I recently watched Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), the first film in his Three Colors trilogy. His style felt like something I’d never seen before: it struck me as daringly paced and elegantly shot with a confident manipulation of colour that didn’t feel forced.
But suddenly, at the start of a sequence in which Julie (Juliette Binoche) drags her clenched fist against a rough stone wall, I realised I had already seen it. I’ve been haunted by that shot for years but have always been unsure where it came from. I knew I had been half-watching something when I was much younger but questioning the people I was watching it with provided no answers: the sequence immediately came to their minds too but the film’s title remained unknown. It was quite a thrilling experience: to rediscover something I thought was long lost, to be suddenly connected very immediately with the (relatively) distant past. In a moment, the film and the experience of watching it changed.
After this latest viewing, the moment is joined by another in my head. In a short sequence, Julie is alone, gazing at a light fitting made of countless pieces of blue glass. She rests in a close shot to the left of this blue mass and dimples of blue light shimmer on her face. After a pause, she walks towards frame right, behind the light. Her face is now fragmented: separated and atomized by chunks of blue glass. The film cuts after a moment: the camera moves to a setup perpendicular to the original position. Julie and the blue glass are suddenly disentangled: in a slightly tighter frame, she is, once again, to the left of the light.
For some reason, the interaction between Julie’s face and the glass made me think about 3D. The effect of fragmentation comes about – in part – because we’re watching shapes interact on a two-dimensional surface. The fleshy coloured oval really is broken into pieces, studded by variously shaped and sized areas of blue. Of course, we are also aware of the spatial relationship that existed between the objects as they were filmed, that this particular oval is a human head and that it’s connected to a woman who stands behind a light. The result is a tension between what we actually see and what we understand is being depicted.
I think I mean something similar to what Tom Lubbock says when he suggests that ‘Painting remakes its world from scratch.’ Though it sounds obvious, the product of artistic creation is not the same as the reality that inspired it. This suggestion is as true for photography as it is for painting. While reviewing a pair of the late art critic’s books, julian Bell develops the sentiment: ‘The stuff of painting is not like the stuff of that other 3D world, even when painting pretends to be realistic.‘ I suppose we can rephrase, saying that the stuff of film is not like the stuff of that other 3D world, even when film appears to be realistic.
So, though I’m not sure the Three Colors trilogy is high up on any production companies’ lists for a 3D rerelease, let’s wonder for a moment what the effect would be if this sequence appeared in three dimensions. Rendered in 3D, the stuff of Blue moves closer to the stuff of that other 3D world, the set constructed to tell the story. We would see – through plastic glasses – a woman walking behind a light and she would remain behind that light until the film cut. If the spatial relationships are actually played out before us, at the expense of the play of shapes on a single plane, then the sense of atomization is weakened. What means of cinematic expression are lost, if we add another dimension?
Busy with my own filmmaking, I’ve not been able to write much recently and I haven’t seen as many films as I’d like. Still, recently I managed to see Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011). It is mesmerising and brilliant.
Jamie Jay Johnson is known as a documentary filmmaker with a comic tone and a unique cinematic voice. It was, in part, the inventiveness of his short work, such as Holiday Around My Bedroom (2003), that attracted the attention of Number 9 Films and the funding bodies required to create his excellent and touching piece Sounds Like Teen Spirit (2008).
A narrow focus that considers the filmmaker’s immediate surrounding – his bedroom – has an interesting parallel in the work of French filmmaker, novelist and essayist Georges Perec. The nutty looking Frenchman (see below) devised well-known literary experiments and imposed various constraints on his textual form: his novel La disparition (1969), for example, never uses the letter ‘e’. Just as Johnson tours his bedroom when in need of a break, Perec dispelled a creative block by looking in front of him and writing a portrait of the objects on his desk.
Both share a lightness of tone, as well as an ability to limit their horizons: for example, while surveying his desk, Perec muses, ‘all my pencils [are] sharpened (but why do I have more than one pencil? I can see six of them at a glance!)’ The observation is almost as silly as seeing Johnson shrink in size and go on a date with a fly.
On Saturday, the director Richard Jobson introduced his new picture, The Somnambulists (2012), as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. I’ve never seen a film like it. Quite fairly, any discussion about it places much emphasis on the intensity of its message: according to the festival guide, it stands as ‘a response to our collective apathy to the war in Iraq’. But there is much craft here, carefully orchestrated by a filmmaker who always champions technological advances. So, while the stories are the focus, Jobson makes use of cinematic techniques to achieve the desired tone.
It would be an understandable first reaction to think that the devices and techniques of cinema have been purposefully drained from The Somnambulists. Sandra Hebron notes that the speakers, against a black backdrop, are ‘starkly but effectively’ lit so that we ‘concentrate on their words, without distraction.’ In other words, the severe matter is expressed in a suitably bare style. Jobson rejects any conventional narrative progression, presenting instead a series of subjective fragments which are united by a common theme (the experience of the war). Though this formal choice brings to mind the work of Sarah Kane (a dramatist who explores the literal and metaphorical meaning of a ‘fragment’ throughout her corpus), it is to her namesake, the Scottish photographer Joanna Kane, that we should turn to understand the film’s structure and aesthetic.
Joanna Kane’s project, The Somnambulists, shown in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2008, presents a series of digitally edited images of phrenological heads and death masks. Plaster off-white, these faces appear to peek out of a thick black fog. Eyes closed, these figures look faintly alive because of the possibility of sleep. Kane uses new techniques and old objects to explore the space between life and death. The photographer’s influence on Jobson is clear.
He also lights his speakers from above, allowing them to struggle to distinguish themselves from the black background. (Their black shirts provide no help.) If, though, Kane’s project is to create the illusion of life in the dead – or the inanimate – then Jobson seems to aim at something different. Through abstraction, he makes living flesh seem not quite alive. The most visually resonant moments of his presentation are those when the speakers’ eye sockets are bathed in shadow. At these points, the figures are at their most abstract – farthest away from being living subjects – because they are closest to our cultural images of death (the skull, the Grim Reaper).
We always see the (closed) eyes of Kane’s (still) subjects; we only need a flicker of the Grim Reaper during the delivery of one of Jobson’s stories to be haunted by the idea that these narratives are separate from the figures we see before us. The effect is chilling, like watching the twitching and animated limbs of a corpse motivated only by still-firing neurons. Whether or not the individual tales end in death, there’s a feeling that they all reach us from beyond a grave.
The BFI thinks this effect is stark. Though it is, the words are not presented unadorned, not given to us totally naked. The opening shot indicates that the film is not concerned with presenting any type of focused cinéma vérité: as a man on fire shapes an outline in flames and slow motion against a black background, with an unseen piano accompanying the image, we’re alerted to the importance of the filmic elements (cinematographic choices, editing, soundscape). The rhythm of the picture is created by a repeating pattern: an account from a speaker followed by a glimpse of a life left behind. We’re invited to take note of the variation within this sequence: from the first figure to the fifteenth, subtle changes in delivery or the position of the cut contribute to the overall effect. During one speech, on particularly resonant words, the lens begins a slow zoom out, reframing the head to create a mass of negative space that engulfs the speaker. During another, as we listen to an enraged cry of ‘Come on then!’, a series of faces quickly flashes before our eyes.
We shouldn’t treat The Somnambulists as a misplaced radio play. Though they are subtle and easily missed, the specifically cinematic details are essential to its overall effect.
In one of the more gruesome scenes in Drive (2011), Driver (Ryan Gosling) stands in a motel room with blood aggressively streaked across his face. Throughout the early parts of the film, he’s predominantly painted in cool tints (subdued greens, blues and shades of grey). Here, though, his own actions have caused a grim and literal recolouring. He becomes emphatically warm and the visual change reveals shifting circumstances: at this point, he is so captivated by Irene (Carey Mulligan) that he is willing to engage more fully with the world of crime. Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, and Newton Thomas Sigel, the cinematographer, control colour expertly, using a fairly limited palette to enact in light the tensions that exist between characters and social worlds.
Despite the extensive use of red, white and blue, the post’s title is misleading: Refn is not concerned with American nationalism or issues of the flag. Instead, there’s a use of colour that enunciates personal emotions by playing with the split between warm and cool. In the beginning, as mentioned above, Driver’s face is washed almost exclusively with the latter. Gosling’s understated performance, which combines subtle gestures and few words, achieves a characterisation that is paralleled in light.
In contrast, Irene, coloured in warm reds, oranges and yellows, radiates care and maternal love.
Refn carefully arranges the frame during Driver’s and Irene’s early meetings so that tints of different temperatures remain quite firmly attached to each character.
But, as the attraction becomes greater, the breakdown of social barriers is paralleled in a blending of hues. The pair are first cast together in a warm glow in Driver’s car, though the effect quickly enters Irene’s domestic space.
Refn’s and Sigel’s use of colour is subtler, though, than simply revealing a movement from separation to unity. Throughout the picture, there’s a tension between gradation and delineation. A scene near the end brings this design into focus. Irene walks back to her apartment, having received no answer to her knock on Driver’s door. The walls are a rich brown and her face is a warm wooden orange. She passes a framed picture of the sea which is composed of blues and greens. The particular perspective of the painting echoes the framing of the ocean in an earlier scene in which Driver commits his ultimate act of violence (which, by the by, we’re not shown). So, then, this image that brings him to mind only reinforces that he has gone. The situation is summarised by the relationship between warm and cool tints (easily kept separate by a frame): the bloody mess that has stained Driver’s face and has escalated beyond control ultimately renders the pair like oil and water, rather than two drops in an ocean.
I saw Warrior (2011) last week. It ends with About Today, a lovely song by The National.
I’ve talked about the film before and I’ve also mentioned GORILLA productions and their excellent combinations of music and boxing clips.
Here are some other music videos that do fun things with visuals and, in the process, heighten our appreciation of the song they accompany.