Alain à la recherche #7: SHORTS

by Ryland Walker Knight

—The halls have eyes
[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Though I arrived halfway into Le chant de styrène, it still tickled me into the goofiest posture possible all teeth, every limb under another, as if pushing into the chair hard enough would help release the giddy brio building up in my bones. Put otherwise, Queneau's puns (oh to be actually fluent!) and Alain's balletic geometry pretzel'd me up into a great mood. Then Toute la mémoire du monde grumbled onscreen out of focus and an odd English voice started escorting me around the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, trying its damnedest to not "do a Borges," to just present a topographical index, we can suppose. However, Alain's image-making inflects this portrait—everything's a tracking shot—with both pride and unnerved anxiety, a weird fear of the calculation of this repository. Each structure our Alain encounters seems to strike him as a possible tomb, and every system a trap, however useful it may be, for any system can ossify. Next: Guernica's a dirge. Solemn though fiery and sometimes mannered, its idea of barbarism will be further fleshed with "real" documentary work in the opening salvo (anti-salve) of Hiroshima, mon amour (still some of the hardest images for me to watch; the sexy sand-shower just prior must play a role, of course, in that reaction). Then the treasure of the night, the very rare (and neglected) Statues Also Die, whose title sounds so much more elegant in French, Les statues meurent aussi, with that "aussi" dangling, like a tsk. Talk about angry: as Rosenbaum already lined out, the final reel of this bad boy is one of the most direct anti-imperialist/anti-racist screeds in cinema—and in 1953! It's a text by Chris Marker, which is another level of cool (and smarts), which is another reason to root with it, which is (of course) really easy. It's also a fine object lesson outside of the polemic, though the political is unavoidable (I must remind myself), as we see just how loaded every thing is in these so-called aboriginal cultures; how histories are most often mythologies; how tradition cannot be ignored; how, ultimately, revolution is a dream and hardly a reality; that is, how little we fight these worlds we're locked into every day. Another way at this idea is right up front in Night and Fog: that, yes, weeds grow but scars and train tracks remain reminders, and nothing's been razed. I quickly realized I was too tired to let that movie work me over (as it always does), and I tipped out in the dark to a misty rain outside.

Alain à la recherche #5: Mon oncle d'Amérique

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Parts of this film get me so giddy, marveling not just at the beautiful photography but also at the beautiful Nicole Garcia (above, on knee) and the silly-smart braiding, that I just don't believe it. Other parts are terrifically moving (i.e., sad). Most parts are didactic; as if its narrative strategy were a form of pedagogy engineered around constant recapitulation; as if Alain's saying, almost like he does throughout Marienbad, that if we say something specific enough times in enough voices then it's bound to burrow in there and register.

Everybody's got a story, and everybody's got dreams. Everybody's got a fantasy, an uncle from America. Except, of course, these people are decidedly French. In fact, we get a full from-birth history for each of our three leads—Garcia, Gerard Depardieu, Roger Pierre—each told a few times over. The film begins more a mosaic than Je t'aime, je t'aime rather literally as our eyes follow a spotlight searching a collage of stills we will know in motion later in the film. Then it's choral, too, our ears parsing these three—no, four—voices recounting their births and their birthplaces and their trajectories all at once all on top of one another—except for some omniscient voice telling us that a being's only purpose is being and/or something else tautological. Shortly, we're given faces to go with the voices, and names, and portraits of their childhood narrated by them. Then the net is cast over this trio: Resnais introduces Henri Laborit (a real-life physician, writer and philosopher) with the same kind of narration, but with "current" footage of Laborit walking around some lab, smiling and scowling. Laborit is a kind of guide, a sage, for the film. Not that the film exactly proves Laborit's theories—a version of evolutionary psychology intent on Explaining It All—but these asides help provide, say, an anatomy for the film to hang stories off of, like limbs.

The film is split, or splintered, or it splits a few times, or it's segmented, though it also finds conjunctions and convergences. In one (dim) light, it's simply didactic and over determined. Resnais never reduces, though, and the repetitions are never played the same—not from the same angle, often it's not even the same exact action but another performance altogether. Even more than the memory game of Marienbad, Mon oncle aims at redetermining events: how new information colors an old event, or a current one, and can influence understanding of putatively unrelated events. Put otherwise, the film is quite clearly about intentionality, and how we think about things, and where we come from when we come to things-people-places. No doubt, there's plenty of Ricoeur's traces in this project, even if it's based in Laborit's mouse traps. It's Resnais' cinematic gusto that frees the film from its unilateral "expertise" echoes and lets time move both—nigh, all—ways at once. Though Alain maps the mice onto the men and one woman we follow, it's not proof; it's a joke. It's a gas that it's a possibility, even a plausibility, in this world. —Jokes can scold!

Though agency seems crushed, to an extent, in this little network of forces, we never feel like life's not open. Rather, life's prone to fantasies, which can, plausibly and paradoxically, be a form of paralysis, an inhibition that blinds us to how we move ourselves (and must) and give each present purpose its purpose. Or, that becomes possible only if (we hope "when") we find a way to gather ourselves, to hold our histories at hand as some ciceroni, and not simply as stained glass. We remember: we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Alain à la recherche #4: Je t'aime, je t'aime

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Perhaps Alain was trying to one-up that left-bank homunculus, Sartre, with this one, a time travel loop where the only exit is that prior end game choice that landed our monad-man with the guinea pig gig in the first place. It's a frisbee film, a breeze built on repetition, one gesture lazing into another laser. It's a gimmick, for sure, all this jumbling, but the conceit is rather perfect; and the opening fifteen minutes, before Claude Rich's Claude Ridder (Claude Raubois in the war) falls asleep in that pod, caper a quick route through jokes of hurt to get us into the "science" part of this "science fiction." Rich-Ridder tried suicide and failed, so a cloaked commune of scientists pick him for their first human sent through their pod of time, a blob of wiring and indeterminate shape. The plan is for our man in the middle to return one year into his past for exactly one minute. The plan fails, like the suicide, but it succeeds as well as suicide, trapping Rich-Ridder in a mosaic of moments. Some moments repeat. His woman, Catrine (the doomed beauty Olga Georges-Picot you see above), never looks happy. The pair play then dig at each other; he's mostly a jerk. We get more information as varied threads reappear and expose more history. The film shifts from frisbee to football, a calfskin of guilt, though it's never quite oppressive—just sad. Its hopping turns to treading, folds the simultaneous around a rubber-band ball of ignobility. And there's Rich-Ridder, placid, both vessel and detective. And that's us, peering on, piecing together a jigsaw we can't get a handle on: all we see are seams.

Telluride #3: The image is alive. Waltz With Bashir.

by Ryland Walker Knight

[Waltz With Bashir had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It was the first official screening we in the symposium attended. As can be expected around these parts, lots of life happened in the week and a half between that viewing and this posting. Sony Pictures Classics has bought the film and will distribute it beginning in December after its festival run concludes. It's certain to be brought up again as more people see it; the opportunities will present themselves soon enough. Until then...]

Amber flares shower past high rise hotels on the beach of Beirut and youthful Ari Folman floats naked off the shore, ignorant and immobile. Two fellow Israeli soldiers wade to the foreground and Folman stands up to follow them ashore in silhouette where they dress in fatigues, their pliant limbs cut against the golden night skyline. In the streets at dawn, Folman turns a corner into a wave of women clad in black burkas wailing; as the cavalcade of cries pass the stationary soldiers, Folman stands fork, impassive. Survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, these wives and sisters flood the frame aimless and wretched, crowding Folman. Twenty-four years later, the grown man Folman cannot remember where he was during the massacre despite being stationed somewhat close to the bloodshed. In fact, he hasn't thought of it in ages. But after hearing his friend describe a dream about rabid dogs, and its links to the Lebanese Civil War where he shot canines not people, Folman has this dream about water and flares and the hurt of it all without specifics. To counter as much as to document this plaintive and guilty resonance, he makes a film. Encouraged that investigation produces understanding, even if such a project forges intuitive links that proffer more questions in lieu of definite answers, Folman starts to draw out his past. Waltz With Bashir is that labor of and for understanding.

The film opens in that dream about dogs: racing through a city, plowing through cafes and intersections, their snarls wet and fierce, seeking the dreamer, Boaz Rein Buskila, ragged. Not rotoscoped like Linklater and not as ugly as an Aqua Teen bit, the flash animation juts and floats in delicious washes of color. The dogs don't quite run but glide, the rain doesn't quite fall but simply slant, tables jerk upend and bodies skid aside; nothing is "real." Indeed, the real is the question. Bashir is organized around series of interviews that yield memories recounted as dreams, including one that explicitly goes into the dream world. Carmi Cna'an opens his war story, perhaps the most gorgeous sequence in the film where darkness pervades the frame, on a boat, where nerves get the better of him and, after vomiting, he lays down to escape: "When I'm scared I fall asleep and hallucinate." He dreams a giant, naked, blue woman boards the now-teal boat to save him; she brings him into the water where he lays between her legs looking back at the yacht, which promptly explodes a blood red. Another interviewee, Roni Dayag, tells a story about water: after an ambush, he flees to the coast to wait for dark; under nightfall he slips into the ocean and swims countless miles south in retreat, occasionally dipping under the surface to avoid helicopters' spotlights and armory, only to find the unit he thought abandoned him (and that he thought he abandoned). Folman's best friend, Ori Sivan, tells us what we know later: water is associated with guilt and fear, a fake haven from the blood on shore, that Ari's recurring dream (however material and palpable) is a projection. Thus, this Waltz is a reckoning, a search to account for Ari's intentionality, how his mind (which ours becomes in the film) has failed to be and is directed anew towards this terrible lacuna.

Ari understands he will never erase his (or Israel's) complicity, but if he can flesh out the picture, he can provide a voice to their limitedness that asks forgiveness without assuming endline benediction. The spike of the final five minutes reasserts that: after an animated zoom into Ari's face, standing at the edge of the Sabra and Shatila camps, watching another wave of wailers, the image breaks form into video coverage from 1982. Not quite a Kiarostami coda, but certainly effective, we see these women cry along with the image; the digital bleeds, combing the bodies massed in corners or piled in the thoroughfare, the trace immediately ephemeral, the world as a glitch. It's unmistakable -- this happened and you can't hide from it. But the animation isn't papering over guilt that the video unveils. It's a direct mediation, an admission that we mediate our memories, that memory may be matter but its image is metabolized over time.

Ari shows Roni a picture of himself from 1982: "Do you recognize me there?" Roni, always blank, offers, "No." Ari says, "Me neither." Roni begins his story and we see a tank troop set a camera on the canon, pointed back at the quartet; right before the picture clicks, the camera falls off that arm of destruction out of frame. The camera fails, lies even. This is not representation. Film is creation, making material. Unfortunately, this brilliant, subtle moment is trumped by a much larger explication of the same in a protracted monologue by a psychiatrist Ari visits who tells a story about another veteran who dealt with being in the war by pretending he was filming, pretending he was behind a camera; until the camera broke and his mind with it. However, Bashir does not suffer too heavily under this or other instances of literal interpretation. Its queries about documents and film documentary, about how we seek absolution and catharsis, about the ethics of the image -- all stimulate imagination and investigation rather than shut it down simple and closed. The film exists in tension with all this evidence, pushing its material, its memories (at one point across the globe and back in time from the Netherlands of now to that West Bank of then) past general dread into singular horror. If anything, at bottom this Waltz against death reminds that the image (memory, understanding, light) is alive and deserves (demands) our accountability at all events.