Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008)
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
(by Alfred Edward Housman)
Woman before the Rising Sun (Woman before the Setting Sun)
Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
Outside Satan
Bruno Dumont, 2011
Photo: Cover for the issue of Film Culture in which “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968” was published first; Source: Dave Kehr’s website
The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is the difference between poise and poetry, between the aristocrat and the tramp, between adaptability and dislocation, between the function of things and the meaning of things, between eccentricity and mysticism, between man as machine and man as angel, between the girl as a convention and the girl as an ideal, between the centripetal and the centrifugal tendencies of slapstick. Keaton is now generally acknowledged as the superior director and inventor of visual forms. There are those who would go further and claim Keaton as pure cinema as opposed to Chaplin’s essentially theatrical cinema. Keaton’s cerebral tradition of comedy was continued by Clair and Tati, but Keaton the actor, like Chaplin the actor, has proved to be inimitable. Ultimately, Keaton and Chaplin complement each other all the way down the line to that memorably ghostly moment in Limelight where they share the same tawdry dressing room as they prepare to face their lost audience.
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, by Andrew Sarris (P. 62)
Abel Gance: “Cinema has only developed a small portion of its possibilities: cinema is, and must absolutely become, something other than what it is, something other than what it is made to be.”Robert Bresson: “I think that the cinematograph is not yet fully realized, there have been attempts, they have been stifled by the theater. It may be that the conditions fit for the cinematograph will be a very long time in coming. The cinematograph is lost from sight, decades may be necessary to find it again.”Jean-Luc Godard (positive version): “And cinema is going to die soon, very young, having failed to give what it could have given, so we must… we must quickly go to the bottom of things.”Jean-Luc Godard (negative version): “So cinema has been useless, it has not achieved anything and there have been no movies.”
Louis Delluc: “I know but one pioneer in cinema. It is cinema.”Jean Epstein: “Intelligence of a machine.”Gilles Deleuze: “Cinema is always as perfect as it can be.”
If you look across the contemporary filmmaking landscape, which peers would you name as allies, which are the ones whose work you cherish the most?
I’d have to say Kiarostami. He is still unsurpassed. As Brecht put it, “simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.” Everyone dreams of doing things simply and still impregnating them with the fullness of the world. Only the best ones achieve this. Kiarostami has, and so has Bresson. But I must say that I see too few new films; I used to see more, but now I mostly watch older things, at home. I feel more enriched when re-watching Dreyer or other classics. They tell me more about the world of today than todays’s films! But, of course, there are many exceptions. I’ll watch Lars von Trier’s films; he’s certainly special, and he probably represents the optimum in terms of doing things with actors. I like the Dardennes, I loved Tsai Ming-liang’s The River, but that was a decade ago . . . And I’m interested in what Valeria Bruni Tedeschi does as a director. She has found something, an original form that’s really hers.
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) – source for the photo: here
Terence Davies’ best film yet testifies to the vigour and flexibility of cinematic realisms. It’s intensely ‘realist’ in three common senses: in bending, not subject to form, but form to subject; in generating ‘the shock of recognition’ at experiences privately powerful but culturally neglected; and in the exploring the lives of ordinary people without foreshortening their sufferings and constraints. Davies’ especially delicate realism requires a rigorous fidelity to raw experience, carefully protected from conventional discourse, although conveyed by artifice. Davies’ style is so closely geared to one individual child, in a largely unique situation (local-and-family micro-culture), as to constitute a sort of ‘micro-realism’, akin to the micro-history now subverting Marxist stereotypes of class and culture and their “abolition of the subject”.
Davies’ double focus, on a vanished world and on subjectivity, far from diluting realism, only extends it. As with Proust and Joyce, subjective remembrance and documentation interweave. A sprinkling of self-reflexive touches (a music teacher telling a percussionist “just tap it, you’re not introducing a film”), and the many looks at, or just off-,camera, are not alienation but, on the contrary, complicity effects. Davies’ aesthetic is utterly non-Brechtian, expecting consummate identification with an ever-pathetic protagonist, much wronged by life and unable to hurt a fly.
The visual style might be described as ‘Wenders intensified’ …
Excerpts of Ray Durgnat’s review on Pickpocket,
Film Comment, 1999, 35 (3) pp. 48 -51
Pickpocket, like Citizen Kane, upfronts the unknowability of soul and destiny. Kane is spectacular, theatrical, noisily virtuoso; it's a "maximalist" movie. Pickpocket is spare, frugal, elliptical; "cine-minimalist."
Kane heavily proclaims its “inner story” (Rosebud-into-Kane), but doesn't tell it (or tells it only as “dollar-book Freud,” i.e., generalized theory without local knowledge). Bresson's fast, fluid, twisting narrative abounds in ellipses, gaps, silences, which “make strange” Michel's devious growth, from “fleur du mal” to straight citizen.
Both stories are told in flashbacks (a news magazine, Michel's jottings). Kane's friends editorialize heavily, Michel scantily or subtly (“I thought” insinuates “wrongly”). His reticence is “attitude” of a kind: not “objectivity” exactly, but detachment, from his earlier self.
Of all Bresson's films, Pickpocket is closest to the French New Wave. In 1959 already, it deploys the same stylistic, fully evolved, perfectly accomplished: camera-calligraphy, as nimble as handheld; real locations; near-available lighting; disorienting cuts; strong shades-of-gray shots (between Dreyer and Rivette); a velvety moodiness (Malle); a psychology concerned to “mix” impulse, drift; and moral choice (Truffaut, Rohmer, early Godard); a related milieu - educated youth, marginalizing itself. Its Young Fogeys shared moral severity, of a worldly kind, with Hitchcock the sado-Catholic and Bresson the fastidious purist.
***
Pickpocket is solidly traditional, though also unconventional - like thorough Christianity. It reconciles realism and auteurist subjectivity by its selection from, and stylization of, real possibilities. It pushes mainstream devices, like riddle and ellipsis, to the point of qualitative change; but it's less a subversion than a new, adaptative mutation of an old Christian ethos.
As regards, not genre exactly, but “modality,” I'd call it a lyrical drama. It stays close to its protagonist's conscious experience, without being limited to his POV. It integrates individual psychology, social description, moral issues, etc., so that no single “level of logic” (or “structure”) can determine the story. Its loose succession of short, swift scenes resembles a “journal,” or a loose “chronicle,” like epic form, though its spirit, and logic, are radically different.
Nonetheless, it's a "well-constructed" drama, tightly obsessional, as David Mamet prescribes - "No characterization except in action." There's even a three-act structure. In a nutshell: Act I, the Road to Ruin: Michel learns thieving skills, and his mother's death cuts his last link with "Society," but it also introduces him to Jeanne. Act II, Triumph and Defeat: now a viable thief, with congenial accomplices, he abandons Jeanne to his priggish friend Jacques, but counter-pressure by the Detective-Inspector starts his panic flight to London. Act III, Returning: he volunteers responsibility for Jeanne, and her child by Jacques, gets a job, but, under temptation, briefly backslides, until prison, near-suicide, and Jeanne seal his redemption.
***
[…] the film's rich psychology mustn't eclipse its core theme: the mysteriousness of its “pickpocket's progress.” Its causality is honeycombed with chance, as if to imply that our lives, even our salvation, must obey Chaos Theory. Materialists will speak of “The Absurd,” “Blind Fate,” etc.; Christians and their fellow-travellers dare hope it's Providence. (Accident/Providence - a Resnais theme). God or Chaos: which do you serve? “God turns the devil's tricks to his own ends”; “it's not what happens to you but how you respond.” These Christian rationalizations, even if true, might impoverish faith, which is acceptance-without-passivity.
Bresson rarely explains: rather, he intimates. The “gaps,” the “silences,” take their meaning from their context (which, being a drama, is contradictions, collisions...). It's a kind of montage of dramatic elements. Its basic coordinates are obliquely implied (e.g., Jeanne asks Michel, “Don't you believe?”, as if she'd assumed people had, i.e., it seems a “natural state” to her).
Throughout, basic mindsets, like “the soul,” fill the screen, in the form of set, “impassive” faces and bodies, like “basic mental states” (like Michel's eyes, defiant-ashamed or mutely blazing, his drooping shoulders, his shallow, tinny voice). Bresson's reticence is not so much refusal to explain (though I think he dreads glib verbalizations) as, quite straightforwardly, how he thinks, nonverbally, visually. In his mind's eye he sees Michel, feelingly, from outside and inside at once. As sternly detached as Bresson's morality may be, he understands Michel's weaknesses from within. The long pickpocketing sequence lyricizes Michel's predatory skill, as a “state of grace,” of an immoral, animal kind. It's a “dance for sly hands,” a “ballet mecanique,” rivaling Leger and Dziga-Vertov, but, secretive, subversive. It's also an instructional, like those wartime documentaries on “Correct Use of the Bayonet." It's simultaneously materialist and “spiritual.” Or, as that excellent critic Henri Agel might say, its poetic is “essentialist.”
Patterns and symmetries, planned or not, abound: two bus rides, two letters from Jeanne, two detectives, two curious hand movements like “blessings,” two references to gambling (seen, I think, as more passive, yet more honest, than stealing). Michel moves through a maze of cell-like spaces, imposed on varied settings by style: tight framing, taut angles, dynamic shot-separation, and a sort of “tunnel vision,” with narrow-angle lenses on small areas, like head-and-shoulders or small furtive spaces, like wallets leaving breast pockets ....
![FilmCulture28[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsOssVIL1I6qVV0duLZDmLbMGQbuPFRRcbcCPWBucGBwdWUpFdUpCMWKDAPJFARNzULIzuieDOZ7b1kAgiMaxlsPE410bOa-Rio2DFNycOJ4oYv6UFBor9yfGcnlhNUkdxeYYVUkrwxhWw/s1600-h/FilmCulture28%25255B1%25255D%25255B7%25255D.jpg "FilmCulture28[1]")
