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Showing posts with label 1001 movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1001 movies. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
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One of the most exciting events in Jeanne Dielman is when she drops a spoon on the floor. It's the kind of film where the prospect of some potatoes being overcooked is an epoch changing catastrophe. Not much happens in Jeanne Dielman. It’s a three and a half hour long film depicting two and a half days in the life of a slowly unravelling housewife (and occasional sex worker) and by the end of it by god you’re going to know exactly how soul-crushingly miserable domesticity is.
Settling down to watch this is like being on some kind of time-warping drug. It makes a mockery of every other film's pretension towards realism. You're shown endless, mind-warping long shots of our lead doing the dishes, peeling some potatoes or laying the table. By about an hour in I was softly rocking backwards and forwards, eyes transfixed on the screen. Two hours in my teeth were grindingly gritted in tension. By the time the film was over my conception of time was completely out of whack. Everything seemed to be moving in fast forward.
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| Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) |
Jeanne Dielman raises some interesting structural questions about cinema. Film allows us intense experiences beyond everyday life, an opportunity to experience, without consequence, the infinite range of human emotions. Boredom and the sheer horror of the mundane are what Jeanne Dielman has to offer. Sure you could put yourself into the scuffed boots of a futuristic cyborg warrior or the bonnet of a blushingly lovelorn Edwardian maiden but isn’t that just vain escapism? It’s the little stories that are as important as the big ones: watching an unbroken shot of a crushed woman stone-facedly kneading a lump of mince for 5 minutes arguably gives you more insight into the human condition than 90 minutes of rah-rah car chases and flying kicks to the face.
Everything about Jeanne Dielman is so utterly dialled down that even the tiniest events become earth-shattering. The events exist in a monotonous purgatory; the vast majority of the film takes place inside a tiny flat, the solitude of Jeanne only punctuated by her weirdly withdrawn son silently eating dinner with her and sleeping on a sofa bed, someone dropping off a baby for her to look after and her clients turning up for perfunctory, dispassionate sex.
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| Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman |
The lengths the film goes to sap the sensationalism and titillation out are perversely impressive. With the camera staring unblinkingly at Jeanne we observe her doing every minute part of every mundane task you can think of. Yet when her clients show up (she has one a day), we do not follow her inside her bedroom. We’re left, standing outside staring at the door, our curiosity growing as we idly wonder just what the hell is going in there.
You get a lot of time to think about stuff over the course of this film, there’s no real plot to speak of, so the mind wandering off on its own isn’t such a bad thing. Questions start to bob about in your brain. How did her husband die? How on earth did Jeanne begin prostituting herself? Why do her clients come back to this semi-robotic emotionless cypher? Why does her son sleep on a sofa bed? What on earth is that rhythmic light flickering outside her window? You hunger for some dark secret lurking at the heart of the film, filling in the blanks. Eventually it becomes apparent that there is nothing except the nightmare of normality.
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| Jeanne Dielman as played by Delphine Seyrig |
In an early scene we see Jeanne having a bath after a visit from one of her clients, my initial reaction to the still, motionless shot was that it positions the audience as a voyeur, staring in on Jeanne's life like she's a rat in a maze. The mundanity of the tasks we see her perform bring to mind surveillance footage, poring over someone’s actions to try and deduce some greater meaning. As we get further through the film, I began to realise that rather than a Gods-eye view of the world, we’re being placed in the same domestic sphere as Jeanne. The camera is always placed in such a way that if we were viewing the events through someone’s eyes, they’d be in plain sight. This heightens your sense of involvement, placing you sitting opposite Jeanne as she fruitlessly tries to drink a cup of coffee, somehow not realising that no matter how much sugar she adds, it will still be bad.
As the film crawls onwards, we begin to notice imperceptible changes in Jeanne. She doesn’t replace the lid of a china pot, her hair becomes slightly skewiff, she leaves the window open and most egregiously, she spoils the potatoes. These tiny errors are momentous, in a film where not much happens, anything happening becomes cataclysmic. I wasn’t being sarcastic or sniffy when I said that her dropping a spoon is exciting – it really, really is. This thrill at tiny events is only possible if you’re prepared to sit through an hour or more of pretty much nothing happening. You find yourself practically breathing in time with the character after about 90 minutes, so when her routine begins to unravel even the slightest slips become quite a big deal.
(spoilers below)
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| This is basically Jeanne Dielman (actress: Delphine Seyrig) |
The culmination of this slow onset of madness is when she has some kind of disturbing sexual experience and stabs her client in the neck with a pair of scissors, killing him. It's almost funny how mundane this act is; as much dramatic weight is given to it as a shoe brush being dropped earlier in the film. Many people read Jeanne's behaviour in bed as her having an orgasm. I don't see it this way, the vested and moustached man weakly grinding away on top of her, pressing her down against the mattress isn't exactly a paragon of sexual dynamism. I see it as her reaction to the full torment of her life dawning upon her, each one of his feeble thrusts underlining just how horrible things have become.
It's like a wakeup call to a woman trapped in purgatory, her eyes opening to the low-level misery that she wallows in. Faced with her utter lack of agency in life she seeks to reassert herself, and it just so happens that this particular guy is going to get it in the neck.
Jeanne Dielman is a film with a strict adherence to reality, and yet the point of comparison I kept coming back to was David Lynch's Eraserhead. Like Eraserhead's Henry Spencer, Jeanne leads a largely solitary life in a cold, unfriendly industrial landscape. Ambient background noise fills her flat, providing a constant low level soundtrack of distant activity. Somehow this reminder of the world ticking along outside makes the apartments in both films that much more isolated. Adding to this is the flickering blue light that flashes across the walls of Jeanne's apartment whenever she turns the light off. The source of this light is never revealed, yet adds a nice effect that's both expressionistic and naturalistic at the same time, the flickering on the walls coming to signify Jeanne's fracturing psyche. This creates a threatening and unnerving atmosphere; both character's surroundings reflect their respective mental landscape, although arguably Jeanne's becomes more disturbing purely because of its unassuming nature.
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| Lotta' sitting around as Delphine Seyrig plays Jeanne Dielman. |
Perhaps the clearest point of comparison comes when Jeanne is asked to babysit a neighbour's baby. After a prolonged period of nothing (seriously, she just sits immobile in a chair in silence for five minutes, pictured) the baby is a sudden, unwanted injection of bawling life into the sterile flat. In Jeanne Dielman, the baby screams like a banshee whenever Jeanne picks him up. It's a horrible sound, like nails being dragged down a blackboard. There are obvious parallels here to the deformed, doomed child monster of Eraserhead.
So, Jeanne Dielman: "Eraserhead for housewives". As disturbing as Eraserhead is, I think Jeanne Dielman probably has it beaten on sheer brutality towards both its subject and audience. If you watch this film you're going to have to understand that if you're bored, pissed off and vaguely horrified then it's firing on all cylinders. Enjoying this made me feel like a masochist - watching this is an experience maybe no other film provides. I'm glad I sat through all 201 minutes of it. I'm equally glad I never ever have to watch it again.
‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ is playing at the BFI Southbank on the 27th of February. Go and see it. I dare you! I double dare you! Bet you haven't got what it takes!
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
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I always wondered exactly what the title to this film meant. I’d picked up from somewhere that it was about a titanic, vicious and drunken battle between a married couple, but I could never figure out how Virginia Woolf related to the story. What I did know was the film’s reputation as a hard, fierce grudge match, Richard Burton v Elizabeth Taylor. A spectacular gladiatorial free-for-all, starring the most famous couple in Hollywood at the time.
“George: You're a monster - You are.
Martha: I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got
to, but I am not a monster. I'm not.
George: You're a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden...”
Based on the hit Broadway play by Edward Albee, the film chronicles one night in the lives of Martha and her lecturer husband George (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) and their guests a younger married couple, Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis). Martha and George return home drunk from a party to their home, having invited Nick and Honey over to continue drinking. As various bottles of booze get consumed, the mood turns ever sourer and the verbal sparring becomes ever more caustic.
“George: Be careful Martha. I'll rip you to pieces.
Martha: You're not man enough. You haven't the guts.”
Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha is outstanding. She acts like every bit of love and tenderness has been expelled from her blackened heart. As the film opens she strides into the house, saying “what a dump” before opening the fridge, tearing off a leg of chicken and attacking it with relish, a lit cigarette in her other hand. We are thus primed that we are in store for not the most glamorous of performances. Martha swears, she drinks, she smokes, she screams at the top of her lungs, she throws calculated insults at everyone in the vicinity. Early in the film she changes into a tight and revealing outfit, seemingly purely to taunt her husband and tease her guest. She seems irredeemably vicious. Initially we have no idea why, but certain asides throughout the film start to build up an fuzzy picture of why she is so miserable.
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Martha’s psychological arsenal consists of grating down everyone else through sheer persistence. She will be as rude as possible in order to get what she wants. As the film progresses we learn that she is the daughter of the President of the university, and that her husband George hasn’t reached the professional heights expected of him. We also pick up hints that there are deeper issues, a son mentioned in extremely vague and nasty tones and mention of him seems to deeply affect both her and her husband.
George, played by Richard Burton, is a different kind of monster. Like Martha, he is also worn down and vicious, but in a different way. His speech is flowery and poetic, as if he is constantly trying prove his intelligence. His body language is less stiff than his wife’s. He wearily sprawls over chairs and sofas. He wears an unstylish cardigan through most of the film, like a man who has embraced middle-age without too much trouble. He is more than a match for Martha’s jibes and insults, but seems wearier than her, as if he has had to adapt himself to life with her, to harden himself to her yells and behaviour. It’s not that he is a necessarily the submissive partner, they both seem to relish their emotional sadism. It is George, for example, who invents a series of cruel parlour games, the film working its way through ‘Humiliate the Host’, ‘Get the Guests’ and ‘Hump the Hostess’.
We only see these two characters in different states of drunkenness – it is genuinely hard to imagine George sober and lecturing about history. Everything about him seems geared towards deterioration. His hair hangs floppily and sweatily over his head, and his cardigan and tie grow ever more rumpled. Compared to Martha, who looks sharp and hard in her rage, he seems to be coming apart.
There is a great fake-out sequence relatively early in the film. Martha is telling the guests an emasculating anecdote about how she managed to knock down George in a faux boxing match. As the story is drunkenly told, we follow George out into a closet. Martha’s voice gets muffled and seems slightly distorted as we see George reach up and grab a rifle. The audience assumes that George has been finally pushed over the edge. Seemingly in a trance, he walks stiffly back to the living room, aims the gun at Martha’s head and…
Pow! It’s a joke gun, an umbrella comes out of the barrel. Leaving aside for a moment the question of why he owns such an elaborate joke rifle (did he make it specially to do this?), it is notable that after a moment of shock, how quickly everyone begins laughing at the joke. In some respects they’re laughing at the audience, this isn’t a film full of easy answers and definite conclusions. You begin to feel like this is merely one night of many for these characters, and you can imagine rows like this stretching back into the past, and forward into the future.
Speaking of stand-ins for the audience, the two guests, Nick and Honey seem to begin as a kind of audience stand in. Two hours locked in a room with George and Martha could get a little claustrophobic without them, and we see them pair off with each other to gossip about their significant others. The film portrays this young, relatively newly married couple as what George and Martha may have been like soon after getting married. Like Martha, Honey is richer than her husband, and like George, Nick is a lecturer with aspirations. The central couple almost function as a kind of warning to them not to go down this path. They also function as a whirlpool, sucking the happy and seemingly stable couple into their world of recriminations and drunken rows.
As they enter George and Martha’s house and see the first shots across the bow of the argument, Nick and Honey glance nervously at each other, and try to make excuses and leave. But as the booze flows, the two get more “into the spirit” of things. Martha flirts outrageously with Nick, while Honey, increasingly drunk on rum remains somewhat innocent and oblivious. It’s a nice dynamic that the further and further Nick gets sucked into the mind games of George and Martha, that the drunker and more oblivious Honey becomes.
There are only four characters in the film, and three major sets. We move from George 7and Martha’s cluttered, claustrophobic house to their garden, out to a bar and back home. Nicholls moves in and around the house, and by the end of the film we have a pretty good idea of the geography of the place. He also tends to place characters appropriately in the frame depending on who has the upper hand. Frequently we see Martha in the dead centre of the frame, the centre of attention, while George prowls in the background. If a character is being disparaged or mocked, then they occupy the periphery of the screen. A good example is when Martha is overtly flirting with Nick – she rubs his leg suggestively as George and Honey sit awkwardly at the edges of the frame.
An important theme running through the narrative is that of fiction. At about the midway point, Nick escapes the house to find George sitting drunkenly on a child’s swing in the garden. George begins to tell Nick a story about a friend of his who accidentally killed both his parents. Nick pays attention, and the story is quite compelling. It is later revealed that this is the plot of George’s book, and is a complete fiction. In return, Nick explains the circumstances of how he got married to Honey. Honey had an ectopic pregnancy, and it was only after George married her that they realised it was ectopic.
It is these fictions that help keep the miserable characters of this film going. Despite the cruel, foul-mouthed barbs they constantly fire at each other, we slowly learn that the two do have a deep affection for the other. It is a strange version of love, conducted at gunpoint rather than romantically, but I think it’s love nonetheless. These are two people who need an outlet to act out their masochistic and sadistic desires, and have found no better victims than themselves. You see hints in the relish with which Martha acts out in front of George, and how he returns with the most cutting put downs. These are two people that need each other. We eventually find out the truth about Martha and George’s child: he doesn’t exist. For whatever reason they can’t have children, and it seems they’ve subsumed their child-rearing emotions into red hot pokers to jab each other with. Their ‘son’, for the purposes of the film is a shared fiction of the two, a cudgel with which to bludgeon each other with.
“Our son was born in a September night, a night not unlike tonight, though tomorrow, and sixteen years ago...It was an easy birth, once it had been accepted, and I was young...and he was healthy, a red, bawling child...with slippery firm limbs and a full head of black, fine, fine hair which, oh, later, later, became blond as the sun, our son...And I had wanted a child...oh, I had wanted a child...And I had my child...Our child. And we raised him...and he had green eyes...and he loved the sun...and he was tan before and after everyone and in the sun his hair became fleece...beautiful, beautiful boy...So beautiful, so wise...Beautiful, wise, perfect.”
This is Martha’s fantasy, the fiction that she would like to have lived, and in her drunkeness may have even briefly convinced herself of. This fictive son is the gaping hole in her emotional armour, the one thing she clings to as a lifeline out of her misery.
“Of course, his perfection could not last...not with George around....A drowning man takes down those nearest. And he tried, and oh God how I fought him...the one thing I tried to carry pure and unscathed in the sewer of our marriage, through the sick nights and the pathetic stupid days, through the derision and the laughter...God, the laughter, through one failure after another, each attempt more numbing, more sickening than the one before; the one thing, the one person I tried to protect, to raise above the mire of this vile, crushing marriage, the one light in all this hopeless darkness - OUR SON.”
Meanwhile, George is chanting a latin mass of the dead– spinning a mock funeral service behind her frantic fantasising. The game is up for their “little sonny-jim”, and in the climactic moments of the film, George ‘kills’ off the son. Everything is demystified, and as dawn breaks and sunlight begins to finally fill the house we finally see Martha emotionally naked, without any witty barbs to disguise her feelings. The ghost son has temporarily been exorcised.
It’s interesting that to dispel the illusion of the son,that George plays along with the fiction. Rather than rely on reality he fights fire with fire, spinning another fiction where their son drove into a tree to avoid a porcupine and died in the impact. Martha even half-heartedly plays along with the fiction, asking George if she can see the telegram saying this. George says he ate it.
Sanity is restored, and all the characters are emotionally and physically spent. Nick and Honey quietly leave, sobered up by the early morning revelations. As George and Martha are left alone, George tenderly strokes Martha’s hair and the two converse in clipped, monosyllabic phrases. All the theatricality of their cruelty is thrown into context as a production for the benefit of Nick and Honey.
We can find a slight glimmer of hope in this scene. Have Martha and George turned a corner, found a new sense of understanding and compassion? Is this the point where they face up to reality honestly? Or is this just another in a long line of reconciliations and inevitably sour once more?
I don’t think two characters with as many flaws as these two can find lasting tranquillity so easily. They’ve blown themselves out here, finally worked out and used up all their anger. Maybe, subconsciously reaching this point in the night was why they were tearing lumps out of each other to begin with. I see the entire process of anger, hate, betrayal and finally calm as the points of a cycle. The problems in George and Martha’s marriage build up pressure like magma in a volcano, and eventually it will erupt – a cathartic release of destructive energy.
When this film was released, US divorce rates were beginning a skyrocket that wouldn’t peak until the early 80s. While it isn’t particularly difficult to imagine a modern married couple arguing like this, it is difficult to conceive of a marriage lasting this long without divorce. The end of the film is faintly, exhaustingly, optimistic. Despite all of the fury and bile the two throw at each other, they still know what it takes to comfort the other, and I think there is a positive example in that.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
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It’s intimidating to write about a Bergman film. Persona is one of the most analysed films of all time. You begin to wonder what you could possibly say that’s new. Even the act of watching a Bergman film can be a bit daunting. You know that you’re going to be looking at something loaded with symbolism, metaphor and philosophy that’s going to take some serious thinking to properly untangle. Persona is a complicated film with a lot to say, but fortunately, the film is minimalist with a fairly straightforward surface narrative and only two central characters to focus on. That doesn’t make it any less complex, but it does mean that we have a definite set of boundaries to work within.
Persona is about the relationship between two women, Alma (Bibi Andersson) and Elizabet (Liv Ullmann). Elizabet is an actress who has suffered some kind of mental break. She froze one night on stage, and has been catatonic and silent ever since. Alma is the young nurse assigned to care for her. The meat of the film takes place in a secluded seaside cottage where Alma ‘looks after’ Elizabet to aid her recovery. Once in the cottage, Elizabet recovers somewhat from her catatonia, but still does not speak. Alma fills the silence by telling Elizabet all about her life, ambitions, dreams, worries and secrets.
Ingmar Bergman’s films are never anything less than beautiful. I’m not sure how he does it – the film mainly consists of long one-sided conversations where Alma speaks at Elizabet, but every shot has its own peculiar beauty. The positioning of the characters relative to each other in the frame is never anything less than ideal and always accentuates the thematic elements. The locations themselves are, as is typical of what I’ve seen of Bergman’s films, still and tranquil. The seaside environment reminds me of Through a Glass, Darkly (1961), with the rocky shore and huge expanses of still water filling the background of scenes.
Before the central narrative begins, and before even the title card we are presented with a rapidly cut montage of various images. They go by too quickly to clearly pick out what each is, but seem to be footage from old films coupled with distinctly Bergman-esque imagery. There’s a shot of a spider, which, from what I’ve gathered from Bergman’s previous films is a symbol of God, we see this coupled with closeups of nails being driven through Christ’s hands. Bergman’s relationship with Christianity is complex at best, and much of the ‘Silence Trilogy’ (Through a Glass, Darkly, Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963) is about the relationship between humanity and a seemingly absent God. These symbols, coupled with shots of cinematic technology and old films seem to add up to a director presenting a summary of what he has achieved so far careerwise. The film is thus positioned as a break from these major themes of the past. The sequence ends with a boy reaching out to a huge indistinct female face which seems to morph between women – a mother figure perhaps. This is held for much longer, and in retrospect, above everything else we have seen in this sequence it is these shots that inform the film we are about to see.
The film simply would not work with lesser actresses, but fortunately we have the amazing performances of both Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman. With such a tight narrative focus on Alma and Elizabet a misguided performance would ruin the whole film. The audience necessarily identifies more with Alma, as Elizabet is mute. They are wonderful actresses, Alma moves between giddy drunkenness, quiet cruelty, shame, murderous anger and apologetic pleading, but through all of these differing emotions we can still recognise the same personality. Of the two characters, she is the transparent one. Her motivations and frustrations are spelled out relatively explicitly.
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| Alma |
Elizabet, on the other hand, is completely opaque. She sits sphinxlike, throughout the film, quietly soaking up everything that the chatty Alma tells us. What we do know about her life comes primarily from letters from her husband, and even then, their relationship is vague and undefined. As the film progresses we do see flickers of emotion from her. She smiles and hums, and at rare points in the film softly speaks. We never find out the reasons why she has retreated into silence, leaving her a mystery to us. There are vague clues in some of her emotional reactions though. She recoils in terror from a news report on the self-immolation of monk Thich Quang Duc and gazes fearfully at a picture of Jewish children held at gunpoint during the Holocaust. Has she become numb to the world as a reaction to its horrors? We can only guess.
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| Elizabet |
It is strange that I watch this film straight after Seconds (1966), I feel both cover similar ground, albeit from different perspectives and with varying conclusions. I believe Persona is also concerned with the malleable identity, specifically the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’.
The concept of the self seems like it should be fairly straightforward. It’s your personal image, how you define your personality, what you want to present to others. As an internal construction it feels inherently original and unique, but everyone’s self must logically be built from what you have absorbed from your environment. A primary way in which the self emerges and defines itself is through interactions with others.: “I want to be/don’t want to be like him/her”. The boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is generally pretty clearly defined mentally. I think the events of Persona are what happens when this boundary begins to break down. The personality and ‘selfhood’ of Alma begins to become mingled with Elizabet, and the film shows the psychological distress of the destruction of the self.
The circumstances in which this happens are carefully constructed. Both characters are placed far away from civilisation, so the only person to interact with is the other. The fact the Elizabet is mute means that Alma feels a compulsion to fill the silence. She talks and talks and in the process begins to outline her deepest secrets and anxieties. Alma happily says that she feels that this is the first time anyone has ever properly listened to her. In terms of the narrative, Alma has been sent to nurse Elizabet back to health, but the therapist/patient dynamic is reversed here. Alma seems to be inadvertently undergoing a somewhat one-sided psychotherapy.
At Alma’s most open moment, she confesses what seems to be her deepest secret. While sunbathing naked with a friend, they seduced and had an impromptu orgy with two boys. This resulted in Alma having an abortion, which it is plain that she feels intensely conflicted about. She freely admits that this was the best sex she’s ever had in her life, and describes it seemingly proudly graphically. This wanton behaviour does not fit into her perception of who she is, and she cannot square what she has done with what she professes to want out of life (marriage and children/security). As she debates with herself she lies in bed next to the silent Elizabet, who is gently stroking her hair and caressing her.
As time goes on the boundary between the two women becomes blurred. In a dreamlike sequence Elizabet places her long hair over Alma’s head. The high-contrast black and white photography makes Alma’s outline indistinct. It’s hard to tell where she ends and the sunlight begins. The characters are often positioned overlapping in the frame.
It would be a mistake to think that this process is working both ways. Alma becomes vastly more dependant on Elizabet than vice versa. Even though she is the one being cared for, she takes on a kind of maternal air in the relationship as Alma bares her soul.
The closeness can only last so long. Seemingly unable to resist temptation, Alma reads a letter to the doctor that Elizabet gave to her to post. It’s hard to fault her for this really. After giving so much of her internal life up to Elizabet it’s totally understandable to want a window into her head in return. What she finds horrifies her. Elizabet is analysing her, and finds her quite amusing. She even describes Alma’s secret beach tryst. The letter is not written in a bitchy way, and from the tone of it Elizabet clearly has affection for Alma, but it is a betrayal of confidence, and rightfully hurtful.
Alma turns against Elizabet, donning a large pair of sunglasses as if to put up a barrier between the two. She accidentally knocks over a glass outside, breaking it. After clearing up she notices a shard left lying in the path. Elizabet is walking around barefoot. We can sense the internal struggle inside Alma. In the end she decides that Elizabet ‘deserves’ the cut foot, and watches as she steps on it and hurts herself. It’s a coldly sadistic moment, and a worrying sign of Alma’s downward spiral.
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| (Also she looks cool as all hell) |
The negative feelings culminate in a row where Alma confronts Elizabet about the letter, angrily saying that she’s breached their trust. As Almamanically tells off Elizabet the row turns physical, ending when Alma reaches for a pan of boiling water. In panic, Elizabet says “be still”! It is one of the few times in the film that she speaks, and jolts Alma from her mania.
Eventually, the two characters seem to become intertwined. In a surreal sequence, Elizabet’s husband visits in the middle of the night, and mistakes Alma for Elizabet. Elizabet guides Alma’s hand to his face. Why does he think Alma is his wife? As Elizabet watches, looking stricken, the two make love.
By the morning all distinctions between them appear to have dissolved. In an astonishing sequence we watch Elizabet’s face as Alma delivers a blistering monologue about how Elizabet loathes herself, considering herself disgusting during her pregnancy, wishing the baby would be still-born and finally hating her son and find him “disgusting”. Elizabet listens. The camera switches angle, and now we see Alma delivering the monologue, we close in on her face. How can she know all this? Is she delivering an accusation or a confession? At the end of the sequence we are shown a terrifying fusion of the two women, neither one nor the other. All personal boundaries have broken down.
Alma panics, shouting,
“I'm not like you. I don't feel like you. I'm not Elisabet Vogler: you are Elisabet Vogler! I'm just here to help you!"
We cut, returning the next morning. Elizabet is now completely catatonic, and Alma has changed into her nurse’s uniform. The divide between them could not be clearer. Alma then gashes her arm and guides Elizabet’s lips to the wound, making her suckle on it. The last boundary between self and other has been breached. Alma then beats Elizabet violently before cradling her and making her repeat one word: “nothing”. She then leaves the cottage alone, the camera turns away and shows the crew and director filming the scene, thus breaking down the final cinematic boundary, between the film and audience.
What does all this talk destruction of boundaries mean? What is Bergman trying to tell us with the film? Is it a warning against giving too much of yourself up to be analysed? In his Silence Trilogy he laid bare his troubled relationship with Christianity. Is Persona a parable about the dangers of exposing too much of your inner being?
Elizabet’s silence creates a dead space that Alma feels compelled to fill, and she pours herself into it, feeding Elizabet in a kind of involuntary vampirism. It is notable that ‘alma’ in latin means ‘soul’, and Elizabet’s job is that of an actress; someone who dons ‘personas’. Are these two sides of Bergman? Does he possess the confused and conflicted desires of Alma, coupled with the desire to exploit those emotional experiences that Elizabeth, the actress must have. Is Bergman someone compelled to create art by cannibalising himself, filling dead space with his own inner fears and troubles while we look passively on in silence?
Like I said, complicated stuff.
This is apparently one of the most debated movies of all time, and apparently “one of [the 20th Century’s] greatest works of art”. I’ve tried to stay away from reading other people’s interpretations of it until I wrote this. So, if you think I’ve ballsed up this analysis, or got everything completely backwards please let me know!
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
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What is a man? Is he his family? His age? His job? His location? His physical appearance? What combination of factors creates a personal identity? Do you choose who you want to be, or are decisions made for you by others? John Frankenheimer’s Seconds tries to peel back the layers of this philosophical onion in this brilliant and bizarre film. It’s impossible to talk about this film without spoiling the plot, and it’s a film that benefits from going into it knowing very little.
Seconds is about what happens to a man when he gets given the chance to make a perfect break with the past and start over. Bank manager Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) lives a detached and numb suburban existence: he’s become emotionally distant from his wife and his daughter is married and lives far away. He feels a constant, deep sense of ennui. Then he is offered an opportunity to start over – to be ‘reborn’. A secretive company fakes his death, ensures security for his wife and daughter, gives him plastic surgery – everything he needs to start over with a new identity. His purported ‘dream life’ is served to him on a platter.. He takes it, and becomes successful artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). But can a man cope with being transplanted into a new life, even one which fulfils his every desire?
John Frankenheimer directs the hell out of this. For a man with such a long working career (1957 – 2002) I’m ashamed to say I’ve seen very few of his films. Earlier this year I watched The Manchurian Candidate (1962) which I thought was brilliant. I’ve also seen The Island of Dr Moreau (1996), but the less said about that the better. What I’ve noticed from both The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds is his firm grasp of ‘the weird’.
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| Reborn as Rock Hudson |
What is ‘the weird’? It’s when a film accentuates dissociative qualities in an attempt to disturb the audience. The conventions of realistic dialogue and normal human interaction become suspended, the film enters a liminal state. It’s not that the characters begin to speak in surreal nonsense; it’s more a question of a shift in tone and emphasis. Characters might place unusual priorities on behaviour, they could matter-of-factly say horrible things, or conversely, cheerily talk about atrocities. One of the best scenes in Seconds is when, after a metaphoric trip through the underworld, the unsuspecting Arthur Hamilton finally meets ‘Mr Ruby’. Mr Ruby is the representative of the company in Seconds which ‘rebirths’ people. As a confused and nervous Hamilton takes a seat, Ruby sits relaxed behind his desk and says;
“My name's Ruby. I've been assigned to go over the circumstances of your death with you”
As the scene continues Mr Ruby happily and calmly outlines the details of how they’re going to ‘kill off’ Mr Hamilton as if it were the equivalent of buying a new car or taking out a loan. You can get a lot of mileage out of viewing sinister acts through the lens of banal bureaucracy. Mr Ruby in this scene seems to prefigure Michael Palin’s ‘Jack Lint’ in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), where the most insidious evil lies in affability and chumminess.
A plate of food is delivered to Mr Hamilton, who, understandably is not in the mood for some light dinner (and considering the tea he drank earlier was drugged I’m not surprised). Mr Ruby is clearly distracted by the uneaten food – and soon he’s perched on the desk, nibbling at a piece of chicken, pausing from his graphic explanation of how they’re going to disfigure a cadaver to resemble him to extol the virtues of the cafeteria’s cheese covered chicken.
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| "They have this wonderful way of baking the cheese onto it so that it gets very crispy." |
Having done this, he casually proceeds to show our hero a film strip of him drugged and delirious, and apparently sexually assaulting someone. “Rest easy Mr Wilson. You did not ravage our girl” he helpfully adds.
What Frankenheimer understands is that you can’t plunge headlong into ‘the weird’, you have to gently escalate things. Treat the audience like a frog in a pan of water – to boil your frog alive you’ve got to heat the water slowly so it gets used to it. The escalation begins with the journey to Mr Ruby, as our lead is given cryptic messages, lead to a bizarre steam filled laundrette, and then through a meat-packing plant. It climaxes with the appearance of ‘The Old Man’, who runs the ‘Rebirth’ company. He is easily the most outré character in the film, a sinister eccentric with undefined but extensive means. His taut but lined face has a salesman’s smile stitched into it, his voice is smooth, grandfatherly and trustworthy. He is Satanic, and he’s got an offer that he says you can’t refuse. As Mr Hamilton hesitates, the pen hovering over the document, the old man sits staring at him, nodding supportively, that horrible grin seemingly slashed into his leathery hide.
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| "Of course the photography is not too professional. But I think it's clear enough." |
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| "There never was a struggle in the soul of a good man that wasn't hard. My poppa told me that." |
Speaking of dwarfs in dream sequences… The obvious master of ‘the weird’ is Lynch (and he gets an pass on the dwarf dream cliche for inventing it in Twin Peaks). Even after 30 years Eraserhead (1977) still sits near the top of the weirdo films pantheon, but elements in practically every Lynch film slide effortlessly in and out of ‘the weird’. There are visual and sonic elements in Seconds that seemingly prefigure similar scenes in Eraserhead and The Elephant Man (1980). Thematic concerns in Seconds - loss of control over your identity and the concept of the malleable personality also slot neatly into Lynch’s later works like Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.
This film would not be half as successful without the cinematography of its DP, James Wong Howe. He’s very much an unsung hero of cinema and in the 1960s about as experienced as it gets. His career dates back to 1923, and he’s photographed classics like The Thin Man (1934),Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Hud (1963)
When he's not shooting in a beautiful wide-angle he goes straight for the intrusive. Extreme closeups repeatedly fill the screen, the camera gets right in the actor’s faces letting us see every imperfection and nervous drop of sweat. Again, the effect seems Lynchlike. Inland Empire, shot on DV Cam utilises these techniques to the same effect, getting as close as possible to the actors, allowing their features to fill the frame, warts and all. Seconds is shot in high contrast black and white, and the lighting of the film picks out every crag, scar and baggy eye of the case. Considering a large portion of this film is set in Malibu, California, it is notable that no-one looks particularly glamourous.
During a drunken cocktail party sequence later in the film the camerawork ducks and weaves as it tracks an increasingly out of control and self-destructive Rock Hudson. Alternating between odd angles, and shaky POV shots the camerawork highlights the danger and picks out the disapproval etched on the faces of the guests. In key scenes Wong Howe distorts the frame, stretching characters and scenery like a funhouse mirror. It’s hardly the most original way to depict the fragile mental state of the characters, but it is undeniably effective.
This film is necessarily a performance of two halves, the first being Frank Campanella, who plays the lead pre-rebirth. A jowly, insecure egg of a man, he doesn’t so much wear a suit, as have it grafted onto his skin. He’s withdrawn, slightly twitchy and easily manipulated. Time after time he’s browbeaten and ordered around, and every time he willingly submits to the orders. Upon being asked to get into the back of a mysterious meat wagon he mildly objects, asking if he could ride in the front, but after meeting the slightest resistance immediately buckles and sits compliantly in the back of the darkened truck. This is a man who has supposedly achieved everything a man is supposed to: he’s got the comfortable suburban house in the country, the wife taking care of domestic duties, he’s next in line to be president at the bank, he’s got the boat to fiddle around in on weekends and a grown and married daughter. Yes sir, he’s got it all!
And he feels utterly neutered.
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| "So this is what happens to the dreams of youth." |
So he proves a susceptible candidate to agreeing to the radical surgery that transforms, him into Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). If there ever was an appropriate stage-name Rock Hudson is it. The stature and physicality of the guy seems to radiate dependability and security. Douglas Sirk recognised this, casting him twice as the domestic dream hunk in his melodramas All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind(1956). He also gives a fascinating portrayal of Texan masculinity during that period in Giant (1956). So if you are going to have your appearance completely altered, you could do a lot worse ending up as Rock Hudson. It’s a different side of him that we see here. He’s essentially playing someone who has been told to try and emulate the Sirk-esque ‘Rock Hudson’ type.
Rock Hudson does a fantastic job of showing us the insecurity of a weak man trying to pretend to be something he’s not. When quizzed about what his ideal job would be, he first chooses a tennis pro (which, incidentally was Frankenheimer’s ambition as a youth) and then settles for his second choice, to be an artist. The seemingly omniscient Rebirth company sets him up with diplomas from several prestigious art schools, produces a number of paintings that they’ve credited to him and gives him a plush and swanky studio on a California beach. Who could ask for more?
A lesser film might take this opportunity to show off how fun a life of luxury can be. In different hands this script could have been adapted to a comedic premise, a somewhat less fantastical equivalent of Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor (1963). Hudson never really looks like he’s having a good time, he clearly doesn’t enjoy his perfect life at all. He spends the initial weeks of his new life as an insecure shut-in, clumsily daubing on a canvas to try and become the successful artist he’s been told he’s supposed to be.
Eventually he meets a lively and impulsive woman sitting on a beach. She, like Hudson has ditched suburbia, and is the kind of character talks to the sea and reads tea leaves. Inevitably they fall into a relationship, and she begins to drag him out of his shell. In a quite bonkers sequence she drags him to some kind of wine-making bacchanalian, where wild, freaked-out hippies slosh around naked in a huge vat of grapes. In contrast, Rock Hudson begins to look a bit Alan Partridge-y, awkwardly watching in a conservative sports jacket and beige slacks.
Here the film taps into a recognisable paranoia. What if everyone sees through this mask? Who hasn’t been at some social gathering and become convinced that people are going to call you out as a fraud? In the face of such wild partying, the character immediately becomes discomforted and wants to get out of there. We feel for him, the party is frantically shot and edited in such a way as to emphasise the overt sexuality and chaos of the affair. If it were in colour, that vat of grapes might look inviting, but in black and white anything could be lurking in there. The cold, creepy, middle aged loser huddled within Rock Hudson’s manly demeanour is beating the walls in desperation. Eventually he gets pulled in, stripped, torn at like a victim in a zombie movie. He begins screaming in terror, but as he’s repeatedly baptised in the grape mush his screams turn to manic laughter. As he been ‘turned on’ to the hippy scene?
For a moment the audience can see a possible happy ending. It’s the 60s, right? All hail the dawning of the Age of Aquarius! What more optimistic message there be that even the stuffiest bank manager can become a sexually adventurous dope smoking flower child? But this isn’t that kind of film.
He goes further and further off the rails, manically screaming nonsense about his old life at a drunken cocktail party. He ends up back at his old wife’s house, desperate to get one of his old “Arthur Hamilton” watercolours back. She’s thrown them out. In this last look back at the life he’s abandoned he realises that he neither wants to go back, nor wants to continue as Tony Wilson the artist. He returns to the company for another bite of the apple and is led into a Kubrick-esque waiting room full of identically dressed men waiting for a re-rebirth.
The final scenes of the film involve a conversation with the Old Man who runs the company. Rock Hudson tries to explain what went wrong.
"You see it's so important. Choice! We gotta talk about it!"
He’s then unceremoniously strapped to a gurney, gagged and wheeled down a corridor to an operating theatre while screaming unintelligibly and thrashing about.
The doctors loom over him, drug him and kindly say “relax, old friend”.
Then they drill Rock Hudson’s brains out.
His last indistinct thoughts flicker before his eyes.
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| "Nurse? Cranial drill." |
Cut to credits.
Daaaaaaaaaamn.
So, what have we learned from this? The Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson character is fixated on the fact that the ability to choose for himself has been denied to him. As Arthur Hamilton he’s miserable because he feels that society has predetermined the boring suburban path his life has taken. As Tony Wilson he’s miserable because the Rebirth company has again made all the important decisions for him. All he claims he wants is his own capacity to choose a life for himself – “[give me] a new face and name. I’ll do the rest.” Unfortunately, he’s missed the point entirely.
He’s had agency all along, he was just too wrapped up in his own misery to realise it. He’s a rich, white, Harvard educated male in the 1960s for crying out loud – the world is practically laid out for him on a silver platter! His repeated desire to be able to make his own choices rings hollow – he’s always been able to make his own choices – he’s just lacked the imagination to do anything interesting with the hand of aces he’s been dealt.
Even when given another dream life, he still wallows in his own self pity. You can change a person’s environment, you can change their appearance and damn near everything else, but you can’t cure a fatal lack of imagination or purpose. Arthur/Tony could have an infinite number of ‘rebirths’ and would still remain stuck in his depressive, solipsistic loop, trying to work out who to blame for his misery this time. Sure, this time things will be different, this time it’s going to work out!
The idea that the film deconstructs is that happiness and fulfilment can be achieved by manipulating the external factors around a person. The ultimate message of the film is that long-lasting happiness is out there, but if you take too many shortcuts and don’t work out why you were miserable in the first place then you’re probably going to wind up with someone jamming a cranial drill into your skull.
And that’s why this is a great film.
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