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Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in THE HOUSE IS BLACK

This article began as a lecture delivered on April 1, 2001 at the conference “Women and Iranian Cinema,” held at the University of Virginia and organized by Richard Herskowitz and Farzaneh Milani. Two years later it appeared in French translation in Cinéma/06, then in a booklet accompanying Facets Video’s DVD release of The House is Black in 2005, and it will also appear in my forthcoming collection Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (University of Chicago Press, 2010). — J.R.

The Iranian New Wave is not one but many potential movements, each one with a somewhat different time frame and honor roll. Although I started hearing this term in the early 1990s, around the same time I first became acquainted with the films of Abbas Kiarostami, it only started kicking in for me as a genuine movement — that is, a discernible tendency in terms of social and political concern, poetics, and overall quality  – towards the end of that decade.

Some commentators — including Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa — have plausibly cited Sohrab Shahid Saless’s A Simple Event (1973) (1) as a seminal work, and another key founding gesture, pointing to a quite different definition and history, would be Kiarostami’s Close-up (1990) (2). Other touchstones would include Ebrahim Golestan’s remarkable Brick and Mirror (1965), Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), Massoud Kimiaï’s Gheyssar (1969), and Parviz Kimiavi’s The Mongols (1973). But I’d like to propose a lesser-known short film preceding all of these, Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962) — a 22-minute documentary about a leper colony outside Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan. For Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it is “the best Iranian film [to have] affected the contemporary Iranian cinema,” despite (or maybe because) of the fact that Farrokhzad “never went to a college to study cinema” (3). It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the first Iranian documentary made by a woman. It won a prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963 and was also shown at the Pesaro Film Fesrival three years later. For me it is the greatest of all Iranian films, at least among the 60 or 70 that I’ve seen to date. More than any other Iranian film that comes to mind, it highlights the paradoxical and crucial fact that while Iranians continue to be among the most demonized people on the planet, Iranian cinema is becoming almost universally recognized as the most ethical, as well as the most humanist.

Farrokhzad (1935-67) — widely regarded as the greatest of all Iranian women poets and the greatest Iranian poet of the 20th century, who died in a car accident at 32 — made The House is Black, her only film, at 27, working over 12 days with a crew of three. The following year, in an interview, she “expressed deep personal satisfaction with the project insofar as she had been able to gain the lepers’ trust and become their friend while among them.” (4) I mainly want to consider it here for its anticipation of “the Iranian New Wave” as I know it. On a more personal level, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and I worked with three others in subtitling The House is Black in English prior to its screening at the New York Film Festival in 1997, on the same program as Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry.

Though it was dismissed in a single sentence by the New York Times’s reviewer, it clearly made a strong impression on many others who saw it there and in subsequent screenings at the annual Robert Flaherty Seminar and at Chicago’s Film Center, before the print was returned to the Swiss Cinémathèque. The same version is what is now being released by Facets Video, and though it doesn’t appear to be quite complete — one abrupt edit looks like a censor’s cut, and a few stray details visible in some other versions are missing   — this is the best version of the film available in North America. (5)

A few relevant facts about the film: its producer, Ebrahim Golestan (born in 1922) — also a pioneering filmmaker in his own right, as I’ve already noted, as well as a novelist and translator (who translated, among other things, stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Chekhov into Persian) — was Farrokhzad’s friend and lover for the last eight years of her life, and she worked with him as a film editor before making her own film. (6) Her most notable editing job was on A Fire — an account of a 1958 oil well fire near Ahvaz that lasted over two months until an American fire-fighting crew managed to extinguish it. As Michael C. Hillmann accurately describes it, the film juxtaposes the fire with “the sun and moon, flocks of sheep, villagers eating, harvest time, and the like”.

Prior to working on A Fire in 1959, Farrokhzad studied film production as well as English during a visit to England. Shortly afterwards, she traveled to Khuzestan and worked on films there in several capacities — as actress, producer, assistant, and editor. (7)

According to Karim Emami, a writer and translator who worked for Golestan Films during this period, her first experience in handling a movie camera was shooting streets, oil wells, and petroleum pumps on a handheld super-8 camera in Agha-Jari, shooting from the interior of a touring car — an image that immediately calls to mind Kiarostami, Taste of Cherry in particular. She also appeared in the Iranian segments, filmed by Golestan, of an hour-long 1961 National Film Board of Canada TV production, Courtship — a discussion of the rites of betrothal in four separate countries — playing the sister of a working-class bridegroom in Tehran. She acted in another Golestan film that was never finished called The Sea, and another, in 1961, called Water and Heat or The View of Water and Fire. She also made one other film after The House is Black — “a short commercial for the classified ads page of Kayhan newspaper” which Emami regards as relatively inconsequential. (8) She is also said to have worked on still another Golestan film entitled Black and White, and plays an almost invisible cameo in his Brick and Mirror — the pivotal part of a young mother who abandons her infant.

In an interview last year, Kiarostami credited Golestan as the first Iranian filmmaker to use direct sound — a common attribution, I believe. But it’s worth noting that The House is Black, which clearly uses direct sound in spots, was made prior to Brick and Mirror, raising at least the possibility that Farrokhzad might have been a pioneer in this technique in Iranian cinema.

Defying the standard taboos and protocols concerning lepers — especially the injunction to avoid physical contact with them for her own safety — Forugh Farrokhzad wound up permanently adopting a boy in the colony named Hossein Mansouri, the son of two lepers, who appears in the film’s final classroom scene, taking him with her to Tehran to live at her mother’s house. Yet some of the film’s first viewers criticized it for exploiting the lepers — employing them as metaphors for Iranians under the shah, or more generally using them for her own purposes and interests rather than theirs.

When I first heard about the latter charge I was shocked, for much of the film’s primal force resides in what I would call its radical humanism, which goes beyond anything I can think of in western cinema. It would be fascinating as well as instructive to pair The House is Black with Tod Browning’s 1932 fiction feature Freaks — which oscillates between empathy and pity for its real-life cast of midgets, pinheads, Siamese twins, and a limbless “human worm,” among others, and feelings of disgust and horror that are no less pronounced. By contrast, Farrokhzad’s uncanny capacity to regard lepers without morbidity as both beautiful and ordinary, objects of love as well as intense identification, offers very different challenges, pointing to profoundly different spiritual and philosophical assumptions.

At the same time, any attentive reading of the film is obliged to conclude that certain parts of its “documentary realism” (perhaps most obviously, its closing scene in a classroom, as well as the powerful shot of the gates closing, which occurs just before the end)–working, like the subsequent films of the Iranian new wave, with nonprofessionals in relatively impoverished locations — must have been staged as well as scripted, created rather than simply found, conjuring up a potent blend of actuality and fiction that makes the two register as coterminous rather than as dialectical. (Much more dialectical, on the other hand, is the relation between the film’s two alternating narrators — an unidentified male voice, most likely Golestan’s, describing leprosy factually and relatively dispassionately, albeit with clear humanist assumptions, and Farrokhzad reciting her own poetry and passages from the Old Testament in a beautiful, dirgelike tone, halfway between multi-denominational prayer and blues lament.)

This kind of mixture is found equally throughout Kiarostami’s work, and raises comparable issues about the director’s manipulation of and control over his cast members. Yet without broaching the difficult question of authors’ intentions, it might also be maintained that the films of both Farrokhzad and Kiarostami propose inquiries into the ethics of middle-class artists filming poor people and are not simply or exclusively demonstrations of this practice. In Kiarostami’s case, it is often more obviously a critique of the filmmaker’s own distance and detachment from his subjects, but in Farrokhzad’s case, where the sense of personal commitment clearly runs deeper, the implication of an artist being unworthy of her subject is never entirely absent.

The most obvious parallel to The House is Black in Kiarostami’s career is his recent documentary feature ABC Africa (2001) about orphans of AIDS victims in Uganda — a film which goes even further than Farrokhzad in emphasizing the everyday joy of children at play in the midst of their apparent devastation, preferring to show us the victims’ pleasure over their suffering without in any way minimizing the gravity of their situation. (9) But it’s no less important to note that one of Farrokhzad’s poems is recited in toto during the most important sequence of Kiarostami’s most ambitious feature to date, whose title is the same as the poem’s, The Wind Will Carry Us (2000).

The importance of Farrokhzad in Iranian life and culture — where even today, and in spite of the continuing scandal that she embodies and represents, she’s commonly and affectionately referred to by her first name   — points to the special status of poetry in Iran, which might even be said to compete with Islam. The House is Black is to my mind one of the very few successful fusions of literary poetry with film poetry — a blend that commonly invites the worst forms of self-consciousness and pretentiousness — and arguably this linkage of cinema with literature is a fundamental trait underlying much of the Iranian new wave.

I hasten to add that “film poetry” is one of the most imprecise terms in film aesthetics, whether it’s used to describe Alexander Dovzhenko or Jacques Tati, so a few precisions are in order about why I’m using this term here. Much of what I have in mind is the suspension — or extension — of what we usually mean by “narrative” or “story” so that a certain kind of descriptive presence supersedes any conventional notion of an event. After a leper is seen walking outside beside a wall, pacing back and forth, intermittently hitting the wall lightly with his fingers, we hear Forugh very faintly offscreen reciting the days of the week over this image, the rhythm of her voice sounding a kind of duet with the man’s repeated gesture. Two notions of time are being superimposed here so that they become impossible to separate: an event lasting a few seconds and a duration stretching over days (and, by implication, weeks, months, and years).

Similarly, in the film’s penultimate sequence, while a one-legged man limps on crutches between two rows of trees towards the camera, we hear Forugh’s voice evoke a cluster of other images, some of them with very different time frames, over this single movement: “Alas, for the day is fading,/the evening shadows are stretching./Our being, like a cage full of birds,/is filled with moans of captivity./And none among us knows how long/he will last./The harvest season passed,/the summer season came to an end,/and we did not find deliverance./Like doves we cry for justice…/and there is none./We wait for light/and darkness reigns.” Again there is a kind of duet, ending this time in a kind of rhyme effect as her last two lines give way to the loud, clumping sound of the man’s footsteps in the foreground as his dark body directly approaches the camera, dramatically blotting out everything else.

Although the film is mainly framed by two scenes in a classroom, the second of these is briefly interrupted by what can only be called a poetic intrusion — a shot I’ve already mentioned that is unrelated in narrative terms but enormously powerful in descriptive terms: a crowd of lepers is suddenly seen outdoors, approaching the camera, only to be blocked from us when a gate abruptly closes on them, bearing the words “leper colony” (or more precisely “leper house,” tied more directly to the film’s title). In narrative terms, this shot has no relation to what precedes and follows it apart from the most obvious thematic connection: lepers. Yet it functions almost exactly like a line in a poem –parenthetically yet dramatically introducing the brutality of our social definition of lepers and how it shuts them away from us — before returning us to the classroom.

That Farrokhzad was the first woman in Persian literature to write about her sexual desire, and that her own volatile and crisis-ridden life (including her sex life) was as central to her legend as her poetry, helps to explain her potency as a political figure who was reviled in the press as a whore and placed outside most official literary canons while still being worshipped as both a goddess and a martyr. Despite her enormous differences (above all, in gender and sexual orientation) from Pier Paolo Pasolini, it probably wouldn’t be too outlandish to see her as a somewhat comparable figure in staging heroic and dangerous shotgun marriages between eros and religion, poetry and politics, poverty and privilege — and a figure whose violent death has been the focus of comparable mythic speculations. She and her film remain crucial reference points because of their enormous value as limit cases, as well as artistic models. And as far as I’m concerned, if the Iranian New Wave begins with The House is Black, there’s no imagining where it can still lead us.

Notes

1. See “Sohrab Shahid Saless: A Cinema of Exile” by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, edited by Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker, London: National Film Theatre, 1999, pp. 135-144.

2. See “Confessions of a Sin-ephile: Close-Up” by Godfrey Cheshire, in Cinema Scope (Toronto), Winter 2000, issue 2, 3-8.

3. “Makhmalbaf Film House” by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, translated by Babak Mozaffari, in The Day I Became a Woman (bilingual edition of screenplay), Tehran: Rowzaneh Kar, 2000, 5.

4. Michael C. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press/Mage Publishers, 1987, 43.

5. A still better version — with French subtitles, taken mainly from the print shown in Oberhausen, and authorized by producer Ebrahim Golestan — was issued on DVD along with A Fire as part of the [then] biannual French magazine Cinéma (#07, printemps 2004) edited by Bernard Eisenschitz and published by Editions Léo Scheer. (This is the source of the frame reproductions used here with this essay.)

6. See also “Ebrahim Golestan: Treasure of Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema” by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Rouge #11, 2007 (www.rouge.com.au/11/golestan.html).(2009)

7. Michael C Hillmann, op. cit., 42-43.

8. Karim Emami, “Recollections and Afterthoughts” (undated lecture delivered in Austin, Texas), quoted on Forugh Farrokhzad website, www.forughfarrokhzad.org (unfortunately no longer available at this address).

9. See also Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 37-40, 83-84, 119-123.

– Cinéma/06 (France), automne 2003; developed from a lecture delivered on April 1, 2001 at the conference “Women and Iranian Cinema,” held at the University of Virginia and organized by Richard Herskowitz and Farzaneh Milani; also published as essay in booklet accompanying DVD issued by Facets Video (U.S.) in 2005; see also www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=8338.

Kid Stuff: A Glimpse at Movie Wonder

Written in January 2006 for 1000 Films To Change Your Life, an anthology edited by Simon Cropper for Time Out. — J.R.

Wonder is closer to being a feeling than a thought, and one that we associate both with children and with grown-ups recapturing some of the open-mouthed awe and innocence that they had as children. Many of us experienced some of this as kids watching the classic Disney cartoon features or certain live-action fantasy adventures like King Kong (1933) or Thief of Bagdad (1940).

Other generations, for that matter, might recall feeling a comparable emotion before the vast spaces of the 1916 Intolerance (whose gigantic Babylon set would eventually be redressed for Kong’s Skull Island) or the 1924 Thief of Bagdad or the 2005 King Kong —- or even in that hokey opening line, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” Or what about the hushed sense of reverence that we bring to the virgin wilderness of The Big Sky (1952), whose very title expresses our feeling of astonishment? It’s a primal emotion, particularly as it relates to cinema in the old-fashioned sense: 35-millimeter projection in palatial theaters, the screen invariably much larger than us (‘Bigger Than Life,’ as the title of a Nicholas Ray melodrama in CinemaScope has it). Of course, with the advent of digital video, smaller screens, home viewing, and a more detailed interest on the part of the public in understanding how various visual effects are achieved, some of this innocence and involvement has been altered. But our primal sense of wonder tied to the cinematic experience remains, in spite of everything, and without it I’m not even sure if we’d still be watching nearly as much.

If we consider the role played by our imaginations in ‘completing’ a film’s image and sound —- filling in the dark spaces that appear between the film frames without ever consciously seeing them; and doing pretty much the same thing with offscreen spaces, such as responding creatively to suggestive soundtracks by filling in additional images of our own —- this shouldn’t be at all surprising. ‘I want to give the audience a hint of a scene,’ Orson Welles said early in his career. ‘No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you.’ In fact, he was referring explicitly to theatre and implicitly to radio when he said this in 1938, not to cinema at all. But the sense of wonder he brought to movies soon afterwards in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons had a lot to do with adapting some of the discoveries he’d already made about other dramatic forms to express a certain wonderment about America in the late 19th century. One might even add to this that the medium for expressing this wonderment is secondary; it’s the feeling itself that remains primary —- the experience of remaining an infant basking in the warmth and expanse of a maternal screen and wondering where all this bounty comes from.

The recent military term ‘shock and awe’ could be viewed as a kind of perversion of cinematic wonder, sought after and applied with the aggressive assault of a blunt instrument. There’s always been this brutal side to movies as well, though I think it would be lamentable to associate this kind of coercion too closely with wonder. The best kinds of wonder in movies are the ones that invite and encourage idle speculation rather than those that are designed to settle disputes, stop conversations cold, or simply intimidate. Wonder is a kind of question mark from which fear is not so much abolished as held in an exquisitely sustained abeyance, allowing the mind in a relaxed state to fill in the gaps with all sorts of possibilities. Terrifying and brutalizing the spectator, by contrast, has zip to do with soliciting the gentler responses of wonder.

Charles Laughton’s sublime The Night of the Hunter (1955), charting the nightmarish pursuit of two children by an insane and deadly preacher (Robert Mitchum) across an Expressionist version of rural Depression America, certainly has its chilling moments. Yet these are mainly experienced as secondary to the sense of poetic wonder felt by these children about the world they’re inhabiting and sometimes rushing through. There’s a sinister edge to the preacher’s nocturnal silhouette on horseback as seen by the boy protagonist from a distant hayloft while he hears the villain faintly singing ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’. Yet it’s the boy’s relatively calm sense of wonder about this threat —- ‘Don’t he never sleep?’ —-that leaves the most profound impression. If fear were all he was experiencing, we wouldn’t wind up with any sense of wonder at all.

Another emotion that needs to be sharply distinguished from wonder is curiosity — especially the kind that killed the cat and that leads us remorselessly through whodunits. Let’s call curiosity in this case a very limited kind of wonder, restricted mainly to details of plot and character that fill out an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Wonder is more spiritual and all encompassing than that, and therefore less geared as a rule to straight-ahead storytelling. As gifted a storyteller as Steven Spielberg is, the moment in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) when we arrive at the massive landing of the huge alien spaceship is basically a stretched-out moment when the story stops and the spectacle takes over. I’m reminded of the term used by the American film theorist Tom Gunning, “the cinema of attractions,” that links early movies to carnival sideshows rather than serial cliffhangers. Both are of course essential aspects of our experiences of movies, but the elements that provoke our wonder are more apt to exist as spectacle than as plot or action: the landscapes in an Anthony Mann western like The Naked Spur (1953) or Man of the West (1958) or the fairy-tale waterfall in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954).

And when we turn to independent cinema and art cinema, a sense that people and life are ultimately unknowable — or at least unfathomable — lies behind the sense of wonder about the world and the human condition conveyed in very different ways by Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes, Carl Dreyer, and Atom Egoyan (to restrict my list to just the first five letters of the alphabet).

The late science fiction writer Damon Knight titled his excellent collection of science fiction criticism In Search of Wonder, and it’s certainly true that it’s a sense of quiet amazement and bemusement that draws us to both SF and fantasy, either on the page or on the screen. It’s the main thing we bring away from outer-space yarns as disparate as Forbidden Planet (1956) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and stories about androids and future cityscapes as different from one another as Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). On the other hand, wonder isn’t at all what we bring away from SF satires like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), or Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997), because sarcasm and wonder rarely make compatible bedfellows.

The sense of immensity and monumentality conveyed in SF films such as  Things to Come (1936) isn’t necessarily just a function of the way we feel about the future. There’s another string of films conveying a similar sense of bottomless mystery about the historical past, ranging from Howard Hawks’ 1955 bombastic and campy  but awestruck spectacular Land of the Pharoahs to Kubrick’s more muted and melancholy 1975 Barry Lyndon (a kind of variant of Welles’s aforementioned Ambersons) —- or from the exquisite Hong Kong biopic Actress (1992), (with Maggie Cheung as Ruan Ling-yu, the Chinese Garbo, working in the Shanghai film industry of the 30s), to Richard Linklater’s underrated saga about a Texas family of 1920s bank robbers, The Newton Boys (1998).

Some filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and Andrei Tarkovsky take us on guided tours of metaphysical worlds, mysterious and uncharted labyrinths of the mind. I’d call them quintessential directors of wonder, above all because their appeal remains sensual and emotional rather than intellectual while plumbing the depths of our inner lives, the kinds of secrets and hidden desires we sometimes keep even from ourselves. If you misread Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad (1960) or Resnais and David Mercer’s Providence (1977) as intellectual or cerebral puzzles, you aren’t likely to catch their poetic handling of nocturnal moods and the imaginative, dreamlike drifts that course through both of them like uncanny, subterranean tunnels.

There’s another sense of the uncanny found in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), both deceptively derived from SF novels of ideas. I would argue that both films have relatively little to do with these ideas — and quite a lot to do with the gut feelings and intuitions of someone experiencing both spiritual desolation and a feeling of awe about the universe he inhabits.

Apart from the church hymn sung by Mitchum, I haven’t yet said anything about music. Yet this clearly plays a substantial role in establishing our gaping sense of wonder in many of the above examples — the “Blue Danube Waltz” of Strauss in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the eerie organ music resembling a spooky silent film accompaniment in Last Year at Marienbad; the romantically lush, Hollywoodish Miklos Rosza score in Providence and the ecstatic burst of the choral climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the final sequence of Stalker.

Which makes it only logical that some of the ultimate expressions of amazement in movies come to us courtesy of actual musicals. Consider the awe-inspiring geometric shapes of chorus girls in Busby Berkeley production numbers, the astonishingly gaudy spectacle of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), or even something as relatively modest as Donald O’Connor dancing wildly around a park pavilion in roller skates in I Love Melvin the same year. For the truth is we can only gape at such soulful visions of glitz, grace, and synchronicity, making us gullible kids all over again.

JR’s Score of Movie Wonders

Tih Minh (1918). My favorite of the wonderful Louis Feuillade serials of the teens —- all of which feature masked criminals, intricate schemes and subterfuges, resourceful servants, dopey lounge lizards, lovely natural locations (such as the Paris settings in Les Vampires or the Côte d’Azur settings here), jaw dropping stunts, and a perpetual sense of fantasy rubbing shoulders with documentary actuality.

Foolish Wives (1922). Erich von Stroheim had never even been to Monte Carlo when he decided to rebuild it on the Pacific Coast in all its glory and play a master Russian swindler and seducer inside this gargantuan set. He robs unsuspecting American tourists blind, especially the ladies in his title, and the so-called Man You Love to Hate can’t help but command our guarded respect for doing so.

Blonde Crazy (1931). Cut to some low-grade urban hijinks in the thick of the Depression, when James Cagney and Joan Blondell perform their own sassy scams with and against one another and sometimes get burned by still others. We can only admire the energy of everyone’s con-artistry.

Ivan (1932). Meanwhile, over in Russia, they’re idealistically building huge dams like the one in Alexander Dovzhenko’s first talkie. But the fact that we never even see this one completed is part of the goofy conceit of this poetic fable, which shows more affection for a crusty old peasant who refuses to move a muscle than for all the laborers breaking their backs.

Sylvia Scarlett (1935). A highly subversive bending of both gender and genre that tanked at the box office because audiences didn’t know what to make of it. Katherine Hepburn disguises herself as a boy, and when Cary Grant (in a rare part exposing his Cockney origins) gets the hots for him (or is it her?), we aren’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Director George Cukor keeps everybody on his or her toes, including us.

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (1944-46). Sergei Eisenstein’s underrated masterwork is at once a period saga, the greatest Flash Gordon movie ever made, a devastating portrait of Josef Stalin’s paranoia, a critical self-portrait with psychoanalytical overtones, and a Gothic nightmare of angularity. And to make matters worse (or better), the whole thing seems to be experienced through the eyes of a ten-year-old.

The Three Caballeros (1945). The Disney studio at its most avant-garde mixes South American live-action and giddy animation with such abandon, and in so many riotous colors that explode into so many alternate and abstract counter-realities, that Busby Berkeley must have been eating his heart out. Donald Duck ogles senoritas and the universe expands.

Park Row (1952). The great Samuel Fuller couldn’t convince Fox to bankroll his action-packed hymn to the birth of New York yellow journalism —- Darryl F. Zanuck suggested he do it as a musical —- so he sank his own money into this vest-pocket Citizen Kane, filmed on a cozy period set, and lost every penny. Hyperbolically sincere and reverent about things like the invention of linotype and a statue of Benjamin Franklin (against which Gene Evans’ editor-hero bashes out a villain’s brains).

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953). The weird imaginings of children’s author Dr. Seuss expanded into a Surrealist nightmare with musical numbers about a diabolical piano teacher (Hans Conreid) who imports 500 hapless kids to his castle to play his favorite exercise on a continuous keyboard. Perhaps I found this tacky monstrosity unforgettable at the age of ten because I was the same age as the hero (Tommy Rettig).

Ordet (1955). What better illustration of stupefied wonder than a genuine miracle? Reportedly Carl Dreyer wasn’t even religious, yet he made this heavy, rural chamber piece about family discord and faith into a challenging confrontation for believers and nonbelievers alike.

The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1959). Fritz Lang’s return to European filmmaking after a long sojourn in the U.S. was a big-budget remake of a fantasy that he’d originally cowritten with his wife Thea von Harbou in the early 20s. This opulent fairy tale in colour was popular with the public, at least in Europe, but its deliberate childlike innocence alienated most critics, who should have known better.

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964). The first feature of the visionary Armenian-born Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov to reach the west, adapted from a Ukrainian novel and set in the Carpathian Mountains. This delirious merging of myth, folklore, history, poetry, ethnography, dance, and ritual begins with the cutting down of a majestic tree in a forest, which is partially seen from the viewpoint of the toppling tree.

Playtime (1967). To realize his greatest film, Jacques Tati built an entire city on the outskirts of Paris and turned his own most famous character, Monsieur Hulot, into one of many extras, insisting democratically that ‘the comic effect belongs to everyone’. Perhaps the cinema’s greatest illustration of community triumphing over architecture.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). An opening title of this pie-eyed epic about a mad Conquistador (Klaus Kinski) in search of El Dorado through awesome natural landscapes claims that this has some historical basis, but filmmaker Werner Herzog freely admitted that he made the whole thing up — and put together a mad expedition of his own in order to film it. One doubts that Apocalypse Now (1979) would ever have been conceived without its shining example.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). Jacques Rivette’s deliciously fusing of Lewis Carroll with Vincente Minnelli (as updated by Jean Rouch) into an uncanny horror comedy. It was cowritten by the four lead actress —- Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier as the goofy title heroines in Paris, Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier as the phantom ladies in an old dark house in the suburbs that the other two periodically visit—- in collaboration with the Argentinian magical realist Eduardo de Gregorio, and over its 193 minutes, wonders never cease.

Perceval le gallois (1979). Eric Rohmer’s overlooked musical, based on Chretien de Troyes’ 12th-century epic poem, and filmed on a deliberately artificial-looking soundstage, with perspectives as flat as medieval tapestries, preserves all the sweet innocence of the original and adds bright colors.

Where is the Friend’s House? (1987). The first masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami to have a sizable commercial success in Iran, named after a locally famous poem by Sohrab Sepehry, is a miniature epic about a rural schoolboy trying to return a classmate’s notebook in a neighboring village and getting lost. Kiarostami makes it a philosophical parable about the adventures and ethical challenges of childhood itself.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Terence Davies’ impressionistic memories of his Liverpool childhood has been faulted for its emphasis on domestic brutality, family rituals such as funerals and weddings, and singing in pubs and parties. But as a lapsed Catholic, Davies endows all these everyday activities with the passion and intensity of luminous dreams.

Dead Man (1995). Jim Jarmusch reimagines the black and white Western the way a Native American during the 19th century might have viewed it — as a genocidal nightmare about the arrival of capitalism. He also creates a warm friendship between a dying accountant from Cleveland named William Blake (Johnny Depp) and a Native American outcast, Half Blood and half Blackfoot, named Nobody (Gary Farmer), and many visionary experiences in the American northwest.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005). In Hayao Miyazaki’s inspired, animated adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’ novel, people and objects undergo constant transformations according to their emotional and existential states of being. Furthermore, wisdom doesn’t so much succeed callowness as peacefully coexist with it. So the teenage heroine may get turned into a 90-year-old housekeeper for a youthful magician in a walking castle, but whenever she feels romantic stirrings for him, she becomes a teenager again —- a wonderful conceit.

The Dance of PLAYTIME

My liner notes for the Criterion DVD of the restored, 65 mm version of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, written in 2006. This also appears on Criterion’s web site, but, following the cue of an anonymous commentator there, I’ve corrected a confusing error that mysteriously appeared only in this online version of the essay. (It isn’t in the essay that’s included with the DVD.) — J.R.

I suppose it could be argued that I saw Playtime for the first time in ideal circumstances — as an American tourist in Paris. Yet to argue this would mean overlooking the film’s suggestion that, like it or not, we’re all tourists nowadays — and all Americans in some fashion as well.

It’s a brash hypothesis, arguably somewhat middle-class and rooted in the assumptions of the 1960s — but then again, a great deal of what’s known today as “the sixties” can be traced back to the vision and activity of middle-class Americans. I was certainly enough of a middle-class American tourist to find myself bemused as well as amused by this account of a day spent in a mainly studio-built Paris — and sufficiently intrigued by the seeming absence of focal points during several busy stretches to return to the movie a couple of times. This was during the summer of 1968. I’d arrived in Paris in June, at the tail end of the famous May events, the very day that the police took back the Odéon from the students. I caught the movie in 35mm, during what must have been its second or third run, a good half year after it had opened in 65mm — the format in which it was shot, which Jacques Tati suggested was the shape of the modern world — with a running time of 152 minutes. Under pressure from exhibitors, and to avoid an intermission, Tati had trimmed about fifteen minutes between the December premiere and mid-February, and with rare exceptions, most of the versions seen ever since have been about this length, in 35mm and monaural. Sadly, not all of the missing footage — most of it reportedly devoted to further variations of existing gags — has been recovered, but everything else was enhanced in a 2002 65mm restoration of the original sound and image. So we can finally see and hear the film as Tati conceived it.

When I flew back to New York, out of Orly, at the end of the summer, I was delighted to hear Playtime’s theme music employed as Muzak on my departing plane. Like the use of the same theme as the movie’s exit music, accompanying my departure from the theater each time, this implied a continuity between the movie and the world that I’ve been discovering and rediscovering ever since. In this respect, Playtime has an unexpected affinity with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a film that, incidentally, Tati adored and that also originally clocked in at about 155 minutes) — in its wide-screen project to reeducate us by disrupting some of our basic habits in organizing visual and spatial data. And its only counterpart in Tati’s own career would be his deceptively modest and boldly experimental last feature, Parade (1973), which carried the radical principle of equating spectators with performers even further, gently insisting that, as Tati liked to put it, “the comic effect belongs to everyone.”

A year after my first encounter with Playtime, I moved from Manhattan to Paris, and in retrospect I think I can say that the film played a significant role in my decision. It was less a matter of my Francophilia than a dawning discovery about how to live in cities that this masterpiece had helped me to formulate. And, not surprisingly, I found I could apply this lesson more readily to Paris, with its outdoor café chairs that function as orchestra seating and the theatrical lighting of its streets at night. By contrast, I felt that in response to Manhattan’s sensory overload I was starting to feel detached from and deadened to the world around me whenever I left my one-room apartment. Playtime proposed a particularly euphoric form of re-engagement with public space, suggesting ways of looking and finding connections, comic and otherwise, between supposedly disconnected street details — not to mention connections between those details and myself.

A few years after my move, I landed an interview with Tati in his suburban office, in La Garenne-Colombes, and began our conversation by telling him how Playtime had changed my relation to cities. (Around me, in his small office, I could see a few enduring elements from the film — most notably, one of the antiseptic black chairs, which, unlike its movie equivalents, didn’t go whoosh when I sat in it.) I’m sure that my declaration, along with my subsequent friendship with Marie-France Siegler, Tati’s main assistant — who can be seen seated on the bus next to the young tourist, Barbara, in Playtime’s final sequence — must have played some role in my getting hired as his “script consultant” a couple of months later.

It was a weekday job that basically consisted of being his audience for a never-filmed film project called Confusion — ultimately lasting, if memory serves, less than a couple of weeks, until Tati became ill. He had recently been bankrupted by the heavy losses of Playtime, so it was generous of him to be paying me any salary at all. This was during the period when Playtime was first showing in the United States, in various cuts over which he had no control, and there were times during our sessions together, often in the late afternoon, when he sank into gloom. I remember one such time when he sought to cheer himself up by looking through his scrapbooks devoted to the Playtime sets. He also once imagined killing off his famous persona, Monsieur Hulot, in the opening moments of Confusion, a gesture that for him would have been liberating. The character was his meal ticket — which is why Tati reluctantly made him more prominent again in Trafic (1971), after deliberately minimizing and even downgrading him in Playtime with a profusion of ersatz Hulots — but he interfered with Tati’s democratic notion of comedy, which did away with stars. In Playtime, he liked to say, the only real star was his set — and maybe that was expensive, “but not any more than Sophia Loren.”

Playtime is a movie that unfolds entirely in a public space defined by that set. Even the strange sequence showing us adjacent living rooms — which wasn’t part of any of the versions I saw until Tati reedited a final version that satisfied him, shortly before his death, in 1982 — is shot exclusively from the street; and the only time we see Barbara in her hotel room is when a maid delivers her evening dress. So there’s something inappropriate and contrary to Tati’s design for the film about its being viewed in private spaces, especially on any screen smaller than oneself. Playtime assumes a precise contiguity and continuity with the public space of a theater, where we share its experience with others — just as the customers and employees of the Royal Garden eventually manage to carve out a common social investment in an establishment that’s gradually disintegrating around them. Even if we sometimes wind up laughing at different gags, we’re all laughing to some degree at ourselves, and the sense of mutual recognition is crucial.

Mobile phones have sadly made the sense of public urban space as it exists in Playtime almost archaic, a kind of lost paradise. The utopian vision of shared space that informs the latter scenes — beginning in the new Royal Garden restaurant at night and continuing the next morning in a drugstore and on the streets of Paris — is made unthinkable by mobile phones, whose use can be said to constitute both a depletion and a form of denial of public space, especially because the people using them tend to ignore the other people in immediate physical proximity to them. Nevertheless, given his capacity to keep abreast of social changes, I have little doubt that Tati, if he were alive today, could and probably would construct wonderful gags involving the use of these phones. And if he were making Playtime now, I suspect he’d most likely be inventing gags for the first part that involved mobile phones, and then would have to find ways of destroying or disempowering them to make way for the second part. (It’s hardly accidental that his most brilliantly and elaborately developed gag involves the shattering of glass, another social barrier.)

The Royal Garden sequence, making up roughly half of the film, may be the most formidable example of mise en scène in the history of cinema. It is certainly the most Bruegel-like in its expansion of the principle — found in such populated landscape paintings as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and The Procession to Cavalry — that life and history unfold in a plethora of small, almost indiscernible details.

The crucial catalyst for our appreciation of this sequence is the music, played by two successive bands and then sung by an old-fashioned chanteuse, who’s eventually joined by the customers — an element that helps us to cope creatively with Tati’s overload of invention by furnishing a rhythmic base to work from. Thanks to this music, each set of visual options has a rhythmic pattern for one’s gaze to follow while scanning the screen’s busy surface of swarming detail, through which we can join Tati in charting our own choreographies, improvising our own organizations of emphasis and direction in relation to the director’s massive “head arrangement.” What other movie converts work into play so pleasurably by turning the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing?

Barthes & Film: 12 Suggestions

From Sight and Sound, Winter 1982/1983, and reprinted in my collection Placing Movies. It was initially commissioned by Peter Biskind for American Film, who decided not to run it and paid me a kill fee, so I sent it next to Penelope Houston, who accepted it without hesitation. Originally, this piece was designed to be run with my translation of a brief, early piece by Barthes (“Au Cinemascope,” originally published in Les Lettres Nouvelles, February 1954). To my frustration, after Sight and Sound secured the rights to run this piece, they wound up omitting it due to lack of space, but it has subsequently appeared online in at least two places: here and here (the latter on this site). – J.R.

One reason for looking at the late Roland Barthes’ writings about film is that we all tend to be much too specialized in the ways that we think about culture in general and movies in particular. Far from being a film specialist, Barthes could even be considered somewhat cinephobic (to coin a term), at least for a Frenchman. Speaking to Jacques Rivette and Michel Delahaye in 1963, he confessed, “I don’t go very often to the cinema, hardly once a week” — inadvertently revealing the French passion for movies that can infect even a relative nonbeliever.

Cinephobic? Perhaps. He certainly mistrusted the hypnotic spell exerted by cinema and the attendant problem, for an analyst, of having to reconcile this continuity of appeal with a discontinuity of what he called signs. Yet what he had to say about literature, theater, photography, and music (his first loves) may wind up telling us more about film than the entire output of many movie critics. And what Barthes had to say about cinema — both in general and in many specific cases — is often interesting enough in its own right.

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Movie Problems

“Resistance to the cinema . . . ” he wrote in the self-regarding Roland Barthes (1975), trying to get a fix on what he didn’t like about the medium. “Without remission, a continuum of images; the film. . .follows, like a garrulous ribbon: statutory impossibility of the fragment, of the haiku.” A lover of the fragment and the haiku, he possibly came closest to analyzing a film when he devoted an essay (”The Third Meaning”) to a few stills taken from Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE. He virtually began his last book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, with the admission that “I decided I liked photography in opposition to the cinema, from which I nontheless failed to separate it.”

Nor was this his only problem with movies. As he went on to say in Roland Barthes, “Constraints of representation (analogous to the obligatory rubrics of language) make it necessary to receive everything: of a man walking in the snow, even before he signifies, everything is given to me; in writing, on the contrary, I am not obliged to see how the hero wears his nails — but if it wants to, the Text describes, and with what force, Hölderlin’s filthy talons.” The trouble, in short, was that film — that “festival of affects,” as Barthes called it — offered the spectator too much, yet not enough.

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A Late Starter

Born in 1915, Barthes didn’t publish his first book, Writing Degree Zero, until he was thirty-seven. He suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis for much of his youth and published his first articles (1942–1944) in a magazine put out by the Sanitorium des Étudiants, where he was staying much of the time. I haven’t been able to track down the third of these pieces — a review of the first feature directed by Robert Bresson, LES ANGES DU PÉCHÉ.

Barthes apparently didn’t deal with film again until about 1954, when he started to write a series of magazine articles that eventually became grouped together under the heading “Mythologies.” This involved writing about all kinds of cultural activity, ranging from wrestling to striptease to tourist guides, in which films were allowed to play a significant part. In the course of developing this approach — initially with the aid of semiology, and later with the help of psychoanalysis — he constructed a critique of cinema that took shape in such essays as “The Third Meaning” (1970) and “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975).

In the late 1970s, not long before his death, Barthes agreed to play the novelist William Thackeray in his friend André Téchiné’s film THE BRONTË SISTERS. (He had earlier refused to play himself in Godard’s ALPHAVILLE in 1965.) And after that, he even contemplated writing a film script which Téchiné would direct, based on the life of Marcel Proust.

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Hair, Sweat, & Semiology

Contemporary resistance to semiology as a dry academic pursuit can’t be dealing with the spirited polemical and political use of it made by Barthes as a journalist over a quarter of a century ago, when he was defining and attacking current mythologies in the pages of Les Lettres Nouvelles. Semiology — a term and concept first formulated by linguist Ferdinand de Sanssure in the early years of this century, when he called for a “science that studies the life of signs within society” — was in fact brought to the attention of a wide public largely through Barthes’ efforts.

Inaugurating the chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, Barthes reminded his audience that:

Semiology, so far as I am concerned, started from a strictly emotional impulse. It seemed to me (around 1954) that a science of signs might stimulate social criticism, and that Sartre, Brecht, and Saussure could concur in the project. It was a question, in short, of understanding (or of describing) how a society produces stereotypes, i.e., triumphs of artifice, which it then consumes as innate meanings, i.e., triumphs of nature. Semiology (my semiology, at least) is generated by an intolerance of this mixture of bad faith and good conscience which characterizes the general morality, and which Brecht, in his attack upon it, called the Great Habit.

In “The Roman in Films” (1954), some of these stereotypes, as evidenced in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of JULIUS CAESAR, turn out to be fairly amusing. For instance, Barthes notices that all the male characters in the film sport fringes in order to demonstrate that they are Romans:

We therefore see here the mainstream of the Spectacle — the sign —operating in the open. The frontal lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome. And this certainty is permanent: the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate “questions of universal import,” without losing, thanks to this little flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the ocean and the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.

From this observation, Barthes goes on to trace two intriguing “subsigns” in the film: (1) “Portia and Calpurnia, woken at dead of night, have conspicuously uncombed hair,” and (2) “all the faces” in the film “sweat constantly,” a sign of “moral feeling.” (”To sweat is to think — which evidently rests on the postulate, appropriate to a nation of businessmen, that thought is a violent, cataclysmic operation, of which sweat is only the most benign symptom.” Hence, Caesar himself, “the object of the crime,” is the only man in the film who remains dry.)

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A Galaxy of Stars, A Plurality of Texts

On the subject of stars, Barthes had many intriguing things to say. Four months after his bout with JULIUS CAESAR, he was decrying the excessive use of movie stars in Sacha Guitry’s SI VERSAILLES M’ÉTAIT CONTÉ:

In the final analysis, the star system is not without a kind of chicanery: it consists of popularising History by Cinema, and of glorifying Cinema by History. It’s a form of barter judged useful by both powers: for instance, Georges Marchal passes a little of his erotic glory over to Louis XIV, and in return, Louis XIV surrenders a little of his monarchical glory to Georges Marchal.

Barthes went on to reproach Guitry for not taking a lesson from the costume styling of the Folies Bergère, where the forms of period dress are false but “superbly so, with a fine contempt for accuracy and a desire to give fancy dress an epic dimension.”

The same year, he praised Charlie Chaplin as a Brechtian artist, showing “the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him,” that is, “a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside Revolution” in MODERN TIMES . Twenty-five years later, in a regular column he was writing for Le Nouvel Observateur, he expressed his fascination with an image from LIMELIGHT— Chaplin applying makeup in front of a mirror — as “literally a metamorphosis, such as only mythology and entomology could speak about it.” And a few years before that, writing about himself in the third person in Roland Barthes, R. B. had this to say:

As a child, he was not so fond of Chaplin’s films; it was later that, without losing sight of the muddled and solacing ideology of the character, he found a kind of delight in this art at once so popular (in both senses) and so intricate; it was a composite art, looping together several tastes, several languages. Such artists provoke a complete kind of joy, for they afford the image of a culture that is at once differential and collective: plural. This image then functions as the third term, the subversive term of the opposition in which we are imprisoned: mass culture or high culture.

Writing poetically about the face of Greta Garbo — that mythic object par excellence — the same year, Barthes found that it represented a “fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of moral faces, when the clarity of the flesh as essence yields its place to a lyricism of Woman.” Comparing her face to the more individualized face of Audrey Hepburn, he concluded that, “As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.” The preceding translation is by Annette Lavers. When another Barthes translator, Richard Howard, published his own version of this essay in the 1960s, this formulation was updated by substituting Brigitte Bardot for Audrey Hepburn, leading to a more topical closing line: “Garbo’s face is an Idea, Bardot’s a Happening.”

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I Didn’t Know the Gun Was Coded

There’s another way of looking at Barthes and film, less poetic, that has been favored by certain academics. This involves seeing him as a great system builder, whose famous phrase by phrase textual analysis of a novella by Balzac called Sarrazine, a study known as S/Z,  breaks down “the realist text” into “five levels of connotation” or “codes.” From the methodology of analyzing prose narrative — which Barthes derived collectively from one of his seminars — certain film academics have tried to establish a more systematic approach in studying movies.

Without wishing to dismiss this sort of work, I can’t say I’ve found it as useful as Barthes’ more poetic and suggestive (if less systematic) writings. Maybe this is because I value his work more for its questions than its answers, and more for its art (and play) than its science (and work). In this respect, stylistically and iconoclastically, Barthes is closer to an American film critic like Manny Farber — above all, in the peculiarly cinematic flux, speed, and movement of his thought — than he is to fellow French semiologists like Raymond Bellour and Christian Metz.

One could also argue that the more “teachable” an analytic approach is, the easier it becomes to apply it mechanically — as, indeed, a generation of graduate students and professors has often tended to apply S/Z, without much thoughtfulness or insight.

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Art as Immobility

Ideology is, in effect, the imaginary of an epoch, the Cinema of a society. — “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater”

In 1959, when the French New Wave was just beginning to make itself felt, Barthes published a critique of Claude Chabrol’s first film, LE BEAU SERGE, which called it right-wing for imposing a static image of man. The same year, in Cahiers du Cinéma, Chabrol wrote, “There’s no such thing as a big theme and a little theme, because the smaller the theme is, the more one can give it a big treatment. The truth is, truth is all that matters.” The problem about this position for Barthes was that it led to political complacency. The offhand way one looked at someone or something, he wrote, could become “the basis for an act of sarcasm or one of tenderness, in short, a truth,” but the offhand way one arrived at a theme could be a falsehood. “What is terrible about the cinema,” he added, “is that it makes the monstrous viable; one could even say that currently our entire avant-garde lives on this contradiction: true signs, a false meaning.”

Summing up what he liked in Chabrol’s provincial melodrama as “micro-realism,” Barthes compared its “descriptive surface” — as in the gestures of children playing football in the street — with that of Flaubert. “The difference — which is considerable — is that Flaubert never wrote a story.” Flaubert had the insight to realize that the ultimate value of his realism was its insignificance, “that the world signified only that it signified nothing.”

Chabrol, on the contrary, his realism firmly in place, invests a pathos and a moral — that is to say, whether he wills it or not, an ideology. There are no innocent stories: for the past hundred years, Literature has been struggling with this calamity.

For Barthes, Chabrol’s “art of the fight” always assigned meanings to human misfortunes without examining the reasons:

The peasants drink. Why? Because they’re very poor and have nothing to do. Why this misery, this abandon? Here the investigation stops or becomes sublimated: they are undoubtedly stupid in essence, it’s their nature. One certainly isn’t asking for a course in political economy on the causes of rural poverty. But an artist should acknowledge his responsibility for the terms he assigns to his explanations: there is always a moment when art immobilises the world, and the later it comes, the better. I call art of the right this fascination with immobility, which makes one describe outcomes without ever asking about, I won’t say causes (art isn’t deterministic), but functions.

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Buñuel Versus Chabrol

Four years later, interviewed by Cahiers du Cinéma, Barthes pursued this notion further by evoking an art which challenged ideology by suspending meaning — a development in some ways of Brecht’s ideas about alienation and New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ideas about nonhumanistic art:

What I ask myself now is if there aren’t arts which are more or less reactionary by their very natures and techniques. I believe that of literature; I don’t believe a literature of the left would be possible. A problematic literature, yes — that is, a literature of suspended meaning: an art which provokes responses but doesn’t supply them. I think literature is that in the best of cases. As for cinema, I have the impression that, in this respect, it’s very close to literature, and because of its structure and material, it’s a lot better prepared than theatre is for a certain responsibility for forms that I’ve called the technique of suspended meaning. I think cinema has trouble supplying clear meanings and that, in its present state, this shouldn’t be done. The best films (for me) are those that suspend meaning the most…. an extremely difficult operation, requiring at once great technique and total intellectual honesty. For that means disentangling oneself from all the parasite meanings . . .

As a prime example of what he meant, Barthes cited Luis Buñuel’s recent THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL— a brilliant comic horror film about wealthy guests who inexplicably find themselves incapable of leaving a dinner party. Here, Barthes said, meaning was deliberately suspended without becoming nonsensical or absurd, in a film that jolted one “profoundly, beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrines.” In the vulgar but accurate sense, it was a film that “made one think.”

A few years later, Barthes’ notion of suspended meaning would develop still further into two major utopian, cultural models. In his beautiful Empire of Signs (1970), Barthes posited Japan and its culture as a system consisting of the “play” of “empty” signs — a concept that was crucially to influence Noël Burch when the latter wrote his history of Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer. And in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), this became the notion of a reader’s “bliss” as opposed to his or her “pleasure” in reading a text — the former a discontinuity of signs akin to the experience of sexual orgasm, when meaning again becomes suspended.

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This Way, Myth

Passing references to films in Barthes’ writings form a significant part of their overall color and texture. Describing the mythical properties of the new Citroën in 1955, he saw it “originating from the heaven of METROPOLIS.” The same year, stirred in part by Jacques Becker’s TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, he analyzed the “coolness” of gangsters in gangster films, marveling at the visual and nonverbal emphasis of their behavior, which insured that “each man regains the ideality of a world surrendered to a purely gestural vocabulary, a world which will no longer slow down under the fetters of language: gangsters and gods do not speak, they nod, and everything is fulfilled.” The next year, writing about the myth of exoticism revealed by a documentary about the Mysterious Orient, THE LOST CONTINENT, he noted the various means by which Buddhism was treated as “a higher form of Catholicism,” and dryly observed that, “Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two types of behavior, which are both mutilating: either to acknowledge it as a Punch and Judy show, or to defuse it as a pure reflection of the West.”

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Barthes and Films

Sometimes a particular film could goad Barthes into a major formulation. For many readers, the key passage in The Pleasure of the Text is a paragraph that links storytelling to the myth of Oedipus. This was written, Barthes notes at the end, after having seen F. W. Murnau’s CITY GIRL — a silent Hollywood film of 1929 that had just been shown on French television. In Roland Barthes, he delighted in the “textual treasury” of a Marx Brothers movie, A NIGHT AT THE OPERA — including “the liner cabin, the torn contract, the final chaos of the opera décors” — as emblems of “the logical subversions performed by the Text.” In the same book, he compared the process of his own writing to a theater rehearsal in a film by Jacques Rivette (who, in turn, has spoken often of Barthes’ influence on his own work), a rehearsal that is “verbose, infinite . . . shot through with other matters.”

Later, in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978), he would cite a scene from Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE — a curtain rising “the wrong way round — not on an intimate stage, but on the crowded theater” — as an emblematic image for the painful revelation of commonplace information by a lover’s informer about his or her beloved. And in a magazine column in 1979, he recorded his distress at an audience laughing at the very things in Eric Rohmer’s PERCEVAL (like the hero’s simplicity) that he loved the most, and his amusement at seeing “a very French film,” VINCENT, FRANÇOIS, PAUL . . . AND THE OTHERS, on French television (”The stereotype here is nationalised; it forms part of the décor, not part of the story”).

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Ugly Excess

In “The Third Meaning,” Barthes distinguishes three levels of meaning in the stills from IVAN THE TERRIBLE that he examines. The first is informational, on the level of communication, to be analyzed by semiology. The second is symbolic, on the level of signification, to be analyzed by “the sciences of the symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy).” The third, which Barthes calls the “obtuse meaning,” constitutes that surplus of meaning which can’t be exhausted by the other two.

This level of “excess” (as it has been called by film scholar Kristin Thompson) is the hardest to describe with any clarity, for most criticism, by equating a film with its story and interpretation, fails to acknowledge that this third meaning can exist on any level at all. Barthes finds it in his own subjective observations of such details as the ugliness of the character Euphrosinia, which “exceeds the anecdote, becomes a blunting of the meaning, its deflection”:

Imagine “following” not Euphrosinia’s machinations, nor even the character . . . nor even, further, the countenance of the Wicked Mother, but only, in this countenance, that grimace, that black veil, the heavy, ugly dullness of that skin. You will have another temporality . . . another film. A theme with neither variations nor development . . . the obtuse meaning can proceed only by appearing and disappearing.

On the Way Out

“Upon Leaving the Movie Theater” begins with Barthes’ description of how much he loves that curious activity, which he compares to coming out of hypnosis. Reflecting on the theater’s darkness and what it suggests to him — the “lack of ceremony” and “relaxation of postures” — he settles on the poetic image of the cocoon: “The film spectator might adopt the silk worm’s motto: inclusum labor illustrat: because I am shut in I work, and shine with all the intensity of my desire.”

Submerged in the darkness of the theatre (an anonymous, crowded darkness: how boring and frustrating all those so-called “private” screenings), we find the very source of the fascination exercised by film (any film). Consider, on the other hand, the opposite experience, the experience of television, which also shows films: nothing, no fascination; the darkness is dissolved, the anonymity repressed, the space is familiar, organised (by furniture and familiar objects), tamed. Eroticism — or, better yet, in order to stress its frivolity, its incompleteness, the eroticisation of space — is foreclosed. Television condemns us to the Family, whose household utensil it has become just as the hearth once was, flanked by its predictable communal stewing pot in times past.

Linking the ideological stereotype with the still image, Barthes wonders if we all don’t have “a dual relationship with platitudes: both narcissistic and maternal,” in psychoanalytic terms. And the only way to pry oneself from the mirror (i.e., the screen) is to break “the circle of duality/ . . . filmic fascination” and “loosen the glue’s grip, the hypnosis of verisimilitude” that is commonly referred to as suspension of disbelief. This can be done “by resorting to some (aural or visual) critical faculty of the spectator — isn’t that what is involved in the Brechtian distancing effect?”

Yet instead of going to movies “armed with the discourse of counterideology,” Barthes suggests another way. This involves letting himself become involved as if he had two bodies at once, one of them narcissistic, and the other one “perverse,” making a fetish not of the image but of what “exceeds” it: “The sound’s grain, the theatre, the obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit . . . ” The distance with respect to the image, he concludes, is finally what fascinates us — a distance which is not so much intellectual as “amorous” . . . And despite all the numerous quarrels with cinema that Barthes maintained over a quarter of a century of writing, one suspects that many of them, in the final analysis, were a lover’s quarrels, a lover’s discourse.

The author’s thanks to Stephen Heath,  Michael Silverman, and Bérénice Reynaud.

– Sight and Sound, Winter 1982/1983

A Little More on Truffaut

Yesterday, while reseeing François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 for the first time in years at the Gene Siskel Film Center, just before doing a Skype interview with Ray Bradbury in California along with Bradbury’s biographer, Sam Weller, I was struck for the first time how different Truffaut’s and Bradbury’s historical groundings were. Bradbury’s novel, first published in the early 50s, clearly reflected the Cold War, whereas Truffaut’s English-language film (his only one) of 1966, two years before his secret discovery via detectives that his father had been a Jewish dentist, seems largely informed by his childhood experience of the German occupation of France, which he would only depict directly 14 years later, in The Last Metro.

The most surprising aspect of this for me is that I never thought of it earlier — but it becomes especially clear during the scene in which Montag (Oskar Werner) and Clarisse (Julie Christie) in a cafe secretly spy through a window an informer pause before mailing his malicious report on a neighbor to the police/fire department (which in the world of Fahrenheit 451 is the same thing), meanwhile making comments on his behavior (some of which are reproduced below in the subtitles). It also seems evident in the number of old, early-40s books that one sees being burned in the many book-burning sequences, as well as in the dingy scenes set in old-fashioned basements, attics, etc. [7/11/10]