Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon had to fight it out with quite a few heavyweights this year at Cannes for the Golden Palm including Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Jim Jarmusch, Jane Campion, Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino. It has also been selected, but not without some controversy, as Germany’s official entry for the Oscars. All I can say is that Austria must be happy. Since the end of the Second World War, fascism has been studied and dissected on film many times over with varying degrees of success. With a veteran such as Haneke at the helm, writing an original script for the movie, I did expect more than what The White Ribbon presents here. Some reviewers have pointed out that being familiar to Haneke’s body of work will help one appreciate this film more. I had only seen his The Piano Teacher (2001) before this one and felt that The White Ribbon does not really succeed because Haneke undoes everything that he did right in the former film. Even his subtle, cerebral and gently commenting mise en scène is not able to heal the film from the blows dealt to it by its script. Sure, it is an ambitious film that many directors would not have been able to pull off, but it falls way too short of standard for a director who has established himself as one of the most important directors working.
The White Ribbon brings to us a chain of mysterious and violent events that occur in a village in Germany prior to the First World War as narrated by a teacher (Christian Friedel) who worked in that village during that period. We are presented with a host of characters from various walks of life – the Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and his wife (Ursina Lardi) who provide employment to majority of the village, the Fender family of peasants who have just lost the lady of the house in an accident at the Baron’s workplace, the village doctor (Rainer Bock), who has recently had an accident riding a horse, and his mistress and the midwife of the village (Maria-Victoria Dragus), the village priest (Burghart Klaußner) and his family and the narrators own love interest – the new nanny at the Baron’s – the seventeen year old Eva (Leonie Benesch). We are made privy to the happenings of each household and the dirty underbelly hiding behind the flawless exterior of the quiet and secluded village. Mishaps pile up one after the other, progressively violent, and suspicion soars in the village as the culprit is nowhere to be found. All these characters and events are held together on a single clothesline that consists of the children of the village. They are the witnesses and victims of the events that unfold. They are also the documents that would define the course of history – of the village, of the country and of the world – that is to come.
Primarily, Haneke’s film proposes political, social, religious and sexual repressions exhibited on a young generation by its predecessors as the roots of fascism and places this argument in the context of pre-war Germany. Although these forms of repressions have been studied individually and in considerable detail in many other films of the past, The White Ribbon attempts to integrate all these influences into a monolithic attitude that defines the course of a society. As observed by many reviewers, The White Ribbon bears remarkable resemblance to Clouzot’s wartime classic The Raven (1943), which scathingly exposes the changes in mentality of a collective during uncertain times and the hypocrisy and hate that such a political climate brings to surface, in its study of a group as a whole wherein disparaging threads eventually converge to draw out a single, coherent portrait of the group at a particular time. The class system is tangible, with the aristocracy, intelligentsia, the middle class and the peasantry being represented with clear demarcation. The Baron and his wife – the upper class – have only their personal relationship and their property to worry about. The bourgeoisie is content in sticking to a set of middle-brow principles (there is way too much formality going on in the film) and maintaining status quo. The peasants can only worry about everyday survival. The apolitical intelligentsia – typified by the doctor and the teacher – is busy with its own romantic encounters and perversions. Cinematographed by Christian Berger, this isolation of the clerisy is summed up in two stunning shots in the film – one during the dance at the village fest (reminiscent of Ophüls’ magical Madame De… (1953)) and one on a horse carriage (reminiscent of Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), one of the best explorations of fascism on film) – in which the teacher and his love interest Eva are alienated from the village events. And whenever a member of any class tries to digress from these functions, they are berated and made to return to their position by either the class divide or the generation divide.
The White Ribbon presents us a seemingly pacific society which thrives on domestic bureaucracy for survival and maintains hierarchies to perpetuate that status. Haneke presents these power games not as a ping-pong rally, as we have seen in so many films, but as a chain of dominoes. In his world, there is no such thing as retaliation. Everybody has to conform to and perform specific roles in society – willingly or otherwise. The elder Fender has to play the role of a helpless farmer whereas his son, the radial, has to play the part of an obedient child irrespective of him being an adult. There is an obligation placed on everyone in the hierarchy by ones above them to conform to certain rules and to get punished upon transgressing those boundaries. The priest ties a white ribbon – another stereotype which symbolizes innocence (as defined by Protestant morals) – on his adolescent son’s arm to remind him of his duty to ward off worldly temptations and lays down an unwarranted responsibility upon him to play the role of a moral Christian. This seems to be the plight of every child and young adult in the village who can’t seem to counter their “masters” and are forced to channelize their reactionary violence through other means. Like Estike (Erica Bók) inSatan’s Tango (1994) and Isabel (Isabel Telleria) in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), both of whose forced passivity and oppression translates into graphic violence on powerless creatures (I can imagine a restless Chris Marker tossing around in his seat), these children, too, exercise their power on those lower down the hierarchy (The White Ribbon could also be titled “The slap fest” for domestic violence in the film is commonplace).
[The White Ribbon trailer]
Moreover, this kind of contrived passivity that we observe within the village is reflected in the larger picture of Germany. The White Ribbon is set in a time just before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that triggered the Great War. History stands witness to the fact that Germany also went through such cycles of passivity followed by misguided violence like the children in the movie (the film is subtitled “A German Children’s Story”). If Germany’s army was curtailed after the first war and Alsace and Lorraine confiscated, it would give birth to a patriotic movement that would go on to mutate into a fascist force. If the second war resulted in a greater chastisement and imposition of eternal guilt on its citizens by the western world, it would explode into a misdirected “terrorist” movement – the RAF (“…punishing the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generations” reads a note dropped at the scene of one of the crimes). Although Haneke shoots in black and white and has the narrator recite the story in the past tense, his film resonates in the contemporary world too. At one point in the film, the priest tells the doctor’s son, who asks his permission to shelter an injured bird, that the bird in his room is used to captivity while the one in the kid’s hand is used to freedom. The upper class in The White Ribbon flourishes by keeping the rest of the village engaged in the economic clockwork that it has setup and by ensuring that any subversion will only result in despair and struggle for livelihood for the insurgents. The elder Fender, although aware that the Baron is responsible for his wife’s death, cannot do anything about it for any action on his part will put the future of his kids in question. This situation isn’t much unlike those in today’s capitalistic societies which have a strong religious backbone.
Evidently, the film’s scope is large. Haneke attempts to study and integrate the very many factors responsible for the rise of fascist movements by actually having many threads in the narrative to illustrate each of these factors. And this seems to be one of the biggest drawbacks of the film. Haneke has way too many characters to have depth in each of them. What begins as an incisive study of a few characters goes on to become a document of the society at large, in which individual characters are sacrificed to drive forth Haneke’s idea. His work here turns out to be a film that is built on a set of judgments made by the writer-director rather than a keen exploration of issues. Compare it to the film that it pipped at Cannes this year for the Golden Palm – Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (2009). Audiard’s film, which I think is one of the few brilliant films of the year, is sufficiently ambiguous and presents us with sketches from the protagonist’s life. Audiard does not give us an “idea” or a “message”. He lets us form any possible meaning out of the film’s observations. Haneke, on the other hand, sacrifices truth for meaning. He cuts from one vignette to another in a deterministic fashion to serve a set of preconceived ideas. His hop-step-and-jump approach works wonders in the initial part of the movie, when we find ourselves struggling to sort out an overarching theme, but it goes on to over-determine the central idea of the film, just falling short of being didactic. Eric Hynes’ review sums up with ease my complaints about the movie. It is true that the film, to a good extent, explores fascism as a phenomenon of the masses rather than that of a single evil soul, but Haneke dwells a bit too much on kindred events to remove any scope for thematic enrichment.
I do not intend to say that Haneke bites off much more than he can chew, but just that the way he goes about chewing seems inefficient. It seems to me that the film would have been better off had Haneke pruned down many of its narrative elements in order to provide depth instead of attempting to crystallize a meaning. By pruning down, I do not mean simplification of its themes or trivializing of the issues at hand, but that the number of characters could have been held at a bare minimum. One fatal blow for The White Ribbon is that, although there is a narrator who provides the basic “facts” about the film before Haneke illustrates the in-between events visually, the film lacks a constant perspective using which all the disparaging ideas could be integrated. It is true that Haneke denies emotional identification in the movie, but the problem is that he does not even provide a reference against which the audience can interpret the events. Haneke’s script, in essence, is a consolidation of the themes Bertolucci explored in detail in individual films. The White Ribbon shares with The Conformist (1970) the idea that sexual repression and social conformism may be the prime instigators of fascist drive. More importantly, the depiction of fascism as being perpetuated by religion and its minion unit – the family – is also that of the masterful The Last Tango in Paris (1972). And the master-slave relationship between the Baron and the Fenders is but a miniature version of 1900 (1976) – an ambitious film that strays off and moves into self-parody. In all the above cases, Bertolucci provides us with a constant perspective, even if he has multiple protagonists, so that we are able to clearly assimilate and make judgment. On the other hand, The White Ribbon lacks a single coherent perspective (or has only one perspective – Haneke’s) and individual scenes, although possessing enough ambiguity of their own to be called virtuoso, exist only to conform to Haneke’s meaning and judgment.
Because of this over-emphasis on the central theme, The White Ribbon eats up many of the other possibilities which the first half of the film puts forth. Even at the end of the film, we do not know who commits these atrocities. It could well be some of the repressed members of one of the social classes and there are enough evidences to actually find a one-to-one matching. Haneke does not implicate them and finishes the movie with an open ending (“open” as far as the genre is concerned). Sure, it makes it clear that it is the whole society that is to blame. But Haneke’s writing prefers to lean towards and to underscore endlessly the idea of a repressed childhood and forced conformism to such an extent that it almost obscures the other dimensions of the movie. The film begins with the narrator confessing that many of the elements in the story he is gong to narrate are hearsay, preparing us for the narrative ambiguity in the film, but the film promptly repudiates that statement and removes any thematic ambiguity the first half may have offered. Scenes like the violent outbreak of one of the village boys on the Baron’s son and the priest’s daughter ripping apart her father’s pet bird are inserted into the narrative in a contrived and unsubtle fashion to be regarded as worthy. So are the scenes of the parents’ behaviour towards their children that end up seeming only like filler materials which aid to fatten a shallow analysis based on a single new idea. But even with a wafer-thin idea on text, the director has enough freedom to explore it cinematically. Bertolucci did it in The Conformist with its dynamic mise en scène, which took over the job of providing meaning and emphasizing the central idea, however simplistic it was on paper, unlike Haneke who relies here on his script to do that. That does not mean that Haneke’s film is technically unsound. Right from the first shot, where a peaceful horse ride in a serene countryside is suddenly interrupted by a jolting moment, Haneke announces the soberness of his gaze. He keeps alienating us from the movie with his choice of B&W, the detached distance of the largely stationery camera, the painting-like stasis of the images and his restrictive framing (his indebtedness to Bertolt Brecht is discussed in detail here). Sure, he does very effectively disengage us from the narrative to make us reflect on the events rather than identify emotionally, but he also goes to the extent of denying omnipresence to the narrator for this purpose. And that hurts the film.
Pregnant with so many allusions, the shot above from Victor Erice’s masterwork The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) that isn’t just the greatest one in this film, but one of the greatest shots in cinema I’ve ever seen.
In the early part of the film, little Ana (Ana Torrent, astounding) watches James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in the town hall, only to be obsessed by its images. Later in the film, as she wanders off into the woods after she comes to know that the partisan soldier has been killed, she has this vision of Frankenstein meeting her by the lake – the shot in consideration. Erice captures both of them in profile, composing with perfect symmetry. There are two trees resembling vertical lines that chop of margins from each side of the frame. By using these, Erice creates a frame within the frame – the double framing device – and presents a reference (and a tribute) to a similar shot from Whale’s Frankenstein that Ana watches earlier (screenshot below). The double framing also allows him to distance us from the film and to remind that we are watching only a movie and that we shouldn’t take what we see too seriously – the same message that we are given prior to the screening of the James Whale film. Erice achieves the first kind of reflection by making life (the horror of the Franco regime that Ana discovers) imitate art (the horror film within the film), employing an art form that tries to imitate life. The reflection of the moon on water replaces the projector beam and the darkness of the night replaces that of the cinema hall.
Many times throughout the film, Erice compares Ana to Frankenstein, for they are both marginal beings oblivious to the fascist laws of the beehive – the society – that do not tolerate any form of anomaly, opposition or subversion. By locating Ana and Frankenstein on either side of the frame’s median, Erice brings in one more element of reflection to compare (and contrast) Ana and Frankenstein. Furthermore, the director provides to the shot a third form of reflection by placing the audience in Ana’s shoes. When Ana watches Frankenstein, she asks her sister, during the movie, why Frankenstein kills the little girl and why is he killed by the people. Following this, Erice introduces another Frankenstein figure into the film – the wounded partisan soldier – only to have him killed by the police. With this shot, we are forced to recall why the soldier (whose murder, possibly, brings to life this Frankenstein that Ana sees) was killed and why this little girl is haunted by all these images that she sees – almost the same question that Ana asks her sister in the film. Don’t they say that life imitates art?
Dokfa Nai Meuman (2000) (aka Mysterious Object At Noon)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Thai
“Now, do you have any other stories to tell us? It can be real or fiction.”
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s maiden feature Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) is an instant success. Loosely based on the game Exquisite Corpse, originally conceived by the surrealists, wherein the participants of the game take turns to advance a storyline, Weerasethakul’s film shows us the director and his crew traveling throughout rural and urban Thailand, picking people at random, presenting them with an audio tape that contains the narrative of a story as told by its previous bearers and asking them to further the tale in whatever way they like. The “story” in the film begins with a physically challenged kid, taught at home by a visiting teacher, who notices a strange, round object roll down from his teacher’s skirt one day, which later transforms into a mystic boy with superpowers! Wait till you see what this already bizarre setup mutates into. The “characters”, who narrate the story, almost run the gamut and include a sober tuna fish seller who, she believes, has been “sold” to her uncle, a talky old lady whose cheerfulness seems to conceal a tragedy, a gang of timid teenage mahouts who seem straight out of a Jarmusch movie, a troupe of exuberant traveling players, each of whom would have a quirk or two if probed, a bunch of TV show participants, two deaf and mute girls who seem to be the most excited of the lot and a bevy of primary school kids whose imagination would, literally, leave one speechless.
The original Thai title of the film, apparently, translates to “Heavenly Flower in Devils’ Hands”, evidently, calling attention to the film itself. It is undeniably true that what starts as a beautiful emotional drama is unfortunately mutilated and metamorphosed into a tale of fantasy, then, mystery, horror and romance. But, surely, this “heavenly flower” is not of much interest compared to the devils which hold it. Mysterious Object at Noon is, perhaps, closest in style and intent to Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework (1989), in which the director brings down a whole nation sitting in a stuffy room with a bunch of first graders (Actually, Weerasethakul’s whole body of work tempts one to equate him to Kiarostami, especially given his penchant for cars and roads!). Here, as in Homework, the initial objective of the filmmaker, eventually, turns out to be one big MacGuffin. The ultimate point of the movies is not to investigate whether the kids complete their homework promptly or if the story streamlines into a smooth narrative ready for Hollywood, but to draw out a portrait of a society derived from these first hand accounts. Weerasethakul’s movie may be a joke derived out of a simple afternoon game, but what it does, in effect, is to draw the cultural landscape of a country, not by taking a didactic top-down approach but by examining the most basic fears, desires, anxieties and interests of common folk who form its social structure.
Essentially, Mysterious Object at Noon examines the function and power of stories as cultural artifacts and explores how stories preserve and reflect the spirit of the age they originate in, much like every art form – major and minor. Additionally, Weerasethakul’s film acknowledges the tendency of these stories to undergo transformation through the years as they pass from one social class, age group, ethnicity and way of life to the other. These stories may get corrupt along the way, may absorb elements from real life and even end up losing their original meaning, but, in any case, they serve to perpetuate culture and build links between generations (One kid in the final segment recites a story about an uncle who recites to his nephew a story about an uncle and a nephew. Presumably, this story was told to him by his uncle). These stories may be passed on in the form of books, paintings, photographs, modern recording media (a la audio tapes, which are used in this film to record the story) and word-of-mouth, as Weerasethakul’s film indicates by turning on and off sounds, images and texts in an incoherent fashion. But, whatever the form, each version of these stories carries an imprint of the narrator’s sensibility and world view. With some effort, from each story, one should be able to reconstruct the realities of the world the narrator lives in and vice versa. Like the image of the railway tracks, which are parallel but seem to be converging at infinity, that punctuates the film, these stories, although appearing to be all over the place on the surface, have one point of convergence – they all help out in sketching the collective consciousness and the collective unconscious of a particular culture at a given point in time.
Moreover, by actually making a film out of the concocted story, Weerasethakul concludes that cinema, too, is one such medium that could well function as a sociological document and which the posterity can use to understand their own history from very many perspectives. By merely filming in black and white, Weerasethakul takes his film one step away from reality and makes it seem like an antiquated object that is being preserved for a long time. And like these stories that shape-shift with time, Weerasethakul, call it a running gag, makes certain folk tales and myths repeat themselves across his filmography, albeit in different avatars – another one of his many similarities to Kiarostami. The humourous father-daughter duo, who talk to the doctor about the old man’s hearing problem, reincarnate in the director’s next movie Blissfully Yours (2002). The story about the two greedy farmers and the young monk, which makes an appearance in the hypnotic Tropical Malady (2004), resurfaces with a more violent outcome in Syndromes and a Century (2006). And the tale about the shape-shifting “Witch Tiger” that the young boy begins to narrate at the end of Mysterious Object at Noon forms the entire second half of Tropical Malady, needless to say, in a completely transformed tone. For a writer-director who has consistently soaked his films in the themes of permanence of history and mythology, recycling of human memories and behaviour and the existence of a common binding spirit across generations, this gesture just can’t be considered as a mere prank.
Mysterious Object at Noon consistently reinforces and reminds of Weerasethakul’s preoccupation with juxtaposition of cultural extremes. Often in the director’s films, aptly highlighted by the “traveling shots” filmed from the car’s front and rear windows, we find ourselves wondering whether we are going forward in time or backwards. The very first shot of this film presents us everything that would become the director’s trademark in the following years. This single four minute point of view shot from inside a car presents us a host of extremes placed alongside each other. The car starts out on a broad highway, amidst tall buildings of the city, and takes a serpentine route to gradually arrive at a sparse and quieter suburban locale. The vehicle is that of an incense and tuna fish seller. He is broadcasting an advertisement using loudspeakers attached to the car, endorsing his brand of incense sticks, citing its virtues, and asking people to use only this brand while worshiping Buddha. This blatant lie on the soundtrack counterpoints the truth of the photographic image, which is also much more banal and undramatic compared to the fictional stories we hear on the car radio. Furthermore, by using an advertisement marked by scientific terminologies and latest capitalistic strategies to endorse a product used in a religious ritual, Weerasethakul brings total modernity and total antiquity – the future and the past – together to provide a broad outline of a country in transition (Tokens of American influence on contemporary Thai culture are abound in Weerasethakul’s films). Later, the director goes on to further explore the volatile boundary between reality and fiction and the object-mirror image relationship that they share with each other – using both the film within the film and its making-of. As it turns out in Panahi’s The Mirror (1997), reality deviates as significantly from fiction as it resembles it (The mystic kid seems, in actuality, far from being mystical and is more interested in KFC and comics).
Weerasethakul prefers to be called a conceptual artist rather than a film director (He cites Andy Warhol as a major inspiration). This tendency of his is most manifest in Mysterious Object at Noon, wherein he is content is merely triggering a chain of events and persevering to see what evolves. There is no manipulation of the mise en scène, the plasticity of the image is never harnessed and the camera is employed at a purely functional level. Weerasethakul does not even polish the gathered fragments and simply joins them, leaving all the interpretation to us. Shot in digital, cinéma vérité style, using handheld, and no with predetermined script, Mysterious Object at Noon oozes with documentary realism. Like he does in most of his films, Weerasethakul keeps exposing the tools of his trade in an attempt to disillusion us from the belief of watching an alternate reality and to reinforce the fact that this movie indeed takes place in our world. At one point in the film, the director himself enters the frame to adjust the lighting for the film within the film he is shooting. As a result, he lets us see both the creation and the creator – the image and the process behind its construction – much like he does with his script and its authors in Mysterious Object at Noon. However, Weerasethakul’s self-reflexive moves do not end here.
The film’s title should, appropriately, be cleaved into “Mysterious Object” and “At Noon”. Weerasethakul, after presenting us the major part of film dealing with the “mysterious object”, adds an epilogue titled “At Noon” shot in the director’s hometown of Panyi, whose quiet nighttime images we are already acquainted with thanks to the director’s earlier film Thirdworld (1998). This one is a completely freewheeling, heavenly segment in which we witness a group of boys playing soccer in the afternoon, kicking the ball into a nearby pond and taking a bath in the process of retrieving it. This is followed by vignettes of people having lunch and a bunch of younger kids, before being called by their mother for lunch, tying an empty tin can to a dog’s neck and watching the poor animal go berserk due to the noise the can produces. They say that the essence of life lies in boredom. Likewise, Weerasethakul seems to be of the opinion that the most interesting things in life arise out of these dead times in the afternoon (one needs to just look at the director’s next film for proof). And like these kids who seem conjure up fascinating things from the most commonplace of objects, Weerasethakul, too, realizes a movie completely out of the “dead time” of his characters’ lives, creating something magical that only cinema could have brought to life. In a way, Mysterious Object at Noon is an elegy for the stretches of time we’ve lost in planning ahead, the times we’ve cast off in the pursuit of “higher” goals and the dead times we’ve killed in order to move into lifeless ones.
What Is Cinema? Volume II André Bazin (Translated by Hugh Gray)
University of California Press, 1971
The second part of Hugh Gray’s translation of Andre Bazin’s essays is, evidently, more coherent and wholesome and better compiled than its predecessor. It may be either because Bazin has sorted out the ambiguity discernible earlier in his theory, which he presented in the previous book, or because one gets accustomed to Bazin’s style of writing and his huge canvas of references that range from philosophy to science. Whatever the case, those who have persevered to read the second volume will only have a richly rewarding experience and get to know why Bazin was so enthusiastically supporting realism in cinema. The anthology begins, fittingly, with a foreword by Truffaut where he recollects, through many interesting anecdotes about Bazin, how his life was enriched by his godfather and “the most unforgettable character” he has met. He closes the essay with a paragraph from Bazin’s letter that sums up his unassuming and open-minded attitude towards the whole of cinema:
“I’m sorry I couldn’t see Mizoguchi’s films again with you at the Cinémathéque. I rate him as highly as you people do and I claim to love him the more because I love Kurosawa too, who is the other side of the coin: would we know the day any better if there was no night? To dislike Kurosawa because one likes Mizoguchi is only the first step towards understanding. Unquestionably anyone who prefers Kurosawa must be incurably blind but anyone who loves only Mizoguchi is one-eyed. Throughout the arts there runs a vein of the contemplative and the mystical as well as an expressionist vein”
The first essay of the book is the legendary “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism” in which Bazin traces out the characteristics of this New Italian School in contrast to the existing forms of cinema in Italy and elsewhere (including his views on the use of non-professionals, its advantages and shortcomings). He illustrates why he thinks that realism in cinema more an aesthetic choice than an ontological byproduct and how this “realism” can be controlled to present a world view of the director without being instructive (“But realism in art can only be achieved in one way – through artifice.”). He then proceeds, taking Citizen Kane (1941) and Farrebique (1946) as examples, to elucidate the conflict between using deep focus (which could then be achieved perfectly only in a studio setting) and using real locations (which are cumbersome from the point of view of cinematography) and, hence, proves why every technological advancement that helps bringing cinema closer to reality must be embraced. This is followed by an analysis of Rossellini’s Paisa (1946), arguably the greatest neo-realist film, which studies the episodic narrative of the film, the elliptical nature of its editing and the ambiguity of reality that it offers.
This grand opening is followed by extremely insightful, individual essays on key neorealist films such as Visconti’s The Earth Trembles (1948, “La Terra Trema lacks inner fire… no moving eloquence to bolster its documentary vigor”), Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957, “I even tend to view Fellini as the director who goes the farthest of any to date in this neorealist aesthetic”) and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1947, “Ladri di Bicyclette is one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”) and Umberto D. (1952 “De Sica and Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality”), wherein Bazin, step by step, clarifies his championing of realism in cinema and his stance that realism in cinema must be concerned only with appearance and not meaning (“Realism is to be defined not in terms of ends but of means, and neorealism by a specific relation of the means to the ends”). Together, these sets of essays make so much meaning, even today, that one is able to see why the photographic property of cinema (and hence its ability to resort to absolute realism) makes it all the more powerful by providing it with the power to reveal the most abstract of philosophical ideas using the most commonplace of images.
Interspersed between these critiques of neorealist films are two essays that deal with the entire filmographies of two neorealist directors – De Sica and Rossellini. In the first of these, Bazin examines the attitude of De Sica towards the reality of the world in his films (“…in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely…in loving them in their singular individuality.”). He notes that although De Sica’s cinema is primarily based on love and compassion, his construction of the film’s universe is nevertheless rigorous and meticulous. The second essay is actually a letter that Bazin wrote to Guido Aristarco, the Editor-in-Chief of the Italian film journal Cinema Nuovo, in defense of Rossellini against the claims of Italian critics who slammed the director for betraying his neo-realist roots. This essay is perhaps the central piece of his set of essays on neorealism and illustrates what kind of realism Bazin was looking for and what value it adds to cinema as a medium (“The traditional realist artist – Zola, for example analyzes reality into parts which he then reassembles in a synthesis the final determinant of which is his moral conception of the world, whereas the conciousness of the neorealist director filters the reality.”)
But what’s really the killer piece of the book is the essay called “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux”. In this section that runs over 20 pages, Bazin explains why he thinks Monsieur Verdoux (1947) is Chaplin’s greatest work by deconstructing the film part by part and taking it into various levels of discussion. He argues that, in Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin absorbs from the myth of the tramp, which was developed by him and lapped up instantly by the world, in order to contrast the mute being with Verdoux. He examines how society has, in fact, killed Charlie and how Verdoux is a revenge of sorts for Chaplin. Bazin takes into consideration the whole of Chaplin’s filmography to explore the significance of Monsieur Verdoux, both to Chaplin and to Hollywood. He makes note of the Chaplin’s casting, which seeks out faces that can not only represent and portray the character in this movie but those which carry with themselves their own cinematic histories and mythologies. In the subsequent two essays on Limelight (1952), in one of which he speaks about the emotional impact that Chaplin’s presence in Paris had on critics during the film’s premiere, he examines how Limelight, in fact, takes the myth of Charlie into the realm of Chaplin, by integrating into itself facets from both Charlie’s persona and Chaplin’s life, and pushes the boundaries of authorship to a point beyond with it is impossible to separate the artist from the person.
Then there are also some pleasant surprises in the form of shorter essays, two of which deal with the Western genre, its evolution, its cinematic and historical exploration, its transformation following World War 2 and authorship of a director within norms of this genre. There is also one about the birth of the “Pin-up girl” wherein Bazin discusses the philosophy between the ways these posters are designed and later reflects on its relation to cinema. This is followed by two articles on eroticism in cinema and censorship, in one of which Bazin, taking up Howard Hughes’ notorious The Outlaw (1943) as the centerpiece, elaborates on the type of censorship that contained within the cinematic image and argues that it is because of Hays that Hughes was able to take cinematic eroticism to the next level by kindling the audience’s imagination using mere hints, unlike his European counterparts. There’s a lot of humour to be found in these essays (and the earlier ones too) that just adds to the effortlessness and confidence that is palpable in Bazin’s arguments. But, in the final analysis, it is Bazin’s inclination to realism in cinema that is the USP of the book and serves to explain why cinema can transcend other arts in some ways. Although this support of Bazin for realism seems to need a revision with the advent of modernist, postmodernist and animation filmmaking, his theories still seem very pertinent and precise as far as conventional narrative cinema is concerned, especially considering the tendency of today’s mainstream filmmakers to move away from realism by imposing a single meaning on the realities of their worlds.
Cartoons are the closest approximation to Tarantino’s movies. They start out as a simple ideas inspired by real-life objects/characters/situations and go on to evolve into completely new universes with their own sets of mythologies and histories. Although controlled to the last pixel by their creators, these cartoon characters take up a life of their own and, in the process, have the creators conform to their characteristics. A sub-art form by itself, the cartoon provides so much scope for exploration of both the animation medium and of cinema itself (by exclusion of reality). When Émile Cohl created Fantasmagorie(1908), now accepted as the first ever animation movie, he had given a mile of head start for the genre with the film’s no-holds-barred repudiation of real space and time. Since then, sadly, animation seems to have been moving in the opposite direction, trying to imitate “normal” cinema with its gargantuan technological expertise, in the same way the latter tries to imitate life. These CG devils do not seem to understand that animation is both an adversary and a complement to photographic cinema – an extreme form of wish fulfillment that wears its manipulation on its sleeve – rather than a clone. Like all genres, the clichés have remained, the spirit and meaning buried. Premiering almost six decades ago, the Wile E. Coyote vs. The Roadrunner cartoon series is one that takes these clichés to the most extreme and, by doing so, digs into the most basic and pertinent of all questions about the medium – What does it mean to be a cartoon?
Honey, I Dehumanized the Kids
The Roadrunner series was conceived by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. And Chuck Jones is as true an auteur that one can find in cartoon filmmaking. One can almost immediately tell a Jones cartoon from the others. His toons are characterized by hard edged drawings with jittery motion that lacks real continuity. His characters are true caricatures, deliberately far from reality, with justifiably no depth at all. These characters somehow appear to know that they are in a cartoon. Consider his stint as the director of the famed Tom and Jerry show. Till then, Hanna and Barbera had been presenting us cutesy, smooth lined and lovable characters (This still remains my favorite era in the Tom and Jerry series) who call out for empathy. With the arrival of Jones, however, things take a dark turn as we see a frenzied Tom chasing a Jerry who seems to be perennially on crack. Jones removes any trace of cuteness from these characters, providing features like vicious teeth and pointed whiskers, and disallows any sympathy for them from us, at least by the virtue of their appearances. It is as if Jones believes that we should know that these are just cartoons and their lives are not going to be altered by our sympathy. That does not mean that he doesn’t give us emotional anchors to hold on to in his cartoons, but just that he consistently avoids the threat of realism – of appearance and of emotions – that plagues the cartoon world so often.
Although it never really upped the ante for the Tom and Jerry series, his style sure does work wonders here. In the Roadrunner series, too, there are no attempts at unwarranted emotional bonding even though one does end up rooting for Wile E. within minutes into each episode. For a comparison, these cartoons of Jones are like the early short films of Chaplin that relied purely on slapstick, without ever concentrating on the Tramp’s relationship to us like the later Chaplin films do. Jones relies on Woody Allen kind of humour – throw them all and see what sticks – with his relentless series of gags. His humour does not depend on what happens (which, by the very virtue of the Roadrunner series, is known to every one), but how does it happen and how long does it take to happen. Part of the fun in watching the Roadrunner cartoons arises from this surprise element of time that comes into picture in these skirmishes. Consider this random episode called Hip Hip-Hurry! (1958) that Jones directed. The episode consists of 8 gags of lengths 58, 30, 26, 8, 28, 35, 25 and 106 seconds respectively. The numbers are enough of a witness that Jones revels in writing both gotcha gags and wait-wait-almost-there-boom set pieces (which were a characteristic of his Tom and Jerry cartoons too) equally. And that is the only kind of unpredictability that he allows in the world of Roadrunner.
[Hip Hip-Hurry! (1958)]
Once More Upon a Time in the West
The idea of the Roadrunner show resembles a western (The fact that the coyote is a symbol of the Native American makes this notion all the more interesting!). Like the western genre, it originates as a piece of history – a shred of fact that a coyote is trying to get his hands on a roadrunner – and then develops itself as a myth that is derived from that piece of history (that the coyote always goes after the bird). Two primary characters facing each other off in a vast, cruel and blazing environment is one of the biggest stereotypes of the now-extinct genre. In Roadrunner, too, the geography is sparse, torrid and lifeless and painted with mostly brown and deep yellow colours. Furthermore, the western has always been a playground for writers to tease our moral standings and to tantalize us with notions we try to take for granted. Usually, the “morally good” according to law and social institutions for justice, in the form of police and the sheriff, is pitted against the morally good according to personal conscience and intuition, in the form of the noble outlaw and the lone ranger. Scenarios are written in such a way that our empathy goes against the justice system, which seems to be blinded by its own rules, and the audience is made to unconciously question the way laws are made. In the case of Roadrunner, this sense of balance between “good” according to public opinion and right-wing morality and “good” according to personal experience and emotional connection is maintained in the form of the roadrunner and Wile E. respectively. The cerebral part of us tells us that the roadrunner is never the instigator of trouble and it is plainly wrong to try to kill the harmless being. On the other hand, by virtue of the script, we end up supporting the coyote’s efforts and even want him to get the bird for once. The result is the deletion of human morality – the notion of heroes and villains and good and bad – from the Roadrunner universe.
No Man’s Land
One observation that one immediately makes when watching the Roadrunner cartoons is the strange absence of humans in the toons. There are no human “characters” in the series as such, even though they make their presence in the world felt indirectly now and then. Even when they do, in the form of the regular afternoon trains that run over Wile E., the random trucks that get him at the tunnels and the friendly neighbourhood highway chases, they merely act as deus ex machinas that make sure that Wile E. does not catch roadrunner and that he always chases him. Same is the case with the ACME Corporation, from where Wile E. obtains all his bizarre gadgets. He always gets what he wants from them although one is not sure how the economy allows for this. ACME is not very unlike our capitalistic companies that benefit from people’s internecine quest for climbing the social ladder as fast as possible and which try to rake money even at the cost of deterioration of people‘s ways of life (and history has made sure that this policy of ACME holds good for Certain Intelligence Agencies too!). Both humans and institutions perpetuate the myth of the roadrunner and Wile E by their non-intrusion and occasional intrusion. Furthermore, there are no laws in the Roadrunner world. Unlike in movies like Toy Story (1995), where the toys had to obey the rules of the human world and come into true existence only when they are far removed from observation, Wile E. need not be ever conscious of his actions. He knows that he is being observed by the humans and he would always be made to chase the roadrunner. Even science, with its selective application of its laws, seems to want to keep the myth alive. All Wile E. can do is to conform to this “fascist conspiracy” of the external world.
The Cartoon with(out) a Difference
In the case of The Roadrunner series, one is safe in saying that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Far from being wrong, it is the very truth of the world of Roadrunner. The stories of all the episodes of the series are so identical to one another, that it would only be a miracle if one can identify individual episodes. You have this lanky, brown coyote – about 45 years of age, one would say, if Jim Carrey were to play him – who tries, in every which way possible, to get his hands on this clever, thin roadrunner bird. Predictably (I mean predictably), he fails, only to get up again and repeat the process. Each of these vignettes starts out and ends in the same way – with Wile E. concocting some new plan to get hold of the Roadrunner and with him getting caught in his own trap respectively. The only difference between each of these encounters lies in the way Wile E. fails in his mission. In fact, the whole universe of Roadrunner relies on repetition – repetition of situations (what would Roadrunner be without the top view of Wile E. falling into the cliff?), repetition of geography (more than in any other cartoon, the scenery in these cartoons repeats very often, especially noticeable in the background during the chases) and repetition of structure (to the point that the relative ordering of the vignettes and the episodes is ultimately immaterial). Heck, even the single piece of speech in the series comes in the form of a repetition – “Beep Beep”.
But then, there are traits that are also shared by every other cartoon (Garfield often speaks to us out of context of the cartoon about these clichés) and also perhaps the easiest ones to devise. But, the real success of the Roadrunner series lies not in using these clichés, but retaining them forever, even at the cost of being unfunny and redundant. Jones takes the practice to the breaking point (and beyond) by bombarding us with the same elements over and over. And, through this monotony, he achieves something much more than instant chuckles. Harold Ramis’ brilliant Groundhog Day (1993) examines, albeit in photographic reality, what it takes to live in a completely predictable world – a world that is mathematically derivable, geographically utopian and emotionally unresponsive. Its protagonist, Phil Connors (who is worthy of Bill Murray), after some days of rejoicing over the unlimited power that he has been given, finds himself completely alienated from his people and then, gradually, comes to accept his situation. Beyond that point, he stops attempting to break the loop of time and decides to enrich his own life and that of the others. Now that it is neither possible for him to pursue any goal in life that he may have had nor take his own life, he realizes that the only difference that he can make in this world is to make the people around him happy, even if it is just for a couple of hours. Phil Connors isn’t very unlike our hero Wile E.
Deconstructing Wile E.
The world of Roadrunner is the perfect cartoon world. It is a world devoid of the notions of hunger, injury and death. Even though Wile E. believes that he chases the bird in order to eat it, that can never be his actual motive. The very fact that he keeps chasing the bird for years in vain suggests that food is never a point of concern for him. His role in life is to chase the roadrunner and nothing else at all. In this regard, he shares a very ironical relationship with the bird. For one, he cannot and will not catch roadrunner ever because, if he did, he would not have anything else to do in his life. In that case, he would lose his identity and turn from being a cartoon ‘character’ with unique characteristics to being a mere ink stain on a sheet of coloured paper. He would then be wandering the wilderness for eternity. Nor can he renounce the chase altogether for that would tantamount to him catching the bird and subsequently losing his identity. On the other hand, the roadrunner’s role is to be chased. Since Wile E. knows that his only option is to chase the bird, roadrunner needn’t ever instigate him. But if ever, Wile E. digresses from his job, it would be the roadrunner’s duty to pull him back into the loop since he has his identity to retain. The whole of fabric of Roadrunner is based on this paradoxical relationship that the two characters share.
Now, this is not the foundation that shows like Tom and Jerry are raised on, although they, too, are reduced to no more than a bunch of futile chases. The kinship between Tom and Jerry is built around the human world, unlike in Roadrunner, like a refrigerator loaded with food, a stray canary or a runaway bear. At any point, Tom and Jerry could make a pact and go on with their lives independently – which means that Tom can laze around forever and Jerry can pinch cheese whenever he wants. But, in the case of Wile E., there are no such easy alternatives. His world is defined solely by his chases and contains no other dimension. Tom or Jerry need not be in every scene in an episode, but Wile E. has to be present in every setup of every vignette and, if needed, in every frame. Like Barry Lyndon, the coyote’s life is sealed in the two dimensions he lives in (The ideal sequel, if you can call that, to the Roadrunner show will not be in 3-D, but rather in 1-D, with the two characters represented as two dots that never meet). Even though the initial motive for Wile E. is to catch roadrunner and that for the roadrunner is to evade the claws of Wile E., in the long run, they would inevitably reverse their roles. That is, the coyote. will, eventually, make sure that he doesn’t catch the bird and the roadrunner will make sure that he is chased. This is almost exactly the kind of relationship that Batman and the Joker share in The Dark Knight (2008).
One is tempted to compare the fate of Wile E. to that of Sisyphus, the Greek king who is made to roll a mammoth boulder over a steep hill slope forever, only to find it roll back down (Is it just a coincidence that Wile E. is seen shoving huge rocks time and again?). The coyote’s life, too, goes around in such pointless loops with no end in sight. In fact, Wile E. is the quintessential Absurd Hero, like Sisyphus, who realizes the pointlessness of his life and nevertheless continues. I’m a philosopher only as much as Barack Obama is a ballet dancer, but from what little I have heard about Camus, he draws three possible responses to this realization of the absurdity of the world – Faith, Suicide and Existence. He seems to reject the first two ideas, denouncing them as tricks to repudiate the truth about the meaninglessness of life. In the third option he proposes that life be lived for-the-moment and enjoyed to the fullest, without any hope or ambition and with the constant knowledge of the absurdity of it all, and thus have complete freedom over our actions. This way, the refusal of suicide becomes the very token of acceptance of absurdity and the freedom of choice that it provides. Now, this is where Roadrunner really takes its medium seriously. Unlike Sisyphus, Wile E. (and Phil Connors) does not even have the choice of suicide, so that he can refuse it. His world knows no death. Nor can he make a leap of faith, for he has nothing to hope for, except maintaining status quo. Thus, Wile E. can only take up the third option of living life for what it is. Wile E., like most Chuck Jones characters, knows that he is in a cartoon, that he has to carry on his chase act for ever and that there is no meaning to his life. So all he can do is keep chasing roadrunner – keep pushing the rock – in an attempt to keep both of them happy. Camus sums up the Sisyphus situation fittingly: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”. The same should be said about Wile E.
The Seventh Art 