The skeletal aspect of cinema

This is a pre-Festival review of Tots els camins de Déu (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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23 August

This is a pre-Festival review of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

A long-form look at Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) is headed This is an hard saying ; who can hear it ? (quoting John’s gospel, just after the crowd has been told that it has to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life (King James’ Version)).

That review (which is perhaps more of an essay) is available here, following the screening (and Q&A with director (and co-writer) Gemma Ferraté) on Tuesday 8 September at 8.00 p.m., and begins by quoting Dante’s Inferno (in Longfellow’s translation (as below)) :

‘Now go, for one sole will is in us both,
Thou Leader, and thou Lord, and Master, thou.’
Thus said I to him ; and, when he had moved,

I entered on the deep and savage way.

Inferno, Canto II, 139–142

A Catalan film for @camfilmfest will be amazing full size : its atmosphere, tension, uncertainty, and reminders of Beckettt, Dante, Borges !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2015

The Tweet tells truth, whereas – with a desire not to say too much, or just (as some reviewers like to do) tell the story – describing this film as Two men in a forest does not sound as though it might have significant filmic possibilities.

Yet one could say that about the essential premise of other circumscribed films such as Dial M for Murder (1954) (with Hitchcock deliberately being stagey, in the same year as Rear Window (1954)), 12 Angry Men (1957), or Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), but give the wrong impression. Also, at this time, (essentially) two-handed plays such as En attendant Godot and The Dumb Waiter were already being written by, respectively, Beckettt and Pinter*, concentrating on the skeletal aspect of drama / theatre.

For now, though, the best thing to say about Tots els camins de Déu probably lies somewhere between all the literary resonances that it brings out, such as with Dante, and these plays and films that have narrowed down to a few figures. That comes down to the notion of the dramatic and what that says to us about cinematic treatments of it, where Sokurov, before the masses employed in Russian Ark (2002), had made Father and Son (2003), and Mother and Son (1997), in the latter of which it is just those two named figures.

Both of those films by Sokurov look at a reality that is not so much distorted as curved, and where he meditates on the relationship between the two sons and the parent, through memory, and physical proximity – and sleep, and dream. In Tots els camins de Déu, it is what happens between men who seem to see each other for the first time when one’s shadow falls on the face of the other, just as he is sleeping on the ground, following emotional rupture and turmoil.

We are then with them in various situations, where patience, trust and nerve are tested, and we are invited to bear with them, not on the journey that they make, as such, within the forest, but in their exploration of each other’s psyches. It is resolutely not a film that is filled with action, and it simply does not engage with the stock cinematic cliché of establishing character-types, presenting a crisis or challenge, and seeing how the character-types deal with / overcome it.

Its business is with how time allows a burden to be shared between them – the cause of all that rupture and turmoil at the start of the film. But it really does do so in a way that is informed by :

* The opening of Dante’s Inferno, when he meets Virgil, also in a forest, and learns that his beloved, deceased Beatrice (already waiting to meet him in Paradiso) wants him to grasp God’s purposes, now that he is Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (Midway upon the journey of our life)

* Who one of these figures is (written about endlessly, but also by Dante and Borges), and what troubles him so

* How the burden of it – whose tangible reminder is so closely related to what he did, because it is partly what he did it for – alters him, so that his mood or attitude can just switch for the worse

* So there is humour, and also fun, and yet we have seen it snatched away by feelings that are heavy and painful


Ultimately, in this exact situation, we are thrown back on words such as these :

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew 11 : 28-30 (King James’ Version)


End-notes

* Earlier, Strindberg and Ibsen (and others after them) could not only write works on an epic scale, and with huge casts (e.g. Strindberg’s multi-part To Damascus and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt), but also focus on a few actors : respectively, Miss Julie and A Master Builder (in the latter of which, it is, out of the cast of seven, with Solness and Hilda Wangel that the play busies itself).

** Before them, possibly most remarkably, Georg Büchner, a scientist with a fascination for Jakob Lenz (he worked on a novella called Lenz), a sort of precursor – in Büchner’s extremely short life – to Woyzeck.

Sixty years before Chekhov (who, as a medic, was also to be an observer of life), his Danton (in Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death)) already seemed alone in a crowd – and so, despite disguising it and / or submitting to a sense of duty, do many of Chekhov’s stage characters. (Can one think of a major play of his without a gun-shot ?) It is that lostness, and the sense of being surrounded by silence, uncertainty, despair and death, that comes through into dramatists such as Beckettt and Pinter – the pauses, hesitations, and the heightened awareness that language can be as a sort of reification to fill or deny the void (L'Être et le Néant ?) – and which we experience here in Tots els camins de Déu.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Kafka, killing, and punishment

This is a Festival review of A Short Film about Killing (1988)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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17 May

This is a Festival review of A Short Film about Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) (1988), as screened at Saffron Screen’s (@Saffronscreen’s) Polish Film Festival on Saturday 16 May 2015 (which is held to celebrate ten years of establishing community cinema in Saffron Walden ?)

The film was introduced by Dr Stanley Bill, from the Faculty of Modern and Mediaeval Languages at the University of Cambridge, who drew attention to two people who had been instrumental in its making : its cinematographer (Slawomir Idziak) and composer (Zbegniew Preisner, who has written for other films by Krzysztof Kieślowski*), the former for his use of filters in front of the lens, the latter for his self-taught style and beautiful melodies.

After A Short Film about Killing, some conversation took place with Dr Bill (and Andrew Atter) about the death penalty**. It appears that there is no definitive version of the film’s relevance to what happened in Poland : in one, it may have done no more than fitting in with the Zeitgeist, whereas, in the other (reported in the Festival’s leaflet), it was instrumental in creating it, first through a moratorium, then as part of a post-Soviet identification with, and desire to join, the EU.

Be that as it may… but is any perceived weakness in the film’s juxtaposition of state and individual killing just because one might assume that Jacek should previously have told Piotr what he does in the prison cell (as if it would, or could, have made a difference, as an exculpation for what had been done – please see below), whereas the fact is that (although the trial judge praises the speech) we do not ever hear what the latter said, in the former’s defence and against the death penalty, and for the failure to avoid the latter of which Piotr blames himself ?

If one knows about the law (as Kieślowski’s co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz also did), although we are told (by the prosecutor, in his narrative prior to the judgement being carried out ?) that the case had gone to appeal, and that a higher authority had not granted a pardon, it is extremely unlikely that a fledgling barrister such as such as Piotr (Krzysztof Globisz) would have handled those further stages : in fact, everything is consistent with what Jacek (Miroslaw Baka) tells him, that he asked for Piotr to be present, because the sole part of the judicial process that had registered with Jacek was his name being called from the court building just before he was driven away. A dual purpose is served, of course, not only that Piotr hears Jacek out, and wants to defy the inevitable, but that his being there point up the inhumanity and the horrible reality of the sentence : his opposition is symbolic, but what, when seeking admission as a barrister, he had said to the Bar committee about criminal penalties (not least capital ones) not being a deterrent is borne out by Jacek Łazar’s own case [does the name denote the word for ‘leper’, connote Lazarus in the New Testament ?].


The film, not just polemically (for we are free to make our own mind up), juxtaposes our notions of crime and punishment : as Dr Bill agrees, we are not a little reminded of Dostoyevsky (even if there seems to be more redemption in pre-Soviet Siberia than in Soviet-era Poland), and opinions may differ about what ‘sentimental’ means as a description. Piotr Balicki’s stance against the judicial machine may be emotional / polemical, but his defiance (as Christ’s is, before Pilate ?) is in words, not actions – maybe, on reflection, we are reminded of, and hope for, what happens in Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie’, where the Explorer’s not so much disagreeing with as failing to endorse*** the Officer’s justification for fitting the punishment to the crime upsets the regime, albeit bloodily and crudely.

In handling and taking as its text Thou shalt not kill [better rendered as ‘murder’ ?], the film is tied to two dates, 17 March [1986 ?] and 27 April 1987, both of which link Jacek and Piotr – or, as we see him in his celebrations on that day, Piotrek (the diminutive by which his girlfriend calls him). With a different, though not wholly dissimilar, aesthetic of connectedness to that of James Joyce, commemorating 16 June 1904 in Ulysses****, A Short Film about Killing shows how, at the moment when Piotr’s reflections over coffee are being coloured by negativity at the thought of what he might have to bear in his professional life, Jacek, who has been cursed by the gypsy woman whom (in a catalogue of bad-mindedness, by him and others) he had rudely rejected, turns his mind to murder (heralded by sinister tones in Preisner’s score) :

The word ‘reflection’ is where we began the film, with the confusing image of a building seeming to rotate and twist as we see it in the glass of the door that Waldemar Rekowski (Jan Tesarz) opens and closes (maybe as Jacek’s own heart and soul are shown doing, as work is found around town for his idle hands, be it frightening the pigeons, or edging a stone forward, as if were just obeying gravity in an accident ?). And, as Dr Bill had mentioned that we might notice, in the cinematography can be seen occlusions of part of the frame*****, but also how the light on the buildings, even of the housing estate, becomes a sort of golden sepia, and the sky, particularly, seems perpetually that of sunset – culminating, after the killing, in a halo of bright sunlight, as if of some unholy transfiguration (in which we might identify Georg Büchner and his revolutionary play Woyzeck ?), before the sombre, washed tones of court-room and prison.

There are hints, here, at Jacek’s mental state, but maybe knowing of the events that had led to the death of his younger sister Marysia would not, as the law stood then in Poland, have afforded him the help of pleading diminished responsibility : Kieślowski does not dwell on the moment, but, when Jacek finds Beatka [with a name that seems to connote blessedness / saintliness, just coincidentally the girl who interested Waldemar and to whom he made a suggestive offer ?], his ideas about what they can do, now that he has acquired a car (and whoever exactly they are to each other), may have lucidity, but they betray that it is in fantasy that he has found a solution to their problems.

Think of capital punishment as a fit one as one may, or as a deterrent, but it may not have been a fit one here, where no one in Jacek’s place would have been contemplating the actual consequences of his actions.

People have claimed that, to A Short Film about Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) (1988), they prefer the hour-long version that forms part of Dekalog :

It's where I started, but I cannot agree with them - there is just too much going on to be limited to that length. pic.twitter.com/loobwqOgri

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 5, 2018

End-notes

* As well as the Dies Irae for The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) (2013).

** Only abolished in the UK, and in living memory, by the efforts of Victor Gollancz, Arthur Koestler and other campaigners – however well known it may be that Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged, relatively few seem to know that this cessation was not merely something that happened (and by no means overnight).

*** Respectively, they are der Reisende and der Offizier : well Kafka knew how (as also in, for example, ‘Das Urteil’) to portray ego-states in all their fragility. So much so, that we almost easily credit that his own personality was of this kind, or else that he was always foreseeing crushing bureaucracies – as if, despite what Alan Bennett wishes to tell us in The Insurance Man, Kafka did not work as a lawyer for The Workers’ Accident Insurance Office. Or even foreshadowing Nazi horrors (as if what The Third Reich resorted to was scarcely unfamiliar to Eastern Europe ?).

**** Albeit one which is more akin to that of Michael Haneke’s films from The Seventh Continent (1989) onwards, or to that of Cloud Atlas (2012).

***** Over coffee with his girlfriend, and when she carries out a palm-reading (the service offered by the gypsy woman, but rejected), we see Piotr’s and her brows shielded by a dark bar at the top of the frame, as he tries to contemplate the future.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 March

A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...


1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?

They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:

It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)

Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.

How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!


2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!

Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.

We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.

He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...


NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'


3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud

World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:

They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:

* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)

* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him

* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)


You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.

How? asks Georges.

Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...


End-notes

* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...

** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.


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