Log

I came here to find the past. I did, and to hell with it.

Of edges and instants, light and shadow, love and work, gesture and speech, silence and dialogue, tension and fear, agitation and pressure: forces of coupling.

“In the film I made about the Straubs you can see there’s really an acute tension in the editing room between Danièle and Jean-Marie, and there’s definitely a bit of fear. Sometimes, Jean-Marie is quite afraid. That’s why he leaves. He says, though without exactly saying it: ‘Danièle, save me, save this image, save the film. I’m afraid. I’m going out for a bit.’ There’s an extreme tension in this film, an enormous resistance. For example, there’s a resistance to the first idea, which is perhaps always a bit deceptive. They say: ‘We’re going to cut the … no, let’s hold off from that, let’s work a bit more.’ Here, we have another kind of resistance: resistance to the machine itself, to the tools of the director.” -Pedro Costa

Two instruments register this “movement by vibration” in Rivette’s film: the line, the ellipsis.

The scenes in Frenhofer’s studio are deceptively continuous.

Extended lags without speech, without narrative action, without sound except for the artist’s breathing and the persistent scratching of drawing utensils on paper, have a lulling effect that disguises all the intermittent fractures: elliptical cuts embedded in the real-time sketching, elaborate switch-outs between shots (Piccoli’s body for Bernard Dufour’s hands, the sketches for the live model, one sketch-in-progress for another), changes of the model’s pose that go unstaged within the supposed continuity.

Rivette once remarked on the crucial role of ellipsis in Dreyer’s cinema, its mesmeric tracking shots abruptly discontinued, its articulations “false” by a few frames: micro-disturbances within and between shots that impress a subtle but palpable strangeness, a sense of “enigma.”

Here Rivette adapts this principle as a means of revealing — of making legible through gaps, breaks, skips, and false accords — the vibratory force of this interaction between artist and model (a principle to which a few transient swells of music alert us).

In the worked-up words of Frenhofer:

“The blood, the fire, the ice — everything that’s in your body.

I’ll get it out of you and put it into this frame, this blank.

I want the invisible. No, it’s not me who wants. It’s the line … the stroke.

Nobody knows what a stroke is, and I’m after it.

I’m running, running. Where am I going? To the sky?

Why not? Why shouldn’t a stroke burst the sky?

No more breasts, no more stomach, no more thighs, no more buttocks!

Whirlwinds, galaxies, the ebb and flow, black holes.

The original hubbub, have you heard of it?

That’s what I’ve always wanted from you.

I want nothing. It’s the painting. You and I are just involved.”

What Rivette’s film presents is a search for a line not as representation but as barometer of a confrontation, the restless traces of which are inscribed on the canvas in spare, overwhelming detail. The final result, the “unknown masterpiece,” is so disturbingly incomplete as to be alive, not the flesh of the model, not a lifelike copy but a “radiation.” And this painting must not be shown, to us or to the film’s other characters, must itself be switched-out with an inferior piece that Frenhofer tosses off and gives to the world. Of the “real” painting we only glimpse, just before it is walled-up behind bricks, a red, tantalizing portion, for a second uncovered by the sheet that hides (renders lacunary) everything else.

Scorsese’s film develops in parallel with Lionel Dobie’s large canvas as the painter builds it up in thick, muscular layers over three weeks leading up to an exhibit.

We see the painting in various stages as the figure of a suspension bridge eventually comes into view, and Scorsese, here working with Nestor Almendros, draws on a wide range of stylistic maneuvers (irises, speed changes, elliptical edits, sweeping and calligraphic camerawork) to establish the space surrounding the work in Dobie’s studio as charged and dynamic.

The work in progress in turn parallels the splitting up of a couple, Dobie (Nolte) and his young assistant and muse Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), who are already on the outs when the film begins, just as the painting has already commenced with bare brushstrokes of black.

The film alternates between moments of creation — to the sounds of rock music, rhythm and blues, and opera booming from Dobie’s tape player — and moments where Dobie humiliates himself with Paulette either in private or in public.

Finding excuses to stumble into her bedroom, giving her advice on how to handle her troubles with a new boyfriend, offering feedback on her own fledgling craft, Dobie is as desperate to hang on to Paulette and to sleep with her again as he is to finish the painting. And Scorsese gives form to this feeling of abject desire by conveying the intensity of Dobie’s look, fleeting glimpses that single out and examine details of Paulette’s figure and gestures.

Two pivotal moments occur near the canvas as Dobie is in the midst of painting it.

In the first, Paulette marches to Dobie’s workspace, apparently ready to declare something decisive, perhaps that she is leaving New York. Yet Dobie, immersed in his painting, doesn’t notice her, and he doesn’t hear her shouts over the music (Bob Dylan performing a live version of “Like a Rolling Stone”). She goes to turn down the volume but then stops and observes his inspired fit of productivity, the “live” music matched exuberantly to the images of Dobie working paint into the picture in half-controlled but acute brushstrokes, his whole arm swinging from the shoulder.

Caught in the charged environment of Dobie’s work, her sadness and frustration temporarily evaporate; an eroticized sense of pleasure falls over her, the result of a mysterious seduction effected by the music, Dobie’s inspired movements, the color and texture of the paint (and given the implied history of the couple, we understand this isn’t the first time this has happened). This intensely lyrical moment seems to convince Paulette to stay in her situation for a while longer, an upshot that Scorsese underscores with a subtle continuity of gesture between successive shots from Dobie’s brushstroke to Paulette, now in the next scene, applying lip gloss for a night out.

In the second moment, Lionel, close to completing his canvas, has a harsh and painful exchange with Paulette, who is taking her things from his loft. The same Dylan recording plays, but Lionel’s brushwork is more labored, deliberate. In this scene, we never see Dobie’s brush make contact with the surface of the work. When he paints, the camera watches him coldly from behind the canvas, and when we do see the face of the painting, Lionel pauses to bitterly explain a thing or two to Paulette. As she walks away, his brushwork becomes more violent and he mutters an insult under his breath. He furiously smears a mix of black and mint green onto the canvas with his bare hand, as if abusing it, until he restrains himself.

At the opening of his show, Dobie, standing alone, eyes the finished work and is pleasantly disturbed by the hand of a young woman reaching into the frame and squeezing his — hoping some of his talent will rub off, as she nervously explains. In these closing moments, Dobie’s acutely perceptive look returns to caress the girl’s neck, shoulder, and lips. “I need an assistant,” he tells her. Procol Harum’s plangent “A Whiter Shade of Pale” returns and dominates the sound track, not so much bookending the film as renewing the conditions for Dobie’s creative process, the relationship it requires, as destructive on both parties as it is galvanizing.

The audition scene, occurring forty minutes into the 1976 cut, consists of two movements, each marked by a somber Bo Harwood song.

Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara) and the cocktail waitress make preparations — music, costuming, makeup. Cosmo selects the music with care, settling on a piano ballad, and when he emerges from backstage and comes to a rest at the foot of a staircase, holding a pose as smoke coils up from his cigarette, it’s as if he has triggered a music cue for his own performance.

In the seconds that follow, the music combines with the lighting and decor and the gestures of Cosmo to form a certain mood.

“Accompaniment” doesn’t quite capture the sense in which these elements intermingle and, at least temporarily, balance one another — the ringing phone somewhere off in the background that goes unanswered, the lens flares, the color suffusion (reds passing into pinks and blues and violets and back again), the gently roaming camera, the way Cosmo carries himself, the vocal shaping of the lyrics.

Notice how the intoned phrase “alone I sit, for the moment…” is timed with an intense flare of light that contracts and dilates as Cosmo languidly moves through it, the piano momentarily silent. Then the clicks of his footsteps down into the main sitting area introduce the next stretch of music.

Meanwhile the film cuts (roughly on the word “desire,” rendered as four syllables) to shots of the waitress in the dressing room, applying makeup and trying on poses, getting into character.

It’s hard for us to know precisely what these two people desire, however. Are we watching a legitimate audition? A seduction attempt? Something of both (after all, doesn’t the one entail the other)? Is Cosmo looking for some action to take his mind off of his recently acquired $23,000 gambling debt? Here as elsewhere in the film, mood and atmosphere are primary and the dramatic causes and effects are resonantly uncertain.

When the waitress finally hits the stage, we’re shown a reaction shot of Cosmo: the camera follows his hand as it falls from his cheek to the table, where his fingers drum out an anxious beat.

In a long take, the camera, perched just behind and above Cosmo, watches the girl prance and jump from side to side, framing her mostly from the midriff down.

“No, you don’t have to jump anymore, sweetheart. Just walk up and down.”

The confusion here as to the desires and stakes of the scene is heightened by the play of onstage/offstage, a motif especially dear to Cassavetes’s work. Still in the same extended take, following the lyrics “and when the time is right,” the girl steps down from the stage and approaches Cosmo, her face now dropping into the frame. She raises both arms, letting her gauzy robe fall open, but at the top of her pose, her eyes suddenly shift to the space behind the camera, alerting both Cosmo and the viewer to the presence of someone else in the club, to an “outside” to this vaguely intimate interaction.

Cut to a shot of Rachel (Azizi Johari), Cosmo’s girlfriend and employee, the most popular of the club’s performers. Backlit by a flaring yellow spotlight, she appears confused by this scene as well. After sizing things up, she lunges at the girl and Cosmo tries to restrain her. The scuffle is presented as a flurry of barely legible, out-of-focus movements and a strange medley of rustling and crashing noises (Cassavetes and Harwood’s modest foley work).

The first Harwood tune ends and a second begins, this one a touch more melancholic.

Rachel now lies on her back, trying to catch her breath, not speaking, refusing the drink Cosmo puts to her lips.

What the scene offers, in its modulation of moods, is an ambiguous collision and overlap of roles public and private, of love and work. “I’m a club owner, for chrissakes,” Cosmo tries to explain to Rachel. “I deal in girls.” The interior of the club is no inert setting for this confusion. Its shifting fields of light and color depending on camera movement are implicated in Cassavetes’s mise en scène as as an active force, as a presence that imbues events in the strongest sense.

All this compels us to wonder just what goes on inside the Crazy Horse West, the place Cosmo, as proprietor and producer, is desperate to protect.

With each viewing of the film it appears more and more that Cassavetes injects the club’s garish atmosphere and ostensibly lame stage productions with a poetic significance requiring our diligent attention, our vigorous “imagination,” as Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts) repeatedly demands as if adapting the prologue of King Henry V, its famous apology for an “unworthy scaffold.”

On display, then, in the work of Cassavetes is not, as is sometimes assumed, a host of slapdash improvisations failing to pique our senses — “freedom” without much structure. As Kent Jones well observes, “Cassavetes’s cinema is acute on a second-by-second basis: To look away is to risk skipping the equivalent of a sentence, if not an entire paragraph (or stanza).”

. . .

. . .

“Try to remember that alpha is another word for passive.

Visualize sitting in an empty theater, in front of a blank screen.”

Only yesterday there were kings here … 

. . .

. . .

“Big screen, in color . . . European films, double feature.

  NT$300 each, 900 for three. 

Up there, eleventh floor. An empty building is the best for this.”

The question that cuts across each of Cassavetes’s films and stage productions, eloquently posed and explored by George Kouvaros in his book-length study of the director: “Where does it happen?”

Where does the scene begin, end, gain momentum, fizzle out, lurch in a new direction? Where do its stakes become apparent, slip away, alter, reemerge? Where do its shifting emotional energies crystallize in performance? Where does all the commotion attain to a single, discrete event with its own parameters?

In the case of Mabel (Rowlands), where does her “insanity” crop up and become something that must be dealt with, something requiring a “sane” course of action?

Such a moment is indeed hard to mark but it becomes legible as an accretion of gestures, bodily tics (Mabel repeatedly hooking a thumb over her shoulder), pauses in conversation, jostles and flicks of the camera . . .

We sense a breaking point is looming not just because of Mabel’s hysterical behavior but because of the nervousness the potential of her behaving “insanely” rouses in those around her, in particular her husband (Falk), whose protestations to his co-workers that she’s “not crazy” alert us to a history of abnormal behavior that we haven’t seen a sure sign of yet (and since the other characters are hardly composed themselves, it’s hard to know precisely what constitutes normality, sanity, or maturity within the film’s world).

“It might well be that, despite Cassavetes’s claim to be interested only in people, it is not the subjectivity of these emotions that is central to his films but rather the traces they leave one the faces of the actors, traces that can be revealed only through the camera’s scrutiny. The end result is the sense of an interior dimension only glimpsed through a haze of accumulated actions, minor movements, and expressions that the camera struggles to decipher.” (George Kouvaros)

Notice (you can’t miss it) how, after the second set of murders, the horizon becomes so prominent, so active, visually and conceptually.

The more the film opens out into wide spaces, the more it also closes in (and not just in terms of the plot, the ill-fated lovers, the law on their heels).  

Several late compositions look almost like Rothko canvases — flat, luminous, the strip of the horizon either marked by the topography or traced by dust billowing up behind by the car. And the car, even when it barrels towards the camera, the effect, the impression is less a matter of distance being crossed than a matter of scale, the object simply getting bigger on the picture plane. Freedom and boundedness compete in the same shots. 

   . . .

   . . .

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that there are two basic ways of staging and shooting bodily movement in martial arts cinema,

a “montage” approach and a “mise en scène” approach, one stressing a synthetic impression of the action through rhythmic and often chaotic juxtaposition (think of King Hu’s near-abstractions),

A Touch of Zen

the other stressing the physical veracity of the scene, the movements shown (as authentic and free of “special effects”) in longer takes and often from greater distances (think of Bruce Lee in medium-long shot, or think of the purity and pictorial precision of Lau Kar-leung’s choreography).

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

And let’s say — since the montage (Eisenstein)/long take (Bazin) opposition is, in truth, a convenient falsehood — that a filmmaker as virtuosically capable as Tsui Hark entwines the two in his martial collaborations with the no less virtuosic Jet Li.

Mann’s style is, once again, anxiously precise, but the volatility this time is amplified. 

Cutting that accelerates, like a quickening pulse, around and through pivotal moments. 

Not to be confused with the choppy disorientation that Bordwell keeps complaining about.

An onslaught of angles, an intense collage of surfaces and textures,

and graphic collisions in constant, irresolvable tension with a continuity scheme.   

Something about the feel of the HD video: the blurred motion, whether generated by the camera (whip pans, readjustments, handheld turbulence) or gestures of performance, leaves a more palpable and durable trace on the screen, which is more like a canvas on which we witness half-controlled slashes and smudges of the palette knife. 

Other formal games Mann likes to play: “unmotivated” pulls of focus, piercingly loud gunfire (here accompanied by staccato flickers, the cuts sometimes embedded therein imperceptibly), alternations in which shot-countershot takes on subtle, incremental micro-inflections (the standard over-the-shoulder setup transformed into a quietly virtuosic play of focus, negative space, and internal reframing using the blurred figure closest to the lens). 

Something about the grain of the video image, more salient in some stretches than others. 

At times it works as a “confuser” of things, bodies, environments, all becoming granular.

 . . .

 . . .

    this time   

A poetics of overlap, superimposition, begins in the opening credits . . .

It resurfaces in the body of the film, doubling the “hero,” shaping his course in multiple and opposing directions at once,

as in this striking shot-to-shot transition through glass (doors being freighted with significance in Bresson): Michel receding into the background, having just hopped a trolley, and Michel also emerging towards the foreground . . .

These multiplications are never fully recuperated by the transcendent aspect of Michel’s “arc” in the film. They remain, stubbornly, as projected possibilities along the “strange path” that unfolds across the film, a path which, however spiritual, is bound up with material complexities, a mass of precise but ambiguous gestures that refuse convenient explanation and remain fundamentally, incontrovertibly, mysterious.