Cinéma, l'académisme d'auteur
Dans son édito du dernier numéro des Cahiers du Cinéma [n° 620], sobrement titré «Dégueulasse», Jean-Michel Frodon s'indigne de l'émergence insidieuse d'une expression «nouvelle» et «infâme» qui s'immiscerait dans les couloirs du CNC et autres organismes d'aide à la création cinématographique. Depuis peu (quand ?), on y entendrait ainsi parler de «films de festivals» (FDF), expression jugée «injuste»,«infâme»,«insultante». Pourtant, les FDF existent bel et bien, je les ai rencontrés. Ce sont les Films d'auteur académiques (FAA).
Il serait fastidieux de procéder ici à l'inventaire des codes et de la rhétorique du FAA. Mais il suffit de parcourir certains des innombrables festivals de cinéma qui ont lieu chaque semaine dans le monde entier (j'omets ici les vitrines cannoises, berlinoise et vénitienne) pour se convaincre, moyennant un minimum d'honnêteté, de l'existence d'un genre dont l'omniprésence n'a d'équivalent que sa rareté dans nos salles. Ce fut par exemple mon cas, au mois de novembre dernier, lors du festival du film de Séoul, qui m'avait honoré d'une invitation en tant que membre du jury. Huit jours de sélection intensive et une vingtaine de films venus du Chili, d'Iran, du Japon, d'Inde et bien sûr de France, vortex esthético-idéologique du FAA dont l'horizon terminal se résume aux films de Godard (dernière période) et des Straub. Le programmateur du festival était ainsi convaincu de l'extrême popularité du couple auprès de la critique française. Quelle ne fut pas son étonnement lorsque je lui fis remarquer que dans la France de 2006, les films de Michael Mann, de Tsui Hark, de Clint Eastwood ou de Brian de Palma, mobilisaient autant d'énergies critiques que ceux des Straub.
En quoi se distinguaient ces vingt propositions de cinéma parmi «les plus audacieuses» du moment ? A quoi ressemblaient les contours artistiques de cet altercinéma si vanté par Frodon?
Il suffit d'ouvrir les yeux pour se rendre compte combien le cinéma d'auteur académique constitue le pendant naturel du cinéma industriel, moins son antidote ou son refus que son négatif parfait, son double inversé. Si le cinéma hollywoodien valorise la vitesse et le mouvement, le FAA lui, met un point d'honneur à ralentir le rythme (on parle alors de beauté contemplative), à étirer la longueur des plans jusqu'à l'immobilisme total. Si le cinéma industriel a tendance à surligner ses effets et à saturer ses plans d'informations visuelles et sonores, le FAA, lui ne montrera rien ou très peu. Ici, tout se passe alors dans le creux de l'image, et ce qu'il y a à voir n'est surtout pas visible. L'académisme ignore les frontières de même que le passage du grand ou petit marché ne garantit, a priori, aucun gain artistique. Pour des raisons rhétoriques et idéologiques (je suis ce que l'Autre n'est pas), le FAA a besoin de celui qu'il a érigé en ennemi puisqu'il s'y oppose et qu'il trouve dans cette opposition même, la matière de son identité. Ce que l'un filme, l'autre le rejette, et vice versa. Rabattre ainsi l'audace sur le simple refus, c'est prendre le risque de ne plus savoir distinguer Solaris du FAA indien [sic] The Forsaken Land, l'Avventura de l'iranien Portrait of Lady Far Away.
Si le cinéma industriel peut apparaître, souvent à juste titre, comme répétitif, formaté et véhiculant une idéologie consensuelle, le FAA en reproduit naturellement les travers et n'échappe donc pas à une forme d'académisme. D'une certaine façon, le FAA est l'allié objectif du film commercial. Il confond l'épure et le rien, l'abstraction et la pose, le vide et la raréfaction, la contemplation et l'ennui, l'enregistrement de la réalité et la vérité du réel qui, on le sait depuis les frères Lumière, n'a de chance d'advenir qu'à condition d'en fabriquer la fiction. Entre le pire film commercial et le pire FAA, un même néant est atteint, mais par deux chemins opposés. La caractéristique essentielle du FAA réside enfin dans le souci de ne jamais céder (ou le moins possible) aux sirènes du plaisir, de la forme, du spectacle, en bref, il témoigne d'une haine de la fiction, suspecte de faire le jeu d'un ultralibéralisme aliénant. Tel est son paradoxe: censé exprimer une irréductible et résistante singularité, il n'est que l'échantillon conventionnel, et donc interchangeable, d'une même formule.
Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Libération (07 Fév 2007)
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Films de festival (Thoret)
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Reject-oriented antilogy (Shaviro)
I'm disappointed that Steven Shaviro's scholarly take on the debate beats around the bush.
Misconceptions:
- He wrongly conflates CCC with Modern Cinema (Antonioni, Jancso, Tarkovsky), then blames CCC for not looking enough LIKE Modern Cinema (daring, provocative, extremist, posthuman?).
- Then he blames CCC for looking TOO MUCH like Modern predecessors!
- He uses uncontroversial big names from the consensual canon of film history, the highest masters, and then blames today's filmmakers for not being as good.
- He can only conceive art cinema if it is daring, provocative, original, insightful, refreshing, inventive... short of that it's not even worth considering.
- He calls "routine", "strictly by the number", what auteurists refer to as a stylistic signature (which explains the recurrence!)
- He calls "default international style" what is an unorganised transnational aesthetic convergence.
- I don't even know what is the "slow norm", the "slow paradigm", so I can't comment.
- He shares with us the auteurs he likes and the ones he doesn't like, the films he prefers and the ones he thinks are inferior... and equates his stylistic hierarchies with the fact that such or such style deserves to exist or not.
- Takashi Miike is more inventive than all CCC combined... so what?
- There are important contemporary directors who have nothing whatsoever to do with Contemplative Cinema... so what?
- Being nostalgic and regressive is a "bad thing".
- CCC can only seduce nostalgic, classicist, old-line cinephiles (like me?)
- CCC is a way of saying No to mainstream Hollywood’s current fast-edit, post-continuity, highly digital style.
Where to start? There is no theoretical matter to respond to there... What is there to say?
He just says he doesn't LIKE this kind of style and that he WISHES that today's cinema would address socio-culturo-political issues of technology and newer media to feel contemporary. But he doesn't prove that CCC is bad cinema, nor that it's an invalid artistic interpretation of the world we live in.
1. If "Modern Cinema" (whatever this vague umbrella term refers to) was a seamless continuous history, I would agree. But the world has changed quite a bit since the 60ies, so it's easy to understand that the reaction of art to a NEW distinct kind of modernity has evolved too.
If you're going to expect Tsai Ming-liang to provide the exact content/style that Antonioni used to deliver, if you want Tarr to BE Jancsó, if you hope Reygadas to measure up to Tarkovsky... you could be waiting for a long time, cause it is not gonna happen. It's not meant to happen.
CCC is different precisely because it doesn't try to mimic older modernists, but develop a brand new style!
2. Forget about the Modernity references, because the films you see today aren't directly comparable to Antonioni or Tarkovsky. CCC is not wordy, not intellectual, not spiritual, not narrator-centric... no wonders it's nothing like the 60ies!
3. Not being as good as the highest masters doesn't mean that the film/auteur/movement is not legit. You're just subjectively evaluating their inferiority. In principle, new trends can emerge and strive without being greater than everything that has been done before. (not that I agree with his allegation that CCC is inferior!)
4. I would expect reasonable scholars to be able to take into considerations more than a single one possible aesthetic iteration to translate on the screen(s) what contemporaneity has brought upon us. He's being partial like an artist who develops the same style over and over. While the critic ought not take positions, but identify the many ways artists find to express their reactions to the same socio-politico-cultural conditions we live in.
Let me remind here, for the record, that during the period of the (Silent) Hollywood Golden Age (which was not shy of art film gems, later reappraised by artfilm critics), Surrealism coexisted with Soviet Montage, Caligarism and Réalisme Poétique, even though cinema culture wasn't any less international than today (territories and political borders were less permeable alright). In 1960, there were various expressions of the "anti-Hollywood" art scene : not only the Modern Cinema of Antonioni, but Italian Neorealism, La Nouvelle Vague, L'International Situationiste, New American Cinema. All very different aesthetics, very different formal responses to the same global climate of the Cold War...
What I'm saying is that Shaviro assumes that there can be only one alternative to Hollywood, and if CCC (which he insists to call "slow cinema") doesn't endorse the new technologies then it must be wrong, therefore slowness shall be excommunicated from art-cinema... we've seen enough of that. The artfilm aesthetic that is "right" is something else, something that "looks right", films where we can identify easily the signs of our modernity, something like Takashi Miike or Bong Joon-ho... OK. That is his partial hypothesis. It's what HE wants the "response to Hollywood" to be. But it doesn't prevent artists to find other ways, despite your preferences.
I don't know why he looks for a unique "international style" that would format all artfilm makers...
5. 6. 7. null
8. (see 3.) again a confusion between hierarchy and ontology
9. 10. It's not because you're going to find someone more "inventive" that it'll preclude CCC any invention at all. Nobody is suggesting that CCC is THE ONLY possible way for contemporary art cinema... at least I wouldn't say such thing.
If all you want, like Nick James, is to disparage these films, be honest, don't pretend you're making important statements about the existence of this trend.
11. This is a personal point of view. I don't think you're going to redefine Art History based on this slim assumption.
12. First, Modernity is not Classic... it's what follows Classicism by definition!
Nostalgic? Maybe, any cinephile who loves cinema history enough to watch films that are not current must be somehow nostalgic and "regressive". All depends if you imply a derogatory meaning to it. Are you looking down on cinephiles as a whole? I don't follow...
Again you're trying to force a point of view, it's not very scholarly.
Am I anti-new-technology? Not at all. I'm interested in the new images coming up. But on this blog we only discuss a very specific area of cinema which has little to do with this stuff.
Since I disagree about the conflation of CCC with Modernity, I'm going to disagree that CCC is being nostalgic or regressive. You realize that you'll have to prove that Hollywood's narrative is more progressive than art cinema?
13. I'm afraid he didn't go read the article (about Matthew Flanagan's Aesthetic of Slow) I linked in my post, because I already addressed this misconception at length. If you had to use a disclaimer to avoid being dragged in a rhetorical debate (what a scary thought for a scholar who prefers the hit-and-run tactic!), at least read what initiated it. Thanks.
In fact, he's replying to Flanagan there, when he opposes CCC to Hollywood. I never did such thing. Apparently I need to repeat this every time I write about CCC, and start all over as if nothing happened. If Shaviro talks about "the aesthetic of slow" and "slow films vs fast films" I have nothing to say, because this is simply not what CCC is and does.
The late (and still woefully underappreciated) Edward Yang abandoned the Antonioniesque stylings and slownesses of his earlier films for something more like a Renoiresque social realism with ensemble casts (I still think that Confucian Confusion and Mahjong are two of the greatest films of the 1990s, together constituting the postmodern equivalent of Rules of the Game).
What are you talking about??? So channeling Antonioni is "bad" but channeling Renoir makes it "OK"? it's not being unoriginal anymore? Is it still inventive and refreshing to simulate the older style of Renoir??? So I guess Antonioni stands for Modern, and an imitation of La Règle du Jeu (1939!) which is a precursor of Modernity, is Post-Modern??? Sorry, you lost me.
Shaviro disagrees that CCC is the most important aesthetic movement in our present cinema, but it's not a question of canonical hierarchy here. I'd be happy if this trend was at the very least understood for what it is (and not totally fantasised and perverted by people who fail to get immersed in contemplation). I don't care if everyone thinks it's a small, weak, short-lived movement, I don't care what intentions you give its filmmakers, I don't care if you think it is irrelevant to today's technological world. The point is to identify its very coherence, its own nature and not mistake it for something it is not, thus blame it for what it doesn't try to achieve.
Slowish Obsession, ter
The misunderstanding sinks in deeper...
Steven Shaviro fully endorses Nick James' quote in my previous post, and agrees that CCC is already a goner. But then again, he praises "new technologies", "digitalization" and "new media"... which explains where he's coming from. I beg to differ with the obtuse idea that art cinema MUST position itself against the dominant Hollywood format (the raison d'être of art was never to "oppose" commerce), that there shall be only ONE alternative style to THE dominant style, that this alternative should have to incorporate something technological or else would fail to address contemporary issues... None of this makes sense, culturally, theoretically or historically.
Vadim Rizov abunds : Slow Cinema Backlash (IFC, 12 May 2010)
"The problem isn't the masters. It's the second-tier wave of films that premiere at Berlin and smaller festivals, rarely get picked up for distribution, and simply stagnate in their own self-righteous slowness.Outside the festival circuit few will ever see them. But those that do instantly understand why someone would wish a pox upon the whole movement. Earlier this year, a few American cities were treated to one such specimen: Jessica Hausner's "Lourdes." This is a movie that really does feel like it's slow because it doesn't know any better: shots go on but they're not particularly complicated. There are no visual riches worth taking in slowly and the drama fails to rise. The whole thing just feels dull. I have no idea how this got distribution [..]"
First : he assumes that the fact a film is bought by a distributor is significant for its cultural value. Which means he takes aesthetic cues from the commercial industry, or at least finds evidence to support his critical stance there! Apparently he expects the crowd of audience to tell him if a film "works" or not. This is mercantile talks. If you want to chip in on the aesthetic relevance of a film movement, you need to bring aesthetic arguments to the table, not Box Office numbers!
He would like to be a critic, and he publicly states that that film, a bad film according to him, shouldn't get distribution! You could rejoice that the film didn't get money from admission (if you're that kind of guy), but denying distribution (i.e. VISIBILITY) to a cultural good, BEFORE it could get criticized by critics and the audience, is called censorship (whether it is operated by the market or by an institutional certification).
Reviewers nowadays are merely pawns of the industry (proudly or inadvertently), they don't think for themselves! They believe Cinema is whatever the industry wants it (allows it) to be.
Second : his vocabulary betrays his taste bias. Typical of the detractors who don't GET what CCC intends to achieve. The shot is not "complicated" enough, as if complexity was a seal of greatness... "visual riches", not enough "drama". What can I say? He wants mainstream action and doesn't find it in CCC, thus discards it without trying to figure out if there are legit reasons to develop an art form WITHOUT these century old clutches inherited from Theatre and Literature.
But then again, this is the guy who believes that "slow criticism" sucks...
* * *
I regret that this debate stagnates on where critics would like art cinema to head towards, as if they were in a position to dictate how artists should respond to the new paradigms of our modernity... Critics forget their place and their role, which is to explicit what happens, not to boss artists around. Tell us whether the artists of our generation do a good job or not (because these articles don't address aesthetic issues, don't prove the failure of CCC, they just state that they got bored with the trend), but don't suggest them where to go!
Shaviro only reinforces the mentality outlined earlier by Gavin Smith in Film Comment, and now by Nick James in Sight & Sound : somehow "La Tradition de Qualité" is in artfilm festivals (which is a complete misunderstanding of what conformity Cahiers opposed in 1954!) and the real great cinema of today is in Hollywood (which has no Hitchcock or Selznick today to save it), or who knows where else, in digital cinema and exploitation...
I believe this is a MAJOR debate of today's cinema aesthetic. Not the only one, but without doubt one of the main questions that critics should address and explore to mark the film culture of our times. Incommensurably more important than Mumblecore, or the decline of the press!
I'm not saying that the pertinence of film criticism necessarily resides in defending CCC, because there is room for sound theoretical examination of its shortcomings.
But History will remember that Film Comment and Sight & Sound took a stance against this trend! I hope you won't feel embarrassed for taking the wrong side when the dust settles. But that's what timely criticism is all about : taking chances.
And I predict a big blunder of the institutional press for dismissing this aesthetic (while only keeping the safe bets on top masters). The debate mistreated, misunderstood, underestimated, neglected in 2010. CCC dates back as far as 1970ies and the various films were systematically colluded with Modern Cinema, Minimalism or other political side-issues, without ever appreciating its main aesthetic component that differs from Antonioni or Tarkovsky.
Just like the critics of the 60ies rejected the breakthrough of Modern Cinema, just like the conservative art critics of Classicism failed to welcome Impressionism, just like the established critics of Figurative Art rejected Cubism and Abstract Art... this is the old tune of shortsighted witnesses.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Slow films, easy life (Sight&Sound)
Via Filmwell :
"Part of the critical orthodoxy I have complained about has been the dominance of Slow Cinema, that “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years”, as Jonathan Romney put it [see here]. “What’s at stake,” he wrote, “is a certain rarefied intensity in the artistic gaze . . . a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.”
I admire and enjoy a good many of the best films of this kind, but I have begun to wonder if maybe some of them now offer an easy life for critics and programmers. After all, the festivals themselves commission many of these productions, and such films are easy to remember and discuss in detail because details are few. The bargain the newer variety of slow films seem to impose on the viewer is simple: it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece.
Watching a film like the Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey (”Bal” Semih Kaplanoglu, 2010) – a beautifully crafted work that, for me suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu – there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects: sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not. Slow Cinema has been the clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, but from now on, with Hollywood in trouble, I’ll be looking out for more active forms of rebellion."
“Passive Aggressive”, editorial by Nick James, Sight & Sound, April 2010
Typical. Misunderstanding CCC. Looking down on art cinema.
We're back in 2006 when CCC was ironically nicknamed "boring art films"! And this is not the dumbing down mainstream press uttering these words... it comes from the most artfilm-friendly cinephile publication in the UK, by the very colleague of Jonathan Romney (long-time defender of CCC) cited in the article. Real film critics giving up on art... who is going to defend real culture then?
First he calls it "slow cinema", like Matthew Flanagan (read "Slower or Contemplative?"), which is a mischaracterisation that induces contempt and caricature. Limiting this cinema to "slowness" is reductive and superficial. This is precisely because unhappy viewers remain on the surface of these films that they are unable to obtain any substance from them.
"Details are few" says he! It's not because you can hardly fill a half-page with plot points and characters arc, or because the list of notable features appearing on the screen is short, that there isn't anything else there to see. Critics need to learn how to name things (and fill up their list of itemisation) that are not obvious, to learn to find the content behind the appearance of emptiness, to learn to understand the depth and complexity in the intervals between the apparent (nominal) details.
It's like dismissing Kasimir Malevich or Yves Klein because there isn't enough "details" on the canvas... sometimes Art is not about WHAT is represented, but about what is NOT represented, or an abstract reflection on the effect of representational minimalism. I thought critics assimilated this breakthrough of non-figurative art long time ago! (see: Non-narrative Film Criticism)
I can't believe a serious magazine would publish such anti-intellectual banter. If you don't like these films, deal with it frontally. No need to pretend that art would never put you to sleep. I believe the guilt is onto the sleeper. Filmmakers, good or bad, don't have to make your job easier. That's your problem. If you have trouble watching films as an imposed assignment, find another job less strenuous on your patience. Because Film Criticism isn't going to change to suit your Diva's demands. When you trade your opinions on cinema, we don't need to know whether you enjoy getting up in the morning, forgetting to drink your coffee, driving to the screening room, struggling with your digestion, feeling nauseous from hangover, falling asleep... This is not the kind of "opinion" you're paid for. We don't ask critics whether they ENJOY watching films for a living, we ask them if these films are any good!
Here is how he defines his profession of film critic : "it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece". The guy is paid to watch movies to give his opinion, and he would like us to feel sorry for him to have to watch all films before knowing whether it's a masterpiece... Maybe he expected the job to be signposted in advance, with big labels in red letters saying "MASTERPIECE" on the DVD screener, so he knows which films to watch and which ones he may skip. Dude! Your job is to watch the damn films, masterpieces or not. "Patience" and screen "fascination" is a REQUIREMENT of your job! "Precious time" is what your are required to invest for the privilege to give your opinion on films.
"sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not" : wonderful insight! Thanks for the truism. How is this any different when you watch dumb comedies and superhero sequels??? Yeah, sometimes it's worth it, sometimes not. But if we knew in advance, you'd be out of job!
If you want to watch only "masterpieces", you're not a critic, you're a READER. Readers don't have to watch all the films, they sit at home and read in YOUR magazine which are the "masterpieces" because critics did their job. What is so hard to grasp here?
And this guy runs a film magazine and writes editorials??? At least he admits he's "bored and a philistine". Typical of the anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment inclination that plagues today's film culture. If you can't tell art from boredom, you won't be taken seriously when you think you've found art in mainstream formulaic genre... cause THAT is the easy life for a film critic (and most of the time they are overstating the alleged greatness of genres, hoping to pull a Truffaut)
This said, to be able to identify CCC in "slower films" doesn't mean that they are therefore ALL great or revolutionary or exceptional... Yes, there are bad CCC films! Who would have thought?
There are bad Soviet Montage films too, bad Italian neorealism films, bad Nouvelle Vague films, bad Westerns, bad documentaries... Yes. It happens! Thanks for the lesson Sight & Sound.
Did you expect films that play it "artsy" to be automatic wins? that if it LOOKS slow, then it must be great art? There is no recipe for art, not in art-films, not in genre movies.
CCC is not a formulaic trend that only produces masterpieces. It is an alternative way to make films, a new narrative mode, a different angle in storytelling, and it gives a new perspective to the audience. You can't judge it with your subjective mainstream prejudices (lack of details, lack of events, slowness, boredom...)
If young filmmakers try to imitate certain traits without understanding what CCC is, they are wrong and they make bad films. But that doesn't undermine CCC, not for savvy critics anyway. There are a lot of wannabe directors who think they can imitate a comedy formula and become a great filmmaker... but it's not that easy. Why? Because critics don't have the "easy life", they know to look past the surface and tell uninspired imitation from a genuine research that happens to take a form common to a certain trend.
If artists tried to avoid their art to look like nothing else around, we would never see the emergence of a collegial trend in the major aesthetic movements of cinema history, in Art history in general.
_________________
Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Films of Sharunas Bartas
Lithuanian auteur Sharunas Bartas is the kind of filmmaker one would immediately be tempted to label “pretentious” and “self-indulgent” because there is absolutely no concession whatsoever that he gives to the viewers in terms of the narrative, artistic, political and personal ambitions of his films, burying them deeply within their part-hyper real and part-surreal constructs. All his films have hinged themselves onto a particular moment in Lithuanian history – the nation’s independence from the USSR, just prior to the latter’s complete collapse – and they all deal with the loss of communication, the seeming impossibility of true love to flourish and the sense of pointlessness that the political separation has imparted to its people. The characters in Bartas’ films are ones that attempt in vain to put the dreadful past behind them, traverse through the difficult present and get onto a future that may or may not exist. With communication having been deemed useless, they hardly speak anything and, even if they do, the talk is restricted to banal everyday expressions. Consequently, Bartas’ films have little or no dialog and rely almost entirely on Bressonian sound design consisting mostly of natural sounds. Also Bresson-like is the acting in the films. There are no expressions conveyed by the actors, no giveaway gestures and no easy outlet for emotions.The outdoor spaces are deep and vast in Bartas’ films while the indoors are dark, decrepit and decaying. The landscapes, desolate, usually glacial, nearly boundless and seemingly inhospitable, are almost always used as metaphors for a larger scheme. His compositions are often diagonal, dimly lit and simultaneously embody static and dynamic components within a single frame. Interestingly, his editing is large Eisensteinian and he keeps juxtaposing people, their faces and landscapes throughout his filmography. But since the individual images themselves possess much ambiguity of meaning, the sequences retains their own, thereby overcoming the limitations of associative montage. Another eccentric facet in Bartas’ work is the amazing amount of critters found in his films. There are puppies, kitten, frogs, seagulls and flies seen around and over his characters regularly. May be, not considering the specific connotations that these creatures bring to these scenes, the intention is Eisensteinian here too – to indicate that the characters have been reduced to a level lower than these beings, unable to either communicate with each other or be at peace with nature, devoid of the notions of nationality and politics.
In many ways, the cinema of Bartas stands in between that of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr – both filmmakers concerned with chronicling life in a communist state. While the childhood memories, existential crisis and spiritual yearning in Bartas films directly has its roots in Tarkovsky’s films (all the films starting from Mirror (1975)), the visual (dancing in entrapping circles, meaningless glances and chatter over banquets and eventual self-destruction of the drifting characters) and aural (the Mihály Vig-like loopy and creepy score consisting of accordions, accentuated ambient noise) motifs, stark cinematography and political exploration are reminiscent of Bartas’ Hungarian contemporary. But, more importantly, it is the attitude towards his characters that puts him right in midpoint between Tarr and Tarkovsky. Bartas’ work has so far been characterized by two impulses – a warm nostalgia and sympathy for his characters that betrays the director’s hope and love for them, as in Tarkovsky’s cinema, and an overpowering cynicism, clearly derived from the (post-neo-realist) films of Tarr, that keeps remarking how the characters are all doomed and done for. This (unbalanced) dialectic is evident in Bartas aesthetic itself, which employs copious amounts of extremely long shots and suffocating close-ups. In the former, characters are seen walking from near the camera and into the screen, gradually becoming point objects eaten up by the landscape while, in the latter, Bartas films every line and texture of their faces with utmost intensity in a way that obviously shows that he cares for them and the pain that they might be experiencing. This conversation between optimism and pessimism towards his people also places him alongside the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian – another historian of traumatized lives in a Soviet state before and after independence.
Praejusios Dienos Atminimui (In Memory Of The Day Passed By, 1990)
One of the finest films by Sharunas Bartas, In Memory of the Day Passed By (1990) is a somber, evocative mood piece set in post-independence Lithuania and opens with the image of large flakes of snow moving slowly along a river. This is followed by a shot of a woman and her kid walking on a vast, snowy plain and moving away from the viewer until they become nonentities assimilated by their landscape. This pair of shots provides a very good synopsis of what Bartas’ cinema is all about. The rest of the film presents us vignettes from the daily life of the people living in the unnamed city, possibly Vilnius, and from the garbage dump outside it. One of them presents a tramp-like puppeteer wandering the streets of the city without any apparent destination. Like the puppet that he holds, the people around him seem as if their purpose of living has been nullified, now that the national strings that had held and manipulated them so far have been severed. Consequently, there are many shots that deal with religion and the intense Faith that these people seem to be having, perhaps suggesting a yearning for the replacement of a superior power that guides them. Bartas suffuses the film with diagonal compositions indicative of a fallen world – a world that can go nowhere but the abyss. Appropriately, the film closes with a variation of its opening image: flakes of snow flowing downriver – an apt metaphor for the many nations that would drift without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Trys Dienos (Three Days, 1991)
Three Days (1991), Bartas’ maiden feature length work, unfolds in a harbor town in Lithuania where two men and a women search for a shelter in the largely uncaring place, possibly to make love. The first Bartas film to feature his would-be collaborator (and muse) Yekaterina Golubeva, Three Days plays out as a post-apocalyptic tale set in an industrial wasteland, complete with decrepit structures and murky waters, where both positive communication (Even the meager amount of dialogue in the film turns out to be purely functional) and meaningful relationships (Almost everyone in the film seems to be a vagrant) have been rendered irrelevant. Every person in this desolate land seems to be an individual island, stuck at a particular time in history forever. The visual palette (akin to the bleached out scheme of the director’s previous work) is dominated by earthy colours, especially brown, and the production design is highly redolent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The actors are all Bressonian here and do no more than move about in seemingly random directions and perform mundane, everyday actions. Like in Bresson’s films, there is no psychological inquiry into the characters’ behaviour and yet there is much pathos and poignancy that is developed thanks to the austerity of Bartas’ direction and the intensity of Vladas Naudzius’ cinematography. The film is titled Three Days, but it could well have been titled ‘three months’, ‘three years’ or even ‘eternity’ for, in the film, all time is one, the notion of future nonextant and hope for escape futile.
Koridorius (The Corridor, 1994)
If Three Days presented people stuck in time and moving aimlessly through desolate landscapes, The Corridor (1994) gives us ones stuck geographically and drifting through abstract time. Bartas’ most opaque and affecting film to date, The Corridor is a moody, meditative essay set at a time just after the independence of Lithuania from the USSR and in a claustrophobic apartment somewhere in Vilnius in which the titular corridor forms the zone through which the residents of the building must pass in order to meet each other. Extremely well shot in harsh monochrome, the interiors of the apartment resemble some sort of a void, a limbo for lost souls if you will, from which there seems to be no way out. Consisting mostly of evocatively lit, melancholy faces that seem like waiting for a miracle to take them out of this suffocating space, The Corridor also presents sequences shot in cinema vérité fashion where we see the residents drinking and dancing in the common kitchen. Of course, there is also the typical central character, played by Sharunas Bartas himself, who seems to be unable to partake in the merriment. Conventional chronology is ruptured and reality and memory merge as Bartas cuts back and forth between the adolescent chronicles of the protagonist, marked by rebellion and sexual awakening, and his present entrapped self, unable to comprehend what this new found ‘freedom’ means. Essentially an elegy about the loss of a sense of ‘being’ and ‘purpose’, The Corridor remains an important film that earns a spot alongside seminal and thematically kindred works such as Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1968) and Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975).
Few Of Us (1996)
Few of Us (1996) is perhaps the least political of the already highly noncommittal works of Sharunas Bartas. Not that this film does not base itself strongly on the political situation in Lithuania, but that the now-intimate backdrop of independent Lithuania is transposed onto a remote foothill in Siberia where a tribe called the Tolofars maintains a spartan life style. It is into this rugged, almost otherworldly land that the beautiful protagonist of the film (Yekaterina Golubeva) is air-dropped like an angel being relegated to the netherworld. She seems as isolated from the people of this land as the Tolofars are from the rest of the world. However, as indicated by the incessant cross cutting between the worn out terrain of the village and the contours on Golubeva’s face, this mysterious, hostile and unforgiving landscape is as much a protagonist of Bartas’ film as Golubeva is. With an eye for small and intricate changes in seasons, terrains and time of the day comparable to that of James Benning, Bartas pushes his own envelope as he lingers on eyes, faces and landscapes for seemingly interminable stretches of time. Each image of the film carries with itself an air of a still paining, vaguely familiar. All this sure does bring to surface the experimental and, I daresay, self-conscious nature of Bartas’ work, but what it also does is familiarize us with the hitherto alien and draw connection between this abstract representation of protagonist’s cultural disconnection in Tolofaria and the typical Bartas territory of desolate, directionless lives lead by the people of post-Soviet Lithuania.
A Casa (The House, 1997)
The House (1997) opens to the image of a mansion as the narrator reads a confessional letter written to his mother about their inability to communicate with each other. The house and mother are, of course, metaphors for the motherland that would be explored in the two hours that follow. It seems to me that The House is the film that Bartas finally comes to terms with the trauma dealt by the country’s recent past that he has consistently expressed in his work. Consequently, the film also seems like a summation of the director’s previous films (One could say that the characters from Bartas’ previous films reprise their roles here) and a melting pot of all the Tarkovsky influences that have characterized his work (especially the last four fictional works of the Russian). Shot almost entirely indoors, The House follows a young man carrying a pile of books as me moves from one room of the Marienbad-like mansion to the other, meeting various men and women, none of whom speak to each other and who might be real people of flesh and blood, shards of memory or figments of fantasy. The house itself might be an abstract space, as in The Corridor, representing the protagonist’s mind with its spatial configuration disoriented like the chessboard in the film. Furthermore, one also gets the feeling that Bartas is attempting to resolve the question of theory versus practice – cold cynicism versus warm optimism – with regards to his politics as we witness the protagonist finally burn the books, page by page, he had so far held tightly to his chest.
Freedom (2000)
Sharunas Bartas’ chef-d’oeuvre and his most accessible work to date, Freedom (2000) is also one of the most pertinent films of the past decade. Taking off from the wandering trio setup of Three Days, Freedom begins with a chase scene right out of genre cinema transposed onto Bartas’ highly de-dramatized canvas. The two men and women seem to be illegal immigrants who are on the coast guard’s wanted list. If The House was national politics distilled into a claustrophobic setting, Freedom is the same being set in seemingly limitless open spaces. The most rigorous of all Bartas films, Freedom is the kind of film Tarkovsky might have made had he lived to see the new century. Like the Russian’s characters, the people in this film are all marginal characters (and are often aptly pushed from the centre of the frame towards its margins) who want to escape the oppressive, unfair politics of this world and become one with nature and the unassailable peace it seems to possess. Alas, like in Blissfully Yours (2002), they are unable to depoliticize their world and start anew. The tyrannical past is catching up with them, the present is at a stalemate and is rotting and there is no sight of the future anywhere. Bartas expands the scope of his usual investigation and deals with a plethora of themes including the artificiality and fickleness of national boundaries, the barriers that lingual and geographical differences create between people and the ultimate impermanence of these barriers and the people affected by it in this visually breathtaking masterwork.
Septyni Nematomi Zmones (Seven Invisible Men, 2005)
The most unusual of all Bartas films, the pre-apocalyptic Seven Invisible Men (2005) starts off like a genre movie – a bunch of robbers trying to evade the police after stealing and selling off a car. It is only after about half an hour, when one of them arrives at a farm that is near completely severed from the rest of the world, that the film moves into the world of Bartas. Seven Invisible Men is the most talkative, most rapidly edited and the most politically concrete of all the films by the director and that may precisely be the idea – to serve as a counterpoint to all the previous movies. All though there is too much talk in the film, rarely do they amount to meaningful conversations, bringing the characters back to the hopelessness of the director’s earlier works. Like Freedom, all the characters here are people living on the fringes of the society – con men and ethnic and religious minorities – who seem to have sequestered themselves with this settlement of theirs. All these characters seem to be trying to escape their agonizing past and the politics of the world that seems to give them no leeway in order to start afresh (The heist may have been the last attempt at escape), in vain. In the final few minutes that recall Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), we see the house, in which the characters have been living in, burn down to dust. But, unlike Tarkovsky, it is Bartas’ cynicism that overwhelms and he sees his characters as ultimately self-destructive beings that have lost all control of their lives and hope for a better future.
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