December 18, 2011
Eva/Kevin
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the UK | Tags: Lynne Ramsay, Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin |[6] Comments
December 11, 2011
Super Scenes #13
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Italy, Super Scenes | Tags: Lucio Fulci, Zombi 2, Zombie, Zombie vs Shark |[3] Comments
A crew of four in search of an island halts in the middle of the sea to check its course. One of the two women gets off the boat for a quick swim. She spots a shark and runs for cover, only to encounter a zombie (under the sea!). She evades them both to get back on the boat and, in the process, ends up pitting the two man-eaters against each other. We have here, cinema reduced to a scientific method. We identify with the woman in the scene (not just because we empathize with her and want her saved, but also because the rewards of horror are sweetest when delayed) and are hence hostile towards both the shark and the zombie. Our emotional investment is the scene comes to an end once the woman gets out of the water and this ensuing fight becomes a pure spectacle to be relished from a safe distance, without taking sides. (This configuration is a regular in horror movies, where the threat is frequently non-thinking, neutral). The woman becomes a catalyst and makes possible reaction between elements otherwise inert and immiscible, a stimulus galvanizing a stable system into instability, a intermediary algebraic variable to be added and subtracted to an equation to make solution easier. Genre cinema at its exploitative best.
December 4, 2011
Ellipsis #51
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of China, Cinema of France, Ellipsis | Tags: Jiabiangou, Jiabiangou Labour Camp, The Ditch, Wang Bing |[2] Comments
Jiabiangou (2010) (The Ditch)
Wang Bing
Mandarin
Wang Bing’s The Ditch (2010), the filmmaker’s first full-length fictional feature, is a recreation of Jiabiangou Labour Camp located in the Gobi desert, where prisoners accused of belonging to the Right were sent in order to be “re-educated” through hard labour. We see prisoners being brutalized, living continuously in starvation and in pathetic trenches. We see them surviving on small critters, regurgitated food particles and even buried corpses. There are two kinds of landscapes that they inhabit – the seemingly-infinite plains of the desert where they toil during the day time and the cramped and under-lit trenches that they take refuge during the night – both of which Wang shoots characteristically in digital video on Steadicam and in long shots. The result has the hangover of Wang’s documentary features and each scene comes across less like illusionary fiction and more like the recording of a performance. The acting, likewise, is perched between the emotive and the expressionless. Consequently, Wang’s foray into the grammar of conventional fictional cinema – the occasional shot-reverse shot and close-ups – sticks out as high relief. No doubt, like Brutality Factory (2007), his first stab at fiction, he’s dealing with thin material here that concerns itself more with the need to remember than with the necessity of analytically dealing with history. This approach – the raison d’être of his best non-fiction works – reveals itself as a substitute for straightforward documentation and intentionally swaps prison dynamics for a survival sketch. However, there is one ironic detail that Wang seems to be arriving at here: that Mao’s re-education program at the camp for purported Rightist subversives only teaches them one thing: Every man for himself.
November 26, 2011
The Scarves Of Grey Gardens
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA | Tags: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Edith Bouvier Beale, Edith Ewing Bouvier, Ellen Hovde, Grey Gardens, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke, The Beales, The Maysles Brothers |[6] Comments
November 19, 2011
Book Nook: Camera Lucida
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Review | Tags: Barthes and Cinema., Camera Lucida, Camera Lucida book review, Camera Lucida review, Roland Barthes, Winter Garden Photograph |[7] Comments
Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes (Translated by Richard Howard)
Vintage Books, 1993
At first glance, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980/1981) appears to be the sort of material the author of Mythologies (1957/1972) will blow a hole through. Part a study of the nature of photographs, part a work of commemoration of the author’s mother, Barthes’s final book hovers frighteningly close to what, in his early years, he had deemed to be an act of bourgeois mythmaking: stripping a decidedly historical phenomenon of its sociopolitical traces and presenting it as an undisputable truth, a ‘nature’, a human essence. True, Camera Lucida finds Barthes’s interest turning away from the historicity of photography to its metaphysics, from the question of how a photograph signifies to what it represents, from a near-scientific system of classifying images to unwieldy pseudo-theory of the photograph, from the idea of signifier and signified to the material referent itself. (This sharply defined arc, in fact, follows closely the trajectory taken by critical theory itself.) Barthes himself makes no effort to underplay this recantation (“…a desperate resistance to any reductive system”) and keeps undermining any approach that could lead to the formation of a totalizing framework like the one proposed in that early book of his.
Camera Lucida, nevertheless, also underscores a significant attitude that illustrates an unassailable continuity between these two books – a continuity that’s most characteristic of Barthes’s thought: a vehement resistance to ‘Naming’. Both Mythologies (“[Astrology] serves to exorcize the real by naming it”) and Camera Lucida (“What I can name cannot really prick me”) work against a culture in which tends to naturalize ideas – dominant and dissenting – and provide immunity against possible threat by naming it and defining its bounds. The crucial difference, however, is that the Barthes of Mythologies, if not a full-fledged, had his sympathies overtly aligned with the Left, whereas in the latter book, written over two decades later, he seems to be holding onto an ideological zero point. Like many critics who are disillusioned by the rigidity of narratives of the Left and the Right and their daunting tendency to pigeonhole people and ideas into stable, tractable categories, Barthes, here, seeks to find the ground for a kind of writing that can not be assimilated, so to speak, by either of these ideologies.
Graham Allen, in his excellent introduction to Barthes’s works, points out that Barthes found the ideal neutral point in the figure of his own body – a site that scandalizes both the rational Left with its individualist inwardness and the moralist Right with its hedonist underpinning. Camera Lucida, perhaps also a result of his mother’s passing and his subsequent mourning, is rife with bodily terms (‘wound’, ‘laceration’ etc.) that are used not only in the evocative passages of the book, but also in association with the various theoretical terms presented. Further, Barthes extends this essential neutrality of the body to the photograph (another commonality between them being the dread of death that both invoke instantly), which, according to him, retains its wholeness, eluding the grasp of dominant forces and ultimately remaining irreducible. For him, the photograph perpetually resists mechanisms that attempt to pin down its meaning and it is in this non-thinking, non-partisan, non-determined nature (“indifferent”, “impotent with regard to general ideas”, “image without code”) of the image that its power rests.
The central theoretical framework of the book is grounded in a dichotomy between what Barthes calls the studium of a photograph –all its theorizable aspects the engagement with which necessitates the involvement of external baggage such as the observer’s political and historical awareness – and its punctum – that unaccountable, non-conscious, partly-accidental detail or feature – a point of reversibility of text, a Derridean supplement – that defies classification and sets the meaning of the photograph into play. The studium, we are told, is that which cries out to be read and around which discourses are constructed while the punctum remains invisible to precisely these forces. The latter, it appears, keeps changing shape, never becoming a concept or following what could be called an objective pattern across various photographs. Barthes’s own definition of the punctum keeps assuming various forms (“shock”, “idle gesture”, “undevelopable”, “cries out in silence” etc.), abandoning its history and avoiding coagulating into anything might be called a theory. What Barthes leaves, as a result, is the trace of a method, instead of a fleshed-out hermeneutic system, so that the readers never latch onto it, but merely discover newer ways of engaging with the photograph,
In the second part – a split among many others – of the book, Barthes moves from a description of the punctum as a material detail in the referent of the photograph – a definition that could be assimilated into the studium by artful photographers no doubt – to one that is based on an experience of time. His reading of the photograph as an “image which produces Death while trying to preserve life” plants him firmly in the tradition of image-theorists like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer (“Seemingly ripped from death, in reality [the photographed present] has succumbed to it]”). Andre Bazin famously traced photography’s roots to Egyptian mummification process and hence to a desire to transcend mortality and preserve one’s image for eternity. Barthes, in contrast, suggests that in the photograph’s assurance that what it represents is real and has been there before the camera in flesh and blood (unlike painted objects) only invokes utter dread, a sense of “double loss” where the beholder is made aware that not only is the person she is looking at already dead now, but that he is going to die some time after the development of this photograph – a moment that the photograph directly channels. In Eduardo Cadava’s words: “memories of a mourning yet to come”. (One is reminded of Scottie’s predicament when he sees Judy after his first loss in Vertigo (1957); Barthes himself calls this experience a “vertigo of time”.)
In itself, the central idea here is not entirely unheard of. Benjamin (a writer who deeply shares Barthes’s fascination with the visual) works towards a similar relationship in his Little History of Photography (1931, “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”) and Barthes himself touches upon similar notions in his earlier essay on Eisenstein. But Camera Lucida presents it in so many seemingly tautological forms, aided in no small part by the book’s structure (a string of minor theses), which prompt the reader keep shifting perspectives, to undo and redo the mental image of the ideas the book presents. In a way, then, the book itself enacts the duality that it proposes, continuously unsettling its model of the photograph – the studia that most books are – with specific, eccentric punctum-like inflections on the text.
Camera Lucida is self-consciously grounded in on a number of such contradictory thrusts: Science and sentimentality, phenomenology and method (“I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own”), the empirical and the theoretical, the universal and the ungeneralizable, For Barthes, such apparent paradoxes – these twin movements – are not indicators of the fallibility of his approach. Rather, it is a gesture in a direction opposite to the one taken by reductive, structuralist approaches. Instead of applying a universal rule to the specific and deeming the latter a mere variation, Barthes’s approach takes the specific – the present, the undeniable – as the starting point and extrapolates the result for every other instance in the world (“…to extend this individuality to a science of the subject”, to achieve “the impossible science of the unique being”). What he achieves by taking this almost anti-scientific route is a strong resistance to reduction of the individual – in this case, his mother. Barthes treads the precarious line between the necessity to remember his mother and the threat of his mother becoming Mother, a universal truth. (That he does not supply us with the crucial Winter Garden photograph of his mother indicates a refusal to generalize the specific). Camera Lucida is a work that conceals its radiant center, allowing us to only sense its emanations and forces us to become the center of our own image-theories. As Barthes puts it:
I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?
Note: There is surely something to be said about the way Barthes examines photography in opposition to cinema. For instance, his insistence that there is no possibility of a punctum in cinematic imagery, thanks to the forward-thrust of montage. I think I disagree. Going by what I understand when Barthes speaks of it, I would say that the punctum – the wounding arrow that catches one off-guard, the spark of contingency – manifests itself in various shapes and sizes in cinema. See Daniel Kasman’s writings, for instance, for the ways one can find oneself moving away from the zone of general interest – the area where films consciously work – into a field of personal commitment – that point where, perhaps, cinema betrays its photographic roots.
November 6, 2011
Ellipsis #50
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of France, Ellipsis | Tags: Abdellatif Kechiche, Black Venus, Venus Noire, Yahima Torres |1 Comment
Vénus Noire (2010) (Black Venus)
Abdellatif Kechiche
French/Afrikaans/English
Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (2010) opens with a scene set in the Royal Academy of Medicine, Paris during the year 1815, in which we see a group of biologists studying the preserved cadaver of an African woman. We learn that she was Saartjes Baartman (Yahima Torres, in a no-holds-barred, one-of-a-kind performance), a South Arican native who migrated to London (and, later, Paris) and allowed herself to be displayed by her employer as a savage in front of curious, paying customers. We see the ruthless physical and racial harassment – not entirely without her consent – that she undergoes. We also see that her status as an ethnic outsider cuts across class (the rich libertines of Paris as well as the proles of London throng to see her) and gender (there are, in fact, more women than men during these shows) divides. Structured as a series of exhibitions – classroom lectures, freak shows, courtroom hearings, party entertainment – Black Venus chiefly concerns itself with the process of comprehending, through the acts of seeing, hearing and touching. Saartjes becomes something of a litmus test for each set of audience, which affirms its own identity and view of the world though her radical ‘otherness’. (That these events take place just after the French Revolution produces interesting implications). During the five years she spends in Europe, Saartjes finds herself increasingly objectified (from a savage, to an exotic body, to an amalgam of unusual body parts) and mystified (that is, she becomes a sum of perceptions). Although overlong and overdetermined, Black Venus weaves a bracing film out of a devastating life story, a testament of whose power is the epilogue of the film, where we see Saartjes’ remains being returned by the French government to South Africa for her final rites.
(Image Courtesy: Slant Magazine)
October 29, 2011
“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.”
– Rumi
October 23, 2011
Short Films #13
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Hollywood, Short Films | Tags: Chuck Workman, Precious Images |[6] Comments
Precious Images (1989)
Chuck Workman
USA
8 Min.
Chuck Workman’s Precious Images (1989), commissioned by the Director’s Guild of America at the unofficial centenary of cinema, is made of hundreds of shot fragments collected from numerous Hollywood titles – mostly highly popular – each of which, generally, lasts for not more than half of a second. If one can get past obvious objections about a centenary film which is made of films from just one film industry and which includes works that had vehemently announced their breakup from it, Precious Images comes across as an effective if not exactly exhilarating tribute to classic Hollywood cinema. Workman assembles his material more on intuition than theory and the film moves from one genre to another, less through their external generic classification and more through the emotional impression the selected shots create. As a result, films from genres such as thriller and horror reside with each other while romance and comedy go hand in hand. Furthermore, Workman cuts his films like the finest of Hollywood films do: manipulative enough to guide our attention from one shot to another and tasteful enough to restrain from overkill. Also typically Hollywood is the way the film employs music and sound bites, mostly culled from iconic film scores, to pull together the disintegrated structure of the film. Putting aside the lingering feeling that this is Hollywood patting its own back for everything that it’s done, Precious Images makes for a great spot-the-movie game.
By a bizarre coincidence, I came across this movie the same day I saw Joel Bocko’s uber-geeky montage that spans 60 years of world cinema. Joel’s vastly superior film plays out like the output of a malfunctioning super-projector in its final minute of operation. Essential viewing, below.
October 16, 2011
Ellipsis #49
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Ellipsis | Tags: Kevin Macdonald, Life in a Day |[6] Comments
Life In A Day (2011)
Various
Various
Ridley and Tony Scott’s production house Scott Free, in association with LG and YouTube, invited users from around the world to submit footage of their lives shot on July 24, 2010 as a part of a socio-cinematic experiment. Out of the 4800 hours of video gathered, chief director Kevin Macdonald and co. wove this exhilarating 90-minute ride, Life in a Day, which, on its surface takes us through one day in the life of people from around the world. If Dziga Vertov attempted to sketch a portrait of a pulsating city as seen through the Kino-Eye over a day and Medvedkin had Soviet peasants shoot their own lives, edited the obtained footage in his Cine-Train and played it back to them, Life in a Day combines both these ideas and realizes them in a post-globalized cultural-economic climate – a time where the omnipresence of branded consumer products is matched by the ubiquity of low-cost image-making instruments. An endless play of presence and absence, lack and excess, similarity and difference, the homogenous and the un-normalizable and the empowered and the marginalized, Macdonald’s virtually inexhaustible film is a snapshot of planet earth in all its glory, stupidity and complexity. So much film theory has sprung up since Vertov et al made their films and what is of interest is not only the relationship between individual shots, but also the dense cultural content within each one of them that enriches our response manifold. Sporadically erratic and miscalculated, Life in a Day nevertheless achieves the remarkable feat of synthesizing a coherent, mesmerizing and, indeed, philosophically ambitious film from the very elements that have become the antithesis of these traits. What appears as a paean to narcissism to some commentators seems to me as a heightened awareness of one’s own existence. The act of photographing oneself – on a particular day and for a particular purpose – prompts one to be continuously conscious of the passing of time and the finitude of experience. One frustrated lady sums it up in the film’s final line: “Today, even though nothing great happened, tonight, I feel as if something great happened.”
October 9, 2011
Of Horse And Man
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of Hungary, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the USA, Review | Tags: Ágnes Hranitzky, Béla Tarr, Erika Bok, Fred Keleman, Friedrick Nietzsche, Janos Derzsi, László Krasznahorkai, Mihály Kormos, Mihály Vig, Risci, The Turin Horse, The Turin Horse film review, The Turin Horse movie review, The Turin Horse review |[11] Comments
The Turin Horse
(Image Courtesy: MottoMagazinBlog)
There are 30 shots in all in Hungarian couple Béla Tarr’s and Ágnes Hranitzky’s The Turin Horse (2011), 29 of which involve a moving camera and most of which are elaborately choreographed amalgam of camera movements. The first and possibly the most exhilarating shot of the film is a compounded crane and tracking shot in which we are presented with a horse cart and its driver. The dolly tracks at the pace of the cart and its craning arm films the cart primarily from two directions perpendicular to each other: a view lateral to the line of action and a view of the horse head-on and up close. (This combination of lateral and head-on angles of the camera will form a major visual motif in the film.) We see the horse pushing hard against the gale, with its mane fluttering backward. We see the man, equally haggard, with his hair swept back by the wind like the mane. We also note that, by himself, the man is static while the horse is the one moving forward and taking him along – a minor detail but also an illustration of the film’s chief theme. The equivalence between the horse and its driver becomes even more pointed as the film cuts to the second shot, where we see the man – now on foot – pulling the horse into the stable (also reiterated in shot no.22 where the man’s daughter does the pulling). After the second shot, the film shifts indoors, where the major part of the film unfolds.
Inside, we follow the man, Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzsi), and his daughter (Erika Bok, who plays a counterpoint of sorts to the character she played 17 years ago in Satantango (1994)) as they go about doing their daily work for 6 consecutive days: she gets up first, wears the countless number of clothes hanging on the wall, adds firewood to the hearth, fetches water from the well, dresses up the man, who has a paralyzed right hand, and boils the potatoes so that they can have lunch. Much of the action involves, as does the latest Dardennes feature, closing and opening of doors, necessitated by the beastly windstorm that plagues the outdoors. Their house is sparse and functionally furnished. Not only are the walls entirely unadorned, but the coating is coming off. The man seems to be a cobbler and he, possibly, sells the belts he makes in the town. The family does not seem to particularly religious. It does not have appear to any neighbours or visitors, save for the man (Mihály Kormos) who comes to their house to get his keg of country liquor filled, and the band of gypsies which arrives at their well for water, only to be shooed off by the old man.
The day-to-day events repeat over and over, of course, but Tarr (Please rest assured that I’m not forgetting the contribution of Hranitzky here and elsewhere) and regular DoP Fred Keleman photograph them from different setups each day, trying out various possible configurations and presentations and as if illustrating the Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence that informs the structuring of the film. The effect of ritualization and repetition of everyday events with religiosity is bolstered by Mihaly Vig’s characteristically organ-laden cyclical soundtrack (reminiscent of the thematically apt Que Sera Sera of Almanac of Fall (1985)) that meets its counterpoint only in the boisterousness of the winds that sweep the plain. Keleman and Tarr light and shoot the interior of the house so painstakingly and evocatively, that even commonplace objects achieve a throbbing vitality of their own. They often light overhead, as they regularly do, imparting a luminous visual profile to the characters, who now seem like spectres haunting this dilapidated house. Unusually, there are also few instances of a voice over, which is new for Tarr, which acts as like the voice of an anti-God looking over the man and his daughter during the course of the film and their eventual fall.
It soon appears as though the horse (Risci) is neither at the centre of the film’s lean narrative nor at the focus of its apparent ideas. Indeed, it simply looms in the background like an unwelcome guest or an illness that is preventing the old man from riding into town to do business. However, actually, the animal not only provides a stark thematic contrast to the human characters of the film, it is at the very foundation of its metaphysics. The film opens with a hearsay anecdote about Friedrich Nietzsche. Apparently, in January 1889, when the philosopher was in Turin, he witnessed a cart driver flogging his recalcitrant horse. Nietzsche is said to have stopped him in haste and leapt on to the cart, embraced the horse and cried profusely. It is also said that this was the day after which he started losing control of his mental faculties. Of course, at the outset, what Nietzsche felt was simple empathy for a tormented creature, like any kind person would have. But because the person we are talking about is Nietzsche, the event holds a very special implication. What he was going through was also a sudden experience of intersubjectivity and, as importantly, the awareness of its existence.
A small detour to Dostoyevsky, a writer Nietzsche deeply admired, would be instructive here. In Crime and Punishment (1865), protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov, a bona-fide Nietzschean character, is haunted by dreams of a horse being cudgeled to death for the entertainment of those around it. It is, in addition, an expression of the owner’s power over and possession of it. Rodion, who believes that certain superior individuals have the right to disregard law and conventional morality if they feel that they are doing so for a greater good, discovers here the fallacy of his worldview. Like Nietzsche, he proposes a philosophy of guilt predicated on the effect of a “crime” on the conscience of the actor and not on the acted upon. But what this idea assumes is that moral consciousness of a person is a given, fully-formed whole, independent of other consciousnesses. Rodion realizes, in this nightmare, the toxicity of appointing oneself a superordinate being, especially when the relationship is that of master and slave, owner and owned. Nietzsche, in a classic case of life is imitating art, faces the same situation at Turin. His tears are an acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of all consciousnesses, an equivalence of each one of them.
The opening text of The Turin Horse tells us that we know what happened to Nietzsche after the incident but not the horse. The film’s recognition of the horse as a being as important as Nietzsche begins right there. The first image we see is that of a mare trotting against heavy wind, very close to the screen, dominating the frame – as if the camera is embracing it – suggesting its centrality to the film’s ideas. (Actually, we are never told that this animal is the same as the one Nietzsche wept for. The cut from the anecdote to the horse prompts us to assume that. This is only the first instance of lack of specificity that pervades the film.) The Turin Horse treats the horse as a fully-formed consciousness in itself – as vital as, if not more, its human counterparts – capable of understanding the world and, more crucially, reacting to it. The two human characters at the centre of the film do recognize the doom that surrounds them, but do not seem to do anything to change or respond to it. On the other hand, it is their horse that protests the cruelty of its master and offers resistance to the decay all around by refusing to eat or work. In other words, the mare seems to possess a higher degree of self-awareness than its human owners. In one shot, the camera lingers on the horse long after the humans have left the scene, with the same solemnity that it displayed towards the people in the film. It is not some overblown anthropomorphism that we are dealing with here. It is a radical decentering of humanity as the locus of consciousness.
This tendency to displace humans as the centre of the universe also furthers Tarr’s and frequent collaborator László Krasznahorkai’s long-standing anti-Biblical programme. If, with the ending of Satantango and the upshot of the Nietzschean Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), the writer-director pair tried to overturn the Scripture, here they take on the Creation narrative itself. Divided into six days, which no doubt serve to echo the six days of the creation of earth, The Turin Horse chronicles in detail the progressive disintegration of the world back to nothingness before time. In this anti-Genesis-narrative, neither is man created in the image of God (one that’s not dead, that is), nor are beasts inferior beings to be tamed and controlled by man. (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.“) In Tarr’s and Krasznahorkai’s Scripture, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate night from day, the seasons from each other. (There are only two seasons in the film’s world – windy and otherwise). Beings, instead of being fruitful and multiplying, become scarcer and scarcer. Earth returns to the formless void – the void that we witness in the evocative last shot – that it was at the Beginning. One imagines that the film would agree with Genesis on the seventh day: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them”.
[The Turin Horse (2011) Trailer]
Commentators have noted the striking silent film-like appearance of The Turin Horse. Indeed, Tarr, who has never been as metafilmic, parallels the anti-Creation narrative with a similar trajectory on the cinematic plane. A number of sub-shots are presented with the set and character in full view, arranged against a flat background and shot head-on with the décor in parallel to the image plane, just like a silent movie. Many of the shots are parenthesized by vertical or horizontal bars of film grain that wipe across the screen. Father and daughter, themselves, resemble the monstrously mismatched prospectors of The Gold Rush (1925), eating a non-meal every day and the smaller one always drawing the shorter straw. This is compounded by the fact that the film is set in 1889, just about the time cinema came into being. Moreover, the two interruptions that disturb the routine of the silent family are marked by excessive talk and cacophony. The film begins with pure movement of cinema and ends in absolute stasis of photography. (It is telling, in this respect, that the only completely still shot of the film is the last one.) It is as though cinema, like the film’s world, has regressed into non-existence, from broad daylight to total darkness.
Judge him, but this affinity for depicting disintegration to rubble has permeated Béla Tarr’s filmography. In a way, each of his film is a document of structural destruction: of urban spaces (Family Nest, 1979), of the modern family (Prefab People, 1982), of society (Almanac of Fall, 1985), of political machinery (Satantango, 1994), of civility (Damnation, 1988) and of civilization (Prologue, 2004). The Turin Horse takes the logic further and locates itself at the probable end of humanity itself. If Tarr’s latest work appears to lack the analytical rigour or satirical edge of his previous films, it is because it distills key ideas of these earlier films into a highly abstract conceptual examination devoid of urgency and pointedness. Looking at the director’s oeuvre, one can see this coming. Tarr started with very topical, socially critical films made in vérité aesthetic. Realizing that surface realism could only get him this far, he took a stylistic as well as epistemological break with Almanac of Fall, after which, instead of recording reality as it appears, he dealt with increasingly abstracted forms removed from everyday experience and a philosophy that replaced materialism with metaphysics.
Such departicularization is the modus operandi of The Turin Horse. The film systematically removes any trace of specificity from within it and builds an extremely generic framework that one can liken to the confident broad strokes of a paintbrush. Such sucking away of particulars would have been fatal in a film with concrete political ambition. But The Turin Horse, in contrast, works in a philosophical and cinematic realm so rarified that such distillation seems tailor made for it. Beyond the very specific opening story (Who: Friedrich Nietzsche; Where: Door No. 6, Via Carlo Alberto, Turin; When: January 3rd, 1889), we are not sure about any narrative detail. The place could be Turin, or not. The year could be 1889, or not. It could be autumn, or not. The long monologue that the first visitor delivers is what Pauline Kael would call a Christmas tree speech: you can hang all your allegories on it. What is the threat he is talking about? Why is the town ruined? Who are “they”? We don’t get any answer. If, at all, Tarr makes another film and intends to take the idea further, he’s, in all possibility, going to find himself in the realm of pure avant-garde, with nothing concrete to hold on to except the truth of photography.
Undoubtedly, Tarr is as cynical as filmmakers can get. His cynicism, like Kubrick’s, is the cynicism of great art, to borrow a sentence from Rivette. But with The Turin Horse, Tarr seems to have punched through to the zone beyond. We have, here, entered the realm of the absurd, where cynicism itself is rendered impotent. In this film, doom is a given, inevitable. Instead of charting people’s downward spiral into the abyss as in the previous films, Tarr and team observe with resignation the insularity of people from their situation. Foreboding gives way to fatalism, cynicism to amusement. Robert Koehler correctly compares the film to the works of Samuel Beckett and The Turin Horse is a veritable adaptation of Waiting for Godot (1953). Right from the lone tree on hill top, through the dilemmas of vegetable eating, the sudden logorrhea of a stranger, the perpetually cyclical nature of events, to the ritualization of actions, especially the changing of apparels, Tarr’s incomplete tragicomedy in 30 shots echoes Beckett’s incomplete tragicomedy in two acts. Like Beckett’s bickering pair, or Buñuel’s angels, father and daughter find themselves unable to leave the house for some reason. And like Vladmir and Estragon, or Pinky and Brain (“Tomorrow we’ll try again”), the two– stuck in their house for eternity with only each other to stand witness for their existence – sit by the window everyday gazing at, or waiting for, a Godot that could be anything ranging from revolution to death.
But there are two key cinematic predecessors to The Turin Horse as well. The first of them, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1976), lends Tarr’s film its finely spiral structure, in which a continuous process of disintegration is made palpable by minute changes in what appear to be unchangeable routines. Like in Jeanne Dielman, another film with an inclination for culinary detailing, the aquarium-like world of the characters is pierced by changes in the outside world, leading to their downfall. Then there is Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Still Life (1974) with which The Turin Horse not only shares its strong comic undercurrent, but also the idea of rendering chronology and the passing of time irrelevant by making it go in loops; the eternal return if you will. But, unlike the makers of these two films, Tarr filters his film from any direct comment on contemporary social organization. (Akerman and Saless, on the other hand, are keenly focused on the issue of urban and rural alienation). But what these films, most critically, share is an acute eye for everyday details, for minor behavioral and physical variations and an unshakeable faith on inescapable specificity of the photographic image.
Rating: 
The Seventh Art 