The Cage

The naked figure runs towards the gate. The surface of it fills the frame, becoming a barrier; an ornate wall - itself a relic to another time - which reduces the body of this man to something small and insignificant. We watch as his futile fists pound on the heavy exterior, both desperately and aggressive; trying without any great success to rend the gate open in a fruitless effort to break through to the other side. Excluding the music there is no sound, but we can imagine what is said: "let me out!" or possibly "let me in!"

From the images and the English translation of the title we can infer meaning. Time as a cage; a prison.

The Cage directed by Shûji Terayama, 1964:

The images are strange and enigmatic, but seem to suggest the various themes that explain what the film is potentially about. The above image can possibly be read as representation of birth. The figure - anxious, naked, desperate to escape this netherworld, to embrace life, or something like it - becomes like a child; his stature reduced to that of an infant in contrast to the overwhelming scale of the barred exterior, which looms before him in stoical reception.

Such a reading might seem too literal. The film certainly doesn't require such elucidation - the mood of the thing is enough to entrance us or provoke a response; the images suggesting stories or interpretations, but really just catching our eye with their disarming compositional approach - but it does make the experience of viewing more intriguing.

The images tell the story, or suggest one. An eye squints through the bars, like the eye of the viewer - the bars, as ever, a representation of the one-way relationship between the audience and the film - watching these images unfold. Some of the images conjure immediate associations, such as the old woman carrying the clock, carrying time, as a figurative gesture. Each of us are a prisoner of time, conscious of it. Perhaps not every second or every minute, but certainly the months, years and decades.

Other images seem vague or beyond easy interpretation. Two men exercise in unison, like prisoners in the yard. A hooded figure stands in the centre of a clock face, his silhouette - a body without a soul - becomes the hour hand, marking time.



These images add to the atmosphere of the film. That heavy sense of foreboding, which is only intensified by the tortured soundtrack; the thump of a drum, counting the seconds, or the howl of an anguished cry. Terayama's short is haunting, mesmerising, like much of the director's work (though some of his films are admittedly too contentious for my tastes), becoming, in effect, a series of bold gestures that suggest different meanings, different ideas, that play on the subjective gaze of the audience, like all art does.

Other viwers might disagree with these suggestions, but for me the film is a great figurative essay on time. A slow march towards the inevitable... like death or something else?

Voices

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Quelqu'un m'a dit

The voice of the man cannot travel between these two spaces; these inner worlds where lost souls attempt to express the feeling of longing through individual pursuits; plucked chords or the dance of light, illustrating the bittersweet embrace of a love that is unrequited. He's attracted to her, in the physical sense, but he cannot hear the sad words that she sings. His light burns brightly, but perhaps not bright enough. The inability to communicate is here in this single movement of the camera. It exaggerates the emotional distance between them by making explicit the physical closeness. Open your window and scream it, at the top at your lungs. I love you... but?

No. He breathes a sigh, lets out a silent declaration, but is content to chase the shadows. He carries a torch, but he can't hold a candle. She doesn't see him (won't ever see him); she's seduced by the muse. The siren, with her song, no longer calling the sailors to their deaths, but attracting, like moths to a flame, the hopeful and the hopeless. What was it Julie Harris said at the end of East of Eden; "it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world" The man is plunged, back again, into the darkness, all hope gone; snuffed out, like the candle. Then someone told me...

This is the Caraxian fascination with obsessive love (dangerous love; a love that destroys) as a counter to Bruni's coyly poetic lyrics. Like Denis Lavant in Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), the man, Aurélien Recoing, shirtless, breathing fire, wants nothing more than to be in the presence of this woman - whose light burns bright enough to illuminate the darkness of his own existence - but he can never possess her. He cannot hold this light for fear of destroying it, corrupting it's beauty with his own cruelty; like Alex with Mireille in Boy Meets Girl (1984), or Pierre with Lucie in Pola X (1999). "Look away" says Nick; "look away... and never more think of me"

Quelqu'un m'a dit directed by Leos Carax, 2003:

Close-Up

For the first few moments of its short duration, this early piece of genuine cinema history is no more adventurous or remarkable than the early experiments of the French-born pioneer Louis Le Prince. What we are seeing, in all actuality, is a basic one-take tableau vivant observation of a single scene, devised as a work of fiction, but no less indebted to the presentational - or, what would eventually be termed 'cinematic' - approach established by Le Prince in the films Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888).

In wide-shot, a little girl feeds her ailing kitty cat some medicine from a spoon. As an action, this is adorable, but alone, the presentation suggests only the intention to record, on film, for commercial purposes, an action to melt the heart's of the kindest old ladies. So far so-so... Then something extraordinary happens. A connection is created between two images. A jump, literally, from far-away to close-up.

The Sick Kitten directed by G.A. Smith, 1903:

The English filmmaker George Albert Smith had pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his previous films, As Seen Through a Telescope (1900) and Grandma's Reading Glass (1900). There the technique was more of a novelty; a way of presenting a new perspective: one of exaggeration. However, in this film, it is practicality that dictates the use of this new technique. The director wants to emphasise a moment that would have been missed had the camera remained at a distance. The kitten's face as it gladly laps up the medicine can now be seen by the audience, allowing us to follow the action more directly.

At this precise moment, cinema finally breaks free from the influence of the stage and establishes something that is unique to the language of film. From this point on, the camera would be able to offer the audience new perspectives; emphasising details and showing the emotion of actors in a way that would have been unfeasible without the benefit of this new innovation. It was now possible for the audience to go from this...



...to this...

...without having to physically bring ourselves closer to the work. A revolutionary moment in the development of the medium and one that indirectly makes possible the extraordinary montages in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, or the expressive, detailed shots of eyes, mouths, hands and iconography in the films of Sergio Leone. This single moment would change the way future film were produced; opening up a new world of creative possibilities, as well as bringing with it the potential for a more intimate form of cinema. Less broad, less theatrical; a cinema of small gestures.

The Phantom Ride

The camera shunts along the tracks, headlong into darkness, into the unknown. This is innovation, the movement of the camera giving the audience the feeling of a journey. As an event in the development of cinema's history, this film is as important as Auguste and Louis Lumière's The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1895), which suggested, through a single moment, the possibility of cinema as spectacle. In George Albert Smith's The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), the opening and closing shots represent the reverse-angle to the Lumière's remarkable film. Now the audience could experience not only the arrival, but the journey as well.

All of a sudden the cinema was no longer a medium for static observations, but something that could move between worlds.

The Kiss in the Tunnel directed by G.A. Smith, 1899:

The kiss that occurs in-between represents the embrace of the new, this kingdom of shadows called cinema. An artistic medium somewhere beyond the influence of literature, theatre or still photography; instead, a magic act of movement and emotion, where the light at the end of the tunnel becomes a premonition to the light from a film projector as it burns against the darkness of the screen. As the camera continues along the track, out of the darkness, into the bright future of this new world of artistic expression, the movement, eloquently described by Mark Cousins as a "phantom ride", suggests the possibility for future films to transport the audience, both figuratively and literally, into the unfamiliar territories of the heart and mind.

The Ghost Story

Though it is the final shot with its wonderfully surreal depiction of scattered pages being blown though a dusky London street that has become the standard 'iconic' signature moment from Roman Polanski's eighteenth feature-length film The Ghost Writer (2010), there is a quieter, much less provocative image earlier in the film that for me is far more suggestive. The shot depicts an abandoned car on a ferry as it arrives at the port of some fictional New England peninsula. The car's apparent vulnerability as a lone object, exposed within the otherwise vacant, cavernous interior of the ship, already insinuates the sadness and the loneliness of the dead body that will soon be discovered.

This image - which, unlike the closing shot, doesn't manipulate or mislead the viewer - suggests an immediate air of uncertainty. Already we suspect, simply through a static single-shot observation of the scene, that there is something more to this discarded vehicle. We begin to sense the influence of something sinister at work beneath the surface of the thing. A feeling of dread that recalls the familiar psychological terrain of Polanski's most famous films; where an unseen system of forces (usually supernatural, though not so here) is later found to be manipulating events from the outset.

The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski, 2010:

Our fears are eventually confirmed in what I feel are two of the most extraordinary images in Polanski's oeuvre. In the first, the car - still abandoned, still vulnerable - is inspected by a security team suspicious of a potential terrorist threat. We can see the ship departing in the background of the shot, as the muted sirens and the flashlights of the security team illuminate the centre of the frame. These actions - the drifting of the ship, the abandonment of the car and the general inspection of the vehicle - already suggests the impending fate of our lead protagonist; a character soon to introduced and immediately cut-off; hopeless in his situation, with no real chance of escape; effectively hung out to dry.

Polanski then cuts abruptly to the second image, as the body is discovered; washed-up as a sad and lonely relic on some anonymous grey shore.

The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski, 2010:

If this opening sequence, with its presentation of ordinary if not mundane proceedings leading us towards a shocking discovery, finds the director playing to the influence of Hitchcock (as he does several times throughout the film), it is the prophetic aspects of these images that really defines this sequence as something astonishing and something unique to Polanski's work. The shot of the lone car - like the two images that immediately follow - creates a disturbing premonition of things to come. These images, which seem to present the story of what happened to the first 'ghost' - the writer we never meet, but who nonetheless haunts the very fabric of the film, leading his eventual replacement on the same journey, to the same end - also suggest the possibility of what might happen, thereabouts, or in some plausible variation of events.

These images are brought to mind later in the film when the unnamed writer (played by Ewan McGregor) - having taken over the job of amending the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister - believes he may have stumbled across the conspiracy that led, directly or indirectly, to his predecessor's death. Making his way back from the mainland following an excursion to track down a potential lead, the writer spots an ominous black car trailing in his rear-view mirror. He abandons his own vehicle on the ferry and makes a run for it, jumping from the vessel and managing to elude his pursuers, once again leaving the car (the same car) deserted on the ship.

The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski, 2010:

All of a sudden we think back to that opening sequence; the car abandoned on the ferry, the body being washed up on the shore. For a split second we create a link between the two scenes and assume, for only a moment (before the film continues with its relatively disappointing final act), that we may be seeing the events leading up to that initial discovery. A brief belief that the entire film has been an intricate series of flashbacks; that the beginning is really the end (or is it... the beginning of the end?) and that all the potential avenues of interpretation can only lead us back to that cold and dismal beach.

It's a remarkable moment that illustrates Polanski's real talent for engaging his audience, not through clever tricks or ironic twists of fate, but through the subtle and extraordinary power of his images to imply or insinuate a story in retrospect. In the psychological juxtaposition that occurs between these sequences we're effectively seeing two different stories folded into one; the story of the 'writer', the main thread of the film, and the story of the 'ghost', the spectre that hangs above the narrative from the very first scene, holding the thing together. The title of the film refers to both.

Water for Maya

How do you describe the indescribable? Narrow your eyes for long enough and the images start to look like the flutter of a billion butterfly wings. Other times, it is a gallery of faces - some haunted, some disturbed - looking out for just a split-second, then gone again; lost in this kaleidoscopic burst of colours, daubed, physically, onto the celluloid. These 'phantom faces' make us question our own role as a prospective audience. Are we the "viewer", passively observing the work presented to us and attempting to glean something meaningful, either a thought or a feeling from the experience; or are we the "viewed", the real objects of significance.

I wonder how many different audiences or viewers a film might see during the course of its lifetime. How different their relationship is to us than ours is to them. An audience may see only a handful of films a year, but the film itself will see literally thousands of these objects of curious interest presented to it during an average day. A very different gallery of faces than the ones imagined here, between the spaces of the frame. Instead, a gallery of faces more like the ones found in Abbas Kiarostami's extraordinary Shirin (2008), in which the spectator becomes the spectacle.

If film was more than just a dead-object brought to life by the gaze of the observer, who enlivens it through personal reflection and subjective opinion, would it be possible for the film, or these faces, to judge us, as a collective work, as we judge it?

Water For Maya by Stan Brakhage, 2000:


Shirin directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 2008:

As the blur of colours and textures explode and disperse, a second layer of images reveals itself, gradually, over the course of the film. A ghost story - non-narrative, but a story all the same - moving beneath the surface. This spectral play of shadows, where the glimpsed faces become almost explicit, is where the real power of the film rests. Not simply as a tribute to the American filmmaker Maya Derren, as hinted at by the film's title, but as a truly sensory cinematic experience.

In this remarkable montage, every frame has the power of a Pollock or a Kandinsky. On screen for less than the normal time that it might take for our eyes to register its form, but still vivid, vital; a series of images open to interpretation. The accumulative effect of these images when viewed against one another in a quick succession, creates something that is difficult to define, and even more difficult to express in words. It is something that can only be felt through the process of viewing.

Water For Maya by Stan Brakhage, 2000: