Receiving its New York premiere this past weekend in conjunction with the just-completed 2010 Robert Flaherty Seminar, Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso's La libertad(2001), the 1975-born director's first feature, provided a fit course for international modernist art cinema in the years immediately following the Abbas Kiarostami-dominated 1990s. With Kiarostami redrawing the boundaries delimiting fact and fiction from Close-Up (1990) onward, La libertad emerges as a sensible extension of the aforesaid's ontological interest, providing a work that is properly speaking neither fiction feature nor documentary. La libertad's grounding in the factual - its non-professional lead performs actions belonging to his daily ritual - insures that this is not fiction filmmaking as it is conventionally defined, while the film's lack of explanation equally argues against its status as documentary. If anything, La libertad suggests a form of semi-fictionalized cinema that is separated from more traditional fiction film by the gulf of non-fiction; in specifying so little, La libertad becomes something other than the non-fiction that a description of its scenario might suggest otherwise.
After the black and red credits and heavy industrial-style scoring that have since become a discordant signature of Alonso's, La libertad opens on Misael Saavedra as he performs the tasks of a lumberjack: the young male fells trees, stripping the bark off the dead trunks with his forearms pulled tight as he flicks the steel blade against the thin outer layer. The viewer can almost feel the vibrations of the axe handle that accompany the thud of the blade as it catches in the thick trunk. Alonso's camera remains fixed on Misael, often in longer compositions and extended duration takes, as he repeats the same practice on a number of the locale's leafless trees, both fallen and standing, before leaving for the shade of his camp and a meal from an iron pot. Once he finishes, pushing the remnants of his lunch back into the same pot, Misael leaves his shaded exterior, covered by a sheet metal roof that also provides its waist-high fencing, the film's subject lies in the dark of his exposed bedroom with his gaze directed outside his makeshift hut.
At this juncture, Alonso's camera peels off from his lead, moving independently to a wire fence that closes off an adjacent field. As such, Alonso intimates the presence of his own narrational position within the film, separating subject from apparatus for the remaining duration of the take. Upon the conclusion of this visual diversion, Alonso returns to Misael who subsequently meets a man and his son after they pull up in an empty pickup truck. After loading the flatbed, Misael rides on the bare logs, with his hand resting on the neck of a panting dog. Throughout this sequence, Alonso awakens his viewer's sensory memory, calling to mind the smooth textures of the logs covered in fine sawdust, the warmth of the animal's neck and its angular shoulder bones. In this way, La libertad prefigures Alonso's outstanding recent Liverpool(2008).
Ultimately, Misael continues on alone in the truck, finally reaching a rural lumberyard where he sells the object of his work - below the price that he seeks initially. Having concluded his sale, he purchases gas and supplies at a petrol station, before returning finally to the same improvised homestead. Building a large bonfire, Misael sits staring into the camera - thus again enunciating the film's apparatus - which accordingly reenacts the shot that opened the film before the loose narration commences in earnest with the lead's work. In this respect, Alonso invites the viewer to consider the film's depiction of work as routine, as a repeated set of gestures carried out before the film begins and after the picture concludes. Here again Liverpool comes to mind. In total, La libertad constitutes a form of cinematic portraiture, procuring an abundant sense of Misael's daily life, featuring not simply the actions performed on the job - though this does constitute the majority of the film as it would presumably Misael's waking life - but also the tactile sensations of these experiences and even those acts that are typically elided from feature and documentary filmmaking alike, whether it is riding in and driving the truck, preparing his meal (including his very ethnographic butchering of an armadillo, a scene that is essentially replayed in his masterpiece Los Muertos; 2004) or even defecating as he crouches toward the bottom of the frame. In this latter instance, the viewer hears though does not see said act, which Misael prepares for by clutching sheets of tissue paper in his fist. La libertad in sum seeks to comprehensively portray what Misael's life is like as he lives alone in the film's isolated rural setting.
Indeed, it may just be the solitary character of Misael's existence that provides the film with its most distinctive quality. The great majority of Alonso's seventy-three minute feature frames Alonso alone, where, save for his singing of a single song, he remains silent. The film itself, though it features an abundant ambient soundtrack, which attracts the viewer's attention as much as does the image track, likewise trades on Misael's silence, with the additional exception of the passages at his homestead where he turns on his hand-held radio. Alonso thusly identifies the experience of being alone as a silent one, where the viewer gradually becomes aware of Misael's lack of speech and the need for communication that will manifest itself in his moments spent listening to his radio, his brief conversation with the gas station worker, a phone call to a friend and even to his song declaimed as he crosses the field in late afternoon. By comparison, writer-director Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes(2006), co-directed by Peter Djigirr, which like La libertad premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes film festival, abounds with speech, featuring a voice-over in English depicting the events occurring in not one but two pasts of increasing remoteness from the opening's present. In the first of these historical settings, an on-screen narrator (David Gulpilil) tells the same extra-diegetically told story in Aborigine to his fellow tribesman (Jamie Gulpilil), whom he suspects of coveting his wife. The story told on-screen is intended therefore as a parable for the young man, with the same actor playing his earlier, covetous counterpart. As Ten Canoes proceeds in its telling of this story, the filmmakers frequently shift between the film's two pasts and at times even the present, featuring black-and-white for the earlier past and color for the both the present and more frequently the distant past. While there is an inelegance to de Heer and company's visual choice in this respect, their strategy does at least insure maximum intelligibly. Indeed, Ten Canoes' non-sequential narrative structure is not adopted to disorient the film's spectators.
Rather, de Heer and his fellow filmmakers utilize multiple temporalities in order to provide a historical framework for the stories being told. Specifically, Ten Canoes pursues a form for the representation of its Aboriginal people's oral history, in this case literally passed down from the past depicted in the black-and-white to the present, with narrators at both historical stages sharing the same story. In this regard, Ten Canoes represents a remaking of film language no less than does La libertad's poeticsub-documentary narrative minimality, through a form of incessant narration that almost completely eschews mimesis (the act of showing rather than telling); in this sense it is the very opposite of La libertad that shows everything and provides no commentary. Instead, de Heer and company's film uses its image track to illustrate both the story being told twice - a mark of another major direction in twenty-first century modernist art cinema, as instantiated by the works of Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul - and also the ethnographic details, the spectacle articulated by the off-screen narrator that emerge throughout the goose egg hunt on which the on-screen narrator shares the film's oral history.
In his essay “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” written for the National Museum of American Art’s 1994 exhibition “Thomas Cole: Landscape into History,” Allan Wallach argues for a “mythic-historical narrative” in the artist’s landscapes.[1] According to the author, “this narrative… unfolds in three stages: in the first, there is the wilderness untouched by European culture (Kaaterskill Falls); in the second, white settlements and outposts appear (The Hunter’s Return); finally, the wild terrain of the frontier is transformed into pastoral or Arcadian landscape (View on the Catskill).”[2] Moreover, “each stage implied the next. The trackless wilderness would be explored, cleared, and settled; log cabins would be built only to be replaced by prosperous farmhouses.”[3]
By the time of Andrew Jackson’s election as the seventh President of the United States in 1828 – and the first to bare the mantra of Democrat singularly – each of the three above phases were clearly manifest in the historical transformation of the North American continent. So too were the first and second scenes from the artist’s 1834-36 “The Course of Empire.” Of course, it would take an additional five-plus years of Jacksonian democracy to draw out the “deep-seated historical pessimism” that was visible in the third through fifth panels of this same monumental artifact – and which would characterize his later landscape works, including those mentioned within the previous ‘mythic-historical’ program.[4] With ‘The Course of Empire,’ Cole’s attitudes toward Jacksonian democracy and “utilitarianism” were made unequivocal: each would “lead the nation to disaster.”[5] Consequently, no Cole landscape painted on either side of this grandiose cycle could be interpreted thereafter without being measured against it – whether it was the pre-Arcadian and Arcadian views of a Pre-Jacksonian America or the more apocalyptic scenes that culminated in Desolation (see below).
A second cycle hints at a different transformation in Cole’s view of the world, which nonetheless was just as shaped by the exigencies of Jackson’s America. By the middle 1830s, Cole began attending St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Catskill.[6] According to biographer Louis Legrand Noble, Cole commenced church member shortly after his return from Europe in 1842, the same year he painted his deeply religious set of four panels collectively titled “The Voyage of Life.”[7] Hence, Cole’s turn toward organized religion coincided with the “increasingly religious temper of the Jacksonian period,”[8] and specifically with the Second Great Awakening, which dominated American religious life into the late 1840s.[9]
The Course of Empire: Desolation (1836)
Further, it was in this same period that Cole “came to see in Christianity’s promise of individual salvation a personal resolution to society’s seemingly unresolvable crises,” as would be exemplified for instance in ‘The Course of Empire.’[10] To quote Wallach once again, “from then on his interest in religious issues grew rapidly, while the social and historical concerns that animated his art during the 1820s and 1830s diminished or disappeared.”[11] The vine covered ruins of a decimated civilization were replaced within less than a decade by a castle in the sky.
If it is possible therefore to compose a narrative whereby Cole first responded to the problems posed by Jacksonian democracy and then by those highlighted in the Second Great Awakening, the question remains what precisely were the issues or concerns that confronted Cole in the few years that preceded the election of President Jackson. Indeed, one might even ask, and perhaps one needs to do so first, whether Cole became a critical artist on the occasion of America’s transformation following the election of Jackson, or whether this tendency – in whichever way it might have been directed – was already present in this earlier phase of the painter’s career? In other words, might Cole have experienced a third period prior to the rise of Jackson and the Democratic party in 1828?
The subsequent essay addresses this question by considering two of Cole’s works in greater detail, The Clove, Catskills and Sunny Morning on the Hudson, both of which date to 1827 (and both of which are reproduced below). In each of these two canvases, a middle-ground mountain face, cast in shadow, bisected by a second mountain or set of mountains, obstructs the spectator’s view onto an expansive valley rendered lower than the paintings’ chosen point-of-view. In my reading of the works, however, Wallach’s social and historical narrative fails to account for the peculiarity that is manifest in these canvases. In fact, the genesis of the following piece was the simple question why does Sunny Morning on the Hudson look the way it does? Hence, this essay intends to answer that question above all others.
In so doing, I will also ask whether Cole’s subsequent work offers any clues to interpret these seemingly obscure, historically-transitional works (that is from a Federalist to a Jacksonian America), in much the same way that ‘The Course of Empire’ inflects the political content of Cole’s other landscapes. Moreover, I will trace the semantics of the above move, emphasizing what it means to leave hidden significant portions of these spaces, by eliciting comparisons especially to Cole’s disciple Frederic Church. I will begin however by creating a baseline for Cole’s pre-Jacksonian corpus with his works of 1825-27.
Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill) (1825)
1825-1827: Cole & Claude Lorrain
As Wallach has indicated, Cole “from the beginning of his career… frequently employed the conventions of pastoral or Arcadian landscape, long associated with Claude Lorrain, for portrayals of rural scenery.”[12] The author cites the example of an 1826 “view” of William G. Featherstonhaugh’s estate, where the artist “employed a basic Claudian formula in painting a serenely horizontal composition, with a single framing tree, in which sheep – the sine qua non of pastoral landscape – graze placidly in a newly cleared pasture overlooked in the distance by Featherstonhaugh’s country mansion.”[13] Indeed, this formula characterizes many of the artist’s earliest canvas. To this end, Cole painted a second landscape, View near Catskill (1827), which similarly figures a group of three grazing sheep on a small grass and pebble covered incline before a placid pond. Likewise, there is the instance of the painter’s even earlier Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill) (1825), where Cole substituted deer for the later canvases’ sheep: the buck on the left is caught staring to its right, its figure framed by three separate fallen trees that form a triangular shape around the animal, whereas its companion trots off to the right in front of the perfectly still, earth-toned pool. In short, Cole was procuring a profoundly Federalist vision of America, represented in a picturesque mode, which in instances such as the Featherstonehaugh canvas “centered on the preservation of aristocratic privilege and traditional property rights.”[14]
Still, it is essential to affirm the role that identity-formation played in these earliest canvases. As Wallach points out, the “taste for landscape,” not more than thirty years old in the Americas, was the sole purview of the aristocracy of the time.[15] As such, Cole, who “had learned to think of himself as a gentleman… whatever his actual circumstances, his belief was unshakable,” would have found an avenue of social-mobility in these canvases.[16] Under the serenity of Claude, the painter’s master and the artist he would later crown “the greatest of all landscape painters,” Cole could create works that befitted his Federalist patrons’ tastes as well.[17] In other words, as expressive as these works are of a particular ethos, it might be just as possible to read these earliest canvases as efforts in imitation that nonetheless found an audience and launched the artist’s career. That is, they represent Cole’s desire to become an artist, even a great artist, more than they do his vision of social and historical circumstances. Only later, with the explicit critique of his post-Jacksonian corpus, does it become clear that Cole is creating out an effort to summarize the political landscape – and in its case the decline of the American civilization. For the time being, the American republic seems more secure.
River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumean Sibyl (c. 1655)
1827: Cole and Salvator Rosa
Importantly, Cole’s work would soon bare a greater resemblance to that of Salvator Rosa, marking the painter as an inheritor to the tradition of the sublime rather than to the Burkean beautiful of Claude: to this end, Wallach points out that “during the 1820s Cole was considered the ‘American Salvator’ in recognition of the extravagant sublimity of many of his early landscape paintings.”[18] However, when Cole himself saw the painter’s work in his 1832 visit to Italy, he claimed to be “disappointed:” “Salvator Rosa’s is a great name… he is peculiar, energetic, but of limited capacity comparatively.”[19] In fact, it was precisely at this time that he affirmed his belief that “Claude, to me, is the greatest of all landscape painters: and, indeed, I should rank him with Raphael or Michelangelo.”[20] Not surprisingly then it was “during the 1830s… when a new tranquility began to manifest itself in [Cole’s] art, [that] he became the ‘American Claude’ – or as one writer put it, ‘our ‘American Claude.’’”[21]
Yet to return to the possibility of Salvator’s inspiration on Cole’s art, which appeared obvious in contemporary judgments of the painter, the American-based artist’s two mountain-centered compositions of 1827, Sunny Morning on the Hudson River and The Clove, Catskills, do seem to confirm the comparison. Once again, in each, the spectator’s view of an expansive flat field, well below the adopted point-of-view, is obstructed by a mountain or set of mountains that fill the image’s near middle-ground, even as they are in part or in whole cast in deep shadow, thus reducing the detail of this facing landmass. Similarly, Salvator’s River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumean Sibyl (c. 1655) positions a mountain mass in the furthest recesses of its right foreground, thereby occluding the path of the river which snakes behind this geological formation. As if to highlight this obstructed space, Rosa introduces small swaths of yellow around the outer edges of rock and upon the water itself. As such, the spectator is cued into reading this hidden space as the point of origin for a light source that is only hinted at within the composition proper. In a sense, the most visually dramatic component of the landscape – a sunset over the serpentine river – is denied to the spectator. Rather we are given intimations of a phenomenon that is far more visually resplendent than the one which the painter has depicted.
So too has Cole chosen to eliminate the most spectacular vantage in exchange for an image that is far less awe-inspiring, particularly in its orientation of the viewer’s point-of-view to the landscape. Of course, Salvator’s painting frames a mythological exchange within the setting in much the same way that two more of Cole’s canvases from the same year treat a historical scene within a space that denies its spectator the most dramatic possible vistas. The first of the two historical panels, Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans”: Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund (see below), commissioned by Daniel Wadsworth, represents an assemblage of the eponymous tribe on a stone platform hanging above a deep precipice.[22] Behind this found proscenium – and a pair of shadow-covered rock outcroppings that back the platform – the landscape again falls significantly. As such, Cole has adopted a point-of-view – in its case, the viewer is positioned above the platform – which once again denies the most dramatic vantage onto this locale, while also greatly reducing the detail and therefore the narrative legibility of the distant middle-ground figural assembly. In other words, Cole’s choice of vantage denies both a clear view of the drama rendered on canvas and also of the dramatic landscape above which these persons hover.
Cole’s other major historical landscape of 1827, Landscape Composition, St. John in the Wilderness, which was purchased by Wadsworth as well, similarly utilizes a rock out-cropping to stage a fictionalized historic encounter. In its case, the platform is divided into two elevations: on top of the first, a single figure points to a lone cross; a golden afternoon side light hits this higher elevation, the figure and cross. Below, a series of figures look above to the evangelist, presumably, occupying the shrub-covered rocky promontory. Palm trees extend from the edge of this platform, and line the spot-lit valley below, exoticizing Cole’s fictional Israel.
Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans”: Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund (1827)
Visually, this promontory again blocks the viewer’s vantage onto the valley beneath the theatrical grouping, though our point-of-view is in this case beneath the platform. Then again, the tops of trees emerge beneath the spectator’s imaginary position, securing a placement that seems to hover in mid air. As with Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans”: Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, Cole has dispensed with the ground-level perspective of Salvator, thereby violating “traditional prohibitions against rendering a view from a high vantage point,” as the artist would do even more famously in 1836’s The Oxbow.
By comparison, both The Clove, Catskills and Sunny Morning on the Hudson River occupy positions on the ground of their respective landscapes, though in the case of the latter it is a position close to a rocky cliff’s edge, perpendicular to a shadow-covered mountain. Moreover, there is a stone ledge at the edge of the cliff that compares to the rocky platforms in the historical paintings, though it is a rocky promontory in The Clove that appears closer to the mythic landscapes. In both, these geological figures are lit theatricality – that is the exact source seems to exceed the canvas’s natural lighting – as is also the case with the natural platforms in Landscape Composition and Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans.” However, absent the human subjects of the historical compositions, this choice of lighting marks the platforms the artist has chosen not to adopt, the more dramatic views that have been denied the spectator.
Parenthetically, it should be noted that this feature of a rock platform appears in a third figure-less canvas from the previous year, Mountain Sunrise (1826). In this work, which in some sense offers a template for the more radical Sunny Morning, Cole has figured a free-standing rock ledge in the deep middle-ground of the composition, highlighting its tip and the facing stone cliff with the same sort of theatrical lighting that appears in The Clove and especially Sunny Morning. In the background, behind a shadow-covered wooded mount, the day begins to break, producing a yellow light that spreads across the horizon and infuses the clouds that bracket the sunrise with a pinkish tint. Here, as we will see in Sunny Morning, the subject of the sunrise is removed from the spectator’s view.
Sunny Morning on the Hudson (1827)
Sunny Morning: Connoting the Un-Visible
What we do see in Sunny Morning is the shadow-darkened face of a rounded, evergreen-covered summit, crowned on the top and encircled to the right by cottony cumulus fingers. In both places, Cole directs our attention around the edges of the geological figure to the sunny front face of a valley that of course we can never reach. On the other side of the mountain, we can see the light brightened horizon, thus confirming that indeed the object of the picture’s title – the sun in the morning – is located outside our view: both behind the mountain, and to the left of the image itself. Ironically, our position is figured at precisely the place where we can least experience the eponymous subject of the art work. Rather, we are given a theatrically-lit, natural viewing platform in the foreground and a mountain face opposite the illumination just beyond. It is behind this seemingly misplaced viewing platform and the occluding mountain that the film’s dramatic content resides. Indeed, Cole’s panel is a remarkably dark rendering of the subject of morning light.
So what than can be made of Cole’s decision to deny his spectator the view of the Sunny Morning that his title announces? Why are we made to view a mountain cast in shadow from close up, rather than either the phenomenon signified or the expansive space over which this event is occurring? While Cole’s debt to Salvator must be noted, certainly this lineage does not tell us everything we wish to know, particularly again as Salvator’s compositions at least figure foreground mythical subject matter, making his blocking geological figures backdrops – even as they imply a segment of the world depicted that remains beyond our vision. Again in Sunny Morning and The Clove (to a lesser extent, perhaps) all that remains is the obstruction, this portion of the world not seen.
Then again, it is worth noting the connotative value of the object selected to complete this task – the mountain – for the artist. According to Noble, in comparison to Niagara specifically, mountains for Cole “were symbols of the eternal majesty, immutability and repose, which no cataract could ever be.”[23] The author continues:
The mountain, with a fullness of might in itself, is yet mightier as one of an innumerable brotherhood, in each of which you behold an image of everlasting repose – from its summit can escape into the infinite, and upon the perpetual rocks hear voices from the bosom of inwrapping clouds, talking of the presence of the Almighty, and say, with both a lowly sense of your own present littleness and restlessness, and a lofty sense of your immortality and final rest, “it is good to here.”[24]
In a word, the mountain figures presence, but even in more ‘as one of an innumerable brotherhood.’ It is at once an aesthetic object in its own right, engendering contemplation and appreciation; and at the same time, the mountain acts as an interface, a place of meeting between the physical and metaphysical, upon whose summit one can ‘escape into the infinite,’ and upon whose ‘perpetual rocks [one can] hear voices of inwrapping clouds, talking of the presence of the Almighty.’
This latter metaphor of the ‘inwrapping clouds, talking of the presence of the Almighty’ seems particular apt a description for Sunny Morning’s mediating function, inasmuch as they lead us from the mountain, from its eternal, unshakable presence, back to the absence, to the un-visible rather than the invisible – that is, to a world whose existence is manifest, but outside the represented universe of the painting. With these ‘inwrapping clouds’ encircling the conical object, as with the river whose course the same figure obscures, we are assured of a presence that we simply cannot see. In short, the mountain generates meaning doubly: first, as a signifier of God’s presence in his creation; and second, as a figure of obstruction, of an object blocking a world not seen but one that most certainly exists.
The Voyage of Life: Manhood (1842)
“The Voyage of Life:” Making Visible the Un-Visible
While this representation of a world not seen repeats in many of the artist’s canvases, it is perhaps even more significant – as it reveals the scope of Cole’s interest in the subject – that the artist moves to make visible this unseen world in his second major cycle, “The Voyage of Life” (1842). Again, deeply religious in both subject matter and tone, Cole completed this cycle at roughly the same time he began his church membership. Here, supernatural presence unequivocally enters Cole’s canvases: an angel with a glimmering halo accompanies the infant in Childhood; the same figure points the way to a heavenly city in Youth; with the human figure in Manhood kneeling in supplication, the same ethereal guardian looks down from heaven (even as further figures are rendered in the gray clouds above); and in Old Age, this guardian reappears with a second to presumably lead the everyman to his new home in the light.
Therefore, the physical and the spiritual have come to occupy the same pictorial space in this series of highly allegorized landscapes. Whereas The Clove and especially Sunny Morning suggested the Divine in its representation of the figure of the mountain and in the un-seen reality that object obstructs, ‘The Voyage of Life’ leaves nothing to implication. There is in this latter series of canvases an unwillingness to be mistaken, and for its religious content to go unnoticed. The world hidden to our view in the former compositions here becomes the ‘cloud-built palace’ as Cole himself described it.[25] In fact, to this latter point, it is not simply that Cole reduced the ambiguity in his landscapes, but that he produced descriptions of each of the scenes, so as to leave none of its meaning up for debate.[26]
Furthermore, ‘The Voyage of Life’ depicts an interventionist God: here, heaven and earth remain in constant communication, be it in the mediating presence of the Guardian Spirit – both with the child, pointing the way to the heavenly city, listening to the prayers of the endangered protagonist or leading the way to the other world – or once again in the combination of physical and metaphysical spheres in a single space. And as the white-waters of Manhood have given way to the calm pool of Old Age, the heavens seem to answer the man’s prayers. By contrast, images such as The Clove and Sunny Morning fail to embellish the non-visible world they depict and to make visible what is invisible. God can be known through what he once made, not through his present intervention. If anything, the divine being of these early landscapes is fundamentally deist, while the God of ‘The Voyage of Life’ is active.
So while God is present in Cole from the first, it is only with his deepening devotion to the faith that the hidden is made manifest, that what has always been is now made clear and unequivocal.
A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch) (1839)
The Hidden and the Horizontal in Cole
Importantly, the subject of an unseen presence does not entirely cease with Cole’s ‘Voyage of Life’ cycle. In his A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning (1844), Cole represents a lone figure in the lower left foreground, standing upon the bottom of two rock platforms. He gazes off toward his and the composition’s left, in the direction of the sun that illuminates the mountain face that bares the eponymous Mountain House. Likewise, on the right half of the composition, two long, narrow, parallel lakes extend toward and perhaps beyond the right edge of the composition. While the two arched trees on either foreground edge of the painting ostensibly frame this picturesque setting, the tree on the left reinforces the direction of the human figure’s gaze, leading the spectator’s off the canvas toward the unseen. A real place beyond the canvas is conceived, and so therefore is a metaphor for the metaphysical.
The motif of the lakes on the right half of the composition is further picked up in canvases such as Catskill Mountain House: The Four Elements (1843-44; also post ‘Voyage’), where the same parallel lakes extend over the right edge of the canvas in a pair of powerful horizontal planes. This same horizontality is also evident, though implicitly, in the earlier A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch) from 1839. Here the titular notch emerges at the base of a towering mountain face, between two lower sections of rock. The mountainous section on the right particularly stands out from the background stone inasmuch as the former is covered in green pines, while the latter is rendered in duller earth tones. Between these two geological formations, a strong horizontal plane extends to the right and eventually past the towering background mountain. Here we have a strong sense of a plane that we cannot see but whose presence is nonetheless manifest.
Crawford Notch in this way possesses more than a passing resemblance to View of Delft, one of the rate landscapes of a second seventeenth century artist, Jan Vermeer. In that artist’s atypical work from ca. 1660-61, once again the spectator is confronted with an occluding foreground rendered at ground level, and covered in shadows, which accordingly blocks the recessive planes of the city’s flat topography. Here and there snatches of the cityscape are visible between the facing structures, but largely the city remains hidden to the spectator. In a more conventional (for the artist) genre setting, a second composition secures a similar effect, 1870’s The Love Letter. In its case, the framing doorway both highlights the work’s human subject, and also renders space invisible before us. It works like the mountains or the front row of structures in Delft. Here, as in so many of the artist’s compositions, a strong sidelight breaches the space, thus calling attention to its off-canvas point of origin – or, once again, rendering real a world beyond our perception.
Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)
Frederic Church: Naturalizing Cole
While Vermeer’s work may be more analogous to Cole’s than it is causally linked, Frederic Church’s intimate connection to the older American landscapist is well-documented.[27] At the same time, it is a similar interest in making manifest the invisible that concerns both Vermeer and Church. In Church’s case, however, it is principally in the landscape idiom – in most cases naturalized, unlike Cole’s ‘The Voyage of Life’ or even ‘The Oxbow’ with its Hebrew script on the hillside in the far distance – that he achieves this end. Accordingly, one might look for example to Church’s 1847 Scene on Catskill Creek: in this canvas, Church presents the placid waterway framed on the left by a picturesquely felled dead tree and on the right by a tall, cropped deciduous. Along its left edge and low on the horizon, the sun is barely made visible. Nonetheless, its excessive luminosity infuses the right half of the image, thereby calling attention to this light source, and equally to the occluded and cropped space that the orb inhabits. Church is making known another reality, through both the mediating object of the sun and also the composition’s guillotine framing on the right side – where another world seems to seep into the frame.
A more spectacular instance of this strategy can be found in Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness from 1860. In this canvas, we are once again provided a strong horizontal obstruction in the manner of the View of Delft and Crawford Notch, with the low-rising mountains blocking Church’s conspicuous horizon. Over the furthest range, the sun is barely made visible once again with a shimmering white light hugging the craggy peaks and a golden yellow radiating above the first hue. The illuminated world beyond the horizon, and indeed the heavens themselves, reaches into the landscape of Twilight in the Wilderness, entering through the sun’s orbital interface.
Then again, it is less in this recurrent motif than it is in the rich salmons and oranges that ordain the dark clouds that cut through the navy sky that the painting’s metaphysical presence is made clear. Church’s world shows God at his most aesthetic: he, instantiated on the horizon-line in a radiant glory, is the painter of this sky that Church faithfully depicts. It is as though this other world has broken through into the terrestrial world, passing through the horizon-bound point of intercession. Or, Church has exploded the obstruction itself, creating a world where the earthly and the divine commingle. And it is a world that is naturalized.
What is significant here is that Church largely follows the same trajectory as Cole, though they achieve roughly the same ends by different means. If both, early in their careers, utilize the same logic of obstruction and occlusion to indicate a world beyond what we see, their investment of this invisible in the pictorial space differs in the elaboration later in their respective corpuses: whereas Cole makes physical the metaphysical heavenly city, Church leaves the trace of the divine in the adornment of a natural world whose beauty far exceeds everyday phenomenon.
The Clove, Catskills (1827)
Conclusion
But what does this tell us again of Sunny Morning and its 1827 corollary The Clove? Simply that in Church, as in his inspiration Cole, each canvas negotiations the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial, the earthly and the divine. These elements may be subsumed by other subjects, as with a later Cole such as The Oxbow, but they remain nevertheless keys – and perhaps the most important keys – to understanding each artist. After all, what can these paintings tell us of an America they largely refuse to depict? Again, considering the painters 1836 canvas listed previously, we would seem to have a clear contraposition of wilderness and civilization rendered on the left and right halves of the image respectively, with the Hebraic writing behind to provide the canvas with an added religious dimension. However, with Sunny Morning and The Clove there is no similar allegory for historical progress inasmuch as we are viewing a space at the same stage of un-civilization.
What we have instead is the religious rather than the political axis of Cole’s art taking precedence. To summarize, these canvases of 1827 give us the writing in the distance, an indication of the presence of the divine, stripped of the allegorical content in the fore and middle grounds. In the foreground of these works we have viewing platforms that are either not adopted (as in The Clove) or which generate a view that provides minimal impact (as in Sunny Morning). In the middle distance we have the occluding mountains, the makers of meaning in these works, the very trace of God that Cole makes so explicit thereafter, and the figures that nonetheless keep him hidden from view. And in this invisible background we have the creator of these mountains, indicated by a world we know to exist but which has been forever elided from our view.
[1] Allan Wallach, "Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire" in Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, ed. William H. Truettner and Wallach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 64.
[2] Ibid, 64-65. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid, 98. [7] Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), 252. [8] Ibid. [9] Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), 266. [10] Ibid. [11] Ibid, 98. [12] Ibid, 70. [13] Ibid. [14] Wallach, "Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy" in Reading American Art, eds. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 80-81. [15] "Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire," 28. [16] "Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy," 83. [17] "Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire," 70. [18] Noble, 125. [19] Ibid. [20] Ibid. [21] Wallach, 70. [22] Robert Gilmor commissioned a second, slightly smaller (25 x 31 in. to 25 3/8 x 35 1/16) canvas on the same subject which Cole completed the same year (1827). I have chosen to highlight the Wadsworth for its similarities to the St. John canvas that I have described subsequently. In any case the Gilmor composition features the same elision of the dramatic that is characteristic of the other two 1827 pieces. [23] Noble, 73. [24] Ibid. [25] Ibid, 215. [26] Reprinted in Noble, 214-216.
[27] In a letter reprinted by Noble it even seems that he was to give Cole's son a drawing lesson. Ibid, 272.
Another highpoint in an exceedingly strong year for both the French cinema and female directors, Mia Hansen-Løve's The Father of My Children(Le père de mes enfants, 2009) fictionalizes the last days of French producer Humbert Balsan's life, with his filmic equivalent Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) taking his own life in the midst of the meltdowns of his finances and of a Swedish-based film production modeled in part on Béla Tarr's real-life shoot of The Man from London(2007); Tarr's film in fact precipitated Balsan's actual suicide.* For the viewer aware of the Balsan-Tarr connection, The Man from London perpetually hangs over The Father of My Children as a possible hermeneutic key that nonetheless never seems to explain Balsan/Canvel's act. The Man from London more significantly provides a perfect inversion of Hansen-Løve's retelling, with the former's long-take, luminous black-and-white camera work articulated for graphic effect and generic citation foremost, whereas The Father of My Children's natural light-infused color mise-en-scène and elliptic cutting proves subordinate to its filmmaker's storytelling and her character formulations; Tarr's film is pure application of style, in other words, while Hansen-Løve's is all humanity.
The film's tenderness emerges very early in The Father of My Children, with Grégoire calling home to speak to his wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli), following a series of work calls that Hansen-Løve combines through a conventionally Gallic, elliptical cutting schema. Sylvia puts on their two younger daughters, Valentine (Alice Gautier) and Billie (Manelle Driss), who affectionately and jokingly converse with their greatly overworked father, who though exhausted, humors and goes along with the tangents of his daughters. Later that evening, following Grégoire's citation for speeding, the same two young girls stage a play for their mother, father and oldest sister Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing); the latter reclines and rests her head on her father's shoulder, one of many moments of physical affection. With the play's monster playfully named for Grégoire, the film's male lead responds, again in jest, with a promise that his daughters will receive the spankings of their life, which he then offers hugging and wrestling his two delighted daughters. Hansen-Løve accordingly captures the authentic, loving rapport shared by members of the close Canvel family. In this way, the late twenty-something's accomplishment converges closely with that of her early thirty-something German counterpart, Maren Ade, whose Everyone Else (2009) similarly brings the lives of its singular protagonists into vivid existence. Both female filmmakers in particular show a heightened sensitivity for the feelings of their young female women, while reserving opacity for their male leads.
Indeed, The Father of My Children is similarly aided by its sketchy depiction of Grégoire's psychology as his suicide nears. The viewer is made aware of his severe financial problems - he receives word that his assets have been frozen immediately prior to his death - which again were most recently exacerbated by the overages of his genius Swede director Stig Janson (Magne Brekke), the film's Tarr equivalent. No more motive is articulated, though it would seem clear enough that Canvel's act followed from his sense that he had no way out of his financial straights, that his career's work was all but gone, as he cautions when it is proposed that he sell his catalog. Hansen-Løve, to her credit, does not push an interpretation of an action that though opaque is easy to identify.
That he acted in the wrong becomes immediately clear, however, whether or not his despair is understandable. Yet, the writer-director does not sentimentalize the experiences of Grégoire's four female survivors, whose grief and perseverance supply the subject of the film's second part. In so doing, the director constructs her narrative to match her persevering rhetoric with the picture's focus shifting from the eponymous male patriarch halfway through, to those whom he has left behind and for whom life must go on after his departure. The Father of My Children's content organically generates its form. At the same time, Hansen-Løve does extract maximal emotion impact from the suffering of Sylvia and her young daughters, inviting an extraordinary amount of pathos for the young victims of Grégoire's action; this again is a work of extraordinary humanity.
As The Father of My Children proceeds, sanspère, the female Canvel's grapple with Grégoire's death and especially their professed feelings of abandonment. Sylvia, in her husband's absence, is compelled to deal with his failing production company, and with the outfit's on-going difficulties with their Swedish auteur. Clémence, on the other hand, discovers an estranged son in her father's past, acquaints herself with one of his Central Asian filmmakers - played here by Tajik director Jamshed Usmonov - and, commensurate with her pre-adult liminality, has (presumably) her first sexual experience with another of her father's would-be young directors. His older two women, in other words, are forced to face up to his problems, while forging their own paths forward.
The Father of My Children thereby inscribes life's continuation after tragedy, the necessity of perseverance after human loss. To this end, Hansen-Løve's film continues to abound with singular, life-filled moments even as the family continues to mourn, as for instance when a sudden power outage forces the women and family friend Serge (Eric Elmosnino) out onto a city street, or when the younger girls insistently greet the workers at the now liquidated production company, before play-acting and searching through their mother's workspace. In the scene to follow, The Father of My Children closes as it has opened, with compositions of the Parisian streets cut with an upbeat musical refrain that serves as the film's literal epitaph: "que sera sera."
Correction [*]: Writing for theVillage Voice, Ella Taylor suggests the director is meant to invoke Lars von Trier and the production was his Manderlay (2005), even though other, earlier reviewers and interviewers have also suggested The Man from London as the source, as I have in this piece; in many respects von Trier's anti-humanism provides as compelling a counterpoint to Hansen-Løve's work as does Tarr's formalism. Perhaps then it would be more accurate to say that "Saturn" is a composite of these two productions.
For the American film viewer predisposed toward seeking out works of substantial artistic achievement - including, I would imagine, the full roster of this site's domestic readership - one's sense of any given year essentially begins in the middle of May with the first reviews issuing from that year's Festival de Cannes. For the same viewer, so long as she or he is fortunate enough to live within a commutable distance of New York or Toronto, the first arrivals from the Côte d'Azur will typically follow that coming fall, through each city's eponymous film festival, with their commercial runs occurring (when the film has managed to secure North American distribution in the first place) at uneven intervals over the next year-and-half-plus. If a viewer accordingly misses even one of the more universally lauded titles of the previous year - such as 2008's The Headless Woman or 2009's Wild Grass - it might mean a wait of at least a year before the titles begin their limited engagements (The Headless Woman opened in August while the latter will debut stateside in late June), let alone reach home video and on-demand platforms.
With the 63rd installment of the Cannes Film Festival set to conclude this weekend, a number of the best films 2010, if history is to be any guide, have just received their first screenings: candidates seem to include Apichatpong Weerasethakul'sUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica, Cristi Puiu's Aurora,Xavier Beauvois'sOf Gods and Men, perhaps Jean-Luc Godard'sFilm Socialism; readers should assume that I will review at least the first three, hopefully in October after NYFF premieres, and that I may be infuriated by the last. In the meantime, in cinema as art terms, it remains 2009 for most American viewers, with Alain Resnais's Wild Grass and Mia Hansen-Løve's Father of My Children, among others, still forthcoming, along with our first comprehensive sense of 2009's Asian popular cinema, late June's New York Asian Film Festival. (At this juncture, the previous twelve months seem very light on superlative works from the world's most populous, and for a number of years now, our most filmically forward-thinking continent; I can only hope that the NYAFF will prompt a revision of this assessment.)
With 2009, therefore, still very much on my mind cinematically, as I wait for the new film year, I have recently returned to one of the better films of Cannes 62 and the previous year, Jane Campion's Bright Star (2009), for which I did not find the time or perhaps have the inclination to write about last fall upon my first viewing - Bright Star bucked the aforementioned trend in that it received an autumn 2009 release, while not being included on the NYFF schedule. That I might not have had the inclination follows in no small measure from the exceedingly bizarre circumstances of my first (preview) viewing of the film: the packed house of Yale undergraduates with whom I watched Bright Star laughed uproariously and inappropriately, at what I cannot even to begin to imagine, throughout the picture. Suffice it to say that if you have seen Bright Star, you are as baffled by that as I was. At the very least, the fact that the Yale Film Society could not in some sense handle Jane Campion of all people does not make me overly optimistic that future US film-goers will demand more timely theatrical releases of the finest in future art house features.
***
Jane Campion's Bright Star, adapted by the director from Andrew Motion's biography Keats, opens on an extreme close-up of a needle being threaded, as the film's title credit is written across the screen in a thin cursive. Campion accordingly cuts to the needle puncturing a cotton surface, pulling tiny tendrils of fabric with it as it pushes upward, before looping back through the white material. The viewer then sees the stitching, and a moment later, the sewer, wearing a white cotton dress and hat as she sits before a blank wall, hunched over her garment (with a back-lit window opening onto a snowy, winter scene to the spectator's right). Campion's art therefore registers an extraordinary degree of harmony from the outset; in this and other moments, Bright Star is reminiscent both visually and conceptually of the work of James McNeill Whistler (see above, as well as the artist's 1871 "Arrangement in Grey and Black"). Indeed, Campion characteristically matches the dress of her human figures, and especially female lead Abbie Cornish, to the details of her film's art direction, whether it is to her drapes (see top image), or the meadow of blooming blue-bells that has provided the film with its most iconic image (see below). Consequently, the filmmaker, like her painter progenitor, reveals a belief in the value of art for its own sake, and of the innate importance of beauty. Bright Star indeed teams with visually redolent candle-lit interiors and pale, moody early winter landscapes that especially in the latter instance foretell of the film's inevitably tragic conclusion.
As the film's central romantic relationship, featuring Cornish's Fanny Brawneand Ben Whishaw's John Keats, develops, the former entreats her poet-neighbor (and beloved) to teach her to appreciate his craft. In their first lesson, after he confesses his doubts about their new pedagogical endeavor, Keats offers a metaphor that equally serves to describe both his art and also Campion's filmmaking practice in Bright Star: "The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery." Bright Star indeed offers just such an experience, luxuriating in the early nineteenth century world that Campion, director of photography Greig Fraser, art director Christian Huband and costume designer Janet Patterson, among many others, have combined to render in such exacting detail. Bright Star is in this respect a very environmental work, a film that compels immersion in its often placid world.
Campion, however, introduces fissures into her enameled period surface. The most notable of these is Paul Schneider's exceptional, tonally modern performance as Keats confident and rival to Miss Brawne, Charles Brown. Schneider in particular brings a quick-witted snideness and disdain, almost exclusively targeted at Fanny, to Bright Star, which in turn reveals both his competitiveness vis-a-vis Keats' affections and also his not-entirely-latent desire for the young woman. Though his behavior often exhibits a high degree of performativity, registering for instance in his grimacing reactions to Fanny, the result is a naturalism that is not conventionally manifest in costume form. In this way, Schneider's work contributes mightily to the film's departures from the genre's characteristic staidness.
The director achieves a similar result by inviting contingency in her direction of child actress Edie Martin as Fanny's sister and Kerry Fox's daughter 'Toots' - the pumpkin-haired, very light-complexioned child performer in fact provides the latest instantiation of the visual type that Fox herself formerly embodied in Campion's masterpiece An Angel at My Table(1990); Cornish, on the other hand, recalls Campion's lead, Nicole Kidman, from her other career peak, The Portrait of a Lady(1996). Through the young girl's very natural performance and Campion's authentic characterization, the viewer sees this expressed in her quarrels with her sister for example, the early eighteenth century emerges in very familiar terms for the twenty-first century spectator. Martin's real effort in performing the tasks of her role, as when the viewer sees the actress struggling to the balance the rolls that she is charged with plating, additionally underscores the film's ontological present-tense, even as it further suggests the gestural recognizability of the past (we can both see the actress really working to complete the task, while also imagining the same difficulty besetting a young girl in the earlier period). Campion's credited feline actor "Topper" likewise underscores the film's present-day valence, as it repeated wrestles itself away from Toots and Fanny's tight embraces. Topper in this way instantiates a pure form of contingency - which similarly appears in the aforesaid performances - of being outside, escaping the film's historical diegetic world, while also making the said world more authentic and vivid. Thus, it is not in the least surprising that the above Keats' quotation recalls the foremost theorist of this sort, André Bazin, and hisdescription of Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning(1932).
The operation of contingency that these figures introduce accords further with Keats' description of poetry, which the viewer is invited to read as a signpost describing Campion's own strategies in Bright Star. In this regard, the writer-director self-identifies as a poet, selecting from the natural and man-made environments that her mise-en-scène brings into existence. Then again, the film's opening segment offers a second, competing artistic mode, which the cinema uniquely resolves: namely Fanny's art, that of the dressmaker, whose work, unlike Keats' and Brown's poetry, permits its creator to make a living. The particular analogy follows from the stitching and sewing, with the latter providing a metonymy for editing, and for the classical decoupage construction of narrative as the physical piecing together of component parts, its montage. With Bright Star, Campion offers a remarkably complete picture of her lyrical narrative cinema, split between the aesthetic crafts of her two leads.
With Fanny and Keats, Campion also reintroduces her signature reversal of the gendered subject-object split of conventional narrative cinema (cf. Laura Mulvey). Here again Campion invests Fanny with subjecthood, making her the focalized bearer of desire rather than its object, which, perversely to the extent that Bright Star is an artistic bio-pic, defines Whishaw's Keats, a cipher in Campion's hands. In this regard, but especially for the film's comprehensive dissection of its maker's artistic program, Bright Star ranks among Campion's definitive accomplishments. The director's latest also signals not only a major comeback for Campion, but the return of a very nineties form of art cinema - a poetical art for its own sake - amid the more socially-conscious art house works of the early 21st century. Campion gives us a "total art" with an emphasis on the latter.
Writer-director Maren Ade's Everyone Else(Alle Anderen, 2009) proves to be another pinnacle among Germany's current "Berlin School" of filmmaking, following Valeska Grisebach's Longing(2006), for which Ade was credited with a "thanks," Stefan Krohmer's Summer '04 (2006) and Christian Petzold's Jerichow (2008), though unlike this trio of major works, Ade's film lacks the triangular geometry that each of these films brought to their romantic plots. Everyone Else's narrative of relationship in crisis remains resolutely couple-centered, dissecting Gitti's (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris's (Lars Eidinger) apparent incompatibility, though it remains unclear whether they would generate equal antagonism in relationships other than their own. Their enmity springs from their clashing personalities - rendered with an uttermost precision by Ade - that at their worst prove irritating in Gitti's case and cruel in Chris's. The latter, indeed, is repelled not only by his girlfriend's genuine, verbose singularity, as is evident in his demand that she "shut up" when he reads, and his nasty response that he had wanted to talk about something else following her suggestion that they live together, but also by her very presence, compelling Chris in one instance to walk rapidly ahead of Gitti as the pair hike through the rocky, Sardinia landscape. Gitti at her least desirous coaches a child to admit that she hates her older babysitter - even though her sentiment seems directed at Chris, he nonetheless finds her behavior amusing - and later pulls a knife on her more attractive, pregnant house-guest Sana (Nicole Marischka), before hurling herself outside a second-story window in what may or may not be a suicide attempt.
Ade contrasts Chris's and Gitti's relational difficulties with the outward happiness of the married Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and Sana, who unlike Gitti and the purportedly brilliant Chris, have each achieved notable successes in their chosen fields - Sana as a fashion-designer and Hans as an architect, Chris's profession. As they meet on two separate occasions for dinner, Hans and Sana convey a decided affinity, even if their rapport is based on unfunny jokes and an obvious, easy derision of culturally outdated artifacts and Chris's mother's singularity (as expressed in her porcelain cat and glass collections). Gitti cannot abide the latter, and especially Chris's participation in the mocking, which marks his and their relative low character, to say nothing of their lack of authenticity. However, they do seem to have achieved a happiness nonetheless - which Ade depicts from the outside: it remains mildly incomprehensible what Sana sees in Hans - as a reminder for Chris in particular as to what he does not have. That the less attractive and talented Hans (though he is still both of these, to be fair) has the more attractive and socially adjusted wife compels at least a share of Chris's animus toward Gitti.
Gitti, on the other hand, proves his devoted companion throughout; she clearly loves Chris more than he loves her (in this regard Everyone Else proves to be a variation on Michelangelo Antonioni's four Monica Vitti vehicles), clutching him from behind as the pair recline on the sunny poolside. Indeed, Chris emerges as the film's more frequent object of desire, shirtless and almost dressed ubiquitously in a tight-fitting pair of blue jeans to the curvy Gitti's bikini; in a moment replicating Longing's most memorable scene - according to Ade, fellow female filmmaker Grisebach helped on the film - Chris sways and dances, crawling along the floor to Willie Nelson's "To All the Girls I've Loved Before," with Ade's mobile camera tightly framing the male lead throughout. Chris's psychology is also the more opaque in comparison to Gitti's straightforward, confessed affection. Chris most frequently returns his feelings during the film's very sexy, visceral love-making passages, thus making his feelings toward Gitti no more clear. Ultimately, it is in both Chris's relative physical objectification and the opaqueness of his psychology - even if the presence of Hans and Sana offer some insight: he wishes to preserve his intellectual superiority, while also winning the more beautiful woman - that the female point-of-view of Ade's film expresses itself most strongly.
For Ade's female heroine, her relative individuality yields her superior character (as seen in her response to Chris and company's ridiculing of his mother's particularities) while also making her less attractive to her somewhat conformist-minded, "weakling" boyfriend. On multiple occasions, Chris even professes his embarrassment with Gitti, who though she attempts to fit in by buying a dress that she later admits makes her feel "bourgeois," proves unable to find pleasure in those things that the seemingly more simple, albeit creative Hans and Sana seem to enjoy. Finally, Gitti again flings herself from a second story window, which ends not in her death but rather a particularly heated, alfresco sex scene. Thereafter she tells Chris that she is leaving and that she no longer loves him, leading to Chris's protest that he knows the latter to be untrue. As she prepares to leave, Gitti takes a sip of juice, a bite of cherry and then collapses onto the living room rug where she remains frozen over what appears an extended duration. Throughout, Chris remains at her side, even answering her cell phone leading him to lie and say that she has gone to the beach. With Gitti motionless on the ground, Chris picks up his pure-of-heart Snow White whom he lifts onto a table, blowing on her stomach as one would an infant. She responds with a chuckle, even as her eyes remain closed and she preserves her unconscious valiance. Character thus takes precedence over narrative resolution in this concluding set-up, as Ade refuses to confirm whether or not they will stay together.
Ade herself has suggested that the conclusion marks a reversion to childhood, "a regressive desire to go back to a time of reckless innocence" that the couple has since lost. The filmmaker's interpretation thusly corresponds to her film's greatest virtue, beyond the precision with which she molds her very authentic lead and supporting players: the precise rendering of a specific time in the lives of a young couple, namely the end of their twenty-somethings, before either has experienced professional success and before the couple has any children of their own. Like the work of Wong Kar-wai, Ade, thirty-two at the time of the film's Berlin premiere in early 2009, has created one of the more authentic portraits of young adulthood - in her film's case from a standpoint inside the couple - ever to have graced the screen. Everyone Else certainly will serve as a mirror to many of its pre-middle aged, art house viewers. Ade's is seriously adult, seriously accomplished filmmaking.
Warning: the following post contains spoilers.
Writer-director Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch (2009) provides key contributions to two of the more distinctive trends to have emerged in the European cinema of the previous decade: first, Dumont's current feature entails a further modification of the iconography of Robert Bresson, whose style has become something of a default mode for the continent's dramatic film art in the years surrounding and following the master's death in 1999. Hadewijch, no less than Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne'sRosetta(1999) and L'Enfant (2005) specifically, represents a modification of the director's universe to its own adjusted worldview, which here is expressly humanist. Second, the filmmaker's latest continues the recent engagement with Europe's Islamification that works such as Michael Haneke's Caché(2005) and Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven(2007) portended previously. Once again, Dumont does not simply rehash the films that preceded his, but rather offers his individuated take on this civilization-redefining transformation. Dumont's work accordingly belongs to that very rare breed: it is a cinema of ideas that seeks to and indeed succeeds in provoking thought.
Dumont grounds his provocation - both in the above sense, and in the more conventional definition of an act of incitement (to which the director of L'humanité, 1999, is certainly no novice) - in his representation of Céline (Julie Sokolowski), a heavily-devout Catholic of collegiate age who opens the film inside a country convent. She is present from the film's opening, panning take, where the young nun rushes between moss-covered trees to a closed chapel gate, covered in the remnants of earlier votive offerings. From the first, Dumont and cinematographer Yves Cape saturate their images in deep blues similar to those of Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan (1987), one of the film's viable points of reference. Following shots of a crane in the midst of the cloisters - thereby establishing its modern setting - and of the pock-marked face of day-laborer David (David Dewaele) working in the grounds below, the film cuts to Céline kneeling beside as she offers supplication. As Céline prays, a box suspended by the crane hovers almost expectantly outside her window. When she finishes and rises to her feet, the crane mimics her motion, pulling the box upwards and out if view. With this doubled rising motion, Dumont presents a visual analogue to her silent act of prayer, and underscores Céline's connection to David whose life seems increasingly predestined to intersect with her own. Almost immediately thereafter, Céline's mother superior expels the young man from the religious community, claiming that she is a caricature of a nun and insisting that Céline's self-mortifying behavior is a mark of her narcissism. The older woman's craggy visage dominates the mise-en-scène, just as the nuns' corporeality, beneath their habits, dominated a previous, longer framing - in this respect, Dumont's film recalls Bresson's Les Anges du Peche(1943) rather directly. The elder nun speculates that Céline would be better off in the world. (David also leaves the cloister, though in his instance it is as a result of his incarceration for a parole violation.)
Now on the outside, the viewer is quickly introduced to Céline's aristocratic circumstances: she lives in an opulent Île de Saint-Louis flat with her mother and cabinet minister father. In a chance meeting at a café, Céline becomes acquainted with a young, unemployed Muslim immigrant Yassine (Yassine Salime), who invites Céline to an outdoor concert that consists of the rock stylings of an accordion player and saxophonist. (She will introduce the young man to her parents subsequently, and will ride with him after he steals a motorcycle to punish a Parisian for his profiling gaze.) In contrast, Céline subsequently attends the performance of a stringed quartet in a beautifully-appointed baroque church - and before a very sparse crowd. Dumont presents their piece in its entirety, echoing Eric Rohmer's similar musical set-piece in My Night at Maud's (1969), released forty years prior to Hadewijch. In both of Dumont's concert sequences, the camera lingers on long close-ups of Céline's face, which conveys both thoughtfulness and abandon in equal measure. Much like her experience of music, Céline's star-crossed love for Christ is mysterious and profoundly internal; because the object of her desire is absent (or at least invisible) her actions provide its only manifestation.
The meager crowd size combined with the richness of the setting contrasts even more distinctly with a religious meeting conducted by Yassine's brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) in the back of a Middle Eastern food stand. (In the same way, the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century luxury of Céline's Parisian home compares with the stark, suburban high rise that Yassine and Nassir occupy.) In the meeting to which Nassir has invited the very-committed Céline, the former emphasizes "the notion of the invisible" in the Islamic faith, that Allah is "present in absence"; in this respect, his tone proves highly ecumenical. Unlike Céline's fellow Catholics, she finds others in the back room who are as committed to their faith as she is hers - Hadewijch clearly makes the point that spiritual devotion is essentially the purview of Muslims alone in contemporary France; in an exceptionally conflationary moment, the viewer will see Céline on her knees as Nassir and Yassine bow to Allah. Nassir consequently chastises one of the comparatively large number of attendees who stares at Céline's bra-less chest through her opaque t-shirt. Dumont's mise-en-scène in fact often underlines the young woman's pert physique. This incident prompts Céline to rush out of the room, and the group leader to follow her with an apology. Céline then claims to her new religious mentor that she cannot stand anyone looking at her other than Christ.
Céline then tells Nassir that "I love him and I know he loves me. He has come to me often," but will later admit that she no longer feels God's presence. In this regard, Céline's faith is expressed as particularly feminine in its emphasis not only on faith, but in the shared feeling between the former "bride" and her "husband." Hers is l'amour fou de dieu. With Nassir insisting that Céline must act if she has faith - his Islamic faith is presented as masculine in juxtaposition to her feminine, "love"-foregrounded Catholicism - she concedes to join Nassir in what proves ultimately to be a terrorist act. As such, Nasser's previously enlightened tone dissolves, as does the politically-correct inference that Islam is a religion of piece. (Likewise, Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, 1996, and its perverted ethical calculation provides another clear point of reference.) Céline's motivation, only lightly sketched by Dumont, derives principally from her feeling of loverly neglect, from the absence she now feels outside the cloister. Indeed, it is as though Céline decides to test her God in aiding Nassir's slaughter of innocents - which Dumont depicts in an uncharacteristically CGI explosion; she will be unfaithful in doing the will of Allah in order to generate a reaction for her God.
After her participation in this act of violence, she indeed returns to the cloister, where along with David (recently released from prison) and a third young nun, Céline finds relief from a sudden downpour within a greenhouse attached to the church. When the elderly nun finds the three, she scolds the group, insisting that they leave the shelter. The church, in other words, proves no respite for this metonymic torrent. At this moment, the police likewise arrive, prompting Céline's flight into the surrounding woods. After returning to the chapel once more where its gates continue to be locked, and after pleading for God's intervention accordingly, she reaches a pond in which she attempts to drown herself. In this moment, Hadewijch directly adopts the iconography invented by Bresson's most despairing work, Mouchette(1967), and repeated in the Dardenne's Rosetta. Dumont, however, provides his variation as David seizes the submerged Céline, pulling her above the surface. Whether or not it is God who has answered her prayer, Céline's earthly salvation comes thanks to the humane action of her fellow man. It is here, rather than within the protective confines of the church, that Hadewijch's figures find respite from the contemporary reality with which Dumont's film confronts its spectators. Thrown into a very dangerous world, humanity has only itself.
Jacques Audiard's A Prophet(Un prophète, 2009), from an Audriard and Thomas Bidegain screenplay, offers a similar sociological portrait of a France where its older (white) populations are being eclipsed by those of its less assimilated Islamic immigrants. In the case of Audriard's film, this dynamic is expressed through the power relationships that obtain in prison, where a young, non-practicing Muslim, Malik (Tahar Rahim), is forced by the Corsican mafia, headed by the aging César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), into murdering fellow Arab prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi). Hereafter, Malik is visited occasionally by his murdered brother, thus connoting the intimacy between the murdered and murderer, while also providing a schizophrenic corollary to his own position shuttling between the Islamic faith of his birth and the secular world of his white gang. A Prophet indeed lacks Hadewijch's comparative theological dimension, save for Hadewijch's distinction between a devout Islam and a Christianity that has become mere culture - its only presence in A Prophet is in the Christmas holiday, just as in Dumont's film, Christianity apart from Céline (and outside the cloister) is mummified in the well-adorned, empty church.
As the narrative progresses, César is deserted by his fellow Mediterranean inmates, who are moved to an institution closer to their native Corsica following a governmental decree. Consequently, César comes to rely on Malik increasingly as he negotiates the increasing clout of the Muslim block. Malik, however, proves exceedingly adept in his own right, as he navigates this same faction even more shrewdly, while remaining loyal to his boss. Ultimately, Malik's power comes to exceed César's, displacing the power dynamics in the prison onto the Malik-César relationship. At the film's harrowing close, Malik not only refuses to cross the yard to visit with his former master, but indeed has his underlings punch the old man in the gut as he attempts to approach. In A Prophet, political calculation takes precedent over not only loyalty, but also over moral or ethical considerations.
A Prophet accordingly represents a French translation of Martin Scorsese's underworld idiom (cf. Mean Streets, 1973; Casino, 1995), replete with a similarly protean, post-classical style. Like the former, though A Prophet does it better than any Scorsese film in more than a decade-and-a-half, Audriard combines markedly disparate techniques in what is, like the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin equally (Kings and Queen, 2004), a filmmaking notable for its variability. In distinct contrast to Hadewijch's heavily composed, patient images, A Prophet often favors documentary-inflected, jittery hand-held takes, hard cutting and subjective focalization, construed by A Prophet's variations in visual point-of-view and on a soundtrack that in pivotal moments becomes highly conventional in its scoring, while also eliminating ambient sound.
Audriard's film, further, utilizes a prosaic narrative structure that borrows heavily from the televisual long-format that represents the core of high-end American popular culture, with HBO's "The Wire"and "Oz" especially germane in this instance. A Prophet possesses many of their virtues, relying similarly on the character-development that the aforesaid procure over their long durations. In this respect, Audriard's film belongs to this new tele-visual regime, whereas Hadewijch remains very much a work of auteurist art cinema in the classical sense: Dumont's film represents the more constricted artistic communication imparted through its organic, if ever so slightly uneven construction; it suggests not only the short story that is at the medium's core, but the painting medium that signifies in similarly discrete terms. On the other hand, A Prophet maintains a greater scope, relying on its storytelling to impart its arch issues. Though it touches on the same world as Hadewijch, it does so with less immediacy and urgency. Audriard is far more detached from his nonetheless very impressive work.
Receiving its New York premiere this past weekend in conjunction with the just-completed 2010 Robert Flaherty Seminar, Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso's La libertad (2001), the 1975-born director's first feature, provided a fit course for international modernist art cinema in the years immediately following the Abbas Kiarostami-dominated 1990s. With Kiarostami redrawing the boundaries delimiting fact and fiction from Close-Up (1990) onward, La libertad emerges as a sensible extension of the aforesaid's ontological interest, providing a work that is properly speaking neither fiction feature nor documentary. La libertad's grounding in the factual - its non-professional lead performs actions belonging to his daily ritual - insures that this is not fiction filmmaking as it is conventionally defined, while the film's lack of explanation equally argues against its status as documentary. If anything, La libertad suggests a form of semi-fictionalized cinema that is separated from more traditional fiction film by the gulf of non-fiction; in specifying so little, La libertad becomes something other than the non-fiction that a description of its scenario might suggest otherwise.
