The Unseen

Self-reflexivity and identity in Lupin (2021)

At the time of writing, I'm only three episodes into the new Netflix produced adaptation of Lupin (2021), but I have to admit, I'm quietly invested. While the show is frequently implausible, contrived and utterly unrealistic in its attempts to fold intricate twists and turns into the narrative – one-upping the ingenuity of the character and their efforts to manipulate events to facilitate a preferred outcome; "the sleight of hand", à la Christopher Nolan's movies, such as The Prestige (2006), or a film like Now You See Me (2013) by Louis Leterrier, who directed several episodes of the show in question – I think the series has more interesting elements surrounding the narrative that are worth looking at in further detail.

First, the meta role that the text plays on the formation of the character and their pursuit of truth and vengeance for a loved one cruelly wronged.

For the uninitiated, Lupin is based on a series of books about the character Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief created by Maurice Leblanc in the early twentieth century. Lupin, as a character, featured in 17 novels and 39 novellas, beginning with the collection, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar (1907). In this version of the story, the character Assane Diop models his life on that of Lupin after being given a copy of the book as a childhood present by his father. The passing of the book from father to son triggers a significant plot-point, wherein the father, Babakar, is accused by his powerful and wealthy employees of stealing a priceless necklace, is imprisoned, and subsequently commits suicide in jail. Assane grows up, adopting the Lupin persona as his own, and sets out to prove his father's innocence.

The book throughout makes an appearance, offering clues to detectives trying to piece together the mystery, and also providing clues to Assane about the exploitation of his father. Sub-plots from the books are also updated and played out as inspirations for Assane's own plans, creating an interesting thread of self-reflexivity.

Lupin: Chapter One [Louis Leterrier, 2021]:

Lupin: Chapter Two [Louis Leterrier, 2021]:

In this production, Assane/Lupin is brilliantly played by the actor Omar Sy. Historically, the character of Arsène Lupin has almost always been portrayed as white. A twentieth-century everyman able to move seamlessly between worlds and stratums of society, discreet and chameleon-like in his ability to disappear into a role or guise. In changing the ethnicity of Lupin, the creators of the Netlfix series, George Kay and François Uzan, imbue the project with a more contemporary social commentary, subverting societal expectations, and injecting a greater consciousness into the show and its subtext of class and racial exploitation.

In the very first episode, we're introduced to Assane working as part of a team of cleaners at the Louvre. Later, he'll visit a violent loan shark installed within one of the predominantly working-class high-rise developments on the outskirts of Paris, setting up the machinations of a robbery. Without establishing the character and the role he'll subsequently play, the introduction to Assane is meant to assuage conservative expectations and prejudices that unfortunately follow people from non-white, non-European backgrounds, before subverting them with later revelations of the plot. The audience accepts the reality of the character, as presented in these early scenes, because it plays into too many well-worn stereotypes frequently presented in films, music and television.

As the scenes unfold, we see that many of Assane's co-workers at the gallery are also from communities marginalized by the middle-classes. They come from African or Middle Eastern backgrounds. They work through the night, hidden away from the tourists and the patrons, invisible and unseen. The foregrounding of this scene and the way Lupin is able to go about setting up the particulars of his heist without drawing any suspicion or distrust, speaks to the way working class people – especially those from marginalized areas of society – exist in the background of things. To the middle and upper-classes, and those made comfortable by privilege, these people are merely there to fulfil a function or a need. They don't exist.

Lupin: Chapter One [Louis Leterrier, 2021]:

Lupin: Chapter Two [Louis Leterrier, 2021]:

It's this anonymity that privilege and ignorance breeds that gives Lupin the perfect cover to move seamlessly between worlds; to adopt new personas; to install himself in institutions. It also gives the filmmakers context to explore and critique systemic values and structures that allow prejudice, inequality, and the exploitation of working-class people to proliferate through a society controlled, not by the many, but by the few.

When Lupin makes his escape from a rendezvous by using his cover as a delivery cyclist to evade the police, or infiltrates a prison by simply swapping places with a detainee with a similar physicality, it further calls out the lack of attention or concern such people and professions are afforded by those that fail to acknowledge their basic human existence. The show confronts audiences with their own prejudices and preconceptions, becoming in a way like a mirror, reflecting but also challenging the accepted cultural narrative that allows these same prejudices to exist.

In this variation of the story, Lupin's ability to be at once a member of high society and at the same time pass unnoticed through the working class, makes him something of an aspirational figure. A kind of folk hero, like Robin Hood. He might rob from the rich, but in doing so, he shows to the audience the inequalities and the poor living conditions that turn many of the characters existing on the margins of the show and its environments towards acts of criminality. In plainer terms, it also shows that a character like Assane can succeed; that he can play the system at its own game and win; that he can move seamlessly and comfortably through a world of wealth and privilege in a way rarely shown in mainstream entertainment.

There's a further self-reflexive quality to this relating to the nature of performance. Throughout, Assane as Lupin takes on different roles and guises. He's essaying characters essentially, putting on a costume and adopting a particular persona. Through the early episodes the filmmakers play with this, continually blurring the line between Assane as Lupin, Lupin as Assane, and the fear that one might be lost to the other. It will be interesting to see how these themes and ideas broaden and develop through the subsequent episodes.

Travelling Light

Thoughts on a film by Gina Telaroli

Three quotes preface the presentation of the film on its director's Vimeo profile. One attributed to a fellow filmmaker, one to an author, and one that remains unsigned but is possibly from Telaroli herself.

"Ten properties of a subject, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness." - Robert Bresson

"They began very promptly—these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches, peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light…" - from Henry James' "Daisy Miller: A Study"

An Amtrak train pulls out of Penn Station in New York City on a cold, sunny February morning. The train moves forward as the landscape changes—the East Coast giving way to the Midwest. Passengers fill their roles, the snow begins to fall and the next train station is announced, all while the light continues shifting, bouncing, swelling and slouching into eventual darkness.

The third quote functions as an obvious synopsis/description of the work itself, defining, in clear-terms, the practicalities of the film's recorded journey, from station-to-station, and place to place. But on a certain level, so too do the quotes from James and Bresson. These quotations speak of the subconscious layer of the film; of what it's depicting beneath the surface of the recording. The significance of the train, its passage through the landscape, the changing topography, the contrast between light and dark, and the transient nature of public transportation, with its journey, both physical and emotional, as a mirror to the journey of a life itself, is expressed between the passages of these words.

The film, in a way, adapts these quotations into images that on one level seem staggeringly mundane and even banal in their presentation of the ordinary, or the everyday, or it applies the quotations to give form to what a first appears formless, but either way, it gets at something inherently mysterious, even monumental, that is felt in the journey (or journeys) depicted in Telaroli's film.

Travelling Light [Gina Telaroli, 2011]:

Whether intentionally or not, Telaroli, in filming the passing landscape from the train's window, creates an iris effect, wherein the edges of the window intrude upon the image, creating a frame within a frame. This, on one level, establishes the subjective relationship between the presence of the filmmaker, recording the journey as it unfolds, but also the notion of the camera as the eye of the audience. It doesn't simply record, it observes, active and attentive, the way a human eye might respond when gazing as a passenger from the window of this moving vehicle.

It also has broader connotations, reminding us of the iris effect of old movies, from the silent era to the golden age of Hollywood, and on an even more vague and obscure level, suggesting the perspective of an astronaut gazing through the visor of their space helmet; exaggerating the almost alien sense of the journey as Telaroli records it, and connecting, again, albeit vaguely, the subjective journey of the film through geographical space with the journey of a character like Dr. Dave Bowman as he travels through the stargate in Stanley Kubrick's enduring masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Travelling Light [Gina Telaroli, 2011]:

Grandma's Reading Glass [George Albert Smith, 1900]:

2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968]:

This may seem like an odd connection to make – and in many ways it is – however, in both films we have the presentation of a journey that functions on both a literal and subconscious level. There is the actual, physical journey, with its departures and arrivals, and then there is the metaphysical journey, the one that transforms rather than transports.

From the very first images, Telaroli's film establishes a connection between the idea of travel, the journey, a train on a track, with the notion of the narrative journey, the progression of a story from beginning to end, from its point of departure to its inevitable arrival.

The train is one of the great symbols of the cinema, having played a key role in its formation from the very beginning of its history. It was a train that thrilled audiences in the silent marvel of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière – investing the cinema was a sense of the sensational – and it was a train that gave way to the notion of narrative cutting, of the edit between interior and exterior spaces, in George Albert Smith's groundbreaking A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899).

Since that time, trains have been a defining narrative and visual presence in cinema, from The Iron Horse (1924) to The General (1926) and beyond, to Shanghai Express (1932), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), Pather Panchali (1955), Night Train (1959), The Train (1964), The Hero (1966), Trans-Europe-Express (1966), La Chionoise (1967), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The American Friend (1977), Runaway Train (1985), Europa (1991), Sleepless (2000), Unstoppable (2010), Snowpiercer (2013) and The Image Book (2018), among others.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station [Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896]:

A Kiss in the Tunnel [George Albert Smith, 1899]:

Pather Panchali [Satyajit Ray, 1955]:

Trans-Europe-Express [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966]:

The Image Book [Jean-Luc Godard, 2018]:

From the beginning of cinema, the train has moved through its narrative, like a leitmotif; the progression of it, as a collective journey, and the experience of that of the passenger, seated, passive, staring through a rectangular window of light at the changing scenes and dramas that pass before our eyes, is like a mirror reflecting back on itself. In many films, the train is a symbol of discovery, suggesting the encroachment of the "modern" world onto that of the "primitive" or outdated, suggesting an escape, a movement, or the journey between worlds (both real or imagined.)

Telaroli's film fits into this tradition. It represents a recorded journey, both pictorially and, on some level, psychologically, presenting a movement between worlds, but it's also a narrative, where the beginning of the train journey and its conclusion mirrors the beginning and ending of the film.

Travelling Light [Gina Telaroli, 2011]:

Here, the intricacies of the title work on two separate levels. There's "travelling light", in the sense of moving without baggage. As in taking a short journey without the need for heavy luggage, but also baggage in the figurative sense, as in not being burdened by thoughts, fears, and responsibilities. "Travelling light" also refers to the progression of light itself, both in the movement from dawn to dusk, or light into dark, but also the journey of light as it moves through the frames of the film.

Here, sunlight on a passing mountain, or daylight streaking through the windows of the train, or artificial light refracted by rain or frost on the glass, becomes as much of a journey as the one being taken in tandem by the filmmaker and audiences as the train moves along the track. Finally, the connection is made clear, with the closing shot, detailed in the final screenshot above, a train retreating along the platform, slowly disappearing into a bank of fog, with only the light on the front of the locomotive left appearing like a ghostly orb shining in the middle-distance. In this moment, the eye of the camera as surrogate for that of the protagonist/audience, is now liberated from the confines of the train. We're outside, emerged, as if from the womb, and faced with something approaching reality.

As a closing shot, it connects back to the beginning of the film, the movement of the train, departing or progressing through the wintry landscape, but also to the notion of the journey, emotional, psychological, or geographical. The notion that we've arrived, marooned upon the platform, rigid and unmoving, but that another journey is already beginning for someone else. Here, in retrospect, the connection to the three quotes highlighted by Telaroli as a preface to her film, make perfect sense.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Shanghai Express [29 February 2020], The Phantom Ride [09 September 2011]

Artificial Intelligence

The Current Cinema

A recent video posted by Insider, How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming, gets to the broken heart of my problem with the current blockbuster cinema, and helps to explain why the directed-by-committee focus of the modern Hollywood franchise film is so frequently devoid of originality, imagination and risk.

Focusing on the work of previsualization company The Third Floor, Inside preface their video with the following description: The Third Floor is one of the world's top visualization studios and has worked on 19 of the 23 installments in Marvel's "Infinity Saga." From previs and stuntvis to techvis and postvis, The Third Floor's work on Marvel movies runs through the entire production process. The first previsualizations of a Marvel film can begin well in advance of its release date, often before the screenplay is fully finished. Find out how Marvel visualizes its movies years before filmmaking and how this practice has helped the MCU rise its position of box-office dominance today.

The video goes on to explain that "previs" frequently occurs before directors and cinematographers have even been hired, meaning the job of a filmmaker hired to helm a Marvel movie is less about directing than merely recreating what has already been rendered as 3D, computer generated animation.

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

You could argue that this process is merely the modern, 21st century equivalent of the storyboard, and to an extent you would be correct. Many filmmakers, from Alfred Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers, have been known to rigorously storyboard every shot in their films prior to the production process. But the difference here is that Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers and others would sit down with a storyboard artist and translate their ideas to the page. They'd then work with cinematographers, production designers and members of the art department to turn that storyboard into a facsimile of reality.

With previsualization, it's not necessarily the traditional filmmakers that are designing and directing the movie, it's teams like The Third Floor, who are creating demo versions of the film and in the process making many of the creative decisions that inform the finished work. As one of the quoted sources in the film puts it, [the previs team are] "literally an additional director/writer/editor on the movie." With this in mind, why are we still crediting directors with the success of these films?

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

The uniformity of Marvel's cinema is not really a surprise at this point. That they're produced by committee is self-evident. A film like Black Panther (2018), aesthetically, looks a lot like Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Captain Marvel (also 2019), and very little like director Ryan Coogler's previous films, Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015). This is because the actual job of directing these films has already been done prior to the director coming on-board. This is why Marvel's cinema feels rote and homogenous compared to earlier, auteur-driven superhero movies like Batman Returns (1992), Unbreakable (2000) and even The Dark Knight (2008).

As one of the contributors to the Insider film puts it, "All a director has to do is be an avid viewer of their own movie," which in other words is a total dismissal or rejection of the role of the director as a creative or artistic individual, reducing it to little more than an arbiter or brand guardian.

For those that enjoy Marvel's movies as escapist spectacle, this is hardly concerning. Most audiences don't care about the role of director and aren't going to see these films for their expression of personal art, politics, or ideology. But what does it say about the role of the film critic? Marvel movies are frequently the most critically acclaimed blockbuster films released. When we have a generation of critics not just rejecting but actively ridiculing a work of personal, auteur-driven cinema, like Glass (2019) by M. Night Shymalan, then falling over themselves to praise directors for work they didn't even create, and films that were put together by artificial intelligence, like those by Marvel, then the future of cinema as anything less than a corporate, committee-driven enterprise, is seriously at risk.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: On contemporary cinema: Superheroes and the denial of humanity [11 October 2020], The Film Director as Superstar [15 August 2020], The Current Cinema [09 January 2020], The Popular Cinema [22 June 2019]