New Voice » Film

The Absence of Everyday Epic

doconnor — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:20:13 +0000

Towards the end of his follow-up to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray mentions going to see a film called Look at Me, “the idiotic title of the French film Comme une image”. He goes on to describe this “freak of a film, full of intelligent and civilized people behaving to each other as such people frequently behave to each other, egocentrically, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, with mainly accidental but sometimes deliberate cruelty, all of them perfectly observed in their smallest reactions…”. I’ve seen the film in question, and he’s right, and justly celebrates the “everyday sort of treachery” that forms the basis for a “marvellously painful moment” in the film.

The following section of Gray’s diary comes under the subheading, in block capitals: WHY CAN’T WE MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THAT? And how can the French do it? How do they get the funds? he asks himself. Gray, being English, or British (he was, in his own words, part Scottie), is not referring to Ireland when he says us, but as with so much else, the same questions are as relevant here.

If we take a look (an experience which is likely to entail great pain, boredom and high embarrassment) at recent Irish films which have, in part, been funded by the Irish Film Board and/or The Arts Council, it becomes apparent that very few seek to elucidate the drama of the “everyday”. Directors not content to highlight problems related to poverty, race, immigration, sexual orientation, sexual abuse, extreme violence, drug and alcohol addiction, or any other category of criminal activity, either do not exist or are not given a chance. As Philip Roth said of 1950s American fiction “provoked by some topical controversy”, those that get made “aren’t very good”, and that’s being kind. (Reading Myself and Others ) So much has been made of the camera’s democritizing powers, yet, in Irish films, only the outlandish is on view.

The shabby adaptations of Roddy Doyle’s already slight novels The Commitments, The Van and The Snapper offer an alternative, but the caricatured dialogue, mostly crap acting, and crass “humour” render them unwatchable. Elsewhere, in Adam and Paul, at least the two main characters happen to be heroin addicts, as opposed to representations or embodiments of drug addiction.

Has Joyce not taught us, and shown us, the epic in the everyday man and woman. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway followed suit. Neither of these writers attempted to move people en masse, to engender mass emotion, knowing that art is a private affair. Even as part of an audience, where many sensations are shared, this remains true.
Film is not devoid of such subtleties, such minute attentiveness as we find in the pages of Ulysses, although as a medium it has struggled to convey inwardness, or consciousness.

Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and Autumn Sonata are works of terrible, intense drama and resonance in which the face is all important in expressing and evoking inner life and emotion on screen. Acting of an extremely rare ability is vital to the success of these films. Bergman knew who was up to the task and he used them again and again. Cassavetes comes close, at times, in a different, noisier manner, to achieving what Bergman mastered.

The Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, in 1949’s Late Spring (and several other works), depicted, with great tenderness, patience and love, the emotional turmoil of everyday life. Social mores and political issues are present only as background contributions to the constricted lives in which his characters strive for peace within themselves and their homes, to cope with the intricacies of an ever-changing world. David Bordwell, in his study Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, comments on the films’ “contemplative resignation to mutability”.

Late Spring tells the story of Professor Somiya, a widower, who lives with his unmarried daughter Noriko. In her late twenties, she is, in the Japan of the time, getting on a bit. He knows, or assumes she’ll outlive him so he and his sister trick Noriko into believing he’s going to remarry, freeing her from any obligation to take care of him. She has no wish to marry or to leave her father. Everyone acts with the best of intentions and two lives are devastated. The final scene in which the father’s head slowly, agonisingly dips in resignation at the loss of his daughter, is as poignant, and as crushingly dramatic, as anything on film. No scream could drown it out.

I do not wish to imply that films about people in extremis should not be made, or that they never have any merit (and JG Ballard’s assertion that the quiet life is the exception is a convincing one), only that the utmost attention must be paid to the telling of the tale. We “must act as our own critics,” Ingmar Bergman advised his fellow film directors, and approach their own work with the same “subtle detachment” an active viewer brings to the screen. In this way, the emotional impact, when it hits, if it hits, is (to mix the metaphor) earned, and all the more lasting for it.

Too many fictions, whether books or movies or whatever else besides, strive, with an air of earnest haughtiness, to teach us something, to tell us something other than a story, to make us agree, and not, as Joseph Conrad said, to make us see.

True lessons are there to be learnt, provided we look in the right place, and with an active, alert eye. Montaigne, explains his favouring of Catullus over Martial: “This is for the reason that Martial applied to himself; ‘He had little need to labour at his wits; his subject served instead.’” Referring to the Second World War, which he lived through, the great Polish poet and prose writer Czeslaw Milosw offered the following warning to artists and would-be artists alike: “The reality of the war years is a great subject, but a great subject is not enough and it even makes inadequacies in workmanship all the more visible”. To do a thing properly, or well, requires effort, and witless work is not worth so much as a giggle.

Secular Sundays

efarrelly — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:22:14 +0000

In my last post I mentioned Lars Von Triers, and the hostility his films provoke. Bryan Appleyard, in last week’s Sunday Times, went on at length about how provoked he was by Antichrist. What quite provoked Appleyard’s hostility was a little difficult to pinpoint – he didn’t like the explicit violence, the nastiness, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it should have been given its 18 uncut rating, as he isn’t quite sure about the whole rating thing. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the violence that left him “insensate with rage,” although he spent quite a bit of the article talking about the violence and nastiness. No, it was that the film was bad, and a display of “undergraduate cynicism” – clearly the worst kind of cynicism, or indeed the worst kind of anything – undergraduate appears as a pejorative more than once in this article. A skip ahead to the movie reviews in the Culture section reveals a selection of movies such as Fired Up (a film about a summercamp for cheerleaders), Hannah Montana The Movie and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, none of which, it seems, have moved Mr Appleyard to vandalise his local Oddbins. But then none of the “sucker” arthouse crowd are going on about Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, at least not in public anyway. Part of Mr Appleyard’s problem is that Antichrist is bad (Appleyard tends toward the declarative), but there are a lot of bad movies out there. His problem is that it has pretensions – indicated by it’s dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky – to art. Unacceptable, of course, and worse than that, the arthouse crowd, presumably armed with their undergaduate degrees, are talking about it as art. So, as well as an exposition of the chips on Mr Appleyard’s shoulders, it basically comes down to the age-old argument about what constitutes art, a debate I thought was flushed down the toilet by Duchamp et al. Anyway, Appleyard, by virtue of the fact that he is writing about it, as opposed to any of the films mentioned above, or any of the plethora of pretentious undergraduate films made each year, elevates the importance of the film and the filmmaker beyond the rest. Von Triers, in his films, attempts to provoke a reaction, and I imagine, to instigate a debate, and Mr Appleyard has been provoked to react and to take part in the debate – suckered into it, as he might say himself.
In my view, good or bad, that a film can achieve this, or even attempts to achieve this (and by this I mean not just a reflex, visceral reaction but a debate, and indeed a considered deabte) is, surely, refreshing. And if Von Triers attempts this by resorting to undergraduate cyncism, surely this is preferable to the commercial, marketing-led cynicism that inspires the relentless conveyer belt of bland, American teen movies and romantic comedies.

In my last post I also touched on the curious idea of realism, and quoted a line from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, that mentioned the uneasy relationship between ideas and realism. I have been reading Saul Bellow’s short (ish) stories of late and, as James Woods argues in the introduction, Bellow in fact is a writer who managed very well to combine both ideas and realism. In fact Bellow’s writing is essentially about fusion – America and Europe, Ideas and Realism, High and Low and so on. Bellow’s stories, so rich in detail, and especially physical detail generally eschew what Amis has someone describe somewhere in The Information (I did try to find this line, but it’s a big book and the golf is on) as the necessary getting from A to B. A concession to realism that Richard Tull is unwilling to make in his ’difficult’ novel.
Woods argues: “His prose is densely “realistic,” yet it is hard to find in it any of the usual conventions of realism or even storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses – they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another – and his characters do not have obviously “dramatic” conversations. It is almost impossible to find in these stories sentences along the lines of “He put down his drink and left the room.” These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both “archaic” and “radical”.” (Collected Stories, xvii)

It could be argued that this represents the position that Bellow finds himself in – an urban Canadian-American, (maybe not, like Augie March, “Chicago born” but a Chicagoan certainly), but rooted in an archaic European tradition, an intellectual concerned with the rythms and cadences of the American street.
But that’s enough undergraduate waffling for one week, I’m off to watch the golf.

Secular Sundays

efarrelly — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:59:40 +0000

…on a Monday, this week. I thought, when I started to write, that I was done with work, and I am, for the moment, in a moment. I thought that I had done work to the death, but its relationship to literature is fertile ground for discussion – since I’ve started writing about it people have been mentioning books that deal with work, or writers known for their relationship with work, especially with means-to-end work. Someone mentioned Flann O’Brien, like myself a civil servant, and a man whose literary output would put one to shame. That he had time to squeeze in so much writing – the journalism and ficiton – between work and prodigious boozing (although he was a civil servant at a time when you could combine the working and the boozing, saving some time at least) is amazing and admirable. I have mentioned it in earlier posts, but it is what I find so admirable, in fact, about these writers – that they managed to find the time, to steal the time, as William Carlos Williams puts it, to write. In fact, quite often, they managed to turn the work to their advantage, to use it. They demonstrate what Mailer refers to in The Spooky Art about drinking, along the lines that if you are going to drink, at least make use of it in your writing, instead of using it as an excuse not to write. Which is what I was doing on Sunday night – successfully making excuses not to write.
My excuse was that I was watching a movie, The Reader, which qualifies as research for this week’s post, as you will see. This week I did want to write about something other than work. I want to write about realism and, briefly, to defend J.M. Coetzee in a way, against the charge that his novel Life and Times of Michael K lacks verisimiltude. This was made in Sam Jordison’s post in the Guardian books blog. I’m not actually going to defend the novel against the charge, I merely wonder at it, or at the need for it, in literature. I wonder at the need for realism and that a perceived lack of realism is regarded as a fault, even in a novel that announces, by virtue of its title, that it’s likely to be somewhat allegorical and owing a little to previous literary creations. It’s surprising that, after the developments of modernism have long become accepted, even unconscious, practice, that after Brecht, this debate is still going on.
Perhaps Coetzee’s crime is to assume the guise of realism, promising, then, the lazy comforts of ‘credible’ characters doing ‘reasonable’ things and instead delivering characters behaving in a way that serves his ideas. But we need only look at his oeuvre to realise that this is his point, his novels are, as written in Elizabeth Costello, and demonstrated blatantly from that point on, about ideas, and ideas and realism don’t sit together well:
Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations… (Elizabeth Costello, Vintage, P.9)
He isn’t intending to be realistic, he instead is attempting an imaginative literary treatment of certain ideas. The blogger, in this case, complains about the blatant flaunting of his didactic passages, one can only imagine what Jordison makes of Elizabeth Costello and the rest of the later works.
One of Coetzee’s intentions, it seems, is to point out the artificiality of ‘realism’. Indeed the idea of realism is absurd in its own right, the action of a novel is ‘real’, only in so far as it conforms to the conventions and structures of an artifical classification – a book is judged as realism not by its relationship with ‘real life’ but by its relationship to the literary ‘simulacrum’, to real life as conveyed in literature. Realism, whether in fiction or in film, requires an enormous leap of faith on the part of the reader, and like religion, rewards this leap of faith with the comforts of convention. Doing something like acknowledging the reader, or drawing attention to the artifice of the novel or film inspires not merely dislike but anger and hostility, I’ve often found myself in conversations with people who are angry by the very existence of these “tricksy” or “difficult” works, quite often without having read, or viewed them. Just the fact that there are those out there making this kind of art pisses people off.
When I rented Lars von Trier’s Dogville from the local video shop the assistant felt necessary to warn me that the film was not what I might be expecting. He had taken to warning everyone because of all the grief he was getting from Nicole Kidman fans expecting, I don’t know, BMX Bandits or something. Surely, though, I should have been warned last night, for example, when renting The Reader, that Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes would be playing Germans but would be speaking English. In the name of realism, though, they would be speaking English with a German accent, or even more bizarre, that a cast of Germans and Bruno Ganz, would be speaking English in what, we hope at least, were their own accents.