26 February 22
“Why do films have to make sense?”
This week I watched the first half of Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” and I can’t decide if I liked it or not. Or even if I was enjoying watching it as I watched. Anderson dualism.
I have nothing against mannered films, or overly stylised films… films where nothing much happens. I adore the work of David Mamet. Well, at least I did, until he retrieved his stepladder, perched precariously at the top (trembling to keep his balance with trousers gathered around his ankles) and shat directly all over his reputation (yes — I sat through the “funny rape play”).
It's November 2013, and I’m programming a web video-art piece for artist Mischa Twitchin1 that sequences his video clips in random order on each viewing to generate new “bring your own meaning”narratives. We met at Shunt, the astounding theatre club space, where I ended up doing the website for free in true fan boy fashion after being introduced by my friend Woody. This was much to the joy of La Jefa, who spent a year or two officially being allowed to collect and hoard cartons and boxes in order to make “cardboard world” montages for the Shunt site.
Anne and I had just seen Robert Lapage’s “Playing Cards 1: Spades” at London’s Roundhouse Theatre. While it’s fair to say it’s “impressionistic” at best, it’s visually rich and makes inventive use of a purpose-made revolving set to deliver spectacle. Mischa had been present the same night as us, taking his theatre students to see it. I expected him to have loved it. Shunt did a play called Money featuring an inventive set.
He didn’t. He hated it. Just goes to show that artists are a tough crowd to please. If I’m right, what upset him wasn’t it being made of not-really-connected vignettes, but its slickness and reliance on polished “set pieces” using the circular spinning stage and trapdoors.
Also discussed was David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” which Anne and I had both struggled with the night before. “Why do films have to make sense?” asked Mischa. A very good question.
A question I’ve thought about ever since. Films being a multi-sensory experience, unlike a book, are better suited to house techniques like random sequences unified by musical score, or dialogue over disparate visuals. Start typing random words in a book and you’re buggered.
Films are still primarily vehicles for stories, and in terms of breaking away from the convention of theatre where one is recording the players on a stage from the audience's perspective, nothing compares to the moment when someone realised the camera could move as well as the actors, also D. W. Griffith's use of shots over different distances (hello the close up). Actually early cinema was a lot more about the visual spectacle and not the narrative.
Cinema started as animated photographs, and there was a delight in seeing what the new medium could bring, without being tied down to reproducing a previous art: theatre.
Immersion and suspension of disbelief are both central to enjoy a book, or film — the notion of being taken to live inside an artificial world. Mozart’s “The magic flute” doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but is widely accepted without anyone saying “But it doesn't make sense!”. Cinema does have a rich history of the experimental from Méliès's “A Trip to the Moon”, running through Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou” to “Holy Motors” and the frankly quite bonkers “The Holy Mountain”. All of these share with The Magic Flute the common paradigm of being rooted in surrealism, or absurdism. They set out from the start to avoid narrative coherence, to present and induce a dream like fugue.
There are successful mood pieces like Koyaanisqatsi, and my favourite, Paul Wright's “Arcadia” with music by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory that teeters on bucolic horror, but these really fall into the experimental documentary camp.
Perhaps Mischa’s question “Why do films have to make sense?” prepared me for Emmanuel Carrère‘s “The Moustache” (adapted from his own novel) which I adored, while everyone I watched it with loathed. When I say adored I mean almost moved to the remote Hong Kong island it was partially filmed on. Anne and I made a one minute condensed version of it on board Hong Kong's The Star Ferry. Lynch’s Inland Empire has much in common with it, each scene makes sense, is shot traditionally, watching any random fifteen minutes it would read as a conventional movie, only viewed overall does it not make sense (although there are theories of explanation). His “Mulholland Drive” – if you don't Google the online discussions – doesn't make much sense with its split narratives, but largely avoids dream-like tropes and produces a wonderful and disconcerting drama.
What surprises is that cinema hasn't produced more films like Mulholland Drive, given its capacity to combine disparate visual and audio facets (theatre is always seen from a fixed viewpoint, so has one less degree of freedom).
Perhaps the question should be rephrased as “Why do films have to make narrative sense?”. Ridley Scott's (somewhat misguided in my opinion) “The Last Duel” uses the three viewpoints technique, but the structure relies upon the final view revealing 'the truth'. Why not make it so all three viewpoints are thrown together, making the truth nebulous and fluid, leaving the viewer to discern what actually happened? Because that would be annoying as fuck? What makes us need to have stories with endings, and not just enjoy them as journeys?
The dilemma I felt with The French Dispatch is one of immersion. With Anderson stylising every aspect of the film and along with the jump cuts between episodes, you find yourself being constantly reminded you are viewing a Wes Anderson film. You are watching a screen, rather than being immersed in a world view, no matter how whimsical, where your own reality is subsumed. Normally, you are taken behind the fourth wall. I was very conscious I was looking at a film as well as watching a film.
Speaking of fourth walls, or out off, this device has been with us since the Greek chorus, and while usually used for comic effect - an aside, in character, to the audience letting them in on a gag, think Peepshow2 - it is used to chilling effect in Michael Haneke's “Funny Games (warning, it's not very funny. Actually it's not funny at all) and poignantly by Claude Van Damme in JCVD. Actually watching again the ‘wall break’ from JCVD just now to include the web link I realise it is a perfect summation of where we're going with this.
Before we get there, shall we throw into the stew Lars von Trier's limitations used to magnificent effort in “Dogville”, where the set is literally just that, an empty sound stage, with where the 'buildings' would be marked out on the floor in white like a blueprint. The rest of the film is shot almost conventionally – OK, there's a narrator; the Greek chorus fracturing the fourth wall - although he is constantly reminding you that you are viewing a film, a false construct, our mind still encompasses this and binds it into a suspended reality.
A brief detour here, to give an honorary mention to Thomas Vinterberg's “Another Round”. Excuse the whiplash, but it is connected: Vinterberg and von Trier founded Dogme 953, a film movement which prescribed ‘rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology’.
The detour is because Another Round does not fall into this week's meandering mediation, but has an honorary mention simply because it is extraordinary. If the ending does not make you want to live your life better, fuller, as does reading Matt Haig's “The Humans” or his more obviously manipulative “The Midnight Library” then... well, just... then.
Vinterberg's “Festen” is also extraordinary but is not life affirming like Another Round, which, if you haven't seen yet, do yourself a favour and watch this evening. I wouldn't have watched it if my friend Zac hadn't picked it for film night, don't repeat my error. If the end doesn't fill you with not just joy, but glee, I'll refund the Amazon fee (figure of speech).
Before someone wisecracks that this post isn't making much sense either, we've distilled the subject at its heart (acknowledge please the witty 'distil' segue from Another Round to the dichotomy of the voyeur).
I am not saying The French Dispatch was bad or I disliked it, just the experience it induced was relatively novel…this sense of being made aware I was watching a film by Wes Anderson as well as cohabiting the world of the characters. It involved being both a participant and an independent observer.
It’s an experience I’ve already encountered reading a novel: Tony White’s “The Fountain in the Forest”. Had I not already have been acquainted with him, with the reviews pitching it very much in the Lee Rourke, Tom McCarthy4 clever end of the 3am magazine spectrum I most likely wouldn’t have purchased a copy. I have bought enough high brow 'thrillers' that I lasted all of three pages trying to reading before giving in to defeat - to learn my lesson (looking at you The 7th Function of Language5 and The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?6).
Tony White has sprung up in my life a few times. I saw him give a great Pecha Kucha at David Gale's wonderful Peachy Coochy7 about being involved with Balkan gangsters and the pulp books of Richard Allen (I think. That's what I remember it as. I could be utterly wrong). Then, I saw him arguing about the nature of true randomness at a symposium event thing at the Science Museum's Dana Institute where Adam Hoyle and I presented a joint piece of work, but because Adam and I bring out the childishness in ourselves we ended up pretending to be each other and getting really drunk. Again. His son also interfered with my daughter for a while. So I felt I should buy his book. Along with the fact 3am like him8.
This duality that cinema can harness — to allow us to be both extra and audience — and the idea of using limitations or stipulations to again draw attention to the false reality of the narrative, un-suspending our suspension of disbelief, doesn't occur as frequently in literature. Or…I'm just not very well read compared to the amount of time I have squandered in front of videos.
The Financial Times review9 of The Fountain in the Forest called it a bildungsroman10. Like what-the-fuck, why is bildungsroman even a word, let alone there are people who can remember it or blithely throw it around in conversation, ‘yeah, that's a bit too bildungsroman for me...’. I think I'm allowed that soupcon of doubt that might enjoy his book, even if it does start with a noseless corpse hanging backstage in a Covent Garden Theatre. But enjoy it I did. Not just the story, but the act of reading it itself.
3am loves Georges Perec too11. Of course it does.
Georges Perec12 is a French author (they love this sort of stuff don't they?) who was a member of the Oulipo group who 'enjoyed' deploying restrictions and rules while writing stories. And here we are again.
A typical Oulipo text is Raymond Queneau's “Exercises in Style” where the same banal incitement is told in different styles: exclamations, the past, free verse, anagrams, medical etc.
Perhaps the classic is Georges Perec's “La Disparition”, a lipogram – a constrained writing in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided – it does not use the letter e. Rather miraculously, Gilbert Adair translated it into English as “A Void”13 still without the letter e. Beneath the word games, La Disparition meaning The Disappearance, with the central character being called Vowl echoes (double e right there) the loss to the holocaust and WWII of both of Perec's parents leaving him an orphan at seven.
White employs a restriction of having to use the words from the Guardian's Quick Crossword March to April 1985 within each chapter (March to April 1985 being one of the periods in which the book is set). To make sure you are party to his word games these words are highlighted in bold. The device makes you aware that you are reading an invented story by the author Tony White, while also being immersed in the actual story itself as if you were there along side the characters, making you actively complicit in the suspension of your own disbelief. The linguistic juggling is pulled off with aplomb, in fact instead of hindering the reading process the clunkier insertions bring delight to the paradoxical nature of believing the story while being told, in plain sight, it's being made up right in front of you.
For all its linguistic games — it also features French Revolutionary calendars — its a novel that works as a bildungsroman (just thought I'd throw that in there), a murder mystery, and a recounting of a shameful piece of modern British history, least we not forget and all that.
To conclude, I have two recommendations, Tony White’s dualistic reading experience “The Fountain in the Forest”, and by way of mental stepping stones, Thomas Vinterberg's “Another Round” which has nothing to do with breaking fourth walls or restrictions and is just simply fantastically life affirming.
Sometimes after all the politics and philosophy you just want some red wine and lentils.
“The Fountain in the Forest” written by Tony White
https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571336197-the-fountain-in-the-forest/
Buy from Bookshop.org
“Another Round” directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Further watching
“La Moustache” directed by author Emmanuel Carrère
“Festen” directed by Thomas Vinterberg
(Note: the trailer does not do it justice. Best watched knowing nothing, the film, not the trailer)
Jean-Claude Van Damme Monologue from “JCVD” directed by Mabrouk el Mechri
Actually don’t watch this. Watch the film instead, which is fantastically self-aware, and this gem will be seen in it’s correct setting.
“Dogville” directed by Lars von Trier
“Arcadia” directed by Paul Wright
“Un Chien Andalou” directed by Luis Buñuel
https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/un-perro-andaluz/perro-andaluz/1570997/
“Holy Motors” written and directed by Leos Carax
“The Holy Mountain” directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
“Money” by Shunt
David Gale’s “Peachy Coochy”
“Playing Cards 1: SPADES” directed by Robert Lepage
References
“Making Incarnation” by Tom McCarthy