Absences

Insofar as one may understand cinema to be a pictorial form of communication; i.e., a medium with a number of two-dimensional surfaces, planes, areas sliding upon one another, like locomotive compartments, in a single-minded pursuit of a destination (in the case of the locomotive: a physical location, in the case of cinema's slides or frames: an abstract notion), it isn't difficult to appreciate why this pursuit is conducted both in space and time (as all pursuits must be). The fact, therefore, of a single film moving with time or within time is integral to the fulfillment of a number of ideas in film: the notion of a narrative itself is built on the central conceit of a present, its past, its immediate future, and the accompanying changes in the universe of the film within these units of time - someone comes, someone goes, others appear out-of-nowhere, more disappear, the hinges of a door come loose, skin wrinkles, the parts of a machine rust, the song on a vinyl record is over and the third song from it now plays, birds halt chirping and the crickets appear - as such, cinema always functions in a set of recurring appearances-disappearances; that it is the one artform that can engage elements of photography (after all, a picture captures not merely someone's presence, but also the absence of the rest of the world not in it), as also, of time-keeping (the ticking of a clock is the ominous soundtrack to all the transformations in the world around us). Of course, the idea in itself may seem a bit complicated, but then great filmmakers consummate it through the simplest of touches; below, two stills from a dysfunctional family from Takashi Miike's debut film, Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) - the younger dissenting brother appears for a family prayer, and as the parents pray in the foreground (the prayer itself becomes the metaphor for time, a device for keeping time), he:

Balthus’ Young Girls

 

 

There may not exist a prospect that is simultaneously so enticing and yet so intimidating for a man than the sight of a woman with her legs spread slightly and strategically, so as to reveal only a slender schism of uncertainty between them. A number of Balthus protagonists were young girls (to him, their pre-youth seemed eternal, if only through its malleability, as opposed to womanhood, which seemed conclusive, and thus, destructible) who he painted partly as perverse fantasies, and partly as objects that provoked continuous bewilderment in him. It is now a cliché to present women as deposits of continous enigma – clichéd to the extent that a lot of crass humour is a yield of the inability of the male section of the species to ‘understand’ its female foil – but the question still remains: how does this enigma manifest itself pictorially? How can undeniable beauty also seem cruddy, shady and basically, shifty? The answer may lie in Balthus, as it may not in Kar Wai Wong – for while the former looks at youthful romantic subjects with suspicion; the latter looks at suspicious objects with youthful romance. As such, a Balthus female will always have turned her face away from the painter’s gaze; either that, or she will furtively steal away from it the tunnels of disclosure: her eyes, by either looking downwards, or even more shamelessly, just closing them.

A Balthus girl is usually resident on a couch or a bed with crumpled bedcovers (still life in a Balthus painting is always suggestive of a past that existed before the moment the painting depicts; much like film noir). At the very moment of the painting’s doing, her legs have begun to spread apart, like a swan’s wings as it begins to take flight – shaped like derelict scrawny archways somewhere in ancient Greece. The darkness of the schism, the tiny separation between the two arches, could either be the greatest darkness mankind may ever witness, an eternal purgatory, an invitation, but such that of a venus flytrap; or it maybe the land of ultimate bliss, as it is conventionally thought of as. But with women, who knows?

Impressions

Selections from a frame-pluck collection:

Humiliations

A Generation (1955)/ Andrzej Wajda

This still from the film is particularly essential, because it combines in a single frame innumerable ideas, all distilled through visual symbols. Tadeusz Lomnicki, who looks like a Hollywood leading-man type from the early 50s, is a Polish rebel who up till this singular moment in the film has hokey ideas about rebellion (rebellion as a medium of courtship/rebellion as masculinity), but deposited in the office of a Polish officer who is on the Nazi side, he finally understands the stakes-at-hand. In this frame, he stands with his back to the Polish map, helpless and defeated, as the baton of the officer casts a diagonal shadow that runs like a scar through his face. There are humiliations through domination of various sorts : the map (territorial occupation), Polish worker (personal insult), baton-shadow (looming armed threat) - all of them coalescing to form a picture of wholesome imposition. Ofcourse, the officer is an off-screen presence, and is, ironically, Polish himself. In the next scene, Lomnicki and his friends sneak up to the joint where the depraved officer's predictably indulging in drunken revelry, and in a revelatory moment of the Micheal Corleone-mode, shoot at him multiple times; in the process, becoming real 'men'.

Compartments

It is always interesting to see directors employ architecture as a compositional grid in a shot. Besides the obvious strict modernist influence in such a method, there is also the small matter of a cinema frame pictorially resembling the page of a comic - with characters conducting their conversation across separate panels. Following are a few such recommendations,

The Thin Blue Line(1988)/ Errol Morris

Vengeance is Mine(1979)/ Shohei Imamura

Harakiri(1962)/ Masaki Kobayashi

Vengeance is Mine(1979)/ Shohei Imamura

X-Ray(1974)/ Krysztof Kieslowski

Jimmy Corrigan/Chris Ware

Tourneur's Scope

Days of Glory (1944)/ Jacques Tourneur

Academic interest : one of the first instances in cinema in which the bullet being fired and subsequently locating its target, i.e. the entire trajectory of the projectile, is featured in one continuous shot.

Cultural interest : the victim; the sniper in the crosshairs is aiming at someone off-screen, someone we will never know. He does not intend any harm whatsoever to the person who eventually shoots him. Such pandering of an ironic circumstance, and the foreboding sense of being 'caught unawares' are typical Tourneur tics.

Sizing Up

Men filmed in/through doorways are always interesting. The doorway-shot, done mostly with a wide-angle and frontally, frames bodies in a manner that they seem to radiate phantom glow and the camera axis becomes a suction-hole for all the neighbourhood luminosity. It is a wholly corporeal composition, because its subject is reduced to a mere outline with a homogeneous interior, a dark smudge that resembles human shape; a cut-paper portrait. As the audience of the doorway shot, the most we are capable of is physiognomy. But it’s interesting also because of its Vitruvian capabilities – there is hardly another shot that sizes up the proportions of a man (thus, manly) body better. If this shot is fundamentally macho posturing, then the actor supplies the posture, but it is purely the composition that supplies the machismo. Because it is a frontal, and not a profile, the face ceases to be important, and the body takes precedence. Mitchum, a beast with shoulders as broad as the cinemascope, would be the ideal subject of a doorway shot.

Some doorways,

Pyaasa(1957)/ Guru Dutt

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly(1966)/ Sergio Leone

The Searchers(1956)/ John Ford

La Notte(1961)/ Michelangelo Antonioni

Altered States(1980)/ Ken Russell

Altered States(1980)/ Ken Russell

Conversations

If faced with a pointed query in that direction, a lot of the great directors would confess to their biggest dilemma onset being the staging of a conversation. A dynamic, or for cinema’s purposes, let’s call it a kinetic object, can seldom present a challenge as overwhelming as a stationery one. Purely through the nature of the motion it is occupied in the performance of, the kinetic object will have already suggested its material and at most times, its psychological reality. Different aesthetic schemas applied, for instance, to the act of a character running cannot alter the basic fact of the shot: that the character is running. He exists in the state of a run, and no matter how one shoots him; the nature of his athletic feat is open to neither negation, nor affirmation. The most a cinema director can offer to answer (in psychological terms) is: what is the character running from? But even then, running is running, and cannot, even in the hands of a great director, suggest any other material state of being. 

When humans deposit themselves around a table for a conversation, however, they can become bundles of suggestion. Cinema is at its most fundamental, the art of gestures – those fleeting moments of supreme truth in which a character, if only for a transitory moment, lays out his entire being and makes it available to vulgar intrusion. The question for any great director, then, is to devise an aesthetic scheme that ensures that the camera does not fail to document any of these transient moments of revelation – a sideways glance, a restless leg, a quiver of the lip, a twitch of the nose. 

Ofcourse, cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what is not, but with a conversation with a number of characters sitting around the table, the more crucial matter is of who’s in the frame and who’s not. A conversation might, infact, be the toughest of scenes to shoot, because the reaction shot to each shot may contain a different emotional response, or each new line of dialogue may create varying levels of commotion around the table – therefore, each new line of dialogue or even a simple glance may demand its own camera angle, length of lens, and camera-subject distance. What may be revealed in a close-up may forever remain concealed in the recesses of a long-shot; also vice-versa. 

While kinetic motion may most literally fulfill the purpose of cinema, i.e. to capture moving objects, it is in the conversations that the real challenge for a cinema director lies. Because it is easy to shoot action, but it is darned difficult to suggest it.

Some conversations around tables,

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)/ Martin Scorsese

 

Close-Up (1990)/ Abbas Kiarostami

Dancer in the Dark (2000)/ Lars Von Trier

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)/ Jacques Tourneur

In a Lonely Place (1950)/ Nicholas Ray

Whirlpool (1949)/ Otto Preminger

Castle in the Sky (1988)/ Hayao Miyazaki

In the Mood for Love (2000)/ Wong Kar-Wai

The Edge of Heaven (2007)/ Fatih Akin