, existing in this space and only happening to toss off some utterances under her breath so as to not look like a complete maverick of indifference. This seeming vacancy of mind is evident in one of the film's most trying scenes, when Costa sets his camera down in one never-ending two shot of Balibar and Rodolphe Burger (the guitarist) as they dissect a pulsing bass sample from Curtis Mayfield’s “Super Fly”. Balibar is mechanically repeating the same vocal melody and her lethargic knee-tapping periodically falls out of time. Surely, it doesn't take much to simply follow a beat or search for some variation in phrasing, and I think Balibar's inability to convincingly do so in this scene suggests a fundamental remoteness, a lack of connection with her music. If it's any measure of credibility, I should make it clear that I have had extensive experience as a musician, rehearsing and recording, and it's something I find consistently exhilarating, making Balibar's indifference that much more irritating.

Unfortunately, this is to the detriment of Costa's own rigorous approach. His unrelenting static compositions provide ample time for Balibar to reveal her inner spark, but she remains remote even as her face, made gigantic with Costa's claustrophobic framing, looms over the theater for several minutes. As a study of a person, it's transfixing stuff, but as a study of a performer and performance, only variably does it offer excitement, immediacy, or insight. Balibar aside, the atmosphere in Ne Change Rien is unprecedented; a feeling of late-night melancholy and introspection pervades the film even during its daytime studio performances, when ethereal light sprays in from the few windows, teaming with domestic lamps as the only sources of illumination in the otherwise black, cavernous space. This moody setting is likely what contributes to Costa's vague description of his film as a "vampire movie where the characters play instruments", and it perhaps speaks to the kind of world-building he advocates for. It's a place you get lost in for however long the film runs, and you lose your conception of time. I wasn't watching Ne Change Rien as much as I was living it.

My Name is Oona (1969) A Short Film by Gunvor Nelson

Gunvor Nelson's 10-minute short My Name is Oona is an often unfairly forgotten gem of experimental cinema, cloaked to some extent by the works of the bigger names of Nelson's time. Its relatively diminutive stature aside, it's an enormously moving visual and sonic poem about identity that manages to get at the simultaneous excitement and anxiety that comes with a knowledge of one's self. Nelson obliquely posits this knowledge in the film as the sensation of gradually coming to consciousness or waking up, capturing in a stirring succession of incomplete, fragmented images her young daughter Oona's realization of her name and her physical world. Her radiant face is subjected to intense scrutiny, pausing in front of the camera to stare into the lens or glimpsed in candid moments of play, grinning hugely. Equal time is spent reveling in the natural landscape around her, such as the silvery bushes that swoop by a tracking camera or the sun-blasted field where Oona rides her horse. The visual information is delivered only in snatches, interrupted by cuts to black or swiftly excised just before the viewer has a full spatial grasp. This naturally creates an impression of ephemerality, which is representative of both the relationship between Nelson's camera and Nelson's daughter and the fleeting nature of childhood itself.

My Name is Oona is anything but an idealized, utopian vision of childhood and identity. Nelson suggests that these notions are ever-shifting from tenderness to profound apprehension, and the film's rhythm consciously triggers these emotional fluctuations. It does so, of course, through its visuals (stalling momentarily for lovely slow-motion before bursting into kinetic movement) but even more largely through its hypnotic soundtrack, by Steve Reich. Reich works with the raw material of Oona's own voice as she repetitively recites "My Name is Oona." What starts by sounding like an elementary school speech exercise gradually coalesces into a pulsing vocal drone, with Reich overlapping and warping Oona's voice to the point that it takes on a purely musical, rather than verbal, function. After the first climax of sound fades out, the film luxuriates in a minute or two of peaceful stasis while Oona intimately reads out loud the days of the week. Then Reich begins building up another cacophony of competing voices, this time incorporating an even more unsettling, robotic version of "My Name is Oona" that discordantly scrapes against the surrounding cadence, paradoxically accompanying what are likely the film's most liberating images, the silhouette of Oona and her horse galloping through the wind. The competition between these forces is intensely effective, communicating both a fond familiarity with Oona as well as a visceral discomfort. Because the film is more impactful than most feature-length works, and because few artists can demonstrate such an inseparable pairing of sound and image, My Name is Oona is a landmark in poetic cinema.

Mulholland Drive: A First Time Viewer's Temporary Catharsis

I had this email exchange with my friend Eric Bolton about David Lynch's stellar Mulholland Drive over the past few days. It was his first time seeing the film (he'd been mulling over a copy of it I lent to him at least six months ago), and he wouldn't consider himself a cinephile or anything, but to my surprise he was enormously impressed by it. Our resulting email chain, though not really formal or all-encompassing in the slightest, is at least somewhat of a cursory examination of the film for a first-time viewer. These are the confounding emotions that are immediately present with Lynch.

EB: I have some questions about Mulholland Dr.

I think I get the gist of it in that the first 2 hours or so are Diane's fantasy as opposed to the terrible life she is shown to really have in the last portion. As with any fantasy, it can't exist completely, parts of reality escape into it and at the end, it comes crashing down to reveal Diane's real life in which she is an unsuccessful actress, and her love is unrequited by Camilla, who she in turn plans to have murdered. Obviously, it's a film that's very open to interpretation, but this is what I got out of it. Keeping that in mind, there were some things I didn't quite get the significance of (if there was any) and was wondering if you could shed some light or tell me what you think the movie "means":

-What was the deal with the blue key given to Diane by the hitman and what did it mean when she saw it on the coffee table? Was it just a signal that Camilla was killed?

-The "face" in the dream, it being shown again behind the alley towards the end, and the box that he has in the bag all really put me at a lost. Any thoughts?

-The theater scene to me was the point where the movie pulled itself apart. I couldn't really pull out any meaning or symbolism from that though. That could be one I'll just need to rewatch, but it was definitely one of the more surreal moments in the film, and seemed to be more visceral than anything.



CL: Realize first of all that David Lynch (the director) is prone to surrealism, i.e he likes to include things that are hard to articulate in literal terms, but contribute something to the overall mood of the work before they have any narrative significance. With that said, I don't think anything in Mulholland Drive is completely "random" or "out-of-the-blue", which is one of the main criticisms of the movie.

The Blue Key: This is a typically bizarre flourish that Lynch likes to include (something that is pretty inexplicable and hard to pin down to one specific meaning - vague on purpose in order to elicit as broad a spectrum of interpretations as possible). The blue box that the key opens is kind of the rabbit hole of Diane's madness I guess, the anchor of reality and fantasy. As you can see, the camera usually enters it when a massive shift in the narrative is approaching. The key is literally "the key" to the different modes Lynch uses in the movie, and the item that triggers Diane's realization of her own delusions and her eventual murder of Camille. I don't think I can really explain this on-the-nose, because with Lynch a "key" is just a playful non-sequitur, since it isn't really the key to anything in particular.

Oh, the creep alleyway guy? That's even harder to give a clear, cohesive reading. But it scared the shit out of you right? In a very basic way, it's emblematic of the fear lurking behind the shadows, where you can't see it, which is in a figurative manner the whole structure of the film. Something is unsettling because we don't quite know what's wrong. Also, notice how the bum is in possession of the box. He (fear, uncertainty) is closely linked to Diane/Betty's transformation. Lynch likes to include the thing with the guy at the diner as an abstract diversion from the main story, which might frustrate some people, but it ties in at least symbolically.

The theater scene might be my favorite moment in the movie, and maybe my favorite moment in any movie in a long time. I also think it's the most important scene in the whole thing, particularly because of the symbolism at work. The performer is not really performing! It's artificial, yet it stills frightens and moves the two women, and the audience. Lynch is playing with the idea of artificiality and Hollywood fakery throughout the whole movie (throwing together random genre elements like Western ("the cowboy"), screwball comedy (the fudged assassination attempts by the hitman), horror (the alleyway guy), melodrama/detective drama (Betty's entire investigation, which is purposely kinda cheesy)). So the theater moment bluntly announces this. Lynch knows the goofy, cliched quality of genre elements, but he also knows how powerful they can be. In this way, the movie is a tribute to the power and allure of the Hollywood machine, and movies as a whole. The theater scene is all about breaking the fourth wall but remaining amazing.

Anyway, if you're interested in further reading, this is one of the most thorough, rewarding pieces on the movie I've read. It's an extremely long discussion between two critics, but it's all pretty accessible reading, and it gets at all of the mystery of the movie better than I ever could.

EB: Thanks for your insight. It was a seriously amazing movie, and has had me thinking about it since watching it. I think the Hollywood stuff in the film is hugely important to it, and while I noticed it, I didn't pay much attention to it since I don't have as deep an affection for it as you do. I'll have to watch it again with all of these things in mind.

And for the record, I really enjoy reading about movies I've seen, and read through the majority of this article. Ed Howard offered some great thoughts, but Jason Bellamy's comments were annoying to read. He seemed to avoid talking about the film at all and instead talked about broader questions. Either way, it was a good read.

CL: Yeah, Ed Howard's one of the better bloggers I know. Extremely intelligent, thought-provoking, and lucid. I like Jason Bellamy too, and I think he raised some interesting points coming from someone who was not as enthusiastic about it, but you're right that sometimes his lack of excitement, or his relatively ambivalent viewpoint, meant he indulged in broader arguments. Either way, there's some amazing stuff in there. You've seen Vertigo right? How about Kiss Me Deadly? Those are very important reference points that they bring up.



EB: I have seen Vertigo, but not Kiss Me Deadly, so all of those references sort of went out the window.

Just watched it for the 2nd time, since I really wanted to see it while knowing the general structure and get a less overwhelming viewing. Still incredible on 2nd viewing. The Club Silencio scene hit a lot harder this time. The way I interpreted it, the man comes out and plainly states that what we see is not real, and that he's able to create his reality by imagination and desire (his calling out of the instruments). This is exactly what is going on in Diane's dreamworld: what we see is all a recording, or in her head, and it's only because she can create a reality in her mind that she sees it, but it is not real. The man's statements terrify Betty and cause her to convulse, but she holds on to Rita and is in turn able to hold on to her dream for just a bit longer. Of course, the singer comes out, it seems like all is back to normal, and then she too proves that it's all a recording, and Betty then finds the key that ends this dream.

After seeing the film again, I think that among many things, it's about both how we see ourselves, how we wish to see ourselves, what we're actually like, and the differences between those. Diane's dreamworld has variable distinctions from her real life. Adam, for example, is not much different. Camilla who was in control of their relationship and generally cruel in real life was in the hands of Betty in the dream, but her general aura was not much different between worlds. Diane sees herself as ambitious, kind, eager for adventure, and talented but under-appreciated as an actress, but while she may strive for those things in real life, she is simply a broken down wreck of a human being. I think Lynch is definitely prodding us in this direction by spending the majority of the film showing how Diane wants to see herself, versus what she's actually like.

It's very difficult to talk about this movie without the proper nouns getting really confusing.

CL: Ha. Yeah, that's why it's easier to simply refer to Naomi Watts or Laura Harring, and I'm sure Lynch wouldn't mind that, as it jibes with the whole subtext of viewers being so immersed in and idolizing towards Hollywood and entertainment.

That's a pretty apt reading there in your second paragraph. You're right to say that deep down it's a character study, and like all character studies, it's effective because it's universal. It deals with actual and perceived selves, and the difficulty of reconciling both. When you get the climactic "versus what she's actually like" thing that you refer to, it's been invested with so much power. The viewer almost wants to deny that it's the real truth because it's so painful and we very well might be convinced otherwise. This speaks to the idea of wanting to really exist as your imagined, idealized self, which is a kind of self that Hollywood manufactures in large doses.

Anyway, I'm glad you saw it a second time right away. I think that's most helpful. And now that you listen to the incredible John Vanderslice tune ("Promising Actress", from 2004's Cellar Door, you can understand his bizarre diversions.

The Descent (2005) A Film by Neil Marshall

In an essay about The Exorcist, Stephen of the blog Checking On My Sausages raises a notion he calls the "horror before the horror" to touch upon the eerie anticipation of a horror film's build-up, the quiet moments before the "tawdry spectacle" kicks in. It's an idea that he likens, in a brief addendum, to Neil Marshall's critically praised 2005 horror flick The Descent, which documents the cave-spelunking vacation/adventure of a group of chatty, convivial young women that gradually coalesces into a brutal, terrifying fight for survival against ugly, slimy prehistoric cave-dwellers. Stephen's concept managed to get at precisely what I experienced with Marshall's film, a case of the supposed horror punctuation marks failing to elicit quite the level of fear and dread that the anticipatory exposition offered, even in some sense diluting the power of the precedings. To be fair, this undermines the fact that The Descent is truly very scary, through and through, and it's rightly praised as one of the decade's most effective works in the genre. But I can't help but wonder what kind of film it would have been if the horror was not materialized, if it remained purely psychological, if Marshall continued to mine the rewarding visual possibilities of his claustrophobic setting. Would it be stronger or weaker, or something else entirely?

There are ample hints towards this kind of visceral spatial and situational terror during the first twenty minutes of the group's expedition. The women - Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza), Beth (Alex Reid), Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), Sam (MyAnna Buring), and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) - are carefree and over-ambitious, lunging ever deeper into each new dwelling with the spunk of schoolgirls being released for recess. Their camaraderie and adventurousness is established early on in a few scenes of blunt exposition in which the group sits around a fire in a woodland cabin laughing and drinking before the following morning's trip; this joviality is intended to sharply contrast the progressive brutality the film slowly mounts. But it's early on when the group is simply traversing through the dark caves that the film accumulates its humble uneasiness, with the sense of audience expectation and dramatic irony at its most vivid. Marshall exploits to great effect the tight, cylindrical spaces and the pitch dark of the caves, letting a black screen be suddenly flooded with one light source as a figure emerges from a tiny hole in the back corner of the frame. If a criterion for solid horror is the ability to tap into an audience's collective anxieties, The Descent is as pure a success as can be in these moments, extracting no-frills terror from the universal human fear of claustrophobia and darkness in a way that's not shallow or easy. It takes its time, and with the exception of one laughable entrance of hibernating CGI bats, it uses its time well.

That the film's most destabilizing moment - which induced beads of sweat down my forehead - involves the simple set-up of a woman and the elements around her (rock, dirt) says a great deal about how effectively The Descent works before introducing the fantastical elements. Sarah is shimmying on her back through a narrow channel created by a cluster of boulders. Of course, she, being the main character and psychological model of the narrative, is the last of the group to traverse the ridiculously thin passageway, and, given the recent loss of her husband and daughter (which is the subject of the film's first ten minutes), her battered emotional state does little to assist her physical agility. And of course, this being a horror movie with a forward-moving narrative for which a relative suspension of disbelief must be nurtured (I hope I'm succeeding in illuminating the film's full-fledged engagement with, and occasional subversion of, typical genre trappings), the repeated movement of the group of women agitates the surrounding rock formation, causing a prolonged moment of potential collapse in which Sarah, bereft of personal motivation in this time of psychological turmoil, must be swiveled out by her friend Beth. As Marshall frames her, the whole affair comes to resemble birth. The underground space is reminiscent of the female anatomy, with the birth canal guiding Sarah slowly and questionably into the deeper recesses of the cave. If the initial shock teases thrown at the women were just warnings before the real dangerous terrain was entered, this scene exemplifies a birth into the hell of the underground. The rest of the film, at least ontologically, rests on the question of whether or not the women, or more precisely, Sarah, will be reborn in some capacity, or if they will wither away.



Giving the film the thrust of this subtle visual birth metaphor is a nice touch on Marshall's part, and it might be even more rewarding had he searched for trickier ways to comment on this guiding motif. But it quickly appears that cerebral complexity is not of interest to Marshall; he'd rather batter the viewer head-on with convincing subhuman creatures, the kind of monstrous things we learn have been adapting and evolving for generations until they have harnessed the ability to survive underground, feeding periodically off the animals above ground. It's a rather ingenious monster profile, stirring up eerie hypothetical inquiries about the nature of evolution and the boundaries of human transformation over time, but once again Marshall cares less about the ideas behind his creations than he does about the sheer potency of them. The relentless second half of The Descent is all blood, violence, and peril and no contemplation. It's no surprise that the offhand character drama that ensues within all this frantic women vs. monster mayhem - Sarah learns that Juno, who accidentally kills Beth when suspecting her to be a creature in the dark, slept with her husband - feels underdeveloped and negligible. More successfully, the film's about the brutal first-hand emotions of the grisly situation, the shuffling between paranoia, desperation, and forced heroism. Broader character conflicts simply come across as wanton and by-the-numbers.

Marshall half-resolves the lingering birth metaphor when Sarah, bloodied and mutilated, triumphantly breaks through the ground after surviving an intimidating series of encounters with cave creatures. This particular image, bathed in the sensationalized light of day, is even more iconic and memorable than the first one, and proves itself to be of unexpected resonance. She sprints out of the woods only for Marshall to pull a fast one and reveal her still within the depths of the cave consumed by reverberating monster noises, and it suggests, quite obviously, that she has simply dreamt up an escape. But since Marshall stages the final shot with the ghost of Sarah's daughter in seeming harmony with her mother (albeit within the cave), this notion of "escape" is deliberately allusive. Has Sarah transcended to a higher realm of peace, surrounded by her family members? And if so, does this constitute a rebirth or a death? The Descent's sudden assault of philosophical propositions is a welcome change of pace after all of the taut, brainless action set pieces up until this point, and they are in some ways invested with greater visceral power in the context of what precedes them. At any rate, the thematic power here is not particularly lasting; it's more like a thrilling rolling coaster ride that is amazing while it lasts, and recalled only in fragmented bits after. In the scope of its modest ambitions, The Descent is an undoubted triumph, but I can't help but wonder how it might have fared with a different approach, if it had taken further advantage of the "horror before the horror".

Jeanne Dielman: Redefining Mulvey and Hill

(This is an essay I wrote for my Media Criticism and Theory class. Forgive the dryness.)

One of the most intriguing and telling facets of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - a radical 1976 Belgian film that aggressively challenged prior notions of shot duration and narrative rhythm - is that it was conceived by a twenty-five year old with virtually no classical filmmaking training. Incidentally, it is this very naiveté in the face of the camera, this utter indifference to standard practice, that lead Chantal Akerman to so thoroughly discover her own unique aesthetic, one that, rather than appearing amateurish in the context of proper film grammar, looked fresh and revolutionary. At the time of its release, the canons of film theory had largely addressed the primarily visible regions of film history – Hollywood as well as, to a lesser extent, the collective contributions of international cinemas – and in doing so, attempted to grapple with trends, formulas, and ideological frameworks that guided the majority of work. What’s striking though about Akerman’s film is how actively it seems to run counter to the central ideas in numerous major essays on cinematic convention. With its simultaneously straightforward and ambiguous narrative, its rigorous immersion in time and space, and its destabilizing lack of closure and character psychology, Jeanne Dielman updates and redefines pre-conceived standards for cinematic narrative and realism.

Two essays, in particular, illustrate the extent to which Akerman’s work goes against the grain of popular thought: John Hill’s “Narrative and Realism” and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Both pieces formulate their discussions principally in relation to the critic’s dominant native cinema. For Hill, it is both the British social problem film and the films of the British new wave, and for Mulvey, it is the Hollywood industry. The essays stress the notion that mainstream cinema has established an array of intrinsic mechanisms to elicit audience interest and pleasure, mechanisms that Jeanne Dielman either conspicuously withdraws or subtly transforms.

The long-standing classic realism that Hill finds “dated” and “melodramatic”, and which is couched in “habitual versions of dramatic reality”, is far from the kind of direct observational realism Akerman engages with. The film is the documentation of 48 hours in the life of the titular character, a widowed, stay-at-home mother, covering in depth her various domestic routines and only consciously excising her sleep. Taking place over the course of an elapsed 201 minutes, it is often a marvel how the film manages to communicate a persistence of real time even in spite of its obviously considerable extractions. If the “distinctive characteristic of realism resides in the ambition to, in some way or other, approximate reality”, Jeanne Dielman tackles this credo with extreme determination, perhaps coming closer to reproducing reality than to approximating it. Akerman probes her subject by completely surrendering to her daily mannerisms, letting her tasks play out in their entirety and only cutting when she leaves a room. Of course, by its very nature, film can never really be a carbon copy of reality, but Jeanne Dielman’s maximum detachment and sense of letting behaviors play out as they would in the real world at least brings it significantly closer than the watered-down examples Hill describes.



Furthermore, Hill explains what he sees to be an inherent pattern in narrative form of equilibrium, disequilibrium, and a new equilibrium that Jeanne Dielman does not adamantly abide by. “Implicit in the structure of the narrative, its movement from one equilibrium to another, its relations of cause and effect,” he claims, “is a requirement for change.” Normally, it is a force such as a crime that shifts the narrative from its initial state of equilibrium, in which case an investigation would propel the new equilibrium. Akerman tinkers with this seasoned formula by not supplying the second equilibrium and only risking disequilibrium in the final scene, when Jeanne carries out a shocking act of violence against her regular John (her daytime prostitution as a means of economic sustainability is one of the film’s fascinating motifs). The result is a permanent state of anxiety and inconclusiveness extended past the film’s ending. Though Akerman appropriates the change said to be a necessary narrative ingredient by Hill, as Jeanne’s familiarized routine gradually and dramatically disrupts, she undermines it by refusing to resolve the tension, instead compounding it with an even greater act of dysfunction.

This denial of narrative strategy is also built into the underlying ideology of the film. Long praised as a milestone work in feminist cinema for its unimpeded focus on the unspectacular ebbs and flows of a woman’s home life, Jeanne Dielman manages to also deflate Mulvey’s position that built into the very fabric of mainstream narratives, there are unconscious ideologies such as a heterosexual division of labor that categorizes the male as the active force and the female as the passive one. Instead of making a male character catapult the film out of its initial stasis, Akerman lets the vagaries of the minimalist narrative rest solely on Jeanne’s shoulders. The male dominance that Mulvey discusses partly exists through Jeanne’s monetary reliance on them, but it is shattered as the film progresses and her dissatisfaction with her lack of self-reliance appears to augment. This culminates with her final murder of the John, accomplished with the kind of dispassion and precision that would suggest she’s aware of Mulvey’s stance. The murder is figurative before it’s literal; no longer does she have to be vulnerable to the scheduled routines of the exploitative, omnipresent male. She has defeated the threat of masculine oppression, and in doing so, alters the misogynistic bent of the typical film narrative.

Mulvey suggests further that the male protagonist often acts as an audience surrogate, and his voyeuristic tendencies towards his female counterpart mirror an intensified male gaze in the audience. But Jeanne is hardly the erotically charged exhibitionist spectacle that Mulvey asserts. The audience does not gain “control and possession of the woman within the film’s diegesis.” As if to emphasize this, Akerman remains outside the room during her daily sex act, fixing her camera on the de-eroticized image of the door and denying fetishistic entry. Curiously, the film intensifies the gaze in a different way. By placing its central character front and center in every frame carrying out the niceties of a stay-at-home mother, it doesn’t so much elicit a pleasuring of the erogenous zones as it does a reawakening of the long-dormant sensations of the Oedipal complex. Immersing the viewer in the uncannily familiar matriarchal rhythms, Akerman promotes a sense of nostalgia and warmth in the viewer, a sense of being susceptible to the behaviors of the female rather than in control of them.



In acknowledging the possibility for the avant-garde to subvert the traditional methods they observe, Mulvey and Hill seem to hint at the particular techniques of Jeanne Dielman. “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” This could be interpreted as Akerman’s formal thesis, and by giving her camera the autonomy to simply record the action over extended stretches of time, she removes the possibility of manipulating the content of the narrative. Her “invention of new forms” works to “undermine habitual versions of dramatic reality and thus communicate new, and more fundamental, underlying realities.” The minutiae of quotidian life, glimpsed in its totality, from the painstaking preparation of meals to the folding of clean bed sheets, comprise a world not often seen in the cinema, and especially not in mainstream work.

By boiling her narrative down to the singular focus of one woman’s routinized existence, Chantal Akerman extinguished all matters of cinematic convention from Jeanne Dielman. She suppressed the traditional standard for greater narrative trajectory as identified by John Hill in “Narrative and Realism” and reversed the standardized processes of audience perception highlighted by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Jeanne Dielman possesses its own kind of narrative ambiguity that extends past its conclusion rather than prematurely leveling out, and it doubles as an acknowledgment of the potential for an active female within a film’s power dynamic. The result is a revolutionary exercise that convincingly puts into question the conventional, popular ways in which films are produced and consumed.

Never Let Me Go (2010) A Film by Mark Romanek

I'm a firm believer in the idea that a film inspired by literature need not transcribe its source material religiously, that it can, and should, simply extract something from the spirit or thematic quality of the work. I would argue that the most compelling cinematic adaptations of novels - The Shining, Hiroshima Mon Amour - riff vaguely off what's on the page, taking only the feel of it and reinterpreting it as something entirely distinct. With that said, there's something warm and comfortable about a faithful adaptation as well, especially for fans of the original novel. Some stories call for a certain manner of telling that perhaps would be done a disservice to in the hands of an over-ambitious filmmaker. When you find yourself sandwiched in between these two extremes - the feeling of a director primarily sticking to his text but straying wantonly from it at the most crucial moments - you get something like Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, a precious film of the Oscar-baiting variety. I was reasonably impressed by the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day), which was hyperbolically proclaimed as the best novel of the decade in some circles, so I was interested to see how Romanek (One Hour Photo, a plethora of music videos) would handle it. That he extracts the romance that was a mere simmering undertone in an otherwise rich thematic palette in the book and makes it just about the entire purpose of the film is as groan-inducing as it is woefully predictable, given the propensity for mass movie audiences to latch onto one, not many, emotional registers.

Signs of Never Let Me Go's one-dimensional melodrama come early and often, when Romanek starts laying on thick an air of sadness and fatalism. The voiceovers of Carey Mulligan - who embodies the story's beating heart and narrator, Kathy - replace the ambiguous flatness of Ishiguro's first-person prose with an emotional severity and a devastating awareness of her condition. Her condition, of course, being the peculiar, sci-fi flourish that the book so effectively employs, and that the film tosses out there only as a barometer with which to judge the romantic trajectories of its main characters: the generation of children that is the center of attention is actually a batch of clones in a medically advanced hypothesis of society. This premise itself, patiently revealed in the novel and more or less nodded at in the opening dictum of the film, is naturally one that leaves ample possibility for poeticism at Romanek's doorstep. The ephemeral nature of life, the sense of literal and figurative borders put up by children in their earliest stages that dictates their eventual moral compass, the debate of nature vs. nurture, the exploitation of the individual in the face of a larger political and social hierarchy, the question of what constitutes a "soul": these are all concerns that are readily present in Ishiguro's novel. Romanek either strands them entirely or suffocates them underneath the big emotions on display at the center of the story, wilting away like the very setting of the first section of the film, the English boarding school Hailsham.

Hailsham's definition as a "boarding school" is, of course, like many of the rigidly sustained definitions in the community's vernacular, problematic: it's a euphemism for what is really a clone development center, a place where these quasi-humans can be nurtured so that their organs will be healthy for their ultimate "donations", the final step before "completion". It becomes clear that the lives, or fabrications, of these people (or not?), are completely pre-destined, lined up as if life is but a series of checkpoints before the time is up. The beauty of Ishiguro's novel is in the devastating acceptance of fate these character's have inevitably built into the fabric of their existence. By the end of the film, a masochistic melancholy has been established. Fortunately, Romanek retains the inaction of the central figures - Kathy and her two friends Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) - and doesn't turn it into some tale of rebellion that would be entirely out of line psychologically, but he does portray what amounts to an emotional explosion that the book does not indulge in. Tommy gets out of a car with Kathy to scream hopelessly into the dark night (at the very least, Garfield, a promising actor, delivers a powerful bellow) after they have been denied a nonexistent "deferral" from donations on terms of love, one of many tall-tales that was spread around Hailsham.



Particularly, it is this first section of the film - this spreading of rumors, creation of false pretenses, and aura of secrecy - that Romanek fumbles, delivering a sadly cliff-noted version of what is the book's finest, most mysterious stretch. It's the naive vulnerability here of the children that is so compelling, driven as they are to convince themselves of the supposedly ideal nature of their suppressed lives. But Romanek hits only the major notes, failing to turn his camera towards the quieter, telling moments that don't necessarily have any narrative import. Worse yet is his altercation of the book's title scene, in which Kathy swoons with a doll in her arms to the song "Never Let Me Go" by a fictional Judy Bridgewater before being ominously observed by the school's mysterious headmaster. The implication, obviously, is of the sexual impotence of these clones, how they can never enjoy the privilege of nurturing a child no matter how badly they desire it. More fundamentally, it's a moment of offhand intimacy and introspection painfully understood by the otherwise cold, calculating headmaster, a spark of humanity that would suggest the answer is "yes" to the story's omnipresent "soul-or-no-soul" question. In Romanek's streamlined vision of the scene though, Kathy is watched tenderly by Ruth, and the feeling has been reduced to an expression of longing for Tommy, which is ultimately the love triangle that the film plainly concerns itself with. More interesting is to watch the faces of Izzy Meikle-Small, Charlie Rowe, and Ella Purnell (the young Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, respectively) - all of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to their older counterparts - as they negotiate the complex emotions the story calls on them to exude. These iconic faces are the heart of the film, and they do a great deal to elevate Romanek's schematic, detached presentation.

There won't be anyone coming out of Never Let Me Go saying the visuals were unflattering, but at the same time it wouldn't be the boldest proclamation to say the visuals are stunning. Adam Kimmel's pristine cinematography lays a thick gloss of prettiness and respectability, but it often trivializes the story and characters, transforming it all into a series of postcards. When Kathy and Tommy go for a stroll around "The Cottages" in the second part of the film, the sensation has less to do with the warm emotionality of these two friends and would-be lovers communicating timidly than it does with the picturesque way Romanek frames them against the skyline and the vast expanses of farm fields. It's not poetic, like in the work of Terrence Malick, because it has little complexity to fall back on, no foundation of psychological and thematic richness. Though Never Let Me Go will likely win awards and impress the masses, it remains a failure as an adaption of depth, a squandering of the enormous potential of the premise.