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Film

Two Views

The 6th Wellington Film Festival

Criticism by Simon Wilson and David Beresford

The following deals with films screened up to and include Wednesday 6 July. Our aim has been to provide comprehensive reviews; rather, we have concentrated on specific elements of the various films which we think of interest or importance in their evaluation. (Neither of the two present writers speaks (or the other). We would like to initiate a discussion through these pages on the films and/or their relationship to cinema itself. If anyone wishes to write an article on any aspect of the festival, they should contact Simon Wilson through Salient.

The Story of Adele H. is a story of suffering. Adele suffers from a passion that is, in her case, obsessive. It takes the form of an undying love that is never reciprocated and as such leads her down the path to a spiritual death. Adele is a pitiable character. She never attempts rationally to come to terms with her obsession. She will win our pity, but because of her blind refusal to examine her own motives, she will not win our sympathy.

It is a true story given dramatic life by Francois Truffaut and is set within the bounds of a romantic genre. As such it is designed to make a plea upon our emotions, to which aim it succeeds to a certain extent. But there are aspects that hamper its development. One is that a film of a romantic nature such as this lacks the breadth and conflict of passions that one finds in, say, (compare Adele Hugo with Scarlett O'Hara) Gone with the Wind. Adele's passion is singular and touches our emotions on one level alone. Adjani achieves a considerable depth within this level and her performance alone is enough to carry the film but there remain avenues of interest (eg. her identity problem) which, were they to have been explored properly, would at least have added a few more shades and textures onto a personality that is only one-sided.

The fault is Truffaut's. He has everything else right: the sombre mood created by the darkness and by overcast skies (significantly there is bright sunshine when her mental and spiritual resources are at their end). But he has hot understood the cardinal rule that governs films concerned wholly with one person. That is, if the film is to succeed, the person under examination must transcend characterisation. This is particularly essential when a film has no other purpose in mind except to be a human study. The Story of Adele H. is such a film.

It would be wrong to go overboard and call it, as some critics have done, "a grand-scale comedy" or a '"woman's film' to end all 'woman's films'". It is simply a sad love story. Let us not have the name "Francois Truffaut" distort our critical sense.

D.B.

The strength of Travailing Players is its synthesis of the didactically political and the aesthetic. The film gives the lie to any suggestion that such concerns are mutually exclusive. Politics retain the immediate significance, art secures it at a profound lever.

The film's most striking aspect is its style: long takes that cover the whole range of camera movement from pans and tilts to extended tracking shots that retain focus in an instant's breath and never miss a cue for action. The preparation has been so meticulous that almost any frame taken from the film would be composition-perfect.

Continuity of time and action gives artistic order to the turmoil and shifting events in Greece during the period. A clearer perception is the audience's benefit.

Colour and atmosphere are exploited for their effect. A funereal air hangs over the locations the troupe visit. Director Angelopoulos uses cold colours in his backdrops to evoke this mood. The dark heavy coats of the players blend into blues, greys and off whites while sunshine is visible only once. It is as if they are taking part in a funeral, the death of their country's freedom.

The players themselves are not real people although the experiences they relate in Brechtian fashion to the audience are real enough. (These occasion the film's only closeups). The players view their situation as tragic and so assume the poses of the tragic Greek figures. In effect they are particulars representative of the universal (proletariat in this case) but through the mythological mode the implications are much wider.

In fact the formal quality of the film can be traced back to the high poetry of Greek tragedians such as Aeschylus and Sophocles. The film is a rendering of this style into cinematic terms. Whereas the poetry of the Ancients found its expression in the spoken word, the poetry of The Travelling Players finds its expression through the image.

Like Aeschylus's 'Oresteia', it is the power of the message which lifts The Travelling Players above the level of the aesthetic. Angelopoulos's contribution to the film form cannot be overlooked To refine cinema down to this 'classical' form is without doubt a step forward.

D.B.

Conversation Piece fails on a fundamental level. All its characters are two dimensional, stereotyped and unconvincing. Their faults, and the film's themes, are easily highlighted because they lack the conceptual depth necessary to this style of film. For however rich it is visually, and however melodramatic. Conversation Piece is a psychological study.

The subject is an old man. The intriguing thing is who this man is, the Professor or Visconti? Or both. They share an obsession with decorative aesthetics, paintings being to the Professor what films are to Visconti. In Death in Venice Thomas Mann did most of the probing. Here, in what is to my knowledge the closest Visconti has come to self-analysis, he is working directly off his own bat.

The decadent bourgeoisie, the post-scripted inclusion of political concerns, are the products of an old man's failing mind. We can say that the behaviour of Konrad and Co. conforms to the Professor's vision. Perhaps the whole film is a dying fantasy: the cardiograph ticker-tape which encloses it is one element which suggests this. His deluded sensibility is evident in such statements as, 'The only old man whose story is mine is King Lear', and, 'I'm not interested in people who lose control of their own destiny'.

Yet this delusion is tantamount to naivety. How else can he seem to be speaking these lines after a lifetime of contemplation? How else does he not see through Konrad's superficial interest in music and painting? And if he is so naive how did he get to be a professor?

This contradiction limits his full characterisation, exposing the weakness of Visconti's vision. If ignored, the film fits very nicely into its elderly-protagonist-in-search-of-a-son storyline. As such the film is enjoyable, especially in its less frivolous second half.

But that's not much. Even the quickest comparison with Death in Venice reveals how heavily schematic the story is. We can follow what is happening yet should not be blind to the way story development replaces development of character and theme. Death in Venice is similarly concerned with rejuvenation of the old by the young and the paucity of aesthetics compared with love/life. It never needs to come right out and say so.

The sad irony of Conversation Piece is its autobiographical nature. Visconti has done a brave and honest thing in presenting himself through the Professor as a man for whom retreat into aesthetics has not provided succour enough. I can't help thinking he has done so in spite of himself, that his desire to criticise certain types of people has been eclipsed by his love of rich decor, that his integrity in facing his struggle has been transformed into a whimsical account of failure which doesn't mean much to anyone.

S.W

If Adele H. was a true story given dramatic life by Truffaut, then the Straubs' production of Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aaron has given the mythical story a dramatic death.

The opera's theme is the dialectical conflict between Moses (with his pure idea of a God that no image can represent) and Aaron (the practical maker of images). Simply stated, between the idea and the form. Schoenberg has put this theme to a powerful and at times melodramatic musical composition which, by the nature of music, serves as an emotional counterpoint to the intellectual discussion between the two main figures. For every "idea", no matter how intangible, is of worth only when the idea itself is either motivated by or will influence an emotional response. It is the balance between the words (intellect) and music (emotion) which keep Schoenberg's "Moses and Aaron" afloat. Which brings us to the visual medium through which the opera is presented and through which, by interpretation, the balance is maintained or re-adjusted.

The Straubs have at their disposal the most subjective of the visual forms, film, yet their treatment of the opera is one that denies its subjective function. Their minimal use of editing denies it its function as a means of developing dramatic tension. Camera movement, while often graceful, is, for a large part, a static affair. The aim is to present a faithful reproduction of the opera; deliberately eschewing the dynamic rhetoric of film secures a greater reality and objectivity.

As far as their film goes, it is perfect. But such perfection has been bought at a great cost for it is a perfection stillborn from a dry, calculated, impersonal, unambitious conception. While the misic remains a strong force in the film, the scales have been tilted in prominence to the theme. This imbalance occurs in the way the cast, especially the chorus, have been made to perform. They respond to their situation unemotionally, best exemplified by the orgy round the Golden Calf which the Straubs turn into a dull and farcial ritual. The neglect of both the opera's and film's potential doesn't deny them an artistic point yet their non-involved commitment is a paradox that remains unresolved.

Their interpretation shifts the level of the film towards a more intellectual base and as a result its range of value decreases proportionally.

D.B.

A Bigger Splash could have been a resume of David Hockney's life and work which told us all about his status in British art, providing a kind of animated illustrated catalogue complete with background information. Such is the documentary norm. Instead it adopted the very themes and principles which Hockney himself uses, avoiding the essay format to initiate us into an empathetic mode of understanding him.

The central themes are the relationships of life and art, man and artist. Hockney's swimming pool paintings are obsessively psychological. They, the photographs he takes and the sketches he does of Schlesinger, all stand at the point where Hockney's every aspect is fused into one. Those photographs express his need of the boy and his need of the perfect image; while the second need is an acute representation of the first. The film captures all this without ever resorting to explanation or analysis.

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In one scant Hockney and hit dealer attempt to discuss their obligations to each other. Both are utterly inarticulate and seemingly unaware of the issues involve. Hockney imagines he sees the dealer standing outside with his face pressed flat against the window; he laughs and so do we. Then we realise the painting behind them is of the dealer doing just that. What we understand by this, and the degree of complexity the vignette contains are left entirely up to us to decide.

A Bigger Splash is basically a series of such scenes in which lack of verbal intellectualisation and abundance of the visual interplay of ideas set the dominant tone. This gives rise to a sophisticated manipulation of space and time which places the film absolutely within its own medium. As such it is an important work. This gives rise to a sophisticated manipulation of space and time which pieces the film absolutely within its own medium. As such it is an important work. When this manipulation it controlled it provides valuable moments when over-indulged in the result is trite.

The most obvious example is the repetitive visual pun of the person striking a pose in front of a picture of him striking a pose. Theme is made unbearably explicit. It is a cheap joke which belies the seriousness of Hockney's work.

The film masquerades as a documentary yet quite patently isn't. The roots support something much closer to fantasy. Improvised dialogue it set in a pattern of prearranged and often recreated events. The result is that we gain remarkable insights into the people, the way they are and the way they think they are.

The honesty of this approach it the film's real strength. Although we are constantly aware of the themes, we are given almost no means to judge them or the people, Except for the music (which involves us when Hockney is onto something) the film ignores the many devices at its desposal for manipulating our reactions. Thus it throws us back on our own preconceptions, making us judge ourselves. This happens whether one likes or hates the film and/or the people in it.

Comparison with Volcano is useful here. Malcolm Lowry was great novelist, we are told point-blank. As if to illustrate this we are presented with a number of rather petty observations from various acquaintances. Of course there are two major differences between Lowry and Hockney: they do not share a medium and the former is dead. Yet Lowry is quite capable of speaking for himself through hit eminently readable prose. This was badly underused. The psychiatrist's explanation of the writer's guilt complex, for example, is superfluous if one has read any of the novels, and gives no clue of Lowry's treatment of this subject to one who hasn't.

The second-hand nature of the film, combined with exclusion of many salient aspects of Lowry's life (intense superstition, the relationship with Conrad Aitken, his admiration for Nordahl Grieg and Melville, etc.) give us little chance to understand or become involved in him for ourselves. Because Volcano merely feeds us information it lacks an essential respect for the viewer.

S. W.

Heart of Glass is a distillation of Werner Herzog films to date, a consolidation of themes and technique. And at the risk of repeating himself he has made another beautiful film.

But beneath the visual splendour there runs, as always, the allegorical tale and, as always, the diverse interpretations to which the tale lends itself. The trap is, of course, to fret and worry over what Herzog himself is trying to say and to arrive at an analysis that justifies the director's position. In pursuing this end it is easy to fall into Herzog's pit of abstruseness. The point is that rather than come to terms with the film on the director's level, the point of departure for resolving the film's intricacies should stem from each person's own mystical/rationale sense, Herzog's films remain deeply personal, but since he arouses rather than directs our feelings and intelligence we can approach his films with as much respect for our own opinions as for those of the director,

I think Heart of Glass it a negative examination of human nature and the destructive fallibilities that are symptoms of it. The townspeople serve as an analogy for the rest of us. Ideals fall first: the ideal in the film is the ruby glass — when the means for perpetuating this ideal are lost the townspeople (and by analogy, ourselves) are on the road to insanity. As proof they refuse to be helped and suppress the agent that holds their only hope for enlightenment. Old age is not wisdom, but bitterness, (the old man's forced, despairing Laugh). Complete symbolic degradation occurs when the glass factory is burnt down.

These events take up the course of only one day, indicating to us that our rational grip on out own natures is more tenuous than we imagine. The seer hints that our level of being is but transitional: "Peasants will become townspeople and the townspeoples apes". To this we remain unaware. We are doomed by our ignorance. (Herzog sought to make this point by literally hypnotising the cast during production. The seer comments: "But, like sleepwalkers, people will walk towards their doom".) It is a deeply pessimistic observation of a life of futility without hope.

Well, this is my version of the film, this is how I understand it as a thematic work. What becomes confusing now is that this secondary, intellectual response is completely at variance with my primary emotional response. For, before the film is understood, it is felt. The problem lies in being able to reconcile the soft, hallucinatory feel of the film with the hard, ruthless message it adopts.

Either Herzog has made an artistic blunder in having his theme at cross-purposes with his form — or otherwise, I have some re-thinking to do.

D. B.

In Heart of Glass the young factory owner says at one stage, 'When you receive a letter with all the words mixed up, it makes you think'. The man it mad, the letter' is a sofa and contains no dues to the secret he is seeking.

In this we have a possible key to the film. Anything in which the component elements are mixed up asks us to investigate it, and denies us the chance to simply follow its exposition one two, three. We must take each separate element on its own terms and discover or even create our own patterns and meanings. Films, and Herzoq contributions in particular, function like this. Like the sofa, they are not letters and cannot be understood by perceiving them as such. If 'letter' stands for logical structure suggesting some truth beyond its own existence, then we must view the sofa, and Heart of Glass, as defining their own logic, as existing as their own truths.

Fata Morgana was the purest film I have seen, in that it is about what Herzog sees at man's saving grace — his creative power — and the film itself it its own witness. Heart of Glass presents us first with the idea that man it not capable of recognising and utilising his creative power, then (when we see the herdsman Hias grappling with an imaginary bear) that this power is itself false, and finally (when the island dwellers set out to discover the world and the birds follow them) with a great question mark.

This allegorical conclusion possibly redeems Hias because it is his vision. Vision, however illusory it may be at heart, is still the greatest hope. No conclusion can be reached. It is very much to the point with Herzog, as with Beckett, that the work itself is the truth. That it was made is cause for hope.

S. W.

Don't forget Paul Maunder's award-winning Landfall on Monday at 2 and 8 pm. Note extra screenings of Fassbinder's Fox and his Friends (Tues) and Wertmuller's Seven Beauties (Thurs) at 10 45 pm.