On The Unrequited Love

In her absence - or in the absence of her - Joseph clings to the only corporal sign of life; the television set. Its light, blue, like Klein, or as reminder of the troubled skies and crashing waves that Godard intercuts in an effort to create visual commentary on the subject at hand - emotions suggested as ever through figurative associations - illuminates the darkness of the room; burning bright enough to cast the shadow of this man in mourning, creating the presence of two when only one is seen. The illusion of light creating life, as Joseph, in his solitude, cradles the early-morning static of this 'box', bereft of images and thus without reason, just as he is without reason without Carmen there to cling to.

As much as the image might imply a kind of vague generational critique, with Godard as the eternal curmudgeon; the mad old uncle casting a narrowed eye toward the youth and their relationship with the TeeVee, enamoured by its spectacle - like James Stewart in Rear Window (1954), the eye becoming a telephoto lens, each channel offering a window into a possible world, to be watched, from a distance, and without feeling - there's still something almost brazenly romantic about its presentation. The character, warmed by a cold blue frost of static noise that runs like sparks through the stubble, finds something in this embrace that is absent from his subsequent interaction with the titular character.

There, moments of love and tenderness are found between moments of great cruelty. A kiss very quickly betrayed by a vicious word or a cold clinch of despair or desperation. Here the embrace of this object, inanimate and without soul, is characteristic of Godard's ability to suggest layers of commentary through an image that at once seems rather straightforward - a symbol that when taken literally could seem like a farce, consistent with the broad slapstick of much of the director's middle-period approach - but when viewed as a representation, or as an almost abstract expression, is full of emotion and meaning, open to interpretation. It's that poet's sorrow for the complexities of the human condition at its most simple or profound.

Prénom Carmen directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1983:

However, the significance of the scene speaks to more than just Joseph's yearning for this beautiful nuisance. Instead, it's a kind of creative shorthand for the one-way love affair that exists between the audience and the work. The television - at this point still referred to, both dismissively and endearingly, as the 'small screen' - is, in some little way, a substitute for the cinema. With such a comparison in place, it makes perfect sense that in this moment of great loneliness Joseph would cling to this substitute as a surrogate for Carmen. In love with the image, its void represented by light, blue, like the words to the song that plays on the soundtrack - "everything is turning blue now" - or like his own heart in anguish - "there'll be someone else to hold you" - but unable to receive the same kind of love in return.

Of course the television is, like cinema, a dead object, brought to life by an audience willing enough to engage it's ideas or emotions through a genuine act of faith. What we get out of it depends on what we put in. A projection - personal and subjective - of our own experiences, wants, needs and desires onto these scenes, characters, words and images; the screen before us becoming a mirror, reflecting the great fantasy, not of how things are, but of how we want things to be. The greater the reflection, the greater our appreciation of the work. If cinema really is this magic mirror onto which we project our own individual dreams and desires, then television is the box we bury them in. Such is life. As much as we like to gesture and pontificate, citing the greatness of a work as we see it, or declaring from the rooftops in a voice as certain as the day that what we've just witnessed is a work of true beauty, it is an experience that exists only for us; like the greatest of all loves.

Joseph, like the audience, thinks he is in love; but Carmen is not a human being capable of receiving such love, let alone giving it in return. She is a character, created for a drama, and appropriated here for the purposes of creative commentary. She is, like the image, an empty space. Again, like the audience when gazing in wonder at the figures on screen, Joseph is in love with what he wants Carmen to be, how he interprets her through his own personal and subjective experiences. He cannot possible love her for what she is, which is an object, less tangible and less real than the television that he caresses in her absence. His attempt, in this scene, to find fulfilment through the embrace of this non-image illustrates the void that exists between the audience and the work as a figurative or poetic expression of the unrequited love.

Intervals

A film nervous with the anticipation of something?

Though the something never arrives, at least not the something one might expect from the grating, almost metronome-like soundtrack, or the framing of shots, which imply The Third Man (1949) via shades of early Godard, or some similar tale of espionage suggested by these street level observations and the European locale. The amplification of the 'dubbed' sounds, at least initially, seem to play against a natural expectation for a certain kind of drama, or 'pay-off', in the dramatic sense. The ticking sound, like a ticking clock, counting the minutes, or a time bomb, like with Hitchcock, from Sabotage (1936) to Saboteur (1942). However, the dramatic reveal that we're anticipating turns out to be something else, unrelated, but no less remarkable! An explosion, not in the sense of a terrorist attack, but as an actual emotional revelation felt within the experimentation of the form.

The creative associations that are forced upon the work by this juxtaposition of sound and image create a sense of drama that would otherwise be nonexistent, and this, effectively, is the point.

Like Greenaway's later film, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), this is a film about the relationship between the viewer and the work itself. While the later film would employ a dramatic device made famous by Antonioni in his masterpiece Blow-Up (1966) - in which an artist creates a work that reveals, on closer inspection, the clues to a terrible crime - the approach to this particular film is less narrative, more subjective. Here the audience adopts the role of the Draughtsman, or the unnamed photographer of Antonioni's film. However, unlike the two characters there, we (the individual spectator) haven't created this work, but are being invited by the filmmaker to look at it, to study these shots, these recurring moments in time, with the same restlessness, the same obsessive curiosity. At first it all seems fairly mundane; geriatrics and hesitant children shuffling through near-vacant streets. Without the soundtrack in place, these images would seem uneventful, perhaps even routine.

Intervals directed by Peter Greenaway, 1968-1973:

In the act of closely examining these shots, the audience begins to project their own ideas and interpretations onto them, drawing consciously or unconsciously on a familiarity with the machinations of a genre (or the general conventional presentation of cinema) to invent their own scenarios, to justify Greenaway's experiment in an attempt to anchor it to some kind of recognisable context or theme. This, as an experiment, is directly related to the specific way that we, as audiences, experience films; an experiment in the art of looking and seeing, but also in allowing the film (and the filmmaker) to manipulate the way we receive information through the combination of sound and image.

In the majority of films this is hidden; part of the great magic act that filmmakers use to dazzle their audience, creating moments of comedy and drama, terror and suspense from a seemingly simple cutting between scenes, characters and situations. With Intervals, Greenaway wants to expose the lie, expose the tricks that these storytellers use to manipulate the emotions of an audience. Here these cyclical street-scenes (presented as the 'Intervals' of the title) that repeat several times, each time with subtle variations on the soundtrack, are intended to push the viewer into analysing their own subjective interpretation of the images, and what these images might suggest.

While the earlier experiments with sound create an atmosphere of tension or suspense - something slightly ominous or threatening, again, like a ticking clock, counting down the seconds to some actual devastation - the wave of orchestration that breaks and pulls the images back from the brink of catastrophe (and back towards something more conventionally cinematic, in the Hollywood sense), creates a feeling in the viewer of our senses or perceptions being altered, subtly or not so subtly, by the experimentation with the form. Here we have the same images, the same streets and people appearing again and again, and yet our interpretation of these events is transformed, significantly, by the specific choice of soundtrack. This, in a very Greenaway stroke, is the essence of cinema at its most creative and unashamedly deceptive.

A Voice in the Wilderness

I thought this might be of interest...

In late September, I set myself a personal challenge. The challenge, which is still on-going, is to write a short comment of roughly 420 characters in length for each of the 670 titles currently listed under the 'favourite films' section of my profile at the cinema-related social-networking site MUBI (formerly known as The Auteurs). In the great scheme of things, I'm still very much at the beginning, but the project so far has been liberating, and in a strange way, far more satisfying than posting my work at 'Lights in the Dusk'. You can read the first 37 comments (thus far) by clicking the link below...

Lights in the Dusk on MUBI:

Quelqu'un m'a dit

The voice of the man cannot travel between these two spaces; these inner worlds where lost souls attempt to express the feeling of longing through individual pursuits; plucked chords or the dance of light, illustrating the bittersweet embrace of a love that is unrequited. He's attracted to her, in the physical sense, but he cannot hear the sad words that she sings. His light burns brightly, but perhaps not bright enough. The inability to communicate is here in this single movement of the camera. It exaggerates the emotional distance between them by making explicit the physical closeness. Open your window and scream it, at the top at your lungs. I love you... but?

No. He breathes a sigh, lets out a silent declaration, but is content to chase the shadows. He carries a torch, but he can't hold a candle. She doesn't see him (won't ever see him); she's seduced by the muse. The siren, with her song, no longer calling the sailors to their deaths, but attracting, like moths to a flame, the hopeful and the hopeless. What was it Julie Harris said at the end of East of Eden; "it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world" The man is plunged, back again, into the darkness, all hope gone; snuffed out, like the candle. Then someone told me...

This is the Caraxian fascination with obsessive love (dangerous love; a love that destroys) as a counter to Bruni's coyly poetic lyrics. Like Denis Lavant in Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), the man, Aurélien Recoing, shirtless, breathing fire, wants nothing more than to be in the presence of this woman - whose light burns bright enough to illuminate the darkness of his own existence - but he can never possess her. He cannot hold this light for fear of destroying it, corrupting it's beauty with his own cruelty; like Alex with Mireille in Boy Meets Girl (1984), or Pierre with Lucie in Pola X (1999). "Look away" says Nick; "look away... and never more think of me"

Quelqu'un m'a dit directed by Leos Carax, 2003:

Close-Up

For the first few moments of its short duration, this early piece of genuine cinema history is no more adventurous or remarkable than the early experiments of the French-born pioneer Louis Le Prince. What we are seeing, in all actuality, is a basic one-take tableau vivant observation of a single scene, devised as a work of fiction, but no less indebted to the presentational - or, what would eventually be termed 'cinematic' - approach established by Le Prince in the films Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888).

In wide-shot, a little girl feeds her ailing kitty cat some medicine from a spoon. As an action, this is adorable, but alone, the presentation suggests only the intention to record, on film, for commercial purposes, an action to melt the heart's of the kindest old ladies. So far so-so... Then something extraordinary happens. A connection is created between two images. A jump, literally, from far-away to close-up.

The Sick Kitten directed by G.A. Smith, 1903:

The English filmmaker George Albert Smith had pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his previous films, As Seen Through a Telescope (1900) and Grandma's Reading Glass (1900). There the technique was more of a novelty; a way of presenting a new perspective: one of exaggeration. However, in this film, it is practicality that dictates the use of this new technique. The director wants to emphasise a moment that would have been missed had the camera remained at a distance. The kitten's face as it gladly laps up the medicine can now be seen by the audience, allowing us to follow the action more directly.

At this precise moment, cinema finally breaks free from the influence of the stage and establishes something that is unique to the language of film. From this point on, the camera would be able to offer the audience new perspectives; emphasising details and showing the emotion of actors in a way that would have been unfeasible without the benefit of this new innovation. It was now possible for the audience to go from this...



...to this...

...without having to physically bring ourselves closer to the work. A revolutionary moment in the development of the medium and one that indirectly makes possible the extraordinary montages in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, or the expressive, detailed shots of eyes, mouths, hands and iconography in the films of Sergio Leone. This single moment would change the way future film were produced; opening up a new world of creative possibilities, as well as bringing with it the potential for a more intimate form of cinema. Less broad, less theatrical; a cinema of small gestures.

The Phantom Ride

The camera shunts along the tracks, headlong into darkness, into the unknown. This is innovation, the movement of the camera giving the audience the feeling of a journey. As an event in the development of cinema's history, this film is as important as Auguste and Louis Lumière's The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1895), which suggested, through a single moment, the possibility of cinema as spectacle. In George Albert Smith's The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), the opening and closing shots represent the reverse-angle to the Lumière's remarkable film. Now the audience could experience not only the arrival, but the journey as well.

All of a sudden the cinema was no longer a medium for static observations, but something that could move between worlds.

The Kiss in the Tunnel directed by G.A. Smith, 1899:

The kiss that occurs in-between represents the embrace of the new, this kingdom of shadows called cinema. An artistic medium somewhere beyond the influence of literature, theatre or still photography; instead, a magic act of movement and emotion, where the light at the end of the tunnel becomes a premonition to the light from a film projector as it burns against the darkness of the screen. As the camera continues along the track, out of the darkness, into the bright future of this new world of artistic expression, the movement, eloquently described by Mark Cousins as a "phantom ride", suggests the possibility for future films to transport the audience, both figuratively and literally, into the unfamiliar territories of the heart and mind.