Lumière and Company #2

Film by Film [Hypothesis Cont'd]

Lumière and Company [John Boorman, 1995]:

Soldiers on parade.  An image from the past - the actuality as documentary - as if some unknown cameraman had just happened to be on-hand to record footage of the Easter Rising of 1916.  Suddenly a man in contemporary clothing walks through the perimeter of the frame.  He carries film equipment; lights and cables.  The illusion of the past is suddenly shattered.  This is not the reality, but a re-enactment.  Not a moment of actual historical interest, but a gesture, to the past from the present.  Just as these modern-day actors and extras are playing the part of historical figures, Boorman, the contemporary filmmaker, is playing the part of the pioneer.  His film, in its very construction, is likewise a gesture to the past from the present.  Like the film by Vicente Aranda, Boorman's short is an observation of a working film-set; in this instance, Neil Jordan's production of Michael Collins (1996).  Again, one thinks of the spirit of revolution (or insurrection) as a shorthand for the artistic and cultural revolution of the cinema itself.

Like the films by Allouache, Angelopoulos, Costa-Gavras, etc, Boorman has his actors (or specifically Jordan's actors) break the fourth wall - acknowledging the presence of the camera (and with it the perspective of the audience) - because it is the device itself, the film camera as an artefact, or antique, that holds such fascination and makes it possible for the audience to enter these olds worlds, to traverse time and space, or to explore this terrain, both geographical and psychological in nature.

Lumière and Company [Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1995]:

There is a quote that states, "The image, alone capable of denying nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us."  Ulysses' gaze - the title of another film by Angelopoulos, depicted, literally, herein - is the gaze of our own restless curiosity; our fascination with this device that makes possible the manipulation of time and our own ability to document "the self"; the memory of our own recorded myths and legends, forever real, because we've seen it, on-screen.  The question is, does the film depict the "history" (our history, or that of Angelopoulos) acknowledging the perspective of cinema, or is history becoming cinema as the cinema becomes past?  I don't know!  But the stare of the actor is intense.  More intense than any actor in a film by Stanley Kubrick; the camera more focused, more intent, than in the films of Robert Bresson.  The combination of the two forces burn a hole through the screen; transforming and transfixing, terrifying and provoking, making this particular viewer shift, uncomfortably, as the gaze of the character becomes more like an accusation than a questioning glance.

Again, like in the previous segments by Boorman and Allouache (and several other segments to be discussed at a later date), the notion of the subject itself turning the attention away from its own natural spectacle to the action off-screen is, in some small way, an acknowledgment that it is the camera (or those of us on the other side of the lens) that remains the real point of interest.  While the name 'Ulysses' brings to mind Odysseus and Homer's epic tales, I was reminded more of the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and that image of Ulysses as an old man, having seen his greatest exploits now behind him, becoming weary with the modern world.  This Ulysses, like the figure on screen, is restless to once again look beyond the horizon, to explore, to uncover new mysteries and adventures.  Therefore the face of this man becomes the personification of the art itself; once an infant (as below), now stunned or destroyed by the hundred-years of horror, wonder and amazement that its gaze has been a witness to.

Lumière and Company [Juan José Bigas Luna, 1995]:

A simple, static observation.  A woman sits in a field, nursing her baby.  Immediately, it conjures the image of the Madonna and child.  This kind of earthy sexuality is often at the centre of Bigas Luna's work, but there is nothing leering or perverse about this display.  It's provocative - without question - but never erotic, nor sensationalist.  If we can infer anything from this film at all it is the natural act - the nurturing of the child by the mother against this backdrop of a freshly ploughed earth - and the idea that this subject - impressionist in nature - is worthy of historical documentation.  It's taking the medium, by now more accustomed to large-scale spectacle, action and adventure, and bringing it back to the most quiet and intimate of everyday scenes.  If we look at Bigas Luna's film on a more symbolic level, then there might even be a more significant meaning to what is being depicted.

Is the director acknowledging that the cinema of the Lumière's - as re-created here - was a moment of birth, now nurtured, a hundred years later - as if to suggest that the history of film is still in its infancy - or perhaps that the cinema itself has given birth to something new; the prospect of the digital cinema, soon to be fully realised with the liberations of Festen (1998) and The Idiots (also 1998).  This baby (now eighteen-years old at the time of writing), as once a representation of the new cinema of the burgeoning twenty-first century, is still growing; still unsure of what it wants to be.

Lumière and Company #1

Film by Film [Hypothesis]

Lumière and Company is a 1995 omnibus film devised by Philippe Poulet and assembled by the director Sarah Moon.  It features contributions from forty different international filmmakers, including Zhang Yimou, David Lynch, Abbas Kiarostami, Peter Greenaway and Jacques Rivette (to name a few).  The intention of the film was to celebrate the first hundred years of cinema by having each director shoot a short film (one lasting no more than 52 seconds in duration) using the actual cameras and equipment employed by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière; the early film pioneers, who - in collaboration - defined the spectacle of the modern cinema, and as such, created the invisible thread of influence that now blind the serialized psychodramas of Louis Feuillade to the modern blockbusters of Steven Spielberg, and beyond.

In this occasional series, I'll be sharing my notes on each of the individual short films (some great, some not so great) in a vaguely alphabetised manner, and hopefully working my way through the entire project, a few films at a time.

Lumière and Company [Gabriel Axel, 1995]:

In a single fluid tracking shot, the lineage of creative expression is revealed.  At first we see a man in contemporary attire creating a small clay sculpture of a Shakespearian icon.  Next, we see an actor dressed as Hamlet, posing for the sculptor, but at the same time becoming a figurative representation of the great idol of contemporary theatre and the art of performance itself.  Next, two musicians - a cellist and violinist - provide an onscreen link to the music that accompanies the scene.  Next, a painter, posed by his easel, creates a picture that we never see.  Next, a pair of dancers, their movements as elegant and graceful as the tracking shot that records their display.  Finally, the filmmaker, turning the hand-crank on his camera as he records a scene of two men about to face one another in combat (the romantic fatalism of pistols at dawn).  The two men that preside over the duel look suspiciously like Auguste and Louis Lumière, the motion-picture pioneers to whom this series of films is dedicated.

Axel's short seems to communicate the notion that film is the ultimate art - the natural conclusion of all great cultural endeavour - because it is, in essence, a continuation of all the arts; an evolution.  Cinema is dance, performance, literature, painting, music, sculpture, photography and theatre, transformed into spectacle; a collaboration.  To cite the eternal Sam Fuller: [the cinema is] "love, hate, action, violence, death... in one word: emotion"; just like Axel's short film.

Lumière and Company [Vicente Aranda, 1995]:

I don't know the background of Aranda's film.  On the surface, it seems fairly similar to the later segment directed by John Boorman, but on the whole, is less impressive in its contrast between the archaic form of the brothers' cinematograph and the perspective of a modern-day setting.  Like the Boorman film, Aranda's segment takes place on a movie set; the Lumière camera, like the eye of God, watching over the development of its own heritage.  Unlike the Boorman film, I have no idea what movie is being made, and therefore it's possible that the significance of the setting was lost.  I can only assume it was shot during the production of Aranda's next feature, Libertarias (1996), which IMDb informs me takes place during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.  Again, as with Boorman's work, we have the spirit of revolution; an uprising.  Aranda is showing us this image of some past insurrection, re-staged as a counterpoint to the revolution of the cinema, one-hundred years before.  The political and the cinematic - or the art in general - forever entwined.

Lumière and Company [Merzak Allouache, 1995]:

In a wide-shot, two characters - a man and woman in period dress - walk briskly towards the camera.  The woman is carrying a suitcase.  The man - dapper in a flat cap - twirls his cigarette in an outlandish fashion.  The first thing noticeable is the incongruous use of sound; footsteps crunching beneath the gravel path; the wind rustling through the leaves; the whir of the camera as it records the scene.  The couple pass by; footsteps continuing unseen into the middle distance as impressions on the soundtrack.  Suddenly the woman reappears, her head dipping into the frame, attention diverted by the sight of the watchful apparatus.  She peers into the lens, childlike and captivated by this new device and its endless possibilities.  A moment later, the man reappears.  Regarding the woman's fascination with this strange and inexplicable new object, he forcibly pushes her out of the frame, positioning himself as the main subject of interest.  Mystery and wonder replaced by vanity, as vice.

Allouache's film is one of many in this compendium that has the actors break the fourth wall; acknowledging the presence of the camera and turning the audience (the "gaze" of viewer) into the subject-matter.  One could argue that the film, on a deeper level, also exists as a figurative commentary on the marginalisation of women in film or the subjugation of women in popular culture.  The camera that so fascinates this woman on a clearly emotional level is soon taken away from her - censored, made forbidden - reclaimed by the man as a means of documenting his own narcissism; the male "self-image" that still dominates to this day.