32. Affective Topographies: Film Reviews by Cheryl S.
Life and art are full of mysteries! Some backgrounds resist filling in. Like, where were Albertine and Paco on the night when Master Raro and I investigated the Cat Lab on the 35th floor of Ebersdorf Tower? We’ve never figured that one out. And what lies behind the brilliance (and I mean that sincerely!) of the new dance that my Sandy has made for Master to solo prepared piano music (no. 12) of John Cage? Is Sandy now also infatuated? As Pippa would say, “Get in line, mister!”
Sandy’s dance (Oestrus) is relatively brief, but it packs a punch. The way I see it, Sandy has asked Master to reveal a gallery of erotic vulnerabilities: in how many ways can one be immediately open to the amorous? It’s like those moments in a classic gangster movie where the cornered felon voluptuously takes the Feds’ bullets – here, the arrows of desire -- and in sensual slow motion. Or, like assessing the effect of your caresses upon your partner-in-love? Imagine all of this accounted for in classically based dance movement, a full capitulation before the erotic in precise, aching detail. A dance Beyond Porn. I expected to be made jealous by the solo, but it is so complete a statement, all I could do was assent to its definitive delivery of itself. (And long to see it again!). There is so little true, fresh eroticism in the arts; when it is discovered it has to be hailed.
New audiences think that a dance has to be flashy in order to be “New”, but Sandy’s dance is so subtle, so tenderly observed, so moment-by-moment. It is the exact opposite of those acrobatic-adagio pas de deux that deface our stages with surface sheen all over the world today, usually in the name of something sensational or novel. Oestrus gives one hope. I congratulated both Sandy and Master with big hugs (as our Russians say). Master has hidden depths, and Sandy is My Boy! They must help me locate the right plotline for Mme Beach’s full-length ballet: she seems to lean on Hollywood films set in the American West.
To celebrate, Sandy and I went to see the new Sam Mendes film, 1917. It is about a near-suicidal mission in World War One France, with two young British soldiers sent across a battle-torn landscape to deliver a message to troops about to launch an attack on German forces. The German command has set a trap that will lead to the deaths of sixteen hundred men if the warning is not delivered in time. We watch the efforts of the two messengers recorded by genius cinematographer Roger Deakins in what appears to be a continuous shot through one afternoon, a night, and the following morning when the planned attack will commence.
The underlying mood is contemplative throughout the movie. Its audience at the AMC Lincoln Plaza complex was utterly silent before the screen. My complaints are fairly niggling. One, sequences of gunfire can sometimes resemble a video game’s hunt-and-shoot mayhem. Two, there is a boy’s-own-adventure element in the setup of the story, although this may be a deliberate irony since the stakes are high and the movie sets out to show how war is not at all fun and games. Other than that, Mendes has to be applauded. There are a number of jaw-dropping sequences. How CGI produced the crash of a fighter plane into a barn is beyond me. The continuity in the camerawork also beggars analysis.
I was especially impressed by three sequences. There is a night bombardment of a French town – all profiled archways and endless explosions – that you won’t forget anytime soon. (The sound design is excellent, the musical score possibly unnecessary.) There is a scene in a roiling river dusted with cherry tree blossoms that arrives right where it should in the movie. And there is a sequence in the back of a transport truck where one of the characters (who has just gone through a traumatic life-and-death experience) has to listen to fellow troops grouse about the things men in war always complain about. Hearing their talk through combat-baptized ears is surreal. And darkly comic. This is great filmmaking, produced well beyond any CGI trickery. The movie will undoubtedly win awards.
Because so much of 1917 documents the ravaged landscape of various battlefields, and because the camera is always on the ground and on the move with the troops, its visual topography requires details like those floating cherry petals or that sound-and-light of the night sequence to register intensely. After a while, one crater looks like another. So classical “composition” and a felt density of visual detail is not what Deakins and Mendes have on offer. They are into forward momentum through the immediate, often deadly, terrain. As a result, 1917 could stand as representative of a digital reduction in what Sandy and Pippa refer to as Affective Topography throughout much of its length. Explosions literally overwhelm landscape. The background in the visual field (whether through documented exteriors or art department interior design) is the source of just one emotional tone involving dread, suspense, and terror. The question is always: What is out there, and what can we do to counter it? Thanks to the moving camera, the forward (or reversed) movement of the landscape renders approaching or retreating objects almost abstract. A martial world resolves into a series of vanishing points. This effect is deliberate on the part of director and cinematographer: we are kept wondering how our boys are going to avoid being picked off in a paranoid landscape amid a cinematic blur. 1917 thus renders the absence of variegate background a virtue in the name of poetic ambiguity in a journey’s end War Zone. Visually, 1917 is the opposite of a recruitment poster. No one will sign up for future assignment in Iran because of Mendes’ movie.
Being a choreographer, I bring up this visual quality (or lack thereof) because when dance movement is recorded on film, it can profit from the support of a topography designed for its details, whether from camerawork or from the art department. Just as in the theater, film dance can be enhanced through visual design. Faster film stock and digital technology have allowed an artist like Deakins to rely sometimes on found locations to produce visual support, but if you saw his work for Bladerunner 2049, you know that he is also sensitive to artificially evoked and boldly stylized environments. Modern digital cinematography can go both ways, with a definite tendency toward the abstract in highly “designed” sequences. Dance could benefit from careful calibration between it’s dynamic detail and a prepared background.
I ran across a passage in Henry James’ preface for his Portrait of a Lady that is relevant. It can refer both to his travel writings and to his literary depiction of physical settings and may throw light upon the conditions that make an affective topography possible. He writes: “How can places that speak in general so to the imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I recollect, again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much – more than, in the given case, one has use for; so that one finds oneself working less congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is concerned, than in the presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of our vision.” Much modern filmmaking tries to give us too much. (For example, too much forward camera movement.) And ends giving us too little for imaginative audience participation. What may be required is “the moderate and the neutral”.
Luckily, such cinematic nuances are present in Jacquot de Nantes, Agnes Varda’s 1991 documentary tribute to her departed husband, the film director Jacques Demy. Her movie was revived recently as part of the commemoration of Varda at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. The work deals with the provincial youth of young Demy in Nantes, as he struggled determinedly to create himself as a film maker. The artful nostalgia of the movie is pungent with the “moderate and the neutral” in its cinematic topoi.
A viewer registers the organza hat worn by the Demy family’s ripe visiting relation, a woman whose wealthy marriage has transformed her into a “South American tart”. She is a deliciously funny satiric portrait. The two young Demy brothers receive a sexual initiation from a giggly female refugee admitted to their attic refuge. We later see Jacquot’s father fuming in his refusal to imagine his son’s future outside a technical career in manual trades. The boy retreats to that dark attic for his cinematic researches. The youngest version of the child Demy is enacted by Philippe Maron, who gives the boy an alert intelligence and innate dignity.
And the viewer registers the topographies of Nantes. The visiting “tart” luxuriates in a local restaurant where she treats Jacquot’s people to a dinner celebrating their reunion. Varda pulls her camera back from the gathering as though memorializing for all time a French family celebration pre-World War Two. Sex-play takes place in that attic where Jacquot will improvise his earliest animation studio. And the father’s opposition to his son’s film career is framed around the family dining table. Now and again Varda reminds us via brief excerpts that such locales will find their later equivalents in Demy’s feature films. Her variations in foregrounded details are distinguished by such conscious framings. Distillation through details becomes possible through held context.
My favorite Demy films have such stabilized settings. Who can forget the Nantes shopping arcade in Lola? Here, in Jacquot, it is identified as the original locale where a photographic dealer provides the boy with his first movie camera. Who can forget the luxury hotel rooms in La baie des anges where Jeanne Moreau’s manic Jackie triumphs between sessions at the gambling tables. And then there are those damp streets and glowing wallpaper designs in the director’s famous Les parapluies de Cherbourg. Such locales are stored in our memories.
These backgrounds are, indeed, like the persistent use of music in Demy’s films. Their many characters may be scattered across a sonic field. His protagonists may be subject to radical transformation, but certain melodies will always return. Provincial passions wax and wane, but the townscapes hold even through the onset of war. When dance is added to the mix in The Young Girls of Rochefort, its movement is a nervous form of jazz impressionism, weak in its choreographic impetus to our contemporary eyes and a challenge for cinematography at deep-focus distance. Like Alain Resnais’ Stavisky (with its commissioned score by Steven Sondheim), Demy’s film musicals were shot to pre-recorded compositions, so his mise-en-scène has a choreographic aspect. Visual and aural textures are adjusted to one another.
In her moving narration of Jacquot de Nantes, Varda says that if you could open up a person you would find a landscape. In the most economical and distilled fashion, she – like Demy -- shows you the young filmmaker’s formative city, unforgettably. As though alive to his immediate environment, the child’s earliest ambition is – of course -- to build stage sets. He will come to understand that before you can depict the kidnapping of a child – dear, sweet Solange – the melodrama must have a setting. How startling to see the boy director thus creating his own L’enfant de Paris from scratch. (That charming 1913 silent movie was one of Edward Gorey’s inspirational touchstones.)
Jacquot feels like a true, rare collaboration between Demy and Varda, husband and wife. (He died just before the film was released.) I will remember certain details from Varda’s recreations. There is the Demy garage, where an older Jacquot soils his communion clothes from a fall from an improvised trapeze. There is the classic façade of the family’s neighborhood, which Varda presents in continuous lateral tracking shots, from doorway to window to garage: a very 1930s technique for identifying the sounds and sights of a neighborhood. There is the family’s one-room bedchamber, where Jacquot sleeps next to his younger brother close to the foot of their parents’ bed. We observe modern French history pass beyond the entranceway of the courtyard: Nazi transports parade as the town is occupied. We visit the local park with its guignol theater, where the children’s convulsions in the audience mirror the writhing puppets on the miniature stage. There is the local movie theater entrance, where tickets can be bought to new native films we now regard as classics. A theft by the boy Demy of small carved angels from the local cemetery reappears on his cardboard puppet theater where they frame the sides of the stage.
The script of Varda’s film was obviously based on her husband’s written memoirs. His often-declared cinematic influences (always Bresson and Ophuls) show up in the style of his wife’s tribute. The child Demy says that Les enfants du paradis is “a masterpiece”. And that if a movie is by Marcel L’Herbier, it is bound to be good. (Out of the mouths of babes issues the auteur theory.) The war teaches the boy about the relation of artful disguise (oxygen masks, Nazis dressed as nuns) to deceptive art. Even mass destruction and terror point the way to film.
I can’t help but draw parallels to my current choreographic duet and the new solo dance by Sandy. My Nekomata pas de deux derives from Japanese legend, but it may be that its sensationalisms are too foregrounded. The reason Oestrus works so powerfully is that Master Raro naturalizes the erotic subject, renders it personal and recognizable rather than sensational. Sandy has achieved the “moderate and the neutral” in his dance details, despite the more predictable expectations of the viewer.
Affective detail in dance or film may indeed be best set in a prepared middle distance, but sometimes detail must be given the opportunity to resonate on its own.
C.S.
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