Top Ten: 2005

Ranking the Decades

A Year in Film List + Image Gallery

Regular Lovers [Philippe Garrel, 2005]:

Last Days [Gus Van Sant, 2005]:

Breakfast on Pluto [Neil Jordan, 2005]:

Allegro [Christoffer Boe, 2005]:

I'm the Angel of Death: Pusher III [Nicolas Winding Refn, 2005]:

Hidden (Caché) [Michael Haneke, 2005]:

Seven Invisible Men [Sharunas Bartas, 2005]:

Reincarnation [Takashi Shimizu, 2005]:

Princess Raccoon [Seijun Suzuki, 2005]:

Munich [Steven Spielberg, 2005]:

Above, arranged in order of preference, my personal top-ten best films of the year (from what I've seen), accurate at the time of writing.

Top Ten: 2008

Ranking the Decades

A Year in Film List + Image Gallery

Che: Parts One & Two [Steven Soderbergh, 2008]:

24 City [Jia Zhangke, 2008]:

Melancholia [Lav Diaz, 2008]:

The Beaches of Agnès [Agnès Varda, 2008]:

Frontier of the Dawn [Philippe Garrel, 2008]:

Birdsong [Albert Serra, 2008]:

Un lac [Philippe Grandrieux, 2008]:

The Sky Crawlers [Mamoru Oshii, 2008]:

Adam Resurrected [Paul Schrader, 2008]:

Waltz with Bashir [Ari Folman, 2008]:

Above, arranged in order of preference, my personal top-ten best films of the year (from what I've seen), accurate at the time of writing.

Key Films #14

Excalibur [John Boorman, 1981]:

The forest - an exterior lit like an interior - becomes a character in its own right. By day, the trees and foliage shimmer in shades of emerald.  At dusk, an ochre-hued fog enshrouds the trees like slumbering giants, becoming the gatekeepers to another world.  At dawn, the violent flare of an artificial sun casts its crimson glow off the glistening armour of a pale and wounded knight.  The forest, like most of the locations used throughout the film, is a place of magic and miracle; an iridescent kingdom of shadows and light.  While the storytelling is somewhat straightforward in its reiteration of this fabled tale, Boorman's film is nonetheless successful in its grandeur and its decadence.  In its imagery - which is vivid and unforgettable in the pure spectacle of colour and movement - but also in its scale.  The Arthurian legend has been told countless times, both in film and other media, but no other filmmaker has successfully captured the magic and the wonder of these stories with the same vibrant and flamboyant approach that Boorman achieves here.  His Excalibur is, at its purest, an epic of theatrical design and Wagnerian excess. 

This spirited and poetic film captures the true power and majesty of the silent cinema, but with all the sound and fury of that post-70s indulgence. As an experience, the film strikes a continual chord whenever I see it, transporting me, to another time, another place; leaving me captivated by its plot and larger-than-life characterisations, or thrilled by its vision.  In terms of the filmmaking craft Excalibur is without a doubt a work of great passion and imagination, and a great testament to the unsung talent of John Boorman, a true visionary, and one of the cinema's most misjudged and maligned auteurs.

The Phantom Heart [Philippe Garrel, 1996]:

A scene we've seen before.  The two protagonists - a married couple - attempt reconciliation, but they know, as well as we, that the situation, for them, is hopeless.  The scene in question occurs quite early in the film and establishes something of a consistent tone; a feeling of desperation or distance; the sense of something reaching an untimely if no less inevitable end.  As ever, the dissolution of a relationship presents the end of something, but also a new beginning.  The chance to move on, to start afresh, to find similar expressions in the arms of another; to avoid the same failures and faults; to ask ourselves, without sarcasm or pity, 'where do we go from here?'  This is a question that Garrel has returned to in several of his films, from L'enfant secret (1979) and Liberté, la nuit (1983), to She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps (1985) and The Birth of Love (1993).  In all these films, his characters are trying to reconcile the experiences of the past with the responsibilities of the present; to make sense of where their lives are heading; to learn from their mistakes. 

In The Phantom Heart, the question is once again suggested by the story of these characters - the husband and his wife - and their relationships with the various figures that drift, phantom-like, not just through the remnants of their past experiences, emotions or shared ideas, but through the traces of a dream.  The dichotomy presented here, between the tangible reality of divorce, middle-age, doubt, fragility and responsibility, and the hopes and desires reflected in the tortured affairs, the creative success and the financial security that comes with it, propels the film; gives context to that lingering feeling of emptiness and futility that punctuates every interaction, no matter how positive or genial it might seem.  Like all Garrel's films, there is something almost impossibly hermetic about its structure, its tone and the use of locations.  A personal quality that borders on the autobiographical, in which these characters, their actions and dilemmas, and the personal spaces that define them, seem to be as relevant and significant to our understanding of the material as the emotions depicted on-screen.

 

 

Love is Colder Than Death [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969]:

The title, Love is Colder than Death, plays beautifully to the violence of the film and also to the influence of film-noir as a facilitator for existential longing, brutality and despair.  As a piece of spoken text, it has the sound of something delivered by Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), or by Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950).  A five word expression that resonates with a sense of longing for unfulfilled romantic desire, full of allusions or suggestions to scenes, situations, characters and dilemmas that would occur and reoccur throughout Fassbinder's later career.  Specifically, through films such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975) and In a Year with 13 Moons (1978); stories where the general brutality of relationships or the duplicitous nature of human beings when pushed into hopeless situations, make death, by comparison, seem like a relief. 

For the characters in Fassbinder's work, love is colder than death, and in this film the attitude is expressed through a fractured, languorous study of petty gangsters struggling to exist in a word rapidly closing in on them.  The sense of fatalism explicit in the title is therefore perfectly suited to the form of the film, which draws heavily on the second-hand references to American crime pictures of the 1940s and '50s, where the overwhelming cynicism of characters or the general loveless nature of the underworld environment breeds a particular kind of person.  One that lives each moment as if it were their last; where relationships burn hard and fast; and where the sense of place - as in 'a lonely place', or in 'a place to call home' - is forever out of reach.

Head Against the Wall

Thoughts on the final scene(s) from Philippe Garrel's 

She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps (1985)

The final moment.  The image of a window.  Or more specifically, the image of a building, viewed through a window.  The room surrounding this frame (within a frame) is in total darkness.  The building on the other side of the street, no doubt lit by an adjacent streetlight, appears like a theatrical projection; like an image directed onto this imaginary screen, created by the darkened silhouetted of the room.  In the film, as in life, everything is cinema.

This image is literally the final frame; a moment, empty and secluded.  A dead end?

The image that precedes it is similar, but not identical.  Another window, again, looking out onto the side of a residential building - a familiar backdrop to many French drama films where the 'action' is localised to a single setting (usually a spacious but sparsely furnished apartment building) - only here, the window is open.  A subtle variation perhaps, but one that suggests something entirely different if we look at the two images together, as a progression.  The two 'shots' - these moments that bring the film to its necessary conclusion - seem to evoke something that is true to the emotional development of the characters and of the filmmaker himself; what was once open is now firmly closed.

She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps [Philippe Garrel, 1985]:

For now, I don't want to dwell too much on these images.  As I mentioned earlier, they're simply moments, redolent of a particular emptiness or a feeling of "ennui."  They imply tone, a sensation; a mood more consistent with the rest of the film, where these characters shuffle through cold rooms and vacant streets, meeting and departing, colliding (momentarily), before slowly drifting apart.  They evoke the spirit of something lost, an ideal or even a person, though more truthfully, an ideology; something that haunts the very bones of these characters and provides a better understanding  as to why the film, as a work, as an object, feels so fragmented, if not genuinely incomplete...

These images provide closure, but closure to what?  To answer this question we need to look back at the film in more detail; to study Garrel's continual blurring of fiction and reality, performance and actuality, and the various semi-autobiographical (or even fully autobiographical) threads that run throughout his films, from the earliest, more avant-garde works, like Le révélateur (1968) and Le lit de la vierge (1969), to the personal (to the point of invoking privacy) confessionals of Les hautes solitudes (1974) and L'enfant secret (1979).  In looking at Garrel's work as an on-going narrative, we can better understand the context of this film, which on the surface is both vague and emotionally disjointed, but beneath the surface speaks very candidly about the great episodes of Garrel's life; from the turbulence of the Paris riots of May 1968 and his tortured relationship with Nico, through to the stability of marriage and the birth of his son.

These events shape the film as much as they shape the perspective of the filmmaker, who appears on-screen, both physically - as himself, as the author of this work - and as a character played by the actor Jacques Bonnaffé.  Bonnaffé isn't so much acting out the part of Garrel the man, as playing 'himself' playing 'Garrel' as avatar; a continuation of that relentless blurring of the line between the film, as a reflection of reality, and the reality itself.  It's an idea also found  in the presentation of the narrative, where we continually see the making of a film (this film?) in contrast with scenes that are perhaps the result of that particular production, but with no clear identification between the two.

Regardless, the entire film feels wounded by fear and self-loathing, as these characters - looking for a way to move forwards without losing the need to look back - exist in the twilight.

As the film reaches its suffering finale - not so much tying things up as just ending, abruptly, on a moment of absolute horror and distress - it is not the memory of things or an ideology or even a sense of failure that haunts the film, but the emotional uncertainty of its director.  This, as an idea, finds its most startling and disturbing expression in a moment towards the end of the film, which, in its mood and presentation, seems to exist outside of the recognisable boundaries of the previous narrative, instead offering a fascinating (if somewhat troubling) glimpse into the tortured psyche of the film's 'auteur.'

This short sequence of shots follows the final image of Bonnaffé - again, playing himself as actor, playing a facsimile of Garrel the director, smoking a cigarette in the half-light - and is a prelude to those windows, which again, seem to suggest a representation of the makeshift cinema of the everyday through which life itself can be viewed as spectacle, or as scene from a silent movie.  As these fragments of a scene unfold, Garrel, as himself, stalks the frame; appearing, first from off-camera, as a silhouette - like the phantom menace of Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) - then as a figure, awkward and alone.  He stands pensively by the window, looking out into the bright illumination that projects radiance onto the wall behind him; passing through him, as if the man himself is already a spectre, trapped between two worlds.

During this sequence, Garrel smokes his cigarette, opens the window, puts on his coat and occasionally throws a discomfited, self-conscious glance towards the camera, as if acknowledging - with some contempt - that he is the subject of this film; this self-portrait.  When he pulls open the window we fear the worst.  The suicide scenes of several of Garrel greatest films are recalled and create a feeling of trepidation.  So too does the character's earlier references to the legendary filmmaker Jean Eustache; author of the colossal masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973) and a close friend of Garrel's, who took his own life in 1981.

What follows  is startling.

As the scene continues, Garrel - a crumpled mess of nervous energy - pounds his head against the wall in resignation, before a jump-cut removes him from the frame.  He returns, repeating the same action in a different variation, as if several takes of a scene have been edited together to draw attention to the repetition of the form.  As the shot continues, Garrel - still physically shaken by something - begins clutching his stomach in distress.  A look of confusion enters his face as he doubles over in what we assume is genuine agony.  His body hardens, shrinking into itself.  He gestures towards the camera with his hands as if urging the film to stop.  The camera goes on recording - without sound, without pity - until the moment of the cut.

She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps [Philippe Garrel, 1985]:

This final scene, in its entirety, is both sad and unsettling.  Alarming for its unguarded vulnerability, the honesty of its emotion and the statement that it creates.  The performance - or the act itself - seems to encapsulate that feeling of frustration or personal disappointment that hangs above every facet of the film; creating an overwhelming sense of desolation or an air of despondency that chips away at every fragmented interaction, unfinished movement or sketch of a scene.

It's an ending perfectly suited to this film, this work of personal reflection.  A film, like most by Garrel, which risks alienating a potential audience so as not to compromise the integrity of its emotions or the sincerity of its approach.

When we look back at Garrel's scene, we think back to those windows, first open, then closed, and what these images might suggest within the context of the work.  Do we view these images as an unsettling suicide fantasy - the director's own potential death, figurative or not, imagined on film - or do see it as being suggestive of a new beginning; the past and the pain now behind us, excluded and locked-out?

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.

Les hautes solitudes

In keeping with the vast majority of the films of its writer/director, Philippe Garrel, Les hautes solitudes (1974) is an intensely personal experience. A film in which characters thrown together in empty rooms stung by silence drift between fleeting glances, reacting or not reacting as the case may be to what is said, what isn't said, and everything in-between. It is, as one might expect given its technical presentation, a fairly impenetrable work, though one that we're free to carry with us; ruminating on each tattered scene as we gather up our thoughts like raindrops, either during the experience of viewing or afterwards, and inevitably projecting our own thoughts and feelings (or personal preconceptions) onto the images, or its central characters, who remain vague and elusive; indistinguishable from the actors who play them and whose faces dominate each single-shot close-up composition, used throughout to establish a story - or a sense of narrative that exists between sleep and nothing - to reveal a sense of the great loneliness that the title of the film so perfectly describes.

Although the intentions of Les hautes solitudes remain unclear, obscured by the closeness of the compositions or the complete lack of any kind of conventional soundtrack to make explicit those stolen moments of thought, we can at least take the film to be a kind of silent-study of its three individual characters; the actresses Jean Seberg and Tina Aumont, and the singer and musician Nico, whose decade-long relationship with Garrel has become a spectre that haunts the very framework of his cinema, stretching as far back as her earliest appearance in the abstract, esoteric drama The Inner Scar (La cicatrice intérieure, 1972), to the recollections of her spirit and the void left in her absence in films like Emergency Kisses (Les baisers de secours, 1989) or I Don't Hear the Guitar Any More (J'entends plus la guitar, 1991).

In Les hautes solitudes, it is Nico's face that we see first, slumped in a kind of morose contemplation as the images flicker with a Murnau-like intensity, as the antique quality of the composition reminds us, subconsciously, of the world of Faust (1926) or Nosferatu (1922); suggesting that feeling of the supernatural, gothic and severe, or of a nocturnal underworld devoid of time and place. As was the case with Garrel's earlier silent film, Le révélateur (1968), there is that sense of a world in which life has stopped dead; where we witness these characters interacting, thinking - the expressions on their faces telling a story in the loosest possible sense - but they, like us, are still waiting; waiting for something (anything) to happen. Good or bad, we don't quite know, but there is a continual feeling that the world around them has fallen away, leaving only the four-walls, floors and ceilings of the apartment, the empty street bellow and those other spaces, rubble and mirrors, that seem to be beyond our basic comprehension.

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:


Nosferatu directed by F.W. Murnau, 1922:


Le révélateur directed by Philippe Garrel, 1968:

In this sense, the film becomes a sort of ghost story in which the inability of one character to relate to another character is conveyed through the intensity of those exhausting compositions of actors attempting to express thoughts and emotions - or the basic human need to a feel a part of something meaningful or substantial - but silenced, literally, by Garrel's particular filmmaking approach. By removing the soundtrack completely, so that not even a musical score or a drone of ambient white-noise can block out our own thoughts (either on the subject of the film, or our thoughts in general), Garrel makes the breakdown in communication between his four central characters - the three women and the actor Laurent Terzieff - all the more palpable; as lips move and the eyes dart back and forth from one side of the frame to another in a parody of conversation while the scene remains silent. The words literally cannot express the complexity of the emotions felt or experienced by these four lead protagonists, just as they fail to fully express our own relationship with them or with the film in question.

We never know if these actors are playing characters, or instead playing themselves, or even if their relationships extend beyond the actual beginning and end of the drama. Such questions remain on our mind throughout the film, as we watch these dramas play-out in bedrooms and kitchens, filled with looks and smiles which could be genuine - as in developing naturally from the drama and the interactions of the characters - or could be a cheat, as in those stolen moments, taken between takes and continuing the often Brechtian, deconstructive aspect that Garrel employs throughout. The accumulative effect of these images is eventually closer to the avant-garde of Stan Brakhage than the cinema of Vigo or Jean Eusrache, as the film becomes an installation piece, just there, in front of us, but beyond a reasonable grasp.

It is an impossible film to really pin-down and explain what is what without the benefit of further reading; with each reaction or spontaneous smile following a scene of full-face emotion disarming us, throwing our interpretations into confusion, leading to greater questions, thoughts and misunderstandings, etcetera. At certain points it seems like a depressing film, as Seberg, still beautiful, but quite clearly a world-away from the lively young girl of Bonjour Tristesse (1958) or À bout de souffle (1960), breaks down in tears and is comforted by Aumont, who reminds us of what a great and expressive actress she was away from the dull exploitation of films like Torso (I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale/Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence, 1973) or The Howl (L'urlo, 1970). However, at other times the mood is playful, as we sense some of the fun and the frivolity of this collective of likeminded individuals, friends and collaborators, producing a film, a personal and to some extents private work (as Garrel's work often seems to be), in the solitude of a rented apartment building.

Despite such moments, which could very easily be another example of Garrel's deconstruction of the film, allowing shots to run further than the moment of the cut - or the way in which the whole thing becomes about the process of filmmaking itself - it is the gloom and the inability of the characters to communicate that we eventually come back to. A haunted film in many respects, in which characters are introduced, either slumbering or on the precipice of sleep (Nico and Seberg) or instead gazing into windows or pools of mirrored reflections (Aumont and Terzieff); or where the high-contrast black and white and the fragmented framing of images, as half-lit faces, hands and arms, expressions hidden, either by the characters themselves or by the doorways that get in the way of the action as we intrude, silently, upon the scene, becomes yet another barrier.

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:

Beyond this, we're left with Seberg's face, which dominates the film, full of expression, even if the ability to plainly express in words seems to be beyond her. The fact that Seberg would be dead by the end of the decade, just three months shy of her 41st birthday, gives the film an added sense of tragedy that may not have been the intention. And when we take into consideration the early deaths of Nico (1938-1988) and Aumont (1946-2006), the idea of a ghost story, or a haunted film, becomes all the more concrete. Such ideas become manifest when combined with the cinematography, the sparseness of the locations and the feeling that time has become a mere affectation. From the first appearance of Seberg seven-minutes into the film, tossing and turning in bed and appearing to eventually fall asleep (in real-time) before a fade to black implies the passage between night and day, the narrative seems suspended, as moments pass, but with no real urgency, nothing to move along to besides the same old rooms and faces.

As a study for Serberg, or of Seberg, the film is absolutely riveting, as we watch with complete fascination the bombardment of emotions, or facial expressions, of acting at its most naked and unrefined, being projected as Garrel cuts in and out of these blurred relationships, where each look to the camera, beyond the camera, to the empty spaces that mock us with their vacant austerity, reminding us of the windows where life should be. Can we take hope from that penultimate shot, which lasts for several minutes and shows Seberg, bathed in glowing light and buried beneath an attractive sunhat, as she coyly expresses a range of conflicted facial expressions as if putting on an audition (for Garrel, and by extension the audience), or is the hope destroyed by the final plunging retreat into backlit melancholia? A silhouetted pose, cigarette smoke and "Les hautes solitudes", as Seberg returns to the darkness, away from the bright white light that filters in through the bedroom window; away from the fantasy ideal of what could have been, or should have been, if only things had been different.

Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:


The End... by Nico, 1974:


Les hautes solitudes directed by Philippe Garrel, 1974:

It is that particular presentation of characters in a state of trance, fearfully in danger, which makes it impossible not to be reminded of Nico's music; with the mood and tone reflecting songs like 'Innocent and Vain' or 'Frozen Warnings', or the lyrical reflections of 'Afraid'; as her voice, an aching monotone, reassures us, but also hold the mirror to the heartbreaking line "you are beautiful and you are alone." Such associations are impossible to ignore given the intensity of these two individuals and their relationship, which dominated a period of creativity that resulted in the conception of great music and great cinema (and the spaces between the two). Let's not forget that a colour-tinted still of the film even featured on the cover of Nico's album The End (1973), or that Garrel originally intended to use segments of Nico's music as a soundtrack to the film, before Seberg suggested that the images remain silent.

As the film ends we're left with as many questions as when it began; basic questions, like who are these people and what do they want? What were the intentions of the filmmaker? What role does the supposed influence of Nietzsche's The Antichrist (first published, 1888) have on the world of the film or the development of its narrative? ...And so on. The only thing we're really sure of is Seberg's brilliance and Garrel's genius, creating a film that is entirely dependent on the interpretations of the audience, as we project our own thoughts and feelings in an attempt to understand these characters and their complex interrelationships. In introducing his own work, Nietzsche wrote that "In order to understand the book, one must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of harshness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion." "Let us look one another in the face." These words, which resonate on a monumental level when watching the reactions of these three no-longer-with us cult-icons, could just as easily be the introduction to Garrel's intensely personal film.