Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
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Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, "I Can’t Sleep"What it isn’t I have before me two statements about I Can’t Sleep (J’ai pas sommeil, 1994) (Amazon US Confessions of an Incompetent Film Critic For people of my generation, who grew up in the 1940s/50s on an exclusive diet of classical Hollywood cinema (with the occasional British movie), the European ‘arthouse’ cinema always presented problems which linger on even today, a simple basic one being that of following the plot. This is not because the plot is necessarily complex or obscure, but, frequently, because of the way in which the characters are introduced and the action presented. When I grew up there was remarkably little serious criticism available (not much beyond the weekly reviews), and film studies courses in schools or universities were not even thought of. I was seventeen when I saw my first foreign language film (Torment/Frenzy [Hets, 1944], by Alf Sjöberg, from an early but already characteristic screenplay by Ingmar Bergman). I knew from the reviews that it would carry me far beyond anything I had seen previously, both in style and subject-matter, and my hand was trembling when I bought my ticket. I believe I had great difficulty following it (my first subtitles, not to mention extreme psychological disturbance). Fifty-five years later I still have the same problem when confronted with the films of Claire Denis (or Michael Haneke, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien...). The habits acquired during one’s formative years are never quite cast off; when I showed I Can’t Sleep to a graduate film group last year, my students corrected me over a number of details and pointed out many things I hadn’t noticed, although this was their first viewing of the film and I had already watched it three times. A classical It is the particular distinction of Denis’ cinema that sets it apart from – almost, indeed, in opposition to – the work of many of our most celebrated ‘arthouse’ directors: Bergman, for example, or Fellini or Antonioni. Their films are rooted in autobiography – not necessarily in any literal sense, but in terms of personal introspection – whereas Denis left autobiography behind with Chocolat, and even that film is notable for its poise and critical distance, its objectivity. Where Bergman or Fellini seems to be saying to us ‘Come with me and I’ll tell you my secrets, share my experiences – how I feel about things, my thoughts about existence’, Denis issues a very different invitation to the spectator: ‘Come with me and we’ll play a game, albeit a serious one. Let’s see how much you can notice in what I decide to show you, how you interpret what you see and hear, what connections you can make, how much can be explained and how much remains mysterious and uncertain, as so much in our lives remains unclear. I’ll allow you a certain leeway of interpretation, because I don’t always understand everything myself, not even my own creations, though I’ll be as precise as possible...’ A few examples from the film’s first ten minutes will illustrate various aspects of this. 1. The film opens (pre-credits) in the interior of a police helicopter, in which two cops are helplessly convulsed with laughter over a joke one of them has just told. We are not let in on the joke, though one of the cops, between spasms, gasps out the odd unintelligible phrase, which may or not be the punch line. Accordingly, we are denied participation in their merriment and left free to speculate – about their duties, and about their possible relevance to whatever is about to happen. They are above open country, far too high to be able to make out details, presumably on some kind of highway patrol, but not paying the least attention to anything outside the cockpit, spending their time (and the taxpayers’ money) on joke-telling. We feel frustrated at not being let in on the humour, but their laughter is so prolonged that it becomes contagious: we almost begin to laugh with them, if somewhat uncertainly, and may reflect that they need some relaxation from a generally boring job (Denis is the least puritanical of filmmakers). These two policemen never reappear in the film or have any apparent connection to anything (they can hardly be searching for the ‘Granny Killer’ way out in the country over open meadows). Two other pairs of policemen do, however, turn up subsequently, but again do not exactly inspire great confidence: the couple who twice encounter Daiga (the first time when she, in a strange country, has left her car in a No Parking spot, the second time by chance) and treat her brusquely, with no consideration for her foreignness; and the pair who, near the end of the film, intercept Camille and take him into custody, but only after Daiga has recognized him from the sketches at the police station and guessed his secret. If the film has anything even remotely Hitchcockian about it, it is perhaps this scepticism about the efficacy of the police. 2. ‘Relaxez-vous’. With the cops still laughing we cut to an aerial view (from inside the helicopter) of the highway glimpsed through clouds on a dull day, then to road level, singling out a nondescript, far from new car, its rear window almost covered by baggage, the cast credits superimposed (alphabetically); woman driver, cigarette drooping from mouth. We shall come to know her as Daiga, from In my films the unknown, that which is hidden in the dark or in places far off the map, is at once frightening and intriguing. It offers the hero a source of a profound self-realization he would never have experienced in a safe environment. At the end of Lange Nacht there’s a song called 'In der Finsternis' by Virginia Jetzt which includes a line that roughly translates as: 'In the darkness everything becomes much clearer'. Nicely put, I think. So, for me as a filmmaker, the night, the darkness, the realm of the fantastic and the horrific, is a place to face and realize instincts, desires, and needs I might not dare to admit in the broad daylight of purely realistic storytelling: there is a reason why most sexual encounters happen by night. Most murders, too. I definitely feel a progression from my earlier films to Cowboy. On a technical level I have become much more confident in the use of film language, in finding the right shots to break down the narrative and express a certain mood, creating a slightly heightened, filmic reality without letting the images become an end in themselves. Also, being able to shoot my last two films on 16mm as opposed to video made me realize a whole new dimension of texture and made the visual storytelling much more precise, because you only have a limited amount of reels, and that makes you choose your shots very carefully. And I think I got better with actors, or at least with casting, because I feel that the acting in my films improved a lot during the years. My recent films are more personal. Now I openly address my own insecurities, fears and longings, and allow them to be the narrative’s driving force. For instance Cowboy is my first film with overtly gay content, and I feel happy to have learned to use film as a means of exploring and expressing something as subjective as sexual desire. It’s often the case that progression or maturing for an artist is supposed to be a process of letting go of your childish interests and becoming more adult and sober, more realistic and down-to-earth, less playful. I don't think that's the case with me. I think the more I progress as a filmmaker, the more I embrace what fascinated me as a child – the fantastic. As a child, I was only able to watch these stories unfold in awe from the outside, not consciously understanding their deeper implications; I have since found a way of going inside them, being able to see more clearly why they mean so much to me and to infuse them with my own personality. RP | Do you have any plans for how you might use the Iris Prize award? Are there points in common between the UK and the underbelly of Germany you’ve explored in your previous films? TK | I'm entitled to make another short with that money, and to do it in the UK. I would like to shoot it in Wales, as early as the summer. All the digging for the story still has to be done. I think I'll return to Cardiff at least once early in 2009 to write the screenplay. It will be my first film shot outside of Germany, and I'm very anxious to live up to the opportunity this presents. I don't just want to make a German film in Wales. I want to shoot in another language, English, or Welsh. I want to find that dark and grim place full of secrets that connects with my sensibilities as well as with the context of the region I'm shooting in. I'm really looking forward to exploring. Contributor details Ryan Prout teaches film and writing in the Department of Hispanic Studies, Cardiff University. =¿YK½mXK ½Ã4 ülü)filter:3:db49127628d50c725f1bd0d60f75b03f‹½Susan Sontag once called transparency—the luminousness of the thing in itself—the highest value in contemporary film. By this, she meant the way Renoir and Ozu remind us of life. What then should we make of the occluded films of Eugène Green, which invoke werewolves, Baroque opera, the ghost of one’s true love, the student protests of late sixties France, academic satire, child-eating ogres, wise babies, prostitutes, holy light, and the wounds of Christ? Green’s characters zig-zag through allegorical systems about art history or Christian theology. They’re eager to chat you up on topics like how words bind us, the way our faces resemble masks, and why certain people have no names. Green’s films have been called quirky, sublime, and capable of restoring one’s faith in film—but what do they mean? A Baroque theater director and fifty-something American expatriate in France, Green has directed four oblique, tender and smart-alecky, charmingly pretentious films. These films have a calm sealed quality, like science fiction movies that only coincidentally take place in our own universe. In Green’s twenty-minute short, Le nom du feu, a man tells a psychiatrist that he’s a werewolf. She meets him in the woods by a fire and flees wounded from the forest after she fails to talk him back into his humanity. Green’s first feature, Toutes les nuits, awkwardly adapts Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Like a diary that is somehow apathetic about its subjects, this voiceover-laden film tracks the lives of two men—a surly lawyer and a pouting dreamer—who grow apart, find and lose love in the same woman (Emilie, played by Christelle Prot), and discover themselves on opposite sides of the late sixties student riots.
Green’s next film, Le monde vivant, a slight, perfect, slantlike hit at Cannes 2003, recounts the tales of a Lion Knight who fights an ogre and wears blue jeans. His “lion” is a golden retriever with an MGM-style lion’s roar slapped on the sound mix. As we seep into this irreverent fantasy, as pat and precious as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mamet, we discover that Le monde almost accidentally becomes profound. It is a special movie about death, language, and love—a love story about performative utterances! Le monde shows us how love can course through sentences like electricity through a circuit board, as when a knight named Nicolas asks a damsel, “Why do you love me?” and she replies “Because your words have freed me.” How does the boyish recipient of this love respond? “Maximus cool!” The film has the geometric meaningfulness of sonnets and echoing motifs, not the social import of life—except that it somehow ends up being about age, with the four characters snapping into two pairs of mature and immature couples (“Maximus cool!”)—and also about motherhood. Prot also plays the wife of the ogre, a woman named Penelope who sews not a tapestry but baby clothes for the children she never ended up having. While Green rarely leaves much room for his actors, Prot somehow manages to imply a history behind her melodramatically vatic character. She gives not just the most surreptitiously moving performance in all of Green, but also the most calm, the most credibly wise. Toutes and Le monde belong to an unusual genre for such urbane and fresh moviemaking: they are pastoral films. The forests have been dappled by the yeasty sun. The world looks as though it has just been born. So as we tour these fables, we never get the feeling that Green wants his characters tainted with enough details for them to be believable: the films are bashfully realist. Green’s most mature work, Le pont des arts is an occasionally wonderful, occasionally fatuous masterpiece that bestows the viewer with a feeling of placid sublimity and also the sense that someone is winding you up. The film holds itself out as both Baroque and anti-Baroque, rationalist and romantic, theological and secular—and appears earnestly faithful to the meaningfulness of these terms. Pascal (Adrien Michaux, who also plays a nearly identical if kinder character in Toutes and Nicolas in Le monde) is an apathetic poetry student at the Sorbonne, who reads Michelangelo’s poetry at cafes and learns to dislike his pretentious poetry professor, his dissertation topic, and his far more serious-minded girlfriend, Christine (Camille Carraz). When we step next door to the adjoining storyline, we meet Sarah (Natacha Régnier), a milky-faced woman who spends most of the film singing Monteverdi’s soul-inflating Lamento della ninfa as the somewhat precarious lead of a Baroque ensemble. Green has fitted the entire film around this wonderful song—actually sung by Claire Lefilliâtre—like a set of hallway doors. Sarah is harassed by her conductor—a wonderfully vulgar, dandified baboon called The Unnamable (Denis Podaldès, who can make even playing the piano seem perverse), who tells her that she sings like a sick kangaroo. And so she tries to console herself with her loving but boring husband Manuel (Alexis Loret, also the werewolf in Le nom du feu, the crass careerist in Toutes, and the Lion Knight in Le monde), who doesn’t know quite what to say when she tells him that her face is a mask. Like Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud, her lamentations seem not personal, but the bottomless channeling of the universe’s mystic hurt. Sarah is ostensibly overcome by her conductor’s criticisms, but also seems wounded by inexplicable forces—and so she throws herself from a bridge. Pascal also tries to kill himself. We don’t mind really—we are incredulous that we should—since Michaux plays Pascal like a model Generation Xer: all arrogant ennui and pretensions to counter-cultural truth. Preparing for his suicide, Pascal puts on a recording of Sarah’s singing Monteverdi and her music sounds so sublime as he nuzzles his head into the gas-fuming oven that Pascal not only saves himself, he emerges from his suicide-chrysalis as a Baroque Romantic! Having molted off his indecisive postmodernism, Pascal enrolls himself in a quest to discover his true love—Sarah, a woman he’s never met!—and encounters Manuel, Christine (who has since acquired another boyfriend, a boring academic who studies soil qualities), and, like the final boss in a Nintendo game, The Unnamable himself. Movingly and somewhat preciously, Pascal also meets Sarah—still dead, for those of you keeping track—in a spiritual bridge-top encounter on le pont des arts.
Though pert and original, Le pont’s subject matter is that of a standard French satire of academic life. Like Va savoir and Look at Me, Le pont possesses a light Rohmeresque style, namedrops dead white poets, and reminds us that Paris exists, is beautiful, and can be spotted looking civilized over the riverbanks. Add two extra servings of classical music slathered on top! Le pont des arts deploys these satirical elements for the not-entirely-believable ends of tragedy. What makes Green’s films compelling is their wonderfully strange formal effects. When speaking dialogue, Green’s actors look directly at the camera (i.e., you) and stand at the center of medium shots that reveal only their torso, as though they were awards ceremony presenters. Yet Green’s actors do not break the fourth wall, speaking instead through monotonic voiceovers that Green actually recorded in caves—an effect that somehow reduces rather than inflates the films’ pretensions, as it allows Green to pare away all inflection until only his text remains. The dialogue seems to emit not from the characters but from some other lyric source, so that, like the conversations in Henry James, one could read the whole script straight down as one text. And because his characters always stand perpendicular to the axis of the shot, the visual space flattens until the shot no longer seems to take place in a real location, but in a formalized world of concepts. This blocking cleaves the conversation towards you, the viewer, who do not exist inside the story, so instead of perceiving two characters talking to each other, you feel as though two only tenuously associated characters both speak to you. In a few scenes, Sarah hugs Manuel and, while executing the hug and whispering her sweet nothings, she peers over his shoulder to the audience, even though her words are directed to him. Green’s blocking has reminded many of Ozu, whose Tokyo Story characters address the audience like they’re trying to sell you something. But it might be more helpful to consider Green’s background as a Baroque theater director. The author of La parole baroque, Green founded in 1977 the Théâtre de la sapience, a theater group that sought to renew contemporary theater through the Baroque. The characters in theater—unlike taxicab drivers and jilted lovers—must always look at you, who are the audience, rather than the diegetically appropriate space provided by the narrative, such as the other character’s face. “The true Baroque state setting is symmetrical,” art historian John Rupert Martin writes. “The reason is that in seventeenth-century scenic design the space of the stage (the world of art) is regarded as coextensive with that of the auditorium (the real world).” (Martin, 1977: 195.) When Bernini staged The Inundations of the Tiber, for example, he so effectively conveyed the bursting dikes that the audience, like Lumiere’s, leapt to its feet to avoid the flood. This “principle of coextensive space,” as Martin calls it, is a general trope of Baroque sculpture and painting: consider the Captain in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch who looks like he’s ready to step out of the painted surface. (Martin, 1977: 158.) When this illusionism is applied, the picture frames melt into doors and windows. Now unstoppered, the “real space of the observer and the perspective space” of the art pour into each other, and the proscenium stage and gallery walkway find themselves studded with portals to these higher worlds of aesthetic representation: the viewer finds herself an “active participant in the spatial-psychological field created by the work of art.” (Martin 1977: 14.) So although this first person cinema, collapses the wall blocking reality from fict Éspan lang="en-GB">, Hyphen, Illuminations, Muse-Apprentice-Guild.com, Offscreen.com, Option, The Quarterly Black Review of Books, Rain Taxi, Red River Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The St Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, 24FramesPerSecond.com, UnlikelyStories.org, WaxPoetics.com, and World Literature Today. For Offscreen, Garrett wrote an essay on the film Proteus, an essay that examined imprisoned South African men who develop a sexual relationship and surveyed similar encounters in other films and literature. Garrett’s extensive ‘Notes’ on culture and politics appeared on the web pages of IdentityTheory.com.
i Page numbers refer to Annie Proulx, ‘Brokeback Mountain’, in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, New York: Simon & Schuster, Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2000, ISBN 0–684–85222–5.
For three days in October 2008, Cardiff was host to the Iris Prize, one of the highlights on the international calendar of LGBT film festivals. Bigger, better, and brighter, the 2008 event included UK premieres of Antonio Hen’s Clandestinos (2007), Todd Stephens’s Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild (2008), Yair Hochner’s Antarctica (2008), Casper Andreas’s Between Love & Goodbye (2008), Julia Von Heinz’s Nothing Else Matters (2007), and James Bolton’s Dream Boy (2008). As in its inaugural year, the festival also included a program of short films, nominated from festivals around the world, and in competition for the £25,000 Iris Prize. Featuring Icelandic wrestlers, Australian cuddle groups, and German cleaning ladies, the titles in competition reflected the shift perceived more generally in gay culture from a diversity based on a putatively uniform difference of sexual orientation to diversity within difference. As jury member and Independent journalist Johann Hari put it, the range of films underscored the shift in gay identity politics from a discourse which claims ‘I am what I am’ to one which insists ‘I am what you are’. The Friends of Iris chose Dream Boy as the recipient of the new award for the festival’s best feature. Northern Ireland director Conor Clements won the Skillset award for James (2008). Russell T. Davies presented German filmmaker Till Kleinert with the Iris Prize for Cowboy (2008). The winning film explores an impulsive relationship between an enslaved farmhand and a slick property developer, and is set against the backdrop of an abandoned harvest in a forgotten landscape. A metropolitan visitor’s survey of this remote rural investment prospect forces him to confront his sexual frustrations and, in the process, draws him into the undergrowth of a bloodthirsty rustic community. Below the belt meets underbelly as scenes which unleash pent-up sexual tension in a way reminiscent of Clay Farmers (1988), converge with a menacing remoteness, evocative of Straw Dogs (1971) or Funny Games (1997). The same open landscape which liberates the suited executive’s desires turns into a monster pullulating with hidden life and threatening his survival. He escapes, taking with him Cowboy, the rusticated punk whose shackles have also been broken by this seemingly random homosexual encounter. If Hergé were to illustrate M. R. James, the results might look a bit like Cowboy. Elan Closs Stephens, Professor of Communications and Creative Industries at Aberystwyth University, was the chair of the 2008 international jury. Explaining the panel’s choice of Cowboy as the winning film, she pointed to Kleinert’s deft interlacing of narrative modes, a trend characteristic of LGBT filmmaking’s move towards transgenericism. She singled out Cowboy as a film which showed great potential for the development of a distinctive and innovative cinematic vision. Besides Cowboy, Kleinert has made 12 shorts as well as the feature Lange Nacht (2004). Ryan Prout asked Till Kleinert about the making of Cowboy and the influences which helped to form the singular aesthetic of a film the director calls an ‘Erotic folk tale’.
RP | Where in Germany was Cowboy |
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) by reputable and intelligent critics: 1. On the cover of the video, Georgia Brown (who used to write for The Village Voice) is quoted: ‘A rich and startling noir that manages to evoke Wenders and Jarmusch at the same time as Chabrol and Hitchcock’; Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis, in the French Film Directors series published by Manchester University Press: ‘J’ai pas sommeil plays on the conventions of the noir genre...’ ( Introduction, Page 1). Much as I respect (in their very different ways) both writers, I find these descriptions misleading. Any connection to Wenders, Jarmusch and Chabrol seems to me merely tenuous and unhelpful, but connecting the film to Hitchcock seems perverse in the extreme. One might see it as the anti-Hitchcock par excellence, the only connection being that one of the film’s characters is a serial killer. Hitchcock’s art is based solidly on the principle of spectator identification, which Denis absolutely forbids; point-of-view shots are rare, and their function when they occur is simply to show us what the character is looking at. Hitchcock’s serial killer films (from The Lodger [1926] through to Frenzy [1972]) play upon suspense, and upon our early knowledge or suspicion of the killer’s identity, while Denis scrupulously avoids any suggestion that her characters are in imminent danger and any hint of his identity until the abrupt and casual revelation in the film’s final third, up to which point the murders are merely a news item, part of the urban environment. The most we might wonder is whether one of the elderly women (Daiga’s aunt, or Douchka the hotel owner) might become a victim, though nothing tells us to expect such a development. Is any film about a serial killer now ‘Hichcockian’? As for ‘the conventions of the noir genre’, they are (as I understand it): black-and-white photography with high-key lighting, shadows, dark corridors, darker alleys, bad weather, rain-washed streets, the essential femme fatale, a pervasive sense of corruption and double-dealing in which nobody can be trusted, the double-cross, a plot centred on money, power and greed, not one of which can be found in Denis’ film. What is striking about I Can’t Sleep, despite its serial killer plotline (merely one of several), is its systematic refusal of the ‘conventions of the noir genre’. 
