Thinking with Parameters?

Photo: What Time is it there? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)

 

“Parametric forms”? I first encountered with the concept some years ago, reading David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film. Borrowing from Noël Burch, and linking with serialism in music,  Bordwell used this term to deal with some formal patterns which couldn’t be described with plot-based structures. Ozu, Bresson,  and Tati’s films are some of the major examples that were analyzed by Bordwell through parametric forms. From one point of view, Bordwell’s suggested model sounds to me as another attempt for dealing with concept of “non-narrative” in films. How can we cope with all filmic devices or elements that don’t originate from narration? How can we describe and put them into critical language?

Reading film critics through the years, we can find lots of efforts to tackle this complicated problem (for instance, see this very informative discussion by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Raymound Durgnat, and David Ehrenstein), but it seems that the topic needs to be more investigated, in new, fresh ways - in particular, if we consider that most of the recent contemporary arthouse movies are trying to experiment with non-narratives; each in its own unique way. What the best way is to deal with the non-narratives is the question open to debate – I have this impression that even Bordwell, today, is thinking, and encouraging others, to find different explanations for these alternative forms, compared to the way he did in 80s with Narration in the Fiction Film (see his discussion here, when he hints at our need for better, and deeper ways of thinking about directors with very different styles than the most narrative cinema).

I will continue this discussion later, but the reason which brings me to the term of “Parametric forms” was reading Adrian Martin’s an old piece on Tsai Ming-liang. This was a great reading, and in one passage of it, Adrian got back to this term, and gave a compact, historical view on it. I found his description so thorough, and thought-provoking (highlights are mine):   

[…] we have the continuation of a very modern aesthetic in Tsai. It was first contemplated cinematically, intuitively, by Rivette in the early ‘60s Cahiers (based on the ‘new music’ systems of Pierre Boulez and others of that era) in relation (surprisingly) to the films of Elia Kazan; and then passes through the late ‘60s and ‘70s era of radical montage (Vera Chytilová, Dusan Makavejev, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Jean-Daniel Pollet); formalised into parameters within the living laboratory of Noël Burch’s Theory of Film Practice; in order to arrive finally at Deleuze’s conceptions of the time-image and crystal-image, or (more philosophically) the fold and the rhizome. In all these models and experiments, the shot in cinema becomes less a quantifiable unit, with fixed functions in a linear chain, than a cell whose elements, levels and layers are multiple, free-floating and easily dispersed to form vital, complex relations across an entire film – and the same goes for all the hallowed units of cinematic narrative: gesture, shot, scene, sequence, act, part, half, whole …

To think of cinema atomically, in terms of the dynamic functioning of a cell or nucleus, offers a way to free oneself from the prison of mise en scène as only filmed theatre, as ‘depth staging’ (as Bordwell calls it) within a singular, co-extensive and coherent scene – which, as a critical practice, performed richly for the likes of Max Ophuls and F.W. Murnau, but tends to shrivel up at the threshold of about 1960, in the face of Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and all who are to follow them. The modern cinema of the fold belongs to artists like Theo Angelopoulos, Sergei Paradjanov and Béla Tarr who, as they cross vast tracts of space and collapse great chunks of time within the shot-tableau, create waves of movement, transcending any one shot, that link up diverse plateaux inhabiting many parts of a film, forming both compacted times and multiple times, [..].

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Links of the day:

• FILM COMMENT’S new TRIVIAL TOP 20: what are the best movies never made?
• Cannes predictions: Carlos Reygadas is likeliest for the Palme!