The
Territory [Raúl Ruiz, 1981]:
I return to
that unforgettable illustration; a map within a map, like a skull within a
skull. Similar folds and echoes reoccur
throughout as these characters try to navigate this terrain, this territory;
hopelessly adrift in a subconscious expression of events, like a narrative within a narrative, or a dream within a
dream. The 'territory' of the title is
both the location of the forest, as a physical space, where these characters
vacation in an effort to get away from the chaos of the modern world, as well
as the psychological topography of the situation, as they inevitably - through
isolation and the gradual erosion of their accepted roles and responsibilities
- succumb to a kind of shared delusion, or psychosis. The allegorical journey as descent into
madness motif is further obfuscated by the meta-deconstructions of the
narrative. Like so many films by Ruiz,
there is the disquieting implication that the gothic reverie that we've just
been witness to is in fact a fabrication; part fiction, part truth. A clever work of deception, told by an
unreliable narrator, and further abstracted by the director's vivid approach to
staging and composition. The distortions
of the frame, the bizarre perspectives and the saturated colours - all
characteristic of Ruiz's work - blur the recognisable line between fiction and
reality.
The feel of
the film - mysterious, hypnotic, enigmatic - becomes, through the layering of
the various perspectives (the different levels of insanity), like a startling
hall of mirrors. A cracked reflection of
the original event - the disappearance - refracted as an endless repetition;
each recurrence, each reverberation, more distorted than the last. Again, we go back to that image of the map -
the country within the skull - and
the metaphorical implications of the title; 'the territory', and what it
represents. Although the iconography of
the film might evoke the tropes and conventions of certain exploitation movies
popular during the late 1970s - with the ghostly woods, the unseen threat, the
party of missing travellers and the use of cannibalism as a metaphor for the
decline of western civilisation recalling everything from The Hills Have Eyes
(1977) to Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - the ultimate intention of Ruiz's film is
perhaps closer to Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), where the descent into
tribal violence carried a socio-political significance, or to Peter Weir's masterpiece
The Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), where the disappearance of a party of young school
children suggests the supernatural presence of the location as a state of meta/physical
awakening.
Holy Motors
[Léos Carax, 2012]:
A series of sketches. Fragmented, loosely connected. At first, the whole thing - every scene,
every vignette - seems randomly put together.
A collision of different influences, quoted, cited, but nonetheless
dropped, as if by accident, into the framework of the finished film. No real rhyme or reason, just indulging, for
the sake of it; for the beauty of the act.
There is an inner truth to the presentation of these scenes, to the
progression of its central character(s), but also a feeling of wilful
eccentricity; a kind of dress-up David Lynch, albeit without the context of
Lynch's continual obsessions or his specifically 'American' way of seeing. And yet, in spite of this haphazard approach,
the film still came together, in retrospect.
In the jumble of thoughts, the initial disappointment; in the imagination
of certain scenes, I understood. Yes,
the film is about 'performance' and
the nature of performance - in life as well as art - but it's also a hymn to
the death of cinema - to the end of film as it once existed for the generation
of its director - and yet a hymn that also celebrates the endless possibilities
that the cinema can still possess.
The
"holy motors" of the title refer to the film camera, the cinema
projector, the moviola; these artefacts, which for well over a hundred years defined
and made possible the process of making films, have been replaced, by digital
technology. Machines that now replicate
the same process, but without the heart and soul of a living person to operate
them. If the film works at all (and it
does), it is in mourning this loss of tradition, while simultaneously demonstrating
that the thrill of cinema is not necessarily found in the technique, but in the
expression. The escapades of the film
are therefore allegorical and not so much exclusively limited to the idea of 'performance',
or the end of cinema as the beginning of something new, but an extension of the
mindset of Carax; his ambivalence to what the cinema has become, and his frustration for what it could still, potentially,
be. His own appearance in the film
suggests a thread of auto-biography; beginning with the self-exiled author
himself as 'the dreamer', asleep in the wilderness. He finds his way back to the movies, to a
subconscious space, but to an audience now bored by the magic and the mystery
of the silver screen.
JLG/JLG -
Self-Portrait in December [Jean-Luc Godard, 1995]:
It begins
with the image of an image. Godard as
child; a portrait, in black and white.
An image of youth, expressive of all the potential and possibility that
we associate with youth; with that period between childhood and adolescence;
the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end. A shadow falls silently across this image,
creating a darkness that is suggestive of both the dark winter nights of
December - that gloom of the winter months - or the dark mood of its
protagonist as he evokes, in agonising voice, the cruelty of age. The silhouette of Godard as a middle-aged man
- present but not present - is like a
spectre. A revenant, existing as a
shadow of the former self; a reflection; a body, incomplete. Like the silhouetted form that haunts the near-silent
images of the masterpiece I... Dreaming (1988) by Stan Brakhage, the presence
of this shape, the dark void of the soul, suggests the loneliness of the man as
he reflects on the image of the child he once was, on the promise he once
held. The image (of the image) once
again defining, in the visual sense, the notion of the self-portrait. The past self
as witness to the present; the present self
as living evidence of the past.
Like Anne-Marie
Miéville's revelatory The Book of Mary (1984), much of JLG/JLG is focused on the
domestic spaces that define a life. For
Godard, the remnants of his own existence can be found in the contrast between
the interior and exterior spaces that characterise the two facets of his
personality. The introvert 'thinker', alone
in his study, marking time with his books and his films, and the public figure,
the maker of films, still roaming the wilderness in search of stories; an exile
of his own volition. The disparities between
the two - the house, dark and cavernous; littered with books and filmmaking
paraphernalia - and the landscape - frozen, crystal clear; tranquil but
possessing a natural drama suggested by the crashing waves and ominous clouds -
create a mirror to this character; this 'Godard' by Godard. The contrast between the two spaces once again
evokes a tender loneliness. Godard, who
once helped to re-define the cinema, is now outside of the culture; forgotten,
ignored. Although there is a great sense
of humour to the film, the overall mood
of JLG/JLG is reminiscent of the mournful, wounded expression of a work like Germany
Year 90 Nine Zero (1991); another film in which Godard, indirectly, questioned
his own mortality; his relevance as a relic in the winter of his years.
