29 results
Acknowledgements
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp ix-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Part 3 - The Forest: From Sensory Environment to Economic Site
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 73-74
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Monumental grandeur, green density, heterogenous ecosystem, leafy maze: forests are a world beyond ours, a support for the imagination, full of enigmas and mysteries. In his study of the history of forests in the Western civilisation, Robert Harrison states that
in the religions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness.
Movies often give forests limited roles; they are spectacular settings, full of symbolic protections, or inhabited by hostile or fantastic creatures. In the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar, James Cameron shows forests as a green, mystic, synthetic and obscure beauty, as an eerie environment where stories of futuristic myths are told. The movie borrows from countless other films, and so forests appear as nothing more than lush scenic ornamentations, a (super)natural, hyperbolic backdrop in which men and giant humanoids fight.
There are others, like Philippe Grandrieux, Naomi Kawase, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, or Lisandro Alonso, who look more humbly on the wooded world, in a more frontal and dualistic way; they remind us of the sensory power of the vegetal environment, they are aware of life’s quivering reality. In their films, forests are an affirmation of a vigorous yet discreet strength; they are a place for the living, rather than a space for the recluse. Therefore, they appear in the pictures as something other than a simple decoration, a temporary and evasive participant. The camera occupies the undergrowth, feels its texture, hooks on to the plants’ arteries, cuts into the bark of the trees: it proclaims that the forest’s nature is to be lived in, to be explored. These filmmakers create narratives that connect the body to its organic environment, whose monumentality overwhelms and dominates us; they weave tactile poetry. Forests, in their films, are no longer a space to contemplate and become instead a place where one can put down roots, even if only for a time. They are no longer a landscape in which to get lost, and become an integral, macrocosmic foundation, where forces can be replenished.
4 - Avi Mograbi: The Political Workshop
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 45-60
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the ritualised silence of an artist’s studio (a painter, a photographer, a sculptor or a filmmaker), works are created. It is patient, generally solitary labour, and the creator, ideally, has no social duties or external pressures bearing down on them. Throughout the history of cinema, a plethora of films, fiction or non-fiction, have tried to show the creative process, and thus taken part in its mystification. Usually, the artist ‘at work’ is filmed in the original creative space, or else in a reconstructed set, or, sometimes, in a film studio. These films, most of them destined for television broadcasting, document the artistic act, but do so by glossing over the original emergence and the maturing process of the work, which typically take place in a remote or religiously minded place. Other, rarer, films present the studio as a centrifugal spot, from which one art (cinema) looks at and reflects upon another art (painting, sculpture and so on).
Being a total art form, [cinema] makes the separation and differences between the arts productive, given that these are, paradoxically, the main way in which they communicate and establish connections. In that sense, and this is what the films of Jean-Luc Godard demonstrate forcefully and intelligently, cinema serves as a point of friction between the arts. Whenever the art of cinema looks at the other arts, when it examines closely the many creative processes that they use, it demonstrates with great accuracy the differences between the arts, and the fact that their identity is constructed precisely through these differences.
The studio, the workshop, the atelier stand, in a way, as silent megaphones for these differences, as mirrors that arts use to face one another, that illustrates their dissonances, the gaps that separate them and the similarities that bring them closer.
Objects in the studio spell out the artist’s identity, and the space itself is a cartography of daily habits, precursive experiments of the creative act. The studio is both circumscribed and free, and because the artist’s life takes place in it, the filmmaker can in turn film it and let the creative process unfold. The cutting room plays a similar role for the filmmaker: an enclosed laboratory, a cavern, where, through long and difficult operations, opinions and aesthetic choices are developed and affirmed.
15 - Sharunas Bartas’s Undergrounds
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 167-176
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In his film In the Memory of a Day Gone By, made in 1990 when he was still a student, Sharunas Bartas used walking to weave together multiple urban scenes in the city of Vilnius. On a street, deaf children communicate playfully in sign language; people hurry along so as not to be late for religious services; maimed people wander about; in a building doorway, a child is playing hide-and-seek … Vilnius is represented on screen as a rhythmic series of mundane micro-situations, each being unique enough, distinctive enough to stand on its own. Slowly, patiently, Bartas’s camera walks by, barely grazing the surface of these moments, and the most banal, the most ordinary turn out to be unfathomable. In Three Days (1991) and The Corridor (1995), he applies this form of urban contemplation to remote, enclosed spaces: a cellar, a corridor, a bunker – places where solitary beings roam – or run-down buildings in Kaliningrad, where bodies worried by desire meet, in a sort of dance. In these two films, the filmmaker tells tales of lonely wanderings, of troubled, tormented people, of waiting. Long, immersive shots show broken, disconsolate lives, imprisoned in squalid locales.
Lives under the Ground
In Three Days, two young men go out of an isolated house in the country and take a train to the city of Kaliningrad. Once there, they walk towards the port and reach an empty, windy square. Three people, a man who is obviously drunk and two young women, enter the cinematographic frame and go and sit on a low wall. The two young men approach one of the women, who has been waiting by herself for a moment, the other having accompanied the drunkard somewhere off screen. As she comes back, she shouts: ‘Who are you boys? Why aren’t you saying anything?’ The four of them start walking about aimlessly in the harbour. They wait, wander around, not saying anything, bathed in the glaring lights of the city. They seem reluctant to do anything, as if they refused to partake in any productive activity. Urban life and its constant bustle seem completely absent from this narrative. Once in a while, a wide shot shows the city and its harbour, but that is all.
2 - Jeanne Dielman: Neurotic Seclusion
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 22-28
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) carries out a kind of solemn purification. A young widow, Jeanne, walks around her flat, going from room to room (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, corridors, living room); she prepares a meal, tidies up her room, prostitutes herself, does the laundry … This housebound, secluded film takes places over three days. Daily activities are shot with impassive directness: making frequent use of medium shots, so as to put body and space on the same level, Akerman shows how her character (played by the beautiful and distant Delphine Seyrig) organises daily tasks with obsessive meticulousness. Babette Mangolte, the cinematographer, shows with merciless formality this compulsive, ritualised behaviour. From a narration perspective, nothing much happens: the fussy, mechanical gestures are the story. Even sex is ‘automatised’. Something is brewing, but it never boils over. Daily life is over-organised, over-structured, but it appears as an ‘unconscious act’: Jeanne Dielman’s automaton body projects on to domestic space its own pathologies, its unconscious chaotic marks. The frenzied body of Blow Up My Town becomes, in Jeanne Dielman, a body besieged by the anticipation and the over-organisation of the mundane. Chores (cooking, cleaning, washing) follow one another, their succession determined by Jeanne’s neuroses and her need to feel protected from a life filled with inhibitions and prohibitions. According to Jacques Lacan, ‘the compulsive person solves the problem of evanescence of their desire by making it into a prohibition. The Other becomes bearable precisely when the Other is forbidden.’ The filmmaker uses long, patient medium shots to display the mental cycle of a woman who prostitutes herself to earn a living. And when she feels pleasure with a client, when enjoyment overtakes her, her reaction is to murder that man: ‘she kills because she wants to get order back’.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is more than a movie about home seclusion. Chantal Akerman explores the structure of an inner life that feels threatened, and she archives a mental disorder, hoping that by compulsively organising daily life, she might find a cure. Babette Mangolte’s unmoving, frontal camera acts as a sort of hourglass: as time passes in each shot, the psychological pressure felt by Jeanne Dielman slowly increases.
Introduction
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 1-12
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In The Man Without a Past (2002), Aki Kaurismäki continues with biting irony his study of the excluded, the abused and the losers, which he began in Drifting Clouds (1996). A man gets off the train in Helsinki, hoping to find work. Just outside the station, he is savagely beaten. He is taken to the hospital and pronounced dead. However, he leaves his room mysteriously. At this point, Kaurismäki inserts a view of the port, with symphonic music, in a slow high-angle shot that reveals gradually the body of the ‘dead’ man, lying on the rocky soil. This is followed by a wide shot of a black and pink sky. A tramp comes along and takes the boots off the prone body, then two blond children, carrying a water can, see it and run off. The next image, a fixed long shot, shows powder blue and rust-coloured metal containers. In front of the biggest container, on top of which lies a water tank, a fire is burning. The two children run up to their father to tell him of their discovery. The audience then understands suddenly that a poor family lives in that container. The polished colorimetry of the shot (the red sky, the blue and yellow containers) produces an affected optical lyricism, which in turn resonates with the orchestral music playing through these shots. The rusted vats and jerrycans, the old containers and the various bits of scrap iron lying about, are carefully and geometrically arranged in this lot near the port, as if chaos was more structure than dislocation. This sophisticated dereliction gives off a feeling of artificiality, of exoticism. In this parable-movie, this harbour rubbish dump is more celestial than terrestrial. It seems one must resort to using the term ‘scenery’ to describe this sundry spatial arrangement, in which poverty is a form of decoration.
In Damnation (1988), Béla Tarr shows the wanderings of Karrer, a disillusioned and dissatisfied man, in an isolated and muddy town on the great Hungarian plains. Having been abruptly thrown out of his flat by his lover, Karrer remains seated on the floor, leaning on the door frame.
10 - Pasolini’s Wastelands
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 115-123
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s mutilated body was found near a beach in Ostia, on a piece of wasteland. His death in this isolated place, on the outskirts of the city where Jean-André shot his film, Pasolini l’enragé, in 1966, resonates with his life as a civil poet, a lively agitator and exceptional film-maker. Throughout his meteor-like life, he passionately defended those who did not have a voice, those who were on the fringe. In his first novels (The Ragazzi and A Violent Life) and in his Roman film trilogy (Accattone, Mamma Roma, La Ricotta), Pasolini gave the outskirts of Rome and their various borgate (areas where the residents built their houses themselves because they could find no other place to live) great importance. In these suburban zones live the poorest of the poor, the underclass that were banished from the noble centre of the city. As Pasolini explained in an interview:
I arrived in Rome from Friuli. I came from the countryside, from a community of peasants, where everything was clean, exact, moral, honest, and I found myself in the gigantic cauldron of the Roman suburbs. I experienced extraordinary emotional trauma, it was a shock to the nerves, truly. I discovered the Roman underclass, their pains, their filth, their cynicism, their unknown Catholicism, their stoic paganism, etc. Really, it was emotional trauma, a traumatic discovery that overwhelmed me.
In his book, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin wrote: ‘the other quality that immediately makes Pasolini a great director, in his first trilogy, is his choice of always shooting in real and astonishing settings, in half-deserted places, on the outskirts of cities’. And he adds right away, referring in part to the masterful integration of the site of Mount Testaccio in Accattone: ‘truly, he possesses a genius of places’.
From Utopia to Anachronism
The banlieue, for Pier Paolo Pasolini, is a nervous universe, where words, gestures and shouts signify the extreme poverty of a community washed up on the outskirts of the city. The banlieue is an edge, yet it is separate from the centre, from the historic heart out of which radiate the power and domination of the bourgeoisie, where the most fortunate bask in their privileges.
8 - Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub: The ‘Sacred Sobriety’ of the Undergrowth
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 90-102
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub make up a cinematographic constellation; they create radically dialectic, meteoric works that resist any typology. Their films storm and rage, criticise everything and everyone, refuse any compromise: they denounce fascism, capitalism, blind faith in progress, the society of the spectacle. Their cinema is unashamedly political and they use it to claim their unconditional belief in Marxist thought. In Kommunisten (2014), Jean-Marie Straub quotes these sentences from Elio Vittorini: ‘Communism does not want to build a collective soul. It wants to create a society where false differences are abolished. And once they are abolished, all the potentialities of true differences will become available.’
Kommunisten was made after the death of Danièle Huillet in 2006; it presents, in condensed form, in one film, the entire trajectory of the Straub-Huillets, made up of resistance, protests, dialectic anger, refusals to submit. Jean-Marie Straub uses various fragments of their previous films (Workers, Peasants (2001), Black Sin (1988), The Death of Empedocles (1986), Too Early/ Too Late (1981), Fortini/Cani (1976)) to create a homogeneous monument in which words and telluric forces endow the act of resistance with renewed vitality. In Straub’s images, the earth and speech acts are indivisible, and their combined power turns the screen into a dialogic fortress. This is what Gilles Deleuze pointed out:
[In the films of the Straub-Huillets,] history is inseparable from the earth [terre], struggle is underground [sous terre], and if we want to grasp an event, we must not show it, we must not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its internal history (and not simply a more or less distant past).3
For Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, one of the bloody consequences of capitalism has been the destruction, the negation and the colonisation of nature. Their works never use nature as a backdrop, or pretend to; they never subjugate nature by placing actors in it as if they were pieces on a chessboard. The Straubs, in their later films, strongly advocated for a ‘return to nature’. Nevertheless, even if the two filmmakers sought an open-ended confrontation with the rustling richness of eternal forces, one should not conclude from it that they give in to lyrical nostalgia.
11 - Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth: From the Slums to the Sanitised Apartment
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 124-133
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Cape Verdean slums of Fontainhas, north-west of Lisbon, are the setting of Pedro Costa’s trilogy, Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006). Most of the residents of the neighbourhood are outcasts, drop-outs and labourers, who were forced to build a dwelling in this uninhabitable place. They moved into these vacant, abandoned areas and transformed a place of exile into an inclusive home. These ‘places for the displaced’ are indeed interstices, narrow openings, in whose gaps are told the stories of brutalised humans and upended temporalities.
In 1999, when Pedro Costa was about to shoot In Vanda’s Room, the destruction of Fontainhas had already begun. He set his film up around two mutually exclusive, yet contiguous spaces: the inside, which mostly means Vanda’s room, where she and her sister use heroin, and the outside, about to be demolished, where dark, narrow streets are lined with tiny shacks that disappear, day by day, torn down by excavators.
The Dilapidated Fragility of Fontainhas
By the time shooting began for Colossal Youth in 2006, Fontainhas had been completely demolished and rebuilt. Pedro Costa had decided to return and revisit the ghostly traces of the old neighbourhood, scattered across the new constructions, when he met a Cape Verdean immigrant, Ventura.
I had seen Ventura many times while shooting the other films. He was a true outcast, a solitary outlaw, an outsider. He always fascinated me. I talked to him and learned he had been one of the first to build a house in the neighbourhood. He had arrived in Lisbon by himself, with no family. Slowly, from to 1975 to 1980, Ventura’s life and the history of the neighbourhood became completely intertwined. He told me about his problems, about his romantic life. From that came the idea that Ventura was a sort of archetypal figure of this past.
Colossal Youth is constructed around a ‘fictional framework’ based on Ventura’s life, but it was constantly modified while the film was being shot, partly because of the working method that was used, based on repetition and improvisation. Costa summed it up in these terms:
The idea was to do a scene, then forget it, and then do it again three months, six months later. It wasn’t the same any more, the actors remembered it, but something else had developed.
Bibliography
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 180-187
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Part 1 - Chantal Akerman: Cloistered Nomadism
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 13-16
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard praises the native home, that first ‘matricial’ place that welcomes the movement of childhood and institutes – between reverie and boredom – a ‘topography of our intimate being’. Bachelard’s home is a maternal figure, which, ‘even more than the landscape, is “a state of mind”’. It is an autonomous space, protected from the outside, where the voices of the unconscious are expressed and where the manners and materials of dreams unfold. Disconnected from the dark rumours of the world, the house is, according to the philosopher, a ‘primitive hut’ that protects from conflictual agitation and centrifugal forces, a shell conducive to withdrawal. To dwell, then, is to remain temporarily, to exist in and through the imagination, and it means to seek relief from the weight of everyday domestic life, to minimise the burden of the commonplace, to abbreviate and compress the intrusive and cataclysmic forces of the outside world, and to prefer contemplative states of reverie.
However, houses ‘in films’ are not necessarily Bachelardian in inspiration: they are, in turn, primordial settings, spaces of passage and circulation, or even shelters; they are the natural spaces of cinematographic scenarios, from the most classic to the most adventurous. Houses are the privileged scenic and scenographic tools where the sometimes intimate, sometimes collective psychological journey of the characters unfolds. Often, they are projected before the spectator’s eyes as the catalysts, and as the crystallising environments of suspended or forthcoming dramas. The fact that houses are the privileged spaces of reception and collection of dialogues and confidences does not imply that they are ‘seen’, or even that they are inhabited. In fact, houses ‘in films’ are most often either beautiful, deserving of contemplation, or disgraceful and repellent: they have the virtues of social identification – ensuring close and intimate relationships or creating separations between the characters. They find their place in films as elementary architectural garments, and they are framed as empty vessels despite the stature that scenarios frequently attempt to confer upon them. In this sense, the representations of houses ‘in films’ mostly draw facades, technical settings where the characters’ movements are organised. The home is thus limited to being a building that houses the characters, a building that is nonetheless absent since it has no real presence on screen, as it is limited to being a contextualising space.
List of Figures
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp vii-viii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
9 - Lisandro Alonso’s La Libertad and Los Muertos: The Dual Forest
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 103-110
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Lisandro Alonso’s La Libertad and Los Muertos: The Dual Forest
Lisandro Alonso’s La Libertad (2001) takes place in central Argentina’s pampa, an immense, wide open territory, a ‘wooded steppe’. However, the director does not take his audience along for a never-ending stroll; instead, with several long takes, he establishes the exact boundaries of his work. A young woodcutter, Misael, after building a temporary shelter in the pampa, surveys a wooded area, identifies the trees that can be cut down and marks where they will be axed based on their size. With graceful dexterity, he uses his axe to remove the bark. He then makes a bundle of this modest treasure, which he intends to sell later, and places it at the edge of the forest lot. Lisandro Alonso shows all this hard work while remaining at a respectful distance. The camera follows every wonderfully skilful gesture. This is reality, powerful yet untouched by any sermon about deforestation, unsullied by allegorical interpretations, unspoiled by any meditation on the generosity of nature. Trees are felled and pruned; the filmmaker is only a mindful observer, and it is the young man’s activity that gives the pictures their energy. These woods are only a work site, the means to produce a modest income. The long duration of the shots underscores the woodcutter’s progress, but also shows the austerity of his life: all he does is cut, transport and sell wood. Lisandro Alonso shows that basic survival activities (hunting armadillos for food, starting a fire) are really acts of autonomous resistance. The forest, in La Libertad, is not just a lush environment or a wild ecosystem; it is a set of habits, a place of endlessly repeated, exhausting work.
The Wooded Pampa, a Modest Production Site
With his axe, Misael carefully removes all the branches that are in the way and starts digging around the base. The camera is placed directly in front of him and looks steadily at his precise motions, emphasising the calm, ordinary courage of this young man. The picture then moves closer to the trunk and the audience can see the axe rhythmically biting into the wood, until the whole tree falls to the ground. The woodcutter then starts cutting into the tree with a chainsaw, slowly, methodically transforming this living being into wood pieces.
5 - A Moving Inwardness: Alexander Sokurov’s A Humble Life
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 61-72
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In A Humble Life (1997), Alexander Sokurov shows the daily life of an old lady who lives by herself in a village in the mountains of Nara prefecture, in Japan. Her time is mostly spent sewing mofuku, or mourning kimonos. Her house is not presented as a domestic, functional space, but rather as an outer layer that strengthens and protects the lonely woman. Indeed, the traditional wooden house serves all at once as protection, as a place of meditation and as a workshop. Alexander Sokurov enters into this simple, unornamented architecture and introduces it as a form of poetic expression: for the filmmaker, it seems as if the dwelling was a way of thinking existentially about space. The Japanese house is an empty but active home, a site favourable to both delight and prolonged enchantment.
The Spirit of the Japanese House
Late at night, clouds rush sideways in front of the camera, streaking before a mountain range. This image is followed by a static shot of a house, barely visible in the darkness. The director whispers calmly and solemnly: ‘I arrived at dusk. The sound of the wind and fatigue prevented me from falling asleep.’ Slowly, the camera inches closer to the house and comes inside. It lingers for a while on an oil lamp, then it examines from up close a hand stroking a tatami, while the sound of burning twigs and the chirp of crickets are heard. Later, Sokurov places his camera on the threshold of a sliding door, so as to bring together the inside and the outside as a continuous whole. Materials and fabrics are closely observed: packed-earth floors, the rush stems of the tatami. Slowly, the superimposed image of a Japanese-style room (washitsu), with its tatami flooring and rice paper (shouji) walls, appears. The audience can hear the sound of a wooden floor creaking, and one guesses that it is the house’s lone occupant walking about. The filmmaker seems to be listening intently to the nervous chatter of the various materials, as if to reveal the quiet, spiritual sobriety of the walls and floors of this Japanese house.
Epilogue
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 177-179
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Because they bring together trace elements of daily life, because they focus on moments without qualities, because they claim an attraction to marginal places, because they unearth the vulnerabilities that are hidden there, the films I have discussed go beyond the ordinariness of spaces to create a true ‘aesthetics of place’. Events both repetitive and inventive, both familiar and strange, can occur there: places are a parchment on which is inscribed our ever-moving contemporaneity. Many books allude to the ‘spirit of place’, or to the ‘genius loci’, to which are attributed mysterious qualities, allegorical values, but that amounts to taking away from places this fundamental trait: people live there. This is where concrete, quotidian gestures are structured and repeated. This is not the case for the places discussed in this book; they are ordinary homes, isolated areas, sometimes titanic, sometimes minor locales: they are dynamically connected with the inside and the outside, their echoes are heard near and far, here and everywhere.
In some of the films of Chantal Akerman, Avi Mograbi or Jean-Daniel Pollet, the houses the audience sees on screen belong to the filmmakers themselves: they give the viewers access to the centre of their subjective thought while paradoxically allowing themselves to step away from that centre. These houses are worlds unto themselves; they are wells to be dug, places where silent confessions and noisy disavowals fill the space, where thoughts about oneself and thoughts about others are shared and linked. What is considered private comes out of its shell, so to speak, and takes part in the experience of the world’s tumult. These houses are not residences any more, they have become spaces where interior powers and exterior forces clash and collide. In them, speech becomes free, mobile, fragmentary, poetic and political, inventive and questioning. They may be turned into workshops, transformed into a temple, made simultaneously ‘nomadic’ and ‘cloistered’. These houses form an archipelago of disparate poetic and political dwellings. To dwell, for these filmmakers, means to build fortresses, so that they may reveal (themselves) through whispers, angry revolts or provocations. But they still imply rather than explain, they prefer to include rather than exclude.
In Pedro Costa, Tariq Teguia or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘real fictions’, to live on the outskirts of the city does not just mean to occupy another space.
13 - Bruno Dumont’s Hamlets: Cursed and Isolated Places
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 147-158
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In France, the very notion of hameau, or hamlet, supposes a tension between two antagonistic ideas: remoteness and community. On the one hand, a hamlet is usually linked, at least administratively speaking, to a village; the hamlet is dependent on it, but it stands apart, it keeps at a distance. On the other hand, any hamlet will contain a number of houses and farmhouses, often quite close to one another, while around the hamlet, a few isolated farms will create a sort of archipelago, a loose network, traditionally separated by fields – family properties, often quite small. These farms are scattered about, close enough that they can see one another, but at some distance nevertheless. It is in such hamlets on the Opal Coast of northern France that Bruno Dumont shot Hors Satan in 2011 and P’tit Quinquin in 2014.
Hors Satan begins under a rainy light, in front of a closed door. A hand knocks vigorously, the door opens slightly, and another hand gives a sandwich to the person who is standing outside. A long shot follows, which shows the various houses and outbuildings of the farm where the young girl lives who will become the vagrant’s friend and accomplice. As the film begins, the director thus sets up two different spaces: one is inhabited by men, made up of several farms huddled together, and the other is a landscape, the dunes of the Opal Coast. Between the constructed world and the natural world, the two main characters (the young girl and the vagrant) go constantly back and forth. In Hors Satan, bodies have a significant presence, while both the hamlet and the landscape as a whole are seized by feelings of strangeness and beauty, by an oscillation between inertia and energy, and, in fact, this fluctuation punctuates the entire narrative and the unfolding of its enigma. In truth, the notion of narrative – a transparent and rational story, told in a straight line – is incidental. As Bruno Dumont himself said about stories: ‘You need one, of course, but it’s of secondary importance. I write about places, not about stories.’
Defective, Luminous
After praying silently for a long time while facing the wild landscape of the sea dunes, the vagrant walks on the road that leads to the hamlet and finds the young girl crying near her family’s farm.
6 - Philippe Grandrieux’s Forest-matter: A Multisensory Place
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 75-82
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The violent thwacks of a young woodcutter’s axe, his bold and rapid breathing, fill the first shot of Philippe Grandrieux’s film Un Lac (2008). Two hands are seen in close-up; behind them, we can make out blurry, shining black filaments that ripple across the frame. After showing a few more frantic hacks, the camera looks up: dark trees sway against the pale dome of the sky. The trunk makes a brief, cracking sound, announcing its impending fall. These thundering noises jolt the images and seem to contract, compress them. It is as if the spasmodic sounds brutalised the lofty and serene verticality of the trees and shook them to their core. Sounds breach the two-dimensional perspective of the landscape, and the wounded depth of the plants stabs through the screen. One could think of these noises as punctures, that exist both physically (as the sound waves expand throughout the forested space) and aesthetically (they deface the beautiful landscape), or as a cinematographic manifesto, an artistic posture of sorts; because he favours the use of sound bursts to torment the elements, Philippe Grandrieux creates an auditory stratigraphy that takes over the appearance of the ecological structure. He unleashes a mobile and excruciating vison of matter that smashes through the illusion of the canvassed landscape.
Poetics of the Unstable
For Philippe Grandrieux, every shot is an urge, a pressure, an energy that lays bare the nervous ripples of reality. In that regard, images are not composed solely with the grammar of visual comprehension in mind, because they also aim to convey the physical and motive experience of perception, the body that makes the film and the body-camera meld into one, thus creating a centripetal force that changes reality and moves the senses polyphonically.
The activity of the maker of films pulls bubbling, swarming forces out of life, which resonates, in this sense, with the way phenomenology describes perception:
to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation. […] We must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time.
Part 4 - The Banlieue: Off-centred, Isolated
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 111-114
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
As early as the 1970s, many works of fiction surveyed the French banlieues and filmed them as if they were a world unto their own: territories standing away from the big cities, where the same scenarios of social exclusion and pain are endlessly repeated. The neighbourhoods, the council housing form the basis of these narratives, and space is structured around them in a purely contextual way. The camera stays close to the characters, hangs around the group, focuses on their individual destinies. These ‘banlieusards’ are, most often, teenagers trying to tame their rebellious energy, to realise their desire to achieve success or to get out and away from there. In almost every film, they end up confronting law enforcement. And the architectural space, meanwhile, the buildings, the staircases, the high-rises, appear mainly as stigmatised containers.
In movies such as Tea in the Harem (Mehdi Charef, 1985), La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), Inner City (Jean-François Richet, 1995), Douce France (Malik Chibane, 1995), Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997) or Bye-Bye (Karim Dridi, 1995), the banlieue is represented as a dreadful lanscape, or as a territory that is to be occupied, or as an unusual setting for a love story and all related conflicts. In short, in most films about the banlieue, the fictional narrative uses sociology and geography to depict in an exceedingly emotional manner the fate of the ‘banlieusard’, a lost cause who may be redeemable or even rehabilitated. As Thierry Paquot said: ‘to shoot a film in the banlieue does not mean filming the banlieue’.
Eric Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) is one notable exception: the Parisian banlieue is new, architecturally interesting, and it is home to young men and women whose only worry in life is experiencing it fully and experimenting with blossoming desires. In this modern and luminous setting, Rohmer’s young bodies exchange various ‘kinds of courtesies’ and discuss in affected whispers the delightful contradictions of their feelings. In an interview in the newspaper Libération, Rohmer said:
Almost everything in Boyfriends and Girlfriends takes place in the new town of Cergy: it is the laboratory for the experiment, the utopian space that allows the narrative and the characters to develop unhindered. Back then, the Saint-Christophe neighbourhood, the train station, the prefecture looked as if they had come out of nowhere.
3 - From Cities to Walls: A Local Change of Scenery
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 29-42
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976) weaves together a voice-over reading of letters that her mother sent from Brussels, and scenes of New York, where she resided at the time: streets, subways and squares. Natalia Akerman’s letters are a link, a materialisation of geographical distance, and as they cross over the Atlantic and come to New York, they express the rhythm of her family’s daily life back in Brussels. The one who is absent, who remained in Europe, becomes an integral part of the American city. These thoughtful missives, written by the mother, read by the daughter as she wanders about the streets, create a poetic connection: they roam around together, follow in the footsteps of anonymous passers-by. The words of the mother, affectionate and forceful, transform unknown silhouettes into familiar bodies, lessen the anonymity that predominates in major cities. Obviously, New York does not transform itself into Brussels, but the letters, as they are read, are superimposed over the images of the American city and establish a correspondence between exterior and interior, as if the world outside was invariably drawn towards the inner life. In other words, in News from Home, the daily life of New York City is permanently attached to the ‘everyday privacy’ of the flat in Brussels. The geographical gap between the ordinariness of the streets and the sentimentality of home exposes, within the frame of the cinematographic picture, a form of sedentary nomadism, a wavering between the here and the far away, the exterior and the interior, between reclusion and wandering. News from Home creates a local change of scenery, in a way that is reminiscent of Maurice Blanchot, who wrote that ‘a change of scenery does not mean the loss of one’s homeland, but rather a more authentic way of dwelling, of inhabiting without habits; exile is but a new way to relate with the Outside’.
To travel, to relocate, to be in transit, all these expressions convey a sense of moving, of mobility. But these ways to exist, to ‘inhabit without habits’, also aim to look for and find an elusive locus. Akerman is at once taken away by perpetual motion, but also impeded by it: she needs to get away from her mother while remaining in close contact with her.
14 - Béla Tarr: Waiting behind Barricades
- Corinne Maury, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
- Translated by Francis Guevremont
-
- Book:
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 159-166
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In films, waiting is usually a moment of inaction and growing exasperation, or else it is a short, insignificant instant that does not result in any introspection. Waiting is a brief pause, a respite that only exists contextually, until the action gets going again and the plot resumes its course. In other words, waiting is hollow, dead time, in the movies; it has no depth. It is just an interruption of motions and dialogues, and it must not last too long, so that active events can happen again, and so that time can become precious and impetuous again.
By contrast, in Béla Tarr’s insistently protracted narrations, waiting implies both breaking-down and self-denial. To wait is to accept that what you expect will not come, that the passage of time is really just a ‘suspended flow’. Tarr’s first films focused on social criticism (Family Nest, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall), on stories in which individual destinies interacted with general history and, more specifically, with communism’s failed promises. But from Damnation on, the filmmaker used the towns and plains of Hungary to film ‘situations’ rather than ‘stories’. In his demonic trilogy (Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies), and in the follow-up film The Turin Horse (2011), waiting is represented as a disintegrating experience, as a confrontation with the indifferent and stolid power of places. As they wait, the characters are stuck and forced to remain ‘nowhere’.
The Window Shows the World’s Stagnation
Damnation begins in a vast, grey, muddy expanse. Several bins attached to a cable go endlessly back and forth between very high pylons, with a loud, continuous buzzing sound. As the camera moves very slowly away, it reveals a man, seen from the back, who is watching through a window the repetitive motions of the bins. Writes Andrea Del Lungo:
A window looks on. According to the old metaphor, it is the eye of the house-body, that looks on the outside world even as it probes its own inner life. Through the window, humans begin the journey of personal understanding, by withdrawing into themselves, by observing the world melancholically or by analysing their own conscience.