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Appropriating the Artist: One + One/Sympathy for the Devil (Mike)

Looking as though it were finger-painted, the opening intertitle of Godard’s One + One/Sympathy for the Devil reads, “The Stones Rolling;” already Godard has begun to play with language.  The letters E-O-N-E-O-N, or O-N-E-O-N-E in the correct ordering of the band’s name, are highlighted in red.  One + One.  For Godard here One + One is never unified into the end result, the final product.  Instead, One + One is just that, one and one; two individual, separate pieces, together.  In many ways, this will come to define the film, as Godard presents us with two worlds, two separate realities.  The first is a world beyond Godard’s control, the world of the Rolling Stones, as he documents their process of writing and recording their song “Sympathy for the Devil.”   The second is a world the filmmaker does control, the world of film, a sphere of fragmented narratives whose figures act as his ideological mouthpieces.  He doesn’t present us with a single message, a unified ideological, social, or political critique.  Instead, these sections are meant to conflict and clash, to raise more questions than they answer, and, ultimately, to alter and shape how we view the Stones at work. 

In the opening shot, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sit on the studio floor, guitars in hand, the camera hovering around them slowly (as it does throughout the film).  The song has yet to take shape; it is the creative process in its beginning stage, in its rawest form. Following the rhythm of the guitar, Jagger sing-speaks variations of the same few words of jumbled, even baby-like, rambling.  There are no words, just gibberish.  Language is secondary here (at least at first); we are introduced, first, to sound; pure sound, before there is any meaning assigned to it.  Whereas Godard has too much to say throughout the film, overwhelming us with multiple and conflicting voices and sounds that overlap one another into an incomprehensible noise, Jagger here speaks only gibberish.

Godard cuts from the studio to a London hotel room, where Wiazemsky (who plays Eve Democracy later on in the film) spray paints the words “Hilton” and “Stalin” onto the hotel window, crossing the two at the “t.”  It is a mixing of terms and ideologies that we will see throughout the film.  “Sovietcong.”  “Cinemarxism.”  “Freudemocracy.”  All of them are One + One; conceptual and ideological combinations he never explores specifically, only mentioning them on the walls and streets in spray paint, inviting questions and provoking questions, but ultimately offering no answers.  Over the image, the narrator begins telling us that he’s a Bolivian hiding in a London toilet to escape from the police.  He reads from a pornographic novel (which he calls a “political novel”), replacing the names of the characters with political figures and cultural icons, mixing politics, pornography and pop culture into one philosophical mess.  We are never fully sure what their connection is.  “Raising the toilet lid I could see Elizabeth’s fat white behind on which Lyndon Johnson was projecting an Andy Warhol movie,” the narrator tells us.  Like Jagger’s singing in the beginning, it is gibberish to us.  The narration will continue throughout the film, running over the image of the Stones in the studio.  What is their role in this political, cultural, and pornographic mess?  Could we just as easily substitute Jagger’s name or Richard’s for Johnson’s and Warhol’s?

“Outside Black Novel” reads the second intertitle in red, the acronym “love” spelled out this time in black.  A Black militant sits in a wheel barrel in a junkyard, reading to us about the history of the blues, its roots, its development, and ultimately its appropriation by young Whites and popular culture for White consumption. “Any group of middle class White boys who need a haircut and male hormones can be a pop group.  That’s what pop means,” he tells us.  We cannot help but think of the Stones in the studio from the scene before, and this is Godard’s intention. Originally starting as a skiffle band (a popular but now-neglected subgenre of music popular in Britain in the 1950s, combining blues, roots, and country), drawing on the styles of Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf, the Stones exemplify this appropriation of “Black music” by the White youth culture.

The camera is the unifying force in the film.  It is what connects these fragmented sections together: the Stones, the Black militant group, Eve Democracy, and even the seedy fascist bookstore later on.  It remains consistent in its style throughout, always slow and controlled in its movement, always moving laterally, always circulating back to where it started.  We watch as it hovers throughout the studio, never intruding on the band as they work, drifting around them as an observer (embodying the perspective of the filmmaker himself), capturing the artist and the creative process at work.  We watch as the song evolves from the simple strumming of Jones and primitive mumbling of Jagger into a complex and layered work.  The lyrics begin to take shape, and the guitars from the beginning disappear and are replaced by maracas, congas, and a chorus group.  We watch in real time as the band starts and stops repeatedly, tweaking different sections each time. The song is never the same twice; the instrumentation, rhythm, beat, speed, and Jagger’s lyrics and inflection change each time.  What is significant here, though, is that unlike the other figures and scenes in the film, the Stones, their process and their output, are outside Godard’s control.  The filmmaker here has no real power over them; they are not a mouthpiece for him to convey his ideological questions and theories, at least not directly.  Nor is this necessarily his intention.  Instead, he works to control everything around them, to place them within a context that he creates.

In filming the artist at work, the artist and his or her creative process come to serve different functions for this filmmaker.  For Clouzot and Parreno and Gordon, the artist is a mystery to be unraveled, a hieroglyphic to be deciphered, and yet in filming them we inevitably realize we can’t ever fully know what drives them creatively.  What, though, is Godard’s interest in capturing the Stones at work here?  What does he hope to learn from filming them?  The song itself would seemingly fit with Godard’s own political position; it is an anti-establishment statement that would come to define 60s youth, highlighting atrocities of the past and present (the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassinations, and the 100 years war) as a way to signify their own break with the generations before them.  And yet Godard here is not interested in (or at least he’s not focused on) that.  His interest instead lies in what the Stones represent and to what their creative process tends. This is a study in control: in its creation and its limits.  The limit of creative control, Godard seems to suggest, is at base in its commerciality.  Although “Sympathy for the Devil” became an anthem of the 1960s counterculture, it is also simultaneously a cultural product that is to be commodified and commercialized, bought and sold by record companies and corporations to the masses.  By placing them in the context of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy, juxtaposing scenes of the Stones in the studio with these other fragmented narratives, we are forced to understand The Stones in a different way.  We must re-examine and re-contextualize them within a larger social, economic, and cultural frame; and in doing so, Godard is questioning not the art itself, not its content, but instead what the art and the artist are used for, how they are to be packaged and consumed.  We come to view them less as artists and more as appropriators and as tools and products.  And by placing them within this context, Godard ultimately exerts his authority as the filmmaker over the band, seizing control from them and placing it back into his hands.

A Dancer's World (Mike)

A Dancer’s World, the first of Peter Glushanok’s three films on Martha Graham, cuts from the title screen of Graham’s company, standing in the dressing room stretching, to three figurines.  The figurine to the right is a dancer, its left leg raised and turned upwards at an impossible ninety-degree angle, with a third arm stretching out from its faceless head.  Next to it, on its left, is a small stone sculpture of an arm, raised on a pedestal, its hand held up like a dancer’s.  To the left of the arm is another figure of a dancer, this time standing with its feet crossed, its back arched slightly, its hands held out in front of it.  Like these three, Glushanok’s film will present us with its own representation of dance, a new, cinematic examination and experience of the medium and of one of its seminal figures.  We do not see her at first, though, only the faint shadow of her on the dressing partition behind the statues.  Over the image, her voiceover begins.  It is controlled, composed, and authoritative, speaking to us almost as a higher power.  “The theatre is a very special place,” she tells us.  “It is where the act of theatre begins.”  The camera is drawn to her here, moving upwards at the sound of her voice, floating slowly towards her shadow on the right and eventually landing on Graham herself, sitting in front of the dressing room mirror.

 

Glushanok’s film doesn’t focus on Graham’s past, who she is and why she’s significant.  Nor does it ever show Graham herself dancing, creating or choreographing a piece, or instructing her company.  Instead, we see her in the theatre dressing room as she applies her make-up and prepares her hair for her role as Jocasta.  Whereas others might pass it off simply as a place to prepare for the show, an interim space between the studio and stage, the dressing room, for Graham, is an integral part of the dancer’s world; it is where the dancer becomes the character she is to play. This transformation is, on one level, physical.  “Make-up,” she says, “is a magic.  It’s a ritual.  It’s the means by which you transform yourself into the character you hope to play.”  But the change is not only external for her, not only the way she styles her hair or the costume she puts on, but internal as well.  As Graham tells us, there comes a moment in which she looks into the mirror and the character looks back at her, recognizing the reflection not as Martha Graham, but as the character herself.  It is through her that her character and her character’s “hopes, fears, love and terror,” will be expressed.

 It is through dance, through how Graham communicates her character, though, that differentiates her as an artist; and yet Glushanok never shows her at work.  We never actually see her on stage or in the studio.  She is presented here not as a dancer or chorographer, but as an actress (both an actress for the stage and within Glushanok’s film).  The image of Graham at the mirror changes and we are brought out of the world of the dressing room and into the studio.  The stark setting, the plain white walls and wood floor, stands in contrast to the cluttered dressing room from before.  From this point on, the film will alternate between the two, with Graham in one, explicating and expounding her artistic philosophies that drive and shape her work, and her company in the other, illustrating the different techniques that define her style: the awareness of the head and throat, the attention on flexibility and control, the mastery of the turn of the body on its axis, the focus on contracting and releasing the breath.  Glushanok and Graham thus provide us with the tools, the raw materials with which she can construct a narrative, but not with the vocabulary of meanings attached to them, nor with the final product or narrative to be interpreted.

 Graham controls these two worlds.  She dictates the action, blocking, dances, dancers, uniforms, and setting.  The mise-en-scene belongs to her.  There is thus a certain struggle here, an inherent tension in the balance of power between Graham as both subject and actress and Glushanok as the filmmaker.  He exercises his own authority over the film, though.  The mise-en-scene may be that of Graham, but the frame is not.  We view the dancers here as Glushanok, not Graham, wants us to view them.  In the first shot of the studio, the camera follows a dancer as she enters the studio and moves across the floor; like her, it is mobile, controlled yet fluid, moving freely throughout the room.  It is its own entity, separate from Graham, elaborating what she says but presenting us with its own perspective, its own point of view. 

The filmmaker inherently imposes himself here, and by filming the dances our experience of them is different than if we were to view them in the theatre.  Dance is a medium without cuts and without close-ups.  Editing and cinematography create their own rhythm that is both intrinsically connected to and separate from the action.  The shifting angles and distances, the movement of the camera, and the length of the shots have their own beat, tempo, and pace that gives us a different emotional response.  Halfway through the film, we watch as two dancers express “youth’s lyric joy and sadness at being in love for the first time.”  It’s a light, energetic dance, captured at first through a long shot, with the two dancers making up only a small portion of the frame, their bodies and the studio in full view.  29 seconds in, though, our experience changes.  Glushanok cuts from the long shot to a medium of the two, the man standing behind the woman, holding her arms as she raises them above her, their eyes locked. There is an emotional shift here as their figures become bigger within the frame, the world around them smaller.  A stronger intimacy and spark between the characters is established, and we feel a new connection with them.  Glushanok gives a new power and significance to the moment between them. The electricity of the live performance is lost on screen, but it’s replaced by a new way to view and experience the work, by a new and different language with which the narrative and characters can be expressed and captured.  The world within the frame may be a dancer's, but our experience is something new entirely; and one that is as reliant on Glushanok as it is on Graham.

 

Vive le Tour!: Vignettes from the Tour de France (Mike)

 

Louis Malle’s Vive le Tour!, a 19-minute homage, chronicle, and examination of the 1962 Tour de France, does not adhere to the typical sports documentary structure or formula.  The viewer is never told where or when the race takes place, who is competing (only Van Looy’s name is mentioned), what stage of the race it is, or what the standings are.  It doesn’t follow a linear sense of time, focus on or highlight the pivotal moments or key individual battles (such as in Joel Santoni’s La course en tete), nor follow a specific rider or team of riders (like Pepe Danquart’s Hollentour, or Hell on Wheels); and although there are lyrical qualities to its editing, cinematography, and narration, it is not a visual poem (such as Claude Lelouch’s …Pour un Maillot Jaune).  Shirking a traditional narrative, Malle creates a montage of random, individual moments connected mostly by their idiosyncrasy.  We see the drinking raids, where riders loot bars and restaurants for drinks (beer, lemonade, champagne, etc.), and we watch as the motorcyclists following the pack try to pick up the cyclists’ food bags with their feet.  We see two riders share a Fudgesicle, one rider hold another’s seat steady as he tries to pee and pedal simultaneously, and a rider with a fractured skull muttering “My head is cold.  Cover my head with something.  I’m cold” as he is airlifted away from the course by helicopter.  In weaving these vignettes together, Malle creates a layered emotional palette that captures everything from the short, subtle moments of humor of the Tour, to the darker, more tragic ones of pain and struggle.

Despite not adhering to the typical sports documentary formula, Vive le Tour! still captures the intensity, tension, and drama of the race.  At one point the music stops, and we hear only the sound of wheels, pedals, and gears in motion.  The riders’ lax style from before has disappeared, and now they are leaning forward, their weight shifted towards the front of the bike, their eyes narrowed and focused on the road ahead of them.  The physical strain is unimaginable as they climb from 600 feet to 6000, then descend to 800, and then climb again to 9000.  Malle cuts in on the faces of the different individual riders, and we watch as they struggle for breath, their mouths open and white around the lips, their eyes bulging and their veins popping from their neck and face.  For each moment of light hearted humor there is one of struggle, physical and emotional strain, and tragedy.  Riders crash, and even some of the toughest are carried off in ambulances.  One racer, his face and shirt covered in blood, pedals on as he is being bandaged up.  Another, pushed beyond his limits from doping (or, as Malle calls it, “charging”), quits, claiming he’d “eaten some bad fish.”  In one of the film’s most extended and dramatic scenes, a rider, virtually unconscious from exhaustion, climbs back onto his bike and attempts to ride on, eventually collapsing on the side of the road.

Malle works on another level in the film, though, demonstrating his skills as a filmmaker.  In the opening segment, he chooses not to focus on the riders or the race itself, but instead the spectacle that surrounds them, the carnival-like atmosphere, the anticipation and celebration of that brief moment when the riders pass by.  We see a nun giving a thumbs up, a man eating a sandwich, a group of boys wearing paper hats, the parade of cars and floats, and the swarms of people lining the street.  This spectacle is lost on the riders, though.  As Malle tells us in voiceover, they “…can’t see the crowd.  They think, ‘I’ll see my wife or my mom,’ but they don’t see a thing.”  On the word “think,” the perspective changes.  The camera shifts from static shots of the crowd as the blur of riders passes by to the point-of-view of the riders themselves.   The camera moves quickly down the road here, the crowd now transformed into the blur of figures and colors.  We are brought into the internal world of the cyclists; we hear what they hear (the “incredibly loud” sound of the crowd around them), we see what they see (the camera becomes their eyes), and we think what they think (Malle’s voiceover telling us what runs through their minds).  Malle thus presents us with two different perspectives, two alternating realities that he will shift throughout the film.  By doing so, he moves beyond the typical, objective portrayal of the Tour de France and allows us to see it from multiple viewpoints, to experience it as both observer and participant.  Malle is thus able to capture in 19-minutes what few filmmakers are able to in 90, presenting us with a layered and captivating examination of one of sports’ most intense and historic competitions.  He does not simply document the race, highlighting the significant moments and characters, but instead gives us a complex and unique experience that alternates between comedy and tragedy, subjective and objective, spectator and racer.

 

Black Sheep in the Modern World: Modern Times (Mike)

Over the face of a clock, the foreword reads, “'Modern Times.'  A story of industry, of individual enterprise - humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”  In the opening shot a herd of sheep, a single black one caught in the middle, dissolves into a mass of workers rushing forward out of a subway station entrance; Chaplin’s comparison is obvious.  We then see these men walking towards a large factory.  It is a place devoid of the natural world; smoke stacks and large concrete and glass buildings dominate the frame, showing only a small sliver of sky at the top of the screen.  The factory is a world of order and repetition. The sets are large and overwhelming, constructed with steel bars, pipes, and levers, and glass windowpanes that all work to create strong horizontal and vertical lines. These lines form an array of ninety degree angles throughout the frame (thus helping to establish the sense of order and balance) that are broken up only by the expressionless, uniformed factory workers and various rotating wheels throughout the frame.  The camera is static in these opening shots, with the large and excessively complex machines taking up most of the frame.  The workers, small in comparison, are robotic in their movement and manner, appearing more as parts of the factory setting than as people.  What these machines and workers are making, what their end product is, is never made clear; their significance instead lies more in their spectacle and in the repetitive nature of their work.

It is not until the film’s thirteenth shot (2:51) that we are introduced to the Tramp.  The camera here moves forward into the factory’s main room, following an assembly line on the right slowly and deliberately, before panning left, pausing on two workers repetitively hammering a line of metal plates.  They illustrate for us how the factory automation is to look and act; large, strong, and expressionless, monotonously working with nothing to distinguish them from one another, and thus nothing to distinguish them as individuals.  The camera does not stay on them for long though, pausing only for a few seconds before panning to the Tramp on their left.  He is an outsider, an individual inside this ordered and repetitive world.  Like the black sheep he is noticeably different than those around him; he looks different (shorter with large clown-style shoes and his trademark mustache), he walks differently (shuffling penguin-like with his arms swinging to his sides or in front of him), he even moves differently (chaotically and clumsily).  But Chaplin establishes him here not only as an individual within the factory, but as an invasion onto it.  He disrupts this sense of order and balance around him, continually crossing the different vertical and horizontal lines created by the architecture and machines (such as when he climbs over the conveyor belt), his every action throwing the assembly line into chaos

One of Chaplin’s most interesting characteristics as a filmmaker is how little he uses close-ups.  The close-up is generally used to focus on an individual character, establish a connection between him or her and the viewer, illustrate their personality, or express their emotional or psychological state.  Chaplin instead chooses to shift between long and medium shots, using the mise-en-scene (specifically the blocking, acting, and the set) to establish the Tramp as an individual.  But he not only uses the long and medium shot to establish his character’s individuality, but also to express his sense of suffocation and suppression inside the factory world. When the factory manager chooses him to test a machine that will allow workers to eat on the assembly line (8:45), Chaplin uses a long shot in which the figure of the Tramp occupies only a small part of the frame (making up roughly half the height of the screen and only 1/7 of the horizontal length).  Yet despite the small amount of space he takes up, he appears cramped, suffocated, and suppressed within the frame.  Chaplin is able to create this feeling in a few different ways.  The long shot emphasizes the large, overwhelming, and repetitive world around him, and although it’s a wide angle depicting a number of figures and machines throughout the frame, it is heavily weighted to the left towards the figure of Tramp.  He is framed vertically by four pipes that stretch to the ceiling and by three workers on his sides.  The three eating machine salesmen and the factory manager are lined up in a row to the Tramp’s right, staring at him.  The conveyor belt intersects this, creating a barrier between the Tramp and the four men, pushing him further back towards the wall and limiting the amount of room he has to move.  Seated along the wall is a line of factory workers, also staring at the Tramp again, drawing the viewer’s focus to him.  The last factory worker on the bench is positioned to the Tramp’s left, forcing him into an area which he seems unable to escape. 

Here, in the world of the factory, the Tramp’s individuality is suppressed.  Even those small moments of independence (such as when he tries to take a smoking break in the bathroom) and little indications or markers of individuality (such as his packed lunch) are stripped away from him.  But Chaplin takes this further; it is not only the Tramp’s individuality that’s restrained, but his very humanity, those basic human needs, as he is constantly forced to adjust himself and his instincts to the factory.  Even if he tries to scratch an itch or swat a bee away from his face, he is kicked and scolded for throwing the assembly line into disorder.  This is a world where the human body becomes mechanized, where the only voices heard are those through radios or monitors, and where workers are fed by (and, at one point, into) machines.

But this suppression, this question of how the individual survives (or doesn’t survive), of how humanity is restrained on the assembly line, is only the starting point for Chaplin in his film.  It is from this point that the Tramp begins his journey, moving from place to place, job to job, in a continual search for somewhere to call home, a space which he can fashion himself and express his individuality.  Chaplin will thus raise a deeper philosophical question of the role of the individual in the modern world.  Ironically enough, it will only be in the small confines of a prison cell that he ever truly finds this sense of home, although even this is short-lived.  In the end, he is left homeless, walking away with the Gamine (his female counterpart) into the landscape.  Although this ending seems to suggest that the individual has no place in the modern world and is seemingly exiled from it, the Tramp’s last words, “…never say die- we’ll get along” suggest that his search (and thus the individual’s search) for his place in the modern world continues.

Football and Hieroglyphics: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Mike)

Directors Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno immediately establish the context of their film: Madrid, Saturday, April 23, 2005, “from the first kick of the ball until the final whistle.”  They open with an establishing shot of the field, the 22 players positioned on their sides waiting for the kick-off.  The image itself is grainy, similar to that of a television broadcast, and a commentator speaks in Spanish in the background; it's the typical view of a football [soccer] game.  The camera then moves in, cutting closer to the field as the game begins.  It follows the action at first, tracking the ball as it moves between the Villarreal players from the center spot to the backfield, and then to the far sideline.  We watch the right-winger as he moves up field with the ball; in this moment though, our focus is no longer on the ball, where it is and who has possession, but instead on the figure of Zidane, the number 5, as he enters the center of the frame.  He stands out immediately to the viewer, almost ascetic in his disposition; his monk-like bald spot and slouching frame, reserved and collected in his expression and movement.  He closes off the midfield lane and a defender comes to his support to block the sideline to his left.  The ball is passed forward off screen and the other two figures sprint out of frame after it.  The camera doesn’t follow them or the ball though, choosing instead to sit on Zidane as he walks back into position; it will stay on him for the remainder of the film.

The image is then transformed, as the grain of the picture is broken into small, green, individual pixels.  Gordon and Parreno redefine the pitch here, restructure it from the space in which the game takes place to a stage, a set, a canvas, a screen, the place in which Zidane will establish and express himself as a player-artist, an individual; it will become a space for him to be studied.  The letters Z-I-D-A-N-E appear individually over the pixels, before being placed on top each other to form a single symbol, a hieroglyphic of his name.  The camera zooms out slightly, the number of pixels multiplying, and the faint figure of Zidane once again becomes recognizable.  Like the pitch, Zidane here is broken down into pixels, signifying that he too is to be looked at and examined differently, to be broken down and analyzed in a new way.

The pixilated image reforms back into the grainy television screen as the ball moves from the Villarreal half to the Madrid 18-yard box.  A low cross cuts across the face of goal and Madrid are pushed onto the back foot.  The left back, Roberto Carlos, takes the ball, fighting off a Villarreal striker and passes it forward to Zidane.  The camera then cuts to the Frenchman just as he is about to receive the ball.  The visual style changes here, as the blurry long shot of the field becomes a high definition medium of the player.  The camera cuts back to the grainy image as Zidane takes the ball in stride, and we watch as he carries it forward, driving up field past a defender.  He sends a pass low and cross field through the defense, ahead of a Madrid forward, pushing him and the flow of the game to the opposite end of the pitch.  His genius, his artistry is established here; in less than six touches he has demonstrated his control, accuracy, reading of the game, his ability to turn defense almost instantly into attack, his ability to create, to transform and dictate the flow of the game.

Zidane is in many ways similar to a filmed poem, lyrical in its examination and use of rhythm, movement, space, and sound.  German filmmaker Hellmuth Costard used a similar approach in his 1971 film Football as Never Before, in which he filmed George Best with eight 16mm cameras over the course of a game.  What is interesting though is that Gordon and Parreno seem to share less in common with Costard as they do with French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot.  Whereas Costard focused more on capturing the balletic quality of Best and the footballer, Gordon and Parreno, like Clouzot in The Mystery of Picasso (his own examination of the artist), go beyond the medium they’re documenting and raise a deeper question of film as a medium, how we film the artist, and of the artist himself.  Like the Mystery of Picasso, the film forces us to ask, what can we really learn about the artist from watching him work, about his “secret process” (as Clouzot calls it), about his internal world and what drives him.  Unlike Clouzot though, who eliminates the face and figure of the artist, showing instead only the canvas and the work as it unfolds, Gordon and Parreno focus on Zidane, the artist, and not on what he produces.  We are thus forced to try and understand Zidane not through his role on the field and what he contributes to the game, but instead on him, his movement, his behavior, and his interactions with others.

In the opening segment Gordon and Parreno tell us we will be “face to face,” with Zidane, “as close as [we] can.”  We learn a number of different things about him through the film.  We see his incredible touch, control, balance and technical ability.  We’re able to notice the simple shifts in his movement, the subtle changes in his position as he receives and feeds the ball.  He is a solitary figure, rarely interacting with any of the other players, and speaking only once (when he tells the referee he should “be ashamed” after awarding the other team an undeserved penalty).  We watch as he wanders the pitch, roaming the field more as an observer than an active participant.  He is reserved, economical in his play and movement, neutral in his expression.  And yet he becomes the game’s central character, the protagonist to a narrative we can’t really see.  He creates one goal with a brilliant run down the left wing past three defenders, sending a lofted cross to Ronaldo on the back post for an easy header (changing the flow of the game in Madrid’s favor), and he is issued a red card in the end after hitting a Villarreal player when a fight breaks out on the pitch (a strange foreshadowing of his exit from the World Cup final a year later after he head butted Italian defender Marco Materazzi).

The medium of film and the different techniques of the filmmakers also allow us to better understand Zidane and his internal world.  The shifts in diegetic (the sounds from the pitch, the noise of the crowd around him) and non-diegetic sound (the soundtrack, the sounds of kids playing), and the text over the image (excerpts taken from an interview with the player) help bring us into his inner world.  We learn what goes through his mind, his strange shifts in consciousness, his acute awareness of everything around him.  But do we ever fully understand Zidane through filming him as he works?  Do we understand or unravel his “mystery,” his internal workings.  Through the 17 different camera angles, the use of text, the layered sound, through breaking his figure down into pixels, do we come to understand what drives him, what pushes him, what goes through his mind as he receives and passes the ball.  He is a mobile character, constantly in motion, constantly forcing the camera (and us) to follow him, to readjust, to change focus.  We never fully move into his inner world, never share that visual connection with him or seeing the field as he sees it; only once are we given a shot from his perspective, an eye line match of the scoreboard reading 0-1 in the second half.  Even as we see him from 17 different angles, even as the text, his internal voice, hints at what he hears and experiences on the field, he remains elusive to us.

The filmmakers use the letters of Zidane’s name to form a symbol in the beginning of the film that they deconstruct in the end.  This symbol, this hieroglyphic suggests that Zidane himself, as a player and artist, is a symbol, a hieroglyphic we try to understand.  When this figure is dismantled, we are forced to question whether we have dismantled Zidane’s character, whether we have deciphered the hieroglyphic?  By bringing us face to face with Zidane, as close as we can get, are Gordon and Parreno allowing us to better understand him or are they suggesting that no matter how close we get to him, we can never fully know what drives him, never know his “secret process.”  What makes him play the way he plays, what makes him do the things he does?  In the final scene, when Zidane rushes into a fight he’s seemingly uninvolved in and hits an opposing player in the face, we are left confused.  How is this the same expressionless ascetic-like figure from before?  We never learn why he hits the other player, or what drove him to enter the dispute in the first place. There was no provocation, no personal attack on him, nothing to justify this sudden burst of anger; instead, like his play, this act seems to be an instantaneous surge of energy and emotion that only he understands.  In the moment after though, when Zidane has been shown the red card and given his marching orders, he calmly and collectedly untucks his shirt and leaves the pitch. 

 

 

Framing Disconnection: Half Nelson (Mike)

There’s little breathing room in Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson.  Daniel Dunne, a drug addicted inner city history teacher, is a character caught in a position he’s unable to break free from (as the title suggests).  The source of this, or what it is specifically, is never entirely clear; does it refer to his inability to change and the sense of stasis his character is perpetually stuck in, his growing disillusionment despite his genuine optimism and passion for teaching, or to how his character seems caught between worlds politically, socially, and economically?  Is it the cause or the result of his addiction?  The film’s visuals help to establish this, primarily framing the figures individually and in close-ups.  It is in this way that Fleck is able to capture his character’s sense of confinement, the feeling that he’s cramped or trapped both internally and within the tight confines of the frame.  Fleck thus establishes boundaries for Dan through the film’s cinematography that only drugs seem able to alleviate.  The strong use of close-ups and individual framing not only serves to establish Dan’s feelings of confinement and restriction, but illustrates the way he (and thus the addict in general) feels cut off, separated from those around him.  It is this feeling, this sense of disconnection that Dan’s character not only seems to struggle most with in the film, but that is ultimately changed through the unlikely bond he forms with one of his students.

           "A Half-Nelson.  One of Its Many Applications", Creative Commons[1]

Unlike other film’s on the subject (such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Blow), Half Nelson’s focus isn’t so much on the exoticism or romanticism of drugs and the addict, the world that surrounds drugs and drug dealing, or the drug experience itself, but instead on how drugs shape Dan’s social interactions and the way he relates (or doesn’t relate) to those around him.  The different drugs he uses throughout the film seem to allow him to momentarily step outside that sense of confinement and suffocation, those isolating boundaries that disconnect him from other people.  Six minutes into the film, Fleck shows us as Dan drops a straw (for snorting cocaine) onto his coffee table, cutting away before we see the drugs or him using.  In the scene that follows, Dan goes to a bar where he meets two women.  They enter the cramped frame with him as they dance.  By keeping the camera close to the characters, focusing on the movement of their bodies, Fleck establishes a certain connection between the three.  He then cuts from the dance floor to the bathroom, as one woman passes cocaine to the other.  They discuss their love for Oprah while Dan, his high presumably subsided, tries to explain how he “fucks things up just to fuck them up.”  Despite the small space of the bathroom and how the three figures are positioned in close proximity to each other, Fleck portrays their conversation almost entirely through close-ups.  The connection between them has been broken.  Unlike before where all three were squeezed into one frame here they are separate, with Dan cutoff from the other two.  Their dialogue reflects this growing sense of disconnection as well.  Similar to his other social interactions in the film (such as with his family, with the other teachers, and with the other girl he meets in the same bar later on) there is a breakdown in communication; the two talk over Dan, they don’t respond to what he’s saying, and they finish his sentences incorrectly.

As the conversation progressively falls apart, Dan leans over and kisses them.  As he does so, the camera follows him, briefly capturing each girl’s face in the frame before settling on Dan again in his original position.  He reaches out here, trying to make a connection, and yet, like his other attempts in the film, it ultimately fails.  His character thus expresses a desire to connect with other people yet the inability to do so sober.  As Dan is speaking the two girls interrupt him, deciding to return to the dance floor.  We don’t see them as they say this; instead, the camera stays focused on Dan as he finishes his cigarette and watches them leave.  For much of the film, the camera will stay on Dan as the action takes place around him, the focus being not so much on what physically happens in the scene, but instead on how he responds to the action and relates to the people he encounters.  We sit and watch as Dan’s figure, alone and smoking what’s left of his cigarette, recognizes the moment as another connection lost.

     Half Nelson Poster, Creative Commons[2]

Drey, a 13-year-old black student in Dan’s class, is the only figure in the film he establishes any sort of connection with; what this connection and what the nature of their relationship are the two themselves have trouble defining.  It is Drey’s character though who seems able to break these boundaries of his character  and in the film’s cinematography.  She is the only figure consistently shot in the frame with Dan and in a wide-angle.  The wide-angle and long shots in the film serve to establish the connection between the two, forcing us to look at them in relation to each other, to think of them as a pair. 

When Dan smokes inside a bathroom stall of the girl’s locker room the camera stays tight on his face (as it does for much of the film), shifting in and out of focus.  The tension, power, and significance of this moment though is not in showing Dan as he gets high (one of the few times we see him in the process) but instead in what follows.  When Drey discovers him inside the stall, crack pipe and lighter still in hand, a certain bond is formed between the two that will act as the driving force behind the film.  The final shot of the scene is a wide-angle (the first wide-angle of the two characters in the film); although the camera has moved back here, Fleck continues to limit his characters’ space, making them appear, similar to the close-ups, trapped inside the frame.  He uses the walls and doorway of the bathroom to frame the two, cutting off two-thirds of the screen.  The bathroom stalls then take up two-thirds of the open doorway, thus cramping their figures into an even smaller area in which they can interact.  The power of the shot, though, lies in what happens in this small space.  Drey’s figure kneels over Dan as he lies on the bathroom floor, his hand holding hers as she presses a wet paper towel to his forehead.  Although the close-up is generally used for the more intimate moments in a film or as a way to convey something emotional to the viewer, Fleck here uses the wide-angle.  It’s after this experience that the camera leaves Dan and shifts to Drey and Drey’s story; their stories intertwining as she becomes the second half of the narrative.  For the remainder of the film, the two characters will be thought of only in relation to each other; even when they aren’t pictured together, or when Fleck crosscuts between them, they still seem present in their absence.  As both characters learn throughout the film, this bond, this connection is complex; it challenges and blurs their roles as student and teacher, child and adult. Drey’s role in the film is never as a tool for Dan to overcome his addiction (that isn’t Fleck’s intention), but instead as a figure that Dan connects with, that pushes him to recognize and understand the direct and indirect effects of his addiction.  Like Dan and Drey, we too are never entirely sure of how to define their relationship, and Fleck doesn’t seem to want us to.  Instead, what’s important to see is how this experience breaks the isolating boundaries of the close-up, forming a bond that brings them together.  Although Dan still appears confined within the screen, trapped in his half nelson, he is no longer alone; Drey has joined him inside the frame. 

 

Photo Credits:

1. Creative Commons, <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Burns_Half-nelson.jpg>

2. Creative Commons, "P373" (Flickr) <flickr.com/photos/ [email protected]/251634787>

 

Currently Watching: Alice (Svankmajer, 1988), Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995), Gonzo (Gibney, 2008), Edvard Munch (Watkins, 1974), Scratch (Pray, 2001), PCU (Bochner, 1994), Vive le Tour (Malle, 1962), Next Friday (Carr, 2000), Frenzy (Hitchcock, 1972), The Secret of the Kells (Moore and Twomey, 2009)

The Painted Screen: Le mystére Picasso, The Mystery of Picasso, The Picasso Mystery (Mike)

“We’d love to know the secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.”– Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Mystére Picasso (1956)

Picasso, seated shirtless in the studio, stares at the easel opposite him (its back turned to us), a rare moment in which the figure of the artist is shown.  Two paintings hang on a wood partition to his left, positioned between the artist and his canvas.  As Picasso stands and approaches the partition, Clouzot cuts to the painter examining his work, his eyes staring intently, matador-like, before cutting to the works themselves.  Even without the filmmaker’s voiceover, his question, his underlying conundrum is stated clearly in these opening three shots.  There is the artist and there is his completed work; what, though, was his process in making them, what was his “secret” method?  In the 75 minutes that follow Clouzot will challenge his viewer to examine this question, to try and understand the artist not through his biography, past work, or what he says about himself, but instead through what he creates before us.

Clouzot cuts to the easel, the blank canvas standing out in the shadows of the studio.  A cloud of smoke is blown from the right into the frame, an introduction to the painter as he approaches the paper.  Picasso doesn’t pause or wait to examine the canvas as he did before with the previous two, but instead begins drawing immediately.  We don’t see him put the pen to paper, though, as Clouzot cuts from the wide angle of the artist and easel to a close-up of the canvas.  Picasso’s hand moves across the paper, sketching a cartoon-like face with a dove behind it.  The filmmaker then cuts to the shadowed face of the artist and back again to the paper.  It is only after he’s finished drawing that Picasso steps back to examine his work.  The artist and canvas are separated here.  It is the hand that connects them; and it is through the hand, as Clouzot states in voiceover, that we can see and experience “what’s going through [his] mind.”  Although this here is made as a statement, it seems as though the filmmaker is inherently asking whether we can ever truly know the inner dynamics that drive the artist’s work.

Clouzot narrates over these opening shots that we can only wonder what Rimbaud was thinking when he wrote “The Drunken Boat,” or Mozart when he composed his symphony “Jupiter.”  What were their secret processes?  Painting, Clouzot says, is different in that it allows us to follow the artist’s hand at work.  By mounting the camera on a frame behind a semi-translucent piece of canvas, Clouzot is able to make the figure of Picasso (and thus his hand) disappear, leaving only the lines, colors (the only instances of color in the film.  All the shots of Picasso and Clouzot in the studio are filmed in black and white), and figures that he paints visible to the audience.  Image is layered over image, constantly changing and transforming.  Characters are drawn, altered, erased, redrawn, erased again, and redrawn again.  Clouzot here raises a question of medium.  As he states in the film, “what is impossible to know for poetry and music is not the case for painting.”  It is difficult to know whether Clouzot is intentionally elliptical here or not.  What is it that separates the painter from the poet or musician?  Couldn’t we just as easily follow the artistic processes of music and poetry as with painting?  It is film, as a medium, that stands apart here then.  It is film, with its unique temporality that makes it possible for us to view the artist at work.  Like Picasso who paints himself painting in the studio throughout the film, Clouzot films himself filming the painter in the studio.  The Mystery of Picasso thus has as much to do with the medium of film as it does with painting; it is a film that exemplifies Clouzot’s skills as a filmmaker as much as it does Picasso’s as a painter.

In Clouzot’s earlier film The Wages of Fear (1953), four men must drive two trucks of nitroglycerine 300 miles from Las Piedras over mountainous roads in South America.  Over the course of the film, Clouzot (often referred to as the French Hitchcock) creates one of the most intense experiences in cinematic history.  There is an undercurrent of suspense and tension in The Mystery of Picasso as well.  The drama here, though, comes from the creation and transformation of the images, their construction and deconstruction, from imagining what will appear next, from watching the scene as it unfolds. The subject matter of many of these is deeply personal for the painter, as Picasso often portrays himself and his friends and inspirations (Matisse, Delacroix, and Miró and his then lover Jacqueline)[1].  Like a film, these works tell stories, they employ a cinematic narrative; they have settings and situations, characters and relationships that grow, change and develop.

By filming Picasso in process, Clouzot forces us to establish a complex relationship with these paintings.  Our emotions are manipulated as the artist blots out large sections he’s meticulously crafted or repetitively tinkers with a face, shape, or detail over and over again.  By watching the artist work, layering figures, colors, and new designs on top of each other and weaving them seamlessly together, the images become inextricable from one another.  As viewers, we’re unable to look at the final product without seeing the series of transformations and changes that went into creating it.  We can hate the image one minute, love it the next, hate it again, and be ultimately left unsure of how to feel.

But what is the value of seeing these works transform and unfold, what is our fascination with the process?  Is there the hope that by watching Picasso work we will somehow unravel what pushes him, what drives him creatively, artistically, or intellectually?  Clouzot creates a “documentary” on Picasso in process in order to reveal to the viewer the inner dynamics that compel his work.  But while it shows us the transformative stages and evolution his paintings undergo, does it ever truly reveal anything about the artist himself?  As Clouzot leads us to believe (and as the film’s title would suggest), the artist is a mystery, something to be to solved or unraveled.  And yet, is the real Picasso revealed here through his work, or is he simply putting on a show for the viewer.  Even by the end of the film, we are still left wondering, who is Picasso?  Is he a performer, a showman?  Is he the creative genius we expect him to be?  To a certain extent, Clouzot is right; we can follow what the painter is thinking through his hand.  The creation and evolution of these images give us a momentary glimpse into the artist’s mind, and through filming the transformation of the image Clouzot allows us to see what Picasso sees, experience what Picasso experiences.  But by allowing us to follow Picasso’s hand as he works, Clouzot is ultimately showing us that we cannot solve the mystery of the artist, especially in the case of Picasso.  The painter’s secret process is not simply how his works transform on the canvas, but instead what happens internally, the psychologically charged creative forces that drive his hand.  Clouzot’s true focus in the film then is not simply in unraveling the process behind the artist’s work to better understand him, but instead to raise a certain deeper question of media.

What is this final product, what is the medium here?  Does Clouzot transform the screen into a canvas or the canvas into a screen?  Is this painting, is it film?  Is it animation, or maybe a medium in between?  Clouzot doesn’t necessarily create something entirely new; the photographer Hans Namuth had worked on a similar project with Jackson Pollock previously in 1951.  But where as Namuth’s film focuses only on Pollock’s process of working, Clouzot moves further by creating something that challenges us to define it, that pushes us to respond to a work of art in a different way.  The Mystery of Picasso is, in the literal sense, painting filmed.  And yet by turning the dimensions of the screen into the canvas we are no longer able to view the film as we would a typical narrative or documentary; our approach and response is inherently different.  We’re driven to look at and consider these works as paintings as well, and yet somehow we can’t.  The temporality of film changes our experience with them; by seeing how they transform and evolve, we’re unable to look at them as if they were hanging on a wall.

Currently Watching: The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953), The Class (Cantet, 2009), Moon (Jones, 2009), Sugar (Boden and Fleck, 2008), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000), Bio-Dome (Bloom, 1996), The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009), Breaking Away (Yates, 1979), Gomorrah (Garrone, 2009), The New World (Malick, 2005), The Pest (Miller, 1997), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009)

 

 

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[1] Archie Rand, painter and professor of Art at Columbia University