picnic at hanging rock, by peter weir

Film Club reconvened this week after a brief hiatus, and we watched Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to continue with our theme of "colonists in supernatural peril."

The film takes place in the year 1900, and focuses on the inhabitants of Appleyard College, a Victorian girls' boarding school. The very phrase "Victorian girls' boarding school" will burn the mind of certain readers with an erotic force that borders on the radioactive, evoking, as it does, a particularly intense mix of succulence and repression. If that's your thing, the opening scenes of this film will function as a kind of fetish material for you, because Weir has gone to the trouble to stock the college with a score of willowy beauties (and a hot French governness), and he presents them in a variety of scenarios that seem like they are, at any given moment, half a step away from tumbling into porn:

But the film ultimately has other things on its mind, and it swiftly transplants the group of girls out on a field trip to Hanging Rock, a weird mass of volcanic stone. Four of the girls wander off to explore:

...and, inexplicably, only one comes back. A governness goes in search of them, and she vanishes, too.

Like our last Film Club pick, I Walked With A Zombie (1943), Picnic is built around a system of clashing opposites: logic and reason, associated (at least initially) in both films by white colonists, versus mystery and irrationality, associated with the natural world that the colonists seek to colonize. The bulk of the film is spent watching various authorities, searching for the girls, interrogate Hanging Rock in various "rational" ways:

The film invites us, the viewers, to perform our own "interrogations"—it provides a goodly number of details that could be said to be "clues." But all these investigations and theorizing end up inconclusive: all throughout the film Hanging Rock deflects attempts to interpret it.

Part of the reason for this might be because the film presents the Rock as resistant to conventional dualites of classification: early in the film, two characters squabble about whether the Rock could be said to be old or young (it's "old" in our time-frame, but "young" when viewed from a geologic perspective). Additionally, even though the landscape also gives off strong psychosexual evocations, it can't easily be gendered. There are plenty of shots that emphasize the phallic presence of the mountain:

—but an equal number of shots which evoke the vaginal:

(My Film Club compatriot Skunkcabbage memorably described this polymorphous mix as a "Freudscape.")

So Hanging Rock remains, at film's end, a "text" that can't really be "read." If this film has set up a clash between rationality and irrationality, irrationality carries the day simply by virtue of its persistence. It basically wins the game by making a single move—spiriting away a selected number of characters—and then simply passing time until rationality burns itself out with fruitless activity. It's not the most dramatic way to play the game (and this creates some dead space in the narrative, which gets filled in with subplots that are more-or-less boring), but it's effective.n

i walked with a zombie, by jacques tourneur

So Film Club has now reconvened, and its kickoff film for 2008 was 1943's I Walked With A Zombie, which continues the "undead" theme we've been working with of late.

It's an interesting and provocative film. It opens in Canada, with a young nurse ("Betsy") accepting an assignment that brings her to the island of St. Sebastian, to caretake and potentially cure Jessica, a woman who has fallen into a seemingly irrevocable trance state:

No one is exactly certain what has happened to Jessica—there are at least three different hypotheses. Roughly speaking, they can be grouped into the medical ("she never recovered from a fever"), the psychological ("her cruel husband drove her mad"), and, of course, the supernatural ("she has become a zombie"). Our nurse learns about this theory from a representative non-white island person:

Some of these trappings, of course, are familiar from other films that deal with the idea of possession. I'm currently reading Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film—my notes on the book are here—and there's a whole chapter in there which examines patterns in the "occult film." In this chapter, she notes that the occult film often contains a struggle between Black Magic and White Science (she borrows these terms from another Haitian zombie film, The Serpent and the Rainbow). That struggle is definitely depicted here, and—again similar to many other films—the body being struggled over is female. (Clover writes that women's bodies, in these types of films, are spaces to be "exposed, denied, fixed, filled, colonized, [and/or] detoxified," and that's pretty much in full effect here.)

It's interesting, though, that the selected representative of White Science is female—traditionally, of course, it's male. And it's further interesting that as an agent of Science, Betsy is also an unusually sympathetic one: it isn't long before she decides that maybe taking Jessica down to the nexus of Vodou activity on the island (the "Home Fort") might actually work out as a way to cure Jessica:

It's important to point out that, at least in this point in the film, Betsy doesn't necessarily buy the theory that Jessica is, in fact, a zombie: it's more that she sees the line between White Science and Black Magic not so much as a sharp demarcation but rather as something that is potentially permeable or negotiable, with Psychology representing a kind of murky middle realm. (The film repeatedly considers the possibility that a psychological state can be the cause of a "medical" ailment, and Betsy's willingness to try magic ritual as a cure shows that she might accept the idea that a ritual can enact medical change via the conduit of its psychological force. In other words, Magical = Psychological = Medical.)

All of this is pretty intriguing (and it gets even more complicated before the film ends), and the blurry lines in effect go some way towards complicating the easy binary wherein non-white-people equal Magical (but simple) and white people equal Rational (but blinkered). The film does even more interesting things with regard to race, though: a number of times the island's Black characters, who (unsurprisingly) mostly play the roles of servants, refer overtly to the island's slavery past. as Betsy effuses about how "beautiful" everything is at the same time her Black carriage driver is calling the island a place of deep suffering. It's difficult to read this as anything other than a privileging of the Black point of view over the White one: not because the Black characters are "simple" or "noble savages" or any of that horseshit, but because they simply hold a knowledge that the White protagonist doesn't have. It's not a supernatural, "primitive" knowledge, but a literal, modern knowledge about colonial violence and its effects. The fact that the film opens with a voice-over from Betsy and closes with a voice-over from an unidentified Black character is also provocative in this regard.

This isn't to say that the film is super-progressive: it definitely trades in the image of the Black body as a source of uncanny creepiness:

—but this is still a film making unusually thoughtful and sophisticated points about race and colonialism, especially given that it was produced during a time when Black people still weren't, say, allowed to vote in this country. I'd be curious to revisit The Serpent and the Rainbow, a product of an age we like to think of as being more enlightened about matters of race, to see if it comes anywhere close to being this pointed, although I won't be doing this next week, because as my follow-up I've instead opted for us to take a look at Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Skunkcabbage's write-up on I Walked With A Zombie is here.

alphaville, by jean-luc godard

For the third week of our film club, Skunkcabbage and I moved on along the Godard axis, this time watching Alphavile (1965), Godard's take on science fiction.

Like Band of Outsiders, which we watched last week, Alphaville gets a lot of mileage out of decontextualizing and repurposing noir conventions. Take a look at our star, tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine playing detective Lemmy Caution, seen here skulking around, you know, detecting things:

The central conceit of Alphaville is taking this type of hard-boiled figure and placing him in a science fiction context, specifically the context of the futuristic dystopia. Alphaville is a city governed by a computer, Alpha 60, who essentially makes all its decisions rationally, based on probability-matrices. This crushes the human spark in the usual dystopian fashion, although Godard's visualization of it is at times striking:

Anna Karina returns in this film, this time playing Natasha Von Braun, daughter of a prominent scientist. She's essentially the science-fiction version of the character she plays in Band of Outsiders: instead of being a cute French schoolgirl who is naive about sexuality, here she's the dystopian lost girl, who needs to be taught to love in a society that's forgotten the meaning of the word, yadda yadda yadda:

All of feels a little bit standard, which is part of the point—since the material feels so familiar, Godard can sketch it quite economically and rely on us to fill in the gaps. This extends to the entire setting, which makes no effort to be especially futuristic, but simply constitutes itself by using suitably dystopian environments selected from the contemporary city, trusting that we'll simply imagine them as science-fictional. Works pretty well; here's the building where the authorities execute free thinkers:

Like in Band of Outsiders, the effect of all this economy is that it opens up the film for digressions. The digressions are a little bit less successful here: whereas in Band the digressive material is mostly antic horseplay (which chafes interestingly against the central crime plot), the digressive material here is more lyrical and experimental. I tend to like lyrical and experimental, but the experimental material here is primarily a meditation on the value of love, and the use of radical techniques to make a point that's not especially radical just isn't that interesting.

Elsewhere, the film proves itself to be smarter than that. There are various moments where we see that Godard's interest in thinking actively about the conventions of filmic narrative is beginning to broaden into an interest in thinking actively about the conventions of language in general: the phrase "I'm very well. Thank you so much" is uttered repeatedly by characters in the film, never in response to an actual inquiry about someone's well being (reminding me of the gifts that are reflexively exchanged in the permanent Christmas of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985)).

It's a sly commentary on the way that convention can override meaning, only mildly undercut by the moment, late in the film, when Natasha struggles to remember the words "I love you." When she finally manages to speak the phrase, it's clearly seen as a triumphant moment—but certainly "I love you," just like "Thank you so much," is a phrase that has the risk of being spoken automatically, emptily.

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.