New Voice

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.