Screening Modernism Created wiih tnft nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdfeom/tsrofeEEional Cinema and Modernity A Series Editedby Tom Gunning Created with Ml nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdfeom/tsrofeEEional Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 ANDRÄS BÄLINT KOVACS The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Created wiih Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online 3t nitropdf.com/t3rofeEEional Andras Balint Kovacs is professor of film studies at Eotvos University in Budapest and the director of the Hungarian Institute in Paris. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 12 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45163-3 (cloth] ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45165-7 (paper] ISBN-10: 0-226-45163-1 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-45165-8 (paper] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kovacs, Andras Balint Screening modernism : European art cinema, 1950-1980 / Andras Balint Kovacs p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45163-3 (cloth : alk. paper] ISBN-10: 0-226-45163-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures-Europe—History. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics)—Europe I. Title PN1993.5.E8K68 2007 791.43094'09045-dc22 2007013782 @ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Created wiih Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/t5rofeEEional to my father Created wiih Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdfeom/tsrofeEEional Created with tnft nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdfeom/tsrofeEEional Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part One: What Is the Modern? 1 theorizing modernism 7 Modern 8 Modernism 11 Avant-Garde 14 Cinema and Modernism: The First Encounter 16 The Institution of the Art Film 20 I Modernist Art Cinema and the Avant-Garde 27 2 theories of the c l as s ic al/mo d e r n distinction in the cinema 33 Style Analysts 34 Evolutionists 38 Modern Cinema and Deleuze 40 Modernism as an Unfinished Project 44 Part Two: The Forms of Modernism 3 modern art cinema: style or movement? 51 4 narration in modern cinema 56 Classical versus Modernist Art Films 61 The Alienation of the Abstract Individual 65 Created with Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdfeom/tsrofeEEional CONTENTS Who Is "the Individual" in Modern Cinema ? 67 The Role of Chance 70 Open-Ended Narrative 77 Narrative Trajectory Patterns: Linear, Circular, Spiral 78 5 genre in modern cinema 82 Melodrama and Modernism 84 Excursus: Sartre and the Philosophy of Nothingness 90 A Modern Melodrama: Antonioni's Eclipse (1962) 96 Other Genres and Recurrent Plot Elements 99 Investigation 99 Wandering/Travel 102 The Mental Journey 103 Closed-SituationDrama 111 Satire/Genre Parody 114 The Film Essay 116 6 patterns of modern forms 120 Primary Formation: Continuity and Discontinuity 122 Radical Continuity 128 Imaginary Time in Last Year at Marienbad 130 Radical Discontinuity 131 The Fragmented Form according to Godard 132 Serial Form 136 7 styles modernism 140 Minimalist Styles 140 The Bresson Style 141 Abstract Subjectivity and the "Model" 146 Bresson and His Followers 148 Analytical Minimalism: The Antonioni Style 149 Psychic Landscape ? 149 Continuity 153 Antonioni and His Followers 156 Expressive Minimalism 161 8 naturalist styles l68 Post-neorealism 169 Cinema Verite 170 The "New Wave" Style 172 9 ornamental styles 175 10 theatrical styles 192 11 modern cinema trends 203 The Family Tree of MocTern^mema 210 Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdfeom/tsrofeEEional CONTENTS Part Three: Appearance and Propagation of Modernism (1949-1958) 12 critical reflexivity or the birth of the auteur 217 | The Birth of the Auteur 218 Historical Forms of Reflexivity 224 The Emergence of Critical Reflexivity: Bergman's Prison 227 Reflexivity and Abstraction: Modern Cinema and the Nouveau Roman 231 13 the return of the theatrical 238 Abstract Drama 241 u the destabiliz at ion of the fabula 244 Voice-Over Narration 245 The Dissolution of Classical Narrative: Film Noir and Modernism 246 Fabula Alternatives: Hitchcock 248 Alternative Subjective Narration: Rashomon 251 15 an alternative to the classical form: neorealism and modernism 253 The End of Neorealism 255 Modernism in Story of a Love Affair: Neorealism Meets Film Noir 256 Rossellini: The "Neorealist Miracle" 260 Part Four: The Short Story of Modern Cinema (1959-1975) 16 the romantic period, 1959-1961 275 Neorealism: The Reference 276 Eastern Europe: From Socialist Realism toward Neorealism 282 I Heroism versus Modernism 284 Jerzy Kawalerowicz: The First Modern Polish Auteur 286 The Year 1959 290 Forms of Romantic Modernism 293 Genre and Narration in the Early Years 295 Sound and Image 298 Background and Foreground 300 From Hiroshima to Marienbad: Modernism and the Cinema of the Elite 303 The Production System of^e^^Newfeinema" 306 Ml nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEiunal CONTENTS 17 established modernism, 1962-1966 310 Western Europe around 1962 310 The Key Film of 1962: Fellini's 81/2 316 Central Europe 322 Czechoslovak Grotesque Realism 324 The "Central European Experience" 326 Jancso and the Ornamental Style 329 Summary 336 18 the year 1966 338 The Loneliness of the Auteur 341 19 political modernism, 1967-1975 349 The Year 1968 350 Conceptual Modernism: The Auteur's New World 355 Reconstructing Reality 357 Counter-Cinema: Narration as a Direct Auteurial Discourse 363 The Film as a Means of Direct Political Action 368 Parabolic Discourse 371 Teorema 373 The Auteur's Private Mythology 376 The Self-Critique of Political Modernism: Sweet Movie 380 Summary 382 20 "the death of the auteur" 383 The Last of Modernism: Mirror 387 Mirror and Serial Structure 389 The Disappearance of Nothingness 394 Appendix: A Chronology of Modern Cinema 401 Selected Bibliography 409 Index of Names and Movie Titles 415 Created wiih Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Acknowledgments The idea of a book like this seems to have been with me since my days as a young researcher. When I mentioned it to Michel Marie in Paris twenty years ago, all he said was, "Hm, tres ambitieux!" Twelve years passed before I ever dared to return to this idea. In 1996, at the kind invitation of Michal Friedman I presented a paper at the Blurred Boundaries conference in Tel Aviv where the first draft of my ideas about cinematic modernism was outlined. Daniel Dayan's and especially Dana Polan's encouraging comments on that piece convinced me that I was mostly likely on the right track to develop some aspects of this project. That is when I started to seriously consider beginning intensive and systematic research. I wrote preliminary drafts of chapters in 1998, but still I wasn't very sure where I was going with the project, and, not being a native English speaker, I worried that I would not be able to write this book in English. Two dear friends, Nancy Wood and David Rodowick, read and patiently edited my first drafts, convinced me to carry on, and gave the last push. I could count on their valuable comments in later phases of my work too. I am thankful to several people and institutions that helped me in my research. First, a Fulbright grant afforded me five months of undisturbed research in the United States. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Southern California hosted me and generously provided access to their rich resource materials, and for this I am especially thankful to David Bordwell and Dana Polan. I did my initial research at the Bib-liotheque de l'Arsenale and at the Bibliotheque du Film in Paris where I kept returning at every stage of the work during the four years I spent in this city. I am grateful to Gyula Gazdagwho helped me in getting access to the film and video collection of UCLA . Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchivum, #11 nitroPDFprofessional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and especially Kata Szlauko, helped my research considerably in Budapest. The Pro Helvetia Foundation in Zurich and Budapest generously provided rare Swiss films. I am also grateful to two commercial video stores in the United States—Four Star Video Heaven in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vidiots in Santa Monica, California—whose rare and comprehensive video collections of European art films considerably helped me to constantly refresh my memory and deepen my knowledge while actually writing this book. Different chapters were read and thoroughly commented on by many colleagues and friends. I am especially thankful for the comments of Miklós Almási, Béla Bacsó, Peter Balassa, Peter Galicza, Gábor Gelencsér, Torben Grodal, Peter Gyorgy, Jeno Király, Sándor Radnóti, József Tamás Remé-nyi, András Rényi, Johannes Riis, Bill Rothman, Ben Singer, Melinda Sza-lóky, Tom Gunning, Balázs Varga, Ginette Vincendeau and Anna Wessely. I am thankful to Dora Borcsok for her help in the filmography research, to Deborah Lyons for her help with some of my trasnslations from Italian to English, and in particular to Maia Rigas, copy editor at the University of Chicago Press, for her exceptionally careful work in correcting some awkward English sentences and inconsistencies. I have to express my gratitude to three individuals in particular. Yvette Biró and David Bordwell were always ready to discuss any problem whatsoever that I encountered while writing this book; they were constantly ready to listen to my ideas over and over again, comment on them, and share theirs with me with no reserve. Their experience, enthusiasm, and engagement with modern cinema and their expertise in the field served as the most important examples to me. Without their own works, without the long conversations I have had with them throughout theyears, and without their supportive friendship, my book would not be the same. However, any shortcomings are my responsibility alone. Last but not least, without the commitment and lasting support of my friend Tom Gunning, series editor for the University of Chicago Press, this book would have never seen the light of day. My wife Erika and daughter Anna-Sarah let themselves be dragged around half the planet during the past eight years, just because I wanted to do this book. Without their patience I could not have finished it. Created with downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Introduction In the 1960s cinema found itself in a distinguished cultural position within Western culture, with filmmakers able to consider themselves the eminent representatives of contemporary Western culture. In the 1960s, modern art cinema had blossomed into the very symbol of a new "zeitgeist" for a new generation that wanted to manifest its opposition to classical bourgeois culture. Educational and cultural reforms in 1968 were hailed by a generation whose members had been raised with the awareness of an existing cinematic tradition. The members of this generation of the 1930s and 1940s were born together with sound cinema, and they regarded silent cinema as their own cultural and artistic tradition rather than as an outdated form of mass entertainment. Even politics became involved with cinema. The demonstrations provoked by the dismissal of Henri Langlois, director of Cinematheque Fran-gaise, became the overture (albeit not the cause) of the student riots in Paris in 1968. And Frangois Truffaut declared, "What we have here is the stupidity of an impossible regime. And also the fact that there are too many self-designed candidates for the elite. But these guys, from De Gaulle to Mitterrand, including Deferre—except the modest Mendes France—do not and will never understand what cinema is all about."1 It never occurred to anyone then or later to judge the quality of the political elite according to its relationship to cinema. It is precisely this awareness of the cultural role of the "film generation" that is reflected in Truffaut's words. The year 1968 1. Demonstrations took place in March and April 1968. Francois Truffaut was one of the leaders of the protest movement. F^pro^nounce^jl these words at the occasion of Langlois's reinstatement on April 22,1968. Cited in liberation, May 4,1998. Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional INTRODUCTION was the culmination of a cultural-historical process that ushered in the era of modern cinema. Many critics and filmmakers saw in modern cinema the apogee of film art, the end result of the development of cinema, and even a kind of paradigmatic, or "most important," genre of modern culture. During the 1970s and 1980s, cinephiles, critics, and filmmakers observed with growing embarrassment the decline of modern cinema, the vanishing of the modernist inspiration, and the reemergence of the classical or "academic" forms in art cinema. What happened? Was it film history that had come to an end, or was it simply a period of film history that was over? Witnessing the weakening of modern art cinema, the decline of movie-going in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the massive closures of movie theaters throughout Western Europe, many people would have responded that film history itself was at its end. But the 1990s made it clear that not only was cinema as an institution still 2 alive even in the face of the onslaught of audio-visual home entertainment, but art cinema as a distinct category within the European film industries became stronger and more institutionalized than in the past. The establishment of the European Film Academy and the Felix Prize, the creation of the European support program Eurimages, the network of Europa Cinemas, and the growth of national film production in France and Germany show that art cinema has continued to thrive in Europe. Moreover, art cinema developed dramatically in the Far East and in Iran during the last two decades of the twentieth century to the point we can say that contemporary art cinema in Asia is probably more inventive and potent than it is in Europe. More than that: contemporary Hollywood cinema also started to use sophisticated narrative solutions developed by European modern art cinema in the 1960s. Art cinema is lively, but modernist art cinema, as we have known it from the sixties, is gone. Modernism is film history now—and not because its inception dates back decades but primarily because today's art films are considerably different from those of the 1960s. And because this considerable and systematic difference has existed for the past twenty years or so, the time is ripe for a historical investigation of the corpus of modern European art film and its aesthetic and thematic characteristics. This book proposes a historical taxonomy of various trends within late modern European cinema covering the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. I will not offer a universal film history of the sixties and seventies since I do not believe that modern cinema can be identified with the whole of film production of this period. Modernism in the cinema concerns a Created with Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional INTRODUCTION relatively small portion of art-film production. I will argue that late modernism in the cinema was a universal aesthetic phenomenon but prevailed only in some films and only during a limited period of time. The category of modern cinema is often related to the category of the au-teur (French for "author"), and since the emergence of modern cinema it is often referred to as a "cinema of auteurship." In my analysis I also will privilege the emergence of the notion of auteurship in modern cinema. However, an auteur-centered modern cinema does not mean that these films are so different that they cannot be compared with each other, as if each director's work would represent a totally autonomous aesthetic vision. Modern art cinema, as opposed to genres and conventions, created its own "genres" and conventions. Those developed very quickly and determined the thoughts and tastes of modern auteurs. I will not consider modern art cinema as a homogeneous style any more than as a set of incommensurable and totally unique works of art. I will attempt to map the variations of modernist forms as characterizing different geographical regions, cultures, countries, or individual auteurs, and at the same time provide an overview of the historical evolution of the different trends and currents. Although the remarkable specificity of late modernism was the first global art movement in the cinema, it started out in Europe. That is where it remained the most influential, and the fundamental options of modern cinema were all developed there. Hence the main focus of this book will be on European cinema, even though I will refer from time to time to important modern films made elsewhere. This book could have been a little shorter as well as much longer. Each of the more than two hundred films that comprise the core of the corpus of modern European art cinema could have deserved individual attention. This broadens even more when one takes into account the second- or third-rate modern art films—among which are some remarkable works. My discussion of these secondary and tertiary works could stretch the text infinitely. I tried to keep the number of examples and analyses at a level where the reader will not be overwhelmed but substantial enough to illustrate the general ideas they are meant to illustrate. I have tried to balance between pure theoretical discussion and an indigestible load of individual descriptions. In order to keep this volume between reasonable limits so that it will be affordable for students I made the decision to cut the detailed filmography of the nearly two-hundred-fifty films representing the core of my sample. An appendix contains a chronological table of these films, however, which makes it easy to locate the films temporally and geographically. Exhaustive filmographies can be found for each film on the Worldwide Web at Internet Movie Database „ .. .11 ^ Created writh (http://www. imdb.com). Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Created with tnft nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional PART ONE What Is the Modern? Created with {J) professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional = 1 : Theorizing Modernism The heterogeneity of artworks and the inaccuracy of the concept make any attempt at a theory of aesthetic modernism almost hopeless. PETER BURGER My primary goal in this book is to develop a notion of modern cinema in terms of stylistic history This involves understanding modern cinema as a historically determined entity located in art-historical time and defined by a finite number of aesthetic/stylistic traits. However, I do not intend this to be a purely formalist work. I want to understand modern cinema and its various forms in its historical and philosophical contexts, which in my view are primarily responsible for the specific aesthetic forms modernism developed. Here and in chapter 21 will present several interconnected arguments. First, modern cinema was a historical phenomenon inspired by the art-historical context of the two avant-garde periods, the 1920s and the 1960s. Second, modern cinema was the result of art cinema's adaptation to these contexts rather than the result of the general development of film history or the "language" of cinema. Third, as a consequence of this process of adaptation, art cinema became an institutionalized cinematic practice different from commercial entertainment cinema as well as from the cinematic avant-garde. And last, another result of this process is that modern cinema took different shapes according to the various historical situations and cultural backgrounds of modernist filmmakers. There are three terms that need distinction and clarification at the outset: modern, modernist, and avant-garde.1 The use of these terms is so widespread 1. There is a huge literature on the history and the meaning of these terms. I list here those that were most helpful for me in this book. Hans Robert Jauss, "La 'modernite' Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE and varied and they are applied to so many different artistic, literary, philosophical and other more or less well-defined intellectual phenomena that we must distinguish their meanings in film history We will see that the different uses and the historical controversies about these terms reemerge quite unchanged in film history The clarification of these terms will lead us to various possible conceptions of cinematic modernism. Modern The term "modern" has its roots in religious history, appearing for the first time around the fifth century c.e., and it was used to distinguish the Christian era from antiquity It is only from the seventeenth century onwards that this term was used to designate certain novel tendencies in art and literature. As Hans Robert Jauss, following W. Freund, points out, 8 "modern" was originally used in two senses. More precisely, its meaning had two important and distinct nuances. [Mjodernus comes from modo, which, at that time [in the fifth century] did not mean only "just," "momentarily," "precisely," but perhaps already "now," "at the moment" also—which meaning became perpetuated in the Latin languages. Modernus not only means "new" but it also means "actual.2 Modern, as meaning not only "new" but also "actual," has the power not only to signify something as yet unseen but also to supplant and supersede something. "Modern" in the sense of "new" would still allow the survival of and coexistence with the "old" along the lines of the cohabitation of different generations. But "modern" in the sense of the "actual" implies that the "old" is eliminated, that it does not exist anymore, or that it has become invalid. What is referred to as "modern" is always opposed to a past, which until the nineteenth century was commonly used to refer to antiquity. The two opposing concepts of "antique" and "modern" were first assigned clear value judgments in the argument of "les anciens" and "les modernes" dans la tradition litteraire," in Jauss, Pour un esthetique de la reception (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 179; Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," Art andLiterature 4 (Spring 1965): 193-201; "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Partisan Review 7 (July-August 1940): 296-310; "Where Is the Avant-Garde?" in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4: 259-265; Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avant-garde (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1974); and Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 19S9). , Created with 2. Jauss, "La 'modernite' dans la tradition litteraire," 179 Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online Et nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism in seventeenth-century French literature.3 Both of these views held that the ideal of beauty was the same for antique and contemporary poets. While the "anciens" maintained that antiquity has most perfectly represented this ideal, the "moderns" believed that the development of human rationality must of necessity result in the continual improvement of the representation of the classical ideal: [T]he moderns did not think that antiquity's ideal of beauty could have been different from their own. What they prided themselves on was only their ability to be more faithful to an ideal that the anciens had pursued less successfully.4 From the beginning of the opposition of antique/modern as a distinction of values we find the ideas of intellectual, technical, or cultural evolution. The early "modern" poets were convinced that artistic evolution is like technical progress whereby the ideal of aesthetic perfection is approached step by step. This resulted in a rigid opposition between the concepts of antique and modern as aesthetic values. The austerity of this opposition was softened by the late-eighteenth-century German aesthetic thinkers who inserted the category of the "classical" between the two. With the aid of the concept of the "classical," the antique ideal of beauty and the antique form of this ideal became clearly distinguished. On the one hand, "antique" as opposed to "modern" art was raised to the highest level of aesthetic perfection by Johann Winckelmann, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Goethe, and the Schle-gel brothers, who considered the antique to be eternally valid as the model of true aesthetic value. On the other hand, "modern" was not simply the opposite of perfection. Modern art was not better or worse but of a different aesthetic structure, which at the same time approached the aesthetic perfection of antiquity in its own ways. "Let each one of us be Greek in his own way," said Goethe. For German aesthetic thinkers, aesthetic perfection was fully represented by antique Greek art, but they also believed that modern auteurs could reproduce it, even if in a different manner. While for les anciens "antique" was the only artistic model appropriate to express the ideal of beauty, to the Germans, Greek or antique was only an aesthetic ideal, and the art of the period was only one example of aesthetic perfection. Or as Jauss put it, antique art was a "comparative parallel."5 For the Germans, and 3. For a historical treatise of the coupling of antique and modern as an aesthetic dichotomy, see Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity. 4. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 32. 5. Cf. H. R. Jauss, "Schlegels un Sd^illers ^jjrjilik auf die 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,'" inLiteraturgeschichteals Provocation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE a hundredyears later, "modern" meant simply a different, and equally valid, way of representing the same classical ideal. The supremacy of antique art in the realm of aesthetic values was overthrown by romanticism. Those artists rejected not only the classical form but also the classical ideal of beauty for the sake of an aesthetic ideal dictated by contemporary taste. From the late nineteenth century on, it is the "modern" that embodies the aesthetic ideal, while "classical" gradually came to mean "outmoded," "conservative," and "invalid." The cult of the "modern" in art lasted at least until the early 1970s, at which point the term and the idea of the "postmodern" surfaced and abolished the illusion that art constantly passes through aesthetic revolutions. With the advent of the postmodern, modern ceased to signify new artistic phenomena emerging after the late nineteenth century and belonging to the endless era of artistic and social revolutions. Henceforth, "modern" signified phenomena repre-10 senting the era of modernity, and its strict opposition with the "classical" tended to diminish. Thus, we can speak about "classical modernity," referring to the everlasting aesthetic values of one-time subversively new works of art.6 In fact, the dichotomy of classical and modern contains three different dichotomies.7 One is the difference between the old and the new (according to their original historical meaning); second, it refers to the opposition between valid and invalid (whichever belongs to one and to the other value, like in the quarrel of "les Anciens et les Modernes" and within romanticism); finally, the dichotomy can be used to designate two different aesthetic models or ideals. For example, in Schiller's view, there is an organic, "natural" model, which is the antique, and an actual, intellectual, or "sentimental" model, which is the modern. Baudelaire says that the work of art has to answer to two different aesthetic ideals: it has to be both antique and modern at the same time, "modernity becomes antiquity": "Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of the art. The other half is the 6. Cf. Jürgen Habermas: "[M]odernity itself gives birth to its own classicism—we can now obviously speak of classical modern." "An Unfinished Project: Modernity," in A posz-tmodern SXapot (Budapest: Szäzadveg-Gond, 1993), 155. Here "classical" is not an opposite of "modern" but a value judgment meaning "something that endures," while "modern" simply means a value-free description of something that is new. 7. According to Calinescu, the notion of "modern" is subsumed by the category that Wellek and Warren called "period terms." In his view all period terms have "three fundamental aspects of meaning: they imply a value judgment, they refer to history, and they describe a type." My analysis basically ^'y11 ^jfj1 Calinescu's categorization. Cf. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 87. ft nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online Et nitropdf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism eternal, the immovable." For Baudelaire, the artist should express eternal values and ideals through the actual and transitory form of the world.8 Modernism The diffusion of the positive idea of the modern in the nineteenth century gave way to the emergence of other variations of this notion, such as "modernity," "modernism," or "modernist." All these terms have been widely used in art history and aesthetics ever since. Appearing as a term in religious history and literary criticism during the late nineteenth century9 the notion of "modernism" became widely employed in the history of literature and art following the 1940s. In art history, it was the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg who first used this term not only for a style or a specific movement but also for a whole period in art history. He included in this term all artistically valid movements and styles starting with the French 11 painter Manet. He calls modernism "almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture."10 For Greenberg, modernism is an artistic movement capable of authentically expressing the experience of the contemporary world. While he holds that the most important values of modernism are authenticity and actuality rather than being simply new and different, he sees it as an essentially historical phenomenon embedded in the aesthetic traditions of the history of art. [A]rt gets carried on under Modernism in the same way as before. And I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation. Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.... Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is, among many other things, continuity. Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as Modernist art would be impossible.11 8. Baudelaire, "La Modernitě," in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1980), 797-798- 9. The first appearance of the term "modernism" dates to 1737 by Jonathan Swift [Oxford English Dictionary); in French, 1879 {Petit Robert). As a term, it originally designated a Latin American literary movement and a Roman Catholic theological trend of the late nineteenth century. 10. Greenberg, "Modernist Pain^ing^' 11. Ibid. Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE Greenberg also insists on the notion that modernism is not an everlasting aesthetic norm. My own experience of art has forced me to accept most of the standards of taste from which abstract art has derived, but I do not maintain that they are the only valid standards through eternity. I find them simply the most valid ones at this given moment. I have no doubt that they will be replaced in the future by other standards, which will be perhaps more inclusive than any possible now.. .. The imperative comes from history, from the age in conjunction with a particular moment reached in a particular tradition of art.12 Greenberg emphasizes the historicity rather than the normative character of modern art. He does not consider modernism as superior in any way to previous periods of art history. He sees modernism as part of an organic development of the history of art, as something that fits in smoothly with earlier artistic traditions. This may be why he does not pay much attention to modernist movements that in fact wanted to break with the past radically and claim superiority over artistic traditions. Nor does he raise the question of the extent to which the traditional notion of art has changed during the hundred years of modernism. He identifies modernism globally with one general trait: aesthetic self-reflection. Modernism, says Greenberg, is nothing but the aesthetic self-criticism of art. He is quite right when he sees in modernism the prominence of the aesthetic dimension, and at its origin, a radical separation from all other dimensions of life. Modernist art in the nineteenth century consisted of an exodus of the artist from the social and political arena, which served as an important inspiration for the abstract character of modernism. "[Modern art is not] an about-face towards a new society, but an emigration to a Bohemia which was to be art's sanctuary from capitalism."13 But while Greenberg insists on the purely aesthetic nature of modern art, he disregards modernism's later developments that culminated in politically committed movements, which ultimately turned artistic self-criticism not only against traditional aesthetic reflection but against modern aesthetic isolation as well. Movements conventionally considered avant-garde, like Soviet futurism and constructivism, Italian futurism, parts of German expressionism, and French surrealism, don't easily fit within Greenberg's notion of modernism. Yet Greenberg does not have a notion of the avant-garde distinct from modernism. For him, the avant-garde is not the elite of modernism but instead 12. Greenberg, "Towards a r^gwer^-a^c^^" 296-310. 13. Ibid. Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism the elite of the contemporary art world in general: that is, simply the name he gives modernism.14 The two aspects of Greenberg's view of modernism mentioned above are probably not independent of each other. He conceives of modernism as a period of art history, which drives him to perceive it as a homogeneous phenomenon. He even goes so far as to speak of a "period style" of modernism as a whole.15 Greenberg conceives of modernism as a transitory, historical phenomenon valued within the continuity of the traditions of the history of art. At the same time, he fails to give a comprehensive account of modern art due to his insistence on the conceptual homogeneity of modernism. This we will have to take into consideration when we define cinematic modernism. It is important to ask whether there exists a consistent concept of modernism at all when one includes politically committed movements and claims to break with the past, like in the case of futurism and Dadaism. Modernism creates new values through its dispute with the classical. Modernism does not value 13 the new simply for being new; rather, it originated in a critical-reflexive relationship with tradition. Thus modernism simultaneously affirms and negates continuity with tradition. Although in Greenberg's conception this duality is clear, since he conceives of the reflexive character of modernism as a stylistic form, he does consider it a paradox. Thus he does not differentiate between modernism and avant-garde. Yet, it is in this distinction that the paradoxical aspect of modernism comes to the surface. In fact, for those who pay enough attention to that difference, modernism as a homogeneous concept is particularly problematic.16 Suffice is to say that if we agree with Greenberg's characterization of modernism—as a period within art history of aesthetic self-criticism of the arts—we will have to be prepared to go fur- 14. Greenberg uses the term "avant-garde" in his essays as a simple synonym for modern art. Cf. Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: Free Press, 1957), 98-107. See also Greenberg, "Where Is the Avant-Garde?" in Collected Essays and Criticism, 4:259-265. 15. Clement Greenberg, "Our Period Style," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 4:323-326. 16. For example, that is why Peter Burger considers that a general theory of aesthetic modernism is "hopeless." The reason is the "aporia of aesthetic modernism": "Within modernity, art is continuously aimed at the conditions which make it impossible to realize.... this art is necessary and impossible at the same time." Peter Burger, La prose de la modemite (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 397. And Antoine Compagnon, in his Cinque paradoxes de la modemite (Paris: Seuil, 1992), consi^erj th^the fundamental paradox of modernism is that it affirms and rejects art at the same time. (hi nitroPDF professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE ther and make room for modern movements whose criticism extends beyond the aesthetic limits. Transgressing the aesthetic means transgressing the limits of art. Since we speak of self-criticism, our concept of modernism should be able to handle extreme cases of this self-criticism, in other words, those that go beyond the limits of art. Therefore, it will be impossible to avoid the distinction between "modernism" and "avant-garde" jeopardizing the homogeneity of our concept of aesthetic modernism. Avant-Garde There are a number of theorists who thought it necessary to make a distinction between "modernism" and "avant-garde." In general, "avant-garde" is used to designate politically conscious, antibourgeois, activist art movements: The most prominent students of the avant-garde tend to agree that its appearance is historically connected with the moment when some socially "alienated" artists felt the need to disrupt and completely overthrow the whole bourgeois system of values, with all its philistine pretensions to universality. So the avant-garde, seen as a spearhead of aesthetic modernism at large, is a recent reality.1' Although Calinescu distinguishes between avant-garde and other modernist movements, his distinction is not substantial. He considers the avant-garde as an extreme case, a "spearhead" of modernism. Other theorists make a more clear-cut distinction based on the avant-garde's aggressive, Utopian, future-oriented momentum. Antoine Compagnon sees in the avant-garde a "historical consciousness of the future and a will of being ahead of time," while modernism is a "passion of the present."18 And according to Raymond Williams, "the avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as a breakthrough to the future: its members were not the bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity that would revive and liberate humanity."19 Some interpretations of the avant-garde go so far as to oppose it to modernism. A good example of this difference can be found in Peter Burger's theory of the avant-garde.20 In Burger's view, the avant-garde is an artistic 17. Calinescu, FiveFaces of Modernity, 119. 18. Compagnon, Cinque paradoxes de la modemite, 48. 19. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 51. 20. Burger, Theorie der Avant-aarde. Created wiih Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism movement of the twentieth century that denies the autonomous character of the work of art and affirms the reintegration of art into the realm of everyday life. As such, avant-garde radically opposes "aesthetic," modern movements, which, by turning away from art's social functions, fit the category of pure aesthetic self-criticism. Modernism institutionalizes art qua art. The avant-garde attacks artistic institutions on the premise that institutionalization confines art to its pure aesthetic dimension and isolates it from its social functions. This, says Burger, signals a radical change in the notion of the work of art since art, for the avant-garde, is not an end in itself. While "aesthetic" modernism affirms art as an independent world, the avant-garde work of art is a social, political, and philosophical manifesto. When the avant-garde claims reintegration into every-day life, it is by no means reintegration into the banality of everyday life, which modernism had turned away from. Avant-garde demands everyday life to be changed, but not through aesthetic values. Artistic and social revolution should go 15 hand in hand, and art should be another intellectual practice promoting social revolution. The elitist thrust of avant-garde art movements stems precisely from the wish of artists to become spiritual leaders—not only in the world of art but also in that everyday life they want to change by artistic means. In this sense, avant-garde movements are essentially political and antiartistic. This short overview will conclude with a review of some of the distinctions and dilemmas raised by the three important terms of modern art. "Modern" in the most general sense means the value of the actual or simply the new as opposed to the old or bygone (whether or not these are endowed with the value of the eternal). But sometimes it is simply used as an adjective meaning good art in some cases or bad art in other cases. Modernism designates an art-historical period characterized by the cult of the modern (actual) and certain general aesthetic features, such as abstraction or self-reflection. This raises the question as to what extent the aesthetic content of this particular period can be considered a set of homogeneous features. Finally, in the sphere of the avant-garde, the cult of the modern is driven by a revolutionary, activist thrust whereby aesthetic programs go beyond artistic creation, typically willing to blur the boundaries between art and social life. But the variety of avant-garde movements and the difference between the two major avant-garde periods, that of the 1920s and the 1960s, raise the question whether political activism or aesthetic radicalism lies closer to the essence of this concept. Defining different aspects of cinematic modernism entails tackling all these questions. Created wiih Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE Cinema and Modernism: The First Encounter Accepting that the common ground in all definitions of artistic modernism is that modern art is an aesthetic reflection on and a critique of its own traditional forms, cinematic modernism is a special case when compared to other forms of modern art. During at least the first sixty years of film history, one could not reasonably speak about a cinematic tradition whatsoever. Cinema as a cultural tradition was first invented by the auteurs of the French new wave. Jean-Luc Godard says, "A contemporary writer knows that authors such as Moliere or Shakespeare existed. We are the first filmmakers who know that a [D. W] Griffith existed. At the time when [Marcel] Carne, [Louis] Delluc, and [Rene] Clair made their first films, there was no critical or historical tradition yet."21 Obviously, the modernism of the 1920s could not be a "reflection on cinema's own artistic traditions." 16 In the early 1920s clear ideas emerged in film criticism about what "real" cinema should be like, and with that an intensive critique of a kind of theatrical "artistic" mass production of European films. The main factor in the emergence of early modernism during the 1920s was not a critical reaction against the narrative standards that were just becoming norms. Some theoreticians and critics of early modern cinema considered emulating even the realist, linear, and continuous narration of the American model. Far from opposing the "Hollywood norm," Delluc, a prominent figure of early French modernism, remarked in 1921 that the real film drama was created by the American cinema, and he called on the French to follow this way of filmmaking.22 Similarly, Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov criticized the "Germano-Russian" theatrical style and praised American narrative films for their dynamism, speed, and their use of close-ups.23 The rise of late modernism in the 1950s witnessed the same relationship of modern European filmmakers to classical American cinema. French new wave critics of the Cahiers du cinema attacked not Hollywood films or narrative in 21. InGuido Aristarco, Filmmuveszet vagy dhmgydr (Budapest: Gondolat, 1970), 355. 22. Louis Delluc, "Le cinema, art populaire" (1921), in Louis Delluc, Le cinema an guo-tidien, Ecrits cinematographiques, 2, pt. 2 (Paris: Cinematheque Franjaise-Cahiers du cinema, 1990), 279-288. 23. Vertov writes in his manifesto, Kino-phot (1919, revised in 1922): "We consider the Russian-German psychological drama, charged with infantile daydreaming and memories, a stupidity. The Kinoks are grateful to the American adventure film for its dynamism, for the rapidity of changes of shots and for the close-ups ... It is better quality but still it has no foundation." In GeorgesSadoul, Dziga Vertov (Paris: Editions Champs Libres, 1971), 59. downlead the free trial online at nitropcHeom/profieEEional Theorizing Modernism Fig. i. A cubist setting: LTnhumaine (Marcel L'Herbier, 1924). general, but—in the words of Truffaut, "a certain tendency of French cinema." Just like some thirty years earlier, the action-centered Holly-wood narrative was an important inspiration for late modern cinema, as op- 17 posed to the "dead classicism" of European bourgeois middle-class drama, which had less to do with classical narrative norms than with nineteenth-century bourgeois theater. Early modern filmmakers critiqued not so much popular narrative cinema as the artistic utilization of cinema, which they themselves were busy modernizing. Because cinema did not have an artistic tradition proper to its medium to modernize, there were different ways to achieve this goal. One way to bring out the artistic potential of cinema was to create cinematic versions of modernist movements in fine arts, theater, and literature, or simply fit cinema in with narrative and visual forms of the national cultural heritage. In this sense, early modernism was cinema's reflection on artistic or cultural traditions outside of the cinema. German expressionism was the first appearance of that kind of modernism in the cinema. Expressionism tried to organically apply extracinematic artistic means to cinema. No filmmaker before expressionism thought of doing this to such an extent, and nobody conceived of cinema as an art related to artistic modernism. The importance of expressionism in this respect is that it institutionalized cinema as a medium capable of modern visual abstraction. Again, the modernity of expressionism is not to be found in how it differs from the canonized norms of narrative cinema. In fact, as far as narrative is concerned, German expressionist films were not at all subversive, and they respected most classical rules. The extremely unrealistic character of some of their narratives was probably unusual in Hollywood terms, but they were not at all anti-Hollywood in their principles. Expressionist films were in fact the first rrScfe^s^ofsome of the mosttjogular Hollywood Ml nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE genres, such as vampire and monster movies and psychothrillers. Even their unusual and extravagant visual devices turned out to be familiar to the Hollywood visual universe. On the one hand, the success of the German filmmakers who emigrated to Hollywood in the 1930s shows that their cinematic culture in fact harmonized well with the Hollywood way of thinking. On the other hand, the stylistic renewal of the American cinema by Orson Welles and film noir in the 1940s had its foundation precisely in expressionist cinematography. Later on, the formal principles of other modernist and avant-garde movements appeared in the cinema as well, such as surrealism (Fernand Leger, Luis Buhuel, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Germain Dulac), futurism (Vertov), Dadaism (Clair, Francis Picabia, Hans Richter) and cubism (Marcel L'Herbier). However, only expressionism and surrealism had a lasting impact on the development of cinema. But other experiments with modernist visual devices and sequential principles were also important to 18 the institutionalization of cinema as a modern form of art. Another aspect of early modernism's reflexive character was its search for the "pure" form of the cinema. While in the trend discussed above the rejection of the narrative function was not always a conscious choice, in the "pure cinema" trend of early modernism it was one of the main principles. Cinema was to be affirmed as an independent art form by isolating its tools from those of other art forms, especially literature and drama. The "absolute film" movement and other early forms of experimental cinema viewed film as a purely visual art in which literary and dramatic forms were not organic parts. This movement concentrated mainly on the technical aspects of the medium as the foundation of its aesthetic specificity. The representation and manipulation of movement, the articulation of time (rhythm), and the unusual association of images were the three main paths the "pure cinema" trend followed. By the end of the 1920s some of its representatives came to articulate this conception as an alternative to the "traditional" representation of reality. Walter Ruttman, Jean Vigo, but above all, Dziga Vertov applied "pure cinema" aesthetics to the construction of an image of reality that would be an alternative to that of classical narrative cinema. There is yet a third way in which modernism informed the cinema of the 1920s. This trend was the least spectacular, but its impact was the most important for the future development of cinematic modernism. This is the movement that Henri Langlois named "French impressionism." Auteurs like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Abel Gance, and Marcel L'Herbier are counted among its representatives. The idea of proving that cinema is a modern art form in its own right is the driving force of this Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism movement, but like German expressionists, French impressionists did not deny the narrative nature of cinema and did not look for cinema's "essence" in abstract visual and sequential principles. As we have seen with Delluc, the main theorist of French impressionism, they rejected above all the theatrical staging of a psychological drama and the visual illustration of a literary plot. Cinema had the potential to represent not only the external form of physical events and human actions but also the inner life and the mental processes of the characters. Impressionism realized a kind of psychological representation in which mental states and processes appeared as a visual reality—thus engendering an important trend of the modernist wave of the sixties. At the same time, they preferred the visual rhythm that followed the poetic logic of the composition to the monotony of a chronological composition. Delluc criticized Gance for not being "an inventor of rhythm and thought" and L'Herbier for being "sometimes more of a writer than a filmmaker" and for "sacrificing from time to time the splendor of 19 the rhythm."24 The prevalence of visual rhythm in the composition also contributed to the construction of a psychic reality in which external and internal sensual stimuli tended to replace physical events. In this respect, the label of "impressionism" is only partially correct, for originally it was used in art history to designate a technique of representing visual surface effects. In French "impressionist" cinema, it was only one aspect of the form and mainly used to underpin the mental character of the narrative motivation. French "impressionist" cinema was also deeply symbolic and psychological inasmuch as the representation of mental images became an alternative dimension of physical reality. It was the most synthetic phenomenon of early modern cinema. It applied extracinematic artistic effects25 like German expressionism, it used abstract rhythmic and visual construction like "pure cinema," unusual associations of images like surrealism, and it remained fundamentally narrative-based. The specific character of French impressionism in the modernist movement was that it invented a different way to represent the psychological, the center of which was not the external acts of the character but his/her inner visions. In the final analysis, early modernism initiated three major techniques that were taken over by late modernism: reference to extracinematic modern art, exploration of cinema's potential for visual and rhythmic abstraction, and 24. Louis Delluc, Ecrits cinematographiques, vol. 1, Le cinema et les Cineastes, 166-167. 25. For example, Leger's decors in L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (1924), or the use of the Alhambra as a setting in Eldorado (1921). Created wiih Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE the establishment of a relationship between mental and physical dimensions of characters. Early modernism sought cinema's potential to become an art in the modern sense, even though the claim to be "modern" is not emphasized in its aesthetics.26 As cinema approached other modern arts, a critique arose concerning the kind of cinema that took inspiration from premodern, classical forms of art. As a consequence of this early modernization process, a special institutional practice of making films came into being: commercial art cinema. Modernism was not the modernization of the cinema in general. In both periods it was the modernization of the artistic utilization of the cinema. Cinematic modernism is art cinema's approach to modern art. The Institution of the Art Film 20 An interesting testimony about which basic forms of the cinema were recognized in the twenties can be found in an anecdote from 1923 recalled by Jean Epstein.27 A journalist had asked Epstein his opinion on the essential form of the cinema: the documentary, the big spectacle, the "stylized film in a cubist or expressionist taste," or the "realist film." Epstein turned down the first three options. But he could not interpret the fourth one. He said he "did not know what realism in art was." What did the journalist have in mind when talking about "realist film"? Another example will help us clarify this. Less than a year later, an article appeared in Le Figaro written by a certain Robert Spa explaining the different existing forms of cinema. He talks about a certain "intermediate category" (le moyen terme): Is not there a way between the most banal films and the search for an art pushed to the extreme, enchanting only mental cubists; a third way, which takes themes taken from real life, based on the similarities with life as we live it, and which is original in its conception and by the careful research for an art by the director?28 It is clear that for the public, and hence for the journalist, there existed a type of film that could not be categorized appropriately. It was a kind of dramatic social fiction (storytelling but in a realist way), which was seri- 26. Sometimes this claim also becomes explicit. Vertov writes in his "Kino-glaz" manifesto: "My life is directed to the creation of a new vision of the world. This is how I translate in a new way the world that is unknown for you." In Sadoul, Dziga Vertov, 82. 27. Jean Epstein, Ecrits surle^nem^ (TJarisjjSeghers, 1974), 1:199-120. 28. Cited inlfl cinematographiefrancaise, March 22,1924,27. n nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism cms and looked like art—but not in the avant-garde sense. Its seriousness stemmed from its social concerns. It was narrative-based, therefore placed in the commercial circuit, but not made for the satisfaction of the widest possible audience. This type of film existed, but was not crystallized enough to be recognized by Epstein as a basic form of the cinema. Nonetheless, it is this intermediate form that will be our focus. Can we speak of institutionalized film practices other than the commercial, the nonfictional, and the avant-garde ? This question is important for us in order to understand the status of modernism within film institutions: is it a style, a movement, or an independent film practice? As we can see from Spa's question addressed to Epstein cited above, apparently avant-garde film was not the only alternative nondocumentary film practice that had emerged in the twenties. There was yet another practice that later became one of the most prominent film types in Europe—the art film—whose "intermediate form" Epstein did not recognize as an art form and that Clair 21 rejected as pseudo-art in the early twenties. "Modern cinema" as a concept appeared in the 1940s. The opposition between "classical" and a "modern" cinema is a genuinely postwar creation.29 Filmmakers before the Second World War had the choice of making a documentary, a narrative film, or an avant-garde film; a "modern film" did not yet exist as a choice. Making a film was considered in itself a modern form of art making. The distinction between art film and entertainment film soon appeared among filmmakers and critics. Early film history abounds with statements by filmmakers, journalists, and theorists claiming that film is art or must become art. Interestingly enough, among them was Louis Feuillade, one of the great figures of the early adventure film who in 1911 called for an "innovation to save French cinematography from the influence of Rocambole in order to drive it towards the highest objectives."30 However these claims were not aimed at the creation of an institutionalized art cinema. When we speak of "art films" as opposed to "commercial entertainment films," we are referring not to aesthetic qualities but to certain genres, styles, narrative procedures, distribution networks, production companies, film festivals, film journals, critics, groups of audiences—in short, an institutionalized film practice. Their respective products are no 29. The notion of "classical cinema" appeared, however, at least as early as 1920. It was used in the sense of a film that by its technical perfection is capable of "producing beauty," and not as an opposition to "modernism." Cf. A. Ozouff, "Le cinema classique," inFilm 176 (December 1920) rf ^ 30. Le cinema a art et aessai (Paris: La documentation Franchise, 1971). (hi nitroPDrprofessional downlead the ■free trial online Et nitropcHeom/profeEEional CHAPTER ONE better or worse than those of others and are not "artistic" or "entertaining" by nature. That is why the label "art film" is often a source of confusion when it is opposed to the commercial industry. Art films are "artistic" by ambition but not necessarily by quality just as commercial entertainment films can very often be commercial failures and not entertaining at all. The origins of the concept of the "art film" as an institutional form of cinema can be traced back to the late 1910s. In 1908 a production company was founded in France named Film d'art, and the same year saw the opening in the rue Charras in Paris of the first movie theater dedicated to the distribution of so-called art films. However, Film d'art did not manage much more than popular adaptations of successful stage dramas and had little to do with what later became, according to the French terminology, a film d'art et essai. Film d'art was artistic only in a very conservative sense, which led to animosity among early avant-garde filmmakers toward Film d'art. For 22 them, Film d'art was nothing but a compromise with traditional narrative and drama, or as Epstein put it, Film d'art was "filmed theater." They saw in it the pretension rather than the reality of being artistic. For them, film as art was the cinematic medium used according to its pure principles. Film had to be acknowledged as a form of art in a modern sense as well before strong institutions could be created around it. That is the reason as well for the relatively late institutionalization of the art-film industry. What is certain, however, was that the ambition to realize this appeared quite early in the cinema with attempts at some sort of institutionalization. In 1915, American poet Vachel Lindsay published a book in which he defined "the art of the moving picture" and distinguished it from the "mere voodooism" of the film industry.31 Not only does he claim that film is an art, but he also recognizes the difference between entertainment and cinema as an art institution. He asserts that art-film movie theaters should be like art galleries, a gathering place for art lovers. For this reason he thinks musical accompaniment unnecessary: "The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no sound but the hum of the conversing audience."32 The idea of the specialization of film exhibition was nowhere near realized at the end of the 1910s. In an article inLe cinematographiefrangais in 1919, an author predicts the full specialization of theaters according to genres by 1930. He envisioned the audience going to a "comic theater," a "lyrical theater," or a "dramatic theater" depending on whether they wanted to laugh, 31. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan Com- Pa"6)- r, Crated wiih 32. Lindsay, Art of the Moving Picture, 189. n nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nftropdteom/profeBEfonal Theorizing Modernism cry, or be shocked, respectively33 But in fact, in the early twenties in England specialization only meant trying to screen films whose "artistic quality" would translate into big audiences.34 Hitherto specialization had been determined by genres or artistic quality, supposing that the better a film is, the bigger audience it would attract. In 1924 another category for specialization appeared in France: "quality films" that do not attract big audiences. Jean Tedesco, the director of the theater Le vieux colombier between 1924 and 1930, realized the need for a specialized distribution system for certain films that were of high "artistic" quality but unsuitable for a large distribution, because "the distributors disdainfully refused the masterpieces with the certainty of infallible judgment." 35 It was Dulac who looking back in 1932 saw in this the emergence of an intermediate category: The specialization of exhibition—the necessity of which was first realized by Jean Tedesco—has this surprising result of letting the audience get in contact with works which it would not tolerate otherwise in other theaters, and to support as well film trends that want to be commercial, but not enough to pander to nervous ignorants.3* This is the first time that artistic quality is emphatically separated from financial success. Dulac's comment makes a distinction not between commercial and noncommercial cinema, which was clearly present in the 1920s, but between two kinds of commercial film practices. He defines the art film neither as a quality nor as a genre (filmed theatrical adaptation), but as a category of film "that want to be commercial but not enough...," which is the first detectable sign of the emergence of a particular type of film—"the intermediate category." At the time the need for institutionalization was not at all evident. An anecdote about the opening of Le vieux colombier illustrates this point. Among the films on the program was Arthur Robison's Shadows (1923), a 33. V. Guillome Danvers, "En dix-nuf-cent-trente," Le cinematographie francais 15 (1919): 9. 34. We can read in the La cinematographie Francaise in 1922 (no. 168, p. 29): "The fashion of releasing the big films in big theaters seems be established definitively. Several United Artists productions will be shown at the Empire Theater (London). However, Griffith's The Orphans, which should be released within two months, will not find a place there. Another big theater was reserved for this sensational show." 35. Souvenirs du Vieux Colombier (cited by B. Van Mierop, "AFCAE: Replique a la crise du cinema? Memoire de fin d'etudes a lTDHECm," thesis, Paris, 1965). 36. Dulac quoted in Henri Fegour^, Ij cjjjigjntf, ^es °"3ines a nos jours (Paris: Ed. du Cygne, 1932), emphasis in the original3 Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ONE film belonging to the expressionist movement but lacking excessive expressionist stylization. The audience, for whom the avant-garde was the only possible alternative to "common" movies at that time, was frustrated by this film, which they found to be not avant-garde enough. One spectator complained to Tedesco, "I came here to see the avant-garde, but in this film I haven't found any!"37 Dulac's remark—films commercial "but not enough..."—foreshadows a conflict that from the fifties on will characterize the relationship between art cinema and the entertainment industry. At the roots of this conflict lies the struggle of narrative art cinema for a paying audience. The non-narrative avant-garde defined itself from the outset as noncommercial and addressed to a specialized audience. The commercial "but not enough" art-film industry, however, would be in direct and never-ending institutional competition with its fully commercial counterpart. Distributors and exhibitors realized 24 that the contradiction between the industrial character of the cinema and the artistic use of this industry could be resolved by a special institutional network that gathers and concentrates paying audiences for that specific kind of cinema. And they were convinced that there was an audience who would pay for art films—the intellectual elite. As the founders of Le Studio des Ursulines put it in 1926: "We want to recruit our audience from the elite of the writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Latin Quarter, an increasing number of whom refuse to attend the movie theaters because of the poor quality of some spectacles."38 Thus in the middle of the twenties we can see not simply the separation of film institutions but also the genesis of the distinction between elite and mass culture in the cinema. This distinction will be the ideological basis for the strengthening of the art-film industry. But specialization was only the first step. It was quickly apparent—in the early 1930s—that the semicommercial narrative art-film institution could not survive without state support. In 1921, Germany adopted a law making films of "artistic or national educational value" eligible for a reduction of up to 50 percent of the normal tax on admission tickets. The first feature film to benefit from this was FridericusRex (1922) by a Hungarian director, Arzen von Cserepy.39 Only in 1937 did the French minister for education and fine arts, Jean Zay, try to follow Germany in supporting "quality films" when he de- 37. In Cinea-Cinepourtous, 25 December 1924,7. 38. Cited in Vincent Pinel, Introduction au cine-club:Histoire, theorie, pratique du cine-club entrance (Paris: Les editions d'ouvrieres, 1964), 29. 39. Paul Monaco, Cinema and^ocietwFranceand Germany during the Twenties (New York: Elsevier, 1976), 47. downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism clared his intentions to pass a law for the financial support of French "quality-film production." However, this project was not realized at the time. In both cases, however, artistic quality was meant to be acknowledged only within a national context. There was no intention of supporting "quality films" of other nations. While both German and French film industries were fighting for different protectionist regulations penalizing film import all through the 1920s (with very little success),40 emerging art-film theaters in Paris showed German and American films as well, embracing artistic quality in film regardless of national origin. Official circles in both Germany and France recognized the importance of cinema in raising national consciousness. State support followed to burnish national prestige through film. In 1939 the National Grand Prix of the Cinema was established in France, which during the Occupation was renamed the Grand Prix of the French Art Film. But it was only a matter of time until the international character of the art-film industry broke through. The first sign of this came as early as 1934, 25 with the establishment of the annual international film festival of Venice. The idea was taken up by France in 1939 with the Cannes Film Festival, though this could not be realized because of the Second World War.41 The Venice Film Festival was also eventually suspended, and both festivals started up again in 1946. In 1945 Andre Malraux, minister of culture, revived the idea of legislating financial support for art films, which had been state policy in Germany since 1921, only to be rejected again. The beginning of the fifties was an important moment in the institutionalization of the art film. Besides the renewal of the Venice Film Festival in 1946, half a dozen new international film festivals were launched in Europe within four years: Cannes, Locarno, and Karlovy Vary (1946), Edinburgh (1947), and Biarritz and Berlin (1950). In 1950 the federation of the French film critics established its own art-movie theater network, beginning with the Reflet 23 theater and followed by five other theaters: Lord Byron, Studio de l'Etoile, Caumartin, Agriculteurs, and Cinema des Champs-Elysees. At the same time in Germany, there were already fifty theaters that were incorporated in 1953 in the Gilde Deutscher Filmkunstteater. In France the network of film clubs was restarted as early as 1944 by a film critic named Pierre Kast, future editor of the Cahiers du cinema and French new wave di- 40. Monaco, Cinema and Society. 41. Originally, the Cannes Film Festival was conceived to politically counter the fascist influence prevailing at the 1938 Venice Biennale. For the history of the Cannes Film Festival, see Paul Leglise, Histoire de j&^>oli£ia^e djyinemafrancais (Paris: Pierre L'herminier Editeur, 1969-1977), 195. Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcHeom/profeEEional CHAPTER ONE rector, and an international association of film clubs was founded in 1947. Also in 1947 the preparations began for the creation of the Italian Federation of Cinema Circles (FICC), and the federation was officially constituted in 1950. According to its constitution the cinema circles were "absolutely apolitical, nonprofit associations whose main goal is the development and the spread of film culture____They want to promote the development of film culture, historical studies, the technique of film art, promote the development of the cultural exchange in the domain of cinema of different nations, and encourage experimental filmmaking."42 Emphasis on the intellectual underpinnings of art cinema was not missing either. Cahiers du cinema and Cinema nuovo, the two most important intellectual film magazines in Europe, were launched in 1951. Positif, another important French magazine, hit the stands in 1952. Throughout the fifties and sixties these would be the most influential forums for European art cinema. 26 In 1952 the Federation International des Auteurs de Film (International Federation of Film Authors) was founded at the Cannes Film Festival. This was the first international institution to openly describe the antagonism between art cinema and film entertainment as an institutional problem. In their statements one can feel the pride and the self-consciousness of an institutional power: Defending their essential rights, film auteurs do not want to defend just their own destiny, but also the destiny of the cinema, which by becoming a servant would stop being an art, and would deserve only the name of an industry. Protecting their own freedom, film auteurs will protect the cinema, its original virtues, its cultural and social function, its high mission.... Thanks to us, the cinema is an art.43 It is worth pointing out that American film "auteurs" participated at this meeting only as "observers" not as prospective members. In 1954 French art-film theater owners wanted to create an association but failed because of the reluctance of the French film critics' association to give up the independence of the theaters they owned. However, when in 1955 the German national federation called for an international association of art-film theaters, the French film critics decided to offer their theaters to participate, and thus a French national association was born, which became a member of the International Confederation of Art-Film Theaters estab- 42. Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano dal 194s agli anni ottanta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), 188. 43. "Proces verbale de la Federation Internationale de Auters de Films," May 2,3,4 !952> downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Theorizing Modernism lished on July 21,1955. Two years later, at last, financial support for French art-film theaters became a reality By the second half of the fifties, the art film in Europe was more than a theory, a prospect, or a critical category—it had become a strong institution backed by tax laws, professional associations, production and distribution networks, film festivals, and prestigious magazines. Modernist Art Cinema and the Avant-Garde Is the distinction between modernism and avant-garde a valid issue in the cinema ? In film historiography, there are two other labels for the type of film usually identified with the "avant-garde": experimental and underground. Very often these tags function as collective names designating the same film practice. In general, in French terminology "experimental cinema" is used to designate noncommercial films whose main concern is not to tell a story 27 or to represent a piece of "real life" but to concentrate on and exploit the possibilities of the formal aspects of the cinematic medium. Theoretician of cinema Jean Mitry, for example, includes in this category all films—from those of Georges Méliěs to German expressionism, from Clair to Sergei Eisenstein, from Walter Ruttman to Norman MacLaren, from Gregory Mar-kopoulos to Godard—that display a degree of this approach regardless of genre or style, but he does not make any distinction within this category44 Conversely, in American historiography "avant-garde" is used as a general term for alternative, commercial, non-narrative film practice. The third label, "underground," is mainly used to refer to the American avant-garde of the sixties, but no essential difference is defined between underground and avant-garde films of other periods. It is safe to say that these terms—avant-garde, experimental, and underground—have fairly similar meanings in designating a particular film practice. However, each reveals a different aspect of the same practice. Non-narrative fictional practice in the cinema is most often structurally determined (thus experimental), it is often personal and based on alternative production and distribution networks (thus underground), and it is sometimes political (thus avant-garde in the traditional sense). The avant-garde label is most justified with respect to phenomena that brutally challenge conventional aesthetic taste and can be considered as the expansion of avant-garde artistic movements, as in Dadaism and surrealism. Also, there is no doubt about Vertov's being an avant-garde filmmaker in the political sense—while most artists of the "pure cinema" or Created with 44. Jean Mitry, Le cinema experimental. Histoire et perspectivesCPms: Segners, 1974). but also because wealth and an upper-middle-class way of life were not considered characteristic of the social structure of Eastern Europe of the time. We can very rarely find poor people in modern cinema, and only a few workers (Ermanno Olmi's The Fiances, 1963; Agnes Varda's Happiness, 1965; or Béla Tarr's The Family Nest, 1977). By contrast, artists are frequently represented in modern cinema, especially in self-reflexive films, such as Antonioni's La notte and Blow-Up, Fellini's 8 1/2, Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966), and Mirror (1974), wijaal^erything/or Sale (1969)1 Bergman's Persona Ml nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf com/profeEEional Narration in Modern Cinema Fig. 5. A pastor without faith and congregation: Gunnar Bjornstrand in Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962). (1966) and Rite (1969), but also in Louis Malle's A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1963), Henning Carlsen's Hunger (1966), Vilgot Sjoman's I Am Curious (Blue) (1968), Wenders's false Movement (1974), Ken Russell's Savage Messiah (1972), 6? and Marco Ferreri's Liza (1972). The first reason why the archetype of the individual is the urban middle-class intellectual is that he has to be free of material concerns. This can be achieved either by making him rich or by placing this problem out of his range of interest. Secondly, the individual should be free to move, so working hours must not be a constraint for him. Therefore he cannot be a clerk or a factory worker. He should not have a profession that dictates that he assume responsibility for other people, either; therefore he is not a doctor or a lawyer, let alone a politician. (He maybe a priest, but one that has lost his faith and has no congregation anyway, like in Bergman's Winter Light). The individual is concerned above all with his inner universe and by the general state of the world, and that is another reason for him to be an intellectual or an artist. But in many cases the individual has no profession whatsoever, or it is never made clear what that profession is. In most early Godard films, the profession of the protagonists is not specified, just like that profession in Antonioni's Eclipse or in La notte, where Lidia's profession is unknown. The individual is lonely, so she lives in a big city or wanders around different places. For all of the above mentioned reasons, the individual must not be too old, which would make him less flexible and more concerned about his material life. And he must not be too young, which would take away much of his freedom of choice, although the theme of revolt fits well with the concept of childhood, as seen in early Truffaut films, The 400BI0WS (1959) and Shoot the Piano Player (i960), or in Malle's Zazie in the Subway (i960). So, most typically the individual is young or in his mid-thirties. Gender is not a distinctive feature ol'^flie uiaividual"; he might as well be a she. Ml nitro professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER FOUR I would not attach too much importance to the fact that in cases of a single lead most protagonists of modern films are male figures; it just probably reflect the average of the overall percentage of single male heroes in cinema or the personal taste of the individual masters. Lack or extreme looseness of the individual's connections to the world makes his persona a manifestation of mental freedom. His freedom has important consequences regarding the stories about these individuals. The first consequence is a certain passivity or inaction; the second is the unpredictability of his actions and reactions. Two main characteristics of modern narrative forms derive from this: the role of chance in the plot and the open-endedness of the stories. The Role of Chance 70 In his analysis of the modern film, Noel Burch emphasizes the importance of the aleatoric principle deriving from modern music. He distinguishes between two different forms this principle takes in modern art. One of them refers to occurrences of uncontrolled events as compositional elements; the second is the use of chance "in the creation of works with multiple modes of performance."9 The first is more characteristic of cinema, while the second is more relevant in music. Strictly speaking, narrative cinema cannot eliminate some kinds of randomness in its form. Even if it is shot in a studio with, for example, highly artificial settings and well-composed images, each take of a particular shot is singular and unrepeatable because it depends on the live character's momentary state of mind and behavior. This is the theatrical principle of randomness. But a film can push this principle way beyond the capacity of any other art to make it its constitutive element. By using natural locations, allowing the characters to improvise their dialogues, and letting the characters' random decisions determine the story, modern cinema extensively incorporated uncontrolled representation of physical reality into its aesthetic composition. One important trend in modern cinema was to make live reality secrete an artistic composition as if its main goal was the disappearance of the distinction between artificial aesthetic form and natural beauty. I want to approach the question of randomness more from the point of view of how the film was created, rather than as how the film thematizes the problem of chance. After all, whatever ways the artist chooses to create his 9. Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 105-121, quotation on 109. Created with M nitro1 downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.eom/profeBEional Narration in Modern Cinema work, it is the coherence of the end result that counts. Overall and multilay-ered coherence will always overshadow the effect of randomness stemming from the creative process. The innovation of a certain type of modern film narrative, especially of those films relating in one way or another to the new wave in this domain, is to make chance a crucial element in the plot. But this theme of chance as the basis of the story will unfold more radically in some postmodern narratives. So, the reason why I will elaborate on this problem is that I will consider this compositional element as a feature of modern narratives in which it is different not so much from classical cinema as from postmodern narrative. The problem of chance interests us here not from the point of view of the "past," that is, its relationship to the classical narrative, but from the point of view of the "future": what is the specificity of the use of chance and accidents in modernist narrative as compared to postmodern film narratives? In a strict sense chance as a narrative element is an organic part of more 71 than one narrative form. Chance as a theme is far from being just a modernist invention. Unforeseen encounters, sudden natural catastrophes, accidental misunderstandings are all obvious tools in all kinds of narratives from ancient mythology to fairy tales and the bourgeois novel. Accidental events in a classical narrative serve as an obstacle that the protagonist has to overcome to restore order in the world. Accidents function as a kind of test through which the world manifests its real nature and by which the viewer or the reader can better understand how things work in extraordinary situations. We might say that chance in the classical narrative is a provocation of the laws of nature and the society. Accidents in a classical narrative therefore confirm the ordinary laws of causality. Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) is one of the most extreme cases of classical narrative's use of the theme of chance. Hitchcock builds a story based on a series of banal accidental coincidences, which finally lead to someone's being mistaken for another person. That mistake triggers a chain of events where predictable causal logic is restored. The film then follows the logic of an ordinary mystery plot until the last scene in which Hitchcock suddenly suppresses all causal linkages: the heroes are saved, but we never learn how. The film consists of a series of incredible coincidences and accidents, which however lead to an ending that is logical and has the element of necessity according to all the classical generic rules, yet it occurs as a miracle: the protagonist finds the woman who was missing from his life at the beginning. The "order of life" is that this should happen in every man's life sooner or later no matter the miraculous perepiteia it takes. If "that is the way it Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FOUR goes," even the wildest improbabilities can lead to a "necessary" outcome. With this last scene Hitchcock makes fun of generic motivation, but, he also shows that generic motivation is in fact nothing but an abstract causal pattern that overrules momentary realistic probability.10 The role of chance in modern narrative is essentially different. The function of accidents in modern films is not to confirm but to question causality and to demonstrate the fundamental unpredictability of the way things happen in the world. Accidents remain on the phenomenological level in modernist narrative, that is to say, they lose their "deeper" necessity. The goal of classical narrative is that at the end the viewer forgets about the random character of accidents, whereas the goal of modernist narrative is to impress upon the viewer the dramatic effect of accidents, which is why accidents occur often at the end of stories. The best example of this use of chance can be found in Claude Chabrol's Les cousins (1959), which ends with 72 one of the cousins accidentally shooting dead the other by pointing the gun on him in fun without knowing that the gun is loaded. Chance remains a central element in the postmodernist narratives as well. The difference is that postmodern use of chance demonstrates that an accident is not a disaster but the manifestation of an alternative reality. At the end of a classical narrative the viewer concludes, "Whatever happened, that is the way things should be." At the end of a modernist narrative the viewer says, "Everything could as well have been different." And a typical postmodernist narrative in fact shows how the same thing can be different at the same time, or simply shows an alternate version of the same story. It is not chaos that manifests itself in modernist narrative's approach to chance but the fact that the freedom of "the individual" cannot be recon- 10. Bordwell makes a distinction between "realistic motivation" deriving from the logical causal expectations raised by a specific plot turn, and "transtextual" or "generic motivation" deriving from expectations raised by the spectator's knowledge about what types of events usually take place in a given genre (see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 3 6). This distinction is entirely functional with respect to the analysis of a particular plot composition. On a more abstract level, however, we can see that rules of genres are merely generalized realistic motivations. If a young man and woman meet at the beginning of a film the most probable scheme for what they will do is that they fall in love with each other at once but probably never happen to make love (melodrama), fall in love and make love at the end (romantic comedy), make love and part later (modern melodrama), do nothing but make love at length (pornographic movie), save each other's life and then fall in love in the end (action movie), etc. All of these are realistic and plausible cause-and-effect chains. Such schemes are typical of "how things usually happen in real life." In a carefully written plot that does not play with chance a|dges th^plot of North hy Northwest, generic patterns are always motivated realisticalryjotney areharder to distinguish. (H) nitroPDFprofessional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Narration in Modern Cinema ciled with the laws of human nature and society. Freedom appears as a dangerous chaos from the point of view of society and society appears from the point of view of "the individual" as a machine, the laws of which are hidden and can strike at any moment. Classical narratives show how social order is capable of incorporating the individual, however extravagant he may be, while modern narratives show how the freedom of "the individual" is crushed by the social order. Postmodern narratives (insofar as they touch on the problem of chance) show that in fact the social order is unpredictable not only for "the individual," but that it is also essentially chaotic, so in one way or another, freedom finds its way in alternative (virtual) universes. Postmodernism returns to the idea of the "higher necessity" of chance, not in order to manifest the underlying deterministic order, but to express an underlying indeterminism or chaos. Between classical and postmodernist narrative's ontological approach, we find the essentially epistemological approach of modernism. Chance does not rule modernist narratives; it erupts 73 at important points as the manifestation of the clash between ordinary expectations and the unpredictability of freedom. In a strict sense, one finds very few cases in modern cinema in which real chance plays a crucial role in the narrative. In most cases we see of an unprepared, unpredictable, or unexplained turn of events, whose reasons could be decipherable if the plot prepared the audience for what will happen. A typical example of the modernist conception of the role of chance in the narrative is Bertolucci's first feature film, The Grim Reaper (1962), based on Pasolini's original idea. The film tells the story of an investigation about the murder of a prostitute. A detective, who does not appear on screen and appears only as a disembodied voice, interrogates six people who were seen in the vicinity of the murder scene around the time it occurred. Just like in Akira Kurosawa'sRashomon (1950), the filmfollows the respective recounting of the events from the points of view of the six interrogated, one of whom turns out to be the perpetrator of the crime. The comparison withRashomon, however, holds water only initially. First, Bertolucci's film tells not the same story in six different versions, but six different stories that cross one another at a given place in a given moment. Second, unlike in Rashomon, where the different versions contradict each other and where we can find no "true" version that would overrule the other contradicting narratives, in Bertolucci's film the six different narratives are like different pieces of the same puzzle. At the end we find out the whole truth; nothing is left hidden. Bertolucci even reveals the discrepancies between the stories narrated by the characters. Sometimes their recounting contradicts what the film shows. But it does not make a difference laracters lie, since Bertolucci's film Ml nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FOUR is not about the subjective or objective character of storytelling, which is Kurosawa's main concern in Rashomon. However, Bertolucci's film is not a "whodunit" story that gives full satisfaction at the end. His main concern is to compare the six stories in order to understand what could have led to a murder in one case rather than in the other. His goal was to show a situation in which an important event, a murder, that usually has a clear cause, in fact becomes accidental in the light of other stories that did not result in this murder but could have led to it. In a way, all of the characters' stories contain elements that make each of them a suspect. All of them had something in their day and in their life that could have led to serious consequences. At the end it appears that committing a murder was already a matter of chance for all of them. Five of the six were involved with some smaller crime (stealing, fighting). Four of them managed to get away without resorting to lethal means. The sixth killed a prostitute, while, just like the others, all he wanted 74 was to steal her purse. He was not a premeditated murderer, just an ordinary fellow like the rest of them. The murder happened for no particular reason, or by accident, just as it was by accident that the other stories did not result in murder. The film is much more concerned with showing that everything could have happened differently than with showing the causal chain that led to the murder. This film sophisticatedly mixes the investigation pattern that supposes close cause-and-effect relations with a narrative conception where chance is the main motivation for important events. Chance and necessity are not contradictory terms in The Grim Reaper. The story depicts a world in which consistency means that anything can happen and where chance is the rule. This idea appeared first in the French new wave, where it determined the most important plot turns. For example, in Breathless both the killing of the policeman and Michel's death are due to coincidences and unpredictable behavior. Michel was not a killer, just a petty car thief. Originally, the police were not after him, he just got nervous seeing the police officer directing the traffic. He did not have a gun, it just happened to be in the car. And he did not have a particular reason to shoot, he could have fled, too. As regards his death, he already wanted to give himself up to the police, he did not want to continue fleeing. His friend threw a gun after him, and when he turned back to pick it up, he got shot dead. In general, we might say that if death occurs in new wave films, it occurs unpredictably. More precisely: disaster lingers on throughout the stories, but when it occurs, it is unexpected.11 The novelty of Pasolini and li. On unexpected deaths ingew ^1™^' see ^ Kovacs, Metropolis, Pdrizs (Budapest: Kepzo'muveszeti Kiadö, 199^^47-55. Ml nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Narration in Modern Cinema Bertolucci's story is that it makes chance not only the motivation of important turns, but also a principle of a whole way of life. It connects traditional Italian neorealist style with modern chance-motivated narrative technique in the modern investigation genre. More than one modern film playfully includes chance as the manifestation of the aleatoric principle or of unpredictability. In Varda's The Creatures (1966) the two protagonists' acts are determined by a manipulator's casting of a die.12 And Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1966) demonstrates the incalculable nature even of fictional heroes. A filmmaker (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) makes up a story during a train trip while we can see the story as he tells it. Increasingly, there are disturbing elements that diverge from what the director narrates, as if he cannot control the trajectory of his own story. What we find in some postmodern film narratives is that they take one step further in developing the theme of chance. They make chance the rul- 75 ing order not only of a particular social environment or mentality, as in The Grim Reaper, but they also generalize it by making it appear as the only substantial organizing element in the world. Just to name some examples, one might think of films such as Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1987) and The Double Life ofVeronique (1991), Ildikd Enyedi's My Twentieth Century (1988) and Magic Hunter (1994), Alain Resnais's Smoking/No Smoking (1993), Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998), and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). These films can be separated into two main variants. In one, chance is the only ruling order. At every turn of the plot chance plays a crucial role (Pulp Fiction, My Twentieth Century, Magic Hunter). In the other, the film consists of alternative versions of the same story pattern where everything depends on accidents, which may veer the story in one direction or another (Blind Chance, The Double Life ofVeronique, Smoking/No Smoking, Run Lola Run). But in a more hidden way, a structure of parallel alternatives can be found also in some films of the first type: My Twentieth Century tells the stories of two siblings separated in their childhood. Since it was pure chance that determined their circumstances, their lives can be interpreted as one another's alternatives. Just like Pulp Fiction, where the different stories of violence crossing each other by accident can be understood as different version on the theme of the relationship between chance and violence. 12. A similar idea is found in Hungarian director Gyula Gazdag's film Bdstyasetdny, on the caprices of two manipulators who supervise and control their lives. downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FOUR But the clearest example of the postmodern narrative's approach to chance is Tykwer's Run Lola Run. The film's story is told in three different versions. There are certain deviations in the story relative to accidental encounters, and the versions differ from each other according to when Lola arrives at these junctures. The manner in which the accidental encounters occur determines how the story will continue and how it will end. There is not even a hidden "master story" that tells how things happened "in reality," like inRashomon or The GrimReaper; Lola's story exists in three alternative versions each as plausible as the others. The role of chance here is not to confirm the rule of order by showing that what should happen happens anyway, like in classical narrative, nor to demonstrate the dramatic disaster caused by unpredictability, as in modernist narratives that show what should happen accidentally does not happen, or what should not happen happens accidentally. Tykwer's film wants to show that nothing that hap-76 pens happens because that is the way it "should be." Every event is a version of an infinite number of virtual alternatives that are plausible and necessary the same way as the one that became reality, just like in a computer game. And the reason why one of the equally possible alternatives becomes reality is pure chance. A narrative structure, based on alternate realities, can be found from the early 1960s on in modern cinema. However, the postmodern approach of narrative alternatives is very different from what we find in modern narrative serialism, such as in some of Alain Resnais's and Alain Robbe-Grillet's films. In the nouveau roman films, narrative parallelism is always related to subjectivity and to uncertainty of knowledge. Alternatives come into being because narrative mixes different sources of consciousness or subjective knowledge and objective reality. Therefore their main subject matter in this type of narrative is the problem of the fake or the lie, and the main question these films ask is, "which one of the alternatives is true or real?" Films in which this theme explicitly comes to the fore include Resnais's Muriel (1963), and Stavisky (1974) and Robbe-Grillet's The Man Who Lies (1968).13 Even in Last Year at Marienbad the mutually contradictory alternative solutions are not conceived as existing side by side. X, the "Stranger," tells something to A, the "Woman," that is true or not. One of the options is always stronger than the other. One cancels out the other, like when the narrator decides to go back and not to kill the woman. One of the possible versions is supposed to download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Narration in Modern Cinema be "real" and final. We just cannot tell which one it is. When talking about Last Year at Marienbad, neither Resnais nor Robbe-Grillet left open the possibility that both solutions (whether or not X and A met in Marienbad last year) are plausible, although their opinion diverged as to which solution they thought was more likely to be true. According to Robbe-Grillet, "to the question, 'Did anything happen last year?' my answer is: 'Probably, not,' and Resnais's is 'Probably, yes.' What we have in common is this 'probably.'"14 "Probably" means, it is either one way or the other, we don't know for sure. This is a typically modernist approach. The postmodernist approach would be "both contradictory options are true at the same time." This is why chance does not have a function in the modernist version of parallel narratives. And in films where chance does have a function we do not find parallel, mutually contradictory narratives. Chance in the modernist approach makes a final and irrevocable decision, and that is the source of its dramatic effect. It follows from both classical and postmodern approaches to narrative 77 that stories have an unambiguous closure. Classical narratives take place in the only one possible world. Postmodern narratives take place in a series of possible worlds, each of which is unambiguous. The universe of modernist narratives is the single possible world of classical narratives, but it is essentially uncertain, unpredictable, and incalculable. This leads us to the next general particularity of the modernist way of narration. Open-Ended Narrative Narrative closure is the point where order is restored in the universe of the plot. It can be a new order, but most often it is the original order that was disrupted by an event triggering a plot, which will be restored. One of modernist narrative's well-known particularities employed in many modern films is to withhold closure from the plot. This device can be found in all genres, all narrative forms, and in all styles, and although it is typical of the late modern period, it is not a necessary condition of modernist narrative. On the contrary, many highly modern films provide conventional narrative closure (Breathless, to begin with, but all the films of Tarkovsky, and Fellini also). Even some of the nouveau roman films have narrative closure, such as Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, or Trans-Europ-Express. By contrast, many films made in this period do not share much with modernism other than their lacking of narrative closure. Buhuel, for example, whose films are not 14. Le Monde, 29 August 1961. Created wiih Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FOUR particularly modern in their styles or their narrative forms, was one of the most consistent users of open-ended narratives. Truffaut also left his first, more or less stylistically classical, film, The 400 Blows (1959), unfinished, but probably the most radical example of open-ended narrative is Milos Forman's first feature film, Black Peter (1963), which ends on an interrupted sentence. Among the great modernist auteurs, Antonioni's great period films all have undetermined endings. In fact, this is one of the main features in his films that divide his premodern and modernist periods. Often open-ended structure has to do with the notion of unpredictability or uncertainty manifested in the story. This is the case in the films of Buhuel, Resnais, and Robbe-Grillet that include the feature of open-ended-ness. Unclosed ending is due to narrative ambiguity also in Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem (1970). There is, however, another reason why modern narratives tend to appear unfinished. This has to do with an overall structure 78 of dramaturgy. Narrative Trajectory Patterns: Linear, Circular, Spiral Usually, theoretical literature about narrative forms use the concepts of "linear" and "nonlinear" narratives referring to whether the plot follows a chronological order of cause and effect. Bordwell has a more nuanced explanation of narrative linearity. On the one hand, he links this term to the causal coherence of the plot construction: "the classical scene continues or closes off cause-effect developments left dangling in prior scenes while also opening up new causal lines for future development."15 On the other hand, narrative linearity refers to the tendency of classical narratives to "develop toward full and adequate knowledge." Linearity in this light means a chronological, causal, and conceptual continuity leading towards a closed set of relevant narrative information. Thus, linearity is not only a sequential order, it has a direction as well. This aspect of linearity directs attention to a problem that will be important to us here. Linearity conceived as a relatively straight line leading from one point to another has a close relationship with the full understanding of the story. Full knowledge is possible only if the story ends at a point at which no more relevant information can be gathered about the story. That is the point from which "another story begins." Another story involves another motivation system. The lovers, as soon as they get married, have different goals, hence different motivations than when their goal was to arrive at marriage. A story Created with 15. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 158. download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Narration in Modern Cinema that can be "fully understood" starts with some emerging goals and motivations and ends with their disappearance. Both the emergence and the disappearance of the goals and motivations are attached to a significant change. In general what one can call a beginning of a story is a significant change in the way things usually happen in the world of the story which provides the protagonists with new goals and motivations. And what we call an ending refers to another significant change, after which no important events occur that could affect the causal chain in between the two, thereby canceling the goals and motivations driving the protagonist throughout the story. What I call here a linear trajectory is an aspect of the narrative in which the closing situation is significantly different from the starting situation (the murderer is found, the lovers are reunited, etc.). By "significant" difference I mean a difference that is a result of a solution to a conflict. For the sake of not confusing the meanings of the term "linearity" we might also call this form the problem-solving narrative, since the ending situation is typically a solution 79 to a problem or to a series of problems that are presented at the beginning of the story. Not all narratives tell stories that take place between two significant changes, and not all narratives that have a "beginning" and an "ending" have them the way classical narration does. That is where "full knowledge" plays a role. Classical narration predominantly arrives at an understanding of the story where all important information has been revealed. However, there are stories in which—although we know more at the end than we did at the beginning—we never find out how the main problem fueling the plot could have been resolved, because the story comes back to its starting point without a solution only to end there. That is what I call a circular trajectory as opposed to the linear one. Its distinguishing feature is that the ending situation is not significantly different from that of the beginning. If a linear narrative is problem-solving, a circular narrative is descriptive. We understand the fundamentals of the initial situation, but we do not understand how conflicts generated by this situation could be resolved. This narrative form was prevalent in neorealism. Examples are quite obvious: The Bicycle Thief (1948), The Earth Trembles (1948), or Umberto D. (1952), and many others. In all of these stories the main heroes want to solve one or more problems, but failing in their attempts they arrive back where they started with no more hope to improve their situation. In the meantime, they go through a series of situations that could lead to a positive result but end up resulting in dead ends. That is how their entire situation is disclosed. A circular or descriptive pattern is generally used in narratives that describe not the process that does not lead to the solutionoP a proTjlem but that discloses the important Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FOUR elements of a certain conflict. This occurs either because the character cannot reach his initial goal or because there is simply no goal to reach. There is yet a third narrative "trajectory shape," which I will call spiral trajectory, which unfolded during the modernist period. We said that the problem-solving form is based on the emergence of a specific mission. At the beginning of the story there appears a problem that has to be resolved. This problem is resolved at the end, for better or worse. The important thing here is that the conflict that was generated by the problem is resolved in one way or another at the end. There are stories in which the initial problem, although partially solved, triggers another conflict that reproduces the initial problem in a different situation. The characters go through a series of attempts to resolve the problem, but each time they reach only a temporary solution. They constantly replicate new situations where the same problem remains to be solved. The conflict reemerges over and over again. The so-so lution in these stories is typically not the elimination of the conflict but the elimination of the characters who cannot solve the conflict. What we have here is basically a series of variations on the initial situation that bear a given problem, and the number of the variations is infinite. One of the early examples of this spiral trajectory is Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1948). The film's story is about a young boy wandering amidst the ruins of postwar Berlin trying to provide for his family and himself. As he finds that he has been cheated and abused by all the people from whom he expected help, he throws himself down from the top of a ruined building. Actually, this film vacillates between circular and spiral form as the situation is not evolving a great deal from beginning to end, which is characteristic of the circular form. However, the boy's suicide significantly alters the situation quite in the way later spiral narratives resolve their situations: by eliminating the protagonist. A clear example of the spiral form is Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962). The beginning of the story describes the friendship of two young men and a young woman. Step by step their little company develops into a menage a trois, which all want to resolve in one way or another. The story goes through different attempts to clarify the situation, but all of these attempts fail, and the young woman has to face the same dilemma over and over again. The world changes around them, they find themselves always in a new situation (before the war, after the war, before the child is born, after the child is born), but each situation reproduces the same conflict. It is clear that the story could go on like this forever with infinite ways to stage the basic conflict. There is no linear causal chain in the story that could lead to a solution. Chronologically the narrative linear, and there is also a causal continuity Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Narration in Modern Cinema in it. There are no undisclosed causes or unexplained turns in the plot. But this causal continuity does not lead to a logical solution; it has no direction. Problem-solving narratives may finish when the problem is solved. Descriptive narratives may end when all the necessary information about a situation is disclosed. In spiral narratives a solution remains temporary, and full knowledge about the situation does not help starting "another story." The only way the narrative can be ended is to cut the vicious circle unexpectedly at some point. Truffaut puts a sudden end to his film by the unexpected suicide of the woman who drags one of her lovers along with her. From the point of view of dramatic construction, the important thing in both the circular and the spiral forms is that there is no decisive turn possible that could either change the initial situation or make this change eliminate the initial problem. After each episode there could be an infinite number of other variations on the same theme. The difference between them is that while in circular narratives the characters never come to a solution, si in spiral narratives there is no solution to their problem at all. Both circular and spiral forms can be open-ended. Examples of open-ended circular narratives include Buhuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962), Forman's Black Peter (1963), Antonioni's L'avventura (i960), and Wenders's The Goalie's Fear of the Penalty Kick (1972). Examples of open-ended spiral narratives include Truffaut's The 400BI0WS (1959), Fellini's La dolce vita (i960), Bergman's Persona (1966), and Godard's Week-end (1967). Created with downlead the ■free trial online at nitropdf com/profeEEional = 5 = Genre in Modern Cinema Narrative techniques frequently used in modern cinema became fashionable not as self-contained play with the form. They are the most appropriate tools for telling specific stories. For example, stories about itinerant characters, having different encounters with various people, and exploring different environments naturally involve episodic narrative form. Stories in which someone is in search of something or someone missing or wants to elucidate some kind of mystery are favorable to elliptical narration. Stories focusing on a character's state of mind or on her problems as she searches to find a way out of an existential situation are the ones that are the more likely to resort to dissolving the difference between past and present, reality and imagination. Stories emphasizing the unpredictable character of the world are likely to incorporate chance as a motivation of important events. All of this makes us suppose that in modern cinema we will find certain recurring story patterns just as popular genres are patterns for recurring stories in classical entertainment or classical art cinema. Modern art cinema tells stories about the "individual" who has lost his or her contact with the surrounding world. Stories about the lonely, alienated, or suppressed individual are endless, but the forms in which these stories can be made intelligible are not. These forms are the essential genres of modernism. Modern films, just like modern narrative in general, are said to transgress the limits of narrative genres and conventions.1 The modern artist's goal is i. Peter Burger says for example: "According to the premodern conception of art the concept of form is linked to universal characteristics of genres ... In turn, the modern concept of form is strictly linked to each particular work, it refers to the individuality of Ml nitroPDrprofessional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema to construct a form that does not comply with previous rules, and at the same time the constructed form remains unique and unrepeatable. As Alain Robbe-Grillet put it, "each new work constitutes and destroys at the same time its own rules of functioning."2 In other words, the role of the modern artwork is not only to transgress traditional artistic conventions but also to thwart the solidification of any kind of artistic convention. Nevertheless, even the most esoteric art-film form was not without some roots in traditional genres, nor could modernism avoid the repetition of some of its most successful forms, which resulted in the crystallization of what could be called the "modernist patterns." The relationship between modernism and genre logic cannot simply be reduced to rule-breaking and deconstruction. Modernist cinema utilized and freely combined conventional genre patterns following all of their national and universal variations, and created its own modernist art-film patterns suitable for the norms of neomodern art. Although one cannot deny that breaking the rules of classical 83 narrative is one of modernism's principal specificities, there are some typical and recurrent narrative schemes that represent the basis of modern art film production shaping specific genres that are characteristic of modern films. In the works of early-period modern auteurs the roots of traditional genres are easily discernible. Antonioni and Fellini start out of Italian neorealist-style melodrama. The leading French new wave directors, Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol, built their stories around crime and adventure cliches. Bergman, up until the 1970s, mainly used a Strindberg type of psychological drama that was already at that time a genre in Swedish film culture. Tarkovsky's first success was with the traditional war film genre and Nikita Mikhalkov's was in a western set in the Russian Civil War. Up until the early 1960s it seemed as if modern cinema did nothing with genre logic but escape it. There was only one new narrative scheme introduced by early modern cinema, based on the nouveau roman technique of "objective narration." However, already during the mid-1960s many "second wave" modern auteurs who started their careers in modernism after 1962 not only used isolated narrative or stylistic solutions introduced by the first wave modern masters but also took over from them entire story patterns or hero types. For example, Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) is not only the first real "new wave"-style British film, but its story is directly inspired by Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It is almost like a sequel to the work, which has nothing to do with a generic determination whatsoever." Burger, La prose delamodernite, 23. _ ... Created with 2. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1963), 11. Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE Truffaut's film, or an English version of it. Forman admits being strongly inspired when making his Black Peter by Olmi's The Job. Bernardo Bertolucci's second film, Before the Revolution (1964), is constructed very much like one of Godard's early self-reflective essay films. In fact, Bertolucci asserted that "when I made my first film in 1964,1 considered myself more of a French director than an Italian director. I was influenced by the new wave and their experiments with cinema at the time."3 The New German Cinema's first international revelation in 1966 was Alexander Kluge's Yesterday Girl (1966), which is a direct replica of Godard's My Life to Live (1962). By the early 1970s, and with the appearance of the third and fourth wave of modern filmmakers, the recurrence of some narrative forms became more and more evident. Their rules were not as rigid as in the case of popular genres, simply because innovation and originality were modern film auteurs' first-order artistic ideals. Strictly speaking, each film could be considered as a personal varia-84 tion of a type of story, situation, or stylistic form. But after all it is now clear that modern art cinema used only a finite number of them. What follows is a description of the most frequent genres and plot patterns in modern films. Melodrama and Modernism One of the most widespread modern art-film patterns had its origins in classical melodrama. Melodrama had foremost importance in the development of the art-film practice. Together with the crime genre, it was the main genre that bridged the gap between commercial popular cinema and art cinema ever since this distinction appeared, and this was the genre that not only survived modernism, but survived within modernism too. In other words, we will find something that is like the modernist version of classical melodrama. The first thing I want to show is that melodramatic structure is not at all alien to modernism; on the contrary, it is perfectly appropriate for the modernist project in the cinema and it is one of the generic sources of modern narratives, even if modern films usually do not use the full scale of melodramatic paraphernalia. Melodrama is commonly identified with stories provoking intense emotional response from the viewer. This emotional intensity is a consequence of a special narrative scheme. Melodrama is a dramatic form in which the conflict explodes between incommensurable forces, where a lonely human 3. Cited by Ric Gentry, "Bertolucci Directs Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man," in Millimeter (December 1981): 58. In actual fact, by 1964 Bertolucci had completed his second film. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema faces powers of nature or society, before which she is helpless and either condemned to lose right from the outset or wins due to a miracle. This power can be physical (fatal illness, accident), social (war, poverty, class difference) or psychic (strong love, murderous hatred, fatal addiction, moral corruption). Melodrama as a genre appeared at the end of the eighteenth century and referred to a dramatic genre with musical accompaniment staging emotional scenes and involving some kind of unpredictable, fatal plot twist. The melancholic, grim and pathetic emotional atmosphere of melodrama was closely associated with its narrative essence: the helpless human faced with repressive forces of the exterior world. In early melodramas this emotional atmosphere had the function of prefiguring the unexpected, fatal turn evoked by invincible external power. Melodrama developed in nineteenth-century theater as a popular dramatic form with musical accompaniment that had the function of expressing excessive emotions provoked by a fatal ss situation. Melodrama has always had to do with the lack or insufficiency of words and verbal expression, which is why grand gestures and music play a central role. Moreover, melodrama has always been about the suffering of an innocent victim, even when the fault of the suffering lies with the victim herself, like in case of self-sacrifice. This is why a happy ending in a melodrama comes always unexpectedly, by chance or by miracle. Melodrama is basically fatalistic. In contrast to what melodrama's high emotionality would suggest, melodramatic narrative can be fitted to stories other than those representing emotional conflicts. The fatalist character of melodrama is well suited for all kinds of social, political, and historical narratives. Moreover, the naturalist novel, drama, and cinema support the melodramatic structure all the more because they also stage great powers of nature, society, and human instincts. The conflict in naturalist narrative is a clash between the objective and unsurpassable laws of society or human nature and a helpless individual, and this type of conflict can be well adapted to the melodramatic form. Yet, naturalist style very rarely yields to the emotional saturation characteristic of melodrama. And the reason is that naturalism focuses on objective laws rather than on the individual's perspective. It is the individualism of melodrama that is the source of its highly emotional character. And it is only from naturalist objective fatalism that melodramatic emotionality, which is the result of its subjective, emotional fatalism, may appear as "excess." In reality, it is part of melodrama's individualist approach. And this is the key for understanding the relationship between melodrama and modernism. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER FIVE Cognitive theorist Torben Grodal proposes a useful approach to melodrama that illustrates how melodrama can be operational in the modernist context. Grodal highlights two aspects of a melodramatic attitude: passive response and subjective, mental perception. Melodrama stages an insoluble conflict between the lonely human and the big objective power from the point of view of a passive perception of the world. While in naturalism both the world and the victim-subject remain exterior and objective to the representation, in melodrama the repressive power of the objective world is represented as a subjective perception, it is "experienced as a mental event." [I]f we are transformed into a passive object for the objective laws, the hypothetical-enactive identification is weakened or blocked, and the experience loses its character of being rational and exterior-objective, and, by negative inference, is experienced as a mental event. In the great melodramatic moments in Gone with the Wind, the agents lose their full ability to act in the world, which is therefore only experienced as sensation, as input, and so remains a mental phenomenon." Grodal supposes that this passive, subjective experience is the source of the emotional saturation of the melodrama. In simple terms: the lonely subject is not only helpless before repressive powers, but her helplessness is staged as a passive process, a mental perception, or an emotional state. Because the difference in the acting potential between the agent and the environment is so great, at important points the melodramatic hero becomes inactive, suffers the difference, and processes it emotionally. In Casablanca (1942), Rick is a perfect melodramatic hero: in the crucial moment, when Ilsa collapses and offers herself to him, instead of grasping the opportunity to actively reconstruct his happiness, he chooses to passively withdraw before the greater powers of historical mission and marital fidelity (Ilsa must remain with Laszlo so that he can accomplish his political mission respected by Rick himself). He chooses closure rather than continuation, staying rather than fleeing, loneliness rather than happy coupling, hiding rather than accumulating power and wealth. Rick and Ilsa are incomparably unhap-pier at the end than at the beginning, but they just cannot find any positive solution to their desperate situation other than remaining unhappy. There is only an emotional response to their frustration caused by helplessness. For fate cannot be shifted, the melodramatic hero overcomes helplessness by an excessive emotional response. High emotional amplitude is therefore not an exaggeration of melodrama, but it belongs to the genre's inherent 4. Torben Grodal, Moving Pirtures: AJslewTheory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 257. download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema representation system: understanding fate and helplessness through melodrama is to understand it through pure passive emotional experience. The active-passive "shifter" introduced by Grodal is extremely enlightening. For what is essential here is that passive mental experience can be not only emotional but intellectual too. A purely intellectual processing of life-threatening helplessness may provoke the same passive, subjective experience. Passive experience before a greater power may be transformed into other cognitive states, too, not only highly emotional ones, and the melodramatic narrative structure may remain operational. Here we must make clear that we are speaking of emotions represented in melodrama and not of those provoked by it in the viewer. Classical melodrama provokes emotional response by the viewer by representing them. Modern melodrama, as we will soon see, provokes emotional states on the part of the viewer by radically withdrawing representation of emotions, which is why the emotion raised by modern melodrama is always some kind of anxiety. 87 The emphasis on passive subjective experience lying at the heart of the melodramatic form explains, for example, the continuity between the Italian melodrama series of the 1930s, referred to as the "white telephone," and Antonioni's high modernism. It makes clear how Italian neorealism as a fundamentally naturalist narrative universe could unfold out of the melodramatic narrative conventions of Italian cinema of the 1940s and incorporate them; and also how the same melodramatic structure could survive in the introverted and increasingly mental character of modern narrative cinema. Naturalist melodrama is born when the helpless agent confronted by external powers is no longer individualized through her mental or emotional states and is staged as an active part of the very environment of which she is a helpless victim. A typical example of naturalist cinema using a melodramatic structure is Vittorio De Sica's neorealist The Bicycle Thief (1948). Ricci is not individualized through his psychological character and emotions but through his belonging to a certain environment of which he is an active part (trying to find his bicycle). Nevertheless, active as he is, he remains a lost victim right from the start. The social order is stronger than him. Classical melodrama reemerges out of naturalism, when the victim of exterior powers is individualized through her passive emotional response to her helpless social situation. A typical example of the post-neorealist classical melodrama is Fellini's La strada (1954), where Gelsomina's story, which starts as a social struggle for life, finishes as a story of emotional and spiritual redemption. And, finally, we can speak of modern melodrama when the hero in the melodramatic structure of naturalism is reindividualized either her mental and not purely emotional rep: downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE 88 Fig. 6. Giulietta Masina in La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954). by complementing pure emotional response by other mental representations, such as dream, memory, or imagination. In other words, in modern cinema as far as it uses the melodramatic structure, the "mental event" of representing one's helplessness is shifted from a (conscious or unconscious) emotional dimension to an^^erk'inS'of (conscious or unconscious) mental Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema dimension. A typical example is Antonioni's La notte, where the characters' passivity throughout the story is due to a purely mental state of being unaware of the reason for their marital crisis. We talk about modern intellectual melodrama when the protagonist finds herself faced with an existential situation that she cannot understand, and this lack of understanding provokes passivity, suffering, and anxiety. Very often in classical melodrama, too, the protagonist does not understand the cause of her suffering, but in modern melodrama characters do not even know that their situation is critical. They can feel their inability to act, but they do not know the reason why. All that is at stake in modern melodrama is understanding helplessness. And that is why modern intellectual melodrama most often provokes anxiety on the part of the viewer. Melodrama is a form of classical narrative that subjects the protagonist to dead-end situations where no active behavior can be effective. Classical melodramatic heroes keep trying to find a solution for a time, but sooner or later they give in and abandon themselves to pure emotional suffering. If there is a happy ending, it is not due to their efforts. It is always by miracle or by chance that the conditions change around them and the "bigger force" dissolves. The reaction of modern melodramatic heroes to the provocation of the environment is even more passive. It can be best characterized as a mental or physical search. Modern melodrama is a type of melodrama in which the protagonist's reaction amounts to searching for a way to intellectually understand the environment, which precedes or replaces physical reaction. The main cause of the protagonist's emotional distress in modern melodramas is not a concrete natural, social, or emotional catastrophe. No matter what concrete event triggers narrative action, it is but a superficial manifestation of a deeper and more general crisis for which no immediate physical reaction is possible. The only adequate immediate reaction is a passive intellectual response of searching for comprehension of the "general crisis" that will lead to a choice that can result in a physical reaction. The reason why the characters in modern melodrama do not recognize their own desperate situations is to be found in the special form in which the "bigger power" appears in these films. One can speak of melodrama only if the environment represents a force incommensurate with the protagonist's powers. Incommensurate power in modern films has a particularity that differentiates it from any other type of melodrama. The "bigger power" in modern melodrama is represented by something that is stronger not by its presence but by its absence. What exactly is missing, however, is in most cases impossible to tell. One can name it only in general terms of positive Crsstod with human values: love, tenderness, emotions, security, human communica- n nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE tion, or God. The power that protagonists of modern melodramas have to face is an existential lack of these positive values, and it is this lack that takes on the form of something invincibly strong. In the terms of existentialist philosophy this invincible power is called Nothingness. To explain his concept of nothingness in relation to modern cinema, we will need to turn to Sartre's major work of phenomenological existentialism, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had a profound effect on modern art, cinema included. Excursus: Sartre and the Philosophy of Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential living Western philosophers in the fifties and early sixties, and there is little doubt that his works had a major impact on contemporary art, especially drama, literature, and film. Many reasons explain the influence of his works on European art. He him-90 self was a writer, and he publicized much of his views in dramas and novels propagating a sort of philosophical writing. He formulated existentialist philosophy on the level of everyday personal psychology, easy to translate into dramatic situations. He also made the case for a direct linkage between philosophy, art, and politics by advocating for an "engaged" literature. And finally, his philosopher persona also explains his influence. He was the prominent figure and the model of what can be called the "French intellectual": philosopher, writer, journalist, and politician all at the same time. He was a kind of spiritual leader, and even the French president De Gaulle addressed him as "Mon cher maitre" (My dear master).5 The modern philosophical concept of "nothingness" appears in German romantic philosophy with Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. An important aspect of this concept is that it is not simply conceived as something entirely alien to what exists but instead is inextricably linked to it. Nietzsche was the most radical interpreter of this notion; he made it an independent power that opposes the banality of life, and the acceptance of which is the precondition of the divine individual's power. Thus Nietzsche used "nothingness" as a tool for fighting metaphysics. This tool, however, turned out to be inappropriate for that purpose. The romantic conception of the autonomy of the individual is to make the individual a divine entity not subdued by any greater power alien to his own nature: the individual chooses, decides, challenges, opposes, and revolts against superhuman powers. However, the freedom of the romantic individual is limited by the fact that the source of 5. Charles De Gaulle to Jean^aul S_artjre, ||jtter dated April 19,1967, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), T- £■!■ download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema his own divinity is precisely the superhuman nature of the greater power she opposes. Nietzsche understands the limits of the romantic conception and refuses the divine individual's dependence on the greater power. He says, "I was given new pride by my own "self," and that is what I teach: do not hide your head in the sand of heavenly things any longer. But carry around freely this earthly head, which gives sense to the Earth."6 The idea that the subject-object opposition can be avoided by introducing singularity as defining human individuality appears at the dawn of modernism in Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche wants to anchor this "new pride" exclusively in the singularity of life without a metaphysical background. The individual subject becomes in this way the ultimate power independent of any metaphysical support. Interestingly enough, the singularity of the individual declared as the ultimate power of life cannot stand by itself. It becomes a power of opposition, an object of choice, as though subjective singularity were not able to fill out the space left empty by the ostracized superhuman powers. 91 It is as though there remained some vacuum around the divine individual, in which another hitherto unknown superhuman power starts to develop: nothingness. Understood in this context, nothingness becomes the shade of vanished metaphysical powers.7 This notion, born in the romantic philosophy of the nineteenth century, in spite of all attempts maintained the metaphysical subject-object dualism up until the emergence ofpostmodern philosophy. With Heidegger and finally with Sartre, nothingness becomes the central concept of existentialist philosophy, and especially in Sartrian existentialism it helps conserve the subject-object dualism thereby generating a new metaphysical myth. It is that myth that comprises the philosophical notion of nothingness, a subject matter well suited for representation in modern film. Sartre attributes concrete content to the abstract notion of nothingness. He pulls this concept out of pure negativity and differentiates it from the simple emptiness of nonbeing. His conceptual operation is this: he makes 6. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Budapest: Grill Karoly, 1908), 38. 7. It was Henri Bergson who noted first that the romantic concept of nothingness was essentially of a metaphysical character: "For the source of the contempt of metaphysics regarding reality in duration is that metaphysics arrives at being through 'nothing,' because being in duration does not seem for metaphysics strong enough to overcome nonbeing and to assert itself," Evolution creatrice, 252. That is why Bergson considered it very important to deprive the concept of nothingness of any kind of relevance, and to prove that nothingness is only a subjective appearance. Considering the philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, at least ufttil tlje ig6o^,^we can say that he was not too successful in doing that. Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE nothingness the key concept of human relations and of the relationship of man to the world. He interprets nothingness as a product of human intentions and at the same time the essence of being. Nothingness for Sartre is not another world, nor is it beyond our world. He translates this concept into a series of everyday situations where man is alone, disappointed by his beliefs and expectations, desperately looking for something solid in a situation where his own identity is called into question. Sartre places nothingness right into the world "into the heart of being, like a worm."8 Nothingness comes not after being as according to Hegel, and it is not beyond the world as for Heidegger. Nothingness, says Sartre, not only exists, but it exists within being together with it and at the same time. Nothingness is not a general logical or ontological dimension; it is rather the foundation of human being. Sartre says, "It is the human being who gives birth to Nothingness." 92 Nothingness is created when a human wish or expectation is frustrated. Nothingness is not a general nonbeing, it is rather the nonbeing of something or of something that should be. In other words, nothingness is human expectation, human frustration, or human memory.9 Hence, nothingness is not simply a negative category as the notion may suggest. All expectations, all disappointments, all memories are related to concrete contents. If my purse is empty, says Sartre, it is not empty in general, but money of an expected order of magnitude or perhaps of a certain exact amount is missing. When a classroom is empty, it is students, not racehorses, who are missing. And when I enter a cafe looking for Peter but I find only John, then Peter's absence is directly mediated by John's presence. This means that nothingness is directly represented by being. The final scene of Antonioni's Eclipse demon- 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'etre et le neant Essai d'ontologie phenomologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 57 9. Sartre, L'etre et le neant, quotationon 65. At this point we cannot disregard the Bergso-nian foundation of the Sartrian concept of nothingness. Bergson considered nothingness as something that is related to the function of the brain. Nothing for Bergson is but a logical operation, and he thereby reduced it to an element of consciousness relating man to the world. Bergson is firmly convinced that nothingness does not exist. Nothingness is but an illusion, a pure word, a consequence of lack of satisfaction. Bergson is therefore more direct than Sartre: "The concept of emptiness is born when human reflection is related to a past memory when already a new situation is in place. It is nothing else but a comparison of what is there with what could be there, in other words, a comparison of the full with the full." Bergson, Evolution creatrice (Budapest: Akademiai Kiadd, 1930), 257. What Sartre says is not very different when he spgks about the^human origins of nothingness, only he tries to recuperate the ontological weignt of notningness, which was denied by Bergson. n nitroPDrprofessional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema strates clearly Sartrian nothingness. The main motif of the film is constant desertion and disappearance. First Vittoria deserts Riccardo's apartment, then Riccardo himself disappears from the rest of the story. And in the final scene a lot of images can be seen from the meeting point where Vittoria and Piero are absent. We do not see the street, what we can see is their absence. The images of the well and of the street are the images of our frustrated expectation. We see directly their not-being-there, in other words, by seeing the street without them, we see nothingness produced by their absence. Nothingness is a positive category in yet another sense. Between what was and what could be there is a hole, an empty space, where man is free to choose. Nothingness is an empty moment in the world, where man is liberated from his past and must choose. Hence, nothingness is the definition of freedom, it is what cancels out the past before the future: "In freedom man invalidates past and creates his own nothingness.... Nothingness is freedom intercalated between past and future." Free choice is based on nothing- 93 ness because it obliges man to choose, but it does not influence the choice. Since choice is indeterminate it is incalculable for others as well as for ourselves. Incalculability for us is the source of our angst, and incalculability for others represents a danger. Freedom based on nothingness is thus the main power and the main source of danger regarding human relations. The other is the dangerous power of nothingness: "[Nothingness] is my being written into and rewritten by the freedom of the Other. As if there existed another dimension of my being from which I were separated by a radical Nothingness: and this Nothingness is the freedom of the Other." Nothingness as presented by something that is missing is the term through which man is related to the world and to others. This is how the Sartrian concept of nothingness becomes the expression of modern experience of human existence: lonely man, freed from his past, forced to choose and to look out for his own self, endangered by the freedom of others, constantly has to face the lack of sublime values, and this lack is incorporated by the concept of nothingness.10 The "modern authentic individual" is someone who accepts nothingness as the fundament of his/her freedom and gives up the search for traditional metaphysical values. The aversion of modernism to mass culture stems from the fact that modernism considers mass culture as avoiding facing the heart of being: nothingness. Mass culture considers the traditional forces of the sublime (God, nature, love, history, destiny) as continuing to work in the modern world. For postwar modernism the only sublime power that can be represented as working in the modern world is nothingness. The modern Created with 10. Sartre, Litre et le néant, quotations on 76,320. M nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE individual cannot face God as a free individual, only as a member of a nation or a congregation, as a dependent individual. If the modern individual is free, it is possible only by facing nothingness.11 According to the romantic conception the individual is someone who is capable of inner freedom and of choosing death over the insignificance of life. The modern individual is someone whose freedom is manifested by the capability of accepting the insignificance, the nothingness of life. Nothingness for modernism is not the opposite of life, like death in the romantic sense. Nothingness is death within life—life itself, that is. Within romanticism the individual is someone who can be independent from the surrounding world. For modernism the individual is someone who can look through the insignificance of life and can free herself of the angst caused by the nothingness of the world and accept her own life in the midst of this nothingness. We find a nice illustration of the difference between romantic and mod-94 ern attitudes to nothingness in two early films of Godard. One is Breathless (i960), the other is Pierrot lefou (1965). In Breathless, Patricia asks Michel what he would choose if he had a choice between grief and nothingness. Michel's answer is nothingness, Patricia's choice is grief. The real significance of this conversation becomes clear at the end of the film, when Patricia finally gives Michel up to the police, then begs him to escape. The fact that she does that is a direct consequence of her choice. She refuses to accept the idea of nothingness represented by Michel's life, but she feels sorry for him, which appears to her as a paradox. That drives her to the melodramatic act of begging him to escape. Michel, on the other hand, chooses Nothingness, which means that he does not want to run away anymore and expose himself to the bullets of the police. Patricia can accept Michel only as a romantic hero, and that is how she casts him when she betrays him. Michel's death is 11. Christian personalism at the beginning of the twentieth century attempted to avoid the dangerous consequences of this by doubling the self. Berdiaev suggested a separation of the self into two parts: the individual, dependent on the surrounding world, and the persona, independent of the material world and resembling God. The persona is free, but this freedom does not oppose the self to God. It is God who, within the self, opposes the material world: "It is within the self that the struggle between the world and God takes place." Nikolai Berdiaev, "The Persona," in Torok Endre (szerk.), Az orosz valldsbbleselet virdgkora (Budapest: Vigilia, 1988), II. kotet, 217. It is by this metapsychological fiction that Berdiaev tried to save individual freedom and at the same time avoid "nihilism," which is a dangerous consequence of individual freedom. Nevertheless he himself accepts that nihilism (in its Russian, and not Nietzscheian form) is quite close to personalism, as an unconscious and philosophically unfoundedantecedent. Cf. Berdiaev, L'idee russe (Paris: MaisonMAME, 1969), 142. download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/tsrofeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema Fig. 7. Not a romantic death: Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot lefou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)- a romantic death from Patricia's point of view, because this way he does not die for nothingness, he dies for love, which Patricia can accept, and which provides her with her choice: grief. That is why Patricia does not understand Michel's last word: "Tu es degueulasse!" (You are disgusting!), and she re- 95 peats Michel's gesture to rub her mouth with her thumb: at this moment he has become her mythical romantic hero, who was ready to die for her. From Michel's point of view, however, this was not a romantic death at all. Not only did he not want to die for her, he did not want to die at all, he just wanted to give himself up to the police, who shot him because he reached for the gun laying on the pavement. He escaped not because he wanted to be a hero, rather because nothing made sense for him anymore once he was betrayed by Patricia. He was killed by chance, and that only made sense for Patricia looking for grief and melodrama. We find similar ambiguity in Pierrot lefou. Only here, the ambiguity is within the same person. After a failed attempt to flee the banality of his everyday life Ferdinand realizes that there is no way of finding what he is looking for. His love betrays him, and very much in the same way as Michel, he comes to the conclusion that if authentic love is no longer possible life does not make sense anymore. But unlike Michel, he decides to commit a "romantic" suicide. He paints his face blue and wraps his head with sticks of dynamite. However, just as he lights the fuse, he mutters: "After all, I am an idiot!" and desperately attempts to put out the fuse—but a moment too late. Ferdinand realizes that after having devalued life, his death is worth nothing, either. There is no other choice: he has to accept nothingness, and he must continue to live. In the final analysis Sartre makes a direct link between the concept of nothingness and fundamental existential experiences of modern man concerning loneliness and disappearance, which makes this concept susceptible to concrete artistic represe^it^on^^Jothingness in Sartrian philosophy Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcHeom/profeEEional CHAPTER FIVE becomes an essential and invisible ingredient in the phenomenological experience of everyday life. It is an invisible but perceptible dimension hiding behind physical reality. And cinema is a particularly appropriate medium to represent the tension between the two. No other medium can represent the physical surface of reality as meticulously as cinema, and no other medium can express the emptiness behind that surface as strongly. But it is in the intellectual melodrama that the philosophy of nothingness is the most productive. It is there that this concept finds a narrative place in a genre scheme as the bigger power before which the protagonist is helpless. Nothingness is the negative power of lost humanistic values. There are direct and indirect ways of representing the power of loss as the general concept of nothingness. For example, in Bergman's modernist career the lack or loss of values appears in a variety of ways. In Prison (194.9) it has a name: "hell on Earth," which is a particularly clear formulation of 96 the Sartrian concept (nothingness in the midst of being). In later films Bergman utilizes a more "romantic" conception as he puts death (The Seventh Seal, 1957; Wild Strawberries, 1957) or the "absence of God" (Through a Glass Darkly, 1961, Winter Light, 1962) into the place of the "bigger power." But in Persona (1966) he clearly and directly gives it the name of nothingness: it is the only word Elisabeth, the protagonist can utter after a long period of silence at the end of the film. In Antonioni's career, from Story of a Love Affair (1950) to Blow-Up (1966), one can trace an even more linear evolution toward a clear formulation of the concept of nothingness. The human absence and disappearance becomes increasingly abstract, especially in Eclipse and The Red Desert, while in Blow-Up nothingness is a direct motive used as the central symbol of the film. And there is also a third film from 1966 in which the direct formulation of the concept of nothingness proves that at the peak of postwar modernism a major trend of modern cinema is constructed around it: this film is Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. I will compare these three films in part 3 to show how they make the year 1966 an important turning point in the evolution of modern cinema through deep reflection on the place of the modern artist in the world. A Modern Melodrama: Antonioni's Eclipse (1962] In the previous examples we saw how the mere concept of nothingness can become a topic in itself. In most cases, however, and in modern melodrama typically, this is only a source of an underlying ideology mainly about human alienation. In the following example we will see how that works. Created wittn Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema Among Antonioni's great period films, Eclipse is the most radical example of what can be called modern intellectual melodrama. Moreover, it exemplifies best all that I said about the role of the concept of nothingness in modern melodrama. Already the title evokes the disappearance of light and warmth: the central recurrent plot element of the story is human disappearance. The story is divided into three loosely connected parts. After a nightlong argument Vittoria breaks up with her fiance, Riccardo. When we meet them, they are already at the end and through the most difficult part of their conversation. "We have said everything we had to say," says Vittoria. Riccardo is still not ready to let her go, but he cannot make her change her mind. When he asks her why she wants to quit, all she replies is, "I don't know." That is her answer as well to the question about when she stopped loving him. All through the film that is the only thing she can say when she is asked about what she wants. The next part of the movie takes place on and around the stock market where she goes to find her mother. She tries to tell her about 97 her breaking up with Riccardo, but her mother is too busy with her stocks to listen. There Vittoria meets a young, attractive, and dynamic broker, Piero, with whom she starts up a new relationship later in the story. But in this second part Antonioni concentrates on the events taking place at the stock exchange and the dramatic market crash pushing a lot of people, including Vittoria's mother, into bankruptcy. The stock market story is interrupted by a scene where Vittoria visits a neighbor just returned from Kenya. The third part tells the story of Vittoria's and Piero's aborted relationship. Both of them seem ready to start a relationship, but at the last moment Vittoria always withdraws. She repeats, she does not know why. She has the desire but she cannot find the emotional energy necessary to fulfill her desire. All through the story Vittoria is undecided and uncertain. Piero is a more simple case: all he is looking for is sexual contact. Emotional or intellectual contact does not matter for him. In the final scene their relationship ends. But it does not break up; it just vanishes into emptiness. The plot is built upon a series of disappearances. At the beginning Vittoria and Riccardo's romance is over, and Riccardo disappears from the rest of the film. Then, in the first stock market scene the market stops for a minute to honor the death of a colleague. In the second stock market scene many people lose big fortunes in one day. Then Piero's car is stolen. Then Piero disappears for the first time: Vittoria says good-bye to him and starts walking away, but suddenly stops and turns back after a couple of seconds, and she can see that Piero is not there anymore. The end of the story comes with the mere and final disappearance of the characters: neither Piero nor Craatod wiih Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcffeom/profeEEional CHAPTER FIVE Vittoria show up for their rendezvous. And in the very last shot the light of the sun goes out. For Antonioni to represent such characters did not mean that he considered this psychological state as an indifferent, natural state of things. He did not just depict the world of lonely and emotionally alienated people; he wanted to represent the emotional drama of alienation. Eclipse has been compared to Marienbad, but this is false. I think that Resnais in Marienbad is satisfied quite well with simply reducing the characters to the status of objects. For me this is a drama. I mean the actual emptiness of the individual. Honesty and beauty tend to disappear.12 Antonioni has a deeply critical attitude toward the world he represents, and his main artistic purpose is to show the dramatic character of a situation, which fundamentally lacks humanistic values. And this lack makes the characters suffer. For Antonioni the lack is the ultimate instance and reason for unhappiness. There is no reason out in the world, no guilt or error in the characters. It is an ultimate existential condition. Therefore the dramatic clash is not between clear values but between the desire for the values and the lack of them. Antonioni creates the drama of vanishing: the characters' vanished ability to love is the source of their own suffering. It prevents them from fulfilling their deepest desires. The characters suffer because they still remember what they are lacking, but they cannot help it disappear. "I wish I didn't love you at all or that I loved you much more," Vittoria tells Piero. She is a captive and the victim of her own emotional "disability," and of her contradictory emotions, and this is the main source of the melodrama. The dynamics of disappearance make "emptiness," "lack," or "nothingness" the ultimate explanatory tool for Vittoria's situation. "Emptiness" is an existential situation that is within her but functions as a disability or as a "disease" of which she is not the cause and against which she cannot fight. She does not suffer because she is bad or guilty. There is no moral or rational reason for her suffering. That is why Vittoria cannot say anything about her emotions. "Allyou can say is, 'I don't know,'" Piero tells her. Vittoria is simply emptied of her emotions, and this emptiness is without any objective or subjective background. Everybody is like that in the film: Ric-cardo does not fight too much, and after all, he accepts quite easily their separation. Vittoria's mother is concerned only with her stocks and deplores their separation because now Riccardo cannot help her out financially. Piero is interested only in money, his car, and sex. That is how the lack or empti- 98 Created with 12. Interview in L'Express, 24 May 1962. download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema ness becomes ultimate powers, incomparably stronger than the power of the characters' desire for love. Other Genres and Recurrent Plot Elements Through the analysis of intellectual melodrama I tried to show that genres are not missing entirely from modern cinema, and that modernism is not merely destructive with regard to formal schemes. Other genres or recurrent formal schemes can be found in modern cinema as well. We may consider forms as constitutive of genres if they recur regularly enough and during a long enough time within the late-modern period. I will examine six such elements or forms here as most characteristic of modern genres: investigation, wandering, mental journey, closed-situation drama, reflexive genre parody, and the film essay. 99 Investigation Modernist narratives are typically constructed on delaying or entirely suppressing solutions in the plot. What makes crime and mystery attractive for modern narratives is that the solution of crime and mystery plots is delayed almost always by a mental or psychological act: investigation. Clarifying a situation, exploring an environment is the strongest common ground of crime/mystery films and modernist narrative. What makes a modern investigation film different from a classical one is the lack of focus on finding the solution to the initial problem. This occurs either because no solution exists, or because other equally or more important problems arise. As a general rule we can say that modern investigation narratives are descriptive rather than problem-solving. In modernist cinema investigation is separated from its result. When following an investigation, the viewer of a modern film is puzzled above all by the mental process and by the different elements surrounding the story rather than by the solution whatever the motive of the investigation maybe. Without the motives of crime or mystery, investigation becomes a simple search, whose motivation can be virtually anything. The most characteristic modern search motive is search for mental content: a memory, a mental state, or for the reason for a mental state (e.g., sadness, anxiety, mental illness). There are several methods modern investigation films may use to divert the viewer's attention from looking for the solution. One is diverting the focus of attention from the init?aTpro^len?Vhis is a characteristic of film noir (hi nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE narratives, which I will discuss below. A similar shift takes place in Antonio-ni's L'avventura. The majority of the story follows the search for the lost girl. But she is never found. The search loses step by step its original goal, and by the end the two characters pursuing the investigation find that their emotions for the lost girl have vanished as well. There are two story lines in the film, but the one dealing with the mystery of the lost girl is not developed at all. Antonioni develops only the emotional story of the two protagonists. The function of the mysterious events of the girl's disappearance is only to give momentum to the other story line. That is as far as modern investigation film can go in eliminating mystery and crime from the plot. Crossing this line, that is, eliminating crime or mystery entirely, means for Antonioni shifting genres from investigation to melodrama. In Godard's Breathless (made in the same year) one can observe the transition between classical film noir and modern investigation film. Like in a 100 classical film noir, the plot of Breathless couples a crime story with a love story, which proves to be destructive for the hero. Yet while the two story lines develop in parallel, they are much more isolated from each other than in a traditional film noir. The most important difference is that the story lines are not motivating each other. Michel does not commit the crime because of Patricia, and Patricia learns after their relationship has begun that Michel is a gangster, even a killer. Michel tries to make a "film noir" out of their story by involving her in his criminal activities (car thefts, escaping the police), but she is supportive of the crime story only for a very short time. Then she changes her mind and calls the police. She is fatal for Michel not because she drives him to crime, like in a traditional film noir, but because she does not love Michel enough to be involved in crime for him. Michel falls because crime and love cannot interact in his story; because his story is not a film noir. Each story line is simple and banal without the other, they do not make sense alone: killing the policeman is an entirely purposeless action gra-tuite; and Patricia is a pretty but rather common girl who just cannot make up her mind. What makes sense to the film is that these two stories are put together, and that Godard pretends to give some chance to their merging. Another solution of modern investigation film is to conceal the goal of the investigation. The best example is Jancsd's The Round-Up (1966). We follow a long and complicated investigation, the goal of which is unclear and seems to change at every turn. We do not know where the orders come from and do not understand the logic behind the orders. We assume the different steps fit in a logical order and that the closure of the story is a logical outcome of the investigation, whose ultimate goal is revealed, but in fact this is not the case. The whole downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema 101 Fig. 8. Crime and love story: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, i960). Copyright Raymond Cauchetier, Paris. tives and turning them one against the other is not necessary for the final result. Logic and rationality are just mystified surfaces in this world of self-contained violence and repression. Yet another solution in modern investigation films is to widen the scope of the research so that the initial problem to be solved turns out to be but a single aspect of a complexof1 f?rotiems that has no simple solution. An {A! nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE example of this solution is Bertolucci's first film, The Grim Reaper. Even though the police find the murderer, at the end we discover that this particular case is only one of many potential other cases to come and that the fundamental problem is not solved by solving this single case. Wandering/Travel Very often search or investigation incites the protagonist to move around in the world. But moving around or traveling may be also an independent narrative motive in modern cinema. In the investigation/search genre, even if the questions are not answered or the mystery is not clarified, still there are specific questions that act as the starting point of the narrative. In the travel or picaresque form the exploration of the environment is not started by a well-defined question that the protagonist must answer. It starts out of a 102 situation that makes the protagonist travel or wander around. If the investigation film goes back to film noir, this type inherits its narrative form from neorealism. The hero(s) in this genre travels around in the world most often with no specific goal. In most cases the motive for wandering is not to arrive somewhere or to find something but to leave a place or to escape. The primary narrative purpose of this genre is not to get the protagonist somewhere, but to explore the protagonist's world with the help of a constantly changing environment. In his early films Truffaut was particularly keen on this form: the protagonist in The 400 Blows (1959) is always on the move and the film ends with Antoine's escape. Godard makes two exemplary works in this genre: Pierrot lefou, where Ferdinand escapes his petty bourgeois family, and Week-end, where a couple who start out wanting to commit a murder end up fleeing the nightmare of a weekend. Tarkovsky's masterpiece, Andrei Ruhlev, in its own way also belongs to this genre even if the actual physical moving from place to place is not represented in the film. However, in later Tarkovsky films the presence of the travel theme is more explicit. Altogether four of his seven films—Andrei Ruhlev, Solaris (1972), Stalker (1979) and Nostalghia (1983)—are made in the wandering or travel genre. The travel genre became very popular especially during the second period of modernism, and this was the genre that had the most influence on the renewal of American cinema at the turn of the 1960S-1970S. The American version of the travel genre is known as the road movie, staging stories based on traveling by car or motorcycle across vast distances, living a life of freedom and independence. During the last phase of European modernism the travel genre was already almost entirely downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema movies, like in Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities (1974), false Movement (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976) or in Antonioni's Profession: Reporter (1975). The Mental Journey Travel means first of all physical dislocation, but in modernism a special variant of this genre was developed in which travel takes place not in the physical world but in a person's mind. The literary equivalent of this genre is modern literature's well-known "stream of consciousness" narrative form initiated by Marcel Proust and radicalized by James Joyce. The basic technique of this narrative form is the extension of short periods of time to vast layers of past or imaginary time. Images of memory or imagination were widely used in all periods of film history. And the narrative form known as "embedded narratives," which consists of staging a character's narrative, is another very old narrative device. The modernist time-travel form differs 103 from traditional forms of representing past memories and imagination in that the different time layers usually overlap and are difficult to distinguish from one another, which means that the connections within the narrative between the layers is blurred. Themes and motives rather than rational time-space relations link them together. In the mental journey genre, flashbacks and pictures of imagination are not tools to help viewers better understand a narrative. If the goal of the travel genre is to explore the physical and social environment of one or several characters, the purpose of a mental journey film is to explore the "mental environment" of one or several characters. An early version of the mental journey form can be found in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957). One-third of the film's playing time consists of scenes of memories and dreamlike fantasy that do not constitute a coherent narrative frame. Although it is never unclear in which mental frame a given scene takes place, and reality, memory, and dream are well distinguished on the narrative level, yet the time frame of the imaginary scenes are made uncertain by the simple fact that the protagonist appears as an old man in these scenes supposedly taking place some fifty years earlier. He is not only a passive observer: other characters talk to him as if to ayoung man of their times. What we see here is a contemporary mental representation of the past, a sort of dialogue with the past or an interpretation of the past. The past is evoked not the way it was but the way it is viewed from the perspective of the present. This is symbolized by one of the dream scenes where the main character's young love from fifty years earlier holds a mirror in front of his face and the rSection^^that of an old man. This is how the (H) nitroPDFprofessional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE protagonist's car trip to Lundt becomes simultaneously a mental trip into his unconscious where anxiety, bad conscience, and painful and cherished memories of his youth produce images in a way to disclose the deepest roots of the problems he must face in the present. Not much later, in 1959 Alain Resnais gave a great momentum to the theme of mental journey with his Hiroshima, My Love where memory and fantasy were not just auxiliary elements to a linear plot, but became the central motives of the narrative. In his later films, Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel, Resnais radicalized this procedure by merging the narrative process with memories and fantasy. In the meantime Marienbad collaborator Alain Robbe-Grillet started making his own films with the same narrative method. Thus, from the early 1960s on, the theme of the mental journey became a genre. Imaginary sequences or mental images occur frequently in modern films, but imagination or remembering is rarely chosen as central 104 themes even in the modernist period. The main representatives of this genre are, not surprisingly, the nouveau roman directors: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and as an exception, Tarkovsky The idea that "writing" is the central element of a novel is directly represented in their films by the fact that in each of these films the central topic is someone's telling a narrative that is, most of the time, incoherent both logically and chronologically. Fig. 9. Journey to the past: VictgrS^grymir^f^iW Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, r957)- # ff nitro professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema Fig. 10. Journey to a phantasy world: The Saragassa Manuscript (Woijczech Has, 1964). The narrative about past or imaginary events is represented through the meanderings of memories, imagination, or lies. And so the film's narrative becomes directly identified with that process. As the mental journey form is in fact a special case of the picaresque 105 genre, in which the travel takes place in a mental universe, it seems quite natural that the two forms are sometimes difficult to distinguish. In his most peculiar film, The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), Wojciech Has makes it quite difficult to decipher which parts of the incredible and fairy-tale-like adventures of his hero are the product of his delirious state of mind and which parts take place in his picaresque adventures. Last Year at Marienbad: The Ambiguity of Narration The early Resnais films show that in fact the mental journey genre has very similar principles to those of the Freudian psychoanalytic technique. All three films focus on the psychological impact that evoking past traumatic events have on the present. In all of these stories a past trauma has to be uncovered, remembered, and lived through again in order to get rid of it. But Hiroshima, My Love is the only one among the three where the function of past memory is clear in the story. The film starts with questioning the woman's experiences about what happened in Hiroshima, since she was not there at the time of the tragedy. She only saw the events on film or the traces of them later on. By contrast, there is no doubt about what happened in Nev-ers, of which she had a real-life experience. Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel are special cases because the factual status of the past event is made uncertain in them and is subject to mental manipulation by the characters. Although Muriel looks more complicated and complex both structurally and visually, Marienbad is more radical in approaching the limits of tn'eB|enre1WB*oth films' narratives are based on Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER FIVE hiding and blurring the characters' identity and past. In Muriel there are three characters who have known each other in the past and have uncomfortable memories about it. The characters evoke different elements of the past, and these elements are questioned or refuted by others. In Muriel it is clear from the beginning that the characters will lie about their past and present, but the fact that there existed a common past about which they have different stories remains unquestioned throughout the film. It is here that Last Year at Marienbad is more radical, since the mere existence of the common past is rendered uncertain in the story. Here, even the "past" and the "trauma" are created by the mere textual process of the narrative, which causes uncertainty to reign over each and every element of the narrative. Past and present are not only indiscernible, but their reality remains a mystery throughout the film. One cannot speak of a relationship between past and present, because the two exist in the same time 106 span. The film's narrative process resembles hypnosis or persuasion13 rather than psychoanalysis. It was Resnais's and Robbe-Grillet's intention to create a narrative behind which no straight and unambiguous storyboard can be constructed.14 They succeeded in doing so with regard to the continuity between past and present: no one can reconstruct the "real" chronology of the events in the film any more than the degree of reality of many scenes (whether real or imaginary). The "past" event that is supposed to have an impact on the present is probably an invention of the protagonist, named X, a product of "the imagination that pretends to be memory."15 However, as a narrative, the past event can influence the present as though it were in fact real memory: the woman finally leaves the castle with him. This is the only chronologically coherent fact in the story: it is predicted by the character, named M, in the future tense; we see it happening, and X narrates it in past tense. For the woman to leave, it is necessary that X convince her that to leave with him has been a promise made by her in the past, as if remembering was the only thing that could give sense to her desire to leave. Without a past, desires of the present, hence acts of the future, have no legitimacy. 13. "If we accept Truffaut's idea: 'It should be possible to summarize every film in one word,' I want this to be told: 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad or persuasion.'" André S. Lab-arthe and Jacques Rivette, "Entretien avec Alain Resnais et Alain Robbe-Grillet," Cahiers du cinema 123 (September 1961): 4. 14. Resnais repeats the nouveau roman idea about the omnipotence of the narrative process: "There is no reality outside of the film, the only time is the time of the film ... The objects do not exist outside of the narrative created by the novel." Cited in Robert Benay-oun, AlainResnais: Arpenteur detimatúncáreJígris: Stock/Cinema, 1980), 105. 15. Marion Denis, he Soir, 22 December 1961. downlead the free trial online at nitropcrf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema But this means that the past is only an accessory; it is not an autonomous dimension, it is a construction of wishes and desires. The past is dependent on present desires, in other words, it takes place in the present, and memories are not only evoked but also created in the present by a narrative that makes some fictitious events appear as taking place in the past. The only role past plays in this game is to give memories a name, to provide a story that can be continued in the present and in the future. Past is represented in this film as pure invention or convention, as M explains, relating to the eighteenth-century sculptures representing Charles III in antique robes. The merit of Last Year at Marienbad is that it not only blurs the boundaries between past and present, between reality and fantasy, but simply cancels out time, and contracts everything into one single narrative surface. "Time has no importance," says X at one point. In fact, the only thing that exists in the dimension of time in the story is the narration itself. All through the film the past tense of X's narrative refers to some past; a real or imaginary "last 107 year" or "the first encounter," and present tense refers to the supposed present time of the narration, "this year" or "the second encounter." But after the scene where M shoots his wife, the tenses of X's narrative suddenly change. When he says offscreen, "No, don't say that it was by force!" he clearly refers to the time that so far has been the time of the narration. From this point on, past tense refers not to "last year" but to the supposed present of the narrative. X does not recount in past tense any longer what happened last year, but what happens right now, in the present or in the future: the woman fleeing with him. The narrative act takes a step forward in time, it leaves the story behind as if there were yet another present tense in which narration continues. The events cannot catch up with the narrative act, because everything that happens becomes a past relative to the narration, which is to say that, strictly speaking, only narration has a story developing in time. Only narration has an arrangement in time, not the story it recounts. What happens does not happen in the story, it happens in the narrative act. This can be well seen where M shoots his wife. After that scene X says, "No, this is not a good ending. I want you alive." Then we see the woman alive again, and now she is ready to leave with X. It is the narrator who makes her be killed, and then changes his mind and makes up another ending he prefers to the first one. That is why there is no puzzle in Last Year at Marienbad. Traveling in time is not real in the film. In a way Resnais cheats the viewer by making her believe that it is important to try to distinguish between past and present and to arrange the logical chain of events. But in reality, rational problem solving does not help one uiSarstlno'tn'e film, because what is narrated in Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE Fig. ii. "Time has no importance": Delphine Seyrig and Sacha Pitoeff in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961). one way or another is not what happened prior to the narration. That makes M stand for an alert to the viewer. M plays a game in the film, the rules of including X. But he knows that he cannot win against X in the big game: the struggle for the woman. X does not fight with logical weapons: he talks and persuades. Narration and problem solving serve as opposites in the film, and if there is a clear statement in the film, it is that narration is not certain knowledge about facts or about "rules of a game," but rather nothing more than emotional persuasion. The film is about the irrational effects of storytelling. Only narration has the power of time, that is, the power to set in motion things immobilized by the logic of conventions and stereotypes. These films nevertheless set the rules for a genre. Typically, in a modern mental journey film the different associations are ambiguously anchored in one character. Often the viewer does not know whose imagination or memory is being represented. In Tarkovsky's Childhood of Ivan (1962) the narrative is from time to time interrupted by scenes that can be interpreted throughout the film as Ivan's dreams or memories. But the very last scene does not fit into this pattern since we know that Ivan is already dead. The fantasy layer of the film is now disconnected from its subjective anchor; the fictitious mediator of the imaginary sequences is eliminated, and the film text itself is meant to become a vehicle for mental associations. In other cases the imagining subject is unambiguous, but the level of reality of the events are not. In a short film by Robert Enrico, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962), we follow a man who falls into a deep creek from a bridge just seconds before his execution. For the whole twenty minutes the viewer is certain to follow his way to liberty. It is only at the end that it becomes clear that what we saw was his last-minute inner visionary journey extended to half an hour, back 108 which only he knows, so he wins at every occasion and against everybody to his childhood. downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema Alain Robbe-Grillet's early films are the most radical cases of narrative ambiguity. In the first film he directed, The Immortal (1963), the contradictions of the story can only be explained if we suppose that all that we see is the imagination of the protagonist, as told by the female character: "All this is your imagination." Robbe-Grillet himself seconds this: "In fact, much more than in Marienbad, in The Immortal everything takes place in the character's mind. Therefore, he is, in a way, superfluous to the image."16 But in this case the film has no narrative situation whatsoever, since the main character is not the narrator of the story, like in Marienbad, and at the end of the story he dies. The last image of the film is the picture of the laughing woman who is supposed to be dead already. As a matter of fact, Robbe-Grillet had a determined narrative situation in mind when writing the script: "In L'immortelle, in particular, the discourse originates from the character in the room who is thinking."17 If this is the case, one thing is sure: this situation is not distinguished in any way in the film other than by reappearing several times.18 109 Furthermore, we do not know anything about this situation, much less, for that matter, than about the imaginary scenes, not the least whether or not it is itself imaginary. The Immortal is driven to the limits of narrative coherence, and apparently that is why Roland Barthes reprimanded its auteur: he believed that the film is beyond ambiguity; it is simply confusing.19 In Trans-Europ-Express (1966) there is ambiguity as well around the degree of reality of some of the scenes. We follow the construction of a storyboard told by a film director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) traveling on a train, and see the scenes of the film he is making up. However, certain elements that take place in the imaginary sequences, namely, details of the sex life of the protagonist, are somehow not taken into consideration by the director; 16. Anthony N. Fragola and Roch C. Smith, The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with AlainRobbe-Grillet onHisFilms (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 27. 17. Fragola and Smith, EroticDream Machine, 29. 18. Robbe-Grillet claims that originally he wanted the room scenes to be distinguished by lighting, which did not happen because the cameraman did not dare to light the room darkly: "The room must be dark, and the outside world should be very bright because what unfolds in his imagination lies beyond the confines of his room. Later, when I objected to this image to the cinematographer, he calmly responded that he was afraid that people would have thought that I did not know how to light the room." Fragola and Smith, Erotic Dream Machine, 29. 19. "In fact Robbe-Grillet does not kill the meaning at all, he just makes it confusing, he thinks that to kill the meaning it i& enquejj to,niake it confusing." Delahaye and Rivette, "Entretien avec Roland Barthes," Cahiers du cinema 147 (September 196^): 30. (HI nitroPDFprofessional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER FIVE they have no function whatsoever in the general plot yet they happen right before our eyes. While the auteur seems to be busy with the logical construction of the plot, the main character is only interested in satisfying his violent sexual instincts. He starts having an autonomous life to the point that, at the end, he leaves the train with one of the imaginary characters of the story, who is supposed to be already dead according to the scenario. His next film, The Man Who Lies (1968), is even more ambiguous. Neither the identity of the main character (who pretends to be someone else in the story and who at some point in the film claims to be just an actor rehearsing a role), nor the coherence of the events in the story is certain. The same events are repeated in different and contradictory ways; the chronology of the events is blurred, and the fact that the main character wears the same suit in the contemporary scenes and in the scenes set twenty years before, suggests that what we see is not a story but a narrative of someone of whom we know 110 nothing certain. He comes into being exclusively through his own narrative; and if this narrative is contradictory, so is his existence. This film, which holds the nouveau roman banner higher than any film before it—"story is nothing, narration is everything"—clearly points toward the total destruction of principles of traditional storytelling, coherence of time and space, identity of the characters, and applies the principles of serialism inherited from contemporary music. It is in fact in Robbe-Grillet's next film, Eden and After (1971), where composition according to musical series entirely replaces linear topochronolog-ical structure, and consequently, as Robbe-Grillet put it, this film becomes "as hostile as possible to the idea of a narrative."20 Whereas earlier Robbe-Grillet films, including Last Year at Marienhad, fit into the mental journey genre since narration is anchored in them in one specific character (even if in a self-contradictory way), this film crosses the border of traditional or modern genres as these are based on linear topochronological logic. There is no distinguished narrative point of view in Eden and After, which made it the first full-length feature film in the mainstream commercial circuit that is fully constructed upon a serial system known at that time only among the avant-garde cinema.21 20. See Francois Jost, "La genese d'un film," video interview by Cellule d'animation culturelle du ministere des relations exterieures et U.A.V. de l'Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud, 1982. 21. Robbe-Grillet's experimental intentions were clear in this case. He made two films at the same time using the same footage. The other film was called N Took the Dice and was made for television release. Robbe-Grillet wanted to apply the two main constructing Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema 111 Fig. 12. The imaginary hero: Jean-Louis Trintignant in Trans-Europ-Express (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966). All modern mental journey genre films are self-reflexive to some extent, because the ultimate narrative anchor is the film itself as a narrative medium. In Resnais's films and in The Immortal the filmmaking situation is implicit, and the act of narration is the basis of reflexivity. In other films, such as Trans-Europ-Express and Fellini's 8 1/2, the filmmaking situation is explicit. The most complex case of reflexivity of the mental journey genre in the modern period is Tarkovsky's Mirror (1974). It can be considered as a summary of different techniques introduced by former mental journey films, and I will return to this below. Closed-Situation Drama Investigation/travel genres are forms of extensive description. The mental journey is intensive in space but extensive in time: the characters remain in the same, often very restrictive, space segment while mentally they fly over different layers of past, present, and eventually future. There is a dramatic form in modern cinema that is intensive in time as well as in space: this principles of contemporary music in each of the versions respectively: serial construction in Eden and After and aleatoric construction in the other one. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE Fig. 13. Robbe-Grillet in his own film as he is making up the story of Trans-Europ-Express. will be called the closed-situation drama. Here, the characters are closed in a limited space segment (a room, a boat, a train, a house) and live through 112 a dramatic situation without stepping outside of it. The spreading of this form in modern cinema is fundamentally due to the theatrical influence in the late 1940s and 1950s, and more specifically to the influence of existentialist drama. Because it is based upon a classical theatrical principle (unity of space and time) the form itself can be found very often in silent cinema too, but the use of this form is characteristically different in modern films. This form may be used simply to provide a starting point for telling different stories, for example, through the narration of the characters. In this case the closed situation is only a narrative framework of traditional storytelling. In one of Bergman's early films, Secrets of Women (1952), four women are awaiting their husbands in a country house. But this situation provides only a frame for the different stories they tell about their marriages. The film's story is not constructed by their interactions and reactions to their actual situation. It consists rather of a series of narratives put side by side and compared to each other very much in a way like the narrative of Rashomon from the same period. But we can find such constructions much later, too, for example in Pierre Kast's Le bel age (1959), where a hunting scene provides the frame for different narratives recounted by the characters. The specificity of modern closed-situation drama by contrast is to build up a narrative originated by the situation of isolation itself. The characters do not necessarily reflect on the fact of isolation, but their reactions to each other are a result of that situation and could not be provoked otherwise. The use of closed-situation dramas started in the 1950s, not in Europe but in America by two figures who are both closely associated with modern cinema. One of them was Hitchcock, who in his Rope (1948) created the first "experimental" case of this genre? tne other was Sidney Lumet, whose 12 Angry Ml nitro professional downlead the ■free trial online at nftropdteom/profeBEfonal Genre in Modern Cinema Men (1957) is the first perfect example of a story in which the isolated situation itself becomes an important factor regarding the characters' behavior. It was however modern cinema that explored all the possibilities of this dramatic form. We can consider it therefore a genuine modernist form, which flourished during the modern period and by which films may belong to the modernist movement even if no other stylistic or narrative modernism and no philosophical topics fashionable in modern art can be found in them. Closed-situation dramas are all model cases of situations concerning existential limits, like in psychological experiencing, where human actions and reactions are provoked in such a way that they are not related to real-life situations or stories. Because it is the closed situation that provides the dramatic starting point, it must be unambiguous; therefore no mental journey film can be a closed-situation drama at the same time even if the situation itself appears to be unrealistic. Buhuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) is the most powerful example of 113 this genre in the early period of late modern cinema. The only thing that brings the characters together is precisely the unlikely fact that they simply cannot leave a certain room. The pure and abstract fact of sequestration with no intelligible reason is the topic of the film. The characters are forced to be together, to cooperate and to communicate with each other against their will, and for no discernable reason. They are trapped in a situation that is new for them all and for which they cannot find an explanation, so they cannot find a way out. This film does not even try to find a plausible pretext for creating the closed situation like all other films of this kind. The most usual situation in this type of film is a random encounter of people in a closed space (such as a train, a prison, a hotel) from where they cannot leave before solving a problem together. The drama springs from the fact of being constrained to cooperate, and the conflict is usually caused by the inappro-priateness of human contacts that slows down or endangers the solution of the situation. Although stylistically Buhuel's film is rather classical, the absurdity of the situation and the surrealism in some scenes make it part of the modernist movement. Moreover, it became the model of other absurd surrealist closed-situation dramas, for example Jan Nemec's A Report on the Party and the Guests (1966). Other important closed-situation dramas include Jerzy Kawalerowicz's TheNight Train (1959), Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water (1962); Miklds Janc-sd's TheRound-Up (1965), Andras Kovacs's ColdDays (1966); Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Persona (1966), and Rite (1969); Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (myi)and The Bitter Tears ofPetra von Kant (1972); and Marco Ferreri's Liza'ffi^anala grande bouffe (m) nitro professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Fig. 14. A closed-situation drama: The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962) Satire/Genre Parody Satire and genre parody are reflexive forms by nature. Satire involves an exaggerated approach to a subject matter where the exaggeration results not in sublime or emotional effectsbut in degradation by ridiculousness. The double reflection cause^lsy exaggeration and ridiculousness ensures asea Dy exaggeration ana naicjuousness ensures Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcffeom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema satire's reflexive character. The genre parody is a form of satire where the subject matter that suffers ridiculous exaggeration is a set of conventions of a genre. In modern cinema mainly popular genres are held up to ridicule in genre parodies. Reflexivity is obviously very direct in the case of genre parody. Parodying filmmaking as an activity was a favorite subject even in the very early days of film. But we do not have too many cases of film genre parodies before the late modern era. Genres became a focus for parodies only from the late 1950s on, and making parodies became a real trend in the second half of the 1960s. This phenomenon is certainly due to the sharp opposition between art cinema and entertainment cinema taking shape during the late modern era, as well as modernism's attempt to question the validity or the unambiguous character of narration. Genre parody is one of the modern forms that was very popular in non-European cinema in this period as well. A remarkable Japanese genre parody was made by Kurosawa in Sanjuro 115 (1962). This film parodies the conventions of samurai films, the kind that Kurosawa himself had also made. His leading actor, Toshiro Mifune, acts in a quite exaggerated way, and the film makes fun of all conventional gestures, situations, and plot shifts of the genre. It is also remarkable that the film has very few fight scenes and especially that the two main enemies do not meet until the end of the film, when their personal duel takes only a few seconds. They face each other for a long time immobile, after which Sanjuro kills his enemy with a single slash of the sword. This short finale in fact corresponds to the Western tradition, where the finale duel consists mostly of one or two final gunshots. Kurosawa's genre parody made a considerable step toward merging two popular traditions: the western and the samurai film. The earliest modern genre parodies include Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, made in 1959, a satirical application of film noir elements. Godard also made a genre parody, Alphaville (1965). He used the character of Lemmy Caution, played by Eddie Constantine, who was very popular in the early 1950s for his light and playful gangster movies, themselves predecessors in many ways of the James Bond series. Alphaville was conceived as another Lemmy Caution movie without the usual gags and adventures and with Lemmy Caution ten years older, serious, and philosophical.22 Alphaville is definitely not a funny film, but still a parody of the hypertechnologized world of the modern gangster and science fiction films. Jacques Demy's The 22. Godard used the character^of L|mm^,(^aution played by Eddie Constantine one more time in his film Allemagne neuf-zero (1990). n nitroPDrprofessional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER FIVE Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) can also be considered a parody of the fashionable American musicals of the time. Genre parodies and satires began to boom in modern cinema after 1964. The geographical distribution of European production of satires is however very uneven. Apparently it became more popular in national film cultures where the literary tradition of satire was already strong, which made France, Czechoslovakia, and England the leading producers of satires and parodies. This genre was eliminated from Czechoslovakian film production following the Soviet military invasion of the country in 1968 but reappeared in a very similar style in Hungarian cinema in the first half of the 1970s. Genre parodies aimed essentially at popular genres like historical adventure films such as westerns, like in Oldřich Lipský's Limonádě Joe (1964), historical costume adventure films like Richardson's Tom Jones (1963), or samurai films such as the Kurosawa film mentioned above; gangster movies 116 such as Varda's The Creatures (1966), and thrillers like Elio Petri's The Tenth Victim (1965). Satires were mainly directed at political regimes like in Milos Forman's The Firemen's Ball (1967), Makavejev's W.R.— Mysteries of the Organism (1971), Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973), or cultural customs and ways of life such as Louis Malle's Zazie in the Subway (i960), and its Hungarian counterpart, Jánoš Rózsa and Ferenc Kardos's Children's Sicknesses (1965); Soviet director Elem Klimov's Welcome (1964); An Unusual Exhibition by Georgian Eldar Shengelaya (1968); British director Tony Richardson's film made in the United States, The Loved One (1965), Yugoslavian director Makavejev's film made in Canada, Sweet Movie (1974), Milos Forman's first two films, Black Peter (1963) and The Loves of a Blonde (1965), as well as his first American feature, Taking Off (1971). The Film Essay This genre is also a typically modernist invention. As uncertain as this category may seem, it has an unquestioned validity in this period of art cinema. The idea that filmmaking should be like essay writing was born in the late 1940s by Astruc. It proposed a film structure where images are linked together by abstract logic of thought rather than by conventions of topochro-nological storytelling. The film essay had a different ideal of nonnarrative cinema than the avant-garde. Astruc did not mean to join the abstract cinema movement or the surrealist avant-garde. He wanted cinema to reach the intellectual level of philosophical essay writing. And since in the modern period we find quite a few cases where the filmmaker's aim was undoubtedly Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Genre in Modern Cinema to contribute with his film to a particular philosophical, political, or ideological debate by making the focus of his film the abstract (mainly verbal) arguments of that specific debate, we can legitimately speak of film essays. The film essay is not an avant-garde film, but it is the most personal genre in the commercial art-film practice. These films may or may not have a coherent storyboard, but whether or not they do, their main goal is to put forward a line of arguments where an eventual story only illustrates one or more theses. Rather than the chronology, it is the conceptual logic of the arguments that rules the construction of the film. Different scenes and events in the film are providing an opportunity for the characters to make their points rather than specific actions. The film essay is a pure late-modern creation; we find no antecedent of it in the early modern period. It is closely related with the auteur idea of making a film on the model of writing a personal essay. Because the film essay was mainly used as a political act by those who made them, which made the film 117 essay a characteristic genre of the political phase of modern film, it is also rare to find film essays in the first period of late modernism. Ever since Astruc raised the idea of essay writing with the camera, the Cahiers critics of the fifties were eager to discover something that reminded them of this kind of filmmaking. Jacques Rivette, for example, saw already in Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1954) the first realization of the film essay: "[N]ow there is Journey to Italy, which with perfect clarity offers to cinema... the possibility of the essay."23 We are not very far from the truth, though if we agree with those who associate this genre with Godard. Godard's most stable and far-reaching influence in modern cinema can be related to his films like My Life to Live (1962), A Married Woman (1964), Masculine-Feminine (1966), and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966). These are his fundamental essays, in which he used cinema verite (self-reflective documentary style) to place his characters in situations where they could make their comments on topics like society, politics, love, sex, and art. Especially in Masculine-Feminine and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, the film's narrative consisted of only loosely connected situations where characters spoke monologues or lengthy, occasionally improvised, dialogues. It is important to emphasize that these were not real cinema verite films. All of them used professional actors who most of the time recited text improvised by Godard himself on location. However, Godard gave to these films a style of a self-re-flective documentary, which became an extremely popular form. Especially 23. Cahiers du cinema 46 (April 1955). Created wiih Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER FIVE My Life to Live had a considerable influence on Alexander Kluge's Yesterday Girl (1966), and on Alain Tanner's The Salamander (1971). The most important followers of the Godardian cinema verite-style film essay include Bernardo Bertolucci, Vilgot Sjoman, Alain Tanner, and Alexander Kluge. Jean-Marie Straub with his Not Reconciled (1965), a dramatized meditation about the possibility of reconciliation between people having opposing experiences and memories about the war in postwar Germany, has made a rather original contribution to the film-essay genre. One of the particularities of the film taken from the Godardian style but brought to an extreme was the discrepancy between the philosophical and poetic style as articulated by the characters and the banality of the situations they were speaking about. Straub replaced the cinema verite style with Bressonian minimalism. Film essays were most popular among directors in some communist countries, for this gave them an opportunity to publicize political ideas 118 that could not be expressed otherwise. In Hungary, Andras Kovacs and Peter Bacsd made films in this genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in Cuba Tomas Gutierrez Alea, with his renowned Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) represents this genre. This film shows all the important characteristics of the genre. After the revolution, when many people left the country, a man decides to stay in Cuba while all his family, including his wife, leaves. He remains alone, and wanders around in Havana aimlessly while in the verbal narration we constantly hear his thoughts about his life, about Cuba, the revolution, the bourgeoisie, sex, war, capitalism. The film abounds in documentary footage, citations of television newscasts scattered among the images about what he is doing. The film is not constructed along a story line even though it includes a side story about a girl who he met on the street, had sex with, and whose family later on tries to coerce him into marrying her. The film finishes not according to dramaturgical rules, but at a point where the director thinks that the concept of underdevelopment as he understands it (mainly in relation to American imperialism and cultural backwardness) is clearly explained. Even though the film essay is constructed by an abstract logic of a line of thought it is not part of the mental journey genre. The goal of the film essay is to build up a system of arguments, not to explore a mental universe. Most of Godard's second-period films starting from 1967 can be listed under this category, but he abandoned cinema verite style as his political message became more radical and focused. Starting with films like Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), La Chinoise (1967), continuing with The Joy of Knowledge (1968), virtually all of his films were codirected with Jean- download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Genre in Modern Cinema Elsewhere (1975) and How Is It Going? (1978), made together with Anne-Marie Mieville. Fellini also made a film essay in 1978, OrchestraRehearsal, in which he expresses his ideas about Italian democracy of the 1970s. The film essay disappeared quite quickly starting from the late 1970s, and virtually the only European director continuing this tradition has been Nanni Moretti, who started his career in the mid-1980s. Created wiih download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional :6: Patterns of Modern Forms Now that we have explored the main principles of narration and genres of modern cinema we can address a more subtle categorization of the form. Referring to Resnais's Hiroshima, Eric Rohmer provided a particularly concise and general formula about how he understood modernism in the cinema: There has not been a profoundly modern cinema yet that has attempted what the cubists did in painting or the Americans in novel writing. That is, reconstructing reality from fragments, and this reconstruction may appear arbitrary or profane.1 Rohmer's formula is a particularly accurate summary of all the important basic principles of the form of modern film. 1. Modernist art has ^fragmented view of reality. 2. The modern artist uses general and abstract principles of composition to reconstruct the coherence of reality. 3. The foundation of this reconstruction is always in its composition an abstract idea. The immediate result of this reconstruction without fail includes an amount of arbitrariness or subjectivity in it, because the form of the work of art refers first to an abstract concept rather than to the reality immediately given to the senses. Therefore, the modern form is always deprived of a certain depth that comes from a common sense of 1. Eric Rohmer, in Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, "Hiroshima, notre amour," Cahiers du cinema 97 (July 1959): 4. Created with download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Patterns of Modern Forms earthly or sacred reality taken seriously and considered as the foundation of all art. In other words, the idea of reality that modern art reflects is always filtered through an abstract concept which it tends to consider more real than empirical reality. 4. The ultimate source of the form of modern art is its own abstract principles rather than empirical reality, which is why to some extent the modern form is always profane and self-reflective. Modern art forms always contain an abstract conception that is meant to mediate between the form and reality. For modernism indeed has a sense of reality, which is a fundamental difference between modern and postmodern. The main tendency in modern cinema's approach to reality is to represent it by surface images that do not refer to an underlying continuous process of development, which is commonly manifested in classical narrative. If the teleological nature of narrative does not provide the sequence of images with a beginning and an end, the surface image of reality always tends to be fragmented and static. The term "static" here means not the lack of motion but the fact that motion has no direction or that it is self-contained or circular. And fragmentation means not a lack of continuity but the fact that the continuous flow of images is not the manifestation of a teleological process. The modern film image is understood more as a standalone (continuous or noncontinuous) fragment than as an organic element of a synthesizing organic process.2 We can say therefore that modernist forms tend to evoke fragmentation rather than continuity of a process; they are analytical rather than synthetic, abstract rather than empirical, subjective rather than objective, self-reflective rather than immediate, and conceptual rather than emotional. These are the most general tendencies that are materialized in very different manners in different modern trends, and these differences are the basis of the different modern forms and styles. There is also a difference regarding the radicalism by which these tendencies are represented in art cinema in the modern era, and so there are a lot of films that we find around the demarcation line between classical and modern art cinema. Late modernism in the cinema was an international art-cinema movement, and wherever it was influential it was adapted to some local cultural tradition. The power of modernism was to integrate so many cultural influ- 2. These two general aspects of the modern film form are closely related in Deleuze's theory of modern cinema. For the relationship between the "pure image of time" and the "crystylline system of images," see Deleuze, The Timelmage. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SIX ences coming not only from national cinemas but also from other forms of national high art or folklore. The diversity of styles in modern cinema is due to the diversity of artistic and cultural references modern films use to construct their forms. The reason why we cannot speak of one single "modernist film style" is just this diversity born from the encounter between the main principles of modern art and the different cultural backgrounds in the cinema. Forms of modernism crisscross the borders of national cinemas. But the forms that become current in a culture in a given period of modernism are very much dependent on the cultural sensibility of a given national cinema. It exceeds the scope of this study as well as my competence to give a thorough explanation of the preferences of specific national cultures regarding modern styles and genres. In later chapters, however, I will try to give an outline of a "geographical" or cultural distribution of the basic forms of modern cinema and leave it to future and more detailed research to an-122 swer the question of what in a given cultural background was receptive to one kind of modernism rather than to another. To describe the main tendencies of modern cinema I will use some general traits related to modernist principles of formal composition. The first distinction will be made between styles based on radically continuous constructions and those based on radically fragmented ones. Primary Formation: Continuity and Discontinuity Whether a film gives a general impression of a continuous process through time-space continuity or rather looks like a discontinuous process of fragmented scenes and images is determined by the fundamental aesthetic texture of a film, and consequently it is part of the most basic choices of a filmmaker. In some periods of film history, this dimension of the film form leaves very little choice to the filmmakers; in other periods a wide variety of ways become "permitted" in both directions. Roughly speaking, the very early period of film history,3 the 1920s and the 1960s, were periods where one could find both highly fragmented and continuous compositions. Rohmer uses cubism to illustrate what he meant by modernism, which succinctly illustrates the fact that modern forms reconstruct reality from 3. As far as early cinema is concerned, I rely on Tom Gunning's article in which he distinguishes four genres of early cinema according to the ways the films handle time-space and narrative continuity. Gunning distinguishes between forms of "continuity," "non-continuity" and "discontinuity." Tom Gunning, "Continuity, Non-continuity Discontinuity: A Theory of Genres in Ea^ FUnis^" in^flriy Cinema, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 86-94. Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf com/profeEEional Patterns of Modern Forms fragments. However, obviously not all of modernism is like cubism. Does this invalidate Rohmer's heuristic conception? I do not think it does; we just have to interpret correctly the concept of fragmentation. Cubism was the style of modern art where fragmentation was the most apparent on the surface, but that does not mean that a fragmented vision of reality cannot be interpreted with regard to other modern styles too, albeit in a different manner. The question is not so much the apparent visual and acoustic fragmentation of the form as the underlying connection or disconnection between the surface of the form and the traditional codes of formal cohesion that dominated European art over the several centuries preceding the appearance of modern art at the end of the nineteenth century. The tonal system in music; the motivation of the plot according to individual psychology in novel writing; and visual verisimilitude composed according to Renaissance perspective in painting are, roughly speaking, the traditional codes that make the surface structure of the form refer to some kind of earthly or transcendental 123 "reality" thereby creating an organic whole of form and content. We speak of modernism in Western art after the nineteenth century to refer to a representation that is not built upon these traditional representation systems evoking an organic vision. When a painting does not represent a scene according to renaissance perspective, when a piece of music is not composed according to the tonal system, when a narrative plot is not motivated by psychological realism, one usually has the impression that these works do not represent the "real world," only a partial vision of it, therefore their forms are abstract. In fact these works use conceptual systems in a similar way as traditional art to create a formal coherence, only these conceptual systems are based on unusual principles, "conceptual inventions" about reality" And when one of these ideas still seems to relate to an important aspect of a traditionally conceived approach to reality, a modernist style or trend crystallizes around it, which may remain ephemeral or become more successful and last for decades. The deepest sense of modernism's fragmented character is the surface structure's disconnectedness from "reality" as conveyed by a traditional 4.1 leave aside the discussion of critical categories such as "beauty," "harmony," and "balance," the lack of which were usually identified with modern art in the common critical practice during most of the twentieth century. I take it for granted that these critical categories are historically and socially based on common aesthetic perception and have a very limited distinctive value in stylistic comparisons. However, in the course of modern art there is a constant tendency of opposing, from time to time, commonly accepted forms representing these critical tgms.^/V^en|his opposition becomes part of the artistic canon after a while, the general perception of "beauty" and "harmony" shifts again. nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SIX logic that is meant to connect empirical surface with an invisible essence of reality. That is why Roland Barthes's already cited idea ("the most immediate criterion of an art work's modernity is that it is not 'psychological' in the traditional sense") could be generalized in spite of its simplicity. If we mean by "psychological" a work of art representing, evoking, or referring to psychological states of mind by means of traditional reference to reality, then Barthes's definition is valid for all forms of modern art. The absence of psychological depth appears differently in different genres, but the common feature is that this absence results not only in a disconnect of the surface from traditional concepts of reality, but also in a disconnect between elements of the surface. The place of the surface elements and their relation with each other is determined in premodern forms by their function in evoking the invisible background of some kind of empirical or spiritual reality. If this general reference is missing, the place of the surface elements 124 become accidental or arbitrary, hence the necessity of an abstract structural concept. This concept maybe required to express the reality of disconnectedness also regarding the relation between the surface elements, but by the same token it may be required to conceal the fundamental fragmented nature of reality represented according to the two basic alternatives of stylistic forms in the cinema: continuity and discontinuity. This dimension of the form is specifically cinematic and has no systematic distinctive value in other arts. This is obviously a result of the temporal and fragmented nature of film technique, that is, the fact that a film is put together with independent fragments of time sequences. Bazin already realized the theoretical importance of the duality of continuity and discontinuity, only he interpreted it as an opposition between the filmmaker's emphasis on representing "reality" and the emphasis on juxtaposing well-composed images. When he wrote his article in the 1950s he really had two characteristic tendencies of artistic use of the cinema in mind: the early avant-garde based on montage on the one hand, and sound art cinema based on continuous and simultaneous recording of sounds and images, on the other. Late modern cinema proved Bazin right in citing this particular duality as a basic dimension of cinema's art form. Only this has nothing to do with an opposition between image and reality. In different ways they both can be forms of visual abstraction as well as forms of representing reality. In other words, continuity and discontinuity are values of film style rather than features of the film's concern for the subject matter. Continuity and discontinuity are commonly measured through narrative. Huge time and space lapses as well as representation of different Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Patterns of Modern Forms Figs. 15-16. Fragmented visual texture: Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966). mental and time dimensions with little or no relationship to one another 125 make a narrative fragmented. In this respect continuity and discontinuity are not dependent on the length of the takes. Frequent cuts and takes of a couple of seconds long do not necessarily make a fragmented structure; just like extremely long takes alone are not necessary for a continuous narrative. However, the audiovisual texture of a film can be also continuous or fragmented regardless of the continuous or disrupted character of the narration. The idea of continuity therefore can be conceived of as a two-dimensional feature of the film form: continuity of the narrative and continuity of the audiovisual texture. These two dimensions provide us with four basic variations of continuous/discontinuous narrative and visual texture. In modernist art cinema we have radical characteristic examples of all four types. Discontinuous narratives with emphasized continuous visual compositions can be illustrated by Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad; a continuous narrative with discontinuous visual texture is characterized by the early films of Godard, such as Breathless, while his later films, such as Week-end or Two or Three Things IKnow About Her, epitomize discontinuous narratives with excessively fragmented audiovisual texture. Continuous narratives with continuous imagery in modernism are best illustrated by the films of Antonioni in the period between 1957 and 1964. Radical narrative discontinuity was very rare before the late modern period. Conscious use of fragmented narrative and/or visual texture characterize the avant-garde of the 1920s and to some extent the form of American film noir in the early 1950s. Some periods in the history of art film can be clearly characterized by the systematic preference of one or the other op- Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nftropdteom/profeBEfonal CHAPTER SIX tion. Roughly speaking, the 1920s' art cinema can be characterized by the use of rather fragmented, montage-based forms, while the thirties, forties, fifties, and the early sixties preferred generally continuous compositions. In some important cases a highly fragmented visual style appeared with modern cinema, and the spread of modernism caused the general trend to change around the mid-sixties to a dominantly fragmented style. This trend lasted until the late seventies, when continuity began to prevail again. In the early nineties the trend changed again, and fragmentation together with montage came into general use once more. We are speaking of fashions rather than of "period styles," which means predominance rather than exclusivity in the occurrence of a given formal specificity. Very important counterexamples may be cited. In the twenties, the films of Jean Epstein or Phil Jutzi are important examples of a nonfrag-mented continuous style. In the mid-fifties Bresson's highly elliptical style 126 goes counter current to the general tendency of continuous composition. During the eighties Peter Greenaway's and Derek Jarman's film styles are atypically fragmented just as the atypically continuous films of Béla Tarr; and Abbas Kiarostami during the nineties. What these counterexamples show is that these basic alternatives are always available, and their choice has a distinctive value within a style or a period. What we can see in the modern period however is a unique phenomenon. Even though the novelty of the sixties as compared to the previous period was the appearance of a fragmented montage-based film style, the presence of the opposite tendency cannot be considered as an exception either like in the pre- and postmodern periods. Both tendencies were represented by equally influential and numerous films. We should rather speak of two equally typical versions of the late modern film form: radical continuity and radical discontinuity. This situation was quite different from that of early modernism. Since montage was by far the most important discovery of modernism in the twenties, radical forms of early modernism in the avant-garde as well as in the commercial art film were created on the discontinuous side. The counterexamples I mentioned cannot be qualified "radical" in their continuity style; they are simply not radically fragmented or not fragmented at all. We cannot find "excessive" use of continuity techniques in early modern cinema while there are a variety of them in late modernism. I call these forms "radical" to emphasize their tendency to go beyond the usual measure of breaking or manifesting continuity in narrative art cinema. In both cases the reason for this stylistic "excess" is to reflect the disconnected, alienated, or one-dimensional character of empirical surface reality. What Andy WarhoílScfaDOUt*o^) art in one of his unusuaUy articu- Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Patterns of Modern Forms lated interviews is a valid characterization of this aspect of modern cinema too: "Pop art just takes the exterior and makes it the interior or takes the interior and makes it exterior."5 Radical discontinuity takes the "interior" (disconnected and fragmented vision of the world) and makes it the "exterior," while radical continuity takes the "exterior" (unarticulated and empty flow of time with no direction) and makes it the "interior." Andy Warhol as a filmmaker provided the most excessive examples of the latter kind of modernism (radical continuity), with his static, long-take real-time films within the avant-garde. But radical continuity was represented in the commercial art-film circuit too. Miklds Jancsd, Andrei Tarkovsky, or early Fassbinder are the main examples of this trend. Similarly the opposite pole, radical discontinuity, has representatives both in the avant-garde and in the commercial art-film circuit. Jack Smith is the blatant example in the first group, and Jean-Luc Godard in the second. As I mentioned above, radical continuity is the result of the same concep- 127 tion about the fragmented nature of the world as articulated by its counterpart, only this fragmentation is expressed by means of a contiguous superficial texture where the elements have accidental, arbitrary connections. Both radical continuity and radical discontinuity can be associated with the distinction Robbe-Grillet made between fictional time and the time of watching or reading, and what Deleuze considered as the essence of modernism: the liberation of time from the logic of dramatic action. There are four directors at the beginning of late modern cinema whose works in this period were the most influential in terms of developing the fundamental alternative versions of radical continuity and radical discontinuity in the modern film form. This does not mean obviously that these four modern directors are to be considered as the only "original" auteurs of modernism. Other original modern forms were created in different styles or genres, but whatever radically continuous or radically fragmented versions came subsequently, I would argue that later forms employed methods first elaborated by one of these four directors. Which is why we can say that the "primary formation" of late modern cinema was carried about by the early works of Bresson (especially A Man Escaped, 1956, and Pickpocket, 1959), Godard (especially Breathless, The Little Soldier, and My Life to Live), Antonioni (especially L'avventura, La notte, Eclipse), and Resnais (Hiroshima, My Love and Last Year at Marienhad). These films can be considered as a sort of foundation of modern cinema as regarding the basic alternatives of the cinematic form in the dimension of continuity and discontinuity, but some of them 5. Andy Warhol, "Rien a perdre," Ca\icrs clu cinema 205 (October 1968): 43. (hi nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/tsrofeEEional CHAPTER SIX were also fundamental initiators of various typical genres of modernism. Antonioni's films were the first manifestations of the modern melodrama, Resnais's films of the mental journey, and Godard's films (especially The Little Soldier and My Life to Live) of the essay film. Radical Continuity In his review of L'avventura, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze put Resnais and An-tonioni side by side: "Hiroshima, My Love and L'avventura introduced what from now on has to be called by its own name: the new cinema."6 Although the two directors differ in many important respects, they belong to modernism by the same virtue. Next to Antonioni, Alain Resnais was the other auteur who was consciously aiming at creating a form where accentuated continuity creates a dimension of time for the film. In his two early films, 128 Resnais created the same immediate temporal surface as the one we find in L'avventura. There are two basic original forms of radical continuity in modern cinema. Both forms are related to specific modern genres. We can even say that these genres were created by these auteurs in their specific versions of radical continuity. One form is represented by continuous and virtually aleatory movements of the characters disconnected from their environment. This is the continuous form of the travel, the investigation, and the melodrama genres. The source of this form was the classical neorealist "traveling" or "wandering film." The other is represented by the continuous way of representing a flow of mental associations through different layers of time and domains of consciousness, in short, the mental journey genre. The source of this form can be found in early modern cinema: in the stories of double consciousness of German expressionism and in the oneiric character of surrealist avant-garde. The difference between the two trends can be found in the way they handle narrative time. The first trend comes out of the neorealist conception of continuity. It is epitomized by the early films of Antonioni and its main characteristics are the use of long takes, very slow development of the plot, which is otherwise classically linear, and extensive representation of scenes where "nothing happens," in other words, temps morts or in Antonioni's phrasing, the time preceding or following action. Although in this trend true and false, imagination and reality are well discernible, 6. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, £Le facteur rl^us et le 113 (November i960): 49. nouveau cinema," Cahiers du cinema downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Patterns of Modern Forms time has a considerable autonomy as slowness and length of takes separate time experience of the film from the events and actions developing in the plot. The main auteurs belonging to this trend include Antonioni, Jancsd, Angelopoulos, Duras, Garrel, Ackerman, Wenders, Schmid, and some films of Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Stalker). The other trend is influencedbynouueau roman and is represented by films of Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Chris Marker Jean Cayrol, some films of Tarkovsky (Childhood of Ivan, The Mirror), or Bertolucci (The Spider's Stratagem). In these films the main narrative technique consists in merging different mental and temporal dimensions so that the transition from one to the other is imperceptible. With respect to both trends it is true that the film constructs a mental structure of experiencing time that is not subjected to the logic of the unfolding of the plot. In both trends the construction of the film is the ultimate reference for the time experience, rather than "reality" at the background of the plot. It is true for both trends that the essential part of what is happening 129 is left to be constructedby the spectator. The spectator's imagination is much more involved in the construction of the story than it is in other trends. Nonetheless, there is an important difference in the role time plays in the two trends. While in the post-neorealist trend the free flux of time helps the viewer to free herself from the constraints of a plot and activate her own mental processes, in the Nouveau roman trend the narrative creates a certain mental construction that leads the viewer's line of thoughts. These films work like a mental labyrinth with no way out. The different solutions for the plot are systematically destroyed as one plot is succeeded by another one until the viewer finds himself with a story that has multiple solutions, which are incompatible with each other. The contradictory nature of past, present, and future is homogenized by the continuous flow of narration, which simply makes passages between them without dissolving the contradictions. Following these narratives the viewer transgresses borders that were conceived as untransgressable. Continuity of narration in the nouveau roman form means a free flow of the narration within temporal and imaginary dimensions, whereas the content of the individual dimensions remains incompatible, in other words, fragmented. Viewing the films of the Antonioni trend by contrast is like watching the same ever-changing substance like fire, water, or sand blowing in a desert, which liberates the mind from the binding of any fixed mental constructions and usual articulation of time.7 As Deleuze suggests, it is like watching time in its pure form. 7. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleujmerpiye^ajfine analysis of this difference by comparing the methods of Robbe-GriUetand Antonioni and by opposing nouveau roman to ft nitro professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SIX Imaginary Time in Last Year at Marienbad Referring to his own Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais said that he wished to make a film for which it did not matter if reel one was projected after reel five, since the only time existing for a film would be the time of the film itself8 This is a very strong statement about the continuity of narrative time, where continuity means basically circularity in which linear reasoning of traditional narration is dissolved into continuously returning, logically disconnected series. In these two early films Resnais's goal was to suspend the flow of linear time for the sake of an almost spatial surface where past, present, reality, and imagination are brought onto the same continuous level, where getting from one dimension to another means a continuous flow. It was especially in Marienbad that Resnais realized that in order to achieve that, he had to emphasize monotony and continuity by stylistic means as 130 well. His taste for long traveling shots was already well known from his earlier short films, especially Toute la memoire du monde (1956) and Night and Fog (!955)> though Hiroshima was not particularly marked by the long camera movement style. In Marienbad by contrast, he spectacularly returned to his long traveling shot style characteristic of his short films. But here, Resnais gave this technique a concrete symbolic meaning. The continuous flow of traveling shots in the endless corridors of the old castle represented a mind traversing different territories of memory and fantasy, until we arrive at a room full of frozen creatures who start to come alive when the voice of the narrator "touches" them. All we see happening in the film is the product of the narrator's mind, including the person appearing as the embodiment of the narrator. Marienbad is the story of the flow of memories and fantasies in a narrator's brain where there is no difference between layers of past, present, reality, and fantasy. Everything and everybody appears here as a creature of the narrator, and there is no distinction between events, Flaubert. "Flaubert's vision is contrary to Robbe-Grillet, and the authenticity of Robbe-Grillet's vision in Antonioni's universe is all the more apparent that his initial effort was to oppose nouveau roman, and he first tried to represent stream of consciousness through the flux of time, which is the cinematic equivalent of the Flaubertian narration." I think Ropars -Wuilleumier is right to oppose Robbe-Grillet and Antonioni, but I do not think that the difference between them has ever disappeared. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, "L'espace et le temps dans l'univers d'Antonioni," Etudes cinematographiques 36-37 (1964): 29. 8. Cited by Benayoun, Alain Resnais, 105. The idea that in the films of Alain Resnais one might as well change the order of the reels emerged probably for the first time in a conversation between the Cahigs cr^tic^s aj^out Hiroshima, My Love, in 1959, Domarchi et al., "Hiroshima, notre amour.'' _ Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcHeom/profeEEional Patterns of Modern Forms places, and individuals having a real existence outside the narrator's mind and those fabricated entirely by him. The only discernible time here is the time of this continuous flow, which is basically the time of the screening. Should the order of the events be altered, the film shortened or expanded, the time of the story nevertheless would remain as real as one of a different film length or reel order. The story of Marienbad is the story of a narration of different fantasies and memories, and as long as the projection of the film is continuous, narration necessarily remains continuous too, as there is no difference between narration and narrated story. Even the occurrence of contradictory versions of the same event does not break continuity as long as it is narrated in the same continuous flow as the rest of the story. When the voice says, "No, I don't want you dead, I want you alive," and then the film goes back to a point where the woman is still alive, and provides another version of the story in which the character named M does not shoot her, even this cannot be taken as a sign of discontinuity, as there 131 is no linear time frame behind the narration related to which this would be a reversion of temporal order. Radical continuity as represented by Hiroshima, and especially by Marienbad, means a free flow of conscious or unconscious contents of a narrative mind the ultimate carrier of which is always the flow of images the spectator is watching. It is precisely the emphasis on continuity that distinguishes this form from nonnarrative films. Continuity and unity in the form called the mental journey genre is assured by the reference to the narrative act, however unique, unusual, or disconnected the flow of scenes and images may seem in it. These films place every event on the same surface where the ultimate plot is none other than the flow of narration. Radical Discontinuity The other trend, radical discontinuity, was started by Bresson and Godard. Both auteurs were highly influential during the sixties and seventies for a variety of films and directors. Godard inspired most of the young directors starting their careers later in the i960, such as Bertolucci, Sjoman, Kluge, and Fassbinder, while Bresson had a considerable impact on Pasolini, Straub, and Schmid. Godard's version of radical discontinuity is more genre-based and tends to inspire most of all the essay genre, while Bresson's discontinuous style is related rather to its highly elliptical narrative technique and the metonymic character of his visual compositions, regardless of the genre in which it is realized. I will discuss Bresson's fragmented style .... , . Created with . , , with relation to his version or minimalism in the next chapter. (hi nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SIX The Fragmented Form according to Godard Godard's discontinuous narrative technique had two sources: one is the condensed character of film noir narratives, the other is cinema verite, from which he created the essay genre. Concerning the audiovisual texture of his films, his most radical innovation was the collage technique (disconnecting the audio and the visual elements from the time-space continuum); together with the self-conscious use of jump cuts that was one of the most common practices among the French new wave directors (Truffaut, or Malle in Zazie in the Subway), and the followers of the new wave taste of playing with time-space continuity (Richardson, Istvan Szabd, Sjoman). His use of jump cuts to increase expressive effects of editing is inherited from Eisenstein's theory and practice of montage. The effect of jump cuts suggests to the viewer that actions are not represented in a film, they are 132 rather created by authorial will, and their pace depends not on how they occur in reality, but what emotional effect the auteur wishes to exercise on the viewer. Again, the jump cut also functions as a narrative device by which events are not told clearly, they are rather evoked. Godard's jump cuts have been extensively analyzed and commented on in film theory over the decades, so there is no need here to recount that.9 Let me take only one short sequence from Breathless in order to make clear what I mean by jump cuts creating emotional effects and replacing narration. In the scene where Michel shoots the policeman the actual action that starts where Michel notices the policeman turning off the road is divided into five shots, and none of them lasts more than two seconds. Michel goes from the front of the car to the door. He reaches in to find the gun (medium shot from his left). Michel's right profile, panning down to his elbow (close up). (Voice shouts:) "Don't move!" Continuing the pan on his lower arm from left to right to the gun. The magazine of the gun, as it turns around, panning down the barrel (extreme close up). (Sound of a shot.) The policemen collapses (medium long shot). 9. Comments on Godard's works and techniques are innumerable. It would be absolutely useless to single out a couple of books or articles. There exists, however, a book of references to all writings on Godard up till 1979, that is, of the period when Godard accomplished his cinematic revolution and introduced his basic techniques, such as the jump cut. Cf. Julia Lesage, Jean-Luc Godard: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979). Created with download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Patterns of Modern Forms The policeman arrives from Michel's left, and after the first shot the camera remains on his right. In other words, the camera, Michel, and the policeman create an axis, and the car is on the right of this axis. As Michel is facing the car from where he pulls out the gun, and we do not see the policeman moving to the other side of the car (which would not be a logical choice anyway, not to mention that there are bushes and trees on that side of the car) the policeman has two physically possible geometrical positions. Either he is on Michel's left or he is at Michel's back. We do not see Michel turning around, nor do we see that his position relative to the camera changes. So, according to the physical directions constructed by the edited sequence, when he shoots, the policeman could not be hit. Yet we see the policeman collapsing in a long shot from a viewpoint that was never introduced in the scene. What we have here is a rapid montage sequence of emblematic images that do not amount to constructing a realistic space in which what is made logical might in fact occur in reality. This sequence does not depict 133 the shooting of the policeman; it rather constructs a series of images the conceptual meaning of which is the killing. The effect of evoking an event that could not occur the way it is represented is the same as in Bresson's Pickpocket, only discontinuity is more striking in this case. Basically, the jump cut became for small-scale scene dramaturgy what episodic narration was for general plot structure. Both techniques serve to liberate narration for the sake of replacing rules of genre and narrative by subjective and conceptual constructions. Both techniques work through cutting an event, a story, or reality into small pieces and then putting them together again by giving them an individual order, structure, and rhythm. And this is exactly what Eric Rohmer in early 1959 meant by modernism when he defined it through the principles of cubism, when Godard was preparing Breathless. Time is created in this way rather than depicted or represented, the ultimate action we see is the act of creation, and the only real time of the film is the time of understanding this creation. The next important aspect of the Godard form is the mosaic or collage-style composition. This style may characterize the narrative structure as well as the visual style but also the relation between the sound track and the image track. This aspect of Godard's style has always been identified as the most fundamental and most spectacular feature since the earliest commentaries on Godard's works. Truffaut recounts that Godard in a single day Godard would read the first and the last pages of as many as forty books. He would watch fifteen minutes from five different films on a single afternoon. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Patterns of Modern Forms (At that time this meant going in and out of five different movie theaters.)10 Fragmented associative character is a quality not only of Godard's film style but also of his whole way of thinking, as one can tell from the way he speaks in his interviews and particularly from his book, Introduction a une veritable histoire du cinema.11 Excessive fragmentation of the form was compensated in most early Godard films by almost constant verbal voice-over commentaries, which increasingly became in his midperiod one of the most important elements of his film form that bound together the fragmented visual and narrative elements. Continuous or fragmented verbal commentaries, most of the time referring to general philosophical ideas rather than to the immediate plot, made some of his films look like theoretical essays illustrated by moving images, where the quality of the visual character of the film was of less relevance than the intellectual content of the text. This highly subjective, fragmented style inspired and encouraged many young people from different 135 intellectual backgrounds to venture into filmmaking, as Godard's films suggested that well-elaborated narrative structure and sophisticated technique were not necessary to make good films. But precisely because this style was founded in his peculiar way of thinking, very few imitations succeeded. The Godard form seemed to be easy to follow but has proven to be very difficult really to replicate. Those directors originally inspired by Godard, who after all found their own original voices, such as Jean-Marie Straub, or Chantal Ackerman, sooner or later dropped the radical fragmented style—Straub later, Ackerman right from the beginning, and their style went into the opposite direction, toward radical continuity.12 In this respect Bernardo Bertolucci's case was very similar as his real originality unfolded when he finally stopped following the fragmented Godard form. The only follower of Godard who continued the fragmented form and still became an original auteur in his own right was Makavej ev. His particular version of the fragmented form consists of putting two or more different and independent stories or even films in an association that exists only on a conceptual level. Makavej ev's W.R.—The Mysteries of the Organism is the most radical example of this form. Not only are there at least three independent layers in one film, but all of them are of different styles and genres. The film conic Cited in Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Seghers, 1963). 11. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction a une veritable histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1980). 12. Still, she made a true "homrna|e |o earhj^odard" in her short film J'aifaimJ'aifroid [I Am Hungry, I Am Cold, 1984). ÉM) nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SIX sists of a conventional documentary, a comedy, and a cinema verite parody sketch that never refer to one another directly and whose plots never meet. There is even a fourth layer of excerpts of old documentaries and scenes from Stalinist films. There is no attempt made by Makavej ev to mix these layers or to connect them in anyway. He preserves the stylistic integrity of each, does not try to create a heterogeneous texture; he rather creates a series of homogeneous texts. He repeats this technique in his famous film, Sweet Movie. Serial Form There is a form of discontinuity that we cannot identify with any of the modern auteurs' styles. This is a form whose visual characteristics of cannot be determined in terms of the organization of visual elements within a pictorial composition, nor in terms of the aesthetic source of these elements, nor 136 in terms of camera movement, lighting, or shot length. Serialism is related to the structural composition of the film rather than with the visual style of the individual sequences, because it is a radical form of narration where the logic of juxtaposition is more important than the interior composition of the images, and it can have a variety of different stylistic elements mixed together. The visual aspect of the serial form derives from the way the elements are mixed rather than from what the elements look like in themselves. It would be very easy to call serial structure a narrative form. In fact, serial composition has to do with the temporal order of the images, just like narrative. However, its logic is contrary to the time-space continuity system of all narrative forms.13 Serial arrangement involves isolating certain types of formal elements from other types and in eliminating the hierarchical relationship between them. Thus, different stylistic layers will obey only their independent inherent logic. Modern art cinema, due to the nature of its institutional characteristics, never reached the level of pure serialism, characteristic of the avant-garde movements of "pure cinema" or the "structural cinema." The idea of serial construction was first developed in modern music. The first film theorist to call attention to a similar serial construction in modern cinema was Noel Burch, but the essential idea goes back to Eisenstein's theory of intellectual montage, according to which the conscious interaction between different levels of signification dialectically constructs the 13. Discussion of the idea of the serial form as different from the topo-chronological system of narrative can be foun^in tl^e \jritj|^gs ofGabor Body See Gabor Body, A vegtelen fee (Budapest: Pesti Szalon, 1996), especially 9-30. download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Patterns of Modern Forms unified meaning of the film. What Burch recognized in modern cinema was a tendency to vary the visual and rhythmic "parameters" of the film's style independently of the narrative.14 Although he repeats several times that the stylistic parameters are "dialectically related" to the narrative, the essence of his finding is precisely the increased independence of different signifying systems rather than their dialectical unity. Thus Burch detected a very important tendency of the modern film form. Burch's notion of a system of stylistic "parameters" independent of the narrative system inspired David Bordwell to construct a film category that is difficult to explain solely by its narrative structure. He named the narrative method of such films "parametric narration." "Parametric" films are those, says Bordwell, where "the film's stylistic system creates patterns distinct/rom the demands of the suzhet system. Film style maybe organized and emphasized to a degree that makes it at least equal in importance to suzhet patterns."15 Burch's underlying and Bordwell's explicit analytical approach make the split between style and 137 narrative salient. But serial composition is not primarily a narrative procedure. Separation of narrative and visual logic is only one form of that kind of analytic composition. Serial composition may be applied to separate series of motives also within the general systems of the narrative or the visual style. What we have here is a sort of "polyphonic" organization of the film's formal texture that consists in creating different series of formal elements running throughout the film independently of whether they have any function with regard to another signifying system. The most important and most current function in the fiction film is naturally the narrative one. In classical narrative cinema, visual style supports narrative clarity, so when in a film the camera does not show the main "theme" as in the Bresson style, or when editing creates a confused sense of time and space like in the early films of Truffaut and Godard, or when we have to watch a scene much longer than it would take for us to understand its narrative substance, as in the films of Antonioni, Ozu, or Tarkovsky, the first impression one has in fact is that style has taken over narrative. However, visual style is never entirely subordinated to narrative, not even in the classical Hollywood cinema. The same story may be told in very different manners and styles. But the freedom of possible stylistic choices in a given period is much more limited for the maker of a popular film than for the maker of an art film especially in the modern period. The popular filmmaker's choice of 14. See Burch, Theory of Film Practice, especially "Repertory of Simple Structures," 51 69 , „ , .Created wiih . . . 15. Bordwell, Narration intheFictionFilm, 275, emphasis in the original. (jn) nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SIX 138 Fig. 18. Successive Slidings of Pleasure (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1974). a particular effect or technique should never cross the limits of clear understanding of the narrative by the average audience, and this understanding is supported by stylistic conventions. As the "film-viewing intelligence" of the general audience is developing, more and more formal solutions and stylistic elements are available for popular film as well. Thus, blurring narrative clarity may also appear in popular filmmaking, as happened in the films of David Lynch in the 1980s, not to mention Quentin Tarantino's films (especially Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction) in which visual style clearly dominates narrative. Separation of visual style and narrative logic appears to be the most conspicuous phenomenon of modern cinema only when compared to classical Hollywood cinema. Within modern cinema independence of style and narrative logic are evident points of departure, and serial composition affects the logic of these systems according to the three dimensions of the film form (sound, image, and time), eliminating the hierarchy among and within them. Serial form therefore is not another kind of narrative form. It is rather an alternative to narrative construction. It is a signifying system that creates its meanings by repetition and variation of elements in given paradigms. The obvious place for serial construction is avant-garde practice, and that , r t Created.wlth ,, , . r, is where one can find its most consistent use. Modern narrative art films can Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Patterns of Modern Forms be regarded as a phenomenon where the avant-garde and commercial art film got very close to one another. As a matter of fact in some cases there is no real ground for making a distinction. Some of Godard's political activist films, such as TheJoy of Knowledge (1968) or The Windfrom theEast (1969), were started as commercial art films but were never released in the commercial circuit just because of their extremely nonnarrative, serial compositions. These films are at the borderline between modern art cinema and avant-garde. One of the first important examples of serial composition in the commercial art film circuit was Resnais's Muriel (1963). While the film's narrative structure is quite ordinary, linear, and easy to understand, Resnais creates a system of image series consisting of short montage sequences of images and sounds interrupting the neighboring narrative scenes. On the one hand the narrative is organized quite conventionally, even the visual style is not extravagant, but on the other hand there is another system of images in the film that has nothing to do with the narrative. We can speak of two differ- 139 ent constructions developing at the same time in the film.16 According to one logic, the film tells the linear story of an encounter of two former lovers many years after their separation. They tell each other stories about their lives. According to the other logic the film questions and refutes the assertions and claims of the characters by diverting the viewer's attention from what is happening with the help of montage sequences of images that do not support the characters' dialogue or acts. The editing "parameter" of the film's style, which does not follow the rules of classical continuity, is not used here to blur narrative meaning; on the contrary, it is by these means that Resnais makes clear the main subject of the narrative, that is, the self-contradictory nature of the characters' communication. One can therefore only agree with Godard when he claims that "I haven't seen a film as simple as this one. It's Simenon."17 A continuous narrative and a serial composition are opposed to one another in Muriel, and together they provide narrative meaning. The serial construction introduced by Muriel can be found in several films made later in the modernist period. Films such as Varda's The Creatures (1967); Hungarian director Karoly Makk's Love (1970) or Cat's Play (1972); Sinhad (1971), by another Hungarian, Zoltan Huszarik; and especially the later modernist period films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Man Who Lies (1968), Eden and After (1971) and Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) or Tarkovsky's Mirror (1974) develop extensively serialism in modern art cinema. 16. For a detailed analysis of Muriel see Claude Bailble, Michel Marie, and Marie-Claire Ropars, Muriel (Paris: Editions GaHjee, 1^7^)'wjy1 17. InExpress, 3 October 1963. M nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism I will distinguish four main styles representing the most important trends that influenced art filmmakers during the late modern period. Not all these tendencies were equally strong or influential in all periods during late modern cinema. As is often the case with matters of art historical categories, one can find only a few emblematic, clear cases of a given paradigm; most of the time we must suffice with mixed or transitory cases. Some of the general forms are not late modern inventions. Minimalism, for example, appeared already in the early modern period. Some of the forms to be discusses may characterize classical films too, like theatrical stylization. What makes the styles genuine ingredients of modernism is their specific manner of depicting the main aesthetic formal principles: abstraction, subjectivity, and reflexivity. Minimalist Styles Minimalism is a systematic reduction of expressive elements in a given form. Minimalism achieves semantic richness by introducing the rule of systematic variation of motives instead of enhancing the expressive power of the motives by multiplying emotional effects of a similar kind. It involves reduction of redundancy as well as eliminating random diversity. Minimalism was characterized during the 1950s in the films of Dreyer, Bresson, Ozu, and Antonioni. But from 1959, stylistic austerity and reduc-tionism became fashionable, and minimalism became the strongest and most influential trend of modern cinema. Even long after modernism's decline in the 1990s some auteurs like Jim Jarmusch, Béla Tarr, Aki Kaurismaki, Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Styles of Modernism Abbas Kiarostami, and at times Takeshi Kitano continue to work according to modernist minimalism. We can discern three main trends within modern minimalist form. The first is epitomized by Robert Bresson's films, and I will call it metonymic minimalism. The second, represented by Antonioni's films between 1957 and 1966, will be called analytical minimalism. The third is what I call expressive minimalism, and its main representative is Ingmar Bergman in his films made between 1961 and 1972. Other major directors who in a given period of their modernist careers developed a more or less characteristic style based on one or more of these forms include Bertolucci, Saura, and Polanski in their debut films, Jerzy Kawalerowicz in his early films, Fassbinder in his 1969-1970 period, Jancsd before the early 1970s, Nemec in the 1960s, Straub in most of his films, Philippe Garrel in his early films, Chantal Ackerman in the 1970s, and Jean-Luc Godard between 1968 and 1975. h1 The Bresson Style Bresson was the first to develop a radically minimalist form in modern cinema. His style became quite self-conscious and was crystallized in his Pickpocket (1959) even though in A Man Escaped, made in 1956, all the main stylistic components that would characterize Bresson's films through the rest of his career were already in place. Contemporary critics reacted immediately to the stylistic maturity of Pickpocket. The critic of Cahiers raised the idea that Pickpocket was nothing but a brilliant stylistic exercise.1 Godard and Doniol-Valcroze contended that Bresson in fact changed his style in this film and that this marked a new period in his career. But Bresson claimed to have made no stylistic changes whatsoever in comparison to his previous film: "I can see neither arrival nor departure in Pickpocket. I am on the right track."2 The minimalism of Bresson's style has three main aspects. One is his extensive use of offscreen space; the second is his highly elliptical narrative style; and the third is a radically dispassionate acting style. It is predominantly because of his use of offscreen space that we name the Bresson-style of minimalism "metonymic," that is, a considerable amount of 1. Jean Wagner, "L'homme derriere l'objet (Pickpocket)," Cahiers du cinema 104 (February i960): 50. 2. Doniol-Valcroze and Godard, "Entretien avec Robert Bresson," 5. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nftropdteom/profeBEfonal CHAPTER SEVEN narrative information is provided, especially by sound effects, from offscreen space that extends just beyond what is in fact visible onscreen. In other words, much of the plot is taking place in spaces not seen but contiguously attached to onscreen space. There are basically two reasons why a filmmaker would use offscreen space in the narrative process. One reason is to enhance dramatic tension, to raise the viewer's curiosity, which curiosity is then satisfied later by showing what was unseen before. The other reason is to reduce information redundancy: part of the narrative information is conveyed only by two channels, not by three: either by time and sight (we see what is happening) or by time and sound (we hear what is happening). In the latter case we speak of minimalist use of offscreen space. Certain events are never seen onscreen, we can only hear the sounds. In the 1950s major predecessors of modernism, Robert Bresson and Carl U2 Theodor Dreyer, were the first to introduce a kind of minimalism based on extensive use of offscreen space that was a result of a radically static composition.3 Bresson later extended his minimalist style in such a way that even the scene that was supposed to be visualized became visually mutilated. In many cases Bresson used medium close-ups whose composition was unclear at the start of the shot. Objects or human bodies are cut off in an unusually nonfunctional manner. In certain cases it is clearly impossible to discern what is shown in the picture. Seconds later, however, something gets into the composition, usually in the middle of it, which finally confers meaning on the rest of the image. In one scene of his Money (1983), for example, Bresson gives a medium close-up of an opening between some vertical metal bars. Then we see the backs of humans from the wrist up to the neck passing through the opening and then quickly moving out of focus. We do not see who these people are and where they are going. A few seconds later, someone steps into the picture, almost covering the whole view, locks the opening and disappears—thereby disclosing in a close-up the big lock of the prison door now in full view. It is only then that we understand what we have seen before. This is an extreme reduction of narrative redundancy in the image, however no narrative information is withheld in any way, but only a part of the visual composition supports this information. The rest of these compositions consist of almost abstract visual elements. Bresson does not change shot length nor does he move the 3. Paul Schräder called it the "transcendental style." See Paul Schräder, Transcendental downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism camera to increase visual redundancy and enhance narrative clarity The only way he emphasizes narrative information in the image is to place the most important visual element in the middle of an unstructured and partial composition. Visually "mutilated" images go together in Bresson's film with a highly elliptical narrative technique. He uses a sort of disrupted narrative working with considerable hiatuses. His peculiar procedure was to construct his Craatoa with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN scenes in such a way as to separate narrative construction from dramatic motivation. This involves showing only the most substantial part of the action. He cuts off preparatory or elaborating parts in scene construction and gives very little verbal explanation. This kind of dramatic construction was already partly present in his previous film, Diary of a Country Priest. The transitional character of this film is clearly indicated by two things. On the one hand, most of the scenes are extremely short, running under two minutes, like in a silent film, and dialogues are reduced to the minimum necessary for conveying the core information of the scene. On the other hand, there are some unusually long dialogue scenes, like the one with the countess and the priest, which runs exactly ten minutes, and in these scenes of course inexpressive acting is hardly possible. In A Man Escaped the dramatic construction of the scenes is much more balanced: the scenes are consistently short and concise. Only three scenes run more than two minutes long in U4 this film. A typical structure of a scene consists of a very short opening sequence, if any, presenting some basic elements of the situation—typically a close-up or medium close-up of an object that will play an important role in that scene—followed by a very concise presentation of the main information, and virtually no closing. Right after the main information is disclosed, Bresson cuts. Hence Bresson's films give the impression that they consist of a series of almost still images, much like in the silent cinema where tools of creating continuity in narration were much more restricted than in the sound era. Reference to silent film is emphasized also by visual austerity and by the increasingly ascetic use of dialogue. In the middle of his modernist period, starting with Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) Bresson entirely eliminated voice-over narration, which he had used abundantly in his films made in the 1950s, and reduced on-screen dialogues also to a necessary minimum. Let us consider an example of the beginning ofPickpocket (1959). The very first shot of the action is a close-up of a lady's purse, from which a lady's hand pulls out some money and gives it to a man, who then goes to the box office to place a bid on the horse race. Then we see Michel, the main character, follow the lady to the edge of the course, and steal the rest of her money. It takes three shots for him to leave the course. It takes him thirty seconds from the end of the race to leave the racecourse. It is almost a real-time depiction of the event. However, right after he leaves the gate of the racecourse we see him followed by two police agents, and in the next shot he is already in a car sitting between them. We can hear his offscreen narration: "I thought I mastered the world. One nSn^eTata,!'i was caught." This is not only ellipti- Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism 145 Fig. 20. A "mutilated" image: A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956). cal narration, it is simply a creation of an unrealistic time span. Not only do we not see the lady discovering the theft, finding the police, explaining to them what happened, the police giving instructions to the agents who should start looking for the young man, or go directly to the gate expecting him to leave, but the thirty seconds (or one minute, according to the voice-over narration) passing between the end of the race and Michel crossing the gate simply do not leave enough time for all of this to happen (especially if we subtract from this the eleven seconds where we watch the lady walking away obviously unaware of the theft, which leaves precious few seconds for the police to catch him). As Bresson uses three shots emphasizing physical contiguity to show Michel's itinerary to the gate from the point where the race ends he suggests continuity of action. But it turns out that these three shots are radically cut off from the continuous flow of action. They stand for a very different system of events. There is a complicated story behind these three short shots that is not referred to in any sensible way, as if the three shots took place in three different dimensions of time all at once. While we see a thirty-second almost continuous period of time, the voice-over relates that this was in fact a one-minute lapse, but realistically this must have covered a much longer time. It is as though the continuous sequence showing Michel walking out of the racecourse was in fact not a representation of what happened, not even in a concise way, but of what Michel wished to Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SEVEN have happened. That is the only way the sudden and surprising appearance of the policemen can be understood. Apparent continuity covers a radical discontinuity. Without signaling any sort of time lapse, the mere fact of cutting alone stands for whole stories, long periods of hours, days, or more. This is already very clear in the following two shots, which altogether last fifteen seconds. The first shows Michel sitting between the two agents in a car, the next shows the last sentence of the investigation at the police station where the inspector sets him free. Obviously, without inserting any image of time lapse, Bresson covers several hours with these two shots. The elliptical narrative technique, together with concise scene dramaturgy, has an important effect on acting. Clearly, there is not much time for much expressive acting in such a construction. The other characteristic of Bresson's style was the extremely dispassionate acting style, which he considered important enough to develop U6 on a theoretical level between 1950 and 1958.4 Bresson's conception is fundamental for understanding the style of acting in many films of the great modernist auteurs in the period, and in many ways the same ideas can be applied to the character representation of Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, and Jancsd. Abstract Subjectivity and the "Model" Bresson opposes two kinds of character representation: one achieved by actors, the other by models. He makes the case for a character representation by models, which he claims is proper for cinema. An actor plays different roles, each of which is different from the actor's personality. But, at the same time, an actor cannot be entirely someone else: "Actor: It is not me you watch and hear, it is an other. But as he cannot be entirely an other, he is not this other." And, "An actor brings forward something that is not in himself really." An actor therefore always tries to be a different person, and this ends up as artificial play. An actor cannot identify totally with her role. A model by contrast is always the same person. The role she plays is essentially the same person that she is in reality. In this sense, the model does notplay anybody; a person on the screen is what the model is. The model is "the way of being the persons ofyour film, it is being themselves, it is remaining themselves." But the person on the screen is not the totality of the person the model is in real 4. See especially Bresson, Notes sur le cinematographe. I will quote from the Gallimard edition (Paris, 1975). Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism life; the screen person is only a part of her. The director reduces her to the traits that are useful for the film. A model on the screen is not a live person in any sense, she is zpure essence, an abstract person, a spiritual ego detached from all rational connections. A model is "his nonrational, nonlogical ego that the camera records." Hence from this is derived a strange relationship to psychological representation. There is no doubt that a character represented by a model is psychologically determined. But this psychology is not a set of rules according to which instincts, subjective intentions, emotions, and different states of mind can be explained and re-presented in other roles or films. A model is a singular, unique person who expresses no intentions, has no consciousness that would link them to general behavior patterns.5 It is as if Bresson wanted to say that the model is in a way inhuman: it is part of a real individual's personality, but that particular part that is not associated with rationality. The model is an irrational psychological abstraction. Irrational here means not a nonsense, nor animality. It refers rather to 147 a behavior that is not determined from the outside, it is totally autonomous and impossible to describe by commonsense motivation. The model must act like a psychic automaton without any attempt to express inner motivations. The "causes are not in the models," which is to say that the model should not act in a way that can be interpreted based on the individual's social, moral, or practical motives. The only way the individual's behavior can be interpreted is based on his psychic singularity, which cannot be reduced to any exterior factor. The model is a singular phenomenon of nature, it is like a unique object. "Persons and objects have the same mystery," says Bresson, and a model must flow smoothly into the order of objects. "It is necessary that the persons and the objects of your film go together at the same pace." A model on the screen must become an object of nature as any other thing, and act according to the part of his nature that is useful for the film as any other object.6 One can easily recognize in Bresson's conception about acting the same antipsychological spirit that was the basis of the French nouveau roman of the fifties and sixties. There are many ways Bresson brings about this extreme abstraction of his "models," but the central feature of this is the reduction of human contacts. That is the way Bresson can express the singularity, autonomy, and objectivity of his characters, but this way they become in a sense empty. It 5. Bresson, Notes surle cinematographe, citations and references from 52, 68,87, 89, 86, 83,22,58. 6. Bresson, Notes sur le cinematographe, 64,23,80. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SEVEN is their autonomy, independence, or disconnectedness, their freedom in the final analysis that appears as a certain emptiness or mechanical behavior. This emptiness however, is counterbalanced by Bresson by a sort of "mystical integrity" related to a deeply religious conception of the human psyche. Bresson and His Followers The influence of the Bresson style of minimalism extends in many directions during the modern period, especially in the form of isolated techniques taken over by various filmmakers. Reduced scene dramaturgy was widely used in French cinema especially by Godard and Truffaut. The model style of acting was taken over by Tarkovsky, who had an unreserved respect for Bresson. The most consistent follower of Bresson was Jean-Marie Straub, especially in his Not Reconciled. Later Straub developed his style towards the-U8 atricality that was fashionable in the early 1970s, but in Not Reconciled the Bressonian mise-en-scene is clearly recognizable. There is virtually no acting and no interaction between the characters, who basically recite monologues in a highly dispassionate tone. The scenes last as long as their monologues, leaving as little space for description of the environment or of the character's state of mind as possible. Straub has been, as he puts it, "careful to eliminate as much as possible any historical aura in both costumes and sets, thus giving the images a kind of atonal character."7 Acts are depicted as symbolic gestures rather than as real physical facts, and so events of the plot for the most part are told rather than shown. For example when Johanna shoots someone who is named "her grandson's murderer" on the balcony, although the script reads "we see Johanna take aim and shoot at the next balcony," what we see is Johanna shooting without aiming in a direction that is impossible for the viewer to determine, and even the sound of the shot is barely heard. She hardly even raises the pistol. Her act is reduced to the signaling of a gesture. This aspect of Straub's style makes it rather theatrical and distances it from its Bressonian origins. The theatrical tendency becomes stronger in his subsequent films. Moses and Aaron (1974), on the one hand is probably his most radically minimalist film, and on the other hand, the theatrical character of this minimalism is the most perfectly developed. The only setting is the ruins of an antique arena where two characters and a chorus perform Arnold Schonberg's opera. Bresson's influence was transferred by Straub to early Fassbinder and early Daniel Schmid. And as Serge Toubiana said in 1989 about Pickpocket, • , • • , , , Created wltfi . 7. Cited in Richard Roud, Jean-Mane Straub (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 40. (h) nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism "it influenced a whole generation of filmmakers who started their careers in the 1960s."8 Analytical Minimalism: The Antonioni Style The most remarkable manifestation of this form of minimalism can be found in the early films of Antonioni, which feature austere compositions associated with long takes and in some cases complicated and long camera movements. I call this form "analytical" for two reasons. One is its tendency toward geometrical compositions, the other is the split Antonioni makes between different dimensions of the form: the background and the characters on the one hand, the plot and the viewer's time experience on the other. Antonioni's use of landscapes as the background of his wandering characters has been one of the most conspicuous elements of his style. The visual characteristics of his landscapes and their role in the plot are important 149 watermarks of Antonioni's breaking away from his neorealist roots. Poor or desolate environments were of course not new to modern cinema. Neorealist films were situated in poor neighborhoods, often emphasizing emotional or spiritual emptiness as well, especially in films by Rossellini like Germany, Year Zero (1948) or Stromboli (1950). The dramatic tension between the characters and the environment disappears, and their communication is broken. Their relationship is reduced to radical isolation or alienation. Emptiness and desolation of the environment are not the indications of a social or cultural condition represented by the background world, and the characters are in a way disconnected from this background. Psychic Landscape? It seems quite obvious to draw a parallel between the bareness of the landscape in Antonioni's films and the depressed state of mind of the characters who wander around within this landscape. This similarity drove more than one critic to characterize Antonioni's use of landscape as one of expressing the character's psyche. Relating to The Cry, Seymour Chatman remarks: "Antonioni relied on the technique of'landscape-as-state-of-soul.'" And he adds, "And those other objects serve as metonymic signs of his inner life."9 8. Serge Toubiana in "Table Ronde: Auteur de Pickpocket," Cahiers du cinema 416 (February 1989): 26. 9. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni; or^T^e S^face of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 90. Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN Chatman is very cautious not to call Antonioni's landscape "symbolic," which is why he uses the term "metonymic" suggesting that the landscape is a physical "continuation" of the character's inner world. He is quite right to avoid the idea of symbolism in characterizing the landscape, which would contradict Antonioni's realism as well as the idea of the neutrality of the object world. The term "metonymy" refers to physical contiguity. It suggests that the characters are organic parts of the landscape they move around in, and the objects of the landscape and its general atmosphere express the same emotional meanings as the character's behavior. However, only the very early Antonioni films, in which landscape does not play an eminent role, would support this thesis. The film of the early period in which landscape has the most distinguished function is The Cry, where the autumnal, hazy, and grim atmosphere of the landscape apparently corresponds to the main character's depressed state of mind. Ironically, however, this film was not meant by Antonioni to represent a landscape evoking psychological states of mind: "The landscape also has a different function here. I used it in my earlier films to better define a situation or a psychological state. In The Cry I wanted to create a landscape of memory: the landscape of my childhood."10 Already in this film Antonioni arrived at another—modernist—conception of using the landscape: that which isolates it from the psychology of the characters. In the series of his modernist films, starting with L'avventura it would be very difficult to argue that the atmosphere of the landscape corresponds to the state of mind of the characters. In most cases the environment in which the stories take place is rich, lively, and beautiful. The first part of L'avventura is set on an extremely barren island covered with rocks and with nothing but the sea around it. But the second part of the film takes place in various beautiful locations in Sicily. We can see the beautiful seashore, the mountains, and the lushness of the plants. Antonioni highlights not only the beauty of the landscape but that of the constructed environment too. Claudia and San-dro visit beautiful cities and churches, stay in superb old palaces and hotels. From time to time there are scenes with bare landscape too, especially the scene in the deserted town of Noto, but this is a brief scene. Instead of contiguity, there is a strong contrast between the characters' desolate psychic state and the diversity and beauty of the world around them. It is the same contrast we can find in Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1954), but in Antonioni's case there is no reconciliation. 10. Andre S. Labarthe, "Entretien avec Michelangelo Antonioni," Cahiers du cinema 112 (i960): 3. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcrf.eom/profeBEional Styles of Modernism 151 La notte is a modern urban milieu that emphasizes geometrical flat surfaces and bare streets, but in the second half the heroes first go into a bar, then go to a crowded party in a rich villa. In Eclipse Antonioni emphasizes even less the mere visual quality of desolation: most scenes take place in highly crowded places, like the stock market, the bar, the park, and the office. Instead of emphasizing the loneliness of the main character by the visual character of the spaces, he rather creates a feeling of loneliness within an agitated environment. Psychic emptiness is evoked with the help of a series of disappearances throughout the story, as discussed above. Finally, in The Red Desert the industrial setting dominates the film almost in an abstract painterly way, inasmuch as Antonioni overemphasizes the colorfulness of industrial installations, industrial smoke, and liquid that dominate throughout the film. In this film the tension between the estranged world of the story and the colorful diversity of the environment almost creates an independent and purely ornamental use of the objects and the space. As a genuine modernist, Antonioni truly believed in the beauty of the industrial landscape: It is a simplification to say... that I accuse the inhuman industrialized world where the individual is oppressed, which leads to neurosis. On the contrary, my intention was to translate the beauty of this world in which even the factories can be beautiful... The lines, the curves of the factories and of their Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN Fig. 23. Industrial landscape: The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964). chimneys are probably more beautiful than the lines of a tree that we have seen so many times. This is a rich, lively, useful world.11 The most general characteristics of Antonioni's landscapes are not that they are expressing human states of mind. Quite on the contrary: they create a contrast between beauty and liveliness in the material world and the depressed or even neurotic psychic states of mind of the characters. This world seems to be devoid and inhuman not because it is empty or because it is physically or visually inhuman and lacking beauty, but because it is lacking human contact. It lacks not only contact between humans but also contact between humans and the environment. For Antonioni human alienation is fundamentally a problem of adaptation. In his opinion the individual has not yet learned to adapt to the modern environment; the individual has not learned how to feel at home in it. Antonioni is criticizing neither this environment nor the modern industrial world; he is rather longing for its appropriation: There are people who have already adapted [to the new world], and others who still have not because they are attached too strongly to obsolete structures or rhythms of life. ... I would like to live already in this new world. Unfortunately, we are still not there, and that is the drama of more than one postwar generation. I believe that the years to come will bring violent transformations in the world as well as within the individual.12 If Antonioni's landscapes are "empty," it is not because they express by their physical aspect the characters' mental state. It is because the characters cannot find their lives in there however beautiful they may appear. The characters cannot interact with their environment. They wander around in it not because they want to find something that is out there, but because 11. Jean-Luc Godard, "La nuit, l'eclipse, l'aurore: Entretien avec Michelangelo Antonioni," Cahiers du cinema 160 (Ngyemberji96^ 10-15. 12. Godard, "La nuit, l'eclipse, l'aurore." Ml nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Styles of Modernism they have lost their human contact with that world. And because there is no psychological contact between the characters and the environment in which they are moving around, the depiction of the surroundings becomes independent of the narration. And that is the ultimate source of the environment's deserted atmosphere. No matter how crowded or eventful the scenes, what we feel is emptiness because they are detached from the lives of the characters. The end of Eclipse is the best example of this. What we see is not an entirely empty square. People come and go, buses arrive, passengers exit the bus, and cars go by. It is only the two main characters who are missing, who do not come to their rendezvous. Somebody is not there whom we expect, something is not happening what we expect to happen, and that is what makes the streets feel really empty even though they are physically crowded. Antonioni's landscapes are not any more expressive than his actors' play. The actors' play is inexpressive precisely in the sense that they do not repre- 153 sent a diverse variety of emotional states. Landscape is inexpressive in the same sense: whatever it shows, it does not represent a variety of different elements, rather a monotonous variation of a small set of visual elements until they grow devoid of any emotional meaning, keeping only their pure aesthetic sense devoid of practical human contact to the point where representation of the background becomes almost self-contained. Thus, landscape in modern Antonioni films, especially the ones following The Cry, is not a projection of the characters' interior life. They are aesthetic rather than psychic. The visual dimension of these films does not represent what is hidden from our eyes, because nothing is hidden. Everything is represented on a pure aesthetic surface. All one can say is that landscape in Antonioni's early films is as emptied of human contact as the soul of the characters wandering around in it, which is to say in the final analysis that Antonioni's landscapes are simply the motivical variations of the characters' way of acting. That is precisely how the Antonioni style can be seen as a purely ornamental use of landscape, like in the early films of Jancsd. And this possibility is already clearly detectable in The Red Desert. Continuity It is very often taken for granted that Antonioni's style involves extreme long takes and also long camera movements. However, it is only true for what became the "Antonioni style" during the 1960s, but not for Antonioni's own style of this period. Seymour Chatman has remarked that at the time of L'avventura there waFnxjtmuch difference in shot length between Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN an Antonioni film and the average Hollywood film of the time.13 Both L'avventura and La notte contain more than four hundred shots with an average shot length over 15 seconds (17.3 seconds in La notte, 18.4 for L'avventura, still double that of the average Hollywood film). On the other hand, in the case of Story of a Love Affair (1950), the average shot length is 33.6 seconds, containing several shots over two minutes. Excessive long takes and long camera movement style characterize Antonioni only at the beginning of his career; in later films, especially in the "great period," his rhythm approached that of the average European modernist art films. As he explains: Naturally, my technique has changed, as I changed my mind. Earlier, I thought that I had to follow a character as long as possible so that I wouldn't miss the truth about him. Hence came the need for endless and very complicated camera movements, and the fact that I refused to make counter shots. Now I think by contrast that it is necessary to create a multiplicity of approaches to a character by varying the points of view, and also that I shouldn't hesitate to treat the setting separately, again for the sake of the phenomenological truth____ My technique now, which seems a regression to you, is in fact much more modern and audacious than what I used in Chronicle.14 The real interest of the Antonioni films of this period is that he does not use extraordinary technical tools to create the atmosphere of radical continuity of his films, as does Resnais, for example, with his spectacularly long traveling shots in Last Year at Marienhad. Instead, Antonioni introduces a very peculiar dramatic device that appeared already in The Cry, which he will only radicalize in his modernist works, the most spectacular and developed example of which he will provide in Eclipse. I will call this procedure inverted dramatic construction. The main point in this structure is that Antonioni inverts the order between the peak of dramatic tension and plot development. Usually, dramatic tension has its climax at the very end of the plot and is related to the solution of the main conflict. In Antonioni's films, from The Cry up to Eclipse, the peak of dramatic tension takes place at the very beginning of the film, before the development of the plot. It is still related to a conflict obviously, but what follows the exposure of the conflict is not the solution of it, but rather the "eternalizing" of it by emptying out the initial situation of its dramatic tension. The situation that was introduced as containing an unresolved and highly disturbing element for the characters becomes a sort of normal everyday state of their existence, and also the extent to which it was disturb- l' U5'Crsatad.wiih 14. Interview with Antonioni in Temoignages chretien 9, no. 7 (1962). download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism ing or even unbearable for them diminishes so as to reach sometimes a zero level as one can see it in Eclipse. The principle meaning of the situation the characters find themselves in is thus continuity, or eternity of the situation's existence. It is the continuous emptying out of their lives that provides the dynamics of these plots, which develop toward a certain end marked by a point where the characters realize the radical emptiness of their lives. And in Eclipse even this point is missing. Whether or not they are aware of their situation, the main characters simply disappear from the film, which ends with the pictures of a total eclipse, or total disappearance of the light. Rather than ascending or wavering, dramatic tension is monotonously descending in the three major early modernist films of Antonioni, and it is that monotony that represents radical continuity in these films even though their editing technique or camerawork would not include any radical solutions. Antonioni's technique is in sharp opposition to Bresson's style. Bresson 155 shows from every action only those scenes where the essence of the given event happens, and very little of the path that leads to the event. That is how he makes the spectator jump through huge gaps in time. By contrast, Antonioni makes the spectator follow the different paths his characters have taken to arrive at the momentous event. But after the first five to fifteen minutes of his films where real action takes place, virtually no scene contains any action of which the spectator could grasp the real sense as to how it helps the plot unfold. We follow long paths, but we never know whether we are getting any closer to a supposed goal. The dramatically tense beginnings of his films always pose an important question that is able to keep the viewer's curiosity alive throughout the film. The construction of the stories that follow the exposition is such that they constantly raise the possibility of getting close to a solution. There is a kind of extended suspense in these films whereby Antonioni makes the spectator believe that something is hidden behind the events, that something's happening beyond the frame (just as in Bresson films). And it is only at the end that it turns out that nothing happens behind the scenes. Where has Anna gone (in L'avventura) ? After all, we will never find out, and our heroes also have lost interest in that question. Can the friend be saved (in La notte)? It turns out that he cannot be saved, but that is not Lidia's only or biggest unresolvable problem. Will Claudia start a new life or go back to Riccardo (in Eclipse)? After all that, we don't know, because he simply disappears from the story. Nothing is hidden, what we see is what there is. Editing for Antonioni is not a way of hiding important information or creating a sense of a metaphysical dimension of the story. Cr-Gstod with Antonioni looks for the "phenomenological truth," as he puts it, not for the |pM nitro professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER SEVEN metaphysical truth like Bresson. As a matter of fact, every technical device became neutral for him, just as he obviously lost interest in using spectacular techniques of continuity because the monotonous nature of his neutral events constructed a continuous and immediate surface with no holes in it whence any change could emerge. Antonioni and His Followers The Antonioni style was further developed and radicalized in two ways. One is what I will call ornamental continuity, initiated by Jancsd and followed by Theo Angelopoulos, which I will discuss below in the section on ornamental style. The other is what I will call minimalist continuity style. The two main representatives of this form are Wim Wenders, especially in The Goalie's Fear of the Penalty Kick and Kings of the Road, and Chantal Ackerman in Jeanne Diel-156 man but especially in The Meetings of Anna (1978). Although these films reduce the Antonioni form to one of its aspects and make excessive use of it, especially Ackerman, this aspect is the one that in fact proves to be the most productive even after modernism, as witnessed in the films of Jarmusch, Tarr, Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and Kitano. This aspect is the predominance of temps mort in the narrative, that is, a representation of a time sequence in the protagonist's life, where nothing happens, for example, transitions from one location to another, waiting, having nothing to do. These extremely long takes, with extremely minimalist use of setting elements, are combined in the early films of Philippe Garrel, but these elements as well as the acting are highly symbolic and mythological, thus ornamental. One of the films most consistently constructed upon the reduced and radicalized minimalist continuity style is Ackerman's The Meetings of Anna. The story consists of a series of accidental or planned encounters of a woman film director traveling on her promotion tour in Germany. The encounters Fig. 24. Empty landscape: Kings of the Rocd^Mw^ Wenders, 1^76). Ml nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN themselves however are not the focus of the film. The biggest portion of the film's running time is spent showing Anna waiting or going from one place to another. The film's narrative form is circular in the strictest sense of the term. Nothing that happens in the film has any effect on any other event. Nothing changes from beginning to end; everything remains the same. Temps mort where nothing happens is therefore not a link between events. It is the other way around: the remnants of what one could call an event separate the continuous sequences of temps mort. That is what makes the film's style highly static. Ackerman systematically uses only two types of shots: static medium to long shot (typically Antonionian) or a few occasional lateral traveling medium shots. There is no panning, no in-depth traveling shots, just as there are no close-ups. Empty space/time is the prevalent subject matter of the images. A good example is the scene in which something emotionally intense 158 could be described. Anna meets her mother, whom she has not seen for three years, at a Brussels railway station. Anna gets off the train, walks across the station till she notices her mother at the end of the hallway It is on Anna's face in a medium shot that we see that her mother has noticed her, too. She then goes to her mother, but the camera does not follow her, so they finally meet in a long shot, very far from the camera. They hug each other and start talking, but since we are far away, we cannot hear a word of what they say to each other, nor can we see the emotions on their faces. Then they leave, but the camera keeps showing the empty hallway for another three seconds. The whole shot lasts fifty-three seconds, of which the "action" part lasts thirty-eight seconds, and during this time Ackerman keeps the viewer at a distance. In other words, the camera remains close to the protagonist as long as nothing happens. As soon as action occurs, the camera stays out of it. Another example is when Anna goes to the cinema where her film is being screened. Ackerman stages the scene when she leaves the hotel to go the cinema, and the very next shot is when she leaves the theater. The "action" sequence is omitted. This film is one of the most radical ones of the Antonioni form not because of extensive use of temps mort but because no other film could eliminate progression of the plot as much as this film with the help of its serial composition of temps mort. Within the continuity form Wim Wenders's early style remains the closest to the Antonioni form. In this respect Kings of the Road (1976) is the turning point, where Wenders returns to more classical depth staging. Wenders develops the picaresque aspect of this form rather than the melodramatic side. He follows Antonioni in^oin^ through different landscapes and in creating the atmosphere oFaSenationfey disconnecting his characters from (HI nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism the given environment rather than using the environment's own expressive visual traits. His most common shot is medium shot to long shot, just like in the "great period" Antonioni films, his takes are rather lengthy and concentrate on moments of emptiness, and the mere passing of time gives priority to the atmosphere of the landscape rather than to the dramatic aspect of the plot. This is especially true for Alice in the Cities (1974). A peculiar minimalist style, a mixture of dispassionate Straubian theatricality and the Antonionianlong take style, was created in the earliest films of Fassbinder (1969-70). Static compositions, long takes with no movement whatsoever in them, and entirely empty spaces with bare white walls around the characters are the most characteristic traits of this early Fassbinder style, especially in Katzelmacher (1969) and Love Is Colder-ThanDeath (1969). In his later films, Fassbinder's theatricality and motivical saturation takes over and pushes minimalist traits of his style in the background. We can find minimalist versions in various genres, but some typically 159 modern genres are more likely to attract minimalist style than others. Closed-situation dramas are most of the time minimalist, since the nature of the dramatic form requires a limited space, a limited number of characters and, more often than not, a highly restricted narrative frame. An early example of this type is Roman Polanski's first film, Knife in the Water (1962), which takes place for the most part on a sailing boat on a lake with only three characters. Very little information is provided of the lives of the characters, but the nature of the drama is such that this information is not necessary to follow the unfolding of the conflict between them, just like in Kawalero-wicz's The Night Train or in Buhuel's The Exterminating Angel. Stylistically, Polanski's film is the most minimalist of all, by its choice of environment and the extremely reduced amount of signifying elements. However, there is a film that utilizes all the possibilities of the closed-situation dramatic form to create a minimalist style in almost all aspects of the form. This is Carlos Saura's third film, The Hunt (1965). The story is about four men going for a rabbit hunt in some deserted area of Spain. The whole story takes place in the desert. We learn hardly anything about the characters apart from some hazy allusions to their past evoking the war and killing. It also turns out that they are long time friends, yet some of them however have not seen each other for some time. Even though there is quite a lot of dialogue in the film, still the information they convey is restricted to immediate reflections on what they are doing and to the mounting tension between them. Unlike in Polanski's Knife, here the nature of the drama makes the lack of narrative information a stylistic element, as the film constantly alludes to their past, which suggests to the viewer that the source of the ft nitroPDFprofessional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism tension between them is hidden in undisclosed past events. The characters' acting style is rather dispassionate except in the moments of high tension, which is why the brutal massacre at the end in which they shoot one another to death comes quite unexpectedly. The story is a perfect closed-situation drama in that the plot is developed from the fact that the characters remain confined in a limited space (in this respect even a spot in the desert can be considered a limited space). Nothing diverts the viewer's attention from what is immediately given in the story, neither on the narrative, nor on the visual level, even though Saura does not apply any radical tools to enhance the minimalist effects of his style. Continuous visual compositions however may have a considerable amount of saturating effect either by the movement that always brings new objects in the image, or by contemplation, which lets the viewer's imagination discover "deeper" layers of the image and is inspired by the mere passing of time. The first version represents the transition from minimalism to ui ornamental style as is well exemplified by Jancsd. Jancsd's style is extremely minimalist in many respects: most often, his stories take place in deserted and confined spaces, he uses inexpressive acting style and characters without individual personality, there is very little dialogue in his films. However, in other respects his style is the opposite of minimalism: abundance of symbolic motives, huge masses of supporting characters, and complicated and symbolic camera and character movements increasingly make his films of the early seventies examples of a certain ornamentalism, which will be discussed below. The saturating effect of excessive continuity and monotony was utilized by several films both from the avant-garde and from the commercial art-film circuit. Andy Warhol (e.g., Sleep, 1963; Empire, 1964), Chantal Ackerman (Hotel Monterrey, 1972), and most importantly, Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker) constructed forms on showing the same thing or the same movement unchanged over a long period of time. Expressive Minimalism Although minimalism involves the reduction of expressive formal elements, this does not mean that all minimalist styles are necessarily inexpressive like that of Bresson and Antonioni. Ingmar Bergman is a case in point. Most of the time Bergman's modern films are also closed-situation dramas, with an increasing amount of minimalism in their styles, which reach their apogee in Rite. His minimalist style is based, apart from the bare and confined landscapes, on his consciously consistent use of close-ups, which Ml nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN Fig. 28. Expressive minimalism: Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968). betrays the influence of Dreyer's modernism. Bergman's use of close-ups becomes clearly more consistent in his modernist period, that is, starting 162 with Through a Glass Darkly, which seems a compensation for the inexpressive effect of extreme reduction of other elements such as characters and landscape. While Bergman's visual style is unusually dramatic, probably the most dramatic and expressive in late modernism, it remains extremely minimalist rather than theatrical, which it tended to be in his early period. Unlike other modernist auteurs, he never ceases to use expressionist lighting effects and an extremely dramatic acting style throughout his modern period. It is in Rite that one can observe the tight links between his minimalism and his conception of theater. His style is so austere in this film that it almost lacks mise-en-scene. The film is entirely shot in close-ups and medium close-ups of scenes involving mostly two, sometimes three, and on two occasions four, characters. In each scene we see the characters seated before some neutral background with virtually no props around and with no visual indications of where the scene takes place. The characters move or make gestures only on the occasion of their rare passionate outbursts; otherwise they remain seated. Locations are specified solely by intertitles like "In an office," "In a bar," or "In a hotel room," and only the shape of a table or chair indicates the nature of the location. The film has a strong theatrical effect stemming from the fact that the whole drama happens through dialogues; however, the fact that the characters hardly move around in the spaces shown, or in any surrounding space, creates a different kind of abstraction from that of modern theater. The "talking head" style and the realist and expressive acting style of Rite bring it close to the style of television drama rather than to theater. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Styles of Modernism Fig. 29. Theatrical setting: Rite (Ingmar Bergman, 1969). Like Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman was one of the modern era's emblematic creators of bare landscapes. While this was one of the most important characteristics of Antonioni's style right from the beginning, in Bergman's 163 career it appears quite late. In the early 1960s we find in fact a radical shift in Bergman's style in this respect. All of his celebrated masterpieces of the late 1950s (The Seventh Seal, 1956; Wild Strawberries, 1957; or The Virgin Spring, 1959) are set in a natural environment. The nature Bergman represents in these films is rich, fertile, and full of interesting creatures, secrets, and mysticism. All of these films in fact tell fairy tale-like stories in which the world of nature is full of signs for the characters suggesting to them what to do, what to think, and where to go in their lives. Therefore, there is a constant interaction and communication between the characters and the natural surroundings. It is a spiritual world that hides the information and the strength the characters need to shift their lives in the right direction, while on their sides they have the moral attitude that makes them capable of this shift. In The Seventh Seal a variety of imagined and real mysterious creatures populate the world the heroes are going through; in Wild Strawberries the childhood memories are hidden in the bushes and behind the trees, and in The Virgin Spring it is God who manifests himself in nature. More than Rossellini, Bergman adopts a genuinely romantic approach to nature. As we will see below, Tarkovsky will continue this romantic approach to natural environment. Bergman's representation of nature suddenly changes in Through a Glass Darkly: we find ourselves on a desolate island with bare rocks, empty seashore, and a shipwreck. This kind of landscape appears briefly already in the beginning of The Seventh Seal, where there is a sharp distinction between different landscapes associated with different characters: the romantic landscape is associated withjof and Mia, and the desolate environment is Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN Fig. 30. "Warm" natural environment: Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957). associated with the Knight. And this is the kind of environment that will characterize his films between 1961 and 1970, when nature is represented. 164 He returns to the representation of a "friendly nature" with Cries and Whispers (1972), where the few comforting scenes all take place in the beautiful garden while the rest of the story takes place in the house interior. The relationship between his characters and their environment is very different, however, from what we find in the films of Antonioni or even Rossellini. While Rossellini creates dramatic contrast between nature and his characters, Antonioni represents indifference and detachment between characters and surrounding. In Bergman's case we can speak of real expressiveness or symbolism in this context. The drama is not between the characters and the environment as in Rossellini; the environment visually contains or represents the drama emerging between the characters. In fact Bergman does not pay too much attention to his landscapes in his modern period. These films are mostly set in interiors, shot in close-ups or medium close-ups, so the environment is not particularly prevalent in the story, unlike in the Antonioni films whose typical shot length is long shot or medium long shot with relatively few close-ups. But every time nature or some object of the environment is given significance in a modern Bergman film, it immediately becomes expressive and symbolic. Bergman's "modern" landscapes are not as diverse as Antonioni's. The reason for this is that the psychological states the landscape is meant to express, in his films from Through the Glass Darkly (1961) to The Passion of Anna (1969) at least, is always that of intense suffering from a mental or physical illness or abandonment. If we said that Antonioni characterizes each of his landscapes by a few elements, it is true for Bergman too, only these few elements remain the same throughout his films: lonely trees, bare rocks, empty meadows, and seas^rore^m1*f'iirough a Glass Darkly, the first film of {A nitroPDF professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Styles of Modernism Fig. 31. "Cold" natural environment: Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968). his modernist period, he still uses a rather "romantic" symbol, a shipwreck where Karin hides and which obviously symbolizes her fears, illness, and what remains is the same bare landscape over and over again symbolizing psychological suffering. In the modern Bergman films a desolate environment is truly a projection of the characters' state of mind, and as these states are always almost the same their visual proj ection remains the same as well. This is why, beginning with Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman shoots most of his most important modern films at the same location: the island of Faro. The expressiveness of the setting of his films becomes apparent also from another aspect. It becomes increasingly difficult for the viewer to distinguish between what is outside and what is inside the characters' mind. In Through a GlassDarkly it is true only for the ill character. But this becomes very apparent in later films, such as Silence, where the outside world is quite unreal; and in Persona, where the film culminates with the inner and outer worlds melting into each other, and especially in Hour of the Wolf (1968), a film full of hallucinations impossible to distinguish from reality. While Antonioni's sets consist of a variety of disconnected and antidramatic spaces full of emptiness, Bergman's sets are uniform empty spaces but filled with tension and drama. With his peculiar style Bergman is one of the most stand-alone figures in modernism. We can find the influence of Bergman's expressive minimalism here and there in small segments of films especially in Eastern European modern films, such as the opening sequence of Kira Muratova's ShortEncoun-ters (1967) and Jerzy Skolimowski's Barrier (1966). Godard admitted that his A Married Woman (1964) was influenced by Bergman's works.15 Even though his modern films were highly characteristic and consistent in their styles, loneliness. In later films, such artificial constructions simply disappear, and 165 15. Godard, Introduction a une verifamemsloire du cinema, 102. downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER SEVEN Fig. 32. Nature and suffering: Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968). they were not imitated nor continued by followers consistently. To give an explanation of this phenomenon we should probably first look for historical reasons rather than stylistic ones. Bergman comes out of a genuinely Nordic theatrical tradition that goes back to the first decade of the twentieth century with Mauritz Stiller, but most importantly to Alf Sjoberg and Victor Sjostrom. Bergman's minimalist style follows another Nordic early modernist director's style, that of Carl Theodor Dreyer. Bergman is firmly rooted in this Nordic film tradition, which itself might be an explanation why other directors from other parts of the world were not particularly receptive to this style. As regards young Swedish directors emerging during the 1960s, they were eager to find their own way, which would make their styles distinguishable from their master's. Rather than being a model, Bergman was a figure who cast a heavy shadow.16 Young French or Italian directors had at least two or three models to follow in their own national cinemas, but Swedes had only one who alone represented Swedish cinema for the rest of the world already in the early 1960s. It is quite understandable that they instead looked for models that could liberate them from the influence of this tradition, which they found in modern French cinema, especially in Godard. Finally, the uniqueness of the Bergman form also has a stylistic explanation. As we said earlier, modern Bergman films are made of two typical prevailing elements: the close-up of the character's facial expression and a 16. In an interview in 1969 Bergman appears very aware of this: "In spite of your tremendous hegemony over the Swedish cinema, which has lasted for so many years, very very few of the so-called Swedish new wave—if you'll allow the expression—can be regarded as Bergman disciples." Bergman answers: "None at all." In Bergman on Bergman, interviews by Stig Bjorkman, T^rste: Manns„and Jonas Sima (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 250. download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Styles of Modernism Fig. 33. The two faces: Liv Ulmann and Bibi Andersson in Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966). particular landscape. We can find no other minimalist style that is so much rooted in characteristic elements that are expressive in the same manner. Antonioni varies the environment in each of his films, and the modernist 1«7 characteristics prevail in the way he represents these environments. Inexpressive acting style ensures that he (and anyone else following his style) may use a variety of actors to play in the highly undramatic stories that do not need characteristic acting. Antonioni's style is not dependent on actors nor on specific environments in spite of the recurrent actors he may use. Likewise, Bresson's style is based on withdrawing and hiding expressive elements, which makes possible a variety of usages of his style. By contrast, Bergman's modern films are based on concise and tense dramas placed in specific environments and expressed by specific faces. That is why we find in the great majority of his modern films the same actors and the same setting. Bergman's style is closely associated with the faces of Harriet Anders-son, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ulmann, and Gunnar Bjornstrand. Bergman recounts that the inspiration for Persona came to him when he noticed the similarities between the faces of Liv Ulmann and Bibi Andersson.17 17. Bergman on Bergman, 196. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional :8: Naturalist Styles The appearance of a certain naturalism in film style was the most general phenomenon characterizing the transition to modern art cinema from the classical expressive style that dominated the 1940s and much of the 1950s. Most of the European "new cinemas" debuted to some extent with a return to the representation of real-life experience even if stylistically this did not mesh well with stylistic changes, like in the case of new British cinema at least until 1962. While the emergence of "new cinemas" can definitely be associated with a more realistic film form, modernism proper is not to be identified with this realism. Realism had a particular modernist form of its own. Under this heading I will gather films using the style in which documentary, or to use the French terminology, cinema verite (direct cinema), is predominant. I prefer to use the term "naturalist" rather than "documentary" as it is more evocative of a style than a genre, and because I want to avoid discussing the problem of documentary and fiction. Naturalist film style reminds the viewer of real-life experiences, either by the characters' natural way of acting and talking or by giving the image the style of a documentary or newsreel (e.g., shaky handheld camera movements, wide-angle lenses, random panning around as if looking for a subject, characters communicating directly with the camera). In modern cinema there were two sources of the naturalist style: socially committed neorealism and ethnographic documentary. The influences of the two sources followed a parallel development only in the first period of modern cinema. Italian modern directors of the early 1960s such as Olmi, Rosi, Bertolucci, and Pasolini started out of their own national heritage of naturalist style, socially cSmrrntte1^1 neorealism. In Czechoslovakia Milos jfl) nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Naturalist Styles Forman, Ivan Passer, and Vera Chytilova also constructed their satirical style on neorealism. In other parts of Europe the self-reflective version of naturalist style, cinema verite, was dominant. This influence was mediated mainly by the films of Godard. who first realized the advantages of cinema verite in its associative self-reflexive narrative commentary with improvised filming style. Post-neorealism I will discuss the emergence of post-neorealism more in detail in the historical section below. Here I will treat only its main formal characteristics. One of them is an increased focus on individual personality and on the psychological factors of the characters' acts. The consequence of this was that post-neorealist films work most often with professional actors rather than with amateurs, like early neorealism. The most typical examples are u? Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (i960) with Alain Delon or Paso-lini's MammaRoma (1962), which was a kind of tribute to star Anna Magnani. Even in Pasolini's first film, Accattone! (1961), the most reminiscent of early neorealism especially in its extensive use of nonprofessional actors, one can observe in the emphasis on the emotional aspect of Franco Citti's character a considerable difference from neorealism. The constant biblical allusions emphasized by some painterly compositions and the music also point toward Pasolini's later modernist ornamental style. The other formal aspect of post-neorealism is the use of some modernist narrative techniques. Together with neorealist style, Bertolucci's first film, The GrimReaper, uses parallel narratives, while Olmi's second film, The Fiances, employs a memory flashback technique. This kind of slightly "modernized" post-neorealism had an impact on the Czechoslovak new wave. In the neorealist tradition based on traditional narrative forms of adventure and melodrama, the author's subjectivity could manifest itself only in an indirect way. For an ironic or satirical approach where the author's subjectivity is expressed in an undercover manner, the neorealist form is more appropriate, which is why the "Forman school" of the Czechoslovak new wave related to neorealism rather than to cinema verite. The reason for the success of the neorealist form in the former socialist countries is that it would have been more difficult for political criticism to circumvent political censorship in a cinema verite form. Neorealist form is an apparently "objective" approach to social problems, whereas cinema verite offers a subjective and individualistic commentary on them. That is why in Hungary following the harden- r 1. . 1 Created wjm . , ,. , mg of communist political power in the seventies, the neorealist style re- Ml nitroPDrprofessional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER EIGHT appeared as a disguised form of political criticism, while in Czechoslovakia after 1968 even this form of criticism disappeared completely. Cinema Verite Right from the beginning, Godard's style was strongly influenced by Jean Rouch's self-reflective direct style. The fact that visual segments of real life, or at least those looking real, can be loosely put side by side and organized by a subjective voice-over or onscreen narrative attracted Godard to a great extent, and of his pre-1964 films contain sequences of cinema verite mise-en-scene. Between 1965 and 1967 some of his films are already spectacularly artificial, like Contempt (1963), Pierrot lefou (1965), and Alphaville (1965), while on the other hand some are like pure cinema verite documentaries, such as Masculine-Feminine (1966) and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966). 170 After 1967, classical cinema verite style disappears from his films. Godard admired cinema verite for the same reason that otheryoung filmmakers admired Godard's use of cinema verite style: not for representing "reality" but for making it possible to express subjective views through images that give the impression of a direct relationship with reality. Godard said, referring to the difference between him and real cinema verite filmmakers such as Flaherty and Rouch, "They take the characters from reality and make a fictional story with them. It is somewhat like what I do, but just in the opposite way: I took fictional characters, and I made a story with them that in a way looked like a documentary."1 The result was still accepted as a direct manifestation of some kind of "reality," but a philosophically and conceptually informed reality rather than a socially defined one. That is why the essay genre in most cases uses the naturalist style. Clear cases are Godard's own Two orThree Things I Know About Her, Kluge's Yesterday Girl, and Sjoman's I Am Curious (Yellow). Even in the Soviet Union, where the loosely constructed documentary style (together with other forms of modernism) was not welcomed by authorities even into the 1960s, the naturalist style essay could find its way in some cases, such as Vasili Shukshin's Happy Go Lucky (1972). The naturalist style reached the height of its popularity at the turn of the sixties and seventies, and in some cases, such as in Hungary, this trend lasted even into the early 1980s. But cinema verite rather than neorealism was at the root of the trend of direct cinema. The reason for the success 1. Francois Truffaut cited in^ duCerf, 1983), 179. i^lair| Cjouzgt, La novelle vague 25 ans apres (Paris: Edition downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Naturalist Styles of cinema verite in modernism, and the reason why post-neorealism and the neorealist tradition finally vanished from modern cinema in Europe (while in America John Cassavetes used this form well into the seventies and eighties), canbe found in the difference of their concentration. Neoreal-ism is a style foregrounding a social environment. Cinema verite is a form that concentrates on individual subjectivity as reflecting on a particular environment. The fundamental assumption of the neorealist form is that the events taking place in the foreground are but an example of the social rules and mechanisms determining the background world. The limits of individualization of the characters in neorealism are always determined by the character's social place. This is true even in the post-neorealist version, where directors tried to concentrate more on the characters' individual personality. In this respect Fellini could be considered as a post-neorealist director up until La dolce vita. However interesting or extravagant these characters maybe, they are always an example of their social type. The shift 171 between neorealism (or post-neorealism) and modernism comes when the character no longer represents a social environment, but on the contrary, she becomes completely alienated from any environment. It is not simply the personalized or psychological description of the character that makes this shift. It is rather with the split between the character and her social or historical background that modernism starts. In cinema verite this split is included in the form. The commentaries and reflections of the characters necessarily distance them from their concrete situations. Cinema verite originated from a fundamentally anthropological approach, which focused on the mental universe of the film's subject. Even though its strict form repressed the author's subjectivity (which was the foundation of Rossellini's criticism of Jean Rouch), still its form could be more personal and subjective than neorealism. The contexts of cinema verite stories were an individual's communicative relationship with his or her environment, in which the consciousness of the filmed situation was included. This resulted in cinema verite characters being considered primarily as unique individuals rather than as social types, and secondly in a constant interaction between the characters and the author. In cinema verite constant communication between the author and the subject made the author's presence a central element of the film, and in this regard cinema verite was a genuinely modernist invention. For directors who wanted and were free to express themselves more overtly and who wanted to foreground their own role in the formation of the film, the cinema verite style became an adequate vehicle. Cinema verite style's popularity is also due to the fact that it could be used also asS^partmi^soWion or as one isolated element Ml nitroPDrprofessional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER EIGHT in the film. Thus even Bergman could use it in his Passion of Anna, where interviews with the actors interrupt from time to time the flow of narrative fiction. And obviously, this particularity is most useful in the essay genre, where different stylistic and narrative fragments are put side by side in an often loosely structured manner. The "NewWave" Style "The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will tell us all that happened to them: it can be the story of their first love or their last, the rise of their political consciousness, a story of a travel, of an illness, their military service, their marriage, their vacation, and we will necessarily like it, because it will be true and new.. . . The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it." Truffaut wrote this in an article, "The 172 Film of Tomorrow Will Be Made by Adventurers."2 The idea of the film as personal self-expression or personal diary is the lowest common denominator of the French new wave. However, this is not only a general idea of the "film d'auteur," but it also had serious consequences regarding the film form. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that it was Truffaut who formulated and advertised most intensively the idea of personal filmmaking, it was Go-dard rather than Truffaut who developed a form, which became influential as the "new wave style." Truffaut as a filmmaker was nowhere as radical as a film critic in opposing the classical form. The quality of a "personal self-expression" characterized his films only at the beginning, and especially in the The 400 Blows, rather than throughout his filmmaking career. Although he was still using some of the new wave gimmicks toward the end of the 1960s—jump cuts, ironic narrative self-reflection, fast motion—his narrative and visual style became more and more conservative even after his first couple films. Yet this relative conservatism or moderate modernism, coupled with some ironic and playful elements, could become quite attractive to important filmmakers with similar inclinations and talents, such as Richardson (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones) or Szabd (The Age of Daydreaming, 1964; Father, 1966; AFilm about Love, 1970). Godard by contrast created from the general "new wave style" a particular coherent form that became especially influential in the late sixties and early seventies: the cinema verite-style essay. This form became extremely attractive for many young European filmmakers. The first follower of this form was Bertolucci (BeforetheRevolution), then came Straub (Not Reconciled, Cr-Gst-ocJ with 2. Cited by Antoine de Baecque, La nouvetie vague (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 89. (H) nitroPDFprofessional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/tsrofeEEional Naturalist Styles 173 Fig. 34. At the release of Breathless: producer Georges de Beauregard, director Jean-Luc Godard, and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. 1965), Sjoman (491,1964), Kluge (Yesterday Girl), Ulrich Schamoni (It, 1966), and Alain Tanner (Charles, Dead or Alive, 1969). The main characteristics of this form are the extreme fragmentation of the narrative, predominant verbal commentaries, on-location shooting at mostly unspecified urban scenes, in most cases self-conscious reaction on the filmmaking process, Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER EIGHT nondramatic action mainly consisting of verbal exchanges, and documentary-style camerawork. Not all Godard films in his first period were made in this form, and he stopped using it after 1967 when political activism made his films even more self-conscious and theatrical. Created with downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles The ornamental trend is a peculiar phenomenon of late modern cinema. Although traces of it appeared already at the emergence of modernism, it was characteristic of the second period starting from the late 1960s. Modern ornamentalism is not mere decoration or spectacular effect. Ornamental films may have theater as a cultural referential background, but most typically, their source is somewhere else. The source of modern ornamental style is either in different national folklore or in a religious or mythological context.1 Thus I will distinguish between two trends of modern ornamental forms:/olkloric and mythological ornamentalism. Ornamental style in itself is not alien to modern art. The Viennese Secession and art nouveau are the most salient examples of modern ornamental styles in the early modern period. Ornamentalism can be a form of abstraction whenever a closed set of regular or irregular geometrical elements that are not meant to represent a part of surface reality becomes an essential part of the composition. However, ornamental elements in modern art are meant to convey some deeper meaning; they are meant to represent some kind of "inner reality" and express fantasy, emotions, or a psychological state of mind allegedly inexpressible by elements of surface reality. Often times, modern ornamentalism mixes elements of realist surface representation with abstract ornamental elements, like in the works of one of the greatest Viennese masters, Gustav Klimt. In other cases ornamental modernism remains entirely abstract, like in case of Vasili Kandinsky or the American 1. The term "ornamental film" was first used by Akos Szilagyi to characterize the aesthetic form of the films of Sergei Paradzhanov. In Filmvildg (1987-88): 34-39. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER NINE abstract expressionists. Ornamental art is abstract, but modern ornamen-talism is always based on the idea that the abstract patterns express some fundamental mental order of human nature. This is why generally ornamentalism uses national or international folklore as a source for its motifs, often apostrophized as "primitive art." Modern ornamentalism is closely associated with modernism's fundamental project of reaching back to the most basic, original elements of artistic expression. The reason for this attachment is modernism's assiduity to go beyond casual disorder of everyday reality and to find underlying general and elementary patterns that are supposed to govern our lives and that are rendered invisible by more complicated cultural structures. Art that is considered "primitive" or "ancient" is thus considered to be closer to these elementary patterns. Whether these patterns and laws are spiritual or psychic, emotional or conceptual, mathematical or physical, religious or historical, 176 the modernist project is to find them and make them the basis of aesthetic representation. The cult of primitivism in modern art and modern thought is part of the quest for authentic, elementary mental and aesthetic forms that are uncor-rupted by civilization. This cult stems from the idea that in abstract patterns one finds the common cultural roots of humankind. Adoption of the simplest, mainly geometric, ornamental patterns of primitive and ancient art (especially from Africa and the Far East), considered as genuine and elementary expressions of "the" human mentality, is a logical consequence of this project. To found a modern art rooted in the ancient spirit of one's own national culture is also an attempt to reach back to uncorrupted original mental patterns as exemplified by the music of Béla Bartók. Modern ornamentalism is also related to the modernist critique of classical aesthetics. Frances S. Connelly argues that the cult of "irrational" primitivism and ornamental style in modernism emerged as a consequence of a revolt against a focus on rationalism of classicism. The grotesque and the ornamental were among those elements of physicality and disorder allowed to exist on the edges if controlled by centrifugal force of the center. They were the marginalia to the rational text, the darkness that fell just outside the aureole of the light of reason, the bestial, lusty satyr that by contrast heightened the proportioned beauty and sober intellect of Apollo.2 Modern artists consciously turned against the rational order of classical representation, which dictated rules that were thought to block instinctive 2. Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of R^asoj^Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press^ 1995), 13. downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEJonal Ornamental Styles imagination. Primitive art and ornamentalism served for modernists as the powerful expressions of genuine artistic instinct repressed by the rules of classical art. The ornamental trend of modern art has also an intrinsic logic in its own development. Roland Barthes, in his essay "Mythologies,"3 concludes that modern art, which is fundamentally alienating and demythologizing, necessarily has to arrive at a certain mythological and ornamental discourse. Furthermore, in a footnote he links this modern mythological approach to free indirect speech, which, many years later, will become Pasolini's basic theoretical issue as the fundamental form of modern cinema. According to Barthes, modern art is characterized by the demystification and subversion of traditional art forms. However, all attempts to dissipate myths will become in their turn a myth right away, so the only way to go beyond myths is to create "artificial" or "experimental" myths, myths of "second degree." In Barthes's account this is what Flaubert had done in his novel 177 Bouvard et Pecuchet, where he mythicizes the already mythical discourse of the two main characters and constructs what Barthes calls the "bouvard-and-pecuchet-ism" as a particular way of behaving and thinking. Through the ornamental excess of the artificial myth construction this results in the de-mythization of the mythical discourse: Flaubert in fact archeologically reconstructed a mythical discourse: this is Viollet-le-Duc of a certain bourgeois ideology. But, in a less naive way than Viollet-le-Duc, he placed further ornaments in this reconstruction, which demythicize this ideology; these ornaments (the forms of the second-degree myth) are like the subjunctive. And the footnote to this is as follows: "Subjunctive, because Latin puts indirect style or indirect discourse in this form, which is an admirable means of demystification."4 According to Barthes the modernist demythi-cizing discourse critique can only be effective through a personal "second-degree" mythical form, where the author can unfold his criticism with the help of the excess of ornaments. A direct criticism would immediately be 3. Barthes, "Mythologies," in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993). In my view, Barthes uses the category of the myth in an excessively restricted sense, detached from its traditional meanings, with a pejorative overtone, and with a weakly disguised touch of left-wing critical bias. This would not be a major problem if he had not claimed the "only" correct definition of myth. He writes self-confidendy: "A thousand different definitions of the myth will be opposed to mine. However, I wanted to define things not just words." 4. Roland Barthes, Oeuvres comple downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER NINE transformed into another "naive" artistic myth. This creates a particular indirect discourse, which is the author's own, and which will keep a distance from the myth it refers to through ornamental intensification. Thus modern ornamental form can be interpreted as an indirect discourse that, through intensification, results in an ironic outsider's position, which is the source of its demythicizing power. Barthes's remark can be perfectly illustrated by Pasolini's mythical-ornamental films and by his theory concerning "free indirect style" as the fundamental discourse of modern cinema. Furthermore, without ever referring to it, Barthes comes to understand quite well the logic of pop art emerging at that time, which can be also viewed as the perversion of the modernist criticism of myths through the intensification of the mythical character of everyday banality. It seems quite natural that wherever ornamental style appears in modern cinema, it is associated either with some folklore or with reconstructed 178 ancient/primitive cultures and mythology. The first type is represented by Marcel Camus, Paradzhanov, Jancsd, some of the modern Fellini films, and Tarkovsky; the second type is represented by the late period of Pasolini and Fellini's Satyricon,Fellini'sRoma, and Fellini's Casanova.5 For obvious reasons, ornamentalism almost never mixes with naturalist style. In some rare cases, however, rather interesting mixtures can be found. At the At the turn of the 1950S-1960S, when the first traces of modern ornamental style appeared, Marcel Camus'sBlacfe Orpheus (1959) canbe considered as the first clear appearance of this stylistic conception. In some parts of this film there is documentaryfootages oftheRioCarnaval—itself an ornamental folkloric ritual, while other parts are pure fiction based on folkloric rituals. Another film form the same year where some effects of ornamentalism stems from the carnivalesque character of the film is Fellini's La dolce vita, which is his first film where his later highly ornamental taste is clearly manifested for the first time. La dolce vita is midway between Fellini's post-neorealist and modernistperiods,whichmakes this film also arare example of some moderate degree of ornamentalism found together with neorealist naturalist style. The modern author who initiated the mythological form of ornamentalism and in whose films one can find an ornamental style mixed with elements of naturalist style is Pasolini. Especially in his mythological films 5. Interestingly, in a documentary made in the seventies, commenting on his own style, Paradzhanov names Fellini and especially Pasolini as his models, although he was one of the first and most powerful representatives of the ornamental conception— together with Fellini and even before Pasolini would turn into this direction. Clearly, this reference to well-known Western authors was due to the fact that Paradzhanov was not Created with only isolated, but was even persecuted in the Soviet Union. Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles 179 Fig. 35. Ornamental mask: Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1969). Medea and Oedipus Rex his usual handheld camera style, his seemingly haphazard camera movements, panning the crowd, as if looking for a topic, some of his camera angles, sometimes up against the sun so that nothing can be seen for seconds, his long sequences about the sacrificial rites, or that of the Delphi scene, give the impression of fictional documentary about a nonexistent mythological reality. For obvious reasons ornamentalism mingles very seldom with mini-,. ml Created wiih T „ r malism. The most important exception is Jancso, as well as some 01 |nl nitroPDF professional downlead the ■free trial online at nftropdteom/profeBEfonal Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles 181 Figs. 36-38. Ornamental style: The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradzhanov, 1968). Angelopoulos's films that are Jancsd-like, such as The TravelingPlayers (1975). However, eveninjancsd's career one finds an uneven bias either on one side or the other. Some of his films, such as TheRound-Up, The Red andtheWhite, and Silence and Cry (1967), create a stylistic atmosphere that is more minimalist than ornamental. In others, such zsAgnusDei (1970), The Confrontation^^), Private Vices, Public Pleasures (1975), or Elektra, My Love (1974), Jancsd emphasizes rather the ornamental aspect of his style. The stylistic balance in his films depends very much on the extent to which he uses folkloric, especially dance, motifs, on the complexity of the sets, which increases over the course of his career, on the number of characters he uses in individual scenes, which varies to a great extent, and on the complexity of the time-space relationship, which is probably the most complex in Agnus Dei. In addition to the films of Jancsd and Angelopoulos, minimalism and the ornamental use of visual elements occur together in the early films of Philippe Garrel. These films of Garrel, especially Le lit de la vierge (1969), The Inner Scar (1972), and Athanor (1972), are reminiscent also of Jancsd's films: large indefinite empty spaces, excessively long takes, constant movement of the characters and the camera, and symbolic use of the objects and gestures. However, Garrel's films are more oneiric and are more theatrical and less action-oriented than those of Jancsd. As for their themes they are even Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER NINE more different since they mainly concentrate on the personal interior realm rather than on exterior historical or social dynamics. One can say with the utmost certainty that the ornamental trend was used more in some countries than in others. Ornamental styles are characteristic of some cultural regions. While all ornamental films refer to some traditional cultural background, some of them borrow motifs from a given cultural mythology more consistently than others. Ornamental-style films that refer to a folkloric or religious background were made most often in Eastern and Central Europe. One can even say that the main contribution of this region of Europe to the modernist movement was its incorporation of a variety of traditional cultural motifs into the modernist form: on the one hand a considerable enrichment of modern cinema's forms, and on the other hand a modernization of a cultural world still very much impregnated by mythologies of folklore. While modern cinema in France, Germany, and 182 Sweden represented first of all the modernization of national and international traditions of art cinema, in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and in some cases Italy (especially through some films of Fellini, Pasolini, and the Taviani brothers) it represented also the modernization of a traditional national cultural environment through its integration into the modern cinematic universe. Traditionalism in this case means not mere representation of a folkloric environment, which obviously is not a modernist specificity. It means representation of traditional myths through their characteristics that are susceptible to some kind of modernist, abstract, subjective, self-conscious, or self-reflective stylization—in other words, elements that refer not to a relationship between myth and reality but to general cultural archetypes. The reflexive character of these modern folkloric films is manifested by the fact that they are not intended to represent folklore or traditional mythology as a real existing cultural universe. They represent it as a source of traditional values, behavioral patterns, in short, basic mental structures. Most often, the elements of a national folklore that are emphasized refer to fantasy or to the unconscious. This is why oneiric and surrealistic motifs dominate in most of these films. In general terms, we can say that modern ornamental films represent the world of traditional mythologies as a hidden or unconscious mental structure underlying the cool, alienated, and technological surface of the modern world. In most cases, where a traditional cultural universe or a mythology is evoked, it is the antagonism or even the clash with the modern world that becomes the central element of the film. Fellini's Roma is a particularly ^oodexample. His conception was to depict the life of modern Rome^y constantly opposing itJ:o the ancient cul- Ml nitro professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles ture of the place sunk to the "unconscious level" of the city.6 While he shows modern life as soaked by the ancient spirit, Fellini tries to seize the moment when this spirit is on the verge of vanishing, which is symbolized by the scene where the discovered underground frescos disappear in the light cast on them. Here the modern tends to destroy the ancient, which constitutes its own cultural "unconscious." Civilization and barbarism change their meanings in the last scene where the group of motorcyclists, contradicting Fellini's commentary ("There is nobody around. A great silence. Only the water of the fountains") enter the scene making a lot of noise, killing the ancient-modern atmosphere, and expropriate the city for a new barbarian civilization. Folklore and mythology for modern cinema is more an example of general human mental creativity than a set of ethnographic facts. For that reason, modern ornamental filmmakers most of the time do not feel it necessary to reconstruct traditional forms with ethnographic fidelity. In almost 183 every case we find a stylistically concentrated or even distorted and intensified way of representing traditional folklore. One of the most spectacular examples is Iuri Ilyenko's The Eve oflvanKupalo (1968), adapted from Gogol's short story, which itself was a compilation of Ukrainian folk tales. Ilyenko transforms the folkloric motives into a highly surrealistic hypersaturated visual texture, where different visual and narrative motives of Ukrainian national folklore overshadow almost completely the linear narrative. The highly fragmented structure (442 shots in 68 minutes) gives this film the look of a series of ornamentally and sometimes surrealistically composed individual sequences. The most typical elements of ornamental style include highly symbolic narrative and unnatural-looking visual compositions, clothing, and facial makeup. Artificial stylization is easier to notice when we have traditional mythologies not issued from popular folklore, like in Wajda's The Wedding or in Pasolini's Oedipus Rex and Medea. These films are based on literary material that became archetypal elements either of a national culture (in Wajda's 6. Walter C. Foreman compares Fellini's film with Virgil's Aeneid. He makes the interesting remark that both Fellini and Aeneas visit an underworld of Rome. While Aeneas "encounters people from his past who reveal to him the future of the city he is going to found in stone, Fellini in the underworld uses futuristic machines as a means of revealing the old Roman house, the past of the city he is founding in images. The Roman future shown to Aeneas by Anchises has in three thousand years become the Roman past seen by Fellini's Camera." Walter C. Foreman, "Fellini's Cinematic City: Roma and Myths of Foundation," in Perspectives on Federico ggllini^ ed. Pf|^r Bondanella and Cristina Degli-Esposti (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993), 155. fr$ nitroPDF professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER NINE 184 case) or of European culture as a whole (in Pasolini's case). In Wajda's film the theme of a wedding at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth century provides an opportunity to bring together a huge variety of different characters in different historical and folkloric costumes in one place where they become symbols of an entire historical society. This society is described as cohering around heroic dreams and fantasies and poetic myths about the past, all of which is challenged by the coming of the herald bringing the news about the war that calls the nation together into patriotic union. The ornamental intensification and the symbolic abstraction in the description of the characters and their relations are contrasted with the reality of the danger where all this mythology is supposed to prove its validity and reference to reality. In other words, the decorativeness of the historical and folkloric costumes is directly associated with a collective mentality. Quite similar is Wojciech Has's surrealistic mental journey film, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973), only here the fantasy universe of the narrative is constructed of elements of predominantly Jewish traditional folklore in Poland of the beginning of the century in such a way as to suggest the perishing of the whole world. Pasolini's mythological films reflect even more a purely mental reconstruction of a mythical universe rather than a historical and ethnographic reality. In The Gospel according to Saint Matthew (1964) Pasolini declared that he was not interested in reconstructing the historical reality of Christ and the story. He rather intended to construct his own sacred vision of it: "I want to re-consecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them."7 7. Oswald Stack, Pasolini onPas^Sni (London: Thames and Hudson; BFI, 1969), 25. (n) nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles It was even more so in his films where he used mythology as a narrative basis. All the settings and the costumes of both Oedipus Rex and Medea are pure inventions of Pasolini and of his costume designer. Both stories are located in a period about which our knowledge is more rooted in mythology than in historical fact. Pasolini wanted to reach the visual atmosphere of a "barbarian look" and at the same time give it a "documentary-looking" reality too. The characters' appearance is therefore an "ethnomythological" reflection of those psychic contents of which each of the stories became an archetypal narrative. Pasolini's reconstructions are not meant to be those of a historical or a mythological world but that of a basic psychic and emotional structure manifested in the myths of this period. In Oedipus Rex this is particularly clear, since Oedipus's original story is associated in the film with a twentieth-century framing story. Rather than modernizing the story, Pasolini wanted to evoke the original myth in the form of a fantasy having a strange, and in many ways frightening, savage atmosphere to refer to the basically barbaric psychic substructure of the contemporary modern world. The apparently ornamental, colorful aspect of the film has the function of representing an abstract structure, which, according to Pasolini, constitutes the psychological "deep structure^'^all societies. {ffl nitroPDFprofessional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER NINE The same basic conception can be found in Medea, even though there is no such explicit allusion to actualizing the myth as in Oedipus Rex. However, here, too, the same two worlds are contrasted to one another in a metaphysical dualism. Medea's world is the ancient, barbaric world of cruel rituals dominated by the nonearthly universe of the gods; Jason, on the other hand, represents a pragmatic, enlightened world, without gods or metaphysics. Jason represents modernity, and Medea represents the world of barbaric, unconscious impulses—and Pasolini's thesis is that the two subsist side by side. There is no dialectical synthesis between modern and ancient, enlightened and barbaric. Both are present at the same time all the time. As the Centaur says in the film: "What is sacred is conserved in its new desa-cralized form. And here we are, one next to the other!" Pasolini represents two antagonistic worlds, which, in spite of the antagonism, constitute one and the same universe. Pasolini's approach is metaphysical rather than 186 historical-dialectical. When reflecting on his own dualistic approach, he said: "My dialectics is no longer tertiary but binary."8 He also had a plan to make another film about the coexistence of barbarism and modernism in a bipolar world, II padre selvaggio (Father Savior), in which a young man leaves an African tribal world for modern capitalism. This dualistic metaphysical approach is a characteristic trait of a modernist author. We find the same conception in Fellini's Satyricon, another highly ornamental Italian film of the period. Fellini's intentions, just like Pasolini's, were to create a parallel, dualistic vision of antiquity and the modern world. Fellini's reconstruction of Petronius's novel was neither an adaptation nor the reconstruction of the "original" world of Petronius. Satyricon presents an archetypal form of the moral corruption of the modern life. As Fellini comments: We can find disconcerting analogies between Roman society before the final arrival of Christianity—a cynical society, impassive, corrupt, and frenzied—and society today, more blurred in its external characteristics only because it is internally more confused. Then as now we find ourselves confronting a society at the height of its splendor but revealing already the signs of a progressive dissolution... a society in which all beliefs—religious, philosophical, ideological, and social—have crumbled, and been replaced by a sick, wild, and impotent eclecticism.... Thus the film will have to be made of unequal segments, with long luminous episodes joined by far-out, 8. Cited inLuigiTorraca, "IlVento Di Medea," Pasolini eL'Antico.IDoniDellaRagione, ed. Umberto Todini (Naples: Edizione Scientifica Italiane, 1995), 90. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles blurred sequences, fragmentary to the point of never being reconstructed again—the potsherds, crumbs, and dust of a vanished world.9 On these premises Fellini, just like Pasolini, feels free not to reconstruct the "original" self-contained world of antiquity but to construct his own visual and narrative mythology from the fragments originating from here and there, from antiquity, from modernity, history of art, and from his fantasy in order to make the everlasting metaphysical structure of decadence salient in the midst of this pile of cultural debris and mythical fragments. According to the apt remark of Bernard F. Dick, Satyricon "has a mythos, not merely a plot." Just like Pasolini, Fellini creates the myth of the demytholo-gized world of modernity. However fragmented and eclectic the film's cultural references maybe, everything comes together in Fellini's mythicizing vision about the contemporary world functioning according the same basic principles obeyed by cultures that went before it: "If the work of Petronius 187 is the realistic, bloody, and amusing description of the customs, characters, and general feel of those times, the film we want to freely adapt from it could be a fresco in fantasy key, a powerful and evocative allegory—a satire of the world we live in today. Man never changes."10 Mythical ornamentalism for Fellini is a way of conceptualizing in an allegorical way the actual reality around him. The barbaric, mythical universe is another invisible or unconscious layer of the same world we now call modern and the surface of which looks empty and desolate. Returning to the discussion above about the concept of nothingness in modern cinema, we can now say that in the depth of the stylistic difference between modern minimalism and modern ornamentalism resides two opposing approaches to the same modern world: one representing the empty surface in the form of the absence or lack of the world of substantial values, the other reconstructing the realm of these missing values in the form of a mythical reality. Within the modern ornamental trend Tarkovsky takes the reality of this reconstruction the most seriously. The reason for this is that the material and sensible presence of the spiritual world is contained in the mythical tradition itself that Tarkovsky is relying upon. Unlike Fellini and Pasolini, Tarkovsky does not have to dig into the depth of modern culture to find the mythical roots of the contemporary world. He has only to refer to 9. Federico Fellini quoted in "Preface to Satyricon," mFederico Fellini:Essays in Criticism, ed. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford, 1978), 16-18. 10. "Preface to Satyricon," p. 17. Created wiih Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER NINE his Russian Orthodox Christian tradition to evoke the dual vision of the world: simultaneously material and spiritual. I have already remarked that Tarkovsky's dualistic representation of the world can be detected in all of his films. This dualism is clearly manifested in terms of cinematic tools. In all of his films there is a serial structure parallel to the narrative one, consisting of recurring visual motifs, such as the rain or the horse in Andrei Rublev, the wind in Mirror, and different fluid elements and images of nature in all of his films.11 In most cases the appearance of a particular element of these series of visual motifs is independent of any narrative function. Either they appear already as independent symbolic motifs, like the motif of the horse that appears in Rublev as a metaphor right from the beginning, or gain their narrative independence step by step as they reoccur. Such is the rain in Rublev, which appears for the first time as a narrative motivation for the monks to seek shelter in a barn where the jongleur 188 is performing. Later on, when rain starts in a given scene there is no such narrative motivation. It becomes a visual element that directly links the scenes in which it occurs to a transcendental divine universe. We cannot call these elements "symbols" or "metaphors," as they do not have any precise conceptual meaning. They are the "manifestations" of this divine universe more than anything else, not subordinated to the logic of the narrative universe. Although the referent of Tarkovsky's dual vision is in most cases the spiritual-material dichotomy, in some of his films this dichotomy refers to the modern-traditional contrast as well. This is clear in particular in Solaris where traditional values of culture and human relationships are opposed to modern technical civilization; in Mirror, where values of a traditional, spiritual, and national community are opposed to the present situation of the communication gap between generations; and in Nostalghia, where the old Russian world is opposed to the modern Western cultural environment. The "other world" that represents spiritual values is, so to speak, unnarrated in these films, it does not have stories, only an eternal presence that manifests itself from time to time through images of nature and different objects representing beauty, culture, and tenderness. Just like in the relevant films of Fellini and Pasolini, Tarkovsky's use of mythical cultural background serves primarily to create a holistic vision of the world, which contains the con- 11. A detailed discussion of Tarkovsky's recurrent motives and relationship with the Russian Orthodox tradition canbe found in Andras Balint Kovacs and Akos Szilagyi: Les , , , ,CraatadwTtri % B} mondes a Andrei Tarkovski (Lausanne: LAge d Homme, 1987). download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Ornamental Styles trast between the traditional and spiritual on the one hand, and the modern and the material on the other. It is that contrast that is missing from the modern cinema of Western and northern Europe, as well as from films of other Italian modern filmmakers such as Antonioni and Bertolucci. Still, any generalization claiming that ornamental style was the main characteristic of Eastern European cinema would be hasty and difficult to maintain. We cannot even say that the basic problematic underlying this style—the clash between traditional mythology and modernity—would be the most important concern of the cinema of this region. There is very little trace of this concern, for example, in the Czechoslovak new wave, and ornamental style is not particularly characteristic of Czechoslovak films either. In Poland only a few films by Wajda and Has raise this concern, and even though it is an important topic in Hungarian modern cinema, it is by no means the most important one. Analysis of problems of national history was a much more fundamental concern throughout 189 Eastern European cinema. What we can assert with certainty, however, is that the most important accomplishments of cinematic ornamentalism in modern European cinema were made in Italy and Eastern Europe and that this style is much weaker in other parts of Europe. Films of Daniel Schmid in Switzerland or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in Germany got very close to mythical ornamentalism, but none constructed a whole mythological universe, remaining rather on the theatrical side. One of the possible reasons for this can be found in the status of modernization of the societies in these countries. Modernization in Eastern and Southern Europe was far less developed in this period than in the northwestern part of Europe. The fundamental experience was not the "modern condition" but the transition to the modern condition and the dissolution of traditional ways of life. As Italian film director Vittorio de Seta put it: Life changed, and with it the quality of life, as if orders had been handed down. Although invisible and unexpressed, they acted like commands that had only to be pronounced for the old models and values, especially those of rural life, to become obsolete and discarded. It was this period of the late fifties and early sixties for which La Dolce Vita served as a sort of watershed____ Urbanism, industrialism, consumerism, prosperity—this entire human transformation occurred—and was experienced—like a natural disaster.12 But the cultural experience that followed was not simply that of the collapse of a traditional cultural universe. Rather, traditional cultural patterns were considered more as a constitutive part of everyday life than in . . Created wltfi . . 12. Vittono de Seta cited in Brunetta, Stona del cinema itahano dal 1^45 agh ottanta, 631. (H) nitroPDFprofessional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER NINE the more modernized societies of the West. Traditional cultural forms were not considered as anachronistic within modernized society rather as a fertile ground for it, a source for a special way of modernization. On the one hand modern filmmakers of this region were looking for ways to reconcile traditional and modern; on the other hand, where the contrast between traditional and modern was represented as antagonistic, it was the modern rather than the traditional that was held responsible for the conflict (Roma, Solaris, The Mirror). By contrast, in modern cinema of the West, if traditional ways of life were represented at all, they appeared as a retrograde and oppressive obstacle standing in the way of modernization, as we can see in Peter Fleischmann's Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1968). Obviously, this approach gives no reason for modern filmmakers to use elements of national folklore and mythology upon which to create a modern film form. By contrast this explains why the young Angelopoulos in Greece found Jancsd's or-190 namental version of the Antonioni form more appropriate to follow rather than other basic modernist forms. Modern ornamentalism, however, is not missing entirely from the cinema of Western Europe either. It was present much earlier, during the first modern period. German expressionism was not only the adaptation of art cinema to the forms of modern expressionist painting and theater but also the cinematic adaptation of certain myths of German national culture. Expressionism was the most decorative of the modern styles in the cinema, and it became the means of processing the psychic effects of modernization in terms of this mythology. Even if one has some reservations with regard to Siegfried Kracauer's interpretation of German expressionism as the foreshadowing of Nazi power in the German social psyche, it is difficult to contest that these stories express some irrational fear or unconscious angst provoked by a social reality represented as extremely precarious and full of unpredictable and irrational threats.13 The source of the danger in German expressionism can be both neurosis caused by anxiety of modern alienation (From Morning till Midnight, 1920; Scherben, 1921), and traditional mythical universe (Nosferatu, 1922). Ornamental and theatrical stylization was more intimately entwined in German expressionism than in late modernism, for the source of both was the same traditional mythological universe. Likewise, but in a less radical manner, in early modern French cinema one can also find ornamental use of national folklore as the basis of modern - 13. See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1347). downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Ornamental Styles ist visual effects. One may think of Jean Epstein's The Faithful Heart (1923) and Finis terrae (1929), or Jean Gremillon's Maldone (1928; especially the farandole scene). It seems that the formalism of primitive myths and folkloric ornamental patterns sooner or later serve as an important source of inspiration for most (even if not in all) national cinemas where modernism became an important movement.14 14. The same is true for most phenomena of modern cinema of Asia and the Americas. A noncompetent viewer (or to use Noel Burch's term, "a distant observer") of Japanese, Indian, or Brazilian films, however, must be very cautious in judging the extent to which these films are or are not based on folkloric ornamental art, since many things may appear as "folkloric" to a Western eye that in fact has been a banal part of everyday life in these countries. The situation is less difficult when we have to deal with clearly mythical stories and characters like in the films of Glauber Rocha in Brazil or in Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (1964) in Japan, or when the film's plot explicitly refers to the contrast between modern and traditional cultural forms, like in Satyajit Ray's Music Room (although it is questionable to what extent this film is part of the modernist movement.) Since the decline of modernism the folkloric version of modern ornamentalism reemerged only in Iranian cinema of the 1990s in some films of Abbas Kiarostami (especially in Wherels the Friend's Home? 1987) and in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh (1996). Created wiih downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional = 10 = Theatrical Styles Theater was one of the main inspirations of late modern cinema, and it served as a characteristic stylistic background in many modern films, which is why we have to consider it a separate stylistic category. Historically, the close interaction between modern theater and cinema is also explained by the parallel activities of many modernist directors. An-drzej Wajda, Ingmar Bergman, R. W. Fassbinder, Peter Brook, Tony Richardson, Vilgot Sjoman, Jean-Marie Straub, H.-J. Syberberg, Daniel Schmid, Marguerite Duras, and Armand Gatti are some of the best-known examples, but also Jacques Rivette of the French new wave constantly referred to theater, and Agnes Varda1 and especially Alain Resnais introduced a certain theatricality into modernist art cinema already in the early period. Even Godard approached theater in some of his most politically motivated films, like The Joy of Learning (1968) and All's Well (1972). There are two general characteristics of theatrical style in modern cinema. One is the excessively unnatural, exaggerated, abstract way of acting that emphasized artificiality rather than psychological realism. The other is the artificial look of the sets as well as artificial, expressive lighting. Artificiality may appear in various ways in modern theatrical styles depending on what kind of theatrical or spectacle background the film wants to evoke. In one of the first theatrical stylized films, Resnais's Last Year at Marienhad, all the characters talk and move as they were depicting a seventeenth-century French classical drama where gestures are overdrama- 1. She was the longtime offi^ial^ho|ogf||Dher of the Theatre Populaire. That experience is clearly felt in her first film, La pointe-courte (1957). downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Theatrical Styles tized and symbolic at the same time. Their acting is not inexpressive as in the Bressonian conception of the "model," and they are not dispassionate like Antonioni's characters. Resnais's films foreground their artificiality, their nonrealistic nature, and their situation. If Bresson represents his characters as "spiritual automata" and Antonioni represents his as suffering humans on their way toward complete emotional emptiness, the characters of Marienbad are pure artificial creatures with no reference to any kind of social or existential reality.2 On the other hand, the location of the story evokes the same cultural universe: the theatrical culture of the seventeenth-century baroque with constant references to antique classicism.3 That artificiality of situation and character behavior is directly and overtly related to theatricality in Last Year at Marienbad. At the beginning of the film the characters are first shown as frozen puppets in a theater who come to life when the performance onstage ends. Furthermore, that 193 scene foreshadows the conclusion of the story of the film inasmuch as the onstage dialogue ends with the female character saying, "And finally, I am yours." Clearly, in this scene Resnais provided a concise "model" of what will happen later, and also a clue as to how to interpret the artificial atmosphere of the character's acting style. Theatricality became a form of abstraction rather than a form of psychological realism for Resnais, which allowed him to distance his film from the surface effects of reality and create an abstract mental model. The relation between reference to theater and artificial acting style is all the more apparent, since such artificial acting style and so direct a reference to theatricality do not appear in other modern-period Resnais films. Another important feature of Last Year at Marienbad's theatrical style is visual expressionism and especially the use of sharp chiaroscuro effects. Expressionist lighting style was not new to Resnais as he used it with his earlier short films. This style was a common expressive tool in the 1950s. However, the function of this visual characteristic in this and other modern theatrical style films is not to emphasize dramatic effects like in film noirs and social realist heroic dramas. It has the function of creating an atmosphere of unre-alness and making the setting look like a theatrical stage. Resnais used the 2. That is how Antonioni comments on this difference: "Eclipse has been compared to Marienbad, but that is wrong. I think that Resnais in Marienbad is quite well satisfied with his characters reduced to the state of objects. For me this is a drama." Quoted inL'Express, 24 May 1962. 3. Marienbad was shot in real locations in twoBavarian castles: interior scenes in Nym-phenburg, and the garden scenes in Schleissheim. ft nitroPDFprofessional downlead the ■free trial online at nftropdteom/profeBEfonal CHAPTER TEN Fig. 43. Theatrical scene in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961). black-and-white contrast to create unreal atmosphere with other motives, too, for example, the woman's dress. She not only wears different dresses in different scenes, but there is a regular alteration of the color of her dress, one time all white, another time all black. This alteration has no dramatic function, not even as to when the scene takes place (sometimes she wears black in the present and white in the past, sometimes the other way around). But it refers to some shift between times or moods that cannot be related to a plot 194 turn. As both time dimensions—past and present—of the story are considered to be imaginary, these shifts cannot be interpreted as shifts between real and unreal, only as shifts between one unreal dimension into another. We find the same basic stylistic structure in Fellini's 8 1/2, and probably not by chance. Although Fellini claims to not having seen Last Year at Marienbad before completing his own film, some similarities between the two films are striking.4 Both films' main topic is the effects of merging of reality, memory, and fantasy. Both films have a central character who is the focus of this heterogeneous mental universe. High-contrast lighting, artificial acting style, and direct reference to stage performance go together the same way in the two films. To a lesser extent than Marienbad, 8 1/2 also creates an atmosphere of unrealness by the exaggerated, unnatural way of acting of many characters, not to mention the accentuated artificiality of some of their costumes and sets. Fellini also uses high black-and-white contrast to shift between reality and imagination, but many times high contrast appears not only between scenes but also within scenes, also creating a strong atmosphere of the theatrical stage. However, Fellini's spectacle reference is commedia dell'arte rather than French classical drama.5 4. "And to help the work of the film historians, I admit that I have never seen Marienbad." Ironically, the mere fact the he mentions that shows that at least he knew about it, and knew also about the similarities. "Confessione in pubblico: Colloquio con Federico Fellini," Bianco e nero (April 1963): 4. 5. It is worth noting that the two Fellini films that are most characteristically theatrical (the other is Juliet of the Spirits) in their use of chiaroscuro contrast are the work of cinema-Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Theatrical Styles Starting with 8 1/2, acting in Fellini's films means satirically exaggerated emphasis of the most important traits of a personality rather than nuanced creation of real-life characters. In the last scene of 8 1/2, all the characters, including Guido, Fellini's alter ego, are taken out of their real-life roles and are represented as fictional characters populating the set of the planned film. Their dancing around in the strong limelight is the final statement of the film about their fictional and artificial existence, in the same mental space, while at the same time they all represent real-life figures too. Last Year at Marienbad is different from 8 i/z in that for Resnais the stage, where the characters play their parts and which is imposed on them by an auteur, is a purely mental universe having no reference to reality other than the reality of the narrative; for Fellini by contrast, it is real life that becomes this stage in the auteur's mental universe. Both films' theatricality is closely linked to their genre, which is in both cases the mental journey. And the reason for this is that in both cases the mental universe the narrative is referring to is 195 some kind of fictional genre: cinema in one case, narration as such in the other. Not all theatrical-style modern films are of the mental journey genre, of course. Louis Malle's Zazie in the Subway is a parody and a satire of that "Parisian life" that other French new wave films made a cult of. Its cultural reference is the new wave fashion of mythicizing Paris with the help of an allegedly innocent approach: "What do you want, this is the new wave!" exclaims at one point Zazie's uncle. Paris is depicted in the film through the eyes of a little girl as a chaotic, bad-smelling, funny and dubious bazaar, full of weird characters where nothing works and nothing makes sense, while Zazie makes a little mischief making fun of everything and everybody. New wave parody, however, means in Zazie not a direct pastiche of something like a "new wave style" but the exaggeration of the new wave's cult of the irregularities, and the new wave mythicizing of the realist environment is turned into theatrical parody. A strong fashion of theatricality emerged during the period of political modernism, which was related to the increased political consciousness the model taken from Brechtian political theater. It was Godard who held on to the Brechtian legacy the most; however, theatrical style characterized only tographer Gianni Di Venanzo, who was known for his strong lighting effects in Italian cinema in the 1960s, especially in Antonioni's La notte andEclipse, but also from the neorealist era. Di Venanzo died in 1967, and Fellini then used Giuseppe Rotunno as cinematagrapher on most of his subsequent films. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional very few of his films. The clearest example is All's Well, and perhaps La Chi-noise. Theatrical references are much stronger in Straubs's films, especially his short film The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp (1968), which includes a ten-minute-long sequence playing on a theater stage filmed from a . , . r . . , Created with . r .... single point 01 view in a long static shot. It was in tact a recording 01 a the- mg static shot. It was in tact a recording ot a the- Ml nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Theatrical Styles ater performance.6 Another highly theatrical Straub film is Othon, an adaptation of French seventeenth-century classical playwright Pierre Corneille's play. The actors play in antique costumes amidst the ruins on Palatine Hill with the life of modern Rome going on in the background. Theatrical style had the greatest impact on new German cinema. In addition to Straub, one can find this style in more than one film by Werner Herzog, Fassbinder, and Syberberg. The director whose films can be characterized the most as excessively theatrical at the beginning of the 1970s was Hans Jürgen Syberberg, especially his Ludwig-Requiem for a Virgin King (1972). It is with Straub and Syberberg also that opera appears for the first time in modern cinema as a reference of theatrical style, and starting from the mid-1970s opera will become the most important theatrical reference. Fassbinder's style was marked by theater in the most varied ways. It is very hard to define anything like a consistent "Fassbinder style." He tried his hand at different genres and styles, but the most consistently recurring 197 stylistic characteristic of his films was a kind of theatrical artificiality. In some of his early films (Gods of the Plague, 1970, Whity, 1971) he started with the new wave idea of making a pastiche of popular genres like the gangster film or the western. However, the new wave directors who applied this technique altered those genres so that it described or expressed some kind of identifiable life experience of their real environment or history: Parisian life in Godard's Breathless and Chabrol's The Cousins (1959); the atmosphere of the French chanson and the experience of childhood abandonment in Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player; the confinement of French small-town life in Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). French new wave genre pastiche always served some kind of actualization: adapting a narrative form to feelings of modern ways of life. Early Fassbinder pastiches do not evoke any kind of real-life experience; he rather emphasizes the artificial and unreal atmosphere of film genres, intensifying that atmosphere to a point where the characters become vehicles for representing abstract relationships, and the environment becomes an accentuated artificial space for developing these relationships. In these two films the abstraction of space is comparable with what we find in Marienbad, only the references are very different: typical spaces of some film genres instead of classical theater and antique sculpture. The only film in which Fassbinder tried to adapt a pastiche to some real-life experience was Fear Eats the Soul (1973). This film is a free adaptation of Douglas Sirk's classical Hollywood melodrama, All That Heaven Allows (!955)- The apparent simplicity, the straightforwardness, and high emotion- 6. From Krankheit derJugend by FeränancfBruckner. Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER TEN ality of Sirk's film resonated with Fassbinder's desire to make simple stories. As he said in an interview in 1971: "I am sure that one day I will be able to tell naive stories."7 Fassbinder was deeply moved by Sirk's work and decided to transplant this cinematic experience into his own story. He even imitated Sirk's use of glaring bright colors to emphasize the same unequivocal and straightforward emotions and emotional conflicts, albeit in a very different social context. Fassbinder gets amazingly close to postmodern stylization in his early theatrical films inasmuch as his use of art historical references are essentially self-contained and are not meant to convey any direct reference to reality nor to any consistent cultural background. However, the abstract and purist nature of this intensified stylization does not let us go as far as to assert something like the postmodern style in early Fassbinder. His style, even when it gets more saturated and ornamental, is strictly oriented toward homog-198 enized abstraction. He does not mix styles; he attempts to create a consistent theatrical style throughout the film rather than using theatrical stylization as one effect amongst others. His goal is to reach abstract representation of personal relationships, which needs some distance from a realist context. In order to do so he uses analytical tools rather than synthetic ones. One of his main tools to achieve abstraction is the very loose connection between dialogues and dramatic situation. In this he follows the Godard-Straub trend to use dramatic situations as delivery mechanism for abstract monologues or dialogues. This effect is the most spectacular in films where Fassbinder imitates American gangster films. In one scene of his The American Soldier (1970), which is his most Godardian and least theatrical early film, the maid comes into the hotel room where she finds Ricky in bed with a woman named Rosa. She slowly sits on the edge of the bed and while the two others are making love, she starts telling a story almost to the camera.8 The cinematic realism of the scene is immediately broken, and the room is transformed into a Brechtian theatrical stage where symbolic interactions take place accompanied by self-reflexive discourses instead of real actions. Another theatrical effect reminiscent of the modernist stage used by Fassbinder was a radical reduction of the sets. Either he used an extremely minimalist background, as in his earliest films, like Katzelmacher, or emphasized artificial sets as in Whity and The Gods of the Plague. While acting style 7 Interview with Christian Brad Thomsen, 1971, in Vince Zalan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Budapest: Osiris, 1992), 53. 8. Fear Eats the Soul will be based pn±he story the maid tells in this film, which Fass- binder found in a newspaper. downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Theatrical Styles is rather Antonioni-inspired and dispassionate in The Gods of the Plague, in Whity it is rather expressive, and more appropriate to the romantic melodrama he makes in a western setting. There is yet another sort of theatricality what we find in The Bitter Tears ofPetra von Kant (1972). This film was made from one of Fassbinder's plays, and it might as well be a minimalist closed-situation drama if stylized acting and extravagant costumes did not add a theatrical touch. Here Fassbinder did not use the stage effect, neither by lighting nor by abstract set design. The fact that the whole of this more than two-hour-long film is staged in a single room, basically on the same bed, is in itself enough to create the theatrical atmosphere. Fassbinder abandoned his theaterlike filmmaking for the rest of the 1970s but returned to it in his last film, Querelle (1982), when postmodern's eclecticism made theatricality popular once again. The static theatrical style of Straub and early Fassbinder had a considerable influence on modernist Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid, who con- 199 sciously went against representation of reality in his films. He took from early Fassbinder the extreme long takes (up to ten minutes) and static compositions and from Straub the mixture of onscreen and offscreen voice-over and a deliberately theatrical way of acting. What he added was abstract theatrical stage sets together with sophisticated lighting. His close relationship with Fassbinder is shown clearly by Shadow of Angels (1976), a highly stylized film made from one of Fassbinder's plays, in which the main role is also played by Fassbinder himself. We find strong theatrical stylization in many more films in the second period of modern cinema. In Marco Ferreri's parable, Don't Touch the White Woman! (1974), which was inspired by the construction of a huge underground shopping mall in the heart of Paris. The film was shot while the immense construction hole on the place of the old market of Les Halles was still open. Ferreri's parable makes a comparison between the demolition of the old market for the sake of an American-type shopping mall and another American campaign, which chased natives from their homeland. The obvious discordance between the story, and the anachronistic costumes on the one hand, and the real location together with the modern costumes of the "Indians" on the other, make this film a theatrical happening or performance. The actual style in each of these films is dependent on the background cultural reference. Their theatricality is always more overt and self-conscious than that of the theatrical films of the early 1960s. Emphasized stylistic artificiality with reference to a theatrical tradition of high culture is a genuinely modern phenomenon that was less frequent in the early period and more widespread m^n^periocl starting in the late 1960s. The cult jffl nitroPDF professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER TEN of artificiality is dramatically expanded in the postmodern period, so the transition to postmodern is very difficult to detect in this respect too. What we can say is that whether a film represents modern or postmodern theatricality, it can be measured with respect to its stylistic homogeneity and the consistency of its cultural references. Fellini gets the closest to postmodern stylization in his And the Ship Sails On (1984), where he does not refer to a homogeneous, cultural, or mythological background. He rather mixes several cultural backgrounds: opera and filmmaking in a specific historical context. To create such a mixture never occurred to him in his theatrical films of the 1970s, even in his most imaginative and artificial reconstructions of different cultural mythologies, like Satyricon or Fellini's Casanova. Likewise, however artificial-looking Fassbinder's Querelle might be, because of its stylistic and referential consistency it still belongs to the modernist paradigm. Fassbinder's intentions were very clear in this respect. He 200 speaks about the "astonishing mythology" of Jean Genet that manifests itself in this story, and his interest in this story was to see how this strange world with its own peculiar laws relates to our own subjective sense of reality, how it brings surprising truths to the surface of this subjective reality of ours by forcing us ... toward certain recognitions and decisions that, no matter how painful they may seem to be, bring us closer to our own lives. This also means that we get closer to our own identities____ Rolf Zehetbauer and I have decided that the film of Jean Genet's Querelle will take place in a kind of surreal landscape.9 Peculiar laws of a "subjective sense of reality" that express a personal identity are in clear accord with the classical surrealist idea of discovering singular psychic laws of human nature that are brought to light with the help of an abstract visionary stylistic universe. The mere fact that Fass-binder mentions "reality," "truth," and "identity" testifies to his modernist intentions whereby a consistent deep structure of reality, even if mythical, is expressed by a homogeneous aesthetic surface. Theatricality of film style in the modern era had an essentially different source than in the postmodern era. In general we can say that theater for late modern cinema always remained a source of authentic abstraction. That is why it became so important when modern cinema fell into a crisis at the turn of the 1960S-1970S. As Pascal Bonitzer remarked in 1971: "The theater effect in the films of modernity (Oshima, Straub, Godard...) is the 9. Fassbinder, "Preliminary Remarks on Querelle," in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, ed. Michael Totenberg and Leo A. Lensing (Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1992), 169. downlead the ■free trial online at nitropcffeom/profeEEional Theatrical Styles symptom of the crisis of the mise-en-scěne, of the spatial arrangement or the ideological basis thereof. Theater in the cinema means the chance of the regeneration of the signifier."10 Bonitzer is right to see the source of theatricality in the countercinema inspiration and that conventions of forms of art cinema (mise-en-scene and spatial arrangement) had lost their authenticity once again. This means in short, that it is modern cinema that has lost its authenticity. Modern cinema was searching for a renewal of its forms, once again, outside its realm, this time in theater. But it used theater as a source of inspiration for which "regeneration of the signifier" is an adequate phrasing. Looking for renewal of cinema in creating a theatrical film style is a typically modernist response to this crisis. Relying on theatrical mise-en-scěne means a search for generating signifiers that can be imported into cinema, revitalizing the cinematic signifier. Or, as Jacques Aumont put it with regard to Rivette: "They resorted to something that from the old art of the theater could help them the best in accomplishing what they thought the mission, the essence or the goal of the cinema, was: to encounter the real."11 Modernist theatricality is theater-as-cinema not theater-in-the-cinema. Theatrical means are used for creating a particular kind of cinema rather than transcending cinema with the help of theater. As Fassbinder put it, "In theater I would stage things as though I was doing a film, and then I made a film as though it was on the stage."12 Even in Peter Brook's Marat/Sade (1966), which is basically a reproduction of the Royal Shakespeare Company's representation, Brook tried to create a genuine cinematic form—a cinematic transcription appropriate for theatrical representation. A peculiar example of theatricalization of cinema can be found in Jacques Rivette's four-hour-long film Crazy Love (1969). This basically half-documentary film is heavily based on long sequences about the rehearsal of a classical theatrical play. The scenes set in the theater do not merely interrupt the narrative but end up as the main stylistic substance of the film. With his peculiar films positioned on the borders between ornamental, theatrical, and minimalist styles, Philippe Garrel was consciously geared toward the reconstruction of the cinematic signifier with the help of theatrical forms (he also made a documentary in 1967 about the group "Living 10. Pascal Bonitzer, "Cinéma/théatre/idéologie/écriture," Cahiers du cinema 231 (August-September 1971): 9. 11. Jacques Aumont, "Renoir, le patron, Rivette le passeur," in Le theatre dans \e cinema, Coference du College d'histoire de l'art cinématographique, 3 (Paris: Cinematheque fran- caise, 1992-93), 236. Crated with, , r, 12. "At Some Point Films Have to Stop Being Films," in Anarcrmofthe Imagination, 14. : to btop Being Films, in Anarchy ojthe Imagination, 14. Ml nitro professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER TEN Theater" in the United States). The theatrical effect is obtained in Garrel's films by abstract space and the abstract and symbolic gestures and object, as well as by the abstract dialogues that do not refer to a plot or to a concrete situation. Hence, his theatrical style is close to that of the early Fassbinder; however his ornamental use of objects and motives often carrying mythological meanings ties him also to Jancsd. On the other hand, his early films consist of symbolic representation of a series of different psychological states rather than a consistent narrative, and these characteristics together make him a rather peculiar phenomenon in modern cinema. The postmodern approach is just the opposite: not the regeneration but the deconstruction or elimination of the signifier through which theater would be a transient tool rather than a "reliable" source. In Greenaway's The Baby of Macon (1993) but also in Prospero's Books (1991), there is a constant flow between the different aesthetic signifying systems of cinema, theater, 202 text, and painting. Each represents a different realm underlying or superimposed on the others, and linked together by an endless flow of meanings that go across, so to speak, the frames separating these realms from one another. Deconstruction of the "cinematic signifier" means in this case, among other things, the elimination of the meaning chained to a media-specific signifier. Meaning is created by a transtextual series of signifiers, each of which are media-specific in its own right, but the meaning they make loses its generic link to a specific media context. Stylistically this translates into a series of procedures referring to transgression of limits, like different frames in the picture, or superimpositions of different media. Postmodern use of theatrical style does not attempt to homogenize its signifying system. It keeps the theatrical, the cinematic, and the painterly separated, setting them all off within quotation marks, and mixing in a transtextual flow their effects rather than their signifiers in a more or less homogeneous system. Created with downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Modern Cinema Trends Throughout the previous chapters I have used a variety of categories to characterize modernist art films: style, genre, general aesthetic conception, and the cultural or artistic tradition a film refers to. The task of this chapter is to impose a certain order among these categories so that the general and homogeneous concept of modern cinema may appear as a coherent set of formal solutions characteristic of a given historical period. The categories I use derive not from a preexisting conceptual system; they were rather "found" and became generalized during detailed scrutiny of the films themselves. What will follow is therefore a systematized taxonomy of forms of art cinema in the late modern period rather than a general theoretical system of the cinematic form. These categories are the most general ones. One can always break down artistic tendencies to the level of individual works. Here the most characteristic directions followed by late modern art cinema will be treated. These categories will characterize modern films from a predominantly formal aspect—visual style and narrative form—but alone they are insufficient to define modernism in the sixties and seventies. One cannot disregard the "content" side, that is, what kind of stories modern films tell with the help of their specific form. I found that three general thematic frameworks recur in modern films. In general terms these are the following: 1. Disconnection of the individual human being from the environment, commonly called alienation; 2. subjective, mythological, and conceptual redefinition of the concept of reality; and 3. disclosure of the idea of nofningnessb1 ehind the surface reality. {§) nitroPDFprofessional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER ELEVEN These themes on the formal side appear as the "modern film genres," that is, the most widespread story patterns that can be detected during this period. What we call "modern cinema" is made up of certain combinations of specific genres with specific narrative forms and visual styles. Some of these stylistic and narrative traits existed before modern art cinema emerged, and individually all of them remained an option for art filmmakers after modernism's decline. The end of an artistic period means not the disappearance of its innovations. Instead, it signals that certain characteristic combinations of these innovations with traditional elements disappear, or that these combinations cease to be innovative. Modernist films could be made any time even after modernism as a predominant norm has ceased to exist, but—to formulate a paradox—modernism was not modern anymore. Three terms served in this survey to define the most general aesthetic particularity of the modern artistic form as such: abstraction, subjectivity, and 204 reflection. Abstraction means that the form refers not to traditional ways of representing nature or reality but to a conceptual structure or system that is regarded as an essential summary of the main constitutive principles of reality or nature. Subjectivity of the modern form means that these conceptual systems are generally presented as an auteur's proposition to be accepted as a new artistic way of looking at things. Reflexivity of modern forms means that the form is constructed in a way so that this proposition is perceived by the viewer/reader as such. In other words, the work of art represents itself as a work of art differing from an artistic tradition. These categories are dependent on each other. As abstraction is defined in relation to nineteenth-century perceptual and psychological realism, modern abstraction is different from "primitive" or early Christian art in its sensibly conscious and individual decision to be different; in other words, in its subjectivity and reflexivity. Subjectivity as well as reflexivity can both be found separately in various premodern arts. We speak of modern forms when these three general aesthetic categories coexist inter-dependently. Late modern cinema bears the influence of three main film historical movements: early modern cinema of the 1920s, Italian neorealism of the 1940s, and American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. However, we defined modern cinema as art cinema's adaptation to the modern arts, therefore it is important to find the extracinematic aesthetic influences also informing late modern cinema. These are the French nouveau roman, English-American pop art; American abstract expressionism; modern, especially serial, music; and the Brechtian political theater. Furthermore, an impor- , „, , Created with . , ,. , tant trend ot late modern cinema extensively relied upon different non- downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Modern Cinema Trends modern or ancient cultural traditions, such as national folklore and antique mythology. In the modern period the choice whether to construct the film's narrative and visual aspect on continuous representation of the world made a great difference. Some films systematically used the method of radical fragmentation, while others stressed radically continuous representation. Fragmentation as well as continuity represents a conscious divergence from the style of classical continuity prevailing during the twenty years that preceded the modern era. Radicalism in continuity and in fragmentation is a formal characteristic that did not disappear after modernism. Regarding the visual quality of the films in terms of motives and compositions used I found four characteristic trends that I call "styles" and that can be ordered into two oppositions. The first trend is what I call the minimalist style constructed upon a variation principle of a restricted number of visual motives, most often themselves extremely reduced and austere. 205 At the opposing pole is the ornamental style, also constructed upon the variation principle, but this time using a wide range of exotic, decorative visual motives usually borrowed from or inspired by ancient or folk-loric cultural traditions. The next style I call the naturalist style, presenting the visual atmosphere of an essentially undisturbed everyday reality. Within this trend I make a distinction between the neorealist and the cinema verite style, whose difference is based upon the narrative organization of the plot: the neorealist trend is narratively unreflected, while the other is fundamentally self-reflective. At the opposing pole of the naturalist style is the theatrical style. This style is characterized above all by the characters' "unnatural" way of acting, their highly stylized behavior, and dialogues. This style often involves stylized, unnatural-looking background or theatrical sets, especially around the end of the modern period. While minimalism often mixes with naturalism, theatricality often results in some form of ornamentalism. In the final analysis these styles represent two basic formal tendencies: one that tends to empty the image of artificial visual qualities, and the other tends to saturate it with these qualities. Combining these characteristics with those relating to the continuous/fragmented dimension of the form we can distinguish four basic formal trends in modern cinema regarding their assault on classical visual style: continuous-saturating, continuous-rarefying, fragmented-saturating, and fragmented-rarefying. The figure below is a schematic representation of these trends and their relation to one another and to classical continuity. Modern cinema can be , , i-i Created jwiih . charted as a rectangle with classical continuous narration circled in the #• nitroPDF professional downlead the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ELEVEN FRAGMENTATION (MOUCHETTE) (EDEN AND AFTER) (THE MEETINGS OF ANNA) (SOLARIS) CONTINUITY middle. Examples of the basic types of the modern film form are located in the corners of the rectangle. The arrows represent the main directions in which the classical narrative art film is diverted by modernism. All directions lead toward the dissolution of continuity in the narrative with identifiable characters and locations. The dotted arrows within the circle representing classical continuity narrative style signify that even within this paradigm there can be found differences between films along these lines; the circle represents the ideal limit of the classical norm. The degree of modern artistic self-consciousness in a film depends on the "excess" by which it extends beyond this ideal circle. Even during the modernist period most films remained close to the limits of the circle. Most filmmakers' awareness of modernism did not amount to much more than applying such narrative devices as shifting back and forth between different time levels, or different levels of consciousness, and leaving certain aspects of the narrative unexplained. This was probably the most commonly acknowledged novelty of modern art cinema, at least at the beginning of the 1960s, which is well demonstrated by a short scene from Joseph Losey's first modern film made in 1962, Eva. At a celebration party during the Venice Film Festival the protagonist, a film director, is approached by a film critic who tells him, "I think your film is an advance on the problem of telling a story on different levels of time and consciousness." For most audiences and critics modernism basically amounted to the use of such narrative devices that made the story hard to follow. The narrative techniques responsible for this, however, soon became commonplace and audiences grew accustomed to them^ATreacly^n'the late 1960s these devices did not Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Modern Cinema Trends Table 1 Form Continuous Fragmented Style Minimalist Theatrical La notte Katzelmacher Pickpocket Alfs Well The Color of Pomegranates Yesterday Girt Ornamental The Red and the White Naturalist Adieu Philippine represent any obstacle to understanding narrative information. As I mentioned at the outset of this book, these techniques would become accepted even in Hollywood some thirty years later. This however does not mean that cinema has become "modern" once and for all; this means rather that certain techniques "survived" the art historical period in which they were invented. They have become an item in the repertory of a filmmaker's options. 207 In one sense of the term "modern," films that to some extent used some of the new devices were actually "modern" at the time, and still can be considered also "modernist" to the degree that they contributed to exploring the central topic of modern cinema: alienation. Losey's Eva is perhaps not the most innovative film of its time, as its modernism amounts to replicating the ambiance of other well-known modernist masterpieces, especially the Antonioni and Fellini films of the time,1 yet this film is rather on the modernist side due to some of its narrative solutions. Almost at any time during the history of cinema one can easily find films that can be plotted in any of the quadrants of the scheme. The period of late modernism is characterized by the fact that films were being made that can be grouped into every region of the scheme; in other words, late modernism involved every possible manner of transgression of classical narrative style. Which modernist options continued to be productive after the decline of modernism is an interesting question. Postmodern cinema continued utilizing primarily the fragmented-saturating style region (Greenaway, Jarman, Tyk-wer), while in the 1990s some auteurs revived the continuous-rarefying region as well (Tarr). The other two combinations continuous-saturating and fragmented-rarefying, were not revitalized after modernism's decline. The combination of the two dimensions of the figure above with the style categories is summarized in table 1 above. The next aspect of modern cinema's formal characteristics to be examined is genre, in other words, the basic story types. I found seven genres that Created with 1. To a great extent due to Losey s cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo. downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.eom/profeEEional CHAPTER ELEVEN Table 2 Genre Mental Investigation Travel Essay Closed Satire Melodrama Journey Situation Style Minimalist Last Year at L'avventura Alice in Not Persona Playtime La notte Marienbad the Cities Reconciled Theatrical 8V2 The Zazie The Gods of Exterminating in the the Plague Angel Subway Ornamental Solaris The Round-Up Satyricon Teorema Confrontation Naturalist The Grim Yesterday I Am Two or Three Black Reaper Girl Curious Things I Know Peter About Her 208 modern art cinema favored over other traditional genres: the mentaljourney, the investigation, the picaresque, the essay, the closed situation, the satire, and the melodrama. These genres, with the exception of the mental journey and the essay, were essential elements of some broader genre category in the pre-modern period, and they were not particularly distinguished as genres. Investigation was obviously part of the crime film genre; the picaresque form is part of various genres, especially of the western; and the war film; and melodrama was transformed into a dispassionate intellectual form. Combining these genres with the general stylistic trends we get groups listed in table 2. The empty cells in table 2 show what combinations of forms are atypical or nonexistent in modern cinema. For example, naturalist melodrama is a characteristic form of neorealism that developed into minimalist or theatrical modern melodrama during the modernist period, which is why this form is not represented during modernism. Post-neorealist films such as Pasolini's Mamma Roma are the representatives of this form during the modernist period. I could not find any characteristic naturalist-style mentaljourney films, either. This could be explained by the fact that representation of a mental universe is contrary to representation of empirical surface reality. Nevertheless, the scenes in the train compartment in Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express are partially filmed in a documentary fashion; also, the characters are playing themselves. Theatrical stylization is characteristically missing from the investigation, picaresque, and the essay genres. These genres are more easily associated with naturalist or ornamental styles. Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Modern Cinema Trends Table 3 Tradition Style Minimalist Theatrical Ornamental Naturalist Avant-garde Film noir Neorealism Nouveau roman The Joy of Knowledge The American Exterminating Soldier Angel I, a Negro La notte La dolce vita Breathless Black Peter Pickpocket Last Year at Marienbad Folklore/ Mythology Silence and Cry Satyricon The Color of Pomegranates Successive Slidings of Pleasure Trans-Europ- The Gospel Express according to Saint Matthew The next aspect from which late modern cinema can be examined is its relationship to film historical, art historical, and general cultural traditions. The main film historical sources of modern cinema are early modern cinema: expressionist, surrealist and impressionist art films, neorealism and film noir. Art historical traditions include the categories that I listed above, and the "general cultural traditions" informing modern cinema include folklore, ancient mythology, and Christian religion. Combining the styles with their tradition sources we can point out some typical examples (see table 3). Classical avant-garde traditions had a considerable influence on all the stylistic trends, but it mixes with the ornamental-mythological form especially in the American underground such as in the films of Jack Smith or Kenneth Anger. I found neither minimalist nor ornamental style films that were influenced by film noir. The reason why one cannot find theatrical films betraying the influence of neorealism seems quite obvious, just as naturalist-style films seem to contradict folkloric or mythological influence, Pasolini's Gospel according to Saint Matthew being a rare exception. The Family Tree of Modern Cinema Since European modernist art cinema consists of a relatively closed set of films delimited in time and space made within a wide but finite range of formal variations, it is possible to outline different lines of descent or something like a "family tree" of modernist art films. The roots that determine Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional CHAPTER ELEVEN the main branches can be quite well defined, although many films belonging to the modernist movement betray a mixture of influences and go back to more than one initial pattern, so ultimately it is quite difficult to connect a film to only one or two sources. Further complications are raised by the fact that one particular auteur or film has more than one innovation that may become influential. However, the main trends and the most important descents appear quite clearly. I will distinguish three main trajectories in modern European art cinema. Each can be characterized by a set of formal features, some of which appear in all of them, some only in one or two. The basis of the definition of each of these trends will be the way these features combine. In later periods of modernism, these initial trends become somewhat overlapping but initially they are easily distinguishable. The first trend I will call post-neorealist, alluding to its main stylistic 210 source. The main characteristic figure of this trend is Antonioni, and the most characteristic features of it are radical continuity; a sort of geometrical minimalism in the composition; picaresque, melodrama, or investigation genres; and a split between the characters and the background world. A sort of folkloric ornamentalism has developed from this trend, especially in the late 1960s. Characteristic and original auteurs of this trend are Jancsd, Olmi, Angelopoulos, Wenders, Ackerman, and Forman. Jancsd and Angelopoulos developed the ornamental potential of this trend, Forman developed its satirical potential, Wenders and Ackerman brought it close to the absurd, and Olmi combined it with the French nouveau roman trend. The next main trend is what I call the nouveau roman trend, which partly overlaps with what is traditionally called the group rive gauche of the new French cinema of the early 1960s. Its characteristic figure is Alain Resnais, and its most characteristic features include radical continuity as well as radical fragmented forms; use of nonlinear time; reflexivity in the form; theatricality and ornamentalism; and its main genre is investigation. The main representatives of this trend are Robbe-Grillet, Tarkovsky, Duras, and Nemec. Robbe-Grillet developed it toward serial construction, Tarkovsky developed the metaphysical potential of this form, Duras has made radical use of literary narration, and Nemec developed its surrealist potential. The third main trend is what is traditionally called the nouvelle vague, the new wave, with Godard as its epitome. This trend's characteristic features are the use of cinéma vérité style and parody forms, reflexivity, and radical discontinuity; and its characteristic genre is the film essay or the genre parody. Main representatives include Truffaut, Rivette, Richardson, early-period Szabd, Makavejev, downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Modern Cinema Trends his early films. Richardson and Szabd are followers of Truffaut, Kluge and Schamoni are mainly following Godard in their early works just like Maka-vejev, Fassbinder develops the pastiche aspect together with different forms of excessive minimalist or ornamental stylization, and Rivette bridges the new wave and nouveau roman trends. There are of course many auteurs, among them some of the greatest, who cannot be classified within one trend only, and in some cases they cannot be classified at all. Bergman and Bresson simply do not fit into any of these trends, although Bresson simultaneously exerted a considerable influence over very different types of auteurs, such as Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, and Straub. Bergman by contrast remains the most stand-alone figure of modern cinema, having virtually no followers, still he follows a well discernable Scandinavian theatrical tradition. Buhuel revitalized the early surrealist tradition, but he was the only director to take this path in the modernist movement. Fellini, just like Pasolini, could be categorized 211 in different trends at different periods of his career. Both began within a clearly post-neorealist melodrama tradition, which theyboth discard in the late 1960s for an increasingly mythological ornamental style based partly on narrative techniques inherited from the nouveau roman trend. Because their most characteristic modernist works were made in their mythological periods, this trend characterizes them more than their post-neorealist works. The figure below shows the main lines of descent of modern cinema. For the sake of clarity auteurs' names rather than movie titles are given, although none of these names represent the integral works of the given author. For the same reason, I omitted many other names that could epitomize the same line of descent. I tried to find those auteurs who succeeded in creating a considerably autonomous individual style and also those who can illustrate the linkage between the individual strands. Thus Godard links the influences of Bresson and the new wave; Rivette and Bertolucci connect new wave with the nouveau roman trend; Olmi, Pasolini, and Fellini connect post-neorealism with the nouveau roman. These examples represent only the most characteristic influences even if this influence is detectable only in one film of the given filmmaker. Godard's influence on Fassbinder, for example, is detectable only in his earliest period, whereas Bertolucci was under the influence of the new wave throughout the 1960s. The nouveau roman's influence on Rivette is palpable only during the early 1970s, and same is true regarding Tarkovsky (Solaris, 1972, and Mirror, 1974); while Olmi's relationship with the nouveau roman trend is restricted to one important work, The Fiances (lg^j^A^Itnese masters have created their own Ml nitroPDF*professional download the ■free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional I J i 11 U| i a a- x ■ A"* I ! ¥-+ 8-*■% u El I II->| |I Created with tnft nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional Modern Cinema Trends individual "auteur" styles, and the figure shows some traceable roots of these personal styles. As mentioned, most art films in the modern period consist of a certain mixture of stylistic and narrative solutions stemming from different original sources. Speaking of a certain "influence," I mean several different possible relationships between films. The first is direct influence, when two subsequent films have important stylistic or structural similarities, and concrete biographical connections can be verified between them as well, inasmuch as the auteur of the later work was aware of the earlier one or there are explicit verbal manifestations of the influence. That is the case of Antonioni's influence on Jancsd. The next is the indirect influence, when no evidence of a direct connection between two works can be found but yet both were made in the same cultural context, so one can reasonably suppose that the auteur of the later work had known about the earlier one when, perhaps unconsciously, choosing a similar form. This is the relationship between Kluge's Yesterday 213 Girl and Godard's My Life to Live. I will call the third spreading of solutions, when some formal solutions become so ubiquitous in a given period that anybody might use them without even knowing their origins. Not all the films that use the jump cut are "Godardian," yet there is a connection between films using this device consistently and Godard's films. Similarly, one should not refer automatically to Hiroshima when encountering a "stream of consciousness" kind of narrative in the modern period. The fourth possible relationship is parallelism, when two films made within close proximity of each other, with no biographical references to each other, display similar systematic solutions. This is the case of Resnais's Last YearatMarienbad (1961) and Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) or Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and Vlacil's Marketa Lazarovd (both made in 1966). In all of these cases we may suppose some kind of awareness of the available and fashionable solutions or at least the problems to which the individual styles were created as solutions. Because the term "influence" is evocative of a direct and conscious relationship, I'd rather speak of reference between two films where the reference may be generative in case of direct influence and merely evocative in case of simple parallelism. Created with downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional PART THREE Appearance and Propagation of Modernism (1949-1958) Created with {j) professional downlead the free trial online at nitropdf.com/profeBEional Created with Ml nitroPDF*professional download the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional = 12: Critical Reflexivity or the Birth of the Auteur Setting exact period boundaries to art historical phenomena is always somewhat arbitrary However, there are always important works of art that can be considered turning points. Here I will try to determine the relevant appearances of basic formal principles of the second phase of modernism in the late 1940s and 1950s. I will look for the (re)emergence of the three most general principles of modern art in the cinema of the 1950s: reflexivity, abstraction, and subjectivity. The way and the circumstances under which these formal principles appear in the fifties are quite different from those in the twenties. Early modernism was essentially a phenomenon of industrial mass culture; late modernism was the first cultural manifestation of the information- and entertainment-based leisure civilization. At least fortyyears passed between the two modernist periods, and those years represented the most important phase in the evolution of modern societies: the period between the birth and the decline of the mass society based on heavy industry leading to the appearance of postindustrial Western civilization. The first phase of modernism was mainly an isolated national phenomenon in German, French, and Soviet cinema, whereas the second phase of modernism was a general phenomenon of global dimensions: apart from most of the European filmmaking countries, Japanese, Indian, and Brazilian new cinemas as well as the North American underground were all contributing to the second modernist movement. It was important as a global film art movement as much as a local national cultural phenomenon. Finally, in the twenties, cinematic modernism (as a silent film movement) was influenced mainly by the visual arts avant-garde, whereas the second phase in the talking era was influenced in large part by modern literature downlead the free trial online at nitropdf eom/profeEEional CHAPTER TWELVE factors into consideration when examining modernist traits as general determinants. So it is no surprise that modernist traits start to emerge in the early 1950s predominantly if not exclusively through problems of narration and dramatic composition. Reflexivity is probably the most complex and complicated general trait characterizing modernism in the arts, and I will discuss this below in greater detail. I do not want to enter into theoretical details about reflexivity in the cinema, as there has been enough attention paid so far to this phenomenon.1 Here, I will concentrate on the specific form and function of reflexivity in modern cinema. Before that, however, I have to discuss another phenomenon that played a crucial role in modern reflexivity as well as in modern cinema in general as its fundamental ideology and one of its main distinctive features: the birth of the film auteur. The Birth of the Auteur Voice-over narration in the early 1950s, especially in those cases where the voice is that of the director, like in some films of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, or Ingmar Bergman, can be interpreted as a sign of the growing consciousness of the film director's auteurial dominance. The role of the film director in the creation process was regarded as more and more important in this period. This is not to say, of course, that there were no autonomous and innovative "auteurs" in the silent or early sound film period. The "birth of the auteur" means the widening acceptance of the idea that the director's autonomy in the creative process was equal to that of the producer or the writer, and further, that the real auteur of the film is the director rather than the producer or the writer. This idea became the dominant ideology and practice in the art cinema of the sixties and seventies. The idea of the director's intellectual and artistic autonomy was sporadically present already in prewar cinema, especially within the avant-garde, but in the late 1940s it was far from a generally accepted view, not to mention the legal aspects of this problem. Even in France, where the idea started to take shape in the late 1940s, according to the law until 1957 the auteur of the film was none other than the producer. In his seminal essay "L'avenir du 1. The most elaborate work on reflexivity in the cinema is Robert Stam's Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). The references ancL.the |el