The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema

THE ALTERING EYE

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Robert Kolker is EmNitus Professor of English ill the University of Marylilnd and Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Virginia, His works include A Cinema QfLl)ndine_�.II Tileatre, edited and translated by John Willett. Copyright © 1957, 1%3, 1964 by Suhrkamp Verlag.. Frankfurt am Main. This tranlsation and notes © 1964 by John Wil­ lett. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and Methuen London. From "To PostNity" in Sell!Cted Poems, copyright 1947 by BNtold Brecht and H.R. Hays; copyright 1975 by Stefan S. Brecht and H.R. Hays. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Ann Elmo Agency, Inc.

Films Sans Frontieres for the cover image from Luis Bufiuel's Lm; Olvidad()�

(1950). All papN used by Op('n Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainabl(' Forestry Initia­ tive), and PEFC (programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.

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F& linda and

ill memury of GI i{(>nier­

Ihe character's name itself recalls Ricci's son in

Bic.lfc/r Thiefj movcs to sell

his baby and Ihen, when his girlfriend collapses in despair, to retrieve it. Travelling by molor scooter, running on foot, hiding in the freezing river wilh a young accomplice (a real-time sequence that is as painful to w,llch as it must have been 10 film), the

mi;;;e-etr-�cetre of L'rrrfiwi doesn't absorb its

chMaclers into Iheir urban spaces, but .11l0WS the grimy streets and grimy characters to coinhabit. The characters arc less products of th(> str('ets

as

its

creatures. This of course has been the hallmark of postwar cinema and is the base of the arguments developed in

The Altering Eye.

Building on a neorealist

ground, post-WWlI European filmmakers havc b('en intent on crcaling narrative Spad, they want to see the world whole, to ilIlow, as Bazin (very much the patron saint of postwar international film) theorized, cinema to emerge from the effacement of cinem conventions of th(> Holly ... vood styk filmmakers were freed (as Klaus Kn>imeier said of Carl Meyer) to think with Iheir eyes.J The D.lfdenne brothers burrow Ihrough Ihe hislory of postwar film to come up with anti-family anti-melodramas in which disenfr,lnchised, m process. In fact process itself is my major concern, and while I will look closely nt representative works and figures, I will concentrate upon movement and the changing perceptions of the work of cinema. Wh.lt follows is a critical progress through progreSSive film, through a cinema that asks to be taken seriously and assumes that complexity is not " quality that diminishes entert"inment. This is a cinema that invites emotional response and int(>Il(>c\ual participation, that is committed to history and polities and an cxamination of culture, that asks for the commitment of its audience; a cinema that offers ways to change, if not the world, at ieast the way we see it.

RPK, June 1982

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The Altering Eye

For th� (lie altering alters all. William Blilkc, "The Mental Traveller"

The screen',; white eyelid lI�Jljld Oil/II . "ud to be able to rrflcct the light that i.� its own, alld it 1IJtlllid blow up the Universe. .

Luis BuRue1

We often went to the m(lvics. The screen lit rip lind we trem blcd.__ Bul mllrl' ojkll /llati 11(>/ Madelei /Ie and I were disapp<Jilllrd. The pic/ures were dated, they flickned. And Mllril.1f1l Mllllroe had aged tariMy. It mllde us sad. TlI;s w/ml', Ihe film we'd dreamed of Till'S wa;;rr'/ the to/al film that each of us had carried within himseif-IIIe film we wanted to lIIake, or, more secret/If. /10 doubt, that we wllIrlcd to live. P,wl, in Jcan-Luc Godard's Ma..'aler wil1ingn('Ss on the part of a producer to allow th(> filmmaker to work on his or her own, to writ(>, direct, and even edit a film, 10

release it in Ihe form the filmmilker desires. In recent years, this respect has been demonstrilted through state support (piHticularly Ihrough television) fur new filmmakers, or for estilblished onL'S who c,mnol find commercial

distribution. Certa in ly stille support brings with it the problems of stille conlrol; bUI overriding this is Ihe facl tholl il permils films to gel made Ihat otherwise could nOI. Th(> rebirth of Gennan cin(>m.. c..m(> about through Ihe p..tronage of the German governmenl and its television subsidiaries.

British cinema is promising 10 show some signs of life through the support of Regional Arls Councils and the British Film Instilute Film Production Board. In past ye.us a vma was born with n(>()realism," h(> was not indulging in southern European hyperbol(>, but locating th(> origin of contemporary film.l There are few terms in the language of film criticism that have such general use and recognition as "neorealism," nor is there another so well defined, placed, and understood; for the critical term was used contemporaneously with the phenomenon it described, .md by those involv(>d in creating the works so describ(>d. While th(> origins of the term itself arc not dear-David Overbey presumes the first time it appeared in ptint was in

1942,

but in the context of an Italian ctitic's description

of French cinema-what it defines is.2 "Neorealism" refers to an aesthetic movement that created a group of films in It.lly betwl.'cn (approximately)

1945 and 1955. Its best known representatives nrc Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open Cit.lf (1945), Paisa" (1946), .md Germany, Year Zcm (1947); Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1947); Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle i'l Milan (1950), and Umber/o D. (1951); Fellin;'s I l1itellQni (1953) and possibly La strada (1954) and Nights I"f Cabiria (1956). ThN(> nr(> othN films, l(>5s w(>1! known, and there arc important ante("('dents, such as Visconti's O",5 he is creating, and the narrative formed by th(> images seems to yield an objective, though certainly not documentilTy, perspective. This apparent objectivity is countered, however, by sentimentality, an almost melodramatic expression of love and sorrow toward the subjects of the film. The visual elements of neorealism arc immediately recognizable in any of its representative films. The harsh grayness of the Cinematography; the fr.1ming of the characters amidst barren urban or country squalor, in ruined tenements or desolate town squilTes, walking along a wall, the camera set or tr.lcking at a diagonal to the character and background, arc al! visual codes that immediately signal a particular attitude and approach to the subject-that Signal, more than anything else, "n(>()f{>alism." The desolation of the

mi.<e-en-f'Ccne

(the structure and elements o( the visual

space, which both defines the characters .md is defined by them) docs not

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The Validity of the Image

The dealh of l'ina (Anna Magnani). Rome,

13

01'£11 City

(MuM:unl of Modern Art Film Stills An;hive) so much reflect as cont(>mingly wilhout hope. But , with all th(> pr(>diclable conv(>ntions and respons('S that make up .my other film genre.J If it wece only a film genre, one among so many others, the movement would not be as important as [ have said. [t would fall into place as a momentary coalescing of themes and structures, developed out of certain historical events by a group of filmmakers with similar ideas about what could be done with their medium, nurtured by a rather high degree of internalion,ll success. It is true that, like other genr('S, n(>ore,llism gf(>W, peaked. ilnd diminished. By the mid-fifties its practitioners had all gone on to other kinds of films; controversy continued in Italy over what they had done and why they were not doing it any more; and European cinema in general went into a short creative retreat. When the New Wave broke in the late fifties, little overt relationship to the Italian school was apparent. The new generation of filmmakers paid much hom.lge to Rossellini (God'lrd had him co-write the script for Les carabillier.;,

1%3).

But th(' young Ff(>nch filmmakers seemed more concerned with

Holl ywood films than with European. and neorcalism seemed to assume a comfortable, esteemed place in film history, often referred to, but ignored as an infiuenc(>. Yet we have to look twice. There are two neorealisms: one is the genre

of

films made in Italy in the decade between 1945 and 1955. The other is

a concept, an aesthetics, a politics,

,1

r,ldical reorientation of cinem.l that

changed the perspective on what had gone before and made pOSSible a great deal of what came after. OccaSionally concept and eXL'Cution came close together in the films made by Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, and othd to be Ihe first film with major neoTealist tendencies. Os..;essiur1c is of stmnge heritage. II is bilsed on Jnmes M. Cilin's novel

TIld to impos(' som(' individuality on thc work they did. What is more, it is

11

co mplex style, based on

conventions that, because they were repeated so often and accepted so thoroughly, arc looked upon by most viewers and filmmakers as the

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20 Tire Altering Eye natural way to tel1 cinematic stories. Cun;ng from an establishing shot into various parts of the action; always completing actions by, for example, following a character in matched cuts from one place to another so that all action ;s accounted for; breaking up a dialogue into a series of over­ the-shoulder shots, from one character to another, with eyelines perfectly matched-these and other smal1 details of construction make up a pattern of storytelling Ih'li lhe neorealisls felt Ihe need 10 reconsider. They realized that, whether practiced by MGM, Rank, Uf,l, Gaumon\, or the studios of CineciltiP., the classical style-the zero-degree style, as it has come to be called-was a complex of conventions, of formal and contextual choices, made, repeated, and naturalizcd: a transposition, to return to Zavattini's phrase, of the various realities of human experience and their expression into the simplified, expectation-fulfilling discourse of cinema.3 National cinemas were dedicated to a comfort'lble silu.lting of Ihe spectator's g,11;e in a cinematic world where space W,lS whole and enveloping (even though it was m.,de up, particularly in American film, of short, fragmentary shots), time complete and completed i n an easily apprehendable order. Within this small but complete world the passions of both character and speclator would be large but manageable, directed in assimilable curves and, above all, predictable and resolved. The neorealists weTC cert.li nIy ,1Ivare th.l t whi Ie this slyle w.1S domin,ln t, it was nol aJl-inclusiw. Small mailers, such as the use of the over-the­ shouIdef shot- the so-called ping-pong method of dialogue construction­ were nol univer5ally adopted by the European studios. More important, thNc were early reactions to the dominant form that prepared the ground for their work. The most Significant is found in the films and critic" l theory of Sergei Eisenstein, who provided the fir51 major allerniltive 10 the kind of cinema being developed by Griffith in America. He understood, more thoroughly than did Griffith himself, the possibilities of editing, regarded montilge as the essential structuring principle of filmmilking, and sought to use it 10 trilnspose reillily inlo il cinem,l Ihat prodded consciousness, allacked tr,lditional politics and morality, and stimul ated thought as well as emotion. In the collision of images that made up the structure of his films, Eisenslein sought to ereilte a dynilmics that would impel the viewer to a recognition and understanding of revolut;on. His films were a structure of and for change, the opposite of Griffith's, which were a struclure of and for rest and resolution. Discussing the classical closeup. Eisenstein wrote in his

1944 ess,lY "Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today": The American says: "car. or "close-u p." We are speaking of the qualitative side of the phenomenon linked with its meaning.. Among Americans the term is attached to vitwpo;ut. Among us-to the value d to Griffith's pastoral landscapcs, studio­ sct cities, and fanciful r('Creations of historical periods by creating two allernati\fC worlds. The most predominant was a fantasy, late-nineteenth­ century Middle Europe, a plac(> of aristocratic decadenox, the diabolical corner of the operett'l kingdom-th(> d.lTk c,lpit'li of Ruritani,l, where nobl(>m(>n drank blood and crippled girls were forc(>d into marriag(> by pitiless fathers engaged in whorehouse orgies, and murdered bodies were deposited in sewers. Too grotesque for melodr'lma (though permitting just some sentimentality), smirking at th(> morbid moralism of Griffith and his followers, von Stroheim's lurid universe created a COffL'Ctive diak,ther in th(> middl(> of Death Vall(>y presents images grim in their expression of a willed, unsentimental destruction. Grim, but with a sense of von Strohcim's delight in the nastiness he portrays and his cold observation of aberrant behavior. Perhaps this emerges 'lS a major legilcy of von Stroheim's: il distance from the characters and their surroundings, an ilbility to observe with some humor and some horror the details and ch.lnns of perversity in a manner th.ll culs through Ihe simplicities of melodrama that were d(·veloping under Griffith's !\ltelage. Von Stroheim's films ask of the viewer Sthetic history of cin(>ma than it is of th(> director's work. And as far

,1S influence

is concerned, von Stroheim's was almost as

diffuse as Eisenstein's. Perhaps onl), Buftuci picked up directly the line of happy perversily thaI runs Ihrough von Slroheim's films. Otherwise, von Stroheim was a principal in the movement of anti melodrama, the kind of filmmaking thilt turns away from conventions of easy emotional manipulation and the deployment of stereotypical ch.lTaclers wilh whom the viewer can "identify." But how(>ver indirect, his influenC(' is appaJ"{'nt in the ncorealists' work. Like von Stroheim in

Greed, they arc attracted to

working-class chMacters, though they come to these with a compassion von Stroheim would scorn. Even more important, the sense of detail, the environment that does not exaggerate the characters' state but defin(>S ii, the ability to make observiltion function in the place of editing arc illl qualities the neorealisls looked 10 adapt. 11 must be not('d in passing that von Stroheim played another major role for future filmmakers to observe, understand, and usc to their benefit, thilt of Hollywood milrtyr. He was the fiTSt major figure to suffer from the growth of filmmaking into a h(>avy industry, with the capital-conservation, maximum-profit, minimum-exp(>nditure ment,llity that goes with such growth. Von Stroheim was fired from both Universal Studios illld MGM for his obsession with detail and his protligacy with lime and money.

Greed was

Originally forty-seven reels long. Von Stroheim himself cut it

almost in half; then Goldwyn Studios, at the pOint of the merger which would creilte MGM, h,ld it cut to len reels, the only form in which it is availabl(>, the r(>St having presumably been destroyed. The f(>w films he was able to direct after that were almost all re-cut by their studios.16 With the coming of sound and the complete normillization of production, von Stroheim's directorial career was over. He was too slow, too meticulous, too arrogant for the line. What happened to him in Hollywood, as well as what happened to Eisenstein (his footage for Que vivll Mexico was stolen from him and his idea for

,1

film of Dreiser's

American Trllged.1l given by

['.uamount to the safely non-revolutionary Joseph von SternbNg) and then to Wdles (who was removed from RKO for making extrav.lgant, non­ commercial films), did not go unheeded by European filmmakers, who attempted with some success to keep control over their \\lork.

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28 Tire Altering Eye The economic and industrial aspects of filmmaking played as important a part in the emergence o f .:l new cinema after the war as did the ,lesthetic movements and the work of miljor individual filmmakers. The neorealists reacted

as

strongly against the methods of American film production .1S

against the form and content of the films those methods produced. In turning away from studios to locillion shooting with non-professional players they joined economic necessity and .1esthetic desire in an aHilck against the complex of (>vents that mad(> it difficult for a filmmak(>r lik(> van Stroheim 10 work. And so his CMeer had a double influence. Both what he did in his films ilnd what was done to him and his films by the studios gave future filmmakers much to consider. Von Stroheim's career directly con\'erges with that of another formative figure who remains to be ilcknowledged 1I10ng the way 10 neorealism. Jean Renoir has stated that yon Siroheim's Foolish Wiues W.1S .1 major influence on his early work, and his admiration was directIy recognized when h(> gave von Stroheim .m imporiant role in

The Gra/ld lI/usimr (1937).

But Renoir's

work goes beyond von Stroheim. His career reflects the political, economic, and aesthetic shifts that have occurred in cinema over a great period of time-almost its entire history, from the silent era to the late sixties. Only the work of Hitchcock and BUr'iuel also spans so great a period, though their longevity is the only thing they h.we in common wilh nenoir. Renoir's cinematic embrac(' of the world is more open and gentle thiln that of either his contemporilries or von Siroheim. Hitchcock's gaze discovers the terrors of seeing too much, revealing anarchy and irrationality; Buiiuel and von Stroheim d(>light in th(>se very things; but I{enoir's look reve,lls a world in which the violence we see and do is at the service of a larger understanding of bourgeois frailty and proletarian need. "Everyone has his reasons," says Octave, the ch.lracter played by Renoir in

The Rules ofthe Game (1939)- one of the most quotl·d lines in any film-and

it stilnds for Renoir's notion of human behavior, from the anti-bourgeois anMchy wrought by Michel Simon in

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932),

to th(> justified murder of the odious boss Batala by his employ(>e in Ih(>

Le crime de NI. Lanse (1935), to the elegies for a dying The Gra,ld /II(•.1I and The RIlles (1 the Game. Renoir's is a

Popular Fronl film aristocracy in

cinema of understanding, of the embracing attempt to comprehend history and the function of men and women in it. The other movements ,md figures we have been observing are limited in comparison. He hils ranged through a variety of stylistic .1pproaches and subjects, through them .111 seeking ways to mah· the spectator's eye participate in the image, which embraces il l arge fjeld, probes and elaborates, bul does not close it off. The relationships of Renoir's characters to eilch other and to their enyironmenl are determined by a narrative and visual openness, a sensitivity to shifting attitudes ,md allegiances and the movements that indicate them. His use of camera movement and cutting creates il scope o( activity, an interplay of face, gesture, and landscape that invite connection and enlargement. Bazin

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The ValidihJ of the tmage 29 writes: Renoir . understands that the screen is not a simple rectangle. . It is the very opposite of a frame. The scret>n is II mask whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves hidden. But this invisible witness is inevitably made to wear blinders; its ideal ubiquity is r....strain....d by framing. jllSt as tyranny is often restrained by assassination," _

__

The image, even Renoir's, c;mnot show everything, .md in the dialectics of th.... seen and th.... not-seak whilt they have to say and Ih(>n to move on. This is what

neorcaJism discovered and whilt W,lS passed on to the next generation. Whether in the casual observation of the beggars in

Bic.l/cie Tllil!Vc�;

the

brief look on Bruno's face of disbelief mingled with fear when he finds

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The ValidihJ of the tmage 39 himself standing among clerics speaking German (a language with many connotations to a postwar It,llian); the simple two-shots of l'ina ,md her fiance on the tenement staircase talking about their future in

Opell

Rome,

Cit.lf; or the point-of-view shot from the fiance being taken aw.1Y in the German's truck, watching as l'ina runs after him and is shot down, there is in the best of these films a

desire not

to emix'lIish or do more to

the characters or the viewer than is necessary. In Visconti's

La terra trl.'ma,

where great care is taken in composing images, where boats and harbor and the people who inhabit them arc given an Eisensteinian grilJ1deur, the visual care expresses Visconti's desire not for embellishment, but for honor. There is an admiration of these people and their struggle which does not make them more than they arc; perhaps just what they an'. Visconti is not dealing in the eXilggeriltions of eilrly socialist realism, the poster nobility of workers and peasants, but with a class of people in a particulilr geographical area (Sicily) to whom attention needed to be paid. The documentary urge inherent in much of the ncorealist aesthetic also leads him a step further; the rich images arc accompanied by a voice-over commentary which, even though it often merely repeats or sums up what we have already seen or will soon see, also ,lttempts to prOvide an exlril objective perspective, a concerned voice to match the concerned eye that forms the images. But some contradictions begin to emerge. Within this documentary impulse, almost contrary to it, there is a desire to go beyond creation of

iln

illusion of unmediated reality. Visconti will not drop all

aesthetic pretense. He observes his world, coaxes it into being, frames and composes it, regards it in the light of his own admiration and compassion, honors it, and finally monumentalizes it. There are im,lgeS in the film that call for an aesthetic response, an appreciation of the way they arc lit and composed. And the manipulation of the narrative, like that of the images, is deSigned to move us in p'lrticular ways. In the end, the calIs to remove subjective contempliltion and mediiltion and reduce aesthetic interference, while necessary to the mor.11 work of the neon'alists, were recognized as impossible to follow. The outstanding f.let about the movement is th,lt they were committed to making fiction films, not documentaries, despite the impulse toward documentary in their theory and occasionally in their practice. The subjective urge was always present, and finally recognized. Chiarini wrote: "Faets speak through the suggestive force of neoreaJism; not as brutal documentary, because absolute objectiVity is impossible and is never 'purified' out from Ihe subjective clement represented by the director; rather, in the sense of the historicill-social meaning of facts."Jl In their urge to purify cinema, they never gave serious thought to using documentary, as had John Grierson in England during the thirties, or Dziga Vertov, who wanted to chronicle post-revolutionary Russia with his kino eye in the twenties. There was nothing for the postwar Italians to chronicle with documentary. There was no revolution .md they did not find lyricism in work or sponsorship

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40 Tire Altering Eye by government ..nd business to cre..te such lyricism as Grierson ..nd his followers had. Instead they chose to dramatize and give structure to postwar events and to a class of people rardy considered worthy of n.. rr..tive in the cinema. They invented ch..r..cters, but ..llowed them to be played by individuals who were close to those characters in their own lives. They told a story but ilt the Silme time attenuated it, subordinating conventional continuity and ch,lr,l(ter development to the observation of detail. Bazin wrote: "The narrati\'e unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of evenls, or the character of its protagonists; il is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more imporlant than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."ll Just as the "image fact" .lchieves imporlance by the

effect of its reill presence, so "the concrete instilntS of life" conlained by the image achieve importance beyond drama, beyond narrative even. Seeing an image of life itself is a dramatic event; it need not be manipulated inlo something greater than itself. The neorealists sought il form thai would attenu,lte the structures of fant,lsy in traditional film. The spect,ltor would be uffered small, unelaborated images built from Ihe lives of a certain class of people at a cerlain moment and in a certain place. These images would, finally, request the viewer to recognize in them not "reality" but an attempt to evoke the concrete the immediate; they would request an attention and a willingness to trust the image not to betrilY eilher its subject or the spectator In

PuiJiUI1,

the second of his three films on the war, Rossellini comes

clos('st uf all the major neorealist filmmakers to making a fictional narrative that does nol intrude upon subject and observer. The film integrates at least three approaches: it is a quasi-newsreel documenting the movement of American troops from Sicily northwilrd to Ihe Po; within this historical structure it presents six episodes, in specific geographical locations, sketching small dramas occurring betwccn Ihe soldiers and Resistance fighters and the people; and within these episodes it reve,lls, tersely and withoul embellishment, some attiludes, ilgonies, defeills, and victories, military and personal, that resulted from the deprivation of war and two foreign invasions, German and American. The mi.�e-etl-scelle thruughout most of the episod(>s is one of cillastrophic destruction and barrenness, of he.,ps of rubble or empty streets through which individuals pursue each other or search for those who have berome physically or emotionally lost. [n the Naples episode a black American MP mLoets a small boy, another of those street beggars who populatE' the neorealist universe. Theepisode is built out of il series of sm�ll ironies and underslandings. When they first meet, ,lt a street f.lir complete with fire­ eater, thE' soldier is drunk, and a group of young childrE'n try to rob him. The boy follows the soldier and Ihe two of them visit a puppet show, which depicts the white crusader Orlando battling a Moor. The black American liberalor watches a display of ancient racism and in his drunkenness attacks

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The Validih) of the Tmage 41

•

• "Joe" and th(' litlk' boy on the rubble heap.

Pai>-fln

(Museum of Modem Art Film Stills Archive) the white puppet. The boy leads him aw,ly through the ruined streets to a rubble heap where the two sit. The soldier plays a harmonica and talks of his fantasy of a hero's welcoml' in New York, realizes it is a fantasy, and says he does not want

to go home. He falls asleep, and the sequence ends

in a manner typical of Rossellini's approach through the film. The little boy shakes him, tells him rather matter-of-factly, "If you go to sleep, I'll steal your shoes." The soldier sleeps. The image fades to black.3J The episode concludes with the soldier finding the little boy again (although at first he does not recognize him), yelling at him, taking him home to the cave where he and many other children live, war orphans left 10 their own squalor. The soldier comes 10 a quiet understanding of the poverty that makes thievery an ordinary childhood activity. He does not lake the shoes offl'red him by the little boy (which are not the ones he stole from him anyway) and simply leaves. The last shots arc a closeup of the boy's sad, scared face and a dist.,n! shot of the soldier driving off. Swelling music provides the only punctuation. Emotions arc not wrung from us here, and the revelation of the city's hopeless poverty that we share with the black soldier, which ironically reverberates with his own situation as a black man, remains understated. Rossellini need only suggest the horror that often proceeds from undl'rstanding, or, in mon' precise ncoreaJist terms, pennit revelation to occur through observlllion

C:lP)'nght0 Valley during the last weeks of the

C:lPYnghl create. Rossellini doC!> make special demands on our reactions in the death of !'ina. the torturing of Manfredi, ilnd the execution of Don Pietro in Rome.

Opell CitH. In that film he is perhaps 100 dose to the realities

of fascism to be able to distilnce himself from its terrors, and not yet ilWare thill an identificillion with and emotional reaction to viewed pain and suffering can preclude an understanding of it.fO He learned this quickly, and

Pais.m

allenuiltcs direct emotion almost completely. Dc Sicil and

Visconti never learned it. This structural difficulty, the inability to separate their own emotions and ours from the chilrilclers they creilte, is compounded by the ncorealists' insistence on using children ,1S the fulcrum on which to turn thL'"Se emotions. It is e,l sy to understand the aHr,lCtion, for childr(>n are the most visible and obvious sufferers in any political, economic, and social disaster. They arc helpless and therefore wronged the most. To sec these wrongs through them, from their perspective, or at least with them as central particip,mts, is to perceive the scope of thLOSE' wrongs most immediately. The problem-and it ;s unclear whether Rossellini and Dc SiC;1 were aware of it-is that the use of children results in a Speci,ll pleading which, at its worst, becom(>s cynicism, a vulgar way to assure audienc(' response. The neorealists fortunately missed being vulgar; they did not miss a certain cynicism and il great deal of naivete. Eric Rhode, one of the few historians not captivated by neorealist children and able to see the faults

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The ValidihJ of the tmage 49 of the movement as a whole, accuses the filmmakers of committing mor,ll blackmail. His analysis is important enough to be quoted at length:

Through his portrait of Peachum in The Threel'muy Opt'm, !Bertolt) Brecht had implied that all claims to charity are a form of licensed thievery- He had recognized how in an unjust society the exploited can exploit the exploiters in a way that tr�p5 everyone into s.ome form of guile_ De Sica and Zavallini are not Willing to accept responsibility for this conception of SOCiety. They reduce everyone to a childlike state, as though en!ryone were a child in the sight of God. Their childlike perception of the minutiae of d�ily life tends to be passive, for all its delicate precision. They eling to the surface of things, and in their clinging a5Sume a perpdual complaint. Brecht had understood that once adults slip back into childlike states of mind and displace responsibility for the community elsewhere, they prefer to complain rather than take action when the community fails to satisfy their needs; and since these needs are seldom satisfied, they tend to imagine Ihal their lives are ordained by some malignant power." Though De Sica and others used children to focus their view of SOciety and our emotionill reilction to ii, I do not ngrcc with Rhode thilt they assume

il

ch(ldlike perception themselves, nor do I think their perception

to be passive. The passivity in their films exists elsewhere. I do agree, however, that the omnipresence of children is a W.1y for them to il.'oid a certain responSibility. A child, by all the definitions of middle-class morality, is helple5s and in need of conslant protection by either parents or charity. The neore.1list child gets none from the latter and only .15 much from the former as the parents cnn spnre in their own desperate attempts ilt survival. The desolation continur dawn, going for th(>ir buses, dominating the landscape and the eMly light. Visconti goes much further than De Sica. But in La terra trema visual splendor and the observation of novel det.liJ ocgin to exercise more control over the narrative than does a sense of social and political revelation. Visconti succeeds in documenting the town and inhabitants of Aci-Trezza-more than documenting it, organizing the buildings, the coastlin(>, the fishermen and their f.lmilies in im.lges that finally overwhelm them. "The documentnty moment previlils over the ideologic'll," Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, and the picturesque prevails over the documentary. Meanwhile the revolutionary intent that Nowell­ Smith cites ilS the initial driving force of the film gets turned into il moving ncorealist affirmation of enduring humanity. The film at limes approaches, in Now(>II-Smith's words, "an anthropological cinema in which the anthropologist sets the scene and comments on i s t significance, but retires from the picture when it is actually being taken so that his presence is no longer felt.""l And so a problem arises. Visconti tries to have things two ways: he attempts to mak(> a visual rt'Cord of a place and a way of life, unenrumocred by an authorial presenct:; and he nttempts to apply an authorial presence through the voice-over commentary and by forming this r('Cord into a narrative of rcb(>llion and failur(>. His desir(> to document a people and their environment, his decision not to depict a successful revolution, his intrusion into the narrative to guide our emotions result in a powerful but conflicted work. The film tracE'S the fortunes of a poor fishing family who att(>mpt to make themselves independent of the padrO/zi, the omnipresent bosses, wholesalers in this inst.lnct:, who take the results of the family's difficult labor, pay them poorly for it, and then sell it at a large profit. The early part of the film observes the Valastros' work at sea, their family life, their bitterness at being unable to sell their own c.ltch. Visconti's commentary, spoken throughout the film, tells us of their poverty and anxiety and their few simple pleasures. We are prcsented with a cycle of work .md domesticity interspersed with innocent flirtations, all of which is knitted together by a voice-over narrator who speaks for the people, 'lsking

CJPYnghted matanal

52 The Altering Eye how they could be content with their exploitation. One member of the family, the older brother 'Ntoni, is not. Against the protestations of his conservative grandfather, he leads a small rebellion. The fishermen gather after the catch; 'Ntoni throws the wholesalers' scales and baskets into the water .md is promptly arrested by the polie. The wholes.,lers realize thilt, without the fishermen to catch fish for them to sell, they will not make money. They have 'Ntoni released from jail. At this point Visconti begins to e\'ade the difficultil's in the situation he has creilled, 'Nloni, freed, persisls in carrying oul his struggle for liberillion from the owners, and in so doing confronts the unwillingness of his fellow fishermen to join him. He tilkes the dangerous step of mortgaging his filmily's house to get the money he needs for his independence. Visconti observcs the neighbors' suspicions and their plilyful mocking of the Valastros; he is sensitive to the shifts in c1ilSS altitudes. In their momentilry wealth, with money from their house and a good catch, the V.llilstros become the rich ilnd are suspected by the olher workers. Bolh 'Ntoni's girlfriend ilnd his sister's boyfriend express an insecurity about this sudden wealth. [t is just here that the "anthropologist" is ilt his most subtle, and here that the would-be revolutionary filmmaker withdraws ilnd the melodramatist enters, leaVing his characters, their situation, ilnd the audience 10 fend for themselvC"S against the intrusion of cinematic convention. The Valastros r",ach a high point of success. They have a good catch. They m.mage to get help from their neighbors in salting the fish, There is laughter and music. 'Ntoni .md his lover run h.lppily through the countryside to m.lke love at the shore. Every message sent out by the activity on tht, screen begins to arouse a Single melodramatic expect.ltion: a disaster is inevitable. Visconti cannot help doubling the expectations set up by the images: the nnrrator emphaSizes the couple's happiness, an emphaSiS that sets up an inevitable response. The happiness will not last. Visconti dissolves from the couple to the windy dock. The men return to the sea. They go offin the boats and the screen fades to black. The image fades up on a pan of the harbor and town, ending on a bell ringer. The nnrrator tells us that the sound of the bell in Ad-Trezza makes hearts sink, for it means a storm is appro.lChing. The pattern is obvious. The storm comes; the family at home are deeply worried. We are shown images of women in black, silhouetted against the shore, looking out expectantly to the turbulent sen. The Va[astros survive phySically, but their boat, and therefore their livelihood, is ruined. One of the wholesalers tells 'Ntoni he will P.1Y for all this. In truth Visconti, the ownt>r of the nanatiw, will make the filmily, and us, pay dearly. The decline in fortune from this moment is precipitous and direct. The wholes.llers cheat the f.lmily, a brother leaves home with a strang",r to work in the north, a sister lakes up with a town official, 'Ntoni finds companionship with thc town drunks because they are the only ones who will not laugh at him. The fnmily's house is sold; they end up in rags. "All that is left of Ihe Valaslros," says the

CJPYnghted matanal

The Validity of the Image 53 •

-••

'1 -

•

•

•

•

-

, •

'Ntoni and his brothers in rags. La terra trema (MUS('Ufll of Modem Art Film Stills ArchIve)

C:lPYnghlrs might want to suggest." No one and nothing helps Ricci when his bicycle is stolen. He goes to a community center after the event for help. On one side of the h"l1 is what appears to be a Communist Party labor meeting, in which a speaker tells the gathering of the need for more jobs. Ricci's personal needs arc rebuffed by the speaker. At the other end of the hall some people arc rehearsing a show, making entertainment at this most serious point of Ricci's life. The P,lTty will not help him, and only a friend, a g man who is rehenture which winds up only in a g(>neral affirmation of humanity-a powerful affirmation, 10 be sure, but also an e,lsy one to make. Nothing specific is offered for the particular case of Ricci and his family or those like him. Simild to (>ndure hardship and despair wilh hope comes oul of another conflicting slrain in the neorealisl endeavor, the attempt to merge a leftist understanding of class and social slructure with Catholic faith." Bt·hind the ncorealist tic 1ay the belief Ihat an op(>nn(>ss to the world would lead to revelation; Ihat Ihe filmmaker need only gaze inlo the book of God's creatures to discover the truths of humanity. Bazin writes th forties, the

audience for Italian fi l m was

excellent abroad, but poor ilt home. The movement Cilme under politicill att,lck-by the left for not providing iI strong enough model for ilnalysis and change, by the right for being too left, and by the center coalition government in power for keeping away Italian iludil'ncl'S and portraying ltilly in

iI

bad light abro,ld. The government won. Italy joined NATO and,

as a recipient of aid from the Marshall Plan, was enjoined to control and if possible do il\vay with any activity that might be taken for left-wing.

In

1949 the Christian Democrats placed Giulio Andreotti in charge of the film industry with powers to subsidize only those films that were "suit.lble.. to the best interests of Italy." Statements made by government ministers at the time indicate the direction being taken- the direction indicated in

Miracle ill Milall-toward a cinema of passivity and pacification: Film is merchandise. If the government has the right to control the export of \'eget�bles and fruits to make Sure that they are not rotten, it also has the right, and the duty, to prevent the cir char.lclNs no longer among the objects but, as if thes(> hild becom(> transparent, through them."" In fact, charactef begins to separate from objects, and soon the two will fight unsuccessfully for Fellini's-and the audience's-attention. Fellini becomes concerned with �igllificallce which, in the films from La strllda through 8 112 (1962), means probing desper.lle characters imd insisting that the audience share their emotional turmoil. Unlike lngmar Bergman (perhaps Fellini's only rival in international movie f.lme), Fellini does not permit his characters iI fearful and obsessiV(> introspection. He is close enough to his tradition to obsefve them from the outside inY Cclsomina, in La strada, is defined by Ciulietta Masinil's expressi\'e face (full of licks and reactions borrowed partly from Charlie Chaplin, pilrtly from Jilne Wyman's performance in the 1948 American film Johnny Belinda), by the character's poverty and physical isoldtion, by her .lssociation with children and animals, and of course in contr.lsl to the brutish Zampano, the itinemnt strong man who treats her wors(' than .md creating eonfront.ltions informed by ideils thilt reach for great signific'lnce-the tr.lnsc(>ndence of innocenc(> in the face of lumpish brutality-he is giving character .1Ild I.lndscape a connotative dimension and 'l moral structure. He is also personalizing his characters more than the forties neorealists would have done, ilnd with curious results. The neor(,'llist ch'lr.lcter is n('ither a stereotype nor an ilbstrilction, but a representative, a figure of his or her class. While the characters in both La 5trada and Nighls ofCabiria have class attributes, the abstraction process is one of declassification, removal to th" status of impassioned idea Of, perhaps more accurately; of moral marker in a l'lndseape o( despilir (il purple phrase adequilte to Fellini's intentions). The politiC'll morality of the neorealists was embedded in their choice and treatment of character and place; Fellini 'ldds to this his abstract morality, and we arc ilsked to make the tillly. He wilnts morill perception and judgment where the neorealists wanled observiltion and comprehension;

CJPYnghted matanal

The Validity of the Image

63

on top of that he wants profound cmotion,il reactions. The melodrama that always threatened ncorealist narrative is now indulged in without embarrassment. The lonely, abused Gelsomina befriends a clown, a man as foolish and innocent as she, but unlike her, willing to stand up to Zampano. The strong man kills him. Gelsomin" becomes more pitiable than before and is abandoned by Zampano, though not before he shows some expression of gUilt. After a passing of time, Zampano wanders

through the streets of a town and hears someone singing music associated with Gelsomina. A woman ha ngi ng wash on a line tells him Gelsomina is dead. A dev ast ated Zlmpano pretends not to be moved. He does his strong man act, but the camera itself refuses to p Siructures of m(>mory and f.mtasy ilr(> limned oul wilh history relegated to a backdrop and nostnlgia elevated abow analysiS. He relurns to a romanticism Ihat insists that the productions of the artist's life and imilgination must be of interest simply because they arc the productions of the artist. The images of such films as 1IIIiet of the Spirits, Sat.lfricolJ, Amarcord, Roma, The City of Wmucu nrc meant to be valid simpl y because theY.He Fellini's images. But this redundancy, like .111 such, has .l gap in its cenler. The demilnd for attention is bilsed only on our suppos(>d curiosity nbout the workings of a single, nnd not singular, imagination. Otherwise, these films respond to nothing. In his later films he wishes to create worlds Ihill expre5S some profound psychologicill truths, but manages to make images thai only corrE'spond 10 his own f'lIllasies .md-when the spedade is stripped away-unexceptional memories. The endless movement of grotesque faces within Ihe landscape of .1 world-cum-carnival must be taken on filith. Bad faith. I risk here the nccusnlion of being presented ilS being beyond compassion as well as help. (No foreshadowing of neoreaJism here, only the expression of il sensibility never moved to pity by the outrag(>ous.)

There follow(>d eight('(!n y(>.lrs of silence. Not (>ven

Bufiuel's biographers are certain of the details of what he did or where he was during that period. According to his own testimony he worked in Europe as dubbing adviser for P.Hilmounl Pictures ilnd supervisor of co­ productions for Warner Brothers. He did some producing; ht, represented the Spilnish Republic in Hollywood until the end of the Spanish Civil War and then worked for thc film department of the Museum of Modern Arl in New York until it was discover(>d thai he was Ih(> director of L'age

d'or and he reSigned. He then went back 10 Hollywood .md may pOSSibly hilve worked as an assistant director (one rumor is that he was ilssistant to Robert Florey on a film called

The 8e�t with Five Finge� (1947)

about

a disembodied hand, which turns-or crawls-up agilin in Bunuel's own film

The Exterminating AIIKe/,

1%2)."1 In 1946 he moved to Mexico, where

he was once again able to make his own films, although at first only a few local potboilers. H(' f(>ports that his producer, OSC.lf Dancigers, asked him "to put up an ide.1 for a children's film. I gingerly suggested the scenario for Lc�

Olvidado� ... .

"�

Gingerly indeed!

Los Olvidados

(1950) is Bufiuel's r('('mergence into

international filmmaking, and a film as violent, anarchic, and funny as those with which he ended the first parI of his car('(!r in the early thirties. But with some major differ('tlces.

Las Olvidados is

morc subdued than

Un

CJPYnghted matanal

The Validity of the Image 69 chiclI alldalou, which contains probably the single most notorious image in the history of cinema: a man slicing open a woman's eye with a straight razor. UI1 c/rir!/J atrdalou is an anti-narrative, a series of surreal images whose chronology and spatial relationships are purposefull y dislocated to dislodge the viewer from the complacency of continuity. L'age d'ar, the film that followed, has a narrative of sorts: a man obsessively pursues a woman through a series of overwhelming obstaclC5 and outrageous hindrances. Bunuel's l'ye is on the obstacles and hindr.lIlces; he is more interested in observing a huge cow on a bed, a peasant and his CMt in an upper-class draWing room, or " man hurling a burning tree, " bishop, and a stuffed giraffe out the window than he is in his story. More accurately, such incidents,

.15 well as the interruptions that .,Ilow him to pursue ., history of

imperial Rome or a history of the scorpion, become the narrative Bunuel is most interC5ted in, the history of madnC5S induced by reprC5sion. It is a history still spuken in the language of Dada and the surrealists, 11 language Bunucl never forgot, but modified and modulated, used as a subversive tool.

L(/s Qlvidados does nut fight narrative but embraces it, and by doing so subverts it. The form Bunuel chooses to embrace is directly connected to the Italian neorealists, for he tells the story of poor children in the slums of Mexico City; uses some non-professional players, and opens the film as if he were going to document the dreadful conditions of tht' breeding ground of delinquents in a miljor city. The narriltive parameters of

Olvidad'J

Los

offer excellent proof of how wel1 neorealism had established

itself as a major cinematic genre whose conventions were immediately us.,ble, rccognizilble, ,lIld finally able to be turned inside out. This film is no document of poverty and delinS that I hilve not yet detililed; howewr, by

bringing neorealism proper up to date, 1 will be able then to fill in some of the intervening ground in clillxlTating the development of contemporary cmema. The films in question are Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, Ermanno Olmi's

The Trcc of Wooden Clogs, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Padre padrtme, all rele,'sed between 1976 and 1978. While Padre pm/mile and TIll! Tree ofWo"dell Clog,; are small-budget films, made for It,llian television but distributed commercially, 1900 is il major production with an international cast, distributed by Paramount, which enforced upon it a succ(>Ssive whittling­ down. The film original1y ran about five and a half hours. Bertolucci cut it to four, and Paramount cut about another fifteen minutes when they finilllygaw it a limited releilse in the United Stat(>S. As it s i now distributed the film is only

,1

notion of Bertolucti's work and, as I have not seen

Bertolucci's original cut, much of my conunentilry will of nl'ct'ssity be

an

extrapolation, working from the film as it is av,lilable in the United States to

it

supposition of its original form. Despite this problem, 1900 is a major

film and Bertolucti, of cours(', a major figure in contemporilry cinemil. A second-gent'ration postwar Italian filmmakt'r, heir 10 the noorSe three films is their subject maHer, the peasantry-a social-economic class that could hardly be more distant from most Western filmgoers. Indeed, it is

,1S distant from contemporary film as

was the working class in the forties. The peasantry is only an idea to most people, though it still ('xists in Italy-indeed in any country where a rural, agricultur,,1 working class attempts to make a living working fanns. For the nilTr�tive imaginntion, from the nineteenth century on, the pensilntry is made up either of lumpish boors, proto-revolutionaries, or sturdy men and women who suffer or accept their lot. They are often given mythic status, looked upon with pity nnd reverencc, with romantic awe as the repository of natural wisdom, or with political hope

as

the procrustean

bed of revolution. Each of the three films deals with, or partakes of, one or anotherof these Iiter,'ry myths and nHempts to construct from it a narrative thilt explains history or defines hum�nity through the peasant c1i1ss. In 1900 Bertolucti aHempts ,1 famili,,1 epic of revolution, of socialism growing

CJPYrrghted matanal

74 The Altering Eye

Families in groups. Ab()vc: La terra trc/Ila (Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive); bel/Jw: The Tree of WlJIJdell

CI"gs (Caumont/5acis/Ncw Yorker Films)

C:lPYnghtives more clearly than her husband the threat of the fasasts, whom he attempts to placate, even at Ihe tisk of Olmo's life; and Altila, the local fascisl leader. Alfredo, his wife, and Olmo are traditionally "well-drawn" charactNs. They exist with full "personalities," struggle with and suffer internal conflicts

of

conscience,

duty,

friendship,

and

loyalties-conflicts

which eventually pull the film off course. Allila, on the other hand, is a straightforward, two-dimensional. almost allegorical figure of political and moral evil. His character is molded to fit perfectly the historical design of the film.

He is an idea of f.lscism pure and unadorned, a figure who takes

equal pleasure in smashing a cat (which he pretends is a communist and ties to a post) with his head, bashing out the brains of a child by whipping it around the walls of a room, or crushing an old woman behind a door. Attila's is not a banal evil, but an active, calculated one. His evil is so great that his rise .md fait structure the movement of the Americ,1n version of the film. When Iialy is liberated on April 25, 1945, nature blooms and the peasants take to the fields with pitchforks to destroy Attila and his wife. (In the first American version of Ihe film, this sequence opened the action, so thai the body of the film explained Ihe peasants' act of revenge and set up Attila as a powerful force of reaction against which Bertolucci could match the progreSSiveness of the peasantry.) After the waf, with Attila dead.

C:lP)'nghld in th(' late seventi(>s. Of th(> thrc(> it is th(> most removed from its ncorealist origins and therefore the most successful. By taking a ncorealist ,

subject and then severing it from a ncoreaJist trealment, the film manlevision aft(>r Padre padnme but not commercially releils(>d in th(> United States) or

D(> Sica in Bicycle Tllieves and Umberto D. Each of these narratives

focuses on

CJPYnghted matanal

86 The Altering Eye The Tavianis refuse to allow a single attitude or mood to predominate for too long. The bleakness of poverty is not as u nrelenting in this film as it was for the neorealists, and is the source less of pity and compassion Ih.m of frustration and anger. [t can even yield images Ihat arc (or c.m be made) ludicrous and amUSing. [mmediately aftl'r the fade to black on the father, we see Gavino, his face swollen from his beating, milking a goat. For all his efforts, he cannot keep the goal from dcfc-cating in Ihe milk. His frustrations are spoken off·scr('('n in threats to the animal, to which the .mimal itself responds, "speaking" to Gavino through his imagination, threatening 10 continue its unpleasant activities so Ihe father will beat Gavino some more. In despair, Gavino attempts 10 drown Ihe goal in its own fouled milk. Then a chain of associait on begins that the Tavianis find irresistible. In the midst of his altercation with the goat, Gavino sees two olher animals copulating. He notes this and begins stroking the goat; there is a cut to Gavino's young friend in Ihe n('ighboring field fornicating with a mule. We hear heavy breathing on the sound track. We sec other children masturbating with chickens. A chorus of heavy breathing builds. Gavino's father sees the children, gets excited, rides off to his wife, and leaps upon her. Other adults procCE'd to the s.lme occupation as the chorus of heavy breathing reaches a crescendo and the camera pans the lown. There is much good humor in Ihis, and al no one's expense, except pNhaps Ihe goat and the chickens. Th(' scatology and sexuality arc not exploitative as they are, for example, in Ettore Scola's neorealist parody Down lind Dirty (1977). They arc one of the menns the Tavinnis use to niter th(' narrative lon(' and structure and diminish reliance on conventional chronology or spnlial continuity. Such digressions and shifts in point of view provide as wdl n means to approach, with discretion, the psychology of the characters, or at least Iheir emotional and phYSical reactions, wilhout pn'suming to reveal them entirdy or to reduce them to stereotypl'S. Later in the film, an older Gavino sits in his mcadow, learning to play a broken accordion he bought for two goats from some wanderers. He has slit his lip with a knife so his fnther will think he was robb('d and beaten. The camer.l p.ms the awful, rocky place he inhabits find moves back to Gnvino as these words nppenr on the screen: "I am Gavino, son of the shepherd Efisio, who is the son of the shepherd, Luca. The cold has filled our pens with fleas. The fattest ones are under my armpits.... [ am Eligio, son of the shepherd, Giovanni, who wns the son of the Carabiniere, Enrico. I had lo cal cheese Ihal was too fresh. When I blow on my longue, it burns." The Cam(>f,l continues to pan th(' meadow ns sounds of sobbing are heard on the sound tnlck and a boy on il donkey rides past, crying. More words appenr: "Angels of paradise who play so swcctly; I'm Mntteo, and [ beg you: let a basin of boiling waler appear that I can put my f('t't in, for I'm dying of cold." Sobbing and sad music are intermixed with the waltz associnted with Gnvino's accordion, nnd the sequence ends with n closeup of Ihe crying rider and the words, "Mine is a pr.l yer. This sequence is "

CJPYnghted matanal

The Validity of the Image 87 immedialely followed by a shol of Ihe f'llher walking along, worrying Ihat Gavino i s slipping away from him, worrying that he must keep his mind nimble, which he does by reciting the multiplication table to himself. In the opposite direction rides Sebastiano, a shepherd who smokes his cigar with the lit end in his mouth, so his enemies will not see him i n the dark. As the camera follows him, he decides to make peace with them. He meets

with them; they make up and proceed to slaughter their sheep together unlil one of the enemies turns and bashes Sebastiano, kills him, and steals his sheep. No one mood is permiHed to wear itself out, and no opportunity is

miss("d to manipulate the view('f's p('fsp('dive and th(" tone of parlicular events, and to comment upon them in the imagery or on the sound track in a manner that is not quite psychol ogical SOCiological, or directly political, yet manages to combine thec threc mode of inquiry. Sympathy, outragc, awe, concern arc all elicited without anyone reaction predominating. Pm!re padrone is a didactic film in the best sense. We arc cngilged and yet asked to keep our distance, ,md we learn with some force of an exotic and ,1pp,1I1ing way of lifL' through a film Ihat is its("lf sonl('what ("xolic in ils mixtur(" of styles ,md levels of discourse. But the various levels are never foreign to the subject of the film. Gavino is a peilsant who became an intellectual, who went from barren fields to a somewhat less barren life in the army, and finally to a university where he became a linguist ,md studied the dialect of his region. Throu gh out he kept returning to his home and the shadow of his f,llher. The conflicts of this p rocess are reilli7.ed in Ihe conflicting perspedives of the film. Just as Gavino learns language that will help him to understand ilnd control his world, the film leilffiS the narrative lilnguage thilt best deS(;ribes him ,md his past and best speaks to us of the charilcter, his surroundings, and his history. The Italian filmmakers and theorists of the forties discovered alterniltives to the artificial language of commerci ill cinema. They allowed the image to record and reveal a historically viable world, a "real" world, stories of which would be more eloquent lind moving Ihan the middle­ c1ilss melodramatics of conventional film. In so doing. they milde aViliiable to the filmmakers who followed them a starting point from which to build new languages of Ihe image, new narrative forms. The "bre'lk" in film history that neoreaJism created led to many experiments in restructuring ,

ilnd revitalizing cinematic storytelling, renewing inquiry into the cinematic

possibilities of telling thee and different ways of engaging the audience in their telling. Having considered the new models of imag(�making the ncorealists provided, we can proceed to eXilmine the structures that were

built by the filmmakers who followed them.

CJPYnghted matanal

Copyrighted material

2.

The Substance of Form

OJcourse it's bern Mid about "'.II /(Iork that the search jor �'yk /1115 oftw rC1;u/ted ill a wanl (1 fec/illg. HowelJer, I'd put il anolher way. I'd say thai s'-Ifle si feelins in its //lost clegall t and ecollomic expression, .. Clive Langham in Alain I{esn ai s's Providence .

_

Reality changes; ill ordcr to rl'presclIl it, modes of rt'prrscntatioll lllust ell/mgt. Bertoli Brecht1

The long-term result of neon'illism was

.In

explosion of form. It was as

if the much of the formal (>xperim(>ntation occurr(>d, th(> government, worried th,lt attention to form W,lS denying the needs of the audience and threatening the dominant socialist ideology, repressed the modernist movement. The stale fea["('d a ["('turn 10 a kind of art fur art's sake where the artist wuuld presumably satisfy his or her uwn imaginali ve needs without ["('sponsibility to a larger group or purpose. The result of this fear was a call for .1 return to "realism," a simple .md direct communication of social and political phenomena through cunventional forms of expression. "Socialist realism" grew out of ideologic,ll hlrmoil, out o( a concern Ihat artists be in touch with their audience, and out of fear; il became a reactionary stance that chose to forget or repress the fact that revolutionary content can only be created by revolutionary form, that perception precedes action, and that content s i detennined by the way content is made. It took many years for the sociillist countries to reali7.e that

CJPYnghted matanal

92 The Altering Eye "realism" meant something other than simple access to simple meaning (too many yenrs, in the course of which Soviet cinema lost its vit,llity). By contrast the Italian neorealists, who, like the socialist realists, chose the working class as subjects, were aWMe that straightforward glorification of the figure of the worker in simple narrativcs of triumph could not opt'n perception and would be counterproductive to their cause. Theirs was a response both to socialist realism

alld to literary modernism

and it made

cinema modernism possible. The f.1scists took care of the threat of elitism by simply destroying anything that smacked of imagination and threat to the status quo. "When

I hear the word 'culture' I feach for my gun," Goebbcls is supposed to have said. The comment is parodied by Godard in his film Cmrtempt (1%3), when Jeremy Prokosch, the American film producer (played by Jack Palance), a m,ln of cultured boorishness, says "Whenever

I

he,ll" the word 'culture'

I

bring out my checkbook."5 Godard has

an

ironic understanding of Goebbcls's

commcnt-,

statement of the philistine's feM of that which is different, perhaps even threatening. "Culture" for Goebbcls was irrelevant and dangerous to the needs of the state, and

as ,I

f,lscist he wanted to annihilate it completely. For

Godard's producer, "culture" is a distraction from commercial viability, ilnd as a c,lpitalist he wants to buy it off. But beneath the brut.ll mindlessness of Goebbels's comment is a perception that Godard gets at in a less bnltal way. Fascism, of any variety, despises difference and would destroy it. But within the concept of "culture" there is often a notion of difference that is itself destructive if it proposes to remove "ilrt" from direct contact with ordinary experience and intellectual or emoional t need. The concept of culture often cilfries the connotative burden of elitism, of snobbery ilnd arrogance (a fact that makes Goebbels's st.ltement ludicrous, since fascism is arrogant and elitist at its ideological core). The extreme reactions of the right and the conserviltive lett toward the modernist movement point up its subversion of conventional and silfe artistic aHitudes and expectalions.

YN the fact is that its subversion can be seen to support the connot.ltions of elitism and snobbery inherent in "culture." If the writer, painter, musician, or filmmilker desires to concentrate on the formal properties of his or her art, demanding we learn its language and then stnrggle for meaning within it, the risk of alienation, of the audience refUSing the struggle, is great. Most people do not want to work for their ilesthctic siltisfaction. When the demands besth(>tically. There were major experimental figures, like Eisenstein, who were part of the avant­ garde movement in Russi.l, and there was

,1

substantial avant-garde

mov(>ment centered in Fr,lnce. In the twenties and thirti('s, people like Abel Gance, Jeiln Epstein, louis Oclluc, Marcrcial film, how(>ver. Buiiuel endured a cinematic exile and then had to reemerge through the forms of neorealism before rel'Stablishing himself as a key figure (and still had to wait many years before he saw hirnselfhaving any direct influence, notably in the work of the New Wave and the Germilns). The expressionist movement in Germany was r'llher qUickly rouled inlo mainstre.lm American production. F. W. Mumau, Fritz Lilng.. E. A. Duponl, cin(>matographer Karl Fr(>und (to name only a few of the German emigres) came to Americ" to work. In Ihe end the Hollywood style was able to absorb and level all others, reprocess them, and return the mixture to Europe where it in tum influenced the stylI'S of various national cinemas. Individual figures like Renoir, Jean Cocteau, and Orson Welles pushed and probed at Ihe boundaries of what

Citiull Killlf, Welles rerouted the expressionist style once ilgilin, initiating a chang(' in mise-ell-scene and narrative content that developed into ftlm no;r, the dark, paranoid cinemil

was ('Ssenti.llly an international style. In

Ihal altered the look of American film and had a lasting influence abroad. (Even Ingmar B(>rgman admits to its influenc(> on his fortil'S filmsY But the fact thatftlm

Iloir involved a radical change in form and content

went unrecognized until the French began commenting on it in the fifties. Given its status as .l mass art, narrative filmmaking in Americil could not admit to any exp(>rimentation and change (>ven wh(>n thL'Se w(>rc occurring. Hollywood suppressed the initiators of chilnge-Welles. like von Stroheim before him, was nol permitted to work-ilnd absorbed Ihe changes themselves into its basic methods. On(> r(>ason th(>

/luir style b(>c,lm(> such

a constant in forties filmmaking may well be that repetition is always easier than exploration, ilnd Americ.ln filmmakers simply reproduced Ihe style rather than attempting 10 understand it. That hild alwilys been their m(>thod, for it was .md is neither a(>sthdic,llly or (>conomicillly fcasible to allow the Hollywood style to begin questioning itself or its iludience's response. The economic .lppar.ltus of commerciill cinema is so Img(> and compl(>x that (>v('fyon(>, from inv('stor to sp('(:tator, is involved in maintaining an illusion of a stMus quo. Arnold Hauser writes that "in order to amortize the invested cilpilal, the cinemil-goers of the whole world have to contribute 10 the financing of a big film." s And to get such global finanCing ther(> must be global ass(>nt, to a style and " subiect mntt(>r that please and do not threaten. So another irony occurs. If the early modernist movement borrowed from cinema, cinema itself-popui.lr, commercial

CJPYnghted matanal

94 The Altering Eye cinema-protecled its audience from modernism. Roy Armes writes: "In fact the cinema established ilself as a reflltation of modernism, becoming the new refuge of story, character and spectacle, and it is to this that it owed its vasl popularity."9 The continuity of the HollY'vood style offered security to an audience who might find the demands made by the experiments in Ihe other arts a chore. None of this resolves the fin.llly unresolvable arguments about the v,ltidity and valu(' of mass or popular cultur(' v('rsus high art; "entertainment" for the largest number of people versus subjective expressions of inquiry in painting, literature, music, or film created for those few with the education and time to understand them. The arguments arc unresulvable partly beC,'US(, they arc based on the false premise (ilself often elitist) that the public gcts what it wants-or worse, what it deserves. Rut the "public" is not a real enlity as much ,1S it is an ideological construct, a s('t of altitudes and responses cr('ated over a period of tim(' by poopl(' who have g"thered to themselves thc apparatus ncre r('luclant to change their creation by changing th(' other creations, the films they made. In a short time the creation took on a life of its own and the filmmakers believed that what they made was what the audience w.mted; the audience was made to believe the same. This self-fulfilling process exists today in American television pruduction and has become even more aggrilvilted in film production, where the films themselves Me of less interest 10 the eXt.'CutiV(>5 who execute them than is the d(',ll that C,lO be mad(' to maximize profits on th(' v('ntur('. Given all this, it is not surprising that mainstream theatrical film by and large resisted the kind of experimentation that was going on in other narrative forms-and even in other branches of film-in the twenties and thirties, or, if it did not resist, ilbsurbcd the experiments into its uwn development. Nor is it surprising that todily cinematic cxperiment direcl lin('S of dev(>lopment, although there is a clear relation to the existenti,llist philosophy and literature that developed in pre- and post-war Eu rope, which itself has roots in the Marxist concerns with the alienation of labor .md the reification of human .lCtivity. Alienation and disengagl·ment had long bE'en a subject of the modl'rnist novel and can be seen in much of twentieth-century nrt, where connection, harmony, continuity nrc refused in both form and content. In film this theme is not only nssocint(>d with these a(>sth(>lic nnd philosophic tr.1ditions but C,ln also be seen as a negatiw inheritance of neorealism. The inability of the neorealist filmmakers to reach an understanding of the poverty and despair that was their subject and the pity and sentiment lhat became their essenti,ll reactions tUTnl'd e,lsily into cxprL>ssions of impotence, especially when the subjo.."'Ct of the modernist filmmnker was the middle class. In

this case, the experience of filmmaker and character merged; the sense of removal from the wurld -figuring itsdf finally in a g(>neral neur.lslhenia, a numbness nnd fmgmentation of the spirit-beca of attraction for Italian filmmakers that figures in Osscssioll.\ the last episode of PIl[�lm, and an early documentary made by Antonioni. But the film is not about Ihe Po Val ley itself, nor its people. Antonioni uses both as matNial outof which to construct a sNies of observations of one individual drained of personality; energy, .md desire. The nOlTrative is in the form of an anti-journey. Aldo (played by Steve Cochran, dubbed with an ltalian voice) wanders with his daughter from place to place, discovering nothing, learning nothing, eventually returning to the plil!X: from which he stOlTted and committing suicide. This plot description is liable to confirm the worst suspicions p('()ple have about "foreign" films, that they are aimless and overwhelmingly depressing. That II grido is in fact neither aimless nor depressing points out precisely what Antonioni is up to, which is a relocation of the narrative away from events and meanings the film may refer to, to those which reside in the imilges themsclves and are largely inseparable from the images. It is true that /I grido is "about" a charilcter who wanders aimlessly and commits suicide; it is not an abstract film, lacking paraphr.lsable content. However, that content is brief, spare, and neither very satisfying nor important. The meanings seen-the meanings of the images, the ways the characters arc pl1lced opposite each other, in 1l 11lndsc1lpe, in the fr1lme that composes them and the landsc1lpe-are the meanings of greatest importance. In I I grido, and Antonioni's subsequent films, p.lTaphrasable content is diminished. It is difficult to detach a verb1l1 summary from them; if detached, the summaries become cliches. Looking 01\ the films' construction with an interpretive eyl' cre,ltes an understanding that is av.lilable only from visuill engagement. The films arc dosed fonns, operating within the circuit created by their projection .lnd the audience's observation, with an effect similar to painting or photography. They do not subscribe to the "realistic" conventions of American film (though Antonioni's methods have an interesting relationship to Americanfilm 1I0ir), nor do they evoke an open, ongoing environment as does the cinema of Jean Renoir. Their connl'ction to the world of ordinary l'xpericnce is subordinated to the world i possible to accuse Antonioni of creilted in and by their imagery.13 In fact it s having more a photographer's im.lginalion than a filmm.lker's (he explores th(' possibilities and ambiguities inherent in the revelatory powers of the photographic image in BI,)1O Up, 1966). But it would be more accurate to state that while he begins with the image and with the photographer's knowledge that the image formulates bits of the given world into precise, imaginative expressions of that world, he has the filmmaker's understanding of movement, of changing sp1ltial coordiniltes, 1lnd of the ability of events to build on each other incrementall y. He fully understands

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The Substance of Form

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Aldo (Steve Cochran) and his daughter wander the flatlands of the Po.

II Grido

(Museum of Modem Art Film Stills Archive) the possibilities of dr,lmatic confrontation; but he is uninterested in the kind of confrontation Ihat isolates the participants from their surroundings. Like many contemporary European filmmakers, he finds the closeup, in theory, of limited value (in other words, he and his colleilgues usc closeups from time to time, bul in a very precise and c.lkulated way, seldom at Ihe expense of the environment of which the faces arc a part). The characters inhabit a place, which is as important, perhaps more so, than the characters alone.

The habitation of/I grido is determined by barely graded gray tones. Mists

and barren trees or a fiat, gray horizon predominates in the exteriors. The interiors arc composed so that p('()ple move behind doors or furniture, or are mOlrked off from one another by objects in the frilme. And the chilracters will often leave the frame before

ol

shot is over, removing their presence,

emptying the shot, which nevertheless remains before us, demanding our altention. lI grido follows the pilth of il gray, obstructed character, a working man spumed by his lover, the mother of his child; he moves through various landscapes, from woman to woman, drained further of self with each step he takes. The landscapes measure his emptiness. At one point Aldo and a woman he has met arc seen on a fiat, feilturelcss marsh. The only objects present, beside the two figures, are a roWbO.ll and some decoy ducks. The woman eXilmincs one of thl' decoys as Aldo, walking fonvard

C:lPYnghl that (>nds L'cdisse is disruptive and discordant. Like the atonal sounds that accompany it on the music track, it forces us into a recognition of the oppressive weight of things that do not relat(>. Within the film, and for Antonioni's work as a whole, the end of L'eC/isse is a summary stOltemenl of frOlgmentalion Olnd separation of self Olnd world. Through no (.lUlt of his, the st.ltement became a cliche of the early sixties, modified into " catch phrase, '·the inability 10 communicate." Antonioni communicates very well, however. and his view is more complex than the cliche. He has been able to tr.lnslate the cultural phenomenon of urban, uppN-middl(>-class depr(>ssion inlo the \risual Signs-the "image facts," to use B,lzin's phrase-of that phenomenon. In his best work, emotion,,1 Olnd intellectual attenuation and obstruction arc given their objective terms. Unfortunately for Antonioni, he has been unable to move very far from Ihis strategy. In

Zabriskie P"int,

an underrilt(>d film made in Americ" in

1969, he attempted to overcome the blockage through a montage in which bourgeois enc\lmbr.mces-a house, food, appliances, books-were blown 10 bits, at lenglh and in slow motion. Howe\'t'r, th(> montage is only

it

fant.1Sy sequence. He attempted to update the senSibility of the paralyzed self in

The Passenger

(1975), a film about an identity crisis so severe (a

newspaper reporter, played by Jack Nicholson-a seventies figure of lorlur(>d identity-borrows thc persona of " gunrunner in Africa) that, at its end, the camera literOl1Jy uproots itself from the character, denies his very presence as it drifts through his room, out the window, into the street,

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leaving him out of sight as he is killed. Though Antonioni Wils un" ble to move far beyond his initial insights, his expression of those insights helped build a foundation for the development of European film in the sixties. The fragment.ltion of the m;"e-en-sccne into small, intractable bits of an obdurate cityscape at the end of

L'ec/i:ssc

is

a definitive statement of the modernist sensibility and a reevaluation of the n('(lrealist style. It is, technkaHy, a montage: a juxtaposition of images whose ultimate meaning is gre,lter than any of the individual shots that make it up. But montage was a technique in some disrepute at the time, indeed ever since the neorcalists called for an unobtrusive and unbroken look at character and place. A further understanding of the controversy surrounding montage will help us understand the aesthetic concerns that went into forming the new cinema. The 'luestion of montage h.ld been of crucial importance since Eisenstein,

who saw it

iIs

the structuring principle of film, allowing the filmmaker to

create dynamic movement out of the raw material of the shot. In American cinema, non-dialectical montage-editing to create a strict continuity of space and time-did become a structuring principle. This was not the Eisensteinian principle of the collision of shots that would enhance and mold a revolutionary perception, but a harmony of shots that would lead the spectator through a simple and closed world. From the early thirties, howe\'er, Renoir and other European filmmakers were working against both the Eisenstcinian and American principles of cutting in favor of the long take. The neorealists extended the actual length of shots to some degree, and extended further the earlier reactions ag,linst cutting as a manipulative force, a me,lns of directing the spectator to specific items in

m;se-en-scCrl(, preferring rather that the wholeness of a given space (as opposed to the preordained Cf)mplelen�� inherent in American continuity the

cutting, which is a differcnt matter) bl' observed by the filmmaker and communicated to the vkwer. Andre Ba7.in emerges again

.1S

a key figure here, for his appreciation

and analysis of neorealism was part of his general aesthetic, which upheld the virtue of the long, deep-focus shot against the fragmentation and manipulation he fclt was inherent in editing. His ideas were crucial, for as editor of

Calliers du cinema,

as guardian and guide of a group of young

critics in the fifiies, he laid the groundwork for the films of tne sixli,.'s. I h�ve emphasized th�t what the ncorcalists developed and passed on to their followers was

.1

reliance on the im.lge itself, a f.lith that the im.lge,

uninterrupted and barely tampNed with, would reveal the world the filmmaker w�nted observed. Neorealist theory fel1 directly in line with Bazin's belief in the analogue nature of the film image, "analogue" in the sense that it seems to correspond to the way we ordinarily perceive the world it records. "The camera cannot see everything at once but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see."15The cSs productive of meaning."'l? Sazin did not extend his theory of the image very filT into il thCQTy of narrillive and of the W.1Y the spectator perceives the cluster of images (and sounds) that t(>ll a story in film.2/) If he had, he might have seen more clearly that meaning is not transferred from "reality" through the image, but produced by imag(>S in a narrative stmctuTC and perceived by a viewer who is always directed in some way by that structure,1l This is .1 most important pOint, and transcends the shaky alliance of the cinematic imilge with the "real world." When we pare away the idCQlogical ilnd occ.lsion.l1 religious effluvia from Ba7.in's thought, and go beyond the oW'rsimplified call for the realism of analogy, we discoW'r in his a(>Sthetic hvo major events: an att.lck on the editing structure of American cinema, in which a spatiill a.nd temporal whole is built up from carefully selected piec(>S of the image which are edited to create the illusion of completen(>Ss, and a call to the filmmaker to create imag(>S that invite the spectator's active partidpation in comprehending them. The latter pfesents a healthy paradox. The film image must be true to the wholeness

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of "objectiY(' reality," but reality is not given to us by its analogue image, ertainly not merely reproduced; it must be worked for, produced in, and read from the image. If we look ag,lin at what Antonioni was doing in the late fifties and early sixties, we can see the importance of Bazin's insights. In Jl 8rido, all commentary is contained within the images themselves. The editing is almost entirely function,ll, moving us from event to event, adv.lndng the hopeless chronology of the narr,ltive. OccaSionally Antonioni will cut for effect. as when the compiH.lIivcly violent action of 11 speedboat race is used as a contrast to Aldo's becalmed spirit and moribund demeanor. But whenever possible, the commentary is kept within the frame. Aldo hears the noise of a prizefight going in a local club. When he goes to investigate it we sec the fight in the bilckground, Aldo in the foreground; his stillness contr,lSts to the physical activity and, through the dynamiCS of the frame, drains its enNgy by diverting our attention from it to him. When Aldo's girlfriend picks up the decoy duck on the marshes, Antonioni does not leap to a closeup and thereby does nol force significane inlo the object or the action. Character and landscape work as internal complements to each othE'r, commenting and reflecting. But there is no "realism" here. We sec objects, tonalities, and relationships in these images that we would be un,lble to sec in ordinary experience. Antonioni is creating the objective correlati ve of an interior world, and whatevN reality exists hNe and in his later films is the reality of the experience of his characters, whose anxieties are reflected in and reflections of their physical, social, ilnd economic environment. Even more, they are reflections of the filmmilker's desire to create the visual manifestation of those anxietiL'S. In short, Antonioni is 'I formillist, a filmmaker 'IS concerned with the ilct of cinematic seeing as with using his vision 10 comment upon larger SOCi,ll and political phenonll'na. Hl' invents images rather than records them. Even though he films on location and uses long tah'S, what the camera eye seC!) is nol lhe physical reflection of ,1 "real world," bUI 'I world perceived 'IS the psychologic.,1 and social manifestation of an individual state of mind and the emotional status of a class of contemporary Europe.lns. In the monlage that ends L'eclil'SC he does not den)' Bazinian principles, but finds a way of breaking down objects and figures that allows us to see the whole of an environment that is forbidding and deadening. The montage dOL'S not analyze .lled. The film is "about" the way cinema c.m show us figure and

II grid/) Antonioni psychologized the image. By the time he gels to L'l'cliS5/', he has gone a step

landscape and comment upon their interrciation. In

beyond the political and psychological expressiveness of the image to a point where the image, while constructing ,1 narrative, contemplates itself and its powers of creating forms, attitudes, states of mind and being. Sazin never quite made Ihe leap from a consideration of im.1ges Ihal reflect the ambiguities of the "real world" to those Ihat reflect the ambiguities of their own existence as images. But this

WilS,

in retrospect,

an inevitable movemenl for the posl-neorealist filmmakers 10 make. Freed from conventional editing, committed to acts of extensive cinematic observation, they could begin calling .lttention not only to the world they observed, but 10 the act of observation itself. Bazin believed that the long lake could create .1 film image Ihal would be .1nalogous 10 the spatial and lempor.11 continuity of the world as dir('ssion. l'osing as a film for a large (though not mass) audience, distributed through the ordinary ch,mnels for "art films" of Ihe time, it thereby offered itself to the usual critical scrutiny, which meant endl(>Ss discussions of what it was about. Did a man meet a woman at a fancy spa the year before, as he keeps insisling to her and to us he did? \Vere they lovers or did he rape her? Is she married to someone? Do the man and woman leave logelher at the end? Whal is Ihe meaning of the match game playt.'S to transgress and threatening disaster at every step taken. Marienbad is a subversive film, and its first act of sabotilge was 10 pr(>Sent itself in a manner that would engender discussion of its slory when in fact the "slory" is nol what the film is "about." What La...t Year at Marielrbad is "about" is the way we look at film and the way film regards its sub}!'cts, Ihe chnracters in it and the characters who watch it. It is about the creation of cinematic nnrrative and the conventions that have developed through the history of that creMion. Rather than posing and answering the usual narrative questions, such as, Who arc these people? What are they doing? What are their reasons for doing it? it pos(>S new quesions t altogether: Why are these people? Why are they here in this spa, or elsewhere, or anywhere? What arc our reasons for observing them observe each other? When one person in a film looks ,11 another, why does that imply spatial or t('mpor,,1 connection bctwe('n th('m? Who is in charg(, h('re, anyway? The film has ., narrator, the man who tries to convince the woman that they met last year. He is perfectly unreliable. The words he speaks and the actions that occur-seem to occur-are related only in a realm of possibilitiL'S. At one pOint, during one of the Cilml'ra'S many slow drifts through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel where most of the action occurs, the narrator comments: . . and silence too. I have never heard �nyone raisn before-we assume this is the p[ilce Ihe chMilcter hilS referred 10. Film ilfter film hilS convinced us of this, usually with the guiding sign of a dissol�'e from the character to the place. In

Mariwbrul,

such assumptions are taken precisely as assumptions

and their validity is always questioned. A[so questioned is the convention ofexpJilnation, Ihe convention that says illl enigmas will b(' solved by film's end, all charilctNs ilnd illl motivations will be understood and given meaning. Robbe-Grillet, perverse as illways, says about the characters in the film, "We know absolutely nothing ilbout them, nothing ilbout their lives. They ilre nothing but whilt we see them its. . . . Elsewhere, they dun't exist. . . . [The[ past, too, has no reality beyond the moment it is evoked with sufficient force; ilnd when it finally triumphs, it has mere! y become the present, ilS if it had never ceased to be SO.17 Perverse ilnd perversely literal.

Th(' fact is that in any film (any narrativ(' fiction for

that matter) the only thing the characters are is what we see them .1S when we sec them. Especiillly in film, which is poor in grammatical past tense, the past has no reality beyond or before the moment it is evoked. What is seen un the screen is, now. That is why fl.lshbacks have traditionally needed to be introduced verbally by a character and by specific devices, like the dissoh'e, and in pitrlicu1.lf the "de-focus dissolve," itS if the P,lst were emerging from the haze of memory. But in

Maricllbad time and place

arc undifferentiated; they arc all present and all parlake of the specificity of the dnematic image, whose space and lime arc only

tilere,

only in the

this work, which is closely related to Robbc-Crilld'5 novelistic practice. But a5 Robbe-Grillet 5ayS, the image-making and cutting were Resnais's; it is his film. So is the Hitchcock rderence. of collaboration in

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115

The static cinematic memory, with and without shadows.

Last Yrar at Mariellbad (Museum of Modem Art HIm Stills Archivc) image itself. To a greater degree than

L'cciissr, Last Year at Maricnbad is a film about

film, ilbout its nilture and its nMrativc conventions. II is also ilbout the imagination, ordering up its creations to do this or that, with the proof of their activities only within the imagination itself. The film's narrator is in filct a voice of the imagination, questiuning its own creations, attl>mpting to determine the reality of their actions, the solidity of their being. The audience too, even more than the char.leters and their activities, becomes thc subject of the narrative. We arc subjected to it and ael in it. Our reaelions, our psychology, our pasl and future ilre more important 10 Ihe narrative Ihan those of the chilrilcters, for the film ilsks us to ;tid in its cre.ltion, while questioning the validity of thai creillion at the same time. All of this makes it a film greatly to be admired, but not loved. It is an exercise of importance, but its insularity, its absolute removal from any world but that of its own making, its denial of emotional response and its continual fruslmling of intellectual response grcatly rl'duce its Significance. It was Resnais's job in the films he made ilfter Mariel/bad to expand upon

Ihe signific.1nce of his images. In his next film,

Murir/ (1963), the complex play of time and memory that goes nowhere in Mariel/bad is rooted in the destructive recollections of war, the Algeriiln

WilT in particular, which

injured the French Ihe way the Vietnam war injured Americans. La gucrrc

est fillie

(1%6) turns memory inside out, studying the perceptions of a

C:lPYnghlathlike stille. Obviously I am asking the film to offer a coherent, paraphrasable content, som(>thing I s.lid Nulier must not be d(>manded. That original notion must stand. As much as the viewer desires Last Yt'tlr al Marienbad to yield up conventional content, that much must it d(>ny the desire. But the deniill can sometimes be counterproductive. Robbe-Grille! directed his own scripts in the sixties. One of these Wms, Trtllls-Eu,,11C E.lPrt"SS (1967), demonstriltes the mod{'fnist dead (>nd. Th(> body of th(> film is il rather conventional European thriller, with Jean-Louis Trintign.1nt (an icon of sixties Europeiln film, the featureless milsk upon which a director could impress ilny charilcter he desired)'" as a slightly bumbling dope runner. Robbe-Grille! interrupts the narr!jrgeois cinema made by the bourgeois tvr the bvurgeois? Workers, you know very wcll, do not appreciate this form of cinemil at illl

even when it aims at relating 10 them."J7 Certainly these films do not have the working-class orientation of neore.llism. Still, this e.uly st.ltement of displeasure at film concerned with issues beyond the personal boded ill, particularl y for Truff�ut, whose own work suffers from his refusal to place his characters in the world and observe them as social and political as well as individual and emotiunal beings. [t is a problem that becomes severe in films like Tilles and Jim (1961) and The Last Metro (1980), both of which attempt to recre�te a speci fic historic.ll setting (the firsl World War and the Nazi occupation uf Fr.lIlce, respectively) ..nd then forget Ihe setting to focus on the romilntic prcoccupiltions of the charMters. Another difficulty inherent in the argument of the New Wave emerges from its very perversity. The Hollywood film they admired, the stnlggle between individual creativity .md studio control they celebrated, were phenomena that could only be admired ilnd celebrated from afar. CriticaJly,

Ihe French created American film. Theygave it status, a taxonomy, a pantheon

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of i ndividual talent. They discovered its thematic an d formal structures and set up the models of analysis we are still using. H"d they done nothing else their influence on film history would have b�n enormous. But when they turned to filmmaking they neither would nor could duplicate the Americ.ln production process. Not only was the French studio system oper,lting on a different and much smaller scalI' than the American, but the New Wave did not w.mt to engage it. They did not admire the American production system as much as they admir(>d th(> heroic (>ndeavor of individual filmmakNs in overcoming it. There was a great deal of romanticism in their attitudes toward Hollywood. Their desire was to emuliltc the individuals and not the system; but they had the historical sense to know that the individuills could not have survived without the system. When they turned to making their own films, they sepilrated out the various componens t of the Hollywood phenomenon, choosing whilt they w.1Oted ilnd discilrding what they did not need. The financial system of big-studio filmmaking was out. Large budgets to assure large profits meant large compromises. The French rC"Ceived limited funds from backers who were interested at least as much in the film made as in the money made from it and illiowed the filmmaker all the control. Filmmaking for the New Wave, in contradistinction to both the French and American traditions, was a personal and independent effort. While the concept of the alilclIY (the director as gUiding, creatiVI' force) had 10 be wrung from the production lin(> of Hollywood, for Truffaut, Godard, and company it was it given, and each assumed the mantle with case. Their rallying point was the words written by the filmmaker Alexilndre Astruc In 1948: scriptwrikr dinxts his Own scripls; Or rath(>r . . . tI,(> scriplwrikr ceilses to exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinction between author and diredor loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a tnle act of writing. The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pcn. In an art in which a length of film and sound-track is put in motion and proceeds, by means of a certain form and a certain story (there can even be no story at all-il matters little), to evolve a philosoph)' of life, how can one po" ibly distinguish between the man who conceives the work and the man who wriles iP'" . . . th(>

"A true ilct of writing!" This statemcnt. along with thcir discovcry of American cinema, was the most powerful impetus for the French critics 10 enter production. Having gi\'Cn authorial recognition to American directors, they wanted now to assume that burden the selves and write in film, inscribing their person ality and perceplions of the world directly into imag(>s and sounds, into narratives told them with film, ill film.39 Even more, this personal cinematic voice would speak, as Godard says, of "things as they arc." Again, though, this statcment conflicts with their admiration of Hollywood. American film can hardly be accused of speaking of or showing "things as they are." American film " lIudes to, transforms,

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The Altering Eye

modulates historical realities, but rarely confronts them, rarely observes

them " as they are." This was the major argument of the neore" lists, and Godard's call parallels theirs, though his romilntic sighs for "girls

as

we

love them, boys as we see them every day" bears lillie apparent relation to whilt the Italians were looking for in the forties. The neore" lists called

for filmmakers to allow the world as it is to inscribe itself on film; some Hollywood filmmakers attempted to inscribe their personalities upon, or within, preexisting conventions; the New Wave filmmakers wanted to

inscribe their subjective views of the world directly on film. In working out the conflicts, they made wise choices and interesting combinations. As excited as they were by the promise of "writing" with film, of giving direct voice to thL'ir perceptions in a cinematic discourse, Ihey were aware of the theoretic,ll nature of the premise. The physical appilratus of cinema m.lkes such direct inscription a concept only. A pleasant room with typewriter or pen will suffice for the writer. But the

filmmaker faces iln arrily of technic.,l equipment, much activity, and the necessity of dealing with (indeed directing) other people. Beyond this, like the writer, the filmmaker does not create from nothing. He or she must confront Ir" dition, Ihe multitude of conventions, the many discourses of

the works Ihilt came before. The personillity the filmmaker would inscribe on film must be informed by experience, insight, and analysis; it must be manifested in characters who are involved in dramatic situations.

Their recognition of these problems ilnd demands brought them back to the Hollywood

auteur.;.

For Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks,

Lang, and

the rest

it w as, ilS [ said, a question not merely of overcoming the studio's pressure to confonn and compromi se, but of understanding the cinematic languilge being used by the studios and forcing it to respond to their own voices.

\Vhen they begiln directing, the New W.lVe filmmilkers were not ready or able to confront tradition with a commitment to observt' a specific

economic dilSS and its concerns, as were the neoreillists; but because they needed n bnse out of which to work, and bec.1Use the experience they h.ld to draw upon for making t heir films C,lme largdy from film itself, American

film again provided them with assistance. They discovered in its generic richness parameters loose enough to pennit movement and expansion but tight enough to offer them codes and conventions they could usc and re-speilk, or break if they wanted to. One wide, encompaSSing genre

appealed to them the most: the gangster film-film ""ir-romantic thriller, that complex of statements, gestures, attitudes, characters, and camera placements that epitomized the high forties and ('ar!y fifties in Hollywood.

II was to this genre that most of the members of the New Wave turned when they began their work. After an autobiographical Stiltement, a study of small childhood moments in

The 400 BlrJW_�, Truffaut turned to it in Shoot the Piano Player; after a false start in Lc bellu Serge, Chabrol began his elegant Hitchcockiiln arabesques around the genre with LtI' cou;;il1!', Leda (A double /ollr), and LC5 bOlllles femmes (.111 made in 1959); Jacques Rivette worked for

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three years on his two-hour-and-twenty-minute version of the genre, Paris Be/ongs to Us (1%1). Godard confronted it he.ld on with Breathless in 1959. Only Eric Rohmer seemed immune, although the urban peregrinations of Ihe destilute hero in his first feature film, The sigll of Leo (1959), are linked to some jiilll lloir and gangster traditions. I am nol suggesting Ih�t these films bear any immediate similarity tQ NlltoriO)us or Lady from Shallghai, to Mildred Piac/?, Pickl,p 0/1 sOulll Street, }oh,w.1/ Eager, Qr, to go back 10 the thirti('s, tQ Scarface. (". . . I do like A bout de Si.!Ujj1e {Breathless} very much," GQdard Qnce said in an interview, "but now I see where it belQngs-along with Alice in WOlldcrJalld. I thought it was Scarface.")'" They are not imitations. They share some imporlant clements with ncorealism that divorces Ihem instantly from the Hollywood tradition: they �re shot Qn locOltion; �Ithough they do not usc non-professionals, they do employ playeT5 not well known at the time; they indulge, though in a som('what dif((>f('nl way, in the n('orealisls' desir(' to use the camNa as objective observer, allQwing the actiQn tQ play Qut before us rather than carefully cQmpQsing and editing our PQint of view. Unlike the neoreOllists, they seriously challenge the Hollywood conventions of continuity cutting. In this one area the New Wave filmmakers' IQve of American film turned intQ a confrontatiQn. Their awe at its facility, its smoQth and direct action, became .1 desire to question those qUOllities and seek alternative methods of narraive t construction and, in turn, audience response tQ that construction. God�rd. as always, led the way. In his initial infatuation with American film as a critic in Ihe early fifties, he questioned his menlor, Bazin, about lhe efficacy of the long tak(>. He was taken by the affectiv(> power of th(> cios(>up, by the ability of Americ.1n filmm.1kers tQ play uPQn emotiQns by tightening space through cutting, enfQrcing the viewer's proximity to the image. In an essay entitled "Defense and Illustration of Classic.11 ConstmctiQn," he wrote: ". . . The simplest close-up is also the most moving. Hments, this is somewhat prophetic. Although h(' is addresSing himself particularly 11.1 the emQtive power of the f,lce Qn the screen, his recognition of the sermiological fact of the screen image, the ability of that image to collect a large amount of emotional and cultural information and release it when placed in a speCific narrative context, will bt- of great import.mce tQ his later develQpment as � filmmaker. But at this PQint he was still stnlggling with some con(Jiding reactions. He admires Ihe ease with which Americ.ln film creates and dir('cts fe('lings through montag('. Yet elsewhere he alsQ gives his intellectual assent tQ Bann's principle th"t the best cinema is Ihat which allows the unmanipulated gaze of Ihe spectator free access to Ihe image. Later in the fifties, when he was already shooting short films, he pursued this problem further. "If direction is " look," he wrote in an essay entitled "Montage, My Fine Care Imml bmu :«Judi . montage is a hearl beat. . ..Wh.1t one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in lime.OJ ..

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The Altering Eye

This is not il new insight on Godilrd's pilrt, but it is d miljor illtempt to seck an understanding of image org.miz.1lion that would take into consideration Eisenstein's subordination of the image to montage, BaLin's subordination of montilge to the image, ,md American cinemil'S subordination of both to the unobtrusive construction of a story. Again in iln anticipation of his approach to filmmaking. Godilrd works out the problem dialectic.,lIy: "Knowing just how long one can make n scene last is already montnge, just as thinking nbout transitions is part of the problem of shooting. . . . The montage, consequently, both denies and prepares the way for the misr-ell­ scclle [the spatial org.mization of the image or of the entire film]: the two arc interdependent."., Not a breilthtaking conclusion, but at least indicative of the attempt to understand the interrelatedness of the two major components of cinematic construction, the shot ,md the cut. \Vhen these reevalu,ltions were put into practice, y('t another dial('eticill struggl(, occurred, betw('('n the Am('riciln genres the French were adopting and adapting and the new attitudes toward the formal construction of these genres. Godard and his colleagues sought a multiple confrontation with, ilnd revision of, cinematic pmctice. The construction of a film is determined by the way it is shot and cut. These in turn arc determined by the choice of the genre, which dictates content and the wily eontent is creilted. Choosing a gt.'flre, like the gangster film, ilnd then structuring it in a radically new way changes the genre, its character, ilnd our characteristic reactions. In Breill/rless, Godard announces fundamental changes from the very first shot. The film opens on a newspaper-a n('wspaper adverlisem('nt showing a woman dad in lingeri(' to be exact-and by so doing denies us the immediate access promised by American film, which usually opens with a long shot of a place that establishes the area that will subsequently be inveslig,lted and analyzed through the cutting of the film. Instead our attention is instantly diverted, even though it is not yet diverted from anything. In the subsequent shots of the opening sequence, Godard gives us the signs of the gangster Him in rric movie-making, part of the plan shared in different degrees by il11 the members of Godard's group (it must be recalled that Truffaut wrote the origin,ll story upon which

Breathless is based and Chabrol gave technical

and financial assistance to the filming). They were out to make a new dnema. "What I wanted was to take a o::oO\'entional story," Godard said about

Breathles._, "and remake, but differently; everything the cinema had

done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of film-making had just been discovered or experienced for the first limc."" The Godard of the early sixties was never given to understatement; but he should have added one important point. Breathle:;s not only gives the feeling of cinematio::

CJPYnghted matanal

130 The Altering Eye techniques being invented, but also allows the e)(perience of viewing to be rediscovered. There is n tension created by the generic e)(pectait ons of the gangster film set against the discontinuity of the shooting. The dislocations of the opening; the long tracks of Michel and P.ltricia (Jean Seberg) on the street or talking in m·d; the abrupt jumps within some shots as time is condensed while space remains the same; the jumps betwC(!n shots, the ellipses that reduce the normal continuity between actions, .111 force the spectator to consciousness of a cinematic nct being performed. The neorealists had made the viewer look at the image content, at people and events we had rarely seen on the scrC(!n before. Godard makes us look at things we were very used to seeing in cinema-a young hood, his contacts and his reluctant girlfriend the police-and asks us to examine how these things arc being looked at. Later he will ask why. Each of the other New Wave filmm.lkeT5 enforced this new consciousness of the look. Rivette worked in an opposite manner from Godard. Instead of foreshortening events as Godard had done, he extended narrati ve detail and in Paris Belollgs t() Us built an enormnus, labyrinthine structure of paranoia, murder, the search for a worldwide conspiracy. Rivette turns narrati ve into a practical joke: the more det,lil we see, the more clues and threMs and possibilities that are laid out, the less we and the chMacters know. Here and in later films, L'amour fou (four hours and twelve minutes), (dine el ,u/ie V(mt en bateau (three hours and twelV(' minutes), the first version of Ollt Qne (twelve hours and forty minutes-screened only once ilt that length), the magnitude of lime expended on the characters is in inverse proportion to what w(' learn about them. Rivette expands emotional and physic'll detail the w,ly Godard conflatL'S cultur,ll nnd generic detail; the experience of his films is like that of the fairy-tale children who drop crumbs along their path to find their way back home, only to have the crumbs eaten by birds. The analog is particularly apt for C.Hine et ,u/ie (1974), which is a f'liry tale about two young women who discover a haunted house. By sucking pieces of c.mdy given 10 them after each visit (a laHer-day version of Proust's madelciue) they C,lIl sit at home and r('live their adv('ntur('S, "s('eing" them as if they were watching a movie. We learn nothing about the house or its inhabitants, except that they play an endless melodrama of love and violence; nothing about the young women, other than that they enjoy their game immensely and that the magic they dabble in may or may not have something to do with their experiences. We do learn a great amount about our own capacity to fit narr.ltive pieces together and our desire for the pieces to be put into plac('. We le,un that desire can create patience, and it is a mark of Rivette's talent at arranging and timing his shots and of his direction of actors within the shot that he is able to keep our attention and desire, to delight us with the game even when no end to it is in sight. Although that desire is threaiL'ned by other modernist filmmakers, the New Wave directors insist upon majnt�ining it. In the counterpoint between familiar genres .md the commentary they make on them .md on the W.1Y we ,

CJPYnghted matanal

The Slibstance of Forl/l

,

r

131

,

-

--' •

The Godardian gangster (Jean-Paul Bclmondo with Jean Scberg).

Brl'athll'SS (Museum of Modem Art Films SWl5 Archive)

look at film in general, an aS it. Eric Rohmer is the most succ(>Ssful of the group in simply avoiding it. His formal experiments ilre less openly radical than his colleagues', and he is the least enamored of the Hollywood style. The six Moral Tales, of which three-My Night at Maud'� (1968), Claire's Knee (1970), and Chloe in IIw Aftt'"Ynrxm (1 972)-received wide distribution .md popular reponse, are films thilt suspend emotional action and reaction in a pattern of talk and introspection.� Rohmer is perhaps the only filmm�ker succesfully to make subjectivity its own subject, without allowing it to expand into a form of expressionism. His characters move through persisting states of self-ex�mination, 'lcted out in their rel�tionships with others but always contained, never hysterical or destructive, abusive or hurtful. The Moral Tales are an astringent reponse to Bergman's confes-sion.lls, for although introspective and centen'd on dialogue, they are cillm ilnd they never ignore mise-en-seem: the Wily Bergman so often docs by concentrating on the face and neglecting the spatial context that gives Ihat face meaning. The characters' surroundings and the Wily they are situated in them are of subtle and central importance. In fact the environment generates the situations.41 The gray, black, and white December of Clermont in M.II Nighl al Maud'�; the bright summer by Lake Geneva in Claire'� Knee; the glassy suburbs and downtown Parisian offices and streets of Chl"e j" Ihe Aftenrool! create the situations in which their inhabitants talk out concerns of will and freedom, the morality of making choict.'"S and slaying with choices made. But the environment never imposes on the characters, never directly or symbolically reflects their intellectual and emotional state. Everything remains in balance, especially the position of the viewer in relationship to the characters in the fiction. Rohmer offers no invitation to emotional involvement and asks of the viewer only disinterested observation and understanding. But there is not the modernist's defiance of the audience, nor any of Truffaut's pleasantries and charm (at le'lSI not until Chloe ill the Rohmer was the late starter of the originJI group. He did a number of short films in the fifties, and in the great year of 1959 � feature, The SiS" rif 110, about a man down and out in !'aris. The M,'r�1 T�I"" begJn with two short sixteen-millimeter films, L� b"..I�"gere de MOIrce�u and L� c�rrihe de S.. z�'me; then Came u. e"l/«ti",,­ ileuSw and unlikdy partners illX' not going to mak(> r(>volutionilry films. (Since forming this strilnge partnership, Godard has made a film in France-Passion (1981)-and it is not clear what his association with the Americiln nco-mogul will be.) But though Godard in his middle ilge may no longer want to CilffY on the good fight, th... legacy he has left is still influencing filmmakers ,md filmgoers. The struggle he carried forward from 1959 through 1972 produced some of the great works of the modern imagination. To understand Godard's .1ccomplishment and influence, we need to retrace some history and look at the ideas of a figure who influenced him ilnd some other major prilctitioners of modernism. The cinema guerril1a w.n of the sixties .md early seventies was fought on the most difficult of fronts: where aesthetics and politics joined to re-evaluate the work of the past, bring it to account, and change the attitude>; of .md toward cinema that had b(>en all but unshakable since its inception. The theory for the struggle came from the modernist movement, with its literary and painterly roots in the twenties and thirties and its political roots in the work of Bertol! Br(>Cht, who was carrying on struggles in the th(>ater similar to those carried on by the filmmakers who concern us helX'. i'oet, playwright, political and aesthetic theorist, Brccl1t a\tempted to change certain fundamental concepts of ;trt th,lt had been pilrt of we>;tern culture since Aristotle. That is an enonnous st.ltement, but it WilS in fact an enonnous tradition that Brecht fought against, persistently. persuaSively, often ironic.llly, in his plays and his theoretical writings. Central to it was the nolion of art as imitiltion, ilS mimesis, th(> id(>.1 that the work of ilrt r(>prcs(>nts the world, in a condensed and abstract way, but r(>Cognizably as il reflection. This concept of art as illusory representation ofthe world is a constant throughout history ilnd it forms the basis of 6ilzin's theories of cinema. But it is essentiill1y an ideal, a f.mtasy. E. H. Gombrich (ilmong others) has demonstrated that the replX'sentation of reality in any period (and in any fonn of imaginative expression) is in f.let the representation of the idea of reality current .It .lny given time, using the formal conventions of representation operating at that Hme.t8 The persistence of the desire for representation, however. is stronger than the need to acknowledge that reality is always mediated by the codes ilnd conventions of a particulilr art ill a pilrticular time, the digital mode I spoke of earlier. The urge for "realism"-for an apparently unmediated representation of the real world -is found at its most obsessive in popular theater and cinema, and we have seen this obse>;sion operating in the zero-

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141

degree style, which embraces the spectator, brings him or her into the spectacle of the work, and presents it in a forward-moving continuity oftime with all the conventions of proximity and transition and the exaggeration of motivation and event that create, through constant repetition, an illusion of unmediated subslance and Ihl' absence of form. For Brecht, who was a Marxist committed to a materialist understanding of the world and

OUT

perception of ii, the illusory aspect of the realist

tr,ldition was mor(' delusion than illusion and not entertainment but a snare. Rather than dealing with the world, as the tradition claimed it did, it evaded the world. The images thnt," as Br(>Cht modestly calls them, involves br(>aking emotional continuity and re.llist representation throughout any given work. He would, for example, employ

a non-realisl acting style. "In order to produce Allienation] eff(>Cts Ihe actor has 10 discitrd whal(>ver means h(> has leaml of getting the iludicnce to identify itself with Ihe chilTacters which he plilYS. Aiming not 10 put his .mdience inlo a trilnce, he must nol go into it ITilnce himsdf."5Z Br(>Chl (d(>wloping techniqu"s from th" r.,dic.,l BNlin th(>atN of Erwin Pisciltor) would breilk dram.1lic continuity by hilving the character address Ihe iludience, go inlo a song, step out of Ihe Tote and out of Ihe narrative movement. The mise-Im-schrc of the work would be disnrplive; no illusion of real space would bt> allowed. In th(>atrical presentation, Ihe nolion of the privileged view through an ilbsent fourth willl would be disallowed, itnd all manner of verbal, graphic, and cinematic intrusions into the stag(' space would be called upon to identify it as a plac" where specific

theatric,ll activity was going on. This is nol the place to eXilmine how Br Nazis took power, it is remarkable th.1l it survived at ,111. The film employs, sporadically, some Brechtian techniques, and an early sequence foreshadows some neorealist ilpproaches: a montage of bicyclists desperately seeking work bears comparison to th(> ride to work of the cyclists in Bicycle TI,ieves.� In Hollywood, the writing Brecht did for Fritz Lang's Hangmen AI:Jc. Mcli cs was filmin g I.a /Ji:;ile du ,
CJPYnghted matanal

156 The Altering Eye worked out byGodard in the course ofhissixties films culminating in Jimt va /,jen, where romance, politics, the factory, unions, the media, and feminism are mixed in a counterpoint of comedy, drama, and didacticism-hild a wide-rilnging influence, particulilrly (ilnd not surprisingly) ilmong those filmmakers searching for means of political expression in their work. I will be returning 10 Ih�t influence 11 number of times in the course of examining Ihe filln,> of Filssbinder and, especially, Ihe revoluti onary filmmilkers in Latin Americ.l. Before that, how(>ver, I want to look briefly al th(> influence of the New W.we on some olher figures, in pnrticular Iwo filmmakers who began their work well before Godard and his colleagues ilppearoo, but picked up Iheir influence in the course of the decilde. While n('ither is within thc Brechtinn tnldition, they both practiced, even before their contilcl with Ihe N('w Wilve, modes of cinemiltic inquiry thnt demilnded reSPOnS(>5 from iln audience diff('rent from those requir('d by conv(>11lional cin('mil. After contact with Ih(> N(>w Win'e Ih(>s(> demands took on a n(>w fonn. In 1966, Bunucl made Belle de jour. his second film in color (the firsl was his hilarious version of R(lbil/$i)l1 Cru:«/t' in 1952). Los O/uidados hild marked Bunuel's return to commercial filmmaking and il revision of his style and approach based on the influence of neorealism; Belle de jllllr mnrks ilnother revision. Its subject-a morill investigation into Ihe cullural psychOSiS of Ihe middle class-wilS hilrdly new for him, but its style and 'lpproilch was. The subjects of repression are no longer the various religious idi"ts­ s.wants or the Mexican or Sp�nish bourgeoisie that had populated most of his films in the fifties and early sixties. No mattcr whill the historical period of thes(> films, they alwilYs app(>ar to be somehow out of tim(>; they create a closed world of perversity and obsession. In Belle de jOllr Bunut>! ilnnounced his modernity. The main charilcter is il contemporary young Parisienn(' (C,llherin(' Den('u vel, a dodor's wif(', who takes up prostitution to relieve her sexual frustr.ltion ilnd repression. The imilges (made by R...'Snllis's Cinematographer, 5.1cha Vierny) hnve a dnrily strongly influenced by Ihe photographic style Ih,lt Raoul Coutard dev(>lop(>d with and for Godnrd. The film's nnrr,ltiv(> structure ilnd cutting style, an easy, unexplnined slipping into different modes of consciousness, was influenced by the New Wave experiments in shifting narrative modnlities. As we saw, Bunuel wns not il newcomer to these modes; indeed the crazed structure of Un chien anda/ou and L 'Age d'or had helped prepare the young French filmmakers for their own experiments, and Bunuel's films of Ihe fifties ,md early sixties h,ld always inlenningled drenm and fanl,lsy, dislorlion and disruption into nilrrntives that never quite settled down into an eaSily acceptllblc "realistic" mode. Thus Bunuel did not copy Godard or Chilbrol; he recognized thnl their methods of inquiry offered him ways of getting to Ihe cont('mporary world h(' hnd not thought of before. He was so pleased with what they had to offer thnt he acknowledged il openly. In Belle de j(lIIr he introduces il gilngster, a tough with steel caps on his tc-cth, dresscd in n lenlher CO,ll (played by one of th(' fine contemporary European toughs,

CJPYnghted matanal

The Slibstance of Form 157 Pierre Clementi, who might have come from Breatlues.�, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, or from a film of Jean-PierI'(> Melville-one of the godfathers of the New Wave to whom Godard gaw a guest role in Breat/JIe5;;)_ The gangster first appears on a Paris street where someone is selling the New York Herald Tribune like Miche1 l'oiecard's girlfriend in Breathless; and wtH'n he is finally shot down, Bur'iuel films the sequence ,lS a homage to Poicc,lrd's death.5� (Godard returned the great compliment by entitling a section of Weekend "The Extenninating Angel" aftN Bur'iuel's 1962 film about a group of Mexican hauts bourgeois who find themselves un,lble to leave a dinner parly and slowly decay to a primitive, deranged stale.) The references 10 Breathless in Bur'iuel's film are more than a homage by an old filmmaker to a younger on",. They aft' a sign of rejuvemltion, an indic,ltion that the old man who taught so much could still learn. The New Wave offered Bur'iucl a way of altering his mise-ell-scene and his editing rhythms, of introdUCing a contempor,moousness, observing the perversities of his ehar,lcters in a modem French bourgeOiS environment, somewhat after the manner of Chabrol and the Godard of A Married Woman, Pierro/ Iefilii, and Wukc/Jd_ Belle de jOllr not only shows the ability of an established filmmaker to modify his style, to be both teacher and student; it validllles Godard's statement that the work of the young French filmmakers WilS a reinvention of cinema, a reexilmination of its form so thorough thilt ,my intelligent dir",ctor would hav(' to take notice of what was happening. European film in the sixties became a great network of cross-references and influences­ something, in fact, like a Bur'iucl nilTTative in which everyone's cinematic dreams keep interfering with everyone else's. Each filmmaker's work seemed to give aesthetic support to the others' ,lnd a communal energy developed. Bunucl was not the only member of an older guard who partook of this energy. Robert Bresson, whose filmmaking career began in the thirties, is among the most uncompromising of directors. He is not lociltable in anyone tradition, though the demilnds he puts on his audience can be seen in the modernist context. Bresson is interested not so much in making the audience aware of the formal patterns in his work as in withdrawing as much as possible from the audience (a methodology thaI greatly influenced Straub and Huillet).(>/] He not only denies melodrama, he attempts to deny all emotional contact between viewer and char,leter. His players exhibit no facial expression (save perhaps a smilll, brief smile at a moment of perverse or ironic triumph); they are the blank slate upon which the viewer molY write or not, develop emotions for the character, or simply view that character as part of a pattern, moving through-or, more accurately, being moved through- a network of events. Working in opposition 10 Bazin's notions of the long take and the open frame which give the viewer room to look and make connections between character and environment, Bl'(>sson frames closely and edits sharply. His shots arc mostly short ilnd highly analytical, directing ,1I1d redirecting our gaze to parts of his characters' anatomy or

CJPYnghted matanal

158 The Altering Eye sections of thei r environment: a hand or foot, the wall of a room, the top of a staircase, objects and gestures that cohere spatially bec,lUse they Me dearly related to each other, yet at the same time are disconnected and refused wholeness by Bresson's fr,'gmenting of them. The result is a recessiveness of mise-ell-scrllc ilnd

ilIl

elliptic.,1 quality that have the effl'ct of intensifying

each image and forcing the viewer to complete the space and the narr,lIive. Every Bresson film is built upon " continuous series of withdrf play on the soundtrack. Again, Tchaikovsky attempts to commit suicide by leaping into a canal. The water, unfortunately, only comes up to his knees, and he stands foolishly as a well-dressed woman w.llks by with her dog .lnd smiles at him. The important part of the Russell canon consists of the films he made for Ihe BBe. "lives" of Frederick Delius, Isadora Dunc.ln, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Richard Strauss (among others), and feature films, the most important of which are Tile Music Lovers and The Dellils (1971), and to a lesser degree, Savage Messiah (1972) .md Mahler (1974). In eaen, a historic.,1 figure or artist is scrutinized in the light of a number of mythologies: the popular myth generated by the figure during and after her or his life and the larger myths created by the genre of film biographies in which the arist t (or scientist) struggles for recognition against his or her ignorant peers, dies in the attempt or, more frequently, achieves tr.lnscendent recognition. When Russell tak(>s up a biography, the myths ar(> shown to b(> inad(>quat(> or destructive, and the inadequaciL'S-particularly those of the centml figure-are not treated gently. Russell puts his figures through a series of cruel, mocking ceremonies of humiliation visited on them by themselves and by the people who surround them. The train sequence in The Music L.mcrs. in which Nina (Glenda Jackson) attempts to seduce Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain), her homosexual husband, is as savage a moment of hysteriil and self-abasement as exists in contemporary film. The participants are drunk and half crazed, the eM rocks, the lamp in the compartment swings back and forth creating il mild pilttern of light and dark, disguising the cutting and further derilnging our senses. In this violence of movement, chilmp.lgne spills over Nina's body and Tchaikovsky cringes in terror, the camera alternately looking ot the scene from obove, regarding his face, then taking his point of view .lnd moving up the hoops of Nina's skirts, creating a monstrous parody of sexual feilT. It is a sequence worthy of the combined cinematic perversions of von Stroheim and Bunucl, and is not the least of the horrors .lnd humiliations Russell heaps upon his characters. Though he is far removed from the quiet anillysis of il Bresson or Godard, his challenge to the conventional pieties of film biographies and the hagiogr;lphy of artists in general gives him an important place in contemporary cinema. Russell h.1S spawned no followers, though his influence can be secn

CJPYnghted matanal

164 The Altering Eye in Peter Watkins's Edvard MUI/cil (1976), whose a temporal kaleidoscope of images and sounds that make up the biography of one particularly distraught artist is more complex than anything Russell has attempted. As for Russell himself, Ihe energy of his early seventies films dissipated rathl'f quickly. In 1980 he moved to Hollywood and made a film called Altered Siaies in which the ironic perspectives and mocking deflations of pomposity that humanized the characters of Ihe earlier films is gone. Instead of putting his char,lcters through an excess of emotion that might clarify their situation for the iludience, he puts his audience through an excess of stimuli that clarifies only one thing, that an option for filmmakers with nothing more to say is to assault their audience with image and sound in an attempt to make them believe they have something to say. There has always been a great deal of the showman and faker in Russell, and looking b,lCk upon Ihe films of Ihe early seventies one can sec Ih,ll he luves the vNy melodramatic gestures he seems to want to get some distance from. He shares with a more important figure, the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, an inability to secure a consistent point of view. [t is true that Pasolini was a much more intelligent filmmaker than Russell is, and films like Tet!rema (1968) and Pigsty (1%9) stand as major Brechtian documents (I shall speak about Pigsty in more detail in the next chilpter). But like Russell, Pasolini was cilpilble of losing himself-in pornography, for example and films like The Decamerol/ (1971) and Til,> Cal/talmry Tales (1972) are as scrilmbled in their exploitative sexuality as is Russell's LisztomiJl/iiJ (1975). [n Salli, or the 120 Days of S"dO/H (1975), Ihe last film he made before he was murdered, Pasolini attempted an intriguing social-political-sexual spectacle. He elided Sade's mathemalic,11 epic of sexual cruelty with the late fascist period in Italy, and by so doing moved Sade's work from the area of quasi-philosophy and speculation into a politic.1l arena where it mure appropriately belongs. SaM is a huge allegorical fantasy of power and male domination in which the human figure is turned into an object to be exploited, hurl, ,md destroyed. But the events of SaM, despite Pasolini's attempts to treat them as tableaux, to observe them coldly and distantly, as if they were on some far stage, to make them into a Brcchtian spectacle, create as much perverse attraction as they do repulsion. Its final sequence, in which prisoners are literally taken apart and dismembered, is photugraphed from the puint of view of one of the captors observing the scene through binoculars. Even so il is not Lu enough away, and the viewer is pul in the peculiar position of wanting to look at the horrurs and being unable to keep from averting his or her eyes at the same lime. While the political perspective is never lost in SakI (it is not presenl al all in Russell's films), Ihe proper analytical perspective is never quite found. The film hovers between profound anti­ fascist st,ltement and crude pornographiC horror show, much ,1s-on a conSiderably lower level-Russell's films hover betwccn a healthy anti­ romanticism and crude pornographic spectacle.

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165

5

Inconsistency, unevenness, a fallible point of vicw ought not to be condemned oul of hand. TIle urge to experiment does not guanlntee success; it d(>monstrates the desire to inv(>Stig,lte the limits of commNcial filmmaking. The investigations of the sixties .md early seventies created as many false starts and dead ends as influential successes. Some figures who began with ingenuity and energy end(>d in complacency, working within the very forms they unce had qm!stioned and abjured. What I have tried to outline here are some of the major paths of inquiry about the nature of narrative cinema. In the following chapter 1 will re-cover some of this ground from a slightly different perspective, (>xploring furthN the influence of Brecht and examining the areas of subjectivity and political response contained within the formal experimentation. But her(> we need to mov(> away from Italy, France, and England to G(>rmany, wh(>re the influence of the movements uf the sixties was somewhat dcl.lyed. When it appeilred, however, the phenomenon that occurred in France in the late fifties was duplicilted. Filmmilkers such as Alexand(>r Klug(>, Wim \V(>nders, Rainer Wl'mer Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. among others, began to work, like the French New Wave before them, as if they were reinventing cinema. In the early sevenli'S, l when the rest of European production seem(>d to b(> r(>treating to those commercial norms that had be-cn lInd(>f attack in th(> sixties, the country whose cinema had been in retreat since the lat(> l\v(>nlies came alive. It was hardly a spontan('Qus g(>n(>ration or a virgin birth. There had ""en some active and engaged probing uf cinematic possibilities in Gennany in the sixties, producing films that went against the chaotic, reactionary, and baSically Am(>rican-dominated production and distribution m(>thods of th(> forti('S and fifties, which had indud(>d the re-release by German distributors of "scores of Nazi entertainment films from the Thirties and Forties . . . at rates with which new films could not compete."(>J Alexander Kluge, whose works are rarely secn in Am(>rica, began, in Yesterday Girl (1966) and Arti�/:; WIder thc Big Top: Disoricnted (1967), to experiment with sume Godardi'ln and Brcchtian methods of narrative deconstruction. Volker Schlondorff, whose Till Drum in 1980 marked the popular accept.mce of Gennan film when it won an Academy Award, milde some small movenU'nts toward an examination of his country's history in his 1966 film ¥Ullllg Tiir/css. Jean-Marie Strilub and DaniCle Huillel, although French by birth, mild(> their early films in Germany and served as an important model for th(> younger filmmakers. In 1962, ., group of filmmakers, Kluge among them, issued a manifesto ill the Oberhiluscn film festivill. II summarizes attitudes now familiar to liS. We h,1\'(> s(>en versions of them in th(> statements ,lhlltlt neorealism and in the proclamations of Godard ilnd Truffaut in the fifties. The)' arc the Jttitudes thilt d to form a distribution oollC as it was, a blossoming of tal(>nt occurred that r(>capitulat(>d and consummated the movements in European cinema begun in the forties, and German cinema finally emerged in the late seventies as the most advanced form of commercial narrative cinema in tne West. The new German filmmakers carry an aL'Slhetic-political burden neavier than that borne by tneir European predecessors. German expressionism, German fascism, American occup.ltion, tne "economic miracle" (the explosi\'e growth of poshvar capitalist endea,'or), and a r('cent wave of political oppression that threatens to cut off the state financing that originally enabled these filmmakers to work, if the work they do strikes the state as being too far to the left, constitute both material for and a danger to their films.'"' They have had to confront a past more complicated than that of any of their European colleagues, and out of the confrontation has come a cinem.l more informed byits past than anyother(with, perhaps, tne exception of the Italian) and more able to speak to the present bC like Wenders, Rainer Werner FassbindeT was concerned with the American presence. But for him it was not ,In obs..ssivc concern, rath...r one of many determinants of modem German culture, and one way for him to work out some formal problems. Fassbinder found in the fOnTIS of fifties

Kings "I the Road is dedicated 10 Fritz Lang. who was a major part of the expres­ sionist movement in Germany and m�de SOme major ""j, films in America. A char­ acter in the film clips a photo of Lang from a film magazine; the picture reminds •

him of his father. The photo itsdf is � prodUCtion still from Godard's C"ntempt, where Lang plays a very fatherly film director. This intricate complex of allusions is typical of the laycrs of references in much of Wenders's work.

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The Altering Eye

American melodrama stylistiC methods that he could refashion and bring to bear on his own cultural and political inSights. His movement back to and out of the fifties was as curious and enlightening a usc of innuence as any we h.we come across so far, and must be examined in the larger context of his work. The most prolific of filmmakers, he directed and usually wrote some thirty-nine full-length films between

1969 and 1982, including multi­

episode series for television (which count as one film on his filmography). He began work in th(' th("ltN and gathered around him a group of playNs, manyof whom remained with him, appearing in one guise or another in film after film. Unlike the repertory companies of other European filmmakers (Bergman in particular), the individuals of this group rarely settled into fixed roles. Though they arc inslantly re1:Ognizable, Iheycontinua1Jy change types. In each Fassbinder film a Brechtian split is always present between the player we recognize .md the character being created. "At no moment," wrote Brecht, "must lthe actor1 go so f,lf as to be wholly transformed into the character played ."70 Along with this anti-realist, anti-illusionary device goes one other element. With the exception of Hanna So::hygulla (whose "star" performance in

The Marriage of Maria Brallll, 1978, may have helped

make that film Fassbinder's most popular with Americ'lns, who still tend to sepilTate a character from the total narrative the character is part of), most of Fassbinder's comp,my, including Fassbinder himself, who often played a

role in a film, are uniquely and wonderfully ugly; particularly in contr.lsl to the kind of face we expect to sec in an American film.7l Thcy arc not uglyin

the manner of the grotes<Jues that populate FelJini's films. Fellini calls our attention to th('m, using them to create awe or amus('ment. Th(' ugly faces in Fassbinder's films do not attr.lct attention, but rather divert it, out of the fiction to a consideration of the face in film. They so work against the kind of ;l.tlractiven('!;s we are used to that they make us conscious of its absence. From the very beginning of his c,ut'er, then, Fassbinder forced the viewer to look at something that was, in the context of nonnal viewing experience, un'lppealing: players who were not beautiful, in roles that did not exploit the conventions of psychological realism because the player always stood back somewhat from the role itself. In the early films, this standing back is very pronounced. In Katzel/llaclrcr and Cod.. ofthe Plague (1969), The American

Soldier (1970; the lattef hvo are \'ariations of the American gangster film), Beware of a HO/If. Whore (also 1970, an enervated hom'lge to Godard's lyrical fUm ilbout filmmilking. CO/l/emp/), the pace of ilcting and cutting is slowed

to a monotonous crawl. The c.lmera is essentially frontal and static, and the plilyers do little morc than recite their words. Katzciruaciler, which Signals a favorite Fassbinder subject, Ihe foreigner entering a Gennan working­ class milieu-here a Creek immigrant worker who boards with a couple and creates enormous racial and sexual tensions among the neighborhood I.lyabouts-is made up of a number of scenes, each taking up the length of one shot. The neighborhood group lounges by a wall, observed frontally, from a medium distance, in c.Hefully posed and unchanging positions,

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The Substance of Form

173

A gaJlery of F and forced to d(>ny Iheir desire by Ih(> proper townsfolk and family who see their union as unseemly. One may groan

as

the deer sadly looks in the house where Jane Wyman sits at Ihe

bedside of her young lover, Rock Hudson. Groan or not, its appearance is

m:ussllry. Sirk cultivates all ihe groaning silliness of mdodramil, rL'CognizL'S its silliness. but stops just short of showing it up. Instead by over dccorilling ii, embellishing it wilh color and movemenl and renections in mirrors, he attempts to redeem th(> fonn. But he cannot. Melodrama cannot be redeemed from the inside, primarily because it is so absorplive. It can suck any subject and almost any attitude inlo its center and adapt it, a fact demonstrated by the way American film has, with only a few recenl exceptions, used melodrama to encompass all of Us non-comedic stOltemenls. Almost d on a

story by Thcodor Font CJPYnghted matanal

The Substance of Form 183

The (amous Bergman two shot from Persona (above: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann), and

(below) one by Fassbinder (rom The Bitter Tears ofPetra Vo/I

JGwt (both Museum of Modem Art Film Stills Archiew)

C:lPYnghtlodrama of the womiln who falls in love with a man out of her class and suffers for it, until snobbery and bigotry are swept away by the force of lo�.... The difference here is that it is a man falling in love with another man, and rather than class bigotry, Fassbinder concentrates on the (>xploit'ltion of one class by another. Love does not conquer, and poor Fox dies on a subway platform from an ov(>rdos(> of V,llium. His body is ignored by his fri(>nds and roll(>d by two young boys. Fox is a direct and straightforward film. The analysis of class structure it performs is simple and moving and proves that emotions can be valid expressions of conflict if the psychologicill and social reillities of the conflict can bE' perceived bE'neath the convenions. t less straightforward, though more moving and ncute in its analysis of socinl structures, is Fear Eat;; the Smll (Ali). Uke Fm·, Ali is closer to the conventions of cinemnlic realism th,m is Petra. That is, it does not attempt an abstract contempliltion of its form, but instead envelops that contemplation within a traditionillly "well-made story" -well made, thilt is, except for Fassbinder's insistent breaking of the action by tableaux, by the hard and eXilgg(>rated slares of th(> peopl(> who observe the main characters, and by the rigorous and distancing double framing of those characters within doorways, arches, and open spaces. The content of the story also creates a built-in alien,ltion effect. Ali is based on Sirk's film AI/ 11mt Heaven Ailows, in which well·to·do widow Jane Wymiln falls in love with young nurseryman Rock Hudson and receives the scorn and derision of her children and fri ends. love conquers (albeit with some difficulty) at th(> end. Ali is about a young immigr'lIlt Moroccan worker who falls in love with an old Germ,ln widow ,1Ild marries her to the scorn and derision of her children and neighbors, who finally come around when they discover that Ali and Emmi can bE' of use to them. Here Emmi begins showing Ali off ilnd he leaves her for il whoN'o They have il reconciliation in the Arab bar where the)' first met, during which Ali collapses from an ulcer, which, we are told by ,1 doctor, is a common ailment of migrant workers in GNmany. like All That Heaven Al/,nvs, Ali ends with Emmi sitting at Ali's bedside. There is, however, no deer at the window; only the doctor looking over them, who has assured Emmi that Ali's ulcer will simply keep recurring until il kills him. The doctor in Sirk's film assures Jane Wyman that love and CMe will help the injured Rock Hudson. The pleasure o( Ali is gilined from the subtle layering thilt Fassbinder achieves, f rst by presenting us with a touching joke-the perfectly i

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The Substance of Form 185

A touching joke: love between Emmi and Ali (Brigitte Mira, EI Hedi Ben Salem). Fear Eats the SOIlI (New Yorker Films) nonsensical notion that an old German Woman, a fonner Nazi Party member, would marry a fOn'igner, and not merely a foreigner, but a young black man-and ttwn using the joke to express some w,um l'motions, eliciting pity and compaassion for the couple, and finilily discovering in their plight some complex social and political problems.

Ali is

concerned

with the isoli1tion of forl'ign workers and native old people from thl' society in which they live, and the further isolation of one foreign worker and one old person from those who immediately surround them, an isolation caused by their atll'mpt to OVl'rcome their loneliness by being together. It is the perfect melodramatic situation: one or two people (it cannot be more, for melodrama depends upon individual struggle) attempt to find happiness and arc made more unhappy because others will not let them be. "Happiness is not always fun," is Fassbinder's l'pigraph for the fi l m. Emmi and Ali arc oppressed on every level, by the society at large, by their neighbors, Emmi by her f,'mily (in a fit of exquisite outrage over her marriage, a son kicks in Emmi's television), and finally by each other. When neighbors and family begin to accept them, because Ali is strong and can help the neighbors move things, because the family needs

Emmi

to babysit, because the local racist grocer needs their trade, Emmi and Ali begin to uppress each other. She shows off his muscles to the neighbors.

C:lPYnghld to I(>,l\'(> the fiction and judg(> the cause of "nd re.lction to emotions. Fassbinder died in 1982. In his work he took over from Godard the role of interrogator of everyday life and the cinematic images that attempt to explain it. A new cycle may be starting. In Sauve qui peut (La Vie), Godilrd reentered the world of everyday struggle, sexual gamesmanship and the oppressiveness of social roles. As the New Wave films influenced a new generation of filmmakers, so those filmmilkNs are now having their effect on their te,lchers. The communal web that marked the vitality of sixties cinema may be reasserting itself, and the cr('atiVI' and commercial success of the Germans may haV(' h('lped to caU Godard out of his isolation. The communal web is not all-inclusive. One major figure of the German renaissance, Werner Herzog, attempts to create for himself the romantic im,lge of the lone artist, whose work is born out of individual stmggle and

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187

deals with human mysteri("S in a landscape of awesome natural forms. Herzog is an extraordinary self-promoter, easer to do or to fabric,lte grat personal deeds (walking 300 mil("S to visit the film critic Lotte Eisner on her sickbed; threatening a c.mtankerous actor, Klaus Kinski, with a gun on the banks uf the Amazon; tra\'eling with a film crew to a Caribbean island threatened with vole,lnic annihilation). And his films arc dedicated to an evocation of the mysterious, the ineffable, a world apparent!y outside the immediate materialist concerns of Fassbinder or Wenders, Alexander Kluge or Volker 5chlOndorff. Herzog is so dedicated to an almost metaphysical contemplation of the spi rit Ihat from film to film he mns the risk of being condemned as a mystic­ or worse, a mystifier-a filmmaker with few ideas, but a distinct talent for creating a mise-en-scene evocative of the unknown and unknowilblc. Yet dearly Herzog does not completely ignore the realities of the world. He is capable of creating films like Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) or Heart ofG/ass (1976) or \-VV.lIlCck (1978), in which the taste for mysteries is put at the service of an investigation of the madn("Ss of power (and the powers of mildness), the distortions and turmoils of early cilpitalism, the infinite abuses heaped upon the lowly ,md Ihe powerless. Perhaps Herzog is the only contemporary filmmaker who can redch for metaphysics while still infusing his meditations with a recognition of histury ilnd human activity within it. If so it is ilS much a result of Ihe way he builds his films as it is of the subjects encompassed and created by them. Had Aguirre been mntury glassmaking town become crazed because they have lost the secret of their manufactUring process. A seer voices fious. As filmmak(>r5 howe begun to r(>veal lhal theirs is a work of artifice, of making images, Ihey have also been able to reveal what milkcs up images-both those of film ilnd those of our dily-to-day lives. In the process of interrogation film has refle.:;:ted back to us the fJuestions that it hOld -until the mid-forties-Iargely ignored. In revcilling the methods of its looking it is able to reveal things not looked ilt before by film. This work of demystification has helped us regain control over what we see, ilnd see where w(' can exercise some control.

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Copyrighted material

3.

Politics, Pscychology, and Memory

In my time streets led to the quicksand. Speech bctrtl,ljed 1/11' to tile slmlSh/erer. There was little I could do. Bul wi/luml me n,l' rulers willlitl have been more secure. r/,is was Illy Iwpc. BertolI Brecht'

Few things make an American film cntLc mOr(> uncomfort,lbl(> thiln a movie wilh an overt political discourse. The critic.,! commonplace is that "politics" somehow diminishes a work, narrows it, turns it into "propaganda." "Propaganda" is limiting; it denies richness and ambiguity be1:ilUSC it propounds (propagates) a narrow. predetennined point of view. To be "realistic" a film must be open to thc fullness of experience, with (h.Hacters roundly developed. given a p.lsl ,md a future, their behavior dearly motivated, living in a world that s('('ms 10 be bas(>d on the world as we know it from everyday experience: continuous, spontaneous in presenting events, and unencumbered by a defined political point of view. A filmmaker must not haY(> "an axe to grind." Tacit permission is sometimes granted to include a political or social "theme" in ,m American film. Statements against bigotry, against corporate tyranny, more recently statements about a wom.ln's right to determine the direc1ion of her life, mily b(' woven into a film's pattern. Usually; however, these statements tilke the form of inoffensive populist arguments-if we all worked together we would ilchieve an equitable solution to our problems- or, conversely (ilnd pilrticularly since the early seventies), the notion thilt exposing the problems also exposes our in,lbility to do anything about them. We have, if anything, only our individual strengths to fall back on. The work of exposure is usu;\lly placed in the frame of il chase thriller: will

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198

An Altering Eye

I�obert Redford and Dustin Hoffman reveal corruption in time to alert the country? Will Jane Fonda Jnd MichJel Douglas reveal the perfidy of the nuclear power company before it silences them? The race against time and evil pursuers constitute5 a genre into which any subject c.m be molded. Even European filmmakers are not immune to it. In Z

(1968), Costa-Gavras

made a powerful politicill thriller ilbout murder ilnd repre5sion in Greece i n whieh,

.1S

in so many recent Ameriean films, a reporter runs down the

dismal facts.1 The fear of determined politicJI Jnillysis, of raising a clear and unencumbered political ,'Oice in commercial American film, is part of a greater politieal phenomenon. In the United States "polities" usually connotes the machinations of vote-getting rather than the realitie5 of the structures of power. When politics in this more gcnerill sense is theorized .lbout, or discussed in il fiction,ll n.lTr,ltive, ilny deviation from the conventional ideologies of individualism, free enterprise, and equJI opportunity for JIl members of the SOCiety to better themselve5 is considered not so much subversive

as

unseemly ilnd the expression of iln

alternative, analytical political discourse is therefore made very difficult. In current commercial cinema (in America, and to a growing extent in Europe ilnd elsewhere) a simple economic censorship operates to keep dissenting voiCe5 unheilrd. Fin.lncing is di fficult to find for political works, indeed for any work which in form or eontent deviiltes from the standard comedic or melOdrilmatiC conventions of realism. Just as the larger, conventional ideology that encompasses it pre5ents itself as the only viilble ideology (even when it does not reprcsent the re,ll situation of most individuals), so conventionill realism presents itself as the only way experience is to be understood cinemiltically. Rildical variations in form ilnd content arc condemned as being "unrealistic," .md worse, not entert.lining-the fin,ll form of censorship awaiting a film that does manage to go beyond the conventions. Film is only entertainment; if it defies thilt boundary it has denied its function. There are differences in the ideologies of European and some developing countrics that make this censorship less rigorous, thJt enilble (or enJbled) the cinemil of these eounlries occilsionally to give voice to iln illternillive discourse or assume a political perspective different from Ihe one that dominates the culture. M.my European countries were socialist, and since it is the Sociillist-the leftist or Marxist-perspective that insists cinema (.1Od imaginative expression i n general) deal wilh people in social and political contexts, the ideological r('pression, on thal le,'el, was less severe there. But other djfficulties emerge. Some SOciillist ideology denies the ilpprOpriatencss of dealing with subjeelivc, psychological problems in film as vigorously as capitalist ideology denies the appropriateness of dealing with social and politic,,1 problems. There is ,,150 the burdensome history of socialist reillism -the refusal to permit experiment, the promotion of fOTnlal simplicity and easily grasped conventions that restricts inquiry as much as

CJPYnghted matanal

Politics, Psychology, and Memory 199 any other unquestioned form of "realism" does. Fortunately the strictures of socialist realism loosened conSiderably in Eastern Europe towards the end of the cold war (even somewhat in the USSR, as can be witnessed in films such ,1S Andrei T.ukovsky's Solaris, 1972). In social democratic Europe, there is nut the paranoia and arrogant dismissal of leftist ideology to the degree that exists in the United States. There is (or at least was) less difficulty in creating and finding an audience for films that inquire about social and politic,ll realities and that offer leftist a!temiltives to them. ConSiderably less inquiry of this kind is going on in the 1980s, and some filmmakers, like Godard, Bertolucci, and Costa-Gavras, arc retreating to less inquisitive modes of fi1mmilking or to downright, unquestioning melodrama."" Much of this retreat may have to do with a desire simpl y to get their work funded and distributed, a problem less oppressive in the sixties ,md seventies th,m it is now. In a sense I hilve been discussing political film throughout this book. An essential component of the neorealist endeavor was its concern, really for the first time in film, to deal objectively with the working class. That it could not avoid sentimentillizing its subject is ultimately unimportant. The fact is that by conSCiously choosing to concentrate upon ,1 SOcially and economically defined entity, the ncorealists politicized their images ilnd narratives. They replilced psychologic,ll inquiry with depictions of external struggle with the social en\mil in the early sixties they were subverting a form known .

...

Costa·Gavms hJS attempted to mainiJin J politicJI bJse to his fi lmmJking, par­ ticularly in his film Mi"",iug (1982), about an American whose son was killed in the Chilean military coup of 1973; but the leftist drive hJS become conSiderably weak­ ened, and by the nineties, he was directing a rem�ke of Billy Wilder's earl)' fifties melodrama, Ace in th" Hole, M�d Cit.".

CJPYnghted matanal

200 An Altering Eye to millions of people who had found it comfortable and undemanding. These filmmakers began implying th"t happiness is not always fun, that the pleasures of narrative had to be sought out and worked for, and that this work would be liberating. [t was precisely the comfort and security of the old, closed fomls of filmic storytelling that illlowed film to be the repOSitory for conventional wisdom, melodramatic morality, dollar-book Freud, and the subliminal whisperings of the domin.mt ideology. Modernist and Brechtian cin('ma attempt('d to remov(' th(' s('curity and dislodge old conventions and viewer attitudes. This was a politic,,1 proc('Ss in th(' sense that it broke the authoritarian grasp of the old, dosed forms and gave the viewer freedom to think and feel, to draw conclusions rather than only accept them. It was a psychological process as well, preventing the viewer from identifying with the events on the screen, instead inviting the viewer to judge their value and use. The films of Godard aTe an ind('x to these processes. In his e.uly generic experiments and tryings-out of the Brechtian model, he probed not only the relationship of image to viewer, but the nature of imilges themselves. He discovered that the imilge had become a fetish, a projection of desire that acted as a substitute for the re" lity of things and prople. [n

Lcs carabiniers,

the brave ilnd stupid soldiers bring home the spoils of war, a trunk filled with picture postcards th.lt they divide, cat,llogue, and covet. The Parthenon (which they do not like because it is damag('d); the leaning tower of l'isa (which they have to bend over Sideways to sec); photos of tr.lins and boats and foreign countries; the Technicolor factory in Hollywood; Ocopiltra (a photo of Elizabeth Taylor); dozens of pictures of things which arc to them as real as-more real than-the things themselves, which they have never sC(!n. The sign replilces whilt it signifies and the owners fetishize the imilge, the Wily the audience fetishi7.es the images on the page or the scrC(!n, embracing them as a reality. In A Married Woman (1964), Charlotte, a wuman torn by the demands of sexuality as advertised i n fashion magaZines and the uncertainties of the sexuality she herself feels. all but disappeilrs into the lingerie ads she obseSSively f('.lds. Godard ere.ltes a montage of lingerie layouts that Charlotte looks at in a magazine. On the sound track is a pop song, "Sad movies always make me cry." As the montilge proceeds, Charlotte appears suddenly in front of a brassiere ad, and not until the camera moves do we realize that it is

an enormous wall poster th'lt she is

walking in front of. Our first reaction to the image s i that somehow she has literillly entered her fashion magazine and become part of it. The image absorbs life, fuse th(> delic,leY of this kind of dial(>ctic and tend to hector the audience. Made in the spirit of the events of May

1968, they are

full of revolutionary certainty .md darity. But, perhaps like those events themselves, they had nowhere to go. The student and worker uprisings in France were an outpouring of emotion and ideas, but stopped short of convincing the bourgcoisie of their power and hope. After the government called upon the electorate to reaffirm its power, the movement died out r'lpidly. Godard's films of th(> period are also an outpouring of emotions and ideas, but they arc detached and raw, too cold and abstract to effect a ch'lnge i n attitude or understanding. To the audience that most needs to be convinced, the films are dismissible as "rhetoric" (the term used bv the dominant ideology to negate the language of Marxism). With some heroic endeavor, Godard turned away from the narrath-c skill and visual fluency he h,ld developed OYer a d('Cade to experiment with direct agit-prop, full of questions and analyses of images and sounds and their political forms.l But he forgot briefly that stories arc the best way film has to communicate ideas, and thiltthe ancient Horilhan dictum that art must teilch alld delight still holds true. Br('(ht never forgot it. N(>ither did th(> filmmilkNs of Liltin America-distilnt students of Godard and the New Waw, of P,lsolini, of the ncorealiss-who t learned their filmmilking lessons under the oppression of military dictatorships or in the excitement of post-revolutionilry society. In Wh,d

/nil/I

tile EaM there is a s('quence in which thl' late Brazilian

filmmaker Gliluber Rochil is seen standing. arms outstretched, at a crossroads. A pregnant wom,ln with a movie camera slung over her shoulder comes to him and says : "I beg your pardon for disturbing you in your dass struggle. [Contrary to majority opinion, Godard had not lost his sense of irony in these films.I I know it is very important. But which s i the way to the political film?" The woman kicks il red ball as Rocha points in one direction and says: "That way is the unknown cinema, the cinema of adventure." He points in the other direction and says: "That way the Third World cinema, il dangerous cinema-divine, milrvellous. . . . A cinema of the oppression of imperialist consumption is il dangerous, divine, marvellous cinema, a cinema out to repress the fascist oppression of terrorism. . . . It is a cinema that will build everything-technique, projection rooms, distribution, technicians, 3(Xl movie makers to make 600 films a yeilr for the entire Third World. It's the cinema of technology; it's for tht' people, to spell it out to the masses of the Third World. It is cinema."4 A cinema that will repress oppression: the dialectic moves bilck and forth. L,ltin American cinem,l,

CJPYnghted matanal

Politics, Psychology, and Memory 203 perhaps more than any other, is dominated by American distribution, American product, American attitudes. The rise of nMional cinemas in South America has been sporadic, often repressed, but occasionally-as in

the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement of the sixties, of which Rocha was a m,ljor member and whose purpose was very much ddined in the statement quoted above, bursting with imagination �nd political \�t�lity. In Cub�, where revolution succeeded, Rocha's dream of an independent cinema, with its own apparatus and distribution, was realiz(>d. The Cubans dedicat(>d their cinema to ideology, an ideology that would clarify history, correct the misrepresentiltions of American film, and propilgilte socialism. They hilve experimented in many forms-documentary, fiction, fiction'll documentary and documentary fiction. Like the French New Wave, Cuban filmmakers prilcticed with v,lrious genres, posed questions ilbout history; ilbout the represent,llion of history i n film; they inqUired about the relationships, public and private, b(>hve(>n individuals; and about how those relationships arc understood in the light of history. In short, theirs is a Marxist cinema that i1t every instant accepts the validity of Milrx's central position: "It is not

the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."5 Like many of the mnjor filmmakers we have examined, the Cubans turned away from the

cinem,l of psychologic,ll realism to the cinema of psychological and social materialism, wh..re subj..ctivity nnd individual (·xperi..nc.. are examined in the context of a culture and its history, of humiln beings in relation to each other i1nd to their world. Their inquiries, however, are always in a

revolutionary context. Within their revolutionary Marxist framework, these films maintain a complexity of statement, an inquisitive and multi-leveled narrative structure that prevent them from being dismissed as simple "propaganch." The films of the Cubans and the political cin..ma of other Latin American countries Me neither hortatory nor reliant on unexamined rhetoricill structures

separated from cultural analysiS and emolionnl response. On the contrary, the filmmnkers understand that Brecht's reevaluation of dr,lma did not deny spectacle, performance, pleasure. Quite the contrary; he dem,lnded them. But he demanded as well thilt the work i1nd the viewer be plilced in the mutually (,nlightening perspectiVI' of history. We need a tyF to (>mbrac(> social and political as well as p(>rsonal and romantic exp(>rience, it became possible to call back more traditional forms to communicate less than traditional content. (n other words, once the illusions of cinema arc revealed as such, the forms of illusion-making can be used for purposes other than fostering more illusions. This may be an optimistic, even idealistic observation. It presumes that enough people will choose to be exposed to the new forms of cinema (or, in the case of Cuba, to be exposed to a wide range of formal experimentation) and leam from them, so they can then read the older forms with a greater comprehension of how they work. Then filmmakers can put the old forms to new use. What is so interesting about Latin American cinema, and Cuban cinema in paricular, t is the concerted effort made by filmmakers to accelerate this process, to teach the audience how to understand what they Me watching so lh.lt all forms of cinem.ltic communic.ltion will be demystifi(·d and thereby rendered usable again. Alfredo Guevara, founder of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, stated that their work was ". . . to demystify cinema for the entire population; to work, in a way, against our own pow(>r; to rev(>al all the tricks, all the resourc('S of language; to dism.lIltle all the mechanisms of cinematic hypnOSiS. . . ."8 One Cuban film, Humbcrto Solris's L!lcia (1969), so encapsulates the process that it stands as something of an encyclopedia of progressive film in the sixties, and as such deserves some spe
La dolc,. vita is aboul decadence

,

ilboullhe falling inlo despair and hopeless

pleasure-seeking of a journalist who finds no satisfaction or reason in his life or work. The young girl on the be.lch is a convention.ll symbol of innocence, the freshness and delight the hero has lost, the offering of freedom and new beginnings to which he is now deaf ,md blind. The young girl at the end of

Lucia

is a figure of continuity. Her pf('sence dOl'S not signify the

hopelessness and despair of the central characters, but the promise of their and her own ongoing battles for equalily. She is the next Lucia for whom the present Lucia and Tomas prepare the way. The film ends with imilges that spe.lk to the possibility of social and person.ll progress, an optimism that may be beyond the reach of the culture to realize immediiltcly; but it is il statement of hope and good feeling missing from most contemporilry cinemil. In comparison to the romantic melancholy of the second part and the vil'llily ,md optimism of the laSI, the first P,lTt is a complex, explosive mixture of slyles ilnd ilItitudt's, an ilttempt to link historicill and dramatic form with psychological aberration and to rclilte the destructive nMure of colonialism 10 the deslructive nilture of melodrilffiillic love. Sol.is works iln analogy: as a powerful country takes over and destroys the nature of one less powerful and more docile, so male domination, and the acceptance of that dominiltion by a docile woman who believes in milsC1.11ine strength and feminine wt'ilkness, destroys her nature. The only curillive lh,lt mily

CJPYnghted matanal

Politics, Psychology, nnd Memory 215 reverse the process is, on one hand, a revolution of the colonized country against the colonizers and, on the other, a desperate revelation on the part of the woman that will enable her to destroy the opprcssive charade of

melodramatic gestures. The story line is simple. In the late nineteenth century a peasant uprising is taking place in Cuba [lgainst the Spanish. Lucia is the daughter of an aristocriltic Havanil filmily i1nd her brother is

fighting on the side of the rebels. She f'llls in love with Rafael, who poses as an apolitical Sp anish businessman. He seduces her; she rcveals th{> location of the plantation where the rebels are hiding_ He launches an attack in which her brother is killed, i1nd in milddened revenge she stilbs him to death.

This is, in outline, a melodramatic plot with a political subtext, in some W,lYS similar to Visconti's film Senso, in which an Italian noblewoman f'llls in love with a soldier of the Austriiln occupation. He betrays her romantically and politically, ,lnd she in turn betrays him. Rut where Visconti cultivates

the (soap-) operatic posturings of his char,lCters and uses politicll intrigue as ,

the underpinning of their sufferings, Soltis givcs the posturings themselves political significance and subverts theconventions of psychological reillism,

showing them to be a kind of languilge system of self-abilsement, delusion, and the suppression of libenlting lction. The episode is structured in, literall y, a black-and-white frenzy. Most of it is shot on high-contr,lst stock, washing oul the grilY tones, making the im[lges h[lrsh and obtnlsive. Action is cut to action without continuity. Lucia ,

and her friends gOSSiping, fanning, flitting about a Victorian drilwing room arc intercut with bizarre battlefield scenes. The women sec out the window

(or sec as if out the window, for the spatial juxt,lpositions are deliberately confused) a madwoman wandering the streets, among carts filled with war dead, exhorting Cuba to awaken from its colonized slumber. One of Lucia's

friends tells the story of this madwoman (and we "see" the story, intercut with the friend's telling of it). Fernandina was a nun who blessed the dead on the battlefield. She and her colleagues were attilcked ilnd raped by Sp an ish soldiers presumed dead. Thi s n ightmare visi on is fdmed Silently, with non.synchroniz{>d sounds of screams and sighs, the shots mshing and fragmented. Like the orgy sequence in the second episode, it bears similarities to Ken Russell's work, particularly in

The Devils.

The mad Fernandina emerges as a major figure in the episode, as chorus to the action and as Lucia's "other." The juxtaposition of proper aristocrat and maddened harridan