Turbulence and Flow (Y. Biro)

Book Review of Yvette Biró's Turbulence and Flow in Films (Le Temps au cinéma) 2007
Read excerpt at Unspoken Journal (on Tarr Béla), My comments on this excerpt at the Unspoken cinema blog, and the essay by Edwin Mak at Unspoken Journal.


Book review by Michel Estève, editor of "Etudes Cinématographiques" :

Remarquable par l'érudition et la culture cinématographique qu'il manifeste, l'essai d'Yvette Biró est profondément original dans la mesure où il renouvèle l'approche traditionnelle de l'examen du temps au cinéma.

L'auteur commente, bien entendu, méthodiquement avec intelligence et sensibilité, les procédés narratifs classiques utilisés par les grands cinéastes pour transcrire le temps par le montage. Durée des plans. Rythme des plans. Rythme du récit, que le film joue sur le rythme rapide, accéléré - Fiancées en folie de Buster Keaton, Raging Bull de Martin Scorsese (où la rapidité suggère un effet de choc et de violence) - ou, au contraire, sur un rythme lent : In The Mood For Love de Wong Kar-wai, Stalker de Tarkovski ou les longs plans-séquence de Théos Angelopoulos qui semblent étirer le temps. Liens noués entre la vitesse et la lenteur, le présent et le passé (Hiroshima mon amour d'Alain Resnais, La Jetée de Chris Marker), le réel et l'imaginaire (Le Locataire de Roman Polanski et Mulholland Drive de David Lynch).

L'essai d'Yvette Biró, et c'est en cela qu'il est profondément original, met aussi très en relief les transpositions indirectes du temps qui donnent vie au film. Trois chapitres sont consacrés à cette technique : le chapitre 3, "Structure polyphoniques du récit", le chapitre 4, "Détours" et le chapitre 6, "La répétition". Dans le chapitre 3, l'auteur étudie la mise en abime d'histoires parallèles et convergentes, liées les unes aux autres, dans un récit choral : Nashville, Un mariage et Short Cuts de Robert Altman. Le chapitre 4 nous suggère comment le rythme du récit peut-être lié aux digressions (les films d'Antonioni, Fargo des frères Coen) ou au ralentissement de la narration, des éléments extérieurs apportant "une qualité nouvelle et une nature temporelle intrinsèque" (p.87). La répétition (chapitre 6), à l'inverse de l'ellipse, peut également transcrire le temps dans la mesure ou le retour d'images ou de situations déjà vues n'est pas simple redondance (Ozu, Rashomon de Kurosawa ou Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc de Bresson).

La Qualité de cet essai tient à la finesse et à la profondeur des analyses thématiques et esthétiques qui nous font découvrir le secret de l'esthétique d'un film. Je pense en particulier aux commentaires remarquables de Elephant de Gus Van Sant, de La Jetée ou du Miroir de Tarkovski.

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Lettre of Pierre Sorlin to Y. Biró

Votre Livre m'a passionné et m'a beaucoup impressionné. Vous naviguez avec une extraordinaire agilité, qui n'enlève rien à votre précision, d'un film à l'autre, vous créez un prodigieux kaléidoscope d'impressions, les idées s'enchaînent aux films qui s'appellent, se répondent, s'étirent en spirale. En très peu de mots vous tirez d'une allusion l'inflexion qui nuance et complète. Vous approchez l'énigme du temps mais vous ne tentez pas de la percer, vous lui laissez sa charge d'incertitude. Notre temps n'est pas celui d'hier, ni dans sa mesure ni dans la manière dont nous l'éprouvons, comme le temps des jeunes n'est pas celui des personnes d'âge. Le cinéma, plus même que la musique, nous place dans le flux du temps, il n'existe que parce qu'il s'écoule, d'une inexorable régularité dans sa mécanique, capricieux et divers, vous le montrez parfaitement, dans sa manière de faire travailler notre imagination. Avec d'étranges faiblesses, des buttées sur des obstacles qu'il ne sait pas franchir. La simultanéité lui échappe, il ne peut montrer ensemble deux événements concomitants. Il ne peut guère (je dirais volontiers pas du tout) se plier à la durée de l'horloge, les films qui prétendent le faire, cléo de 5 à 7, Jeanne Dielman sont obligés de tricher - la tricherie est même un élément du plaisir filmique, une ruse que le spectateur se plaît à déjouer. Tous les mécanisqmes que vous analysez avec une étourdissante maîtrise visent simplement à transformer en un non-temps, en une temporalité ludique l'inexorable écoulement du temps de la projection. Vous mettez votre lecteur en face de ces tours de force que sont les films et vous le forcez à s'interroger sur sa pratique d'observateur muet, c'est un remarquable travail maïeutique et je vous suis reconnaissant de m'en avoir fait bénéficier. [..]

Pierre Sorlin est professeur emerite à l'Institut de Recherche Cinématographiques et Audiovisuelles de l'université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Enseigne à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris.

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Préface par Michel Ciment (rédacteur en chef de Positif) dans l'édition française :

L'anecdotique n'est pas le fort d'Yvette Biró. Critique et théoricienne du cinéma d'une haute exigence, elle s'est imposé en Europe et aux Etats-unis par des essais fondamentaux qui concernent aussi bien les amateurs de cinéma que les chercheurs et les étudiants.
son nouvel ouvrage Le temps au cinéma, turbulence et apaisement aborde un thème qui a été central pour le 7e Art dès ses origines mais qui nous concerne aujourd'hui plus que jamais : celui du temps.
Yvette Biró dans une série de chapitres magistraux - à la fois complexes et dépourvus de tout jargon - aborde toutes les facettes de cette problématique, aussi bien esthétique que philosophique.
Dans le cinéma contemporain les œuvres dominant sur le marché priviligient la vitesse, le rythme rapide, le montage court. L'auteur met en valeur un autre cinéma de résistance, cinéma du silence, de la contemplation, de la rêverie qui va de certaines réalisateurs asiatiques à Angelopoulos, Kiarostami, Wenders, Kieslowski, gus Van Sant ou à ses compatriotes Béla Tarr et Miklós Jancsó.
En ce sens son livre est une contribution essentielle sur un courant majeur de l'art contemporain.

Jeanne Dielman

Chantal Akerman’s most famous film gives away all that is factual about it in its name itself. The rest of it follows what the titular Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) does in this 23, Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles house of hers, over a three day period in almost in its entirety. Using completely stationery cameras, Akerman creates a claustrophobic document of life in its most mundane form. Even with a screen time of over three hours, there isn’t much in the movie that could be fit into something called plot. That, precisely, is Akerman’s intention. Details are given with extreme reluctance and in exceedingly small measures (with hardly 10 minutes of spoken dialogue). On the first day, we witness Jeanne ritualistically moving about in her house, switching on and off the room lights, cooking potatoes for her obedient son, arranging tables, doing the dishes and making the bed. She earns by selling herself during the afternoons in her very house. All this is done by the book, if there ever was one.

It is precisely these systematic acts which become our reference for the next day. The next day follows almost the same pattern. Only that Jeanne drops a spoon and the polishing brush. Oh yes, she also goofs up the dinner! On the third day, the bank is closed, she reaches a shop before it opens, the coffee is spoilt and a button snaps off from her son’s blazer. This is all the change that Akerman allows Jeanne. What surfaces is a gradually progressive deviation from our “reference” and perhaps for the worse. Like the geometrically flawless décor and lighting of the film, which exude cheerfulness, contentment and sanity are only apparent. It is almost as if one can mathematically calculate, using these extremely small “mishaps”, when Jeanne will completely succumb to her condition. And this is the kind of gradual disintegration of sanity that many films fail to portray credibly (Revolutionary Road (2008) comes to mind first). What happens obscures how it all happens. Cinema becomes text. Although Jeanne Dielman is much more extreme in its form than the mainstream narrative cinema would require, it clearly shows that why a formal stance doesn’t merely justify the medium chosen but enhances its possibilities.

It wouldn’t be unfair to call Jeanne Dielman an experimental film. Where other films that deal with similar theme of urban alienation tend to bend towards the cerebral side, Jeanne Dielman is more experiential. At any point in the film, once the viewer gathers everything there is to an image, like Tarr’s movies, fatigue sets in. We start experiencing time as it is, undiluted. In other words, we begin taking part in Jeanne’s life by experiencing the savage inertia of time. The only difference is that she is oblivious to it while we, possessing knowledge of the artificial and transitory nature of cinema, are not. Jeanne doesn’t pass through life. She lets life pass through her. Not once does she show signs of emotional fatigue. She is insensitive to her condition much more than her cerebral counterparts. Except for one sequence at a button store, where she shows clear indications of mental derailment, there apparently is no outlet for her emotions at all. Apart from the perfunctory conversations with her son and the occasional visit by the neighbour, who asks Jeanne to take care of her baby (who could well be considered a miniature Jeanne) from time to time, Jeanne is completely cut off (at times literally, in the frame) from the world.

In his extraordinary article on Tarr, Kovács writes about the director’s style:

In Tarr’s world, deconstruction is slow but unstoppable and finds its way everywhere. The question, therefore, is not how to stop or avoid this process, but what we do in the meantime? Tarr asks this question of the audience, but if the audience wants to understand the question, it first has to understand the fatality of time. And in order to grasp that, it has to understand that there is no excuse in surviving the present moment: time is empty—an infinite and undivided dimension, in which everything repeats itself the same way.

Akerman’s own style does not seem far from this. Through repetitions, in gratuitous amounts, Akerman creates a film of high precision and low life quotient. In fact, everything in the film seems to exhaust itself the moment it takes birth. Akerman repeats every element of the film – time (Jeanne’s daily routine), space (the viewer is immediately acquainted with the couple of rooms that the almost the whole film takes place in), the actors’ movement and gestures (Jeanne act of switching off lights moves from interesting to an in-joke) and even camera angles (as if the actors are passing in front of stationery cameras installed at various locations in the house).

The only hope for Jeanne to snap out of this vicious loop comes in the form of the final sequence in the film where she stabs to death an unsuspecting client of hers (Actually, it is never made clear if the scene takes place in Jeanne’s present or not. The man could well be her husband, whose death is talked about regularly in the film, thus, also, creating a narrative loop within the film. But considering the realities of the world, it is unlikely). This is where Akerman deviates from Tarr. Tarr seals his characters in their own existence until they fade into oblivion. His characters neither have history or hope. Akerman, on the other hand, gives her characters a past and a future. The circle in Jeanne’s life may just be a stray deadlock that had to be resolved by her action (rather, by ceasing her inaction). There is certainly a gaze at a different future throughout the film. Jeanne is expecting a gift from her aunt, which is revealed to be a dress later. She deposits money in the bank for future use. Her aunt even urges her to migrate to Canada. Even though, a large part of the movie is concerned with her empty life, it does offer a hope for renewal.

Obviously, Akerman is far from being a romantic. It is true that she does not choose to tread Tarr’s spiral, which seems to go in circles but ends only in decimation, and concocts an open ending, thus leaving margin for hope of escape. But why Akerman’s masterwork feels ultimately like an exercise in despair is that she generalizes Jeanne’s existence. As a matter of fact, we don’t even know if the lady we are watching is Jeanne or if the building is the one mentioned in the title. By not pinning down particulars, Akerman seems to speak for an entire generation and era. Of course, the whole film could be deconstructed to unveil political, social, sexual and cultural outlook of the age, but what makes Jeanne Dielman stand out from its contemporaries is not its keen study of lives in modern times, but its ability to make us experience what every Jeanne Dielman experiences and understand why we each of us, in a way, has become a Jeanne Dielman.

[Originally published at The Seventh Art]

James Benning in Pampelona 2009

James Benning à Pampelune (Feb 2009) from Independencia on Vimeo.

Extraits d'une conférence donnée par James Benning à l'Universidad de Navarra (Pampelona, España) en février 2009, à l'occasion de sa rétrospective au festival Punto de Vista.
(Image : Antoine Thirion. Montage : Saskia Gruyaert. Independencia.fr)

Propos sur la flânerie

"Propos sur la flânerie" 2009 Ed. L'Harmattan. Sous la direction de Suzanne Liandrat-Guigue.
Séminaire M.S.H., Paris Nord, 2005-2007, organisé par Jean-Louis Déotte.

"La flânerie est un concept de la modernité rompant avec l'idéal de la perspective hérité de la Renaissance. Fondée sur le décentrement, la discontinuité, la sérialité d'une part, et d'autre part, sur la montée en puissance du qualconque, sur les devenir insolites, en accord avec la déambulation, la foule et la ville, la flânerie ne va pas sans changement dans le statut du sujet. La perception devenue flâneuse, se vérifie alors par une capacité à être "appareillée" à l'ère de la reproductibilité technique. Ainsi deux notions clés de la pensée Benjaminienne se retrouvent étroitement corrélées (l'appareil définissant une époque, tout autant qu'il est caractérisé par une époque) pour assurer un nouveau partage de l'expérience esthétique."

Aussi dans cet ouvrage:

• Truchot, Damien, "Vers l'intérieur. Les promenades en chambre de Chantal Akerman"
• Costanzo, Alexandre & Daniel, "Les Territoires émancipés"
• Leutrat, Jean-Louis, "Modulation et flânerie"

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's masterclass

Masterclass by Nuri Bilge Ceylan at ParisCinema festival (7-4-2009) with his co-writer and actor, Ercan Kesal, and Libération journalist, Marc Semo.

Introduction : he makes films with a small (familial) crew, an autobiographical work also on the modern face of Turkey.
There he corrects the autobiographical claim. The subjects are close to him, the characters contain a lot of himself, on a profound level, but this is all fiction, and the superficial stories are not the portrait of his own life events.
Since Three Monkeys, he writes his scenarios with the collaboration of his wife, Ebru Ceylan, and his friend Ercan Kesal, who is a doctor in real life, and also plays a non-actor in his last film. He say he prefers to work with co-writers, because the collective discussion helps to solve problems much faster. Testing out whether an idea will work out or not can be sorted out in 5 minutes, while it would take a week by himself.

Chekhov, the Russian writer who strives to understand mankind, was a major influence for him, a passion he shares with co-writer Ercan Kesal.

Young, he thought that he was different from everyone else, who were "normal", and felt a sentiment of guilt leading to neurosis and solitude. Notably the sound of the Muezzin call to prayer was a trigger and reminder of guilt for him, because of the religious moral it evokes. That's why we hear the Muezzin in the background when the boy slaps his mother in Three Monkeys.
He decided to escape his neurosis by embracing and studying philosophy and the arts.
Watching Bergman's The Silence (1963) at 16 was a revelation to him. Finally he would not feel alone, and different, anymore, because he could relate to Bergman. This gave him taste for cinema.

"As Bergman said, there is maybe more reality in dream than in wake life."
(in Positif, #551, Jan 2007)

"There are filmmakers who shook me inside. The first one was Bergman. When I was 16, it's when watching The Silence that I had the impression to wake up from a dream, because it was so different from everything else I saw until then. This impressed me a lot. Then, I discovered Tarkovsky, Bresson and Ozu who transformed me. Amongst contemporary ones, there is Kiarostami, and some critics even found certain resemblance between our films. What is sure is that he gave me a lot of energy and the courage to make films based on simple subjects. [..]

I deeply love Satyajit Ray's Pather Pantchali [1955], as well as the whole Apu trilogy. I think that Tarkovsky must have been touched by this film too. It was a work of beginner with modest means. Like Bresson, I believe that luxury is not an advantage for artists. I'm very sensible to bareness and simplicity ; that's why I prefer the later works of Ozu to the preceding ones."
(in Positif, #482, April 2001)

During 10 years he would watch a lot of films and read on film theory, without thinking about making films himself. He studied as an engineer at the Bosporus University. He then travelled abroad. During his time of military service, he met people from every corner of Turkey and this gave him the envy to make his own films.
In an interview to Time Out (Jan 2007), he declared he decided to become a filmmaker upon reading Polanski's autobiography : "Roman by Polanski"

A recurrent theme that obsess him and come back in every film is the way truth hides within our mundane behaviours, our acts. We lie to protect ourselves. The family is a condensed model of the world, but the tensions to conquer power are not limited to the family environment. We also use and abuse power with our friends, or at work.

Ceylan is the antithesis of Turkish cinema politically engaged, like Serif Gören and Yilmaz Güney (Yol, 1982).

He's not interested in politician politics because he believes neither things nor people change. He rejects the label of "political films" because the audience would focus on the wrong elements, on conjunctural positioning, on superficial labels. In fact, he doesn't make activist propaganda to make political statements, or comment political issues. He wants the audience to concentrate on more essential issues, like human relationships. Political issues (like unemployment of young students, machismo, the shame of the female adultery opposed to the valorous and encouraged male adultery) are only implicit and neutral, not to alienate the audience on a specific topic.
What is important is how people live through these problems, and to observe how they react and evolve.
Ceylan says he tries to understand life, it helps him to understand how to live better.

"I hate to explain, to insist, to convince : the audience shall guess. (...) I think the point of view of a film should be close to life. As if you observe a couple of strangers in a cafe, trying to figure their relationship, their problems." interview in Libération (01-17-2007)

"Robert Bresson is one of my mentors. To tell certain things, image is useless, sound is enough." interview in Positif #575, January 2009.

His films are more viewed in France than in Turkey, but he believes that it's only a matter of proportionality, because there are comparatively less movie-goers in Turkey than in France [see here]. He doesn't think that Turks understand his film less. It's a question of minority.

His first feature film, Kasaba/The Small Town (1997), was like a draft, and the next one, Mayis sikintisi/Clouds of May (1999), was its "making of". He says he was unsatisfied because he was not concentrated enough. Lots of things didn't work out. The latter was more satisfying.
Uzak/Distant (2002) was his way to confront his fear to make a film in the big city, Istanbul.

When a man in the attendance asked him why the guilt of the boy who slaps his mother in Three Monkeys was more perceptible than the guilt of the mother, he replies that every viewer engages with the film on a different level, according to their emotional experience and past stories. Some will relate to the runaway wife, some with the betrayed man... But critics, who watch so many films, give a cold dispassionate analysis of every point of view offered by the film to measure/compare them and are not touched by the characters like the average audience would be.

Lastly he recounts an anecdote that happened to him today, on his way to this conference. He was in a car with Ercan who received a call from a friend of his in Istanbul. He hadn't heard of her in 2 years. She tells him that her father has died. So Ercan feels embarassed and helpless. He keeps repeating "I'm in France" as an excuse. Ceylan's take of this little daily life event is that the circumpstances we're in (in this case, Ercan was no longer a doctor and a nextdoor friend in France, he was an actor/scenarist attending a festival) may temporarily alter our social role, our connection with others, project us in a different dimension. If he were in Istanbul, Ercan's reaction would have been natural, evident, he would have given his condoleances and asked the time of the funeral to pay his homage. But in Paris, he was unable to fulfill his role of friend and support, he could only apologize for not being there. And this causes a certain guilt of being someone else, of being a personality on a trip abroad. Sometimes the mundanity of daily life is irreconcilable with other prospects... And this is the kind of micro-drama that could be developped in his films.

• Read also my notes on an earlier interview, at Screenville (January 2007) about Climates.