18. Visual Sensations: Film and Dance reviewed by Pippa Hammet.
As the great George Balanchine once wrote: “Choreographic movement is used to produce visual sensations.”
The choreographer Cheryl S. and I met for coffee last week, and I brought up this basic matter of dance aesthetics (having cinematic FX in mind, as I often do), but all she wanted to talk about was our handsome Master Raro. I think she’s another infatuate. “Girlfriend,” I advised her, “join the club, but he’s out of bounds for a relationship.” She took it like a veteran, although Cheryl is only in her early twenties, I believe. I explained that Master has had so many on-again, off-again needy-clingy types, he’s basically celibate now. Besides, as our boss Louise Ebersdorf’s chauffeur, he may be what the French refer to as an “angel of death”. (Think Proust’s Agostinelli. Or ill-starred actor Patrick Dewaere’s unresponsive beloved.) Our Master is best regarded by admirers as a “visual sensation” himself. Period. Plus, he’s a very good driver. Louise hired Master partly because he is a dancer from East Texas (specifically its rose-capital, Tyler) whom she once employed for her ballet company, and she herself is from West Texas (desert bloom Odessa). They also both have German ancestry.
Dear Cheryl explained that growing up in St. Petersburg (Florida) and being the youngest of a family of twelve bred independence in her early, so getting a scholarship to H.S.P.A. was her way to fend for herself. But now she would like a steady. I told her to concentrate on her art, since she’s very talented. Cheryl wanted to know what growing up on the Pacific Rim had been like. “Often cold,” I told her. “The Pacific Ocean is great for reading on the beach, but not for dips until high summer. Our two Poles are melting fast. That’s why I came East to study Popular Culture and warm my hands before High Art, learning about the ballet from dearest Louise and present company.” I asked Cheryl about her assistant, the all-American red-haired Sandy, who really intrigues me because he’s into putting dance on screen. She said that Sandy is gay but discreet. In other words, he plays around but shows taste in his partners. But Cheryl thinks our Sandy may also be taken with Master. Oh, my. The list grows.
As luck would have it, Louise gave me a night off, and I had a movie date with everyone’s favorite that very evening. Dear Master and I went downtown, just the two of us, to Film Forum for a new 4K restoration of Last Year at Marienbad, script by French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and realization by Alain Resnais, whom a famous character in a modern American literary classic compared favorably with Andy Warhol! Master and I are big admirers of Resnais, especially of his ability to transform stage effects into film equivalents. For example, his movie of Not on the Lips, a 1920s jazz operetta that may have inspired Cole Porter; and his Melo, a brilliant conversion of stage drama into cinema that is right up there with Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud in our opinion. Master informed me that Resnais was a big fan of American Musical Comedy and especially of Ethel Merman. (Another Cole Porter connection?)
The 1961 Marienbad is about the slow, mutual immersion of two guests at a lavish European hotel in a shared fantasy-memory of erotic complicity and romantic escape. The male (designated as “X” in the screenplay, played by Giorgio Albertazzi) eventually convinces the woman (Delphine Seyrig, who plays “A”) that last year they had met at yet another luxurious spa and now must elope according to the prior plan, rescuing A from a deadening relationship with her Companion or Husband (Sacha Pitoëff, called “M” in the script). A initially resists, but little by little she recognizes X’s descriptions of their former encounters as indeed predictive of a shared destiny. At the end of the film, A leaves the hotel with X, abandoning M. The arc of the movie thus charts the incursion of one character’s (X’s) dream-like obsessions into the mental space of another (A), resulting in effective change out in the real world, rather like that feeling you sometimes get while day-dreaming that your subconscious life is in control of some of your most immediate daily actions, choices, and goals: thus, human volition is not what we usually take it to be. Predestination has a certain reality, and certain psychic forces are in control of us. It’s like that line from a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett: “We are mere pawns in the game of skill and chance which is being played.” Some viewers in 2019 might see X as a stalker; I see him as a Fantomas-psychologist rescuing A by summoning repressed memories and freeing her from a form of mental self-enslavement. Seyrig plays the woman like a silent film diva equipped with a little-girl voice that begs for rescue.
Alain Resnais has used Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay to explore varieties of mental reflex and instinctual defense in film scenes that expand the language of movie acting, direction, and editing. It’s as though a special formal and stylistic idiom had to be devised to make manifest various automatisms of the mind. Master and I were especially struck with two scenes that make such mental operations knowable through a kind of cinematic choreography. The scenes create sensational directorial effects equivalent to those that Balanchine identified in his own stage art of the ballet.
Master agrees with me that the scenes work because they take place within a locale that the audience comes to trust through Resnais’ montage: the rooms, corridors, and grounds of the vast hotel (and its complementary version from “last year”) as rendered by Sacha Vierny’s extraordinary black-and-white cinematography. Shifts in mental focus and physical action can be clearly foregrounded by Resnais because we in the audience have come to recognize certain settings as relatively stable and resonant, as though the mind imposes such an order as a defense against spatial and temporal disorientation. This is especially striking since Resnais used three European hotels in his filming, building a composite of locations to represent the present spa as well as the remembered one. (We learn that A and X had agreed “last year” to meet in twelve months and then possibly elope.) Even when Resnais’ individual images are sometimes quasi-surreal (and some are), the viewer is able to assemble a consistent topography of the film’s locales through a type of cinematic collage.
The first scene we were struck by takes place in an intimate salon at night. X and A sit at opposite sides of the room, she to our right on the screen, he to our left. From behind, without being seen initially by the couple, M enters ominously and slowly walks toward them. The tempo of his approach is insistent, as though his looming threat to the growing relation of A and X is now to be made literal. Is he a victim of jealousy, in the novelistic Robbe-Grillet sense? But M stops abruptly and retreats, exiting the center of the shot and ending the building suspense. Throughout this sequence, X has been describing in voice-over a memory of just such an approach “last year” when he had queried A about M: “This is about your life. . . . You have to go away with me. . . . Who was that? Your husband?” We watch an immediate situation and hear about its precedent: two time-schemes in parallel. The visual entry of M becomes itself a metaphor for those powerful incursions of memory and fantasy that we see throughout the film and which will apparently defeat M in the renewed relation of A and X. The effect of M’s entrance and retreat is eerie since we are seeing a mechanism of mind and film laid bare. M can represent both the “return of the id” and the reality principle simultaneously. Resnais accomplishes this double exposure through visual composition and movement in conjunction with the Robbe-Grillet spoken text.
The second Marienbad scene is a celebrated walk of A and X along a hotel corridor while he tries to convince her of their prior meeting and she tries to escape his seduction. At one point, A involuntarily “corrects” one of X’s memories, suggesting that she indeed has had a prior encounter with him. He persists: “No! . . . I hear your voice. . . . I loved you! . . . It probably was not by force!” Resnais has the actors walk in exaggerated slow motion while X interrogates A and spins his tale. (When A tries to escape eventually, she breaks into an allegro dash.) As they traverse the corridor, their alternation between stop-start and the slo-mo walk must occur at least seven times, while the camera backtracks down the hall before the couple, stopping when they stop, moving when they move. At one point in the extended pursuit, we see a hotel worker off to one side gathering up newspapers in a reading room. He is moving in a naturalistic style and tempo, while the couple’s movement continues to be stylized to a synchronized adagio pulse. I must confess the contrast took the top of my head off, Virginia Woolf-style. (And the effect is accomplished by the actors, not by changing the camera’s motor speed.) When A eventually breaks free of the corridor and of her pursuer, she escapes onto a nearby balcony to confront . . . the persistent vista of a formal garden at last year’s hotel, washed out in blindingly overexposed cinematography. No escape for A that time.
The movie’s sense of psychological entrapment within an ongoing erotic pursuit is only possible because the hotel’s walls and environs make invasive phenomena ultra-visible against their background -- when they are not themselves scenically invasive through Resnais’ bold editing. The only current filmmaker who practices on this level is Robert Beavers. Beavers and Resnais represent unsurpassed formal mastery in the editing room. (Next year MoMA will present a Beavers retrospective. Master recommends the filmmaker’s 2013 Listening to the Space in My Room.) At the end of Marienbad, when A and X take their leave, we sense that their escape has its conventional, melodramatic side, something of a banal anti-climax. The spectacular persuasions toward escape have been so much more interesting that a common “adulterous” resolution to their story. This irony is very French.
This week, after recently enjoying Danil Trifonov’s rendering of the Schumann Piano Concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (courtesy of a ticket from Florian), I decided I needed more pianism, so I opted to see the new film Rocketman for its tribute to Elton John’s instrumental skills. I’m happy to report that Cheryl’s Sandy was my date. He and I generally agreed that the movie was only a self-indulgent and overblown biopic. Sandy called it a multi-million-dollar pity-party re the famed rock star’s early years of struggle and heartbreak. (Sandy’s own gay adolescence in South Carolina was far more challenging. Elton John got off comparatively lightly in England. Sandy is not personally embittered. He says most artists are abused by their social surround.) I was a little more generous to Rocketman, finding some of the cartoon characterizations to be handled with speed and efficiency by director Dexter Fletcher. Fletcher was a child actor (he was Baby Face in the 1976 film Bugsy Malone -- the one with the all-child cast -- and an adolescent Caravaggio in the 1986 Derek Jarman film). But by the time Rocketman reaches production numbers depicting John’s obligatory suicide attempt and a rather tame Studio 54 orgy, the cartoon has exhausted itself in cliché. Musical sequences in movies require fresh invention and plenty of it from beginning to end.
At least Sandy and I had a chance to talk afterward at a late-night diner. We agreed that the choreography of the film (by Adam Murray) is sacrificed upon the current requirement for plot advancement and constant temporal transition. We move through John’s career so speedily that no song and dance number has a chance to develop. Between “Honky Cat” and “Pinball Wizard” Murray’s work devolves into flashdance-for-camera. Very MTV. The choreographed numbers take place against backgrounds (a suburban street, a fairground, an urban arcade) that are so fleeting and insubstantial they contribute almost nothing affective to the dance action and fail to develop as design elements or art direction. The film’s non-stop movement hides a type of conceptual stasis, an absence of cinematic time and place in contrast to what Resnais achieves toward Marienbad’s precisely discriminated visual sensations. No A.T.: Affective Topography.
If you wish to see a much better depiction of youthful rise in the rock world, take in Max Minghella’s Teen Spirit, with its fine central performance by Elle Fanning. The musical sequences are vibrant (three choreographers are credited), the film has an immersive sound design, and there is one memorable supporting role played by the splendid Rebecca Hall as a recording company scout. I hope to see more directorial work from the young Minghella. He responds visually to today’s music, and he obviously loves capturing the spontaneity of performance, whether acting, singing, or dancing. And much of his movie seems to take place somewhere real: memorable locations on the Isle of Wight.
Sandy and I agree that too many films today take place in a no-man’s-land and develop a non-topography. Think of Red Sparrow’s flash-forward international locales and the funhouse fantasia of the new John Wick movie (Parabellum), both of which use references to ballet for suggestions of threatening violence. In the Wick sequel, the dancers are seen warming up in a nightclub-dance academy: ticky-tacky terrorists. The “choreography” is by the real-life ballerina Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet. (In Red Sparrow, the “choreography” was by Justin Peck, also of N.Y.C.B. J. Peck’s work will soon be on screen in the new Spielberg version of West Side Story, where the dancing killers are Sharks and Jets.) What is N.Y.C.B. breeding – a generation of choreographic gunsels for hire? And in the future, I understand that we may get a movie entitled Ballerina, about another cold-blooded female assassin en pointe. Dance art is now not only metaphorically lethal; its tiny dancers are reduced to properties or decor. Parker Tyler would have been fascinated with this filmic development – Dance Me Deadly.
Despite all the technology of today’s movies (Dolby sight and sound being the most obvious examples), our commercial filmmakers have difficulty showing anything like recognizable reality. Sometimes their elaborate sound designs even obscure the dialogue. And Sandy and I agree that before you can employ fantasy and imagination, some relation to a recognizable world – a topography – has to be established on the screen. This skill is missing throughout much modern cinema, especially in the pop-comics movies featuring superheroes and interplanetary worlds. Perhaps such a persistent irreality and the misrepresentation of ballet on our movie screens do not matter to younger choreographers. That way leads to Black Swan hyperbole. Dance in today’s films can surely be more than a fight-club blur.
I asked Sandy what I should watch to see how dance can be put on film. He suggested a negative example available on YouTube: the excerpted Divertissement from the 1967 movie that Balanchine made of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sandy pointed out that here Balanchine uses some interesting contrapuntal dance effects and some off-center asymmetry in his handling of the corps de ballet. I should look at the way they appear (or disappear) in the film version. I watched. The movie is shot frontally for the most part, and perhaps because of limited time and money, the display of the dance is partly obscured in the framing and cutting. (I think there is just one overhead crane-shot in the sequence.)
I was then able to go to the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to see the ballet live during N.Y.C.B.’s recent spring season. I loved it. So vintage Walt Disney in its tropes! And in the second act I saw on stage exactly what Sandy meant: Balanchine has the six corps couples of the Divertissement displayed not only three against three but sometimes four against two, so the stage design is indeed briefly unbalanced, even when the leads come on and we see four couples against three. How to film this so that the deliberate asymmetry is clear? Split-screen? More crane shots? More cutting?
The question is germane because balance is a theme in the second act – especially in the wonderful Wedding Pas de deux, where the ballerina’s physical security and balance are dramatized in one choreographic invention after another, and her cavalier is right there to help facilitate and resolve such tensions in the duet. Also, Sandy says that there was once a quartet of young men who entered in the middle of the pas de deux and who demonstrated their group achievement of balance in deep arabesques penchées. (Balanchine cut the passage early in the first season.) So the Divertissement and the Wedding Pas may suggest that a marriage involves achieving symmetry and balance in conjugal relations. If you film these dances, you have to include the “visual sensations” that state this theme. That’s the challenge.
Maybe you would need a more substantial background for Theseus’ court or ballroom, so that the imaginative dance designs could resonate clearly against scenic particulars: a Resnais-like Affective Topography. I know that Balanchine planned on switching backgrounds within a projected ballet for MGM during his Hollywood sojourn. (It was never filmed.) That would mean coordinating dance detail precisely against art direction and cinematography. Complicated and challenging. Sandy and I must talk!
P.H.
__________________
Comments