Tag: Genre: Essay Films

Nora Alter on Sans Soleil

After a second viewing, I still needed some help wrapping my brain around the structure of Marker’s Sans Soleil. The following is a summary of useful ideas from Nora Alter’s book, Chris Marker (from Illinois UP’s Contemporary Film Directors series, 2006):

Nearly all of the locations in the film are islands: Japan, Cape Verde, the Isle of Sal, Iceland. Alter sees this as part of Marker’s larger interest in the relationship between space and time, which Krasna, the film’s “author,” identifies as the major preoccupations of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. An island is “separated from the mainland and operat[es] according to its own, relatively autonomous flow of time,” Alter writes. (Note: Twenty-five years later, this idea seems almost quaint in our globalized world.)

Like the small Icelandic village where it was shot, the image of happiness that opens the film (the three children) is obliterated by darkness: volcanic ash buries the town, blank leader buries the image. Sans Soleil presumes that manufactured images are likewise burying memory, killing off ritual and history in the process. Krasna asks, “I wonder how people remember things, [people] who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape?”

Krasna’s first instinct upon returning to Tokyo after a twenty-year absence is to “see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive.” These landmarks remain, but Japan is a radically different place. Modernization is complete, and society has become totally mediated by technology. Alter points out that both the sights and sounds of the city are seductively micro-managed and offers as an example the strange sequence in which people mourn the death of a panda with curiosity rather than sorrow. “Death has become abstract,” she writes. “By way of contrast, Marker then inserts, without commentary, a graphic and drawn-out film clip depicting the shooting of a giraffe.”

For Alter, the giraffe scene also serves as a transition to the portion of the film that deals with successful revolutions against the Portuguese in the 1970s. Contrary to Krasna’s earlier claim that only “banality still interests him,” Sans Soleil contrasts its images of mediated Japan with a “story about the promise of liberation and its subsequent disappointments.” Which isn’t to say that the revolutions — and our understanding of them — aren’t also mediated. Alter examines Krasna’s fascinating reading of the photo of Luiz Cabral decorating Major Nino, then concludes: “The impermanence of images merely mirrors the impermanence of history. They are constantly shifting, fleeting, being rewritten and re-remembered.”

The most obvious form of technological mediation that we experience in Sans Soleil is “The Zone,” the digitally synthesized images that, in Krasna’s view, are “less deceptive than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.” The following shots are among the most memorable:

Alter identifies five distinct uses of The Zone: first is a rethinking of a documented past (protests of the 1960s); second is the development of video games and representation of the burakumin (“They are non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?”); third is the function of memory; fourth is Japan’s recent history (kamikazes); and fifth is a return to and re-remembering of Marker’s own images (like the screen captures above, which are separated by nearly an hour in the film).

February 7, 2008
Calls to Conscience and Action

Jeffrey Overstreet, who’s writing a book about his experiences as a film critic in/to Evangelical America, has posed the question, “What would you show in a film festival about ‘Calls to Conscience and Action’?” Specifically, he’s looking for “works of art that make us want to put our hands to the plow.”

Frankly, his question makes me uncomfortable. I say that, in part, because I’m having trouble coming up with one or two specific titles (a topic I’ll come back to later) but mostly because it’s been so long since my hand last touched a plow, metaphorical or otherwise. I’m more the “righteous indignation” type — the guy who carefully positions himself above the fray while the “Red States,” on the one side, react against liberal America’s progressive agendas, and the “Hollywood Elite,” on the other, try to decide which is the bigger evil: racism, homophobia, or, um, Joe McCarthy. I prefer to strike the pose of the humanist aesthete, sniping soldiers on both sides from the satisfied comfort of my expensive home theater. It’s so much easier than, you know, doing something. (Have you ever tried to plow? That shit is hard.)

Sarcasm aside, I’ll admit to feeling a bit shamed by Jeffrey’s question. That it would arise from a book project addressed to Evangelical readers should come as little surprise. Whatever frustrations I feel toward that world’s cultural and ideological assumptions are always tempered by my genuine love and respect for so many people who have found their spiritual home there. Color me ambivalent. When, a few years ago, I suggested to some friends that we temporarily set aside our Bibles and study art instead, I first had to convince them that the questions we’d been trained to ask would remain essentially unchanged: What does this text (whether Scripture, a painting, or a film) teach us about truth, beauty, and grace? What aspects of God’s character are revealed here? And how do we apply these lessons to our daily lives? Say what you will about Evangelical America’s failure to meet Christ’s standards (and I’ve said more than my share), but that question of application — of putting hand to plow — is more prominent there than in any other American sub-culture I’ve inhabited.

And so it pains me to review my life as a critic (for lack of a better word) and find so little evidence of my faith/politics/aesthetics translated into practical action. Maybe this hypocrisy (too strong?) is partly to blame for the ferocity of the public debate surrounding the Oscars this year. High-minded talk, whether from the Right or the Left, divorced from sympathy and service will inevitably come off as smug.

I’m deliberately overstating the case here. Of course my sense of the world, of right action, of human tragedy and grace have been radically transformed by an immersion in the arts. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the simple idea of empathy. (Slacktivist, by the way, has written two great posts on the subject this week.) I wonder, for example, how I would view the war in Iraq if, instead of watching regional, humanist filmmakers like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi, I was learning about righteous vengeance, sadism, and “freedom” from Hollywood. The creative imagination, as expressed through great art, can be an empathy-making wonder. Christ, after all, was a prophet and a storyteller.

But to answer Jeffrey’s question: If offered the chance to program a “Calls to Conscience and Action” festival, my opening night film would be The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnes Varda’s documentary about the long-standing tradition of gathering up leftover crops (“gleaning”) after the fields have been harvested. Varda, as much an essayist as filmmaker, explores gleaning as a hypertext of ideas: gleaning is an alternate economy; at times it’s a moral choice, at others a lamentable necessity; it’s both transgressive and communal; and, finally, it’s a metaphor for the artistic process itself. As Jonathon Rosenbaum points out, Varda expresses the ambiguities of gleaning even in the title of the film, though her point is lost in translation:

There’s a suggestive discrepancy between the French and English titles of this wonderful essay film completed by Agnes Varda last year. It’s a distinction that tells us something about the French sense of community and the Anglo-American sense of individuality — concepts that are virtually built into the two languages. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse can be roughly translated as “the gleaners and the female gleaner,” with the plural noun masculine only in the sense that all French nouns are either masculine or feminine. The Gleaners and I sets up an implicit opposition between “people who glean” and the filmmaker, whereas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse links them, asserting that she’s one of them.

Regardless of what would follow on the festival program, The Gleaners and I would properly frame the central question of conscience and action, making it a matter of community (or, to satisfy the pomo Christians in the audience, we could call it “kingdom” instead) and foregrounding art as an underutilized means of consciousness-raising, community-building, and (dare I say it) worship.

I would also program The Gleaners and I for personal reasons. For a large number of viewers, the most memorable sequences in the film involve a young man who, despite having earned a Masters degree in Biology, has chosen to glean his food from a Paris market and to live in a shelter, side-by-side with the newly-arrived immigrants to whom he voluntarily teaches French most nights of the week. I can’t imagine that I would have become an English as a Second Language teacher myself had I not first met so many non-Americans through the literatures and cinema of their countries. My ESL work is as close as I’ve come, I suppose, to pushing a plow, though that metaphor distorts the actual experience. It implies calloused hands, sweat, and sacrifice.

March 9, 2006
Week in Review
- Films Watched: Nosferatu dir. by F.W. Murnau; 28 Up dir. by Michael Apted; Vers Nancy dir. by Claire Denis; Me and You and Everyone We Know dir. by Miranda July; Los Angeles Plays Itself dir. by Thom Andersen
- Books Finished: The Public Burning by Robert Coover; Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction by Amy Elias
- CDs Purchased: Until the End of the World (soundtrack) by various artists; Me and You and Everyone We Know (soundtrack) mostly by Michael Andrews
With apologies to Nick Hornby. While reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer, two things occurred to me. First, Hornby’s columns are essentially blog posts by another name: they’re written in the first-person, they’re chronological (especially once collected in book form), and they’re unified by a single topic. Second, like Hornby, I could chart the course of my life by pacing slowly through a library full of books, CDs, and DVDs.

Because Long Pauses is essentially a notebook, a diary, and an archive, all in one, I’ve decided to give this “Week in Review” idea a shot. Granted, seven days from now this will all likely have taken on the smell of a deadline, but for now, it seems a fine way to spend a Sunday morning. If I stick to it, the Song of the Moment feature will probably be absorbed into the weekly review, Borg-like.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, left quite an impact on me, though I sense the effect waning somewhat. I worry that, when all is said and done, the film’s message is only slightly more nuanced than “carpe diem,” though, really, as far as messages go, that’s a pretty good one, especially when handled with a certain grace. July has a deep, deep fondness for her characters and a child-like wonder about the world in which they live. As a storyteller and filmmaker, she’s ambitious in the best sense of the word, and her ability to capture something of the beauty and fear (often simultaneously) that characterize love and life in the modern world is something special. Maybe the best compliment I can give the film is to say it doesn’t feel like it was made in America. “When I call a Name” is the opening track from Michael Andrews’s fine soundtrack, which reminds me a bit of those Brian Eno Music for Films albums.

Nosferatu is the latest entry in my Great Films series. I watched it last Sunday after a long weekend that involved two trips to the emergency room, an overnight stay in the hospital (for Joanna), and very little sleep. Which is to say that Nosferatu is an almost perfect film to watch in a waking dream state. Murnau’s brand of expressionism is so organically “uncanny,” and Max Schreck’s performance is so utterly alien. It’s my new favorite Dracula, bar none.

Like any great essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost too rich to be eaten in one bite. I want to watch it again before commenting at length, but three quick points for now: 1) It made me want to watch Blade Runner again. 2) It made me want to track down the films of Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, Julie Dash, and other independent black filmmakers of the 1970s. 3) I love the idea of looking for documentary moments in narrative films, an idea that was raised in Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves, as well. (Doug has a really great essay on Los Angeles Plays Itself, by the way.) I’ll return to the 7 Up films and the Denis short in later weeks.

Seeing only two titles on the “books finished” list undersells the size of my accomplishment, I think, considering that the novel weighs in at 534 pages and the other is a book of critical theory. The next chapter of my dissertation, ostensibly a tight reading of The Public Burning and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, is actually about the rise of the academic Left in the 1970s and 1980s and the political problems of postmodernism. Elias’s book posits that “history is something we know we can’t learn, something we can only desire,” which she wraps into discussions of “the Sublime,” the traditional historical novel (think Walter Scott), and post-1960s American fiction, in particular those novels she calls “metahistorical romances.”

Did I mention that Elias is on my dissertation committee? Or that her book was blurbed favorably by Linda Hutcheon? Or that in her preface she thanks Hayden White for his encouragement, advice, personal generosity, and kindness? (I know those two names mean, like, nothing to most people, but if you’re working in history and postmodern literature, they mean a lot.) The Public Burning comes up quite a bit in Elias’s book as an example of an avant-garde metahistorical romance, which is quite a nice way of describing it, I think. Its voice alternates between first- and third-person (the former from the p.o.v. of Vice President Richard Nixon), and Coover also cuts into “Intermezzos,” which take on various forms: a poem pasted together from snippets of text from President Eisenhower’s public statements, a dramatic dialogue between Ike and Ethel Rosenberg, and a mini-opera sung by the Rosenbergs and James Bennett, then-Federal Director of the Bureau of Prisons.

The novel reaches its climax in the middle of Times Square, where all of American history has come undone. Betty Crocker, Uncle Sam, and the nation’s Poet Laureate (Time magazine) are all there to witness the Rosenberg execution, as are the Republican Elephant, the Democratic Donkey, Cecil B. DeMille (who’s producing the spectacle), Walt Disney (who’s selling souvenirs), and fighting bands of patriots and redcoats. Elias (via Soja, Jameson, Frank, and Foucault) would describe the scene as an example of spatialized metahistory: “What one gets is a view from above, a critical view akin to the perspective of aerial photography, flattening out time, space, and history in order to map them.” The question for my chapter is this: “What does this mean for a ‘real’ politics of the Left?” I’m intrigued by the line that ends Elias’s second chapter:

The humanities [English and philosophy departments, for example] not only take seriously the challenge to history in fantasies and novels; they have forcefully asserted that history is fantasy and fiction allied with power, and have thrown down a gauntlet to the social sciences to prove otherwise.

That “prove otherwise” puts an interesting spin on the debate, I think.

That covers everything from this week except for the Until the End of the World soundtrack I picked up used for $7, proving once again that spontaneous buys are seldom good buys. I think I’ll enjoy these songs more when they show up randomly in iTunes. They don’t make for a very cohesive or compelling album.
August 22, 2005
From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

Dir. by Mark Rappaport

Inspired by my recent wanderings through Ray Carney’s Website, I rented Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg and watched it twice this weekend. Here, Rappaport — who Carney calls “a geographer of our fantasies, dreams, and obsessions” — splices together news footage, film clips, and original video, creating a documentary-ish collage that transforms Seberg’s life into a meditation on misogyny, the Hollywood star machine, and the morality of spectatorship. He also manages to chart America’s journey from Eisenhower-era consensus through the rise and fall of the New Left, and does it all with wit and authority and insight. Quite a feat for a 95 minute film.

Journals is built around the performance of Mary Beth Hurt, who plays Seberg from beyond the grave. The actress stares directly into the camera — which is only appropriate for someone standing in for the star of Godard’s Breathless — and recounts her life in the first person: born in 1938 in America’s heartland, discovered in Otto Preminger’s nationwide talent search for his adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, launched to international stardom by Godard, abused by a trio of husbands, excoriated for her involvement with the Black Panthers, ignored in a series of forgettable roles, dead from suicide at the age of 40.

Rappaport follows this line in mostly chronological order, using Seberg’s major film roles as jumping off points. For instance, when discussing the artistic and commercial failings of Saint Joan, he wanders off through the lives of Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, and Alida Valli — all leading ladies who carried the “curse” of playing Joan of Arc. It’s a fascinating conceit — a kind of associative editing that, in a sense, hyperlinks the various threads of film history and, in the process, forces us to acknowledge the strangeness of narrative and symbolic archetypes. Why do we take such pleasure from watching a noble young woman burned before us? Or, as Rappaport asks when discussing Seberg’s most interesting role — her lead in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) — why must men (the writers, producers, and directors) always equate female madness with aberrant sexuality?

Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film’s more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements. Their stories ended quite differently, though. Redgrave retreated to the stage and to small, innocuous film roles. The public, Hurt’s Seberg tells us, doesn’t care to watch its young beauties grow old on screen. Fonda exploited her sexualized Barbarella persona by stretching and gyrating her way through a series of popular workout videos that earned her millions. My favorite of Hurt’s lines is when she mentions that in 1988, in order to stave off bad publicity, Fonda apologized to veterans groups for her Vietnam-era activities, but never, as far as Hurt could remember, apologized to feminists for being a bimbo.

Seberg’s life ended in 1978, when she finally succeeded after a series of failed suicide attempts. The reasons for her depression are complicated, the film shows us — her lopsided marriage to Romain Gary, a lifetime spent “doing what she was told,” the death of her daughter, and the hounding pressures exerted on her by both Hoover’s F.B.I. and the popular press. But, ultimately, we’re left to wonder about the destructive effects of a life lived on screen. A life of being looked at. At one point, Rappaport draws a line from the Kuleshov effect to Breathless to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — or, from Russian Formalism to the first Modern cinema to Reagan-era machismo. Seberg is stuck there in the middle. Her blind stare into the camera is “enigmatic” and “sphinx-like,” or so the male reviewers have said, and all I can do is project my own desires onto her beautiful, beautiful face. The story of her life.

I look forward to sharing Rappaport’s film with students who bristle at the word “feminism,” because Journals is not the least bit preachy — in fact, it offers few pat answers at all — but it makes feminist concerns immediate and (I hesitate to use the word) entertaining. Quite a feat.

June 16, 2003