David Lynch’s work in both television and film mesmerised his viewers. With originality, a purity of vision, lovers will be matched by detractors. That is no bad thing – not in the superficial ‘any attention is good attention’, but in the challenge it poses. Stop Making Sense, as another David, Byrne, would have it, and you might think Lynch thought so too; if only you take a moment to think about what ‘sense’ means. A great indulgence in obscurantism for the fun of it is not what either has in mind. But what is infuriating for Lynch’s detractors, and so solemnly and lovingly admired by his supporters, is that Lynch’s visions make perfect emotional sense. It is more than difficult to explain how this is so: it is not even for the esoteric few who are in on the action, Lynch is popular, a popular Surrealist who created his audience, gave an audience a world they didn’t know they needed.
I have thumbed my way through books and music and films, some jumping out deliciously and some horribly, all furnishing mind (or not) and bringing delicacy to thoughts (or not), new perceptions and sensitivities to your world (or not). Making an ideal wish of when to listen to this or when to read that is pointless; you get what you get when you need it, just like in life (beware the straight-point fortune tellers). It can’t be but unplanned and un-looked for, even if the signs were right there in front of you. I, and many others, had this experience with David Lynch, and not on the one occasion. It is, it seems, his aesthetic which supposes: this is what you needed to see then and there. It is, if anything, a sign that you’ve found something, and in this case, it feels more like you’ve remembered something (it was always there). What was?
You can’t take away from Lynch’s will to sport his ideas; to follow them through and stay true to the birthing impulse. His tenacity was that of a game a child refuses to give up on, no matter how the all-wise unimaginative adult tells him to gather up and put away his toys; it just won’t do. I cannot tell whether my refusal to understand wholly, or, rather, interpret, any Lynchian project makes me a poor or good viewer. All the way through, you hear a little voice at the back of the mind, like an accompanying bass, whisper: yes, things do appear and happen like this; why are you acting astounded? Why not follow the lead, destroy this work of art with my self-satisfying interpretation? Triumphantly, I say no. Lynch’s willingness to step into his own intuitive logic, his own dreams, makes his work continually fresh, young. Even recurring dreams seem new – like re-watching his films. It percolates all the way through, from camera-work to dialogue. The lines run just to the left of your right, the right of your left – the uncanny dances all the way. And the uncanny is fertile all the while.
By all accounts, David Lynch was a remarkable man. The flooding of heartfelt messages from around the world attests to that. The personal eulogies from actors that were shaped by him (Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan) shows Lynch as a light in our strange world, irresistible and kind. Someone who, regardless of the usual methodology, took considered interest in the people who would bring his imagination to screen; plucked then-unknown actresses and actors out for roles and, not knowing why he felt so, but that he did, but that he was genuinely interested in something in them – see Naomi Watts – ought not to be astonishing for a director, but, sadly, it often is. It is definitively striking, and we think about Ingmar Bergman’s or Lars Von Trier’s favoured few; it feels more than the paid role, more like a famous troupe that through time have sculptured their art to a pinnacle. And to the utter Surreal confusion of his films, his person seemed to be the warm counter-part, of an untroubled faith, excited by the state we live in: to be alive is something to reach into, to take into oneself, following each electrifying idea as they come, when they come, how they come – there is no rush and worry.
David Lynch will be sorely missed by his fans, mourned deeply by his loved ones, and viewed continuously as long as there are eyes and minds to see. An artist, an uncompromising artist, has left the world. May he swim through light and bliss.
Without consulting a reputable source that might satisfactorily define what ‘Landscape Cinema’ might be, I am left to define it myself. Alone, in suburbia, the low drone of midweek traffic humming through my windowpanes, I am to consider what I mean when I designate a film to fall into the category of landscape cinema.
It is always better to give examples when defining a concept, but I will give a brief explanation as to what I mean by the term landscape cinema. In my eyes, landscape cinema is cinema that employs the landscape not as a path on which its characters tread, but as a character in its own right. In the films I will discuss, the landscape sleeps and wakes and breathes and dreams and argues and laughs along with its human protagonists; it demands as much attention from its viewers as the actors that walk amongst it. Landscape cinema can manifest in narrative pacing, whereby the events in a film seem to mirror that which is occurring in the natural landscape; on the other hand, it can occur as an inevitable result of a film whose focus IS the natural landscape and its effects on the people that live within it.
Of what I have seen of it, I love landscape cinema. Perhaps it is partly to do with my penchant for slower-paced films, but to me it seems that filmmakers who take the landscape and use it to reinforce the story being told on screen create works that have a great thickness and richness to them; these are films that remind us we are but flesh walking atop a merciless earth.
There are a wealth of movies that fall into this category, most of which I have not seen – many are obscure titles that are difficult to find and watch, and many are documentaries. I will focus my efforts instead on the films I have seen and which I deem suitable for the categorisation I have proposed.
A very long time ago, my mother had a subscription to ‘LOVEFILM’, which was the precursor to ‘Amazon Prime Video’. She’d get DVDs delivered through our door and we’d watch them together, often on a Friday with a bowl of buttered pasta on our laps. I remember a film I must have seen when I was about 14 years old called Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, Luc Besson, 1988), a film that chronicles the devastating and glorious power of water Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr), its protagonist, is an accomplished free diver drawn to the deep, the deep blue, the wide blue, the blue that stretches out as far as the eye can see. Whatever might happen on land, and much does indeed happen, Jacques finds solace in the quiet beneath the waves. For much of the film, director Besson places his viewers under the water. It is difficult to think of any other times we are subjected to this kind of imagery, save for in nature documentaries. In Jacques’ waking life, he finds himself falling into strange hallucinations, and his dives become increasingly extreme throughout the course of the film culminating in his ‘final dive’. Facilitated by Éric Serra’s surreal, dreamy soundtrack, Le Grand Bleu is a hallmark of landscape cinema that stares nature in the eyes and beckons it to fill the screen with its impulsive, changeable character.
A few months back, The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square screened a few films by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of which was his last feature, completed just before his death: The Sacrifice (1986) a Pagan-Christian parable about a man (Alexander, played by Erland Josephson) who attempts to bargain with ‘God’ to stop the impending nuclear holocaust. The Sacrifice is a lonely film, shot in a place that seems as though it could already be a cemetery of post-nuclear fallout. It was filmed on the southeast coast of Gotland, Sweden, in a peninsula called Närsholmen, a savanna-like nature reserve of grass and stone and sea. A person walking through this landscape could be seen from miles around, and this is key to the film. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to shelter save for the house where our Alexander lives with his family, and the house down the winding road where Maria, the family’s pagan maid, lives.
Desperate hope rings as a central theme for the film, and yet the landscape itself speak of hopelessness, of isolation and separation from the mainland, from the people, from time itself. This is a land without time, without dates or days or weeks or years. The Sacrifice speaks also of the strangeness with which we perceive nature and the landscape; when I am out and about in the forest, beside the sea, in fields, by ponds, I become acutely unaware of the implications of pollution, of warfare, of the ongoing decline of the natural world as a result of climate change. I am here, in the trees where the birds chirp, and all is well. Isn’t it? In the world of The Sacrifice, we are left wondering what exactly would change, or has changed, in the event of nuclear disaster. Would the lives of these people, far from everything, change? Would the landscape change, or would it simply breathe differently; where before, it breathed the clear salty air of the sea, would it heave and splutter beneath the surface, invisibly clogged with nuclear waste that would manifest in deformities of its flora and fauna?
Where the landscape of The Sacrifice stands as an onlooker as its character slowly fall into despair, in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), we witness a different landscape, one of a much more insidious nature. Here, the malevolence of the landscape is pinnacle to the tale itself, a tale of private school girls disappearing at a picnic in rural Australia. The ‘hanging rock’ of the title is situated in rural Victoria, and is a towering volcanic formation – called a ‘mamelon’ – which is created by a particularly stiff variety of lava which solidifies as it travels. The result is the rugged, maze-like structure that the young girls are drawn to explore during the picnic. There is something in these rocks, something inexplicably terrible but which remains unnamed and unseen throughout the film, save for a few strange lights, colours, and memories told from the eyes of the girls who survived the experience. The otherworldliness of this film, and of its depiction of the Australian landscape, was facilitated by the brilliant cinematographic techniques of Weir and DOP Russell Boyd, who were inspired by British photographer David Hamilton to drape fabric over their lenses to create the dreamlike visuals in the film. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir dwells on the rock itself, on its grandeur, its coldness, how it pierces the sky, how it takes the girls in and hides them from view.
Nature is often perceived as the ideal, as the ultimate in purity; current trends in diet and fitness are geared towards eating closer to the ‘earth’, or how our ‘ancestors’ used to eat and move. We forget that many of our ancestors were pillaging colonialists, and often even warmongering rapists, and that the majority of fruits and vegetables that we eat today have been manufactured over hundreds of years to make them edible to us, where before they might have been too fibrous or even downright poisonous.
Nature is not always our friend – nature is cruel, nature is merciless, nature lacks consciousness, morality, kindness. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir shows us the brutality of the landscape, its inhospitability, and, ultimately, our complete lack of understanding of it. With all our advancements in technology, industry, and all the rest, we are still powerless in the wild. Weir’s rock is a fearsome antagonist, and Picnic at Hanging Rock is a wondrous example of landscape cinema.
And then, there are the instances where the landscape watches. It stands and watches from behind bushes and rocks and trees to see what we will do next. It is silent, but it is not benevolent. Here, I speak on Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022) and L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960). To speak of them in parallel, and to witness them as such, we might see, from the perspective of landscape cinema as a concept, some innate similarities between these two films. In these films, we see two separate rugged isles pushing humans to the brink, both emotionally and physically. Nature watches from the sidelines of L’Avventura as its protagonists, Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search desperately for a trace of their lost companion. It is as though the land had eyes, for it stares at these lost people through cracks in rocks, from behind bushes, from the coastline. The sea batters the shore of the island of Lisca Bianca, where much of the film was shot, and the body of the missing woman is never recovered. What are we meant to feel? The emotions of these people are as unreadable as the landscape itself; beautiful yet unfriendly, cold yet at times joyous.
In L’Avventura, the landscape blends with its characters to make something inexplicably poignant. In Pálmason’s Godland, we see something else; the presence of the landscape within a character: Ragnar (played masterfully by Ingvar Sigurðsson) the leader of the Icelandic group guiding a Danish priest (played by the brilliant Elliott Crosset Hove) to the southeast coast of Iceland so he can build a church and spread the word of God. Ragnar is the rugged barrenness of the icescape, and the fairytale beauty of waterfalls plunging down from flower-covered precipices, and the quiescence of water lapping before a half-built wooden church. As in L’Avventura, Ragnar watches with a silent, all-knowing eye. He can read the skies and the water like they were words written in a book, and he is as humble as the horses he rides. But our protagonist – Lucas, the Danish priest – is a most wondrous contrast to the weather-worn Ragnar. In him is modernity, is the rejection of the ways of the land, is technology and callousness and colonialism, all in the name of God. In Godland, the landscape is fractured, and the calm existence of a people is disrupted by the oncoming tide of foreign religion, domination, and greed.
Ah, I could speak for hours on this. I have a list beside me with all the other films I was going to talk about, but perhaps we should leave this here for now. I can’t say for certain why I was drawn to speak on this, but perhaps it is something to do with the low drone of traffic outside my windowpanes, and the rumble of trains beneath my feet, and the sky, obscured by the rooves of the houses on the other side of the street. Perhaps it is that, despite all of their violence and coldness and mercilessness, I long to be in the landscapes that I see on my screen, away from the blinding noise of the city.
Friend of the Carl Kruse Blog, Rick Minnich will be celebrating the world premiere of his latest film “The President’s Tailor” as part of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg. The screening takes place at the Bundesplatz Kino in Berlin on June 19th at 20:30.
Blog followers and friends will gather with Rick at the Mexican restaurant “Alcatraz” beginning at 6pm for complimentary appetizers and drinks. The restaurant is located at Bundesplatz 6, right across the theater.
“The Presidents’ Tailor” is a heartwarming story about the Holocaust survivor and star tailor Martin Greenfield, who dressed six US presidents and hundreds of celebrities. The New York Times wrote an extensive tribute to Martin upon his death in March at age 95. The Jewish Journal also ran a cover story about the film.
An additional screening is planned for June 23rd at 5 p.m. at the Bundesplatz Kino.
There will be a Q&A session with Rick after the film for those interested.
Tickets for the film are 9€ and can be reserved at http://www.bundesplatz-kino.de/ The Carl Kruse Arts Blog has 5 complimentary tickets, preferably earmarked for students and anyone under financial duress, but really available to all on a first come first served basis.
For any questions please write me at info@carlkruse.net
See everyone on June 19 for what should be a wonderful evening.
It is sincerely difficult to write about love. Attempts to do so are often vapid, overly sentimental, gratuitously flowery, or simply boring. We have all written about love; in letters, poetry, texts, emails, journals – we have all thought ourselves to be the most intuitive of poets with visions of love and life more fruitful and honest than any of our predecessors. This is because love is an all-encompassing experience; it blinds, weakens, strengthens, feeds, and drains all at once. We cannot see love when we are inside it, and this can stunt us, creatively speaking. So, when someone makes a work that looks into love, as though from the outside gazing in through a window lit up in the dark, it is a marvelous and admirable feat.
Breaking the Waves is Lars von Trier’s fifth feature film, released in 1996 as part of his ‘Golden Heart’ trilogy, so named because the three films within this compilation (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots (1998), and Dancer in the Dark (2000)) all contain within them heroines who, despite their devastating misfortunes and tragic encounters, remain naively ‘golden-hearted’ right up to the end. Breaking the Waves’ heroine, Bess McNeill, played by Emily Watson in her breakthrough role, is perhaps one of the most wonderful female characters I have ever seen on screen, not only for her inimitable onscreen chemistry with Stellan Skarsgard (who plays her husband, Jan). She has an abandon, a childish glee and freedom that pervades the atmosphere of the film with nostalgia and beauty. Bess loves with her whole self, a self that is defined by her unwavering faith to God and her achingly innocent perceptions of romance, a self that seems so fragile, so virtuous so as to not belong to or be deserved by this world. When one watches Bess glide about the screen, giggling and dancing and running and making love, one feels a guilt, a shame that one so pure as Bess should be so crushed by the horrors of the world. There is a Bess in us all, a golden-hearted soul that was trampled by the boots of responsibility, work, money, debt, heartbreak.
Bess was Lars von Trier’s first female lead, and she was a stark contrast not only in gender but in temperament to von Trier’s prior male protagonists, whose idealist natures were brought to ruin oftentimes as a result of femme fatales of some variety or another. Female protagonists are a difficult thing to get right, it seems; the critics and scholars have much more of a taste for shooting down the depiction of a woman or female-identifying protagonist on screen than a man, lest he be overtly of the distasteful variety. Bess was no different – soon after the release of Breaking the Waves came the claims of misogynistic intent in the portrayal of her martyrdom. Such words as ‘problematic’ and ‘oppressive’ began to be flung about. Now, I’m not diminishing the widespread critical acclaim of the film – it was arguably Lars von Trier’s most highly awarded and celebrated film, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1996, Best Motion Picture in Drama at the Golden Globes in 1997, and continues to be beloved by many arthouse filmgoers and critics alike. But I think it interesting to enquire into the qualm of representation of female or female-identifying characters on screen; how do we get it right? Can we even get it right, or are its parameters too tight, so tight as to be suffocating, restricting, stifling to a writer or filmmaker? Are our desires for the ‘correct’ female protagonist too extreme? Which female characters do we deem to be ‘correct’ and ‘unproblematic’?
Well, if I were to refer to the perspectives of charity website ‘Girls Empowerment Network’, I would see the following list of so-called ‘empowering female leads’. Granted, this is a list for ‘girls’, but, still, I found this list to be quite enlightening: Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Merida (Brave), Imperator Furiosa (Mad Max), Nakia/Okoye/Shuri (Black Panther), Mulan (Mulan), Storm (X-Men), Elle Woods (Legally Blonde), Princess Leia (Star Wars), Starr Carter (The Hate U Give), and Katherine Johnson/Dorothy Vaughn/Mary Jackson (Hidden Figures). Now, I can’t speak to all these characters, partly because I haven’t seen all of these films and also because this article isn’t about how ‘empowered’ these respective characters are. But I’ll just comment briefly to try and contextualise my misgivings about the perspective that Bess is a less ‘empowered’ woman than any of those on this list.
We’ll start with Hermione. I grew up with Hermione, watching and reading the Harry Potter series from a very young age and still thoroughly enjoying the films today. I understand the sentiment that this article is attempting to propound by putting Hermione on this list, but I’m afraid I have to fervently disagree. One, because Hermione’s character in the films is oftentimes COMPLETELY defined by her relationship with men, and the conflicts that arise as a result of these relationships. Hermione comes between her two best friends, Ron and Harry, because Ron is in love with her and believes her to be in love with Harry in the film(s) The Deathly Hallows. In part 1 of this two-parter, the smell of Hermione’s perfume lures in a band of snatchers. In the film The Goblet of Fire, Hermione is depicted as pining after a love-potion in an odious moment where all the girls in potions class walk towards the love potion in a sickeningly fawning manner. At the Yule Ball, Hermione’s arrival in her elaborate pink dress is lingered on in a most obvious manner, as if to say ‘look, Hermione doesn’t always dress in jeans – she’s a woman too!’.
What is Bess McNeill to us, now? Why are people so afraid of a woman using her sexuality as a form of payment, a form of sacrifice? If Bess had, for example, given away all her money and belongings when her tragically paralysed husband, Jan, told her to, then I’m sure no-one would bat an eyelid. Or maybe it would just be a different complaint, one about female empowerment in the business world, or something. We can’t pretend that bad things don’t happen, that bad people aren’t out there, that young women don’t fall prey to bad decisions due to coercion and sense of duty. I know that I have had tendencies like Bess, to please people and do what they ask because, for some reason, I feel I ought to, like I owe it to them and don’t owe anything to myself. Breaking the Waves does not suggest that a woman should do such things; rather, it explicitly reveals the pain and suffering that comes as a result of how young women are raised. Religion defines Bess’ lived experience, in a village where women cannot go to funerals, where men dominate the landscape in dark and insidious ways. Bess is just a product of her surroundings, a lonely girl whose only purpose is to serve, to serve her Lord God. So when she finds love, a beautiful, effortlessly tender love, what can she do but give herself to it, just as she has given herself to others her entire life? Bess’ power is her womanhood, her sexuality, her devotion to love and faith. We should not criminalise her or damn her for being who she is. Bess is simply a person who lived in the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong world. Lars von Trier was not misogynistic or wrong for depicting a character like Bess, in fact, he was probably right to do so; he made us feel for Bess, hold sympathy for her, laugh with her, wish the best for her. After all, women such as Bess do exist, even if we’d prefer to pretend that they don’t. And that’s just how it is.
Filmmaker and friend of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog, Rick Minnich, cordially invites you to the closing night screening of the documentary film ‘The Strait Guys’ taking place at the Global Peace Film Festival on Saturday, September 23, 2023, 7:30-9:15 PM, at Crummer Auditorium, Rollins College, Fairbanks Ave. & Interlachen Ave., Winter Park, FL 32789.
The Strait Guys tells the story of the 76-year-old retired mining engineer George Kounal, who is on a mission to connect the United States and Russia via the world’s longest train tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. Filmed across Alaska and Russia over a twelve-year period, The Strait Guys follows the efforts of George and his fellow “Strait Guys” to convince governments, corporations and indigenous tribes to green light their $100 billion project, which promises to become the Panama Canal of the 21st century.
The film poses the timely question: What is preventing the US and Russia from being connected?
Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the tunnel plan certainly seems absurd. Yet the Strait Guys are more convinced than ever that their mega-project is exactly what the world needs to finally leave wars behind and create “peace, progress and prosperity” for all.
‘We all need to know one another and see each other as friends and coinhabitants of this beautiful planet, not as enemies. What a massive, ambitious and visionary project. We need a transformation in discovering we are all brothers and sisters! The train could help facilitate this change.’ -David Hartsough, co-founder World BEYOND War and author of WAGING PEACE: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist.
To request a press screener or interview appointment, please email head of distribution Charlie Corubolo at: distribution@ourmaninberlin.com.
ABOUT The Strait Guys, a film by Rick Minnich 99 min. color English + Russian English + German subtitles
Global Peace Film Festival Since 2003, the Global Peace Film Festival has used the power of the moving image to further the cause of peace on earth. From the outset, the Festival envisioned “peace” not as the absence of conflict but as a framework for chanelling, processing and resolving conflict through respectful and non-violent means.
Rick Minnich Rick Minnich is an American independent filmmaker based in Berlin, Germany. He holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an MFA equivalent in film directing from the Film University Babelsberg “Konrad Wolf” in Germany. Rick Minnich has been writing, directing and producing shorts and feature documentaries since 1993 through his companies Rickfilms and Our Man in Berlin and in association with various German broadcasters, film funds, and production companies. He has dedicated his life to building bridges, rather than walls. In his filmmaking and teaching, he is always on the lookout for stories about what motivates and connects us human beings no matter where we live on this beautiful planet of ours.
There is a pristineness characterizing the modern film scene. I do not mean a pristineness or cleanliness of character, theme, or narrative, necessarily, but rather of the visual. Films, and other recorded media, have become indescribably high-quality, to the extent that one can see the tiny circular pores on an actor’s skin, or the goosebumps on the bodies of lovers, or the granules of salt on a table. Of course, considering the rapid advancement of filming technology; any would testify that the crispness of the image in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, shot in 1968 with the revolutionary 70mm spherical-lensed Super Panavision 70, is a delectable thing with an intricate and sophisticated image even in comparison with later films, such as Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2015 feature, The Revenant, which was filmed on various models of the ARRI ALEXA series. My conclusion being: if one has the money, why wouldn’t one propose a film of the highest calibre; clean, and sharp, and visually breath-taking.
But I have a bone to pick with such clarity, the same bone that I might fiddle with if I were to discuss hyperrealism in painted artworks. When a film overtakes its viewer, when its eye becomes greater than the eye of its beholder, then I think it begins to separate itself from its observer. Just as, in hyperrealism, a painting of an apple, which looks perfectly like an apple, cannot be an apple because it is too perfect, too real, too incredible to be the thing itself. The painted apple has overtaken the apple itself, and in so doing, becomes not-apple. It becomes an apple we can never hope to touch or taste, because it is infinitely better than any apple we might come across.
This is why I fall upon the name Lars von Trier. Trier, in his odd trajectory of filmmaking, has an overwhelming catalogue of brilliance strung to his name. I recently had the pleasure of watching his debut, The Element of Crime (1984), which I realised was indeed the veritable predecessor of much of his narrator-led filmography. The Element of Crime also offered me a prequel-esque vision into his later film The House That Jack Built (2018), mainly referentially but also in sentiment; that is, of the story behind insidious acts. Though Trier has indeed made some ‘pristine’ works, including The House That Jack Built, which was filmed on the ARRI ALEXA MINI, I admire Trier’s commitment to the aesthetic and significance of a lower-quality film, which he owed to his own manifesto, created as a joint endeavour by he and director Thomas Vinterberg. This manifesto was called Dogme 95.
Lars Von Trier
I would be loathe to attempt to describe the foundational philosophy behind this manifesto, so let me refer to our good friend Wikipedia for an answer. This sentence describes the rules detailed in the accompanying Vows of Chastity which detailed the ‘dogma’ (I suppose) behind Dogme 95:
“These were rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology.”
And, in so doing the above, the power of filmmaking was pulled out from under the rug of large corporate studios and placed back in the palms of the directors, offering them artistic authority with which to tell their stories once again. Before I continue discussing Von Trier, let me share with you the rules of Dogme 95, for I am sure that you are curious:
Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)
Optical work and filters are forbidden.
The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
Genre movies are not acceptable.
The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
The director must not be credited.
(And, further):
″Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.″
I would argue that the last section of this passage might be devoid; we know, of course, that the film Festen (1998), was created by Thomas Vinterberg, and that the 1996 feature Breaking the Waves was directed by Lars von Trier (and arguably not a Dogme 95 film, despite von Trier’s desires for it to be…we’ll discuss that at a later date), so the tenth statement appears unachieved. Not that this matters; perhaps I’m misinterpreting the rule, anyhow.
This manifesto, which was inspired by and directly quotes François Truffaut’s Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (1954), was revolutionary for the film industry, which had taken a sharp turn towards the extremely high-budget, high-production, and highly-controlled waters of Hollywood and its sheer breadth of influence. Von Trier and Vinterberg claimed their manifesto was aimed at restoring a kind of balance within the film industry, so that its barriers could be brought down and opened up to a greater number of less-wealthy creatives.
Von Trier, despite his many scandals and sometime questionable approach to directing is, to me, a genius, and a master of his craft. If there is anything I take away from all that I have seen from him, it is that von Trier is a palpably self-aware creator, conscious of his own faults and unafraid to highlight them to his audience. I watched the new series of his 90s series The Kingdom, released this winter on MUBI, and, though I preferred the earlier series on a personal level, what I particularly enjoyed in this new incarnation of The Kingdom was von Trier’s incessant self-deprecation. He consistently mentions how cocky the young von Trier was and how mediocre and unremarkable the earlier series were (despite fervent disagreement on my part). This is what makes a great artist, to me. It is well and good to celebrate and publicly enjoy one’s work, I think, but to have the insight to damn it, to acknowledge how one has progressed and also not progressed, is a wonderfully powerful thing that I think we should all learn from as artists and creators. Perhaps it is no good to be embarrassed, or ashamed by one’s past, but to learn from it, and to continue forging ahead after all the mistakes, all the indignities, all the failures, is how we progress, in all parts of life. ————— The homepage of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog. Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other articles by Hazel include Giorgio Morandi, Central Governor Theory, and Art for Art’s Sake. Also find Carl Kruse on XING.
The Greek composer and musician Evangelos Papathanassiou passed away in Paris recently. Better known as Vangelis, the award-winning musician and beloved film-score composer. Obituaries and the programs of his life abounded against the fact. A career of over fifty years, and not one that could be characterized easily; Vangelis floated through genres, as he roamed from place to place, picking up and discarding forms in the search for the sound he is now remembered for.
Papathanassiou began his musical career in his home country, forming the band Forminx in the early 60s. A rock-n-roll band that was through by the mid 60’s. With the political turmoil of the 1967 Greek Coup, Papathanassiou debarked to Paris in search of the new, and he found it in the Prog-rock band Aphrodite’s Child. Finding success with the band would ultimately lead to its dissolution as Papathanassiou began to abhor the structured program of show business, admitting that “you have to do something like that in the beginning for showbiz, but after you start doing the same thing everyday you can’t continue.” Now having solidified what music meant to him, an adventure, a kind of freedom to create, Papathanassiou settled into an apartment in Marble Arch, London, where he would emerge as Vangelis, creator of the poetic synth albums at his own expense.
Vangelis
In 1980, Vangelis was approached by Hugh Hudson to make the film-score of the movie Chariots of Fire. This, in Vangelis’ words, ‘very humble, low-budget film’ won him an academy award, and set a precedent in film-scoring. The incongruous synth in a movie set in 1924 – Ridley Scott’s comment: “It was off the mark, but worked like a son of a bitch.” It was this film that earned Vangelis the score for Scott’s Blade Runner, another perfect encapsulation, but this time of a Philip K. Dick inspired dystopia. It would have appeared that Vangelis had found his alcove, and the Hollywood scene would be waiting for his arrival; he did not take the bait. Vangelis only scored several films following his success, and again, the same reason which had resolved Aphrodite’s Child directed his actions: the stifling formula of success.
“I think music is much more interesting, and much more rich than to lock yourself in one kind of area”, said Vangelis, and this is the true sentiment that spans his long, adventurous career. Running after awards, or pandering to expectation, could not dwell amicably with Vangelis. The balance between ‘true’ creativity and success is a precarious thing, and one that often means disabling the former for the latter. Vangelis is an example of the opposite. He sat comfortably with music for music’s sake, and this extended from something intrinsic in his beliefs. Not a man to talk openly about his personal life, he rather aimed discourse towards music with a capital M. Music, for Vangelis, existed before humanity existed. In conjunction with humanity, music was a complex of the universe, of humanity’s metaphysical duration; obscure, infinite and absorbing.
It is no wonder that Vangelis’ sound echoes these very feelings; hints and suggestions of something large, something otherworldly. Music as remembrance, our channel to this metaphysical plane. Whether willingly or not, Vangelis’ life seemed to follow this kind of unsettled suggestiveness. He roamed, and possibly felt most at home in the roaming, rather than the stability of one place and one time, just as his music rhymed the disparate, way-ward, realms of the inner mind with the cosmic stuff that shapes the universe.
The stage is set. Three pyramids built up of myriad buildings and angles forge forth unto the screen. Spotlights dance in symmetrical lines, lighting up sections of the structures like a stage. The buildings blur into three black pieces of machinery plunging up and down, then these blur and a montage begins showing cogs and valves and compressors and axles whirring around and turning and grinding. The screen dissolves and we are shown a clock with numbers from 1-10. The hour of 10 is about to strike. Another image of cogs churning covers the screen. The second-hand ticks forward and finally hits the hour. The image switches to another scene where a jumble of pipes sits amongst a cityscape, this time ta view of the ‘Below’ – the worker’s city (the first city was that of the above-ground). These pipes begin bursting with clouds of steam from every hole. The screen turns black, reading the words ‘Shift Change.’
Opening scene of METROPOLIS
A new scene. Crowds of workers clothed in black overalls stand in rigid lines behind a gate to the left of the screen, and, to the right, another crowd of workers stands in front of a separate gate. Each gate lifts, and the workers on the left walk forwards to begin their shift. The workers on the right walk towards the other gate to rest briefly before they must work again. These men move like puppets, mechanically swaying side to side in unison as they shuffle. Their heads are bowed, and each man is indistinguishable from the next. They are the tools of the machine, the people who hold up the city from deep below the earth’s surface while the rich dine and drink and dance and merry away the hours. This is the introduction to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis.
Workers change shift. METROPOLIS
It had been some time since I had watched a silent film when I came around to watching Metropolis. Though to call such a film ‘silent’ seems to diminish the visual and philosophical noise that perpetuates the entire 153 minutes it runs for. Furthermore, the film is near-constantly accompanied by the haunting militaristic soundtrack of Gottfried Huppertz, so to call this movie silent is somewhat inaccurate in all senses of the word. The last silent film I had watched prior to Metropolis was The Artist, Michel Hazanvicius’ 2011 part-talkie (whereupon sparing dialogue is used in an otherwise silent movie) black-and-white picture made in the style of a 1920s Hollywood silent film, full of romance and hilarity and warmth – a world away from Lang’s dystopia.
I recently learned that I have been accepted for an MA Acting degree program at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, during which I will have the opportunity to experiment with different theatrical techniques from various acting theorists, predominantly those working during the twentieth century. Among these myriad approaches to learning the art of acting, there is one theorist who I am most excited to discover: Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq worked primarily in the realm of physical theatre (using movement to tell stories, as opposed to words). His method involves the use of six different types of mask – the neutral mask, larval mask, expressive mask, commedia mask, half mask, and finally the clown’s eponymous red nose – to encourage his students to act from a base of ‘newness’ or ‘unknowing’, as the mask works as a blank canvas upon which an actor can express themselves playfully and openly. The final stage of mask work, the red nose, is the stage at which the student may finally discover their own unique ‘clown’, because it allows them to finally use their face to express their emotions and thus to communicate through facial AND physical mime.
Original poster for METROPOLIS, 1927.
The reason that I am bringing up this method is because I note similarities between the acting in German expressionist films, such as Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari – the 1920 silent horror directed by Robert Wiene – and the techniques used by Lecoq. Most of the emotion and action in Metropolis is explained by dramatic movement and facial expressions, along with the occasional use of mouthing and captions, though these are limited. In a time where language seems to be the most prominent device used by contemporary film to guide and explain a storyline, it is refreshing and fascinating to watch a film that relies on the skill and versatility of its actor’s mime to develop and carry a storyline. Maria – the love interest of protagonist Freder and also the ‘saint’ of the underground workers, who prophesizes the arrival of a ‘mediator’ who will unite the ruling and working classes – has her face ‘taken’ and transposed onto the face of a robot by the dictator of the city (Joh Fredersen, Freder’s father) in order to quell the possibility of a rebellion by the workers. Maria is a mesmerizing character, because her actor – Brigitte Helm – takes on both the role of the innocent Saint Maria and the robot, or The Machine Man. Helm’s captivating use of body contortion and facial expressions makes her equally credible in both roles; the robot is highly sexualized, with heavy eye makeup and a malicious, crazed grin, while Maria is meek, near-bare-faced, and gentle.
The transformation of Maria into the robot. METROPOLIS
Watching Helm work made me want to discover more about the Expressionist film movement, and to learn how I could learn to use my body and face as tools upon which to create stories and words without ever opening my mouth to speak. I have always relied on language throughout my acting career to date, though this might sound like an obvious claim to make. For most acting jobs, one is required to learn a script and is then told how best to move in order to create meaning from this script. I would generally consider myself to be a method actor; when learning to play a character, I find my thoughts and feelings begin to become one with the part I am to play, and even sometimes implementing aspects of these characters into my ‘real’ life. When learning the script for Measure for Measure (Shakespeare’s 1604 dark comedy), I quickly understood the advantage I had over some of the other actors in that I understood what Shakespeare was saying, whereas those from a less-literary background (I studied Literature for my Undergraduate degree) found more difficulty in interpreting the early modern vernacular of the play. But when I look back now, I think that what may have seemed to be an advantage – the ability to dissect and interpret Shakespeare’s work from a linguistic point of view – might have impeded my ability to freely embrace and embody my role as Isabella. I placed too much importance on what I was saying, and not enough on how I could say just as much by using movement and facial expressions. I was complimented on my performance, and I do believe that I did justice to Isabella’s character, but I find it interesting to think back on the methods I used to approach my role and to consider how I could have bettered my interpretation.
In the 1920s, countries were beginning to experiment with new techniques and styles of cinema, partly due to the poor economic states of many European countries after World War II. Many directors started to create dystopias and science fiction works to illustrate the changes that were occurring around them in technology, authority, fashion, art, and writing. Some of the earliest Expressionist (art which employs a distortion of reality to express the ideas and emotions of its creator) film creators were forced to be innovative in their approach to film-making due to the limited budgets they had to play with. This led to such techniques as painted shadows (see The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari) and paper set-designs (Metropolis) which create a sense of distortion and unease due to the oddity of the images they produce. In Metropolis, the images of the city are terrifyingly oppressive due to their harsh angles and oddly inaccurate shadows. The trend in these films was a rejection of realism and an emphasis on the possibilities of the future and whatever shapes, textures, and emotions the director might have believed the future would materialise in.
German Expressionism was cut short after the 1930s, but its impact was long-lasting and Nazi films made use of the tropes of Expressionism to create anti-Semitic propaganda. Later on, directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, and Ridley Scott would use techniques in their films influenced by the Expressionist film movement. The acting in German Expressionist cinema was just as impactful in the cinematic world as the sets and styles of the films themselves. During the filming of Metropolis, Lang forced his actors into near-perilous circumstances in order to increase the veracity of their performances. When, near the end of the film, Maria (Brigitte Helm) as The Machine Man is burned at the stake, Lang insisted on using actual fire to burn the detritus beneath her tied-up body. This purportedly led to Helm’s dress catching fire. Prior to this moment, Maria is forcefully dragged by her hair by another actor (Grot, the man who works the ‘heart’ machine which keeps the city running), which she said was ‘[not] fun at all’ in a later interview. Lang wanted to create an environment whereby the actors would be forced to act more genuinely in their roles, and despite the controversy of such techniques, it certainly did lead to an astounding performance by all of the actors in the film. The suffering, anger, distress, and panic of the characters in the film is almost haunting in its sincerity, and almost all these emotions are conveyed to us without the use of any dialogue.
Human language has evolved so far as to develop the unprecedented ability to use words to form abstract thoughts about the future, to recall past events, and to create new ideas in the present. How wonderful it is that we have the capability to produce innovative works of fiction using our complex grasp of language and our knowledge of literary history. In theatre and film, however, I think that language can sometimes impedes an actor’s ability to freely embrace their art because they find themselves too focused on perfectly regurgitating lines as opposed to really feeling what those lines actually mean. Metropolis was, for me, a perfect study on how powerful physical acting can be, and how easily one can follow a narrative without the need for dialogue. This form of theatrical expression seems intrinsic to humans; children, while they might lack the linguistic ability to communicate freely with other humans, learn to navigate their world by reading the faces and bodies of people around them, and by taking in stories through picture books and objects around them. We need only look at a young child’s face to understand if they’re happy, hungry, uncomfortable, distressed, or tired. If we look to one of the most popular children’s television shows, Pingu, we see that it uses a fictional dialect to tell its stories, yet we have no problem understanding its narratives because we can use the visual cues it offers as well as the tonal implications of the language it employs.
Metropolis ends on a happy note, whereupon the ‘mediator’, Freder Fredersen, joins together the ‘head’ (the ruling class) with the ‘hands’ (the working class) using the ‘heart’. Trumpets blare an uplifting final hoorah as the workers walk up the steps to the cathedral in a pyramid formation and watch as the head and hands shake hands. A black screen covers this happy scene with the words ‘THE END’.
