Sunless

Notes on a film: E-clip-se (1999)

"Once you look further from the delusion of banalities, you can find that the eclipse-goggle bearing individuals are more than just the observed. The film simply tells you: We are still waiting for Godot. Just in a more controlled fashion. From an owl's eye perspective, to which Marker later even alludes, the masses of the eclipse's watchers are almost as dystopian as modern-day human beings who grab their VR-headsets (to escape reality). Was Chris Marker a prophet of times to come?"

- Rahul Sharma, Letterboxd, June 30th 2020

Eclipse. Or clip? In the absence of E and se, the two words fading in and out of one another against an image of the titular occurrence, form a half-word: a word between words, like an image between images. The appearance of this first eclipse – a black and white solarization that looks like a human mouth in negative – cuts via a crude iris wipe to the face of a smiling child that for a moment recalls the gurning lunar surface from Georges Méliès silent landmark, A Trip to the Moon (1902). In doing so, the transition of shots connects the present to the past and reality to fiction; framing the observations of everyday people attempting to view the natural spectacle of a solar eclipse as another of Marker's alien dispatches, in which the filmmaker attempts to understand the vagaries of human behavior by wielding his camera like a scientist wields a microscope.

E-clip-se [Chris Marker, 1999]:

Like much of Marker's work, it would be easy if not dismissive to read E-clip-se as a documentary. On one level, the film is essentially a homemade observation/recording of an actual solar eclipse, which occurred on the 11th of August 1999. The subjects – gathered in a park on a warm, late summer day, some sat at picnic tables eating food as nearby children play innocently on sculpted objects, all dressed in their solar goggles to stare wordlessly into the darkening sky – are real people: strays before Marker's lens. However, in filming real people reacting genuinely to a real occurrence, Marker isn't simply documenting the occurrence itself or the reaction of those in attendance, but instead creating a homage to the audience, to the act of spectatorship, which for Marker becomes spectacle itself.

Hence, the deconstruction of the title at the beginning of the film and its presentation in all further promotional materials, "E-clip-se", which can be read in a variety of different ways, with a myriad of different interpretations and emphases. From the obvious, "Eclipse", which refers primarily to the actual occurrence that these spectators have gathered to view, to the included word, "clip", which might refer to the film itself, the clip, the short film, or to the idea of the cut, the edit, this montage of shots depicting the human face and its various expressions. In the image of Parisiennes watching the eclipse occur behind their disposable solar goggles, the film also recalls, intentionally or not, sinister images from Marker's earlier and more famous film, La Jetée (1962). In this context, they suggest the presence of a hidden mystery, a conspiracy, though one that I won't spoil.

La Jetée [Chris Marker, 1962]:

La Jetée is a film that evokes sight, its montage of still images broken only by a single shot of the eyes of a blinking face. However, it's also a film about time; about human existence, and the attempt to save a remnant of civilization following a cataclysmic event. In the film, an unnamed protagonist – a prisoner of a post-apocalyptic future ravaged by a third world war – is sent back in time by a group of scientists attempting, in their own words, to "call past and future to the rescue of the present". Using a memory of a significant event, the man is sent backwards through time and space to become a witness to an incident that connects both his past and future lives to a single fixed point in time, creating a paradox, or a window between worlds.

In E-clip-se, we see a different event being depicted; however, it's one that again creates a fixed moment in time that Marker – and in turn the viewing audience – can return to. Not via the efforts of scientists from the future, but via the film itself. The work, the recording, becomes a vessel, a piece of history however small and seemingly insignificant, that we can go back to, again and again.

E-clip-se [Chris Marker, 1999]:

Throughout his career, Marker was a filmmaker obsessed with notions of time and travel. In films as varied as Sunday in Peking (1956), Letter from Siberia (1958), The Koumiko Mystery (1965), Sans Soleil (1983), Tokyo Days (1988), Level Five (1997), The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), Ouvroir, the Movie (2009) and others, the filmmaker depicted travels between countries and territories, both real and imagined. Travel for Marker was both physical and metaphysical. One could travel between countries and continents, cross borders and observe actual cities and their customs, or one could cross more figurative territories of time, memory, and space. Whether turning his camera on the underground bunkers of a post-War future-world ravaged by destruction, the bustling urban streets of contemporary Tokyo, or the ephemeral worlds of the internet and the online gaming platform Second Life, Marker was interested in the ethnological minutiae of lives and the memories and experiences that make up life.

Thinking of E-clip-se as an echo of La Jetée gives the film a whole new perspective. Is what we're seeing really a benign observation of Parisiennes gathered together in a park to watch a solar eclipse, or is this some kind of dispatch? A warning from Marker, the alien anthropologist, the time traveler extraordinaire, connecting the past to the present, a memory translated into fragmentary images that play out like a short film? At eight-minutes, many will dismiss the film as a short-sketch, a "clip", an observation, but in its imagery and ideas it creates echoes and repetitions that reverberate throughout Marker's career, creating a dialog, or a conversation across time. It's as if each project existed within another, both a continuation and reflection of itself and its predecessors. In this context, I don't think it's an accident that the subject matter evokes the title of an earlier film by Marker, Sans Soleil. The English-language title translating plainly as "Sunless", or without sun. Another eclipse.

E-clip-se is currently available to view on YouTube. Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Sans Soleil [20th August, 2020], Tokyo Days [31st of March, 2020].

Sans Soleil

The Image of Happiness

or: 'the black leader'

"The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: One day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black."

Chris Marker begins his film Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) with the above quotation. It is accompanied first by the image itself: three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. A second image, unremarked upon by the narrator, shows fighter planes on a naval ship undergoing maintenance. The first image, and Marker’s characterization of it as "the image of happiness", seems like a provocation; one of several that occur throughout the film. Is the filmmaker challenging the audience to find happiness in the image? Or is he challenging us to find what signifies this as an image of happiness in the context of the film, or indeed, in the life of his fictionalized avatar, the photographer Sandor Krasna?

Admittedly, I've never seen happiness in the image itself. The image for me looks like one of fear and discomfort; three children reacting to the intrusive appearance of a stranger, who films them without permission. As they move through the frame, their pale skin and blonde hair turned silvery by the low sun, they seem incongruous against the green of the surrounding landscape; out of place and out of time. Marker's camera dehumanizes his subjects throughout Sans Soleil, as he studies objects and individuals with the detached curiosity of an alien anthropologist trying to make sense of a culture and its customs beyond his understanding. As the children move, they do so like trapped animals, retreating, clinging to the edge of the road, unsure of the intentions of this photographer, who records them without consent.

Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:

While it's perhaps irresponsible if not ableist to force a developmental diagnosis onto someone based only on a slim understanding of their personality, I do speculate whether there was something almost autistic about Marker. It would explain his way of bending the world to meet his various interests and obsessions, his ability to find meanings and connections in signs and symbols, the unerring gaze of his camera and the need to make sense of actions and interactions, as if straining to understand the deeper nuances of a glance, a stare, a gesture. Of course, it's possible that this was simply a result of his background in journalism, which had perhaps conditioned an approach to people as subject-matter, rather than as individuals. For Marker, people and places pose questions to be probed and explored. In turning his camera against them, he finds different ways of telling his own story, but never theirs.

The approach presents a barrier for many viewers. While Sans Soleil remains an acclaimed and singular work, feted and debated by film scholars the world over, there are many critics, especially on social media, that have found Marker's depiction and discussions surrounding other cultures and people to be both racist and colonialist in nature. The argument being that the filmmaker speaks on behalf of his subjects; that he denies them a voice; that he takes their images without consent and uses them in a context they could never agree to.

Throughout Sans Soleil we see people flinch at the sight of Marker and his camera. We see them pull away, turn, cover their faces. The images Marker captures are often of people showing discomfort, made anxious by the presence of the camera and the intrusion of the lens. On one level this creates an inherent truth, revealing personal and private moments that are authentic and real, but it does so at the expense of individuals who didn't agree to this exploitation. It presents a moral conundrum for many viewers more sympathetic to invasions of privacy and the loss of personal agency, especially those we now face with our own images in the age of the internet and social media.

Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:

In discussing Marker's later film, Tokyo Days (1988) – a work that functions on some levels as a postscript to the film in question – I remarked upon the voyeuristic nature of Marker's cinema. How life, once viewed through a lens that both records but transforms its true reality, becomes a spectacle of performance, to be viewed and interpreted in the same way that we interpret a photograph or film. There's an element of this present in Sans Soleil, which moves between ethnological studies of modern Japan and the islands of Cape Verde, but also the phantom studies of the imagined San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958) or the cultural footprints left by writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

There is a sense that for Marker there is no clear delineation between the reality of the modern Japan and the unreality of Vertigo's San Francisco; that there's no line between his observations, both of and on the dock workers at Guinea-Bissau (recorded here by the filmmaker Sana Na N'Hada) and his later observations on the fictional characters of Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster from the aforementioned Hitchcock film; that everything is part of a more intricate system of memory and human consciousness (or even subconscious), which, like a foreign territory, is there to be explored.

Personally, I find Sans Soleil to be a remarkable, genuinely profound work that defies categorization. Many have called it a documentary, or cinema essay, and yet I feel both terms misrepresent the film and only worsen the problematic nature of some of Marker's observations, or the charges of Orientalism. The film is as much a documentary as "Alice in Wonderland", operating instead on a level of fantasy, or science-fiction. It's a film that demands the viewer to adjust their perceptions and understandings of the world and its people to the same wavelength of Marker, where an obsession with cats and TV commercials, sleeping commuters and the realities of Kamikaze pilots, entwine with the influences of Jules Verne, Hitchcockian mystery, computer systems, natural disasters and the supposition that there is a layer of hidden reality that exists between all things and all times. For Marker, this hidden layer is called "the Zone"; an elevated state of being named in tribute to the metaphysical, extraterrestrial territory seen in the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Stalker [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979]:

Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:

Like the image at the beginning of the film, of the three children on a road in Iceland, we end the film with another provocation, and another admission of happiness. When Marker asks us to find "happiness" in the picture, it's a personal challenge. But are we seeing a depiction of happiness in the conventional sense, of smiling faces and arms outstretched, or are we being asked to find happiness in our own reading of the image, in the projection of our own personal thoughts and experiences upon it? Perhaps we find happiness in the memories and associations of our own childhood innocence, in the relationship between siblings, in the landscape, or the sense of home? Perhaps the real answer is in the Zone?

The "Zone" for Marker is not the sentient, metaphysical space that it is for Tarkovsky, but the space between images, between past, present and future, between reality and memory. Here, Marker shows us the same images we've seen before, only this time they've been run through a video synthesizer. This transforms the image into a second image. One that exists between reality and something else; not pictorial, nor documentary in nature, but a kind of projection, a phantom image, an image in decay. This brings us back to the implication of the first sequences of images and the significance of the black leader.

When Marker, via his female narrator, challenges us to see happiness in the picture of the three children, or be satisfied with only seeing the black, he's effectively asking us, in retrospect, to see the layers between images: the "zone" itself. In showing the two images concurrently, he isn't creating a juxtaposition: it's not an either/or. It's about seeing both pictures at the same time, one on top of the other, and finding the image that lives in-between. The image that exists in the blackness, and the blackness as an image itself. It's in these distinctions and the images between images that the secrets of Sans Soleil are revealed.

Tokyo Days

Thoughts on the film by Chris Marker

A video camera operated by the filmmaker encircles the woman, the actor Arielle Dombasle. She asks her companion, filmmaker Chris Marker, what lens he's using. He responds: "35mm." The actor complains that the perspective with a 35mm lens will look awful. "Marlene Dietrich refused everything under 100mm", she jokes.

Already the subject is the image. How the image, its presentation, the choice of lens, can flatten or change perspective, altering reality. Most amateur or hobbyist photographers don't think about lenses or their effect. It's more about capturing the image; recording what is there in front of them. Even here, it's the actor who voices a concern, rather than the filmmaker. But why? Because the actor isn't playing a role but playing herself. She wants to be seen the way she is, as she was at the time Marker turned his camera upon her. Or is this a part of the act?

There is a question of reality verses perception here. Several images throughout the film seem chosen specifically to show how reality can be transformed into an unreality by the way it's captured and recorded. These images include: a burlesque of a tree top canopy, warped and distorted when seen as a reflection in the polished brass of a musical instrument; three young men on a video recording, their faces obscured by deliberate pixilation; an escalator replicated ad infinitum by the mirrored walls of a shopping complex, and so on.

Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:

It's often been said that there was something almost extra-terrestrial about Marker. Something not quite human. He approached his role as a filmmaker as if he were an alien anthropologist attempting to make sense of humanity and how it works. Cultures and sub-cultures recorded, not as a means of promotion or celebration, but almost as an effort to understand how humans work; their differences and foibles picked apart and juxtaposed against images that depict realities, but also figurative interpretations of reality. The unreality of life exposed as a social construct.

In this context, it seems fitting that the film begins with automatons; robot mannequins "performing" in a shop window. In these first few shots we have a thread of objectification; the subject displayed and exhibited for an audience, who, like us, stare at these objects of curious interest through the glass.

Spectatorship is close to voyeurism. Like watching a film or series, either at the cinema, or at home on a television or mobile device, we remain passive and inert. We watch from a position of remove, trapped behind the glass. The automatons for Marker aren't merely lifeless objects programmed to perform, but something else. They provide a self-reflexive function, expressing in both a real-life and cinematic sense the Guy Debord-ian notion of the society of the spectacle. Their performance is an imitation of human behavior. Behavior that Marker will later contrast against actuality footage of real people working, but also, in a sense, performing.

Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:

Film, like all art, is essentially a lie. Though it may succeed in revealing some personal or universal truth, it does so through manipulation and contrivance. Marker understands that if he shows interior shots of commuters travelling by train and then cuts to an exterior shot of a different train travelling along an elevated platform, the audience, versed as we are, consciously or not, with the "rules" of conventional montage, will make an association, connecting the interior to the exterior as if one and the same, even if the reality may be something else.

For Marker, his focus, his discreet observation, at least in the context of the title and presentation, seeks to find an element of truth or reality. But even this is being constructed, consciously or unconsciously by the filmmaker. Every edit, every choice of shot, every juxtaposition of sound and image, is a construct, and as such belies the reality. Marker plays with this notion in the juxtaposition between robots programmed to perform a retail function and the human beings conditioned into performing a role as part of their day-to-day lives. By simply contrasting images, manufacturing in the process a layer of commentary, or even criticism, Marker shows how life, work, experience, etc., have become a performative ritual; a simulacrum, more programmed than truly felt.

On the train, Marker pans his camera between images of two women. The first looks like a woman from the then present; her clothes and hair representative of 1980s fashions. The second woman seems to have been transported from the distant past. Her hair and clothing, from what we can see of it, belongs to a different age. Is this observation an actuality? Was this the reality as Marker saw it? Or is the contrast contrived? Are the women real people, caught by Marker's intrusive, objectifying lens as they go about their daily commute, or are they actors or models hired by the filmmaker to create this sense of time overlapping; of one generation seeing itself reflected through a window into the past?

Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:

At a slim twenty-minutes in duration, Tokyo Days feels at times like a postscript to Marker's earlier monumental film essay, Sans Soleil (or Sunless, 1983). There, the filmmaker again captured everyday scenes of Japan, and found within the comparative unreality of its culture, in contrast to the staid traditions of western Europe, the foundation for a far greater meditation on consciousness and human memory. By comparison, Tokyo Days feels relatively slight; its montage of observational imagery recalling something of a vlog or travelogue. Less a documentary, as the critical categorizations of the film dictate, than a precursor to Instagram stories; where short clips and images are curated by the user to create a kind of narrative.

While not as deep or insightful as Sans Soleil, or other films by Marker – such as The Grin Without a Cat (1977) or the prescient Level Five (1997) – the experience of Tokyo Days does eventually build to something that seems quietly profound. In its final images, Marker turns his camera on a string quartet performing for an impromptu audience. As the musicians play, Marker cuts first to shots of passengers on a ship: migrating souls travelling like the filmmaker between dimensions of time and space. As the public performance, impassioned and beautiful in its sensitivity continues, Marker then cuts to nature footage recorded off a video monitor. Here, we see images of whales, lizards and of course the filmmaker's avatar, cats. This juxtaposition of forms works to underpin the expression of the film and its observation on modern existence.

The sequence here is as casual and spontaneous as any other sequence in the film; however, its placement at the end of things is deliberate. Once again, Marker is bringing the film back to the notion of performance: of society as spectacle. The musicians and their performance speak to one of our greatest achievements; the ability to express through art something fundamentally human; something that comments on and enriches the human experience. But even this is in direct competition with those earlier automatons, who performed for absent shoppers behind their wall of glass. As Marker travels around Tokyo gathering these images and scenes, he seems to be observing a society that exists simultaneously between the boundaries of past, present and future.

Viewing Log / 2013 / Week One

31/12/2012 - 06/01/2013

 

Recollections of the Yellow House [João César Monteiro, 1989]:  The first appearance of Monteiro's provocative alter-ego, 'João de Deus', a sarcastic and highly acerbic middle-aged intellectual (slash "deviant"), who stalks the winding streets of Lisbon like Nosferatu in Murnau's famous film.  If 'Recollections...' feels like the least of Monteiro's three narratives on the life of this 'John of God', it's only because the follow-up films, God's Comedy (1995) and The Spousals of God (1999), are amongst the finest works of cinema ever produced.  Looked at as a work in its own right, 'Recollections...' is still a film that crackles and pulsates with an intelligence and imagination that few other films can equate.  A deceptive, highly amusing and sometimes shocking character study - presenting the minutiae of the character's daily rituals and existence as a succession of effortless, observational vignettes - 'Recollections...' is eventually transformed through tragedy and misadventure into something more abstract or metaphysical.  An expression, as if the film itself has become a mirror to the psychological deterioration of its central character - this madman or misfit - as he is forced to become the monster that he's perceived to be as a reaction against the profane corruption of the modern world.  Like most of Monteiro's greatest films, 'Recollections...'  is an accumulation of moments of pure cinematic invention; the most memorable of which is found towards the end of the film, where Monteiro, through sheer act of will, turns the circular walls of an insane asylum into a living nickelodeon.  Life as cinema, cinema as life, forever as one. 

Level Five [Chris Marker, 1997]:  The perfect note to end the year on.  Level Five, a film as enigmatic and inscrutable as its title, is effectively about 'the end' of things.  The end of life as a catalyst for the end of a relationship, leading a character, bereft by this end, to question the nature of memory in the age of the internet; the end of language and the end of communication.  Though as ever, this "end" is simply the start of something different.  A new beginning?  Through a consideration of the cinematic qualities of video games and the internet, Marker's narrative becomes an interrogation of the image; of the power of images, not simply to capture a moment in time, presenting a subjective truth - a truth defined by the viewer - but to mislead, betray, provoke and confound.  It seems to me to be one of the very first films to really acknowledge the role of memory in the mass media age, where the miscellany of our existence can live forever in the memory of these machines.  When I first saw the film back in September 2012, I wrote the following: "[the film is] an extended essay on the power of recorded memory, which is given a greater emotional weight by the heartbreaking performance of Catherine Belkhodja as this woman attempting to come to terms with the loss of her husband, and in doing so, finding the remnants of his being in the codes and script of a video game that he was developing shortly before his death.  This, as an event - as a memory - is enough to lead Marker back to Japan, to Okinawa, to contemplate the notions of atrocity and recollection."  My opinion of the film is even greater now than it was then.

The Adventures of Tintin [Steven Spielberg, 2011]:  In truth, I should really hate this adaptation for the liberties the screenwriters take with Hergé's most famous work; picking out the greatness of the book(s) and replacing the witty satire and the foregrounding of actual historical context with a never ending flow of enormous spectacle; reducing the wry humour to a series of pratfalls and slapstick; pillaging several individual storylines to create one single, condensed, heavily bowdlerised narrative arc.  But this is Spielberg doing what Spielberg does best, and his action has never been more immersive (or more fun).  His vision of 'Tintin' is part Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), part Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), as the young reporter finds himself embroiled in a great mystery, full of adventure and suspense.  The plotting is so-so, but it's the direction of the film that really stands out.  The extended chase through the streets of Bagghar in particular is superior filmmaking, in no way lessened or diminished by the dependence on the mo-cap technology.  Free of the shackles of conventional moviemaking apparatus, Spielberg's camera is free to roam; capturing sequences in single, fluid movements; blocking and revealing action in a way that is exhilarating, precisely because it brings the audience into the film, transporting us, not just through the sights, sounds, colours and textures of this digitally rendered world, but through the clever manipulation of the filmmaking form.  Like the similarly flawed War of the Worlds (2005), the film is not perfect, but there are several astonishing sequences positioned between the nonsense and the exposition that rival anything from the greatest of Spielberg's masterpieces, be it Jaws (1975), Empire of the Sun (1987) or A.I. (2001).

Vanishing Point [Richard C. Sarafian, 1971]:  I first saw the film back in 2008, initially influenced by the endless references to it in Tarantino's still largely enjoyable 'Grindhouse' effort, Death Proof (2007).  At the time, the experience left me cold.  The action seemed more like a precursor to the highway hi-jinks of Smokey and the Bandit (1977) than a counter-culture counterpart to Easy Rider (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) or The Sugarland Express (1974).  Maybe I've matured with age or perhaps I've just grown more disillusioned with the way of the world, but this second viewing was far more successful, if not genuinely revelatory!  In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to call Vanishing Point a minor masterpiece; a great character study, carried along by a sense of disenchantment (or by the sadness of a country left wounded by the failure of war, protest and political betrayal) and by the haunted central performance of Barry Newman as the enigmatic protagonist Kowalski.  Astride his white Charger, Kowalski becomes an almost mythical figure.  A Don Quixote driven (literally) mad by the unreachable ideals that his country was supposed to represent; a living embodiment of the new revolutionary spirit, ready smash into (and through) the barriers of the old and the staid.  As he carves his own path across the harsh landscapes that recall the desperation and despair of the America of Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he transcends the need for 'society' or 'place', becoming more like an embodiment of the spirit of freedom, unshackled and unbound.

One-Hundred Favourite Films - Part Nine

Ongoing response to The Dancing Image "100 (of Your) Favourite Movies" meme-that's-not-a-meme, presented here in a loosely alphabetical order. I'm posting the series in reverse formation in an attempt to maintain the original continuity, from A to Z.

Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa - 1985

The title in Japanese invokes the dual spirits of chaos and rebellion, establishing this as a film about power; about the endless struggle for power, the need for it, and the inevitable corruption of those who seek it. It also establishes the prevailing theme of defiance. Defiance, not simply as a component of the plot, or as shorthand for Shakespeare's text, but as a statement of intent. An early indicator that the film, like many by Kurosawa, is one that defies convention.

Though the story, with its veiled allusions to King Lear and the rich historical context of its 16th century setting, is full of intrigue, brutality, magic and suspense, it is the pure, cinematic presentation of the film that leaves the greatest impression. The blur of colours, the space, the shrieking insanity of the performances and the noiseless battle sequences that underscore the seething, operatic soundtrack of Tôru Takemitsu, rend their way into the viewer's subconscious; defining the experience as something beyond simply telling a story, but creating, in the best spirit of Angelopoulos, something that resembles a work of living theatre. Theatre on a larger scale perhaps, but existing, in a physical sense; as if this play of moments and emotions had once occurred, like a conventional theatrical recording, on a stage of real locations.

In its continual back-and-forth between scenes of static observation, discussions of politics, strategic plans and personal intrigue, and the enormous scenes of warfare, destruction, violence and devastation, Kurosawa's film is never less than a true epic, but an epic that doesn't lose sight of the small details that define the greater whole. Like the hand of the Emperor brought down in a single movement to initiate the battle, the film is a sweeping gesture, but a gesture of great intelligence, integrity and emotion.

Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock - 1954

The strength of Rear Window is the film's enduring correlation between the 'protagonist', as a receptacle - through which the dramatic events of the film unfold - and the role of the audience as spectators; a collective witness to the on-screen events, who enliven the drama and their link to this fictional character through their own subjective interpretations. In L.B. Jeffries - the wounded action-photographer 'inventing' a personal (Hitchcockian) thriller from the suspected safety of his own living room - the filmmakers create possibly the most stable template for the endlessly fascinating 'protagonist as audience/audience as protagonist' dichotomy; offering a central character who functions, much like the audience, as a viewer, intruding, literally, into the lives of these "characters" and the stories they tell.

The tension in the film comes from the identification of Jeffries as an extension of the audience; both parties confined to a single room, searching the rectangular window-space that breaks the fourth wall for the only real source of entertainment. As viewers, we're all guilty of this intrusion, this voyeurism; investing something of ourselves in the lives of others and perversely being rewarded with scenes of comedy, drama, titillation, intrigue and finally heart-stopping suspense.

N.B. I think this attempt to explain what I like most about the film was a bit of a failure. In the interest of keeping the series going, I've included it. It's the best I can do for now. In the future, I intend to come back to this entry and write something more definitive.

Red Angel
Directed by Yasuzo Masumura - 1966

As an anti-war statement, Red Angel is a film less about the "horrors of war" than a horror film that uses war as a backdrop to a more solemn philosophical concern. Though the exact nature of the concern is open to interpretation, I like to see it - first and foremost - as a film about the perseverance of the human spirit as something pure; something imperishable. Even amid the general atrocity of the setting, the filmmakers present their protagonist as someone strong enough to endure even the worst degradation; carrying the sorrow and the pity of these fallen young men and attempting to suffer on behalf of those too damaged or broken, regardless of the personal toll that such suffering might take.

In this respect, the character is not so much a protagonist in the conventional sense as a symbol. A nurse - referred to in the English translation of the title as an "angel" - who assumes the responsibility of human suffering; becoming a force of great comfort for those no longer strong enough to weather the indignity of war, or the physical and psychological transformations that the war can inflict. Through the perspective of this central character, the filmmakers are able to present war as something entirely brutal, horrifying and utterly demoralising, but without reducing it to the usual conflicts and divides that attempt to point the finger of guilt, or elicit sympathy and support for a specific (patriotic) cause.

In Red Angel, we feel not just the humiliation of war, but the sense that war is the ultimate humiliation, with Masumura denying us the spectacle and the heroism of a conflict full of action, excitement and bravery, and instead focusing on the cruel aftermath of lost limbs, pain and desperation. In doing so, the filmmakers are able to show the true cost of war, on a human level; not as something noble or necessary, but as a grotesque machine that moves across the landscape, destroying everything in its path.

Le révélateur
Directed by Philippe Garrel - 1968

In Le révélateur, the domestic drama becomes 'psychodrama', expressing through a series of allegorical gestures the sense of disappointment felt by the director as an immediate response to the perceived failure of the Paris riots of May 1968. In this sense, the film can be looked at as a silent scream, where the inability of these characters to express in words their anger, fear and frustration is conveyed, subjectively, by a deliberate lack of sound. Robbed of any kind of context that a soundtrack might provide, these silent images are left open to interpretation, but still seem to suggest an infernal parody of 'the modern family' - as a symbol - and their uncertain place within the turbulent culture of late 1960s' France.

The emphasis on the family is a convenient through-line for Garrel's more inscrutable ideologies, managing to evoke the political through the personal, while also creating an element of trepidation - if not outright peril - as we watch the family stumble through an extended nightmare into the brutality of the unknown. As the narrative-line develops, the parents become increasingly void-like; simply going through the motions of this bizarre situation, as the child - progressively more disconnected, emotionally and physically, from his parents - becomes a witness to their self-destruction.

By the end of the film, the child - a symbol for an ideal, or a way of thinking that must be protected against the unseen forces that pursue the family across a devastated landscape of scorched earth and roads leading nowhere - becomes the first sacrifice to this hedonistic folly; to the failure of that collective ideal. Pulled screaming from the arms of his parents - who attempt to claw him back from the forces working against them - it is difficult to see the child as anything less than a representation of the hopes and beliefs of the filmmakers' generation, forever out of reach.

Rope
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock - 1948

The construction of the film, like the titular cord of death, is a continuous strand, tight and unbroken. The beginning and end - isolated elements there to be "tied up" in the sense of narrative exposition - eventually become entwined at the precise moment of Stewart's third-act revelation, creating a noose that entraps these killers in a downfall of their own creation. Rope for me is the greatest illustration of Hitchcock's 'bomb under the table' theory, where the suggestion of intrigue or suspense is created by the knowing, rather than the not knowing; where the anticipation is much greater than the thrill simply because we know that something is about to happen. In this instance, it is an extended scene of social interaction taking place in a single location where the body of a young man, murdered by his friends in the opening sequence, is hidden, just out of view.

Hitchcock's perverse, darkly comic but never less than thrilling film is not just an excellent murder mystery, it is a film that actually engages with its central themes in a way that is both intelligent and genuinely thought-provoking. In its final minutes - in which the character played by James Stuart breaks out into his impassioned condemnation of the two protagonists - Hitchcock and his co-conspirators turn the finger of judgement against the audience for condoning this ruse, this crime, with their enjoyment of it; making any real sense of gratification that comes from the viewing of the film both bitter and acidic.

The Round-Up
Directed by Miklós Jancsó - 1966

The prison camp becomes a microcosm, both historically and politically. The approach presenting a world in miniature, where a re-enactment of a very real historical incident is used to create a veiled commentary on more recent cultural events. The political view, climaxing with the dark satire of the final scene, is pessimistic, but the liberation of the camera, as a force - able to intercede on behalf of these characters; expressing that which cannot 'freely' be expressed - finds poetry in scenes of confinement, persecution and betrayal.

The juxtaposition, between the brutality of the subject matter and the graceful way in which Jancsó records it, creates a moving contrast between the reality - with its violence, discrimination and corrupt political system - and the 'cinematic' - powerful enough to transform the expression into something beautiful, aesthetically, without losing the seriousness and the tragedy of the real event - is one of the most remarkable aspects of the film. Likewise, the visual contrast between the prison itself - closed-in and claustrophobic; there to trap and ensnare - and the surrounding landscape - a wide-open panorama of fields and marshes; where the line of the horizon becomes yet another on-screen representation of incarceration - depicts these characters as minute objects dwarfed by the complexities of a situation that is beyond their understanding and control.

Jancsó's film is an extraordinary experience, and genuinely: one of the most powerful films I've ever seen.

Sans soleil
Directed by Chris Marker - 1983

Sans soleil is an experience beyond easy categorisation or critique. It is a film that moves between narrative elements almost as freely as it moves between continents, cultures, ideas and events; finding, through its montage of images, a unique approach, able to suggest layers of interpretation, both emotional and analytical. As a general cinematic experience, there is a sensory aspect to this approach, in which a bricolage of elements - from documentary images to video-footage to photomontage to clips from Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) - are all cut together to create a story across time.

The montage approach, which at first seems scattered at will, is united by the narration, which creates, on one-level, a context for these moving-pictures, but on a separate level breaks-off, invents, projects and transforms this very real documentary-style travelogue of places into something approaching a vague science-fiction parable about the nature of recorded memory.

In pointing his camera at this world, Marker finds - within its collection of objects, faces, street scenes and relics of popular culture - an intricate network of stories, dramas, sketches and vignettes, unfolding, inter-connected, like a vast system of information. Like an anthropologist from a distant planet, Marker looks at the world with its histories, connections, emotions and meanings within meanings, all resting on the surface of the mundane, and creates from this restless observation a work that at almost thirty-years old, still feels like an audio-visual communiqué from not-so-distant future.

Sicilia!
Directed by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub - 1999

A film that could have carried the subtitle "- A Return", illustrating that preoccupation with 'place'. The memory of a place, made distant by age, or exaggerated in the mind - as distant things often are - but still existing, as a reality, to be rediscovered by this character on his journey into the past. The sense of nostalgia is palpable from the very first frame. The silhouette of the man, a protagonist in the conventional sense, looks out across the water. The landscape in the distance is either a place that he's returning from or the place that he's returning to, but either way, there's the suggestion - even before the first interaction - that the journey is significant, if not emotionally overwhelming.

Sicilia! - which is less an adaptation of Elio Vittorini's novel 'Conversation in Sicily' than a public reading of it - is built around several "dialogues" on the subject of 'home' and the relationship that these characters have to the land of their fathers', which has fallen into despair. The journey of the protagonist across country culminates in a reunion between mother and son, where the discussion attempts to define the geographical history of the place through the personal history of these characters, as each confession, accusation and interrogation fills in the blanks left vague by the filmmakers' rigorous attention to the formalist elements of the text, and their framing of these locations via painterly, static tableaux.

The image of the countryside is turned into something almost mythical by the black & white cinematography, which on the one hand recalls the Italian 'neo-realist' films of the 1940s and 50s - with their natural cinematic beauty and the sense of post-war authenticity - but at the same time is an exaggeration of the reality, once again turning this land, as a reflection, into something that exists as a suspended recollection within the minds of these characters.

Solaris
Directed by Steven Soderbergh - 2002

As a point of reference, Soderbergh's hermetic adaptation of the 1961 science-fiction novel by Stanisław Lem is closer to the work of Alain Resnais than it is to Andrei Tarkovsky. While Tarkovsky's own 1972 adaptation used the basic concepts of Lem's text to explore the filmmaker's usual concerns, Soderbergh's approach is to jettison the metaphysical aspects in favour of a more intimate deconstruction of the book's central relationship and its prevailing forces of guilt and grief. If Tarkovsky's film was "sculpting in time", Soderbergh's is sculpting in memory.

The film - which plays like an intense encounter between two people trapped in the cycle of a relationship doomed to repeat itself, endlessly, like an echo through the depths of space - brings to mind the haunted expressions of films like Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) or Muriel (1963), where its fragments of narrative, and the sense of time and space as something oppressive or tyrannical, turn the experience into a breathless reunion between the wounded and the dead. This feeling of a memory made real, turned frightful by the bitterness and isolation of these characters lost in space, is further suggested by Soderbergh's cold, formalist approach; where the framing of actors as immaterial objects against a labyrinth of buildings or planetary structures, or the play of lights, which evoke the inner emotions of characters unable to express, finds the filmmaker working at the absolute peak of his abilities; not just as director, but as writer, editor and cinematographer.

This continual focus - as voices drift over static, often blurred images of empty spaces, which emphasise the sense of loss and dislocation - creates something almost hypnotic, if not genuinely suffocating. The entire film, which moves to the ambient rhythms of its Cliff Martinez soundtrack, becomes, in the light of its characters' final sacrifice, a blue note of despair.

Still Life
Directed by Jia Zhangke - 2006

The film's opening sequence establishes a tone and an atmosphere that will develop throughout; a scene of quiet reflection on the Yangtze River, introducing us to the pensive coalminer Han Sanming on a boat bound for the Three Gorges region of the rapidly dissipating town of Fengjie. Here we begin the exploration of director Jia Zhangke's quietly compelling Still Life. An extraordinary work of enormous atmosphere and great natural beauty, about characters disconnected; in search of the past in a town in which the past is literally being levelled to make way for the future, and where the people we meet on life's lonesome journey fail to alleviate our struggle, acting only as markers; like the inanimate objects that we leave in our wake that remind people that we were here, that we existed.

Through this entrancing scenario, Zhangke is able to comment on the fleeting nature of time and existence; of the co-existence of two completely different characters arriving in this location at the same time and for similar reasons, though never once interacting. The symbol of the town and how these characters adapt to it also allows the filmmaker to form a more pointed commentary on the politics of contemporary China; in particular the sense of corruption and resulting violence that has been allowed to escalate and eventually destroy these grand historical settlements that have been inhabited, visited and documented in countless works of art and literature for many centuries past.

In this sense, it is a film of ever shifting perspectives; not simply in the emphasis on two separate characters, but in the specific way in which Zhangke is able to move so seamlessly between the poetic and the political, the abstract and the natural. In this regard, film feels like a kind of restless combination of Andrei Tarkovsky's great masterpiece Nostalghia (1983) - in which a homesick Russian poet explores an ancient Italian village that holds the secrets to a haunted past - and Michelangelo Antonioni's unsung documentary film China (1972), which recalls the notion of a film crew entering forgotten pockets of reality and creating a contemporary portrait of the world as it is (as it existed) at that point particular in time.