a man escaped, by robert bresson

For the last few weeks, Film Club has been interested in movies that present strategies—some successful, some not—for weathering the forces of cultural oppression.

At a certain point, when a film has amassed a sufficiently complicated set of interrelated strategies, I think we can officially say that it is actually depicting a scheme. We have good reason to perk up here: the development of a scheme is a great narrative device, and, in the hands of a competent filmmaker, a deeply satisfying one. Think of films like Rififi, Man on Wire, and Oceans 11: very different films, but each one is built around a scheme, and as their schemes unfold they each yield similiar pleasures.

To this list we could add this week's pick, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1959). The plot is simplicity itself. A police liutenant in occupied France is imprisoned by Germans. He intends to escape. That's pretty much it. He is planning this escape literally every second we see him on screen, starting when he's being driven to the prison. Before we even see his face we see him trying to figure out if he can get out of the car and make a run for it:

It's not the most successful attempt:

So, OK. He chalks this up to "if at first you don't succeed" and carries on. The next attempt, made from within the belly of the prison, is going to have to be more complicated than a simple jump-and-run. But that's OK: the more complicated the scheme is, the more enjoyable it is to see enacted.

This hinges, of course, on a filmmaker who is willing to visually represent the details as they unfold. To his enormous credit, Bresson lavishes loving attention on these details. There are passages in this film that are practically like an Instructables video on How To Break Out of Jail:

Part of the reason that Bresson can spend so much narrative time on examining these details is that he rigorously strips out any element of the narrative that doesn't have to do directly with the protagonist and the plan. It's not hard to imagine a less assured filmmaker building in a villainous German character, as a way of establishing their threat level: Bresson just takes it as a given and moves on. A less assured filmmaker would likely show us the other prisoners being executed: Bresson just relies on word-of-mouth, and the occasional sound of machine-gun fire.

This may sound like its short on visceral thrill, and, it's true that we're not dealing with Oz here. But Bresson has a different goal in mind: he wants to put us in the head of our protagonist, to impress upon us the "thrill" of the smallest details. Bresson is right that, to a prisoner, something subtle like approaching footfalls or the quickest glimpse of a weapon can hold enormous menace:

...and he is right that, to a prisoner, the smallest utilitarian object can convey enormous advantages:

...can be, in fact, a source of hope and courage:

This goes all the way down, in Bresson's conception, to finding a splinter of wood that is the correct size for one's purposes:

When we begin to discuss the ways in which the quotidian can be charged with enormous meaning, we begin to move out of the realm of filmmaking, and into the realm of spiritual or mystical belief. (Bresson himself has been quoted as saying "The supernatural is only the real rendered more precise; real things seen close up.") His religious belief has been amply discussed elsewhere, and it's really beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will say that by the point in the film where one character refers to incarceration as a way of moving into a state of "grace," I'm prepared to believe it. (Especially impressive: the film has invested this observation with the weight of truth through craft, rather than through the easy application of sloppy sentimentality.) This film makes a great introduction to Bresson; I hope to watch more of his films in the future.

Next week: Film Club member Tiffanny E. writes "I wanted to explore more the idea of being imprisioned but avoid actual jails ... so I am picking The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Stay tuned~

sans soleil, by chris marker

So this week, we decided to follow up Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera with Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983). As with Man With A Movie Camera, you watch Sans Soleil and you're given the feeling that you've seen everything in the world at least once. Here's a random assortment from the film's opening minutes:

Of course, neither film is really about the whole world, and this is where an illuminating contrast can perhaps be made. Vertov is a Russian, making a movie about Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow: some variety there, but at the root it can be said that he is making a movie about his own homeland. (This is part of what contributes to the overall atmosphere of "boosterism" that seems to vaguely surround the film.) Marker, by contrast, is a Parisian, making a movie about Japan, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Iceland, among others: and so at the root it must be said that he is making a movie about places that very precisely aren't his homeland.

So, on one level, Sans Soleil can be said to belong to the tradition of the ethnographic documentary. Certainly the film's emphasis on festival and ritual belongs squarely within that tradition:

Documentary in general, and ethnographic documentary in particular, carries with it a variety of tricky ethical problems, ones which have been ably recounted elsewhere. For portions of its runtime, Sans Soleil risks falling into some of these traps. For instance, it's problematically interested in the most alien and exotic aspects of the cultures it looks at. For instance, here's the shrine devoted to cats:

To its credit, though, I don't think that Sans Soleil is interested in committing the other ethnographic sin, that of recasting its subject as "primitives." Tokyo in particular is one of the most hyper-modern cities in the world, and as much as Marker seems interested in the "quaint" spiritual traditions of the Japanese, he seems equally interested in the quasi-futuristic aspects of the Japanese media landscape:

Even Guinea-Bisseau, with its photogenic squalor, is a site that Marker is interested in for its postmodern aspects—the film explicitly remarks upon the challenges involved with completing, taming, or fully articulating the partial industrial infrastructure left behind by the European colonists that revolutions forced out.

But Soleil ultimately wants to subvert the ethnographic documentary even more directly, going straight to its core principles. The film remarks repeatedly on the inevitable distortions that time introduces into our perception of reality. Our memories, of course, have massive powers of distortion, but Marker seems to feel that the meaning of images, too, shift through time, that our ability to treat them as "proof" diminishes with the passage of time and the loss of context, if indeed this ability ever existed in the first place.

There's another film that famously deals with the fallibility of perception: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which manages to get shoehorned in to the final third of Sans Soleil in order to underscore this point:

So, ultimately: Our direct perceptions are incomplete, faulty, and subject to the ravages of time—and perceptions we might obtain through, say, film, are not more permanent impressions of "truth," but rather are even more dubious because of the absence of context and the introduction of the distortions inherent to mediation. "Sunless" indeed! This is not exactly the underlying message of most documentaries (although it's not, in fact, a far cry from the underlying message of American Splendor (Film Club XXII)). As messages go, this one may seem bleak, although the film seems to accept these ideas with something like hope. In the end, the unknowability of other people (including Marker himself, and the extra-enigmatic figure of this film, Sandor Krasna) seems to be a source of joy and wonder.

That, at least, appears to be a pleasure that endures.

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.