Dear Friends,

It's been so long since there was a post on this board, I
almost forgot it existed!

In hopes of bringing some much-needed emails to my in-box,
I've placed a draft of an essay of mine in the 'files' section
of our Yahoo page.  It's the beginnings of a large-scale
argument about Cornell's great film, _Rose Hobart_.  If the
spirit moves any of you, I would appreciate your comments, and
especially your critiques of what I have to say.  It's only a
draft, and my ideas are still warm and ductile, so I'm
enthusiastic about the possibility I might provoke some of you
to vehemently disagree with what I've written.

(If you don't feel like slogging through my unpolished prose,
no hard feelings.)

Please don't share the essay with anyone outside the group
without my permission, OK?  I'm happy to discuss it here in
the open, of course, with the knowledge that all FilmArt
messages are publicly accessible.

Yours,

Kian
-----
Peculiar Marks are the Only Merit.
    -Blake on Reynolds

Thanks to Doc Film at the University of Chicago for showing Hou
Hsiao-Hsien's great great "Millennium Mambo."

Something I have been reminded of in recent years, in part through my
former participation in the group a_film_by,
is the extent to which many or most auteurists, rather than being open
to any possible use of cinema, and any possible worldview, in fact
adhere to a particular brand of humanism. A film is respected for
preserving some Bazinian sense of "reality," and for reflecting warmth
and "generosity" toward its characters. A film that appears, even
superficially, to regard its characters with some degree of dislike or
contempt is somehow judged inferior. What many auteurists look for is
warm, wonderful, human dramas in which an interesting and engaging story
is enhanced by fine acting and sensitive direction. This is a particular
view of the value of human beings and human emotions, one that I don't
even necessarily agree with. Nor do I think of empathetic (or, one might
say, "escapist") involvement with characters and stories is necessarily
in and of itself a good thing.

I have always been opposed to the imposition of any particular bias or
taste on cinema. What makes a film great is not whether one agrees with
its vision. In my view, this perspective is ultimately a narcissistic
one, looking for art to mirror the self, and one that disregards the
real power of art to imbue an artist's particular vision with "truth." A
major point of art to is to allow us to see visions other than one's own.

All of this leads me to Hou's "Millennium Mambo," which can hardly be
said to show warmth and generosity toward its characters. No, it doesn't
treat them with contempt either. But what seemed most amazing to me
about this film is the way the particular and unique qualities of Hou's
close, cramped spaces (which includes snow surrounding a road outdoors)
undercut our "natural" perceptions of characters as complex beings with
autonomous emotional lives, seemingly rendering the humanist notions of
the individual and of individual freedom irrelevant. It is as if for Hou
the turn of the millennium also announces the death of the self, at
least in the old sense. Humans are not spirits free to make wise
decisions or tragic cases when they make poor ones; we are shadows,
encased by culture and by thumping music. This is not a Langian trap,
one that allows for some nobility (as in Bannion's quest in "The Big
Heat"), but a more postmodern one.

But there's more. Hou's cramped spaces don't simply entrap; they also
expand. That's perhaps the most amazing and beautiful effect of the
film, the way that small areas seem to lead outward, sprawling,
spreading, connecting to everything else as if making a continuous
ether, creating a vastness that itself prevents characters from becoming
focal points. Indeed, neither "entrap" nor "expand" are especially
useful concepts here.

I thought of Dreyer, and I thought of Mizoguchi, as being vaguely
related, but in those more humanist filmmakers, characters' bodies can
at times be emotional and moral loci (the close-up of the father
speaking to his young son just before departure in "Sansho Dayu";
O'Haru's receding shadow at the end of "The Life of O'Haru"), however
qualified. Not so in Hou. His characters are "mere" points of light
within a much larger context in which "even" an out of focus background
area seems of equal importance. In fact, I can recall no film that uses
those out of focus backgrounds that result from certain kinds of tight
closeups so actively, so poetically. But it's not just the
"backgrounds." What I'm trying to get at with "expand" is a kind of
"spreading" effect in which every object that seems as if it might be a
point of interest seems connected to every other part of a frame in a
way that spreads "defuses" the power of any one point throughout the
whole. Individual actions and feelings and quests are thus curiously
devalued, and the film's elegiac feeling seems to be in part an
acknowledgement of that.

"Humanist" values are hinted at only in the narration, and in the film's
two times - which imply a loss of the autonomous self.

Fred Camper

I should add that when I say "spiritual" I do not at all mean
to suggest that there is a sense of the spiritual realm in the
world of the film. I refer more to a feeling of new
understanding or realization than one as potentially psychotic
as epiphany or revelation. It's just that this feeling is so
powerful and transporting that it makes one, especially
someone like me, an atheist with a strong affinity for much
that is Catholic, want to evoke the imagery of religious
experience. I am moved. We are moved, and I think de Toth like
many artists wishes to move us. Perhaps I shouldn't be ashamed
about what words I use, and I'm not really, but I do wish to
be clear here that this stems from no exaggeration of the
film. Rather I wish to capture the contradiction at the finale
between a sense of ecstasy and devastation.

edo

Fred,

Over the past two days since I posted this on Film Art, I've been
editing the same entry on my blog. So for some elaboration and
clarification of my ideas I direct you to it:

http://asperfectasitcanbe.blogspot.com/

It's a paragraph or so longer, and I've changed the words. Like you, I
also reference the title "none shall escape", though I haven't seen
the film yet. I hope someday Doc will be able to show it.

I agree wholeheartedly with your analogy of the film to "a global ice
palace" or a "frozen jigsaw puzzle". Note that at the end of my notes
I put quotes around " 'better' direction". Here, I'm trying to
emphasize through irony that when Gene, Bruhn, and Starrett make their
decision to lead the band into the wild they may be making a better
decision for the farmers, but they are also condemning themselves and
others to death. Our choices, even the best of them, bear heavy
consequences in this universe. In this sense, I think freedom in de
Toth is about responsibility to the self. Starrett comes to realize,
and by his example so do we, that one has agency only over oneself,
that one is free only in terms of the power of individual choice.
Faced with this, he decides to sacrifice himself not for the
townspeople or for some noble ideal of community, as might happen in
Ford, but for the sake of his own moral integrity. It's all about the
preservation of self, I think. This is what we are driven to in a
world of rock, snow, and timber. So yes, I agree that de Toth's
universe eliminates the possibility of the forms of community we find
in Ford or Minnelli or Hawks (haven't seen enough Cukor to discuss this).

To answer your more general question as to my position on the
universal in art - you didn't put it that way specifically, but I
think this is generally the problem with auteurists, or any kind of
critic for that matter, who reduce the question to character - I think
this notion of 'character' in cinema operates, as you once put it on
a_film_by, as 'example' for us, though maybe 'surrogate' is an even
better term. Character stands in for spectator, and their adventures
through space become our own - the most essential illustration of
which is any Rossellini film, which is to say that in Rossellini's
cinema this idea is very central to what he's trying to accomplish. At
the same time, they are 'objects' within a world of objects that we
are looking at - the best instances here being Sirk with his
anti-materialism or Hitchcock with his fetishism, or Mizoguchi or
Minnelli with their aesthete/connoisseur sensibilities. Again, this is
to use your terminology. If I were to use my own, I'd cop from writing
on painting or sculpture and speak of 'figures', 'bodies', or 'forms'.
Of course, in narrative cinema, it is typically the human form that is
at issue. Gallagher has analogized cinema post-Murnau to "sculpture in
motion", and where the narrative cinema is concerned I think that
might be the best way to put it.

Finally, as to how the film's ending fits into my scheme, I try to
point out near the end of my notes, at least in the most recent
version on my blog, that in the end all we can do is "endure". We take
care of ourselves, cultivate the self, and in so doing try not to
bother anyone else. Generosity, mercy, pity, and even love - these do
exist in de Toth's world, but never in and of themselves, so that
Blaise stands by Bruhn during the operation out of genuine pity but is
only prompted to do so at all by the prospect of the bandits killing
everyone in the town. Also, Ernine falls in love with Gene, but during
the dance scene her manner suggests this is at least partly out of
fear and the desire for the sense of security and safety he ensures.
Thus, de Toth seems to acknowledge that ultimately there are things
like hope and freedom, but that these concepts are born only out of
our necessity to have ideals which we can lean on. People are always
going to be unreliable, no matter what, but if we have faith we can at
least convince ourselves and each other that that isn't true. Isn't
this wherein love consists? A mutual delusion.

So at the end, Starrett and Gene have managed to "endure" better than
the outlaws, by not deluding themselves. Starrett knew the risks and
yet he went anyway. In the end, it is almost a mystery as to how he
survives that midnight blizzard when the two bandits do not. The best
explanation is I think the "sadism" you mention in your own piece,
Fred. De Toth punishes the bandits for their sins. Starrett survives
on the one hand because he endures better than they, and on the other
because de Toth awards his nobility and purpose of self, just as
Captain Bruhn and Starrett do the same when they allow Gene a way out
by having him leave his horse to Tex.

The last scene is beautiful, one of the most overwhelming in all
cinema. It seems to embody this contradiction between de Toth's
universal law that 'none shall escape' and his truly felt affection
for Gene and Starrett who have grown so much over the course of the
film. Thus, I think those final pans across the town and the mountains
serve both to "exclude the possibility of human warmth" as you have
put it, but at the same time to carry us to a higher plateau of
consciousness. It's transcendent in the way that so much late fifties
Hollywood cinema is in its total authoritativeness. We have learned
something from the film, something about our innate human condition,
and so have the characters. Thus, there is a sense of spiritual
liberation, even if we still remain physically isolated and earthbound.

--- In FilmArt@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper <f@...> wrote:
>
> Edo,
>
> Thanks for some terrific comments on this tremendously great film, long
> a particular favorite of mine.
>
> I think you're largely right about the entrances. I would emphasize,
> though, things like your "That final word, 'murder,' hangs over
Helen as
> she walks toward the cabin," more than ideas about individual versus
> community and especially more than ideas about freedom. Sirk once said,
> "I believe that happiness exists, if only by virtue of the fact that it
> can be destroyed," and I would translate that into de Toth's
universe as
> "Freedom exists only by virtue of the fact that it can be destroyed --
> and is being destroyed at every moment." I don't think I'm really
> disagreeing with you here, as you seem to acknowledge this. The film's
> editing seems to me to fit characters together like the tightest of
> frozen jigsaw puzzles, each becoming a trap that ensnares the others,
> as Jack Bruhn serves as a trap for the other outlaws when he rescues
the
> town's women from their entrapping clutches at the dance, to take a
> minor example. The film seems to me more like a global ice palace
than a
> complexly articulated representation of varieties of human
> relationships. For that one might look to Hawks or Ford or Cukor or
> Minnelli, even though each also overlays all characters with their own
> visions. Though others won't always agree with me about this, I tend to
> see great filmmakers, including great Hollywood filmmakers, as having a
> "total vision" that should not be reduced, as some auteurists do,
and as
> I all too often have done in my own writing in the interest of
> accessibility, as primarily articulating the specifics of character
> relationships within scenes, even though many or most great Hollywood
> filmmakers do do that too. It sounds like you partly or mostly agree
> with me here, actually (and I'd be curious about your thoughts on this
> in general), in that you describe scenes and cuts in terms of the way
> they serve de Toth's overall expression.
>
> My own favorite "entrance" of the film is perhaps the one that
occurs at
> the opening, when the outlaws brutally burst into the bar, disrupting
> the complications of a "Ramrod" like plot that seems to be unfolding
> with the much more totally despairing prison they impose. Indeed, if I
> had my choice of a program to introduce de Toth, it would be those two
> films, "Ramrod" first of course.
>
> For me, the opening and closing pans that emphasize what you call a
> "circular plateau" form the film's ultimate encirclement, so to speak.
>
> The scene you call pivotal, and the line in it you cite, I have always
> found immensely moving. I think the full line (and you or others could
> check this on DVD) of Bruhn's is something like, "I know what I'm
doing,
> but what about you? What's your reason for wanting to die." (Pause) "I
> guess every fool has his reasons." So they head off into the hopeless
> snow, knowing, unlike the men, that there is no way out, that "none
> shall escape" (to quote the title of an early and great de Toth.) But
> actually, that isn't quite what happens, and the young man's final
entry
> indoors fits somewhere into your scheme, though I'm not sure exactly
> how, as does of course the reflection on the door window as it closes.
>
> Fred Camper
>

Edo,

Thanks for some terrific comments on this tremendously great film, long
a particular favorite of mine.

I think you're largely right about the entrances. I would emphasize,
though, things like your "That final word, 'murder,' hangs over Helen as
she walks toward the cabin," more than ideas about individual versus
community and especially more than ideas about freedom. Sirk once said,
"I believe that happiness exists, if only by virtue of the fact that it
can be destroyed," and I would translate that into de Toth's universe as
"Freedom exists only by virtue of the fact that it can be destroyed --
and is being destroyed at every moment." I don't think I'm really
disagreeing with you here, as you seem to acknowledge this. The film's
editing seems to me to fit characters together like the tightest of
frozen jigsaw puzzles, each becoming a trap that ensnares the others,
as Jack Bruhn serves as a trap for the other outlaws when he rescues the
town's women from their entrapping clutches at the dance, to take a
minor example. The film seems to me more like a global ice palace than a
complexly articulated representation of varieties of human
relationships. For that one might look to Hawks or Ford or Cukor or
Minnelli, even though each also overlays all characters with their own
visions. Though others won't always agree with me about this, I tend to
see great filmmakers, including great Hollywood filmmakers, as having a
"total vision" that should not be reduced, as some auteurists do, and as
I all too often have done in my own writing in the interest of
accessibility, as primarily articulating the specifics of character
relationships within scenes, even though many or most great Hollywood
filmmakers do do that too. It sounds like you partly or mostly agree
with me here, actually (and I'd be curious about your thoughts on this
in general), in that you describe scenes and cuts in terms of the way
they serve de Toth's overall expression.

My own favorite "entrance" of the film is perhaps the one that occurs at
the opening, when the outlaws brutally burst into the bar, disrupting
the complications of a "Ramrod" like plot that seems to be unfolding
with the much more totally despairing prison they impose. Indeed, if I
had my choice of a program to introduce de Toth, it would be those two
films, "Ramrod" first of course.

For me, the opening and closing pans that emphasize what you call a
"circular plateau" form the film's ultimate encirclement, so to speak.

The scene you call pivotal, and the line in it you cite, I have always
found immensely moving. I think the full line (and you or others could
check this on DVD) of Bruhn's is something like, "I know what I'm doing,
but what about you? What's your reason for wanting to die." (Pause) "I
guess every fool has his reasons." So they head off into the hopeless
snow, knowing, unlike the men, that there is no way out, that "none
shall escape" (to quote the title of an early and great de Toth.) But
actually, that isn't quite what happens, and the young man's final entry
indoors fits somewhere into your scheme, though I'm not sure exactly
how, as does of course the reflection on the door window as it closes.

Fred Camper

(This is also posted on my blog, but I'd like to stimulate
some discussion so that I'm not just talking to myself!)

Hitherto I have seen only the one Andre De Toth film.

To try to sum up what I feel is most powerful about it, I
seize on the way De Toth has characters enter a scene. "Scene"
here mostly takes place in the stripped, box-like cabins of
Bitters, Wyoming, a remote town situated in a circular
plateau, near completely circumscribed by a wall of wilderness
and mountains. Groups of characters at odds must reconcile
without the possibility of escape. The problem is that it's
getting crowded in Bitters. Whenever a new character or
characters enter(s) a scene alliances shift and priorities are
reordered. Formally, this process plays out without stylistic
flourish. The execution is logical, direct, almost ruthless,
and yet at once tragic and poetic.

A good example of this mode of 'entrance' is the introduction
of Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the more prominent of the film's
two heroines and a reservoir of mercy in a filmic universe
starved of it. In this scene, Helen interrupts a conversation
between Bitters's local store owner Vic (Donald Elston) and
Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) the compromised hero of the
piece. Like so many other Ryan characters, Starrett is a
primitive, a misanthrope and a control freak. His violent love
for Helen will drive him to attempt the murder of her weak
farmer husband. Brooding over this course of action, he
debates the consequences with Vic indirectly. It is at this
point that Helen appears. Rather than merely have her walk
'on-stage', however, as I think would have been common
Hollywood practice (a practice which Otto Preminger had by
this time carried to the apex of its expressive potential), De
Toth cuts outside, to a shot of Helen approaching the general
store, and cutting well before the shop keeper Vic (Donald
Elson) has completed his last line: "you call his hand it'll
be plain murder". That final word, "murder", hangs over Helen
as she walks toward the cabin, hangs over her as if it were
suspended in the dense whiteness of the sky above her. When
she does make her entrance, even though he could probably
manage the staging, De Toth leaves her to her own space in
medium shot, emphasizing, in the shot-reverse-shot montage
that follows, how the other characters internally size her up,
debating her presence outside the master shot, but within the
grand scheme. At the same time, this plan gives prominence to
her own feelings. It is not until she is invited into the
group by Vic's daughter Ernine that she enters this master
shot, and then only to pass through it and gain access to a
site of hospitality, the family dinner table.

The film is filled with such 'entrances' - Starrett's
confrontation with the farmers, Starrett stopping a dance, the
outlaws' arrival etc. - and repeatedly deploys this montage
which opposes an individual to a group of individuals. With an
acrobat's skill, this mode of montage brings momentary
equilibrium to an intricate network of social relations and
emotional tensions, which threaten to boil over at any second.
Rhythmically, this mode plays out deliberately. Our experience
of time is bitter, harsh, and seeming endless. Even more
impressive is that De Toth manages to work this same operation
in single shots. After all, these groups, framed in master
shot, are not communities. Made up of immigrants and misfits,
outlaws and cattle herdsmen, they share no culture, represent
no social order, but in fact a social disorder. They inhabit
fields of conflict: political, emotional and eventually
physical battlegrounds. It is that 'entrance' of some other
individual or some other group which leads people once at each
other's throats to band together. In this sense, the isolation
of the individual, represented in medium shot, outside of the
intertwined, self-destructive group, represented in master
shot, must speak to a kind of freedom, and yet freedom which
enables what exactly? Certainly, it is not a freedom from
association. Like Helen, we must still confront the group.
People still need to be dealt with, social problems to be
negotiated. In a world encased by a "white silence" as De Toth
put it, the tendency of people to strike out, gang up, betray,
and destroy is axiomatic. It simply cannot be escaped. How
then are we free?

In a pivotal scene, the three main characters of the film,
Starrett, Captain Bruhn (Burl Ives) the leader of the outlaws,
and Gene (David Nelson) their newest recruit, must make a
crucial decision: will they sacrifice themselves for the weak?
Accruing added intensity in a film mostly staged in long
shots, the scene is broken down into isolated medium shots of
each man. Each is left to decide for himself. "Every fool has
his reasons." Thus, freedom consists in this reflective act,
when the individual is forced to look at him or herself, to
face the "white silence" in isolation, and to contemplate what
kind of a life is worth living. It is to understand the
inevitability of death, and to determine how we meet it. Only
then can we reenter the scene to influence it, to steer the
group in a new and 'better' direction.

I had surmised that you might like this one better than the others.
Even though "Platform" is my favorite, "Still Life", which was the
first I saw always seemed the most formally mature. I've now managed
to see all his feature work, including his latest "Useless", and one
can clearly discern a line of stylistic development where "Still Life"
and "Useless" mark the turning point or culmination of everything
that's come before them.

A large part of this flowering is how plastic his art becomes, more
and more with each work. Perhaps most explicitly acknowledged with the
move to DV ("Unknown Pleasures") and then to HD (the latest four
films), Jia starts to play with the presumed integrity of his images
as recorded 'facts', highlighting their artificiality. Especially in
"The World", where nearly every composition seems as arbitrary as it
is elegantly arranged, all aspects of experience have become fake
plastic, and impossibly so. It's a testing of the image as bearer of
truth, conceived mainly in response to the economic devaluation and
deformation of images, and reflected formally but also at the level of
plot and character. We find that in his actor's lives even emotion has
become mass produced. I think this is what you're seeing in "Still
Life", only more fully worked out than in "The World".

In "Still Life", this tension between the artificial and the genuine
visual experience infuses every image. Though Jia stages the majority
of his compositions at a distance, as he has done since "Platform", he
breaks this paradigm quite often in "Still Life" by cutting in to
magnify sections of a space. Here, he picks out objects to study in a
fashion at once discursive because randomly chosen, and controlled
because looked at in a unified and unifying way - mostly slow pans.
Thus objects assume a greater prominence than ever before in his
films. They become nearly as important as the characters. Everything
is product and evidence of the impact of economic and social upheaval.
Everything is wound. People become like objects, while objects acquire
stories just as people do.

That's all I have for now.

edo

--- In FilmArt@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper <f@...> wrote:
>
> I have long wanted to post a few comments on Zhang Ke Jia's "Still
Life"
> (Sanxia haoren) which recently played in Chicago. I had seen two
earlier
> films of his, "Platform" (Zhantai) and "The World" (Shijie), and
thought
> this was the best of the three.
>
> What I liked was the way his long take tableaux, while often offering
> elegant arrangements of characters and landscapes, also felt highly
> tentative and provisional. Every composition seemed somehow temporary,
> even to the point of feeling as if it is acknowledging its own
> arbitrariness. Characters come together against a background, and one
> somehow "feels" that it's simply a temporary arrangement. Every moment
> seems somehow fugitive.
>
> This all connects beautifully with a theme of the film, the changes
> China is undergoing. The upheavals caused to lives and landscape by the
> monstrously huge Three Gorges Dam become a metaphor for China's larger
> modernization process, truly uprooting social traditions. Certainly I
> could see some of this in the month I spent in China in 2004, in cities
> that were chaotic and ever-changing mixes of very old great buildings,
> older housing crowded along alleys ("hutongs"), and grotesque new
> mega-structures that seem quite at home in an American suburb. Jia
> seemed to be depicting this rather than judging it.
>
> I'm not sure I know another filmmaker's work that has this particular
> image quality. It reminded me more of some of the paintings of Gerhard
> Richter.
>
> Fred Camper
>

I have long wanted to post a few comments on Zhang Ke Jia's "Still Life"
(Sanxia haoren) which recently played in Chicago. I had seen two earlier
films of his, "Platform" (Zhantai) and "The World" (Shijie), and thought
this was the best of the three.

What I liked was the way his long take tableaux, while often offering
elegant arrangements of characters and landscapes, also felt highly
tentative and provisional. Every composition seemed somehow temporary,
even to the point of feeling as if it is acknowledging its own
arbitrariness. Characters come together against a background, and one
somehow "feels" that it's simply a temporary arrangement. Every moment
seems somehow fugitive.

This all connects beautifully with a theme of the film, the changes
China is undergoing. The upheavals caused to lives and landscape by the
monstrously huge Three Gorges Dam become a metaphor for China's larger
modernization process, truly uprooting social traditions. Certainly I
could see some of this in the month I spent in China in 2004, in cities
that were chaotic and ever-changing mixes of very old great buildings,
older housing crowded along alleys ("hutongs"), and grotesque new
mega-structures that seem quite at home in an American suburb. Jia
seemed to be depicting this rather than judging it.

I'm not sure I know another filmmaker's work that has this particular
image quality. It reminded me more of some of the paintings of Gerhard
Richter.

Fred Camper

Matt, thanks for your response, which I've been thinking about for a
bit. Unfortunately, I don't remember that moment in "L'Argent," which I
have not seen in a long time, well enough to comment on it. But you
bring up a more general issue too, of camera awareness and awareness of
individual characters.

First, I don't think Bresson films are generally "about" their
characters as flesh and blood human beings in the way that a Hollywood
melodrama might be. "Is it even about him" seems a good question to ask,
and usually answer is "no." Even the moments that seem to be exceptions,
such as the ending of "Mouchette," seem to me to prove the rule. Is the
issue there the fate of a particular human being, or is it something
that "feels," in Bresson, much larger than that? I think it's the second.

You also raise the general question of the way in which one is aware of
the camera's presence. I could recast the issue you raise in terms of
how much the image feels like a cinematic construction, and how much it
feels like a piece of a pre-existent actuality. Thus on one side we
might have Eisenstein and Brakhage and Hitchcock, and on the other Ozu
and Bresson and Rossellini. It's not that there is a rigid border
between these groups either; there's some constructed-ness in each and
some sense of the larger world in all, and of course each filmmaker is
also very different from the others.

In the case of Bresson, his oblique angles have an effect that I think
is very different from what it might logically seem such shots should
have. He's a great lesson in how there are no formulas for understanding
how film style works; the same type of camera movement might mean
something totally different in Sirk or Borzage. (I still groan at the
memory of the film textbook used in the first course (in 1972) that I
ever was a TA for, Louis Giannetti's "Understanding Movies." I see that
it appears to be still in general use. I hope he has long since fixed
such howlers as his claim that 95 per cent of all camera movements
express "the instability of the universes," or something like that.)

Anyway, you might guess that Bresson's oblique angles and austerely
cramped compositions should call attention to themselves, and to the
filmmaker as image composer, and surely they do do that at first glance.
But ultimately they serve, as you say, more as a "window" than as a
"canvas." Cramping things together, creating artificial rather than
Renaissance spaces, is a way for Bresson to introduce what I think he
really wants to evoke, which is a strange, almost unnamable "continuity
of emptiness." One always feels one is looking *past* what is
immediately in front of the camera lens, "into" an unseeable world in
which objects can mysteriously commune with each other. This can lead to
a kind of freedom or a kind of horror, depending on the "plot," and in
Bresson there isn't necessarily that much difference. The scraping
against prison walls in "A Man Escaped" is a good metaphor for what
Bresson's style tried to do: take us out of the "prison" of a world of
separate objects and into a vaster, and massively less physical, realm.
Even if the "subject" is a closeup of a face or of a hand writing, one
is looking "through" it toward something else. Cramped, constrained,
sidelong glances function in Bresson to reduce the powerful illusion of
physical objects,  to encourage you to look past them as much as or more
than at them, and to create a sense that they can all commune with each
other, the priest with his writing paper, Mouchette with the forest,
Yvon with the blackness at the end of "L'Argent."

Fred Camper

It's a shame I wasn't able to make it to that screening.

Thus far I haven't really been able to get into Tourneur--possibly
because I haven't seen anything of his on film.  From your description,
however, it sounds as though _Nightfall_ could have been the one that
sold me.  I hope I'll be able to catch up on it at the Siskel Center or
somewhere else in the near future.  The ones I've seen on video are:
_Cat People_, _Out of the Past_, _I Walked With a Zombie_, and _Night of
the Demon_.

For some reason, your account of that bit of dialogue brought to mind
another bit of dialogue--one of my favorites in cinema--from Bresson's
_L'Argent_.  It occurs just after Yvon receives news that his daughter
has passed away; while he is sobbing silently on the bed, one of his
cellmates says,"On craint la mort parce qu'on aime la vie/We fear death
because we love life."

Perhaps a comparison/contrast with Ozu will throw into relief one
feature of Bresson's style that intrigues me.  One of Ozu's well-known
mannerisms--especially in the 50s and onwards--is almost never to move
the camera; but still to follow the action through editing (through he
does so in what Bordwell aptly calls "360-degree" space).  The
combination of 360-degree space and matches on action often gives his
editing the feel of live television (I used to do a little live tv
editing with a video switcher--looking at different monitors, choosing
which angle to switch to when, etc.--Ozu brings it all back).  The
position of the camera never seems intrusive; it never feels as though
the camera were there first and all the decor "mis en scene" around it
anew for each shot (as it does in e.g. Eistenstein, or Leisen, or
Borzage, or Minnelli, or Blier).  Rather, the camera feels as though it
just "happened to be there" to see things take place in a world that is
unaware of its presence.  Somehow in Ozu that combination of
mise-en-scene and editing has distancing effects, which is something you
wouldn't necessarily expect.

Take that recipe: 360-degree editing, matches on action, and straight-on
camera angles.  Then make the following changes: a) keep the "window
rather than canvas" mise-en-scene, but make all camera angles oblique
(rather than looking straight down a hallway to its vanishing point, as
Ozu almost always does, place the camera so that you're no longer
looking the vanishing point "straight in the eye"; so that it's just
offscreen); b) follow the action with the sorts of camera moves we might
expect, but follow torsos rather than faces; hands rather than arms;
legs rather than bodies; and c) keep the blocking slow and unambiguous,
so that figures in the frame move "with the camera in mind," as though
they were in an instructional film trying to teach the viewer to do
something; as though they were executing a set of instructions.  You'll
end up with some approximation of Bresson's style.

The scene which builds up to that extraordinary moment of dialogue is a
dizzying cascade of obliqueness in every conceivable form: oblique
camera movements, oblique camera angles, oblique figure movement,
oblique glances between characters, editing that follows the narrative
action--but only the bits of it that your eyes would drift toward when
you were daydreaming--dialogue that's half relevant to the moment and
half withdrawn into poetic reverie.  We cut straight from someone
reading the letter to Yvon's cellmate as he picks it up from the floor,
so that we never see Yvon read it.  Temporal obliqueness.  The cellmate
gingerly returns the letter to its former position on the floor, so as
not to disturb Yvon.  Gestural obliqueness.  He utters the line of
dialogue.  Semantic obliqueness.  How exactly is what he said
intelligible as a response to the letter?  It doesn't seem to be, in any
literal sense.  Doesn't Yvon appear to be expressing grief rather than a
fear of death?  Is it even about him?  It has the grammatical form of a
maxim (and even the repetitive rhythm of a maxim, like something out of
De la Rochefoucauld); a generalization.  And yet, it isn't as though
grief has nothing to do with the fear of death.  It isn't as though
death and life have nothing to do with their situation.  In fact, in
some way that isn't easy to explain, something about that line seems
more to the point than any direct statement about Yvon could have been.
To top it off, they then make a toast, which (in much the same way) ends
up being more "obliquely relevant" than any direct response could have
been.

It boggles the mind how much there is in that film to be unpacked.

-Matt

I wanted to offer some comments on Jacques Tourneur's masterpiece,
"Nightfall," which I recently resaw at Doc Films in Chicago.

It seems to me to be easily Tourneur's greatest film. Other favorites
include "Stars in My Crown" and "Curse of the Demon,"  great but
clearly not as great. "Out of the Past" is great too, but there the
time crossing techniques seem graceful uses of convention, while the
cross-cutting in "Nightfall" seems considerably more profound.

One key to "Nightfall" is the way it moves from cutting between
different scenes in the present to cutting between past and present.
At first we cut between James Vanning (the protagonist, played by Aldo
Ray) and the investigator stalking him. Soon that intercutting becomes
also cutting to flashbacks, as Ray tells his story. A cut to a plate
of fish being cooked over a campfire has never been as great as it is
here! In familiar "noir" fashion, the intercutting, and the original
way it weaves together pursuer and pursued and present and past,
creates a net trapping Vanning. Little moments like lights coming on
in the pre-credit sequence leading to the title "Nightfall" are
similar to cuts as well, signaling the passage of time, as does the
cutting within scenes, creating a wonderful feeling of time's
irreversible, one-way flow. The flashbacks do that too, because rather
than representing the triumph of memory over the present, as in, say,
Ford's "How Green Was My Valley," the give life to power of awful
facts of the past, the crime Vanning cannot escape, over his present
life. This results in part from the way they are interwoven with the
present, rather than being presented in a single flashback.

The intercutting also presents time and space as interdependent, and
yet connected loosely rather than tightly. And it is sometimes
mirrored by cutting within scenes, not colliding images so much as
placing them side by side, in a way the reinforces the gentle, liquid
gracefulness of Tourneur's imagery, his supple and almost tactile
sense of light and space. These elements seem almost contrary to the
trap. Nearly an opposite of, say, Lang's, Tourneur's vision is less
one of global paranoia or terror than of the modesty of individual
lives in the face of larger forces, and somewhere in the gentleness of
his light lies a way out of the trap, the possibility of those lives
triumphing as well.

Though I had seen this film perhaps four times before reseeing it on
Thursday, there is a single line of dialogue that, while always a key
moment for me, for the first time moved me to tears. Near the film's
end, the investigator who had been stalking Vanning finally introduces
himself, but rather than "taking me in," as Vanning pleads, he
presents his own reasons for believing in Vanning's innocence. When
he's done, Vanning holds out his hand and says something like,
"Pleased to meet you." Why was this so affecting? Not because I cared
all that hugely about Vanning as a particular character, but rather,
because that moment represented a sudden untangling of the film's
spider-web-spinning montage, a sign of possible coming freedom.

Similar moments occur often in the greatest of Hollywood films: a line
in the dialogue seems to somehow engage all of the imagery. In
Minnelli's "Home From the Hill," there's a devastatingly powerful line
that begins "His illegitimate son...," somehow pulling the cycles of
repetition in the film ever tighter. A similar later line, Rafe's
explanation of his reasons for a marriage proposal, is just as moving
for seeming to unsnarl them.

I think what I'm trying to argue here is that many of the most moving
moments in Hollywood films come from an intersection of dialogue and
the deepest levels of the style, one affecting, perhaps explaining,
and even transforming the other. The titled shot of Uncle Charlie in
his room in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" has no dialogue, but its
frozen claustrophobic spaces evokes his mind, and the image has a
similarly resonant power across both images and narrative.

Fred Camper