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2 or 3 Things I Know About Demy

Written for a retrospective catalog devoted to Jacques Demy, published by the San Sebastian International Film Festival, September 15-24. — J.R.

“Braque, Picasso, Klee, Miro, Matisse….C’est ça, la vie.” –- Maxence in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort

“Life is disappointing, isn’t it?”

–- Kyoko in Tokyo Story

1

I’ve never come across any critical discussion of common traits in the separate films of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, who lived together for three decades. Their oeuvres are in fact quite different and distinct from one another, but one striking characteristic they share as filmmakers is their preoccupation with indexing and cross-referencing their own works within their own films.

In chronicling and excerpting her own previous work, Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) brings this tendency to a climax, but her DVD containing Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (20000) and its sequel, Deux Ans Après, already formalizes and optimizes this tendency — which can be traced within and between some of her previous films — by allowing one to leap via one’s remote control from a character in the former documentary to the same person being filmed two years later (or vice versa). In a comparable spirit, Demy transplants Cécile/Lola (Anouk Aimée), the title heroine of his first feature (1960), from Nantes to Los Angeles in his fifth feature, Model Shop (1968), after having had her killed offscreen in Rochefort in his fourth feature, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). In Model Shop, he also has Lola explain that Michel (Jacques Harden), her long-lost boyfriend who returned for her at the end of Lola, eventually abandoned her to run off with Jacqueline Demestre (Jeanne Moreau), the heroine of Demy’s second feature, La Baie des anges (1962). Meanwhile, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), the young man in Nantes who fell in love with Lola before leaving for Johannesburg, re-emerged in Cherbourg in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), Demy’s third feature, as a successful diamond merchant to marry the pregnant and abandoned Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), the heroine of that film.

Bearing this common trait in mind, Varda’s wonderful documentary L’univers de Jacques Demy (1993) manages to cross-index her late husband’s work in many effective ways — cutting directly, for instance, from the father-daughter incest in Demy’s final feature, Trois places pour le 26 (1988) to the father-daughter incest in his earlier Peau d’Âne (1970), or cutting between a suspension bridge remembered in Demy’s childhood to several bridges of this kind in his films (e.g., the credits sequence of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, the backdrop of some dance performances in Trois places pour le 26) –- and also cross-references his work with her own (as well as with their separate and their interconnected lives) in many other ways.

Part of the point of stressing all these interconnections is the fact that Demy (like Varda), in spite of all the frustrations and economic imperatives that frequently interfered with his plans – and indeed, perhaps in part because of them — has to be seen as the author of an oeuvre, not simply as the author of individual films (and one, moreover, who assumed sole screenwriting credit on most of them). The iris shots that end both his first feature, Lola, and his last, Trois places pour le 26, is echoed fairly precisely by the iris shot that opens his second feature, La Baie des anges; and the blazing colors of the wallpaper in his third feature, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, are already anticipated in the blazing red wallpaper of the only set in his short film La Bel Indifférent (1957), made three years before Lola.

We know, of course, from the superb documentation of Jean-Pierre Berthomé’s Jacques Demy ou les racine du rêve (Nantes: L’Atalante, seconde édition, 1996), that Demy rarely (if ever) got the opportunity to make his films according to his original conceptions. In the case of La Bel Indifférent, he would have preferred to have adapted Cocteau’s La Voix humaine; Lola was conceived as a Michel Legrand musical, and he had to dispense with color and (for the most part) songs when his budgetary restrictions made this impossible; he wanted to cast Nino Castelnuovo, the male lead of Cherbourg, in Rochefort, until he had to rewrite the script and assign this part to Grover Dale; and comparable revisions of this kind can be found throughout his filmography. Yet at the same time, the autobiographical elements that got worked into his scripts and projects are equally constant, accounting for everything from the garage in Cherbourg (inspired by the one where his father worked in Nantes) to the aforementioned suspension bridges.

2

To broach the issue of how Jacques Demy is misunderstood and misperceived in English-speaking countries, one should go to the English-language version of Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (at wikipedia.com), where the second sentence of the entry on Demy comes close to summarizing many of the major misunderstandings and historical confusions:

Jacques Demy (5 June 1931 – 27 October 1990) was one of the most approachable filmmakers to appear in the wake of the French New Wave. Uninterested in the formal experimentation of Alain Resnais, or the political agitation of Jean-Luc Godard, Demy instead created a self-contained fantasy world closer to that of François Truffaut, drawing on musicals, fairytales and the golden age of Hollywood.

At the beginning of the respective careers of Demy, Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut, one might counter that certain signs of “political agitation” came from Resnais as well as Godard (in Le Petit Soldat) — a trait especially apparent in Resnais’ first major short film, Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), an essay about African sculpture made in collaboration with writer Chris Marker and cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, an essay film whose attacks on racism and colonialist appropriation in its final reel led to the film being banned for almost half a century. Moreover, all four of these directors, along with Jacques Rivette, clearly had some interest in formal experimentation, and in the case of Demy, this interest had a great deal to do with confronting “musicals, fairytales” and “the golden age of Hollywood” with the real world, including such real cities as Cherbourg, Los Angeles, Monte Carlo, Nantes, and Rochefort — a confrontation, moreover, that had (and still has) many political ramifications.

So one way of perpetuating the historical misunderstandings and confusions found in these two sentences would be to assume, as this Wikipedia entry does, that “formal experimentation” and “political agitation” are necessarily alternative paths to take in filmmaking rather than, at least in certain cases, as two manifestations of the same impulse, and that the creation of “a self-contained fantasy world” that is misleadingly attributed here to both Truffaut and Demy represents a third path. Yet the moment one starts to consider what could be meant by “self-contained fantasy world[s]” in the early features of Demy and Truffaut, one would presumably also have to include such themes as parental neglect (Les 400 Coups), World War I (Jules et Jim and La Chambre Verte), the plight of a single mother (Lola), the French war in Algeria (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), the U.S. war in Vietnam (Model Shop), and a shipyard labor strike (Une Chambre en ville) as parts of the presumed “unreality” of these fantasies — along with the unorthodox and unstable genre mixes of, say, Tirez sur la pianiste and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.

Most musicals shift back and forth between story (spoken dialogue) and song-and-dance numbers — sometimes creating queasy transitions just before or after these shifts, when we’re uncertain where we are stylistically. But Les Demoiselles de Rochefort often daringly places story and musical numbers on the screen simultaneously, mixing them in various ways and in different proportions, which wittingly or unwittingly produces a certain malaise, or at least a certain amount of disquiet or discomfort, along with some exhilaration. (Two freakish American musicals of the 1930s, Love Me Tonight and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, display a related metaphysical impulse to perceive the musical form as a continuous state of delirious being rather than a traditional story with musical eruptions, with comparably unstable results.) One of the stars may be simply walking down the street, for example, while many or all of the pedestrians around her are dancing, and she can be seen slipping momentarily in and out of their choreography. The feeling of uncertainty or instability arising from this mixture produces powerful and deeply felt yet conflicted emotions — exuberance combined with confusion or a sense of absurdity, a kind of transport underlined or at least threatened by an almost constant sense of loss, yearning, and even tragedy. All of which makes it explicable why both Rochefort and the 30s musicals just cited failed at the box office in the U.S., and why Trois places — which contains similar moments of uneasy transition in relation to its choreography — has never received a commercial run there. (By way of contrast, the commercial success of Cherbourg in America can probably be explained in part by the continuous use of song and the absence of choreography, both of which result in an avoidance of the kind of instability I’ve been describing.)

3

I suspect that the problems being broached here are ultimately philosophical ones — specifically, the empiricism of Anglo-American culture trying to make sense of some of the Cartesian underpinnings of French culture. For me, one way of expressing the philosophical paradoxes of Demy’s films would be to say, “ I think, therefore I am, and dreaming is a part of thought, therefore a part of life and existence; ergo, I dream, therefore I exist.” Or, more simply, “I dream, therefore I live.” Consequently, the impressions of both artificiality and of actuality in Demy’s work can be highly deceptive: the use of “natural” locations that have been freshly repainted (as in Cherbourg and Rochefort), the supposed simplicities of fairy tales and “innocent” Hollywood genres complicated by such things as incest (in Peau d’Âne and Trois Places pour le 26) and an ax murder (in Rochefort). Serge Daney once aptly described Une chambre en ville as Bizet’s Carmen revisited by Visconti, and it is important to bear in mind that operatic and melodramatic modes are as pertinent to Demy’s art as cinematic ones. (Significantly, he often recalled that his formative filmgoing experience as a child was Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.)

A somewhat different spin on this position can be found in a famous statement of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “In dreams begin responsibilities.” And what responsibilities are these, in the case of Demy? Among others, formal and political ones. The formal responsibilities include his uses of “musicals, fairytales and the golden age of Hollywood,” along with operas and melodramas, and the political responsibilities include his considerations of the “real,” the world of the everyday as it brushes part or collides with these various modes of fiction and artifice.

For Pauline Kael, writing about Model Shop (in The New Yorker, February 22, 1969), Demy’s first film in English, about Los Angeles, commits the fatal flaw of treating its setting and characters realistically after he excelled as a master of movie-based fantasy in Lola, Les Baie des Anges, and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and, according to Kael, “misunderstood” the conventions of Hollywood musicals in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. But I believe it’s a serious error to assume that any of Demy’s features can be classified quite so simply or unambiguously, which can only be done by overlooking the complex mixtures that inform his work at virtually every moment. Even the forays in his work that appear to come closest to “pure” actuality or artifice, such as the Los Angeles of Model Shop or the fairy-tale trappings of Peau d’Âne, are contradictory portraits, especially if one considers all the coincidental and chance elements of the former and the conscious anachronisms (such as the hash pipe and the helicopter) in the latter.

By comparing Demy with three other filmmakers —Yasujiro Ozu, Frank Tashlin, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of them quite dissimilar to one another — I would like to suggest that what we generally mean by such terms as “fantasy” and “reality” are invariably grounded in alternative sets of film conventions that need to be defined as such. While Ozu, for instance, is commonly regarded as a “realistic” chronicler of everyday life in Japan, the critic Shigehiko Hasumi has adroitly demonstrated how even the weather in most Ozu films, all of them set in Japan, is the sunny weather of southern California –- as perceived by Ozu through his career -long absorption in and fascination with Hollywood films -– rather than the rainier weather of Japan. Similarly, one could argue that even the more “realistic” employments of French locations and social mores in Demy’s first four features are informed and inflected by various film traditions (such as those deriving from Bresson, Cocteau, Ophüls, and various musicals from Hollywood and elsewhere), so that Hollywood and other forms of commercial filmmaking serve to shape as well as filter many of the “realistic” details.

A famous line uttered in Ozu’s Tokyo Story – “Life is disappointing, isn’t it?” -– could serve as a virtual motto to Lola and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and it is worth adding that Demy is every bit as preoccupied as Ozu with the formulas, ceremonies, and rituals of everyday life — not only rituals such as getting married, going off to war, having children, and losing or finding work, but also such minor rituals as saying “Good morning” and “Thank you” — with the full span of generations and age groups informing the social interactions of particular neighborhoods and their hangouts (mainly cafés) as well as the dynamics of family life. One of Ozu’s sublime late films, Good Morning, is very much concerned with that particular salutation — as is Cherbourg, which has more than its share of bonjours, each one musically placed. It may say something about the difference between Japan and France–as well as the difference between Ozu and Demy as artists–that Ozu’s films are full of father figures and Demy’s are more often bereft of them (with a few exceptions in the latter portion of his career). But their views of the human condition are surprisingly similar.

By contrast, the similarity of Demy to Frank Tashlin is relatively limited — circumscribed by the fact that both directors entered film via animation and that both had a special taste for “loud” primary colors — and one should emphasize that their differences are just as relevant. Tashlin’s satirical mode, to begin with, was almost entirely foreign to Demy. When the latter charts in Cherbourg with withering accuracy the steps that Geneviève’s mother takes to snare the diamond merchant — a process that begins even before she discovers that Geneviève is pregnant – he doesn’t view the process satirically or even judgmentally; he’s simply observing in detail the way French people behave in such situations, with a kind of accuracy and fidelity that seems comparable to that of Ozu in chronicling the behavior in his own country.

The dialectical play between documentary and fantasy in Godard seems far more relevant, especially as it figures in a film such as Alphaville. Indeed, the two features of Demy that to my mind have been most critically underrated and neglected are arguably the ones in which the play between actuality and artifice is the most complex and unconventional, Model Shop and Trios places pour le 26. The nature of both the realities and the contrivances that figure in each film, I should add, is quite different, and these films need to be considered separately.

In Model Shop, one should consider first of all a portrait of everyday life Los Angeles in 1969, particularly in relation to the counterculture of that period, that seems remarkably accurate and authentic (especially if one compares the film to Antonioni’s relatively expressionistic depiction of Los Angeles in Zabriskie Point a year later), placed inside a “drifting” narrative that unfolds over a few hours that is essentially framed by the hero (Gary Lockwood) driving around, attempting to borrow money to prevent his car from being repossessed, his chance encounter with and pursuit of a French model (Anouk Aimée), the discovery during a phone call to his parents that a draft notice has been sent to him in San Francisco, and his eventual breakup with his girlfriend (Alexandra Hay) back at their bungalow. This narrative material — which is paradoxically both action-packed and, in terms of most Hollywood conventions, devoid of incident, and in which the sprawling topography of Los Angeles figures as a constant documentary presence –plays against contrary elements that can be characterized as “auteurist”: a very contrived and artificial back story bringing together diverse characters from Demy’s first three features (which I’ve already described in the second paragraph of this essay) as well as an employment of the film’s title location as a self-referential device that addresses Demy’s own activity as a “photographer” and director. (One should also cite the use of film stills from both Lola and Godard’s A bout de souffle, two low-budget Nouvelle Vague features sharing the same producer and cinematographer; in a similar spirit, Lola employs a still of Elina Labourdette from Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne to represent her character’s past as a dancer.)

In Trois places pour le 26, one finds Yves Montand not only playing himself, but doing so in a musical revue in Marseille that is based on his own life, with allusions to his real-life romantic involvements with Edith Piaf, Simone Signoret, and Marilyn Monroe. The plot’s main narrative thread, however, involves a wholly fictional affair of Montand with a Marseille prostitute (Françoise Fabian) over two decades earlier, producing a daughter (Mathilda May) whose existence he never knew about, who winds up costarring in his musical revue and having sex with him.

In this case, where Montand’s own life provides the documentary subject in almost the same way that Los Angeles figures in The Model Shop, the “back story” is even more contrived, to the point of hyperbolic provocation: not only do father and daughter sleep together unknowingly, but the daughter, once she discovers the facts, contrives to bring her mother along with her on the show’s tour, rejoining her with Montand in the final scene — a denouément which seems conceivable only in France, and “acceptable” only because of its outrageous contrivance.

This dialectic between the real and the false matches the unending struggle in Demy’s work between blind chance and overdetermined control (and between chaos and symmetry), reaching a kind of temporary climax in Rochefort. It’s part of the film’s overarching design that characters who are perfectly matched keep missing one other as they go about their daily routines, in most cases not even realizing that they’re in the same city. And even though The Young Girls of Rochefort could be described as Demy’s most optimistic film — the one in which every character eventually finds the person she or he is looking for — the missed connections preceding this resolution are relentless. Indeed, the split second by which Maxence (Jacques Perrin) misses Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) at the café before he leaves Rochefort might well be the most tragic single moment in all Demy’s work, perhaps even surpassing the grisly suicide at the climax of Une chambre en ville, when Edmond (Michel Piccoli) slits his throat on-camera in the presence of his wife Edith (Dominique Sanda). By contrast, when this “ideal couple” does eventually meet — an event represented only obliquely and offscreen — this mainly registers as a sort of offhand diminuendo and postscript, a simple concession to musical-comedy convention. What reverberates more decisively is the earlier moment of dreams just missing their realization. The same might be said for the hyperbolic “happy” ending of Trois places, and, for that matter, the conclusions of all of Demy’s other best films — Lola, La Baie des Anges, Cherbourg, The Model Shop, Une chambre en ville. The vision of these works is ultimately closer to tragedy than it is to comedy.

Published on 15 Sep 2011 in Notes, by jrosenbaum

Misrepresented History, Displaced Emotion

Written in mid-July 2011 as my 22nd bimonthly column (”El movimiento”) for Cahiers du cinéma España, which might be described as a Spanish extension (rather than the Spanish “edition”) of Cahiers du cinéma. A Spanish translation of this appeared in their September issue, no. 48. — J.R.

We all have different biases and thresholds when it comes to formulating our separate perceptions of history. Recently reading J. Hoberman’s new book, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, which I mainly find an apt ideological reading of Hollywood in the early 1950s, I experienced a rude shock when I read his interpretations of two 1950 features, William Wellman’s The Next Voice You Hear (a very strange suburban family drama about God addressing the world over the radio) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. In both cases these interpretations were predicated on the assumption that both the Hollywood studios of 1950 and their audiences were preoccupied with television: “The Next Voice You Hear is of 1950 but not in it: the Smiths [the film’s archetypal central family] do not own a television set because, like God, TV cannot be shown on the screen.” And Sunset Boulevard “displaces Hollywood’s current crisis [i.e., the coming of television] to the technological crisis of twenty years earlier — the coming of sound.”

Hoberman is five years younger than me, so he was only two years old when these films came out, and he first saw The Next Voice You Hear in 1970, on television. I saw it with my family at New York’s Radio City Music Hall the summer it was released, and I’m sure that we weren’t thinking even slightly about television at the time. In 1950, radio and the movies were the only relevant media, both expected to last forever; at most, television might have been in the back of the minds of a few studio heads and a few families who purchased the first television sets. But it seems that people who grew up with television find it harder to imagine such a pre-television culture.

Similarly, I find myself gaping in disbelief at Michel Hazanavicius’s L’artiste when I see it at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, as a plausible depiction of the end of the silent cinema in Hollywood — a vision that looks almost entirely bogus to me, stylistically and in terms of period details. Yet I’m startled to discover that some specialists of silent cinema — including Kevin Brownlow, who’s five years older than me, and is present at the same screening in Bologna — find L’artiste both acceptable and moving. This seems to invalidate my theory about generational differences accounting for such divisions regarding taste. And in fact, Hoberman himself, even though he likes the film better than I do, seemed to agree with me when he reviewed the film from Cannes: “As a formal stunt, this (mostly) silent film love letter…adapts some basic tenets of pre-talkie visual storytelling to suit a modern gaze. But since there’s little here other than form…that process of adaptation feels like a cheat. If you’re making a silent film just to make a silent film, why employ a performance style that mimics not silent film acting nor naturalistic behavior, but the mid-century mugging of musicals like Singin’ in the Rain (The Artist’s most obvious influence)?”

Indeed, how can one take seriously a film that contrives to express the sadness of the end of silent cinema in 1929 by using Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film made almost 30 years later, on the soundtrack? For me the employment of this music was a deal-breaker, making it impossible for me to take the film seriously. Sixteen years ago, in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, I had a similar problem adjusting to the use of Georges Delarue’s theme music from Godard’s Le mépris [Contempt] in order to express a character’s feeling of estrangement from his wife, which for me became a kind of rented expressiveness rather than any sort of emotional investment or discovery. But if we can ignore or overlook such sources, perhaps they no longer matter.

Recommended: THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES by Sarah Kozloff

Deep in the Tarr Pit [THE TURIN HORSE]

From Film Comment (September-October 2011). — J.R.

Recalling the incident in Turin that reportedly occasioned Friedrich Nietzsche’s final breakdown into madness — his weeping and embracing a cab horse that was being beaten by its driver for refusing to budge — Béla Tarr’s regular screenwriter, novelist László Krasznahorkai, has noted that no one seems to know or ask what happened to the horse. But The Turin Horse is only nominally concerned with this riddle. It’s more concerned with the horse’s driver and his grown daughter, who live in a remote stone hut without electricity, subsisting on an exclusive diet of potatoes and palinka (Hungarian fruit brandy) while a perpetual storm rages outside, then arbitrarily subsides, over a carefully delineated six days. Their abject life remains fixed by a few infernal routines, such as dressing, undressing, drawing water from a well, or looking out the window. (One exterior shot of the daughter doing just that towards the end of the film will haunt me the rest of my life). What passes for plot gradually becomes even more minimal by the driver’s horse first refusing to pull the wagon, then refusing to eat. Eventually father and daughter also become immobilized, confirming one of Tarr’s helpful statements — that this is simply a film about the inescapable fact of death. And Tarr is so unconcerned with the usual rules of consistency that he can show us the father and daughter (the latter played by Erika Bók, the little girl in Tarr’s Sátántangó and Henriette in The Man from London) theatrically lit while she refuses to eat, even though the previous scene, ending in total darkness, has shown the lantern repeatedly burning out while it’s still full of fuel. So “What is this darkness, Papa?” is a question that goes unanswered. This film is so bound up in what it’s doing that it can’t be bothered to care about explanations.

The other “major” incidents are no less perfunctory. A neighbor who’s run out of palinka stops by for a refill and expounds on the awful state of the world and those who “acquire,” “debase,” and “destroy” it. Perhaps because this is the film’s only extended monologue, some viewers are lured into thinking he must be expounding the filmmakers’ “message” rather than merely spouting bullshit (which is what the father suggests). But what Tarr and Krasznahorkai are offering is a vision, not a message. The only other visitors, two women and five men, arrive in a wagon drawn by two robust horses to fetch water from the well, all of them insanely cheerful; the father, who calls them fucking Gypsies and clearly despises them, orders his daughter to chase them away, and after one of them says to her, “Come with us to America,” he charges out of the hut with a hatchet, provoking their curses as they ride off. One leaves her a religious book about defilement that she reads aloud from, haltingly, in the next scene. The next day, she discovers the well has run dry, but this is no sort of “message” from the film either, neither retribution nor any sort of causal effect that we can be certain about. Like the neighbor sounding off or the lantern refusing to stay lit or the daughter refusing to eat, it’s just another facet of a universe that’s blighted by definition — and one that can’t be sentimentalized as a blight populated by salt-of-the-earth types, either. Ever since his 1982, 72-minute video production of Macbeth in two shots for Hungarian TV (available as an extra in the Facets edition of Sátántangó), Tarr’s universe has operated according to some sort of demonic anti-theology that’s more a matter of feeling than one of principle; it can’t even be counted on to confirm the triumph of evil or pestilence or futility. If this proves to be Tarr’s last film, as he now maintains, this may be because it goes beyond any necessity to reach final conclusions about anything but extinction.

I suspect the father partially hates the Gypsies because they’re so cheerful. I’m reminded of a hilarious early scene in Sátántangó – which has no Gypsies but shows most of its major characters peevishly and with great difficulty dismantling the furniture in their collective farm before they abandon it so that the cursed Gypsies won’t get their hands on any of it. (In conversation, Tarr confirmed to me that The Turin Horse, unlike Sátántangó, isn’t really Hungarian except for the palinka and “Gypsies”– and by the latter I assume he meant the everyday passionate Hungarian hatred for Gypsies more than the Gypsies themselves. Clearly the father doesn’t feel the same way about his gloomy neighbor or even his recalcitrant horse — whom he and his daughter drag along with great effort, in spite of the horse’s illness and uselessness, when, after the well goes dry, they attempt to escape. And why do they fail to escape?

The film doesn’t say; that’s how little it cares about storytelling, apart from conveying the characters and their daily existence. Or unless we redefine storytelling as what the camera does whenever it moves, which happens to be most of the time. That comes close to defining the narrative of Sátántangó, thereby implicating us at every turn. But does The Turin Horse implicate us morally in the same fashion? Not really, because the turf has become more metaphysical than socio-political. Part of this film’s mystery is how much it can borrow from the expressive materials of Sátántangó (black and white, a droning minimalist Mihály Vig score, horrible weather, rural setting, slow and perpetual camera movements, seeming inactivity, a novelistic narrator summing up what the characters think, feel, and are at the end of various sequences) without expressing the same things or serving the same functions — as if Tarr and Krasznahorkai were contriving to turn a chair into a table, or vice versa. Sátántangó used a rain machine and this film uses a wind machine; Tarr is so adept at film illusion that many viewers still believe that he actually killed a cat in Sátántangó and that the hut here is some found object, not a constructed set. Like Kiarostami, he resents Hollywood so much that he winds up beating it at its own game, giving us the impression that he’s telling a story without actually doing so. The Turin Horse may offer an anti-universe according to some anti-theology, but it’s one that lives and breathes.

For me the abiding mystery isn’t what the film means but how and why we watch it. “Try not to be too sophisticated” was Tarr’s suggestion the first time he introduced it at the New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland. A sound piece of advice, but not easy for all cinephiles to follow, especially if the “sophistication” resembles Dan Kois’ pseudo-populism masquerading as common sense (“Eating Your Cultural Vegetables”) in the New York Times. Going beyond the usual middlebrow philistinism, this position suggests that audiences supporting art movies by Akerman, Costa, Kiarostami, Reichardt, Tarkovsky, or Tarr (strange bedfellows, these — back in the 60s they would have been Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Godard, or Resnais) – must be masochists wanting to impose their self-inflicted punishments on others.

Factored out of such reckonings are those who regard Star Wars, Amélie, Slumdog Millionaire, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds or even The Tree of Life as obligatory cultural vegetables. And meanwhile denying that sensible individuals can find pleasure in Tarr films ultimately means attempting to outlaw the possibility that any might do so. Clearly part of America’s eccentric mistrust of art and poetry is bound up with a bizarre association of both with class; the usual pseudo-populist position is to find such activity excusable only when it’s interlarded with religion and/or “entertainment” (which in most cases entails colonial conquest, revenge, violence and/or some form of mush). To fail in this sacred duty apparently means to make films that are lethally boring, so that Rivette’s 13-hour Out 1, even as a serial, allegedly can’t be fun and games like Twin Peaks.

Why, then, did I wind up at all three screenings of The Turin Horse in Wrocław, three afternoons in a row? Largely because of my fascination with how a film in which practically nothing happens can remain so gripping and powerful, so pleasurable and beautiful. I’m usually reluctant to compare an anti-cinephile like Tarr to any other filmmaker, but even though his diverse technical materials are completely different from those of Erich von Stroheim, there’s something about the sheer intensity of both filmmakers as they navigate from one moment to the next that makes the usual rules and logic of film narrative and even the usual practice of following a plot seem almost beside the point — a kind of distraction. The world of The Turin Horse isn’t unveiled or imparted or recounted or examined or told; it’s simply there, at every instant, as much as possible and more than we can think to cope with, daring us simply to take note of it.