The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [Tobe Hooper, 1974]:
The film is bookended by two extraordinary if very different
representations of light. At the
beginning, darkness is pierced by staccato bursts of flashbulb photography;
revealing, in small fractures of illumination, the grisly aftermath of a
terrible crime. Later, at the very end
of the film, we find the unforgettable image of the demented antagonist,
Leatherface, wielding his chainsaw in a macabre dance against the amber
sundowing of a rural plane. The first scene
is significant in as much as it initiates the audience into the story - teasing
us with those blink or we'll miss them flashes of violence and gore as an
appeal to the viewer's natural sense of morbid curiosity - while the second
image is one that seems to exist outside the realms of reality, instead,
becoming symbolic; a physical manifestation of the violence that stalks and
sears the American landscape. While the
first scene is a prelude to the carnage that will follow - the glimpses of
degradation becoming a promise of things to come - the later scene is a
culmination; the madness and murder of the preceding seventy-some minutes
finding an expression in this strange and unsettling image of a fury, uncontrolled.
Both of these scenes - these moments - are inherently
cinematic. By "cinematic", one
means, more specifically, an image (or images) where the physical expression of
a particular emotion or psychological state is expressed through movement and
motion, light and sound. A moment that
could not be written, or even spoken (a short one-line description would rob
the image of its significance, or its power to provoke), but only filmed. Throughout The Texas Chain Saw Massacre it is
images like these that define the
experience. Images that can only work on
the screen; they need a particular actor, the correct light, the right setting
and the natural atmosphere that comes from these locations; the house with its startled
chickens trapped in undersized cages, its metal doors, its skull and bone
ornaments. The power of the film is as
such entirely visceral; it comes from the impression of different places, the
sense of the heat and dirt, the interactions between characters and the
accumulation of moments and images that get under the skin; strange images, but
ones that are presented with a matter of fact practicality, as if simply
documenting a scene of everyday life.
For me, this is the essence of cinema; the use of images to
evoke and influence a particular emotional or psychological response. Not something that is written (literature) or
even performed (theatre), but something much more sensory; the experience of
entering into a pitch-black space with only the flicker of the screen providing
a relief from the darkness. In the gloom
of the cinema, the play of light and shadow (which in turns creates the
illusion of movement, bringing images to life) and the horrendous din of the
buzz saw cutting through a disharmony of shrieking screams will play on the
nerves of its audience, putting us on edge.
Just as those staccato flashbulbs at the beginning of the film work to
dazzle and disarm us - the brief sight of the rotting corpse unsettling us, but
also drawing us in - the later scenes, like the encounter with the menacing
hitchhiker, the family dinner or the killer's dance of death, work - like the
most iconic and powerful cinematic moments - to translate complex thoughts and feelings
into images that are indelible and entirely direct.
These images seek to translate the horrors of the modern world into
something primal; giving "form" to them; visualising, in tangible
terms, our deepest and darkest fears.
____________________________________________________
New Rose
Hotel [Abel Ferrara, 1998]:
What begins
as surveillance will end in a memory.
The "reality" (this story of warring corporations, business
deals, industrial espionage, role-playing, seduction and manipulation) is just
pretence for the existential dilemma that dominates the final act. A kind of context; a reason or justification
that motivates this character; that compels him on a journey towards an endless
oblivion in a box at the "New Rose Hotel." The location of the title - a derelict
capsule hotel somewhere in a multicultural future-space indebted to the
iconography of the modern Japan - is more than just a setting; it becomes an
on-screen illustration of the character's psyche; a cell, or void-like
sarcophagus, where memories play like the scenes from a film. These memories are in fact repetitions from
the film in question; scenes previously shown as part of the conventional
narrative arc, now linger, phantom-like, as echoes through an empty space. However, in repeating these scenes in the context
of what we've seen since, Ferrara, his co-writer Christ Zois and his editors
Jim Mol and Anthony Redman, find subtle variations in the dialogue (the
re-emphasis of certain words, the discrepancy of information, inconsistencies,
etc), demonstrating how easily a smile, a glance, a frown or a gesture can
change its meaning when viewed in retrospect, or in the context of something new.
While many
have dismissed this final montage as lazy filmmaking or joked that its
inclusion resulted from an obvious lack of funds, I found the presentation of this
almost "psychological reiteration"
of events to be profound, shocking, even moving. What this third act does is push the
subjectivity of the film to breaking point.
While the earlier scenes - the more conventional three-act structure;
where characters are introduced and the narrative established through
exposition - have a more observational, even recorded objectivity (though one occasionally broken by the
inter-cutting of different film formats, such video and super 8), the feeling
of the third act is essentially that of being trapped in the mindset of a
particular character as he sifts through his past recollections; through events
that at the time seemed relatively mundane - just business as usual - but which
now seem loaded with the intrigues of a greater conspiracy. Is it truth or paranoia? The character, having lived by the sword of
this world of corruption, surveillance and betrayal, now feels the walls
closing in on him; the practicalities of the job - his lifestyle - being used
as a weapon against him. Like the tormented Harry Caul
in Coppola's The Conversation (1974), the protagonist of Ferrara's film
knows the realities of this world from his own involvement in its illicit
practices; his suspicions fuelling a kind of emotional fallout that is profoundly
devastating and all too real.
____________________________________________________
Whispering Pages [Aleksandr Sokurov, 1994]:
I've gone back and forth on this one, trying to clarify my
opinion. At first, I was stunned by the
cinematography - the sense of "world building" - but found the
narrative disengaging and hard to read; the characters never becoming more than
just vessels for poetic expression, or direct quotation. These characters - the man and woman - might
exist on the pages they've been ripped from (primarily, the work of Dostoevsky)
but unfortunately appear lifeless on the screen. Their lives of squalor and desperation are not
felt - in the emotional sense - just
ornamental; an affectation on the part of the filmmaker to give a social and
political weight to the material; an air of significance, dignity or
intellectual prestige. I didn't believe
for a second that Sokurov had any feeling for these characters and their
situation, but was simply using them to make possible an exploration of this
world that is rich, both in design and physical direction. Through the development of the film this
location becomes a legitimate character.
It "lives", suggests
a particular psychology, an atmosphere; it intercedes on behalf of these
characters that have neither light in their eyes nor life in their voices.
It was only in hindsight, as I thought about the film a few days
later, that this particular detail struck me as significant. Maybe this was the point? The characters don't define the world; the
world defines its characters. This man
and woman, speaking, without emotion or engagement, the dead words of a departed
author, do nothing to comment on the human condition. Instead, it is the world of the film,
stylised and exaggerated, that gives a context to the various themes. The full course of the relationship between
these characters, wracked, as they are, with suffering and betrayal, says, in
its entire eighty-minute duration, less about the struggles of the underclass
than a film like The Immigrant (1917) by Charles Chaplin conveyed in a single
shot. However, the presentation of the
world, which traps its characters, feels like an attempt to adapt, dramatise or
personify (as an immaterial space) the emotions and subtext of these works of Russian
literature. An adaptation, not in the
conventional sense of providing an illustrated text, but approaching the work
as if it were an architectural narrative, apropos The Library of Babel (1941)
by Jorge Luis Borges; a physical space that becomes a materialization of the
emotions and psychologies of characters torn from the whispering pages of Dostoevsky
and those of his assorted contemporaries.
This world, eerily lit by cinematographer Aleksandr Burov in a
sickly, soft-focus monochrome (the aspect ratio often distorted as if to
suggest the presentation of a fever dream; its characters, drifting like
sleepwalkers through a laboured trance) is used to tell this story that the
characters themselves are unable to put into words. If their loneliness, fear, anger and
destitution cannot be spoken, then it is there in the cavernous walls of the
city, in the stagnant reflections of its waterways, in the black fog that
obscures the frame, in the dust and debris that covers objects (and the
characters as objects) as if the
world no longer has use for them. The
rhythms and rituals, attitudes and routines of the setting and its inhabitants
and the way Sokurov films them, tells the story. This mix of Caligari (1920) and Tarkovsky,
which seeks to express the life of the mind, to make the internal "external"
and as such plain to see, becomes a projection of who these characters are and
what these stories are essentially about.
And if an image of beautifully lit doves, glowing, iridescently, as they
glide off the surface of a murky canal might push the symbolism to levels of cliché,
it's only as a brief respite from the drudgeries of a world that drives its
inhabitants towards madness.
