Thinking About Film

Sharing my reviews of films that I find noteworthy. Most of the films reviewed here are personal favourites. The views expressed here are mine, though they are inspired and informed by readings I have done about said films. I do not claim that my ideas are wholly original or definitive - only that they ought to provoke discussion from lovers of cinema alike.

Film #1: Prelude: Dog Star Man (Brakhage, 1962)



While Dog Star Man can be read in terms of representation (what objects certain images correspond to in the real world), symbolism (femininity: moon to breast, Christianity: babies head to glass of Madonna) or metaphor (the myth of self-actualization and spiritual rebirth), it is first and foremost a work of aesthetics which directly implicates the spectator in the constitution of its own images. At its core, Dog Star Man is about what comes prior to and enables the condition of possibility for representation, symbolism and metaphor - the genesis of perception.


All perception emerges through a process of repetition and pattern-formation at a preconscious level. Dog Star Man is not a silent film, for it expresses the same mechanisms composing sound as that which constitute image. There are no pre-given figures; their emergence can only rely on fractured micro-perceptions (pure Affect/Sense/Flesh) that must construct both itself (the eye) and the external world (the mind's eye). Brakhage refuses the distinction between interior and exterior. Hence, their respective geneses can be said to be equivalent - the emergence of the world comes about in the same way as our perception of it. Before sedimentation of the concept (tree, green, waves), we have to rely on both habit and memory in order to make sense of perception. Habit comes about when we extract and contract a series of micro-sensations (AB, AB, AB) in order to perceive discrete/distinct patterns within perception itself, such that the emergence of A is closely followed by B. Simultaneously the present habit is supplemented by the past memory of concepts such that our perception of discrete repetitions is recognized as falling under that of the general concept. Brakhage suspends the second function (memory) so that our minds are now freed to form associations (AC, AC, AC). Free interplay and association generate shapes/forms instead of being overdetermined by them - how do our eyes unlearn, to teach it forgetfulness, to untrain it so as to perceive the field of "greening" instead of green. Indeed, the field of relations is presented not just to the human eye, but also that of the dog, the wind, etc. By juxtaposing different perceptions, Brakhage reveals multiple planes (and worlds) in which objects interact with one another by adopting non-localizable "shots" to show the inherent omni-perception in nature. Whether this entails us subscribing to panpsychism is not as relevant or interesting as the call for eternal creation. Not the creation of eternity, but need of the perpetual creation that is fundamental to reality. The question becomes no longer whether concepts latch onto our perceptions in a reliable way, but how do we create concepts from the infinite relations that can be obtained from perception. What cinema is all about, and needs to do, is an acceleration of repetition in order to continuously create new forms, and also the simultaneous deconstruction of familiar concepts. An explosive work of expressionism.

Film #2: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975)



The singular event* that erupts at the end has often been characterized as a brief, momentary (re-)assertion of one's autonomy from the oppressive mundanity of labour - an emancipatory albeit destructive act. There is however a sense that Seyrig feels most at ease when she is precisely going through her chores inattentively, whereas the few moments that punctuate - those scenes where she literally does "nothing"/being out-of-sync with her mundane routines - are also those where she appears to be at her most tense (a testament to how far capitalist ideology has cultivated a sense of freedom through endless work). This alters the meaning of the ending to be far bleaker than one which can be calculated in terms of repercussions. Instead of a triumphant break-out from the cycle of domestic servitude, the after-effect of the act dissipates further highlighting that Seyrig can never manage to escape from both her geo-spatial & mental patterns of behavior.

More instructively, I think the film draws to our attention that mood & emotions are not something that reside internally within us but take on their existence via the affection of objects around us. No matter how close the camera invades Seyrig's private space, or how long the static frame attempts to confine her, it can never capture the existence of her feelings. Their implied existence do not come prior to their expression through the minutiae changes in habit and orientation of said objects. Expression, explication, habit, disposition, attunement - these are the key features of existence which come prior to any sort of cognitive reflection that retrospectively imputes a mental state of affairs. In this regard, Dielman is more like a dance than a film by foregrounding the embodied-ness of Seyrig and the audience.

Besides presenting to the viewer an externalist view of the psyche, the film also broaches an ontological issue related to Heidegger's concept of "un-ready-to-hand" which describes our fundamental encounter of the world as being perpetually mediated by the modes of familiarity/unfamiliarity. This epistemic tension is underpinned by the corresponding Heideggerian duality of concealment/un-concealing. Our default engagement with the world is marked by familiarity, whereby the world is actually concealed from us. Heidegger's call-to-being is a necessarily unnerving one as it is marked by a sudden/abrupt unheimlichkeit in which the world un-conceals or "reveals" itself to us. Yet, for every revealing (the product/consciousness), there is also a simultaneous concealing of the grounds of being (the process/pre-conscious). We can say that the pre-conscious grasps the process of becoming, is in tune with the world in flux, and therefore is the closest to Nature before it is differentiated/bifurcated into Cartesian subject and scientific object.

Seyrig becoming unattuned to her familiar world of habitual dispositions mirrors that of the audience noticing the changes in her rhythmic patterns of behavior. For Seyrig, heretofore familiar objects oppose and resist her grasp, unconcealing their presence to her. For the audience, a series of seemingly ordinary routines becomes transformed by a singular event, which then forces a re-evaluation of the entire preceding sequence that used to pass by unnoticed - a veritable analogy for the history of all forms of oppression, and also of life in general.

What is truly disquieting is this: by objectifying Seyrig as a domestic subject to be studied, she actually disappears into the mis-en-scene/background like a cog in the wheel of domesticity. The revelation of the extent of her entrapment becomes apparent through the very same mis-en-scene that enables her emergence from it, like a being that flickers into and out of existence. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty calls this site of encounter the reversibility of Flesh, where in-betweenness is not something derived secondarily from pre-given fully-formed objects but is the original plane of encounter with the world that has yet to be constituted as "things"/"objects".


*Contrary to common opinion I do not believe that Dielman endorses the private interiority or hidden depths of psyche. Even the viewpoint that the psyche's existence is retrospectively inferred or implicated is a mistaken one because we only witness DIFFERENCES in habitual movement, nothing more and nothing less. This is a film that revolves around the relationship or Sense between Dielman and her space, which exists as a set of foreground/background (unconcealing/concealing) thresholds. The subject and object only emerge as a consequence rather than origins of such spaces. More instructively, Dielman's preconscious habits parallel that of the audience who only observes and realizes the changes in behavior which is always already blind to her. The preceding events that occur in the first two days only (re)surface to our consciousness and acquire significance due to that singular event of the third day. As third-person observers, we are ourselves blind to most of our own preconscious actions just like Dielman to hers. Dare I say Akerman's film comes the closest to charting the preconscious life which is characterized not by individual thought and actions, but by bodily patterns and dispositions. In short, Being-in-the-world as a fundamental ontology about our primordial encounter with reality.

*Event: An effect that exceeds its own causes, which retroactively determines its own causes, and that we only makes sense of after its emergence. A rupture that breaks from its linear trajectory timeline - it creates its own path. At its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.

Film #3: The Double Life of Véronique (Kieślowski, 1991)



It is conceivable that we share the same thoughts and feelings as someone else, that every move we make simultaneously diverges from instances in many possible worlds and also continues to remain coherent in an infinite set of parallel realities. And if we were to simply collapse all these universes into one, and let it run for an infinite time, then we shall find the existence of someone indistinguishable from us, who has gone through the same experiences as us. We think knowledge of this person will allow us to eliminate chance and control our own fate. But fate and chance are two sides of the same coin. Fate as the outcome which cannot have happened otherwise - Zizek said that Veronique's present state is haunted by all the untaken possibilities, but possibilities are only retrospectively conferred. Outcomes are "under-determined" by preceding events, for there will always be the indeterminacy of chance that cannot be resolved prior to their actualization. The reciprocal relationship between Veronique and Weronika is that of an Entanglement rather than direct causality. There are no underlying essences which pre-determine each of their respective beings (as Bell's theorem rules out Einstein's hidden variables theory). Rather, entangled relationships are correlations without causation (hence no "spooky" action at a distance or faster-than-light transference needed) that precede the determinate state of both beings, such that while their individual natures are ontologically distinct/discrete they nonetheless are phenomenologically inseparable - both women share the same experiences (the simulated double). These shared experiences are tied to the repeating motifs of strings in the film.


It takes the imaginative brilliance of this film to completely subvert causation or causal determinacy from the picture. What we are left with are effects - resemblances, reflections, associations, convergences, etc.

Soooo... Did you like these movies?

__________________
San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

Yes I consider both Prelude: Dog Star Man and Jeanne Dielman as highly radical and innovative films, perhaps near the pinnacle of what cinema has ever attained. Hypothetically speaking, I would've changed the script of Double Life of Veronique to give equal attention to both characters. It's still a masterpiece, albeit not a ground-breaking one like the other two films.

In general, my enjoyment of any film is very much tied to the appreciation of it - I struggle to recall a film that impressed me (on any level) but I did not come away with more than lukewarm feelings for. In other words, if the film is capable of raising interesting problems which stir contemplation then it is equivalent to a film that appeals to my senses. If the film raises interesting problems but expresses resolution(s) which go against my worldview without adequate justification, then such is a film that I would be rather critical of (and hence, would not enjoy them as much). Hope I've addressed your question.

There's the age-old predicament about whether one's personal worldview (metaphysics, ontology, politics, ethics) pre-disposes one towards certain kinds of films, and whether appraisal and/or enjoyment of such films are already necessarily filtered through (biased) lenses. I can answer affirmatively to both questions. The appeal to suspend judgement and review any film (or art) objectively as if one can approach any subject with a blank state of mind, or at least value-free state of mind, is quite frankly an impossible task to begin with and not something one ought to strive towards. Rather, I think when critics beseech us to "keep an open mind" towards any film, it means to evaluate said film based on the strength of the network of its ideas. How well or poorly do ideas hang together in the spiderweb-like structure of belief? How much does it disturb and call into question our own web of belief? Everyone of us has "contradictory" beliefs within our network/web of belief. That does not negate or invalidate the entire system of belief because other auxiliary beliefs compensate in order to accommodate such "contradictory" beliefs. To evaluate a film therefore, is akin to evaluating another person's web of beliefs. If a film reinforces our current web of belief but does so in a prosaic/formulaic manner by restating its ideas in the same style, then it is an objectively poor film. If it challenges, rather than reinforce, our personal belief system in ways which require considerable effort on our part to reject such film based on our belief system, then it is objectively a good film.

The oft-quoted saying that "Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed" revolves around the old adage that objectively good art provokes/raises good questions rather than provides answers to poorly formulated questions. An answer is only as good as the question it seeks to address. Art, philosophy and science are three different ways in which we carve out the problematic in life. But that requires a whole other topic, which I've once again went off-tangent...

Film #4: Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)



Analyze the nature of dreams and one always encounters all the characters one has met in different times of one's life. In dreams we always feel like a spectator to the events which unfold upon us, surrendering to the will of our own predominant desires. Every character within a dream is inflected through heightened emotions as a result of the "self" becoming vulnerable and allowing senses and signs to pass through it. Dreams are the battleground on which the problematic situation galvanizes different conflicting desires to "resolve" themselves. Mulholland Drive is about the meta-structure of dreams, and the way in which dreams appear to play out as a coping response of the self not as a unitary unit but as a multiplicity of selves. In dreams these (larval)-selves are not tied down and related back to the 'I' but are left to freely revolve around events/situations which the dreamer has experienced before.

To dream, therefore, is not to freely create fantasies from a set of pre-given personages, let alone the self choosing to construct a make-belief narrative at its own discretion, but is always already a response to a problematic situation around which the fragmented self's personages coalesce. These personages are larval selves, each an expression of a pure mood - composed as a particular set of mutually reinforcing desires. That's why disillusioned Diane projects her conflicting senses onto Rita (complicated as Camilla) and Betty, the former as an innocent vulnerable lover whose amnesia requires her care & nurture as a guise to exercise/retain some form of her fledgling control over, while the latter as her idealized self - the self that she could never be (confident and successful). Matters become complicated by a casting director whose reason to reject her application, as the situation plays out in her dream, is not due to her failures but because of his personal tryst with another actress. It's the latent self fractured & manifested as different separate personages reflecting different personas, distinct and problematic (oftentimes too transparent and one-dimensional as in the case of Rita), all of which revolve around disparate situations/events.

Film #5: The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov, 1969)



The Color of Pomegranates is a radical film because it shows us what the logical conclusion of an orthodox Christian reality is like. Instead of beginning from The Real, it begins right at the end - where at the end of man's life all that remains are the persistent symbols which define his being. Here only symbols proliferate while the Real is severed/untethered from all connections with the phenomenal world. Symbolic representation is a hermetically and hermeneutically sealed world unto itself, where the intransigent signs directly communicate with the soul of the individual (in this case, Sayat-Nova), but from the outside the biographer is left with the abundance of symbols which hang together, revolve, oscillate and circulate one another in an empty space. This is a total break from dialectical materialism that subordinates progress to the linear passage of time. Here an individual's life is defined neither by space and time nor bodily movement, but is now liberated and free to express its relation to the signs it receives. Upon death, the enlightened soul is fully laid out into still symmetrical tableaux. The illusion of depth is replaced by the equality of two-dimensional surfaces, for such a life can be both witnessed forwards and backwards. Iconoclastic.


Film #6: Edvard Munch (Watkins, 1974)



At first glance one wonders what a committed leftist/Marxist like Watkins, dedicated to emphasizing man's social conditions over the individual's private life, might have to say about Expressionism. As this docu-drama unfolds it soon becomes clear - if Impressionism is directed towards objects from the perspective of a singular point of view, Expressionism is of/about the world by the artist not as a unified being but fragmented as micro-sensibilities shaped by milieus. The difference is crucial. While heretofore works of art extol perspectives, with vision as the privileged sensation, expressionism replaces depth with surfaces. Surfaces of sensations which cut across and traverse that which comes prior to what we define as interior self and exterior world. In this regard Expressionism as a whole deals with the universal because their expressions lack discrete objects of reference (the expressed) and discrete subject (that who expresses). To arrest sensation in itself, or pure expression, that is neither the product of subject nor object but their pre-condition - Munch's art as shown to be the product of events that seize him throughout his life; the expression of the totality of events as pure sensation.


+ Der Schrei der Natur is often interpreted as a depiction of the subject's scream causing the trembling of nature around him, but that is an incomplete picture if we ignore the full title which indicates rather that it is a scream reverberating across nature that stirs up the subject. His contorted facial expression is one of an effect rather than cause of the scream (Affect), such that the reaction becomes indistinguishable from the scream itself (unknown origins). Both the self and the world are the background which only emerge from the Scream itself.

Film #7: Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)



The precession of the simulacra where images dizzy the subject and drive it to reproduce the signs associated with the object. A world without depth but vertiginous surfaces that slip & slide. The feigning of the depths where there is none - Scottie's condition is not just metaphorical but literal. The more he sought to manipulate the signs of his object of desire, the more he falls victim to them. Such is the death drive - both a repulsion and fascination by what it cannot obtain. Scottie's compulsion to repeat and recreate/refashion events and appearances, as if he could somehow overcome his condition by exorcising its spell, so that he could "reach out" (again, literally) to save his perceived object of desire that we soon find out to not have existed in the first place is ultimately a fascination of his own psychophysical condition.

Or does Scottie's fascination with his condition also serve as a meta-commentary on cinephilia? Like us, he is not in love with Judy but rather her image(s) (modeled after a dead Madeline who in turn is said to be possessed by the returning spirit of her great-grandmother). Afterall his first encounter of Judy is actually through a painting in the museum. The clever framing also draws our attention to the painting first, such that it (Carlotta) becomes identified with "Madeline"; an image modeled after another image. What could she possibly be staring at that is so alluring? Hitchcock's reply is that the living are always already encountered as "dead" images, be it the murdered, the doppelganger, the ghost or the artwork. Of course the illusory depths are more alluring than the living (eg. Midge). The novel on which the film is based alludes to it being a retelling of the Orpheus & Eurydice myth, except that there never was a real person in need of rescue.

The ending suggests that one never breaks free from the spiral without the death of either object of desire or oneself. As Richard Brody remarked, Scottie "overcoming" his condition is the same as his realization that Judy wasn’t merely his simulacrum of Madeleine but was one and the same. It is at this moment that Judy becomes superseded by her own double rather than her own guilt (the nun does not symbolize her conscience but the return of her phantasm - the signs of Madeline). Clearly she has so successfully stepped into her role that the singular event of the feigned suicide overwhelms her, preventing her from distinguishing discrete entities. The feigned or the virtual becomes actual.


Film #8: What Time Is It There? (Tsai, 2001)



What is love? To love is to engage in and recreate the signs emitted by our object of desire. These are the multiple worlds which affect and shape the person whom we love, and we believe that by willingly immersing ourselves with them, attuning our whole beings to them, we somehow are able to connect with the Real person. How many times have we listened to the same music, willingly consumed the same food or frequent the same places that our beloved has? We all wish to be affected by the same signs that also affect our object of desire (resonance and synchronicity). That's why Hsiao-Kang connects with his object of desire through recreating the experiences of Parisian life - by tuning his clock to the time of Paris, he also simultaneously block out others who attempt to establish some form of connection with him such as the advances of a stranger in the cinema, nor does his mother pay any attention to him in her own obsession over the signs of her dead husband whom she vicariously preserves in the form of the whole apartment as if the husband was still living. Not realizing that we fall prey to the signs the more we try to manipulate them, as in Hitchcock's Vertigo where Scottie's hunt makes it apparent that he is more of the hunted (induced dizziness by the signs of Madeleine) than the hunter of Madeleine. The end result only marks the "death" of the real object of desire - the real Madeleine that is killed rather than her preceding simulacrum, or in the case of Tsai's films whereby his characters can inhabit the same geographic space and time but exist phenomenologically elsewhere with their phantasms. Tsai's greatest film, and also one of the most romantic of all films.

Film #9: Possession (Żuławski, 1981)



The body as the site where forces of chaos (random chance) clash with the ideal image (soul). Faith is the hope for a perfect marriage with the other/void that requires the making Whole of. Christian theology has gotten it the other way round - there's no reunion because there never was a Whole that later became split, only the false illusions of the other's double that demand domestication and assimilation. Possession, then, is not about evil entering and corrupting what was once good, or splitting and turning the Whole against itself, but about the impossible faith of making Whole what never was by erecting an idol/God to worship by the ideal image. The solution is to expel, not assimilate, the ideal image from one's body (the infamous subway scene actually depicts an expulsion rather than a possession), and to prevent this monstrous (Christian) God/the other's doppelganger from re-entering the abode of the body.

Film #10: Near Death (Wiseman, 1989)



The philosophy of Wiseman's style, perhaps exemplified no better than through his magnum opus Near Death, is one that neither concerns itself with the normativity or morality of institutions nor about the conflict between the personal or emotional with the social or hyper-rational. Despite the heaviness of the subject it deals with, the quiet lightness of Wiseman's cinema lies in the fact that there is nothing instructive or proclamatory in all his documentaries. No grand existential epiphanies emerge throughout the course of the film. Instead, Near Death is modestly centered around negotiations amongst four interlocutors - the patient, relatives, nurses and physicians - as a perpetually on-going and indeterminate process which is radically subjected to change as the Situation unfolds. The Situation so impenetrable that Thought is forced to reckon with the total unpredictability/uncertainty of time itself; and every decision made is as undecidable and paradoxical as its non-decision, left to suspend and hang in the pure present. We feel the sheer weight of time hanging on each passing moment as both past and future fade into hazy nebulousness with every sudden turn of the Situation. This is the emergency of the Situation which cordons off and paralyzes Thought since it cant reside in the future nor find solace in the past, or the future that is blocked off (the severing of possibilities) while the past is irretrievable (and even if resources are recovered they become useless in light of the evolving Situation). As such, the lived moment of the present is overwhelmed by the Situation against which Thought becomes forced to rise up to and contend with.

Film #11: Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)



When we recall the "past", we also actively re-create reality. Isn't this the very nature of existence itself? To ward off the forgetfulness of death (without-sun) is to constantly put disjunctive images together into some sort of resonance; life as the tracings of linings (remembrance) that impress upon memory. Remembrance is no more active than it is the work of the unconscious, insofar as forgetting is no less passive than one chooses or wills not to remember. From this we can make sense of Marker's quote that memory consists of liminal, threshold surfaces rather than the depths of substantive spaces.

By inquiring into this process, the recall itself becomes a time of memory (time) about the memory of time (remembrance). Hence there are, working in tandem, no less than 2 series of time occurring that result in a spiral-like effect - the perceiver's time and the perceived time. The manner in which images are put together carries a rhythm (time) as much as what those images intend to represent (the time of the events in the past).

But then each of these 2 series is composed of further series. From the point of view of the perceiver, the numerous films that we watch remind us that there are other times which are manifested in these other films. Each director's vision carries its own time. We may even say that our perception is shaped/influenced by the perceptions of others - this is multiplied in the age of media. From the point of the perceived, objects undergo their own speeds and therefore their own respective time. For example, supposedly sedimentary rocks settling under a stream of current have their rates of becoming which interact with the rate of waterflow around them, the "time" of the river thus emerges out of the interaction between two (or more) rates of becoming.

How then can fragments resonate with one another? Is there some sort of miracle like life itself that binds them together momentarily and cause them to resonate into synchronicity? How does order emerge from random chaos? The answer perhaps, can be found in similar masterpieces of literature (T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets; Proust's In Search of Lost Time) - Desire. It is desire that brings together these separate images with their own rates of flow. The past that was and the past that could have been. These are intertwined in memory, in consciousness. Isn't this the basis for why we watch film?

Film #12: Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)



"We never really know if the scenes are occurring in the man's mind or the woman's. There is a perpetual oscillation between the two. You could even maintain that everything is told from her viewpoint." - Resnais

"The entire story of Marienbad happens neither in two years nor in three days, but exactly in one hour and a half." - Robbe-Grillet


WHAT IS THE IMAGE?

The iconic freeze frame encapsulates the "time-image" in which moments of the past and future coexist (THE PRIORITY OF EVENTS), where memory and external reality are as indistinguishable and therefore as real as each other, and pre-consciousness is an infinite repeated loop. More adequately, we can say that events are most prior followed by the emergence of images (and the concomitant birth of the subject - its frame of reference), and finally the percept of time (it's own time, not Time). In this nebulous zone prior to the subject and time, all events are coexistent and are predestined to repeat/recur for eternity. Whilst Robbe Grillet frames Marienbad as a story of subjective psychosexual purgatory where the frozen present is assailed by the past and future, Resnais creates in filmic form the metaphysical grounds of reality that precede our conscious activity. This pre-conscious or pre-representational stage resembles that of a universal memory, one which is composed of pure affective images.

Most films that explore the relationship of subjectivity with time still hold onto an outdated theory of reality. In these films, our limited and flawed experience plays out in a non-linear manner but external reality itself is objective and time flows in a linear way, established independent of experience. In Resnais film, the opposite is actually the case - objective reality is itself non-linear (events precede the emergence of time - the first encounter, the rendezvous, the escape all have happened and will happen) whilst subjective memory filters and sorts events out into a linear fashion (the subject does not express temporality, the subject IS temporality). What we already grasp as reality has to be, and cannot be otherwise, arranged in chronological order, yet we are given no clue as to whose perception or recollection is being presented as fact. Are we inhabiting the world of X or A, or maybe both? Is this X's attempt to retrospectively justify to himself an outcome which has already happened? Or is this A's premonition of her dilemma between staying or leaving, while slowly being seduced and convinced by X? How much of what is perceived is desired/willed into existence as opposed to what there is? Make no mistake - the world of Marienbad is no more solipsistic than the fact that memory isn't purely the active creation of the individual subject but rather the subject is the passive by-product of a universal memory, where shared images composed of different rhythms bleed so seamlessly into one another that it is impossible to tell where one begins and ends, or where one's perception (X) is distinct from another's (A).

Last Year at Marienbad sets up and acts out the process for us. If the image is not the content of consciousness but its structure, then the process of repetition (both narrative and visual) is the image of thought. The object of thought is the representation of its image. Narration and visuals which were out-of-sync slowly come into consistency, before breaking off midway again. Frequently, X describes an event that presumably took place in the past (such as A breaking the heel of her shoe), and the visuals show us either a different action or later reveal the same action with A dressed in clothes from the "present." Thus it is impossible for the spectator to determine whether these scenes take place in the past, present, or imagination. There is no way to establish an independent point-of-view or at least an Archimedean observation. Instead, our inter-subjective conscious lives revolve around images which are themselves atemporal and in a sense, eternal. There is no start and end - everything that has ever occurred will continue to occur on a single flat plane in the middle. The multitude of photographs X took of A revealed in the drawer utterly horrifies X (return of the repressed) because it reminds him that the story has already repeated itself for an indefinite number of times. To echo Deleuze contra Freud, we don't repeat (the same actions) because we repress; but we repress because we repeat.

What is the Image? Between the object and thought lies the image. The image is not a representation or a thing. Neither is the image the product of conscious thought. The image connects the object and its thought, and is the foundation for both to emerge. Every image is a composite - of differential forces and energies that manifest in movement and action respectively. But most importantly, the image is a set of timeless events that persist and outlive the individual subject. What is significant are events, which are not ordinary moments but threshold points marking two different phase states (like between a horse trottle and a gallop, or water becoming steam at 100deg, or the first encounter, or the rendezvous to escape...). Events are the fundamental constituents of reality. Nothing can exist outside of reality by its definition. If time is nothing but a measure of change between two different speeds/becomings, then it is an empty concept that is superimposed onto reality by a perceiving subject. Reality itself is timeless (zero or infinite time). Now, coexistence of events alludes to the static block of time. Simply put, due to the finite speed of light, observers in different frames of reference will necessarily disagree on the simultaneity of events. General relativity (GR) explicitly states, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that neither reference frame is privileged in any way, utterly abolishing the Newtonian concept of a "universal present moment" or "now". It means the so-called "future" and "past" exist, simultaneously. There is, quite simply, no logical ground to think that your "present" moment is all that exists. All moments in time exist, equally real. This leads us to a rather profound conclusion that the supposed origin of the universe to its final death, has occurred/is occurring/will occur, and the universal (pre)-consciousness is like an infinitely repeated tape, akin to Morel's island in Bioy Casares novel. The pre-conscious is therefore a continuous uninterrupted flow of images.

Resnais has emphatically insisted that the film plays out not in 2 years or 3 days but 90mins (the exact run-time of the film), hence there can be no separation of fact from fiction, no outside to what is already given. If we take X as a mathematical variable, then its consciousness is inherently empty and is nothing apart from the shared images that pass through and affect it. Last Year at Marienbad thus presents to us images which are freed from the subject and of time. The meaning of such images are already saturated/contaminated by desire and one cannot possibly separate, except in theory, the wish-fulfilment/desire-projection aspect from images which are stripped of desire. Desires are universal, but the atomic self is not and in fact we can say that the preconscious is a bundle of perceptions (Hume) without an organizer. The universe of Marienbad is our actual reality that we are thrust into, as real as the opening theatre play spectated by X and A that mirrors what has already and will unfold. The game of life against death (embodied by the constant M) involves an infinite set of repeatable games with its societal rules, risks, competition, deception, where the only way "out"/"escape" is to be forced to make the throw-of-the-dice (Mallarmé). It is here where we return to Nietzsche's beseeching cry for Amor Fati and the love of fate that reminds us, in spite of what discontinuous consciousness tempts us to believe in deterministic laws that ultimately it is chance, randomness and luck right at the bottom whereby the outcome cannot be known or calculated prior to the necessity of making the decision. We cannot pick and choose parts of what is desirable from non-desirable - must embrace the entirety of the past. The Eternal Recurrence is the willing for the return of all images (and non-discrimination for all actualized outcomes). Hence we are not only affirming the necessity of history, but the necessity of chance behind everything (amor fati). We affirm the difference that chance makes at every moment for eternity. What returns is therefore not the Same, but difference and openness to novelty. Ultimately, Last Year at Marienbad is about the eternal return of images.

Also posting an older review of one of my favorite films because it deserves a more in-depth appraisal than usual.

Film #13: Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000)



Upon this cosmic canvas of existence, what we call 'life' is nothing but it a constellation of forces that oscillates between the poles of disorder and consistency. The universe has one universal law - the law of indeterminacy. Inexplicable events randomly arise and re-structure the existing configuration of reality, only to dissipate as abruptly as their emergence. Singular events are already incipient in relatively harmonious states, whose eruption onto the "status quo" may appear to be external (the Prince) but are always internal to any meta-stable system (micro-fascisms).

The film opens with what I consider to be the greatest scene in the history of cinema by connecting the particular with the universal; linking the local and the nonlocal. On a quantifiable scale it shows the cosmic significance that has always existed and can be located in the quotidian. On a metaphysical level, its a choreography of the genesis of life. From what seems to be the purely indistinct and random movements of inconsistency emerge a pattern of repetition, consistency and discreteness. A sea of chaos synchronizes and resonates into a meta-stable order before dissolving back once again into oblivion. One might mistake this order as perfect or always desirable. Yet the irony is that it is during one particular brief moment of such order / ie. the Order of orders (the temporary "perfect" alignment of planets which causes the darkness of eclipse) that the most catastrophic of events would emerge. This is a premonition of later sequences to come, whereby the arrival of the Whale is foreshadowed by the metaphorical eclipse. Werckmeister Harmonies reveals the grounds of the political are actually fundamentally metaphysical in nature.

There's a thread that connects Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies with Arendt. The origins of Evil are not actually the deeds of dangerously charismatic men with grandiose ideas about how to bring order to society, but rather the micro-fascisms within us all and of how society can sleepwalk itself into the allures of totalitarianism. The tendency of subjects to take their daily labour and concerns within the private sphere as main/sole sources of meaning to Life (whose stake lies in the public realm of pluralism and deliberation). When pessimism towards Life takes root, that's when restless and despondent subjects are organized by totalitarian ideologies which promise to deliver one final solution. In essence, the celebration of the meaninglessness of everything is precisely the negation of Life which leads to nihilism (Nietzsche).

There are at least 2 singularities in the film - the Whale and the naked man in the shower room. Both mark thresholds between two unique phases of nature, almost like strange attractors/oscillators which designate a dramatic change in the system of flows. The Whale is the Leviathan, an imposing figure of awe and authority, but nonetheless "dead" - because its power is composed of the totality of the townspeople (the Hobbesian image). This image of order (of something larger than Life itself) galvanizes the people into violence with the idea of restoring meaning into the aimless lives of the downtrodden village people. Like water that boils and transforms into steam, a disturbance that reconfigures the constellation of all elements in the system and persists in another meta-stable state (albeit of pure violence and destruction) until the sudden emergence of the lonesome figure of a naked elderly man in a hospital, the sign of pure naked vulnerability, who exists as nothing more than a pure Affect. Both singularities are quasi-causes, since they do not directly cause the incitement/dispelling of a highly charged state of affairs, but instead indirectly signal the transition from one phase to another. Similar to how 100 degrees Celsius at 1 atm is not the cause of water to boil, but rather the designation and representation for the boiling of H2O. Afterall, the Leviathan and naked man are not merely things-in-themselves but a physical representation of their respective Idea and Affect.

In a more cryptic scene expounding musical theory, a character laments the hubris that modern musicologists have vis-a-vis the ancient greeks. Maintaining that his analysis is not technical but philosophical, he proceeds to give a genealogy of the development of tonality. While the greeks were contented with their limited use of tuning to produce consistent melodies, the moderns inspired by the Enlightenment believed they could achieve the expression of totality by increasingly the range of tones in their instruments. However, the ratios between notes are no longer 100% pure. So if the interval between two notes is a fifth, the ratio of the frequencies of the tones (in Hertz) is not the perfect 1,5, but something like 1,4983... In effect, he's saying that the harmonies that Werckmeister dreamt of are illusory, just like any utopic dream for a theory of everything. We can somewhat understand this analogy with Gödel Incompleteness Theorems and the necessary tradeoff between completeness and consistency. While the ancient greeks opted for consistency and purity, without minding about completeness, modern music culminates in Werckmeister who wanted to express totality while remaining consistent (which as Gödel demonstrates is an impossibility). This is an allegory of totalitarian ideologies, which naively insist on their coherence to dissolve all political problems - but when they express totality they must become inconsistent and internally contradictory.

What should be our healthy relationship towards chaos? If all order is born out of disorder, and not the other way around (as what Platonism "deviation from perfect forms" to Christian "original sin/fall from grace" to Enlightenment "mind that comprehends the determinism of fixed transcendent laws behind everything" worldviews express), ultimately what matters is to acknowledge the inexhaustible well of energies in excess of what is given/perceived (and the pure randomness at the heart of nature itself) while taking guard against organising such forces into coagulated fascistic forms engendered by the forces of resentment (Nietzsche attributes the denial of life to reactive forces like nihilism). Sedimentation occurs when certain principles emerge and seek to order/govern all the spontaneous randomized drives once and for all, while disregarding the infinite potentialities of nature upon which it draws, and to which it owes its existence.

Some great films reviewed here. Some of them amongst my own favourites (Marienbad, Pomegranates, Mulholland), although I wouldn't be able to write about them as well as these quality reviews.

I found with Marienbad by the way that the first time I watched it it seemed to take forever, even though it's only 90 minutes.
Then the second time, it went really quickly.
I did actually wonder whether it would be better the first time to watch it in say 10 minute chunks.


I notice you've included a Tsai film. Have you seen Vive L'Amour? Absolutely love that film. Funny, suspensful and very original/inventive.

Thanks, I enjoy viewing film as an art-form, and as other forms of art like literature, that is an expression of Ideas. This clash of ideas and their resolution is what enables me to write what I feel is the most revealing aspect of particular films which lend themselves to such readings. Notice I barely talk about individual components of film analysis - plot, acting, cinematography, direction, etc. - but what they come together to broach broad, universal themes that inform the way we view a film.

As to your question, I've seen almost all of Tsai's films including Vive L'Amour, but my impression of it didnt last as much as What Time is It There? Perhaps I need to rewatch it in the future to see if theres some sort of thread that weaves the familiar themes of loneliness/ennui in Tsai's films. But its finest expression, or at least most distinct, is in the film What Time is It There? There's another film that talks about the loneliness of modern man - Yang's The Terrorizers (1986). But this one is more psychological, so that is the angle I took in my review.

Film #14: Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (Bae, 1989)



Caught in an endless stream of life without beginning nor end, where transcendence and immanence (up/down), arrival and departure from one phase/journey to another (left/right) are indistinguishable, and therefore ontologically the same. Buddhism is the failed discovery of the "self" - an inward asceticism turned outward to embrace the world. Outward as the result of emptiness/Sunyata (no essence implying no self) and dependent co-arising, where the only power to reality is found in our reciprocal, reversible symbiosis amongst man and nature. Whatever "essences" there are must be illusory, derivative of the externality of relations and its expressed power in-itself as background of the world. Here, the Buddhists are immune to the criticism that they conflate epistemy (what we can know) with ontology (what there is), neither is there a chicken or egg problem since Buddhist logic tolerates contradictions. If we were to use the pseudo-problem posed by analytic philosophy, the tree did and did not fall. In fact, we can say that the falling is real, but the tree is not. Whether the tree instantiates the property/condition of falling depends on observation. We observe states of affairs, and assign objects with what they undergo (of course, through parallel convergence and corroboration with other observers). We do not observe but perceive events. But where does this perception come from without the self? Perception therefore is universal, just like falling or crying or "green-ing", and no object or being owns or is the origin of it (independent of the particular that instantiates it). As Heidegger lamented, it is language that insists on the subject before the predicate. The possibility for analytic contradiction only arises when the object or thing is spoken to have instantiated the property/condition... ignoring the fact that the latter comes prior to the former. The world is thus a constellation of events (expressed as the pure 'infinitive' or verb(s)), while what we call the self is the product of the confluence of universal non-human forces that come together to define its being (the fleeing, the weeping, ...).


Film #15: Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2015)




Amongst Hong Sang-soo's entire body of work, this film is perhaps the most tightly rigorous in explicating the recurrent themes of difference that unfolds with repetition, and repetition that subsumes difference. Hong would often employ parallelism in narration and structure across his entire oeuvre - with neither "perspective" or "part" claiming more truth/reality than the other. Both are simultaneously true at once, and the concept of right and wrong becomes a normative claim that later on gets retrospectively attached onto each state of affairs based solely on the consequence, the endpoint or (intended) goal of the character and/or viewer. Hong's films are adequately subtle to indicate that any consequence of our actions/behavior cannot be reduced to the sequence of preceding events. In either case the future is uncertain and remains open to changes, albeit one may be construed as more desirable than the other hence the assigned normative claim of right and wrong, relative to each other. The cinema of Hong is all about parallelism, difference, and repetition. It is not a cinema of determinism, causation or even ethics. It is a cinema of chance, randomness and indeterminism.

The fatal error is in reading Hong's films as a didactic treatise into human behavior or how one ought to behave. It's neither about the honesty of spontaneity nor the importance of miniscule changes in one's actions having a butterfly effect on outcomes. Imperceptible changes in behavior result in drastic changes in outcome, whilst dramatic changes in behavior result in barely perceptible, or inconsequential, changes in outcome. The fact is that neither are predictable, as one could only judge an action after the consequence has elapsed, and therefore cannot be used as a template for future course-of-action. An additional layer to the complexity of our social interactions is the effect of the environment (milieu) on our psyche and thus our actions. This is very much beyond the limits of our control, but always already present and motivating the way we behave. The glare of the sun in the first chance encounter forces our protagonist to adopt a more awkward posture, whilst in another world the warmth of the sun results in a more comfortable posture with his surroundings. We only notice such details when the scene is repeated, not before but after - difference can only be understood through repetition.

Perhaps we can take it a step further and view the oppressive mood reflected in the mis-en-scene of the first half vis-a-vis the light-hearted mood in the second as a subjective reevaluation of what has already happened. I'm inclined to believe, given how both are laid out and labelled accordingly (Right Then, Wrong Now / Right Now, Wrong Then), that we are viewing the whole picture as some sort of "spot the difference" exercise, just as other Hong's films presented in objective matter-of-fact fashion. One may certainly interpret the second sequence as wish fulfilment but that is entirely up to the viewer rather than the filmmaker. Time and again, the brilliance of Hong's films is in the fact that they RESIST prioritizing one point of view over another. As a result, not only are we exposed to the plurality of perspectives but more importantly also that of hidden discoveries and unactualized potentialities found during each moment. A different camera angle/lay-out of surroundings/way of speech and its tone and inflection would reveal/obscure certain features which our minds may choose to focus or even over-index on as possible explanations for any difference in outcome.

This is why I made the claim that Hong's trademark parallel narrative structure is so refreshing and unique in cinema. His films enumerate multiple worlds that hang together; sequences and events which are all real simultaneously but which converge through the act of observation and analysis. These can be understood not as multiple trajectories indicating possibilities (what *could have* happened) branching off from a single actual world, but moreso as parallel worlds with no causal efficacy between them. Make no mistake - Hong is not a fatalist but a tragic romantic. In his obsession to track and arrest difference through the act of repetition (both performatively and conceptually) something totally new always emerges with every scene he repeats, and in every film he directs. With this philosophy in mind, the parallel universes that Hong creates and reflects upon endlessly are what elevates the POSSIBLE to the POTENTIAL.

I watched Terrorizers a few days ago. It went straight into my top 20, to join Taipei Story.

I will try What Time is it There? Thanks.

Interesting that you got Terrorizers the first time. It's one of the most cryptic films which I do not feel capable writing of (as yet) and I'm inclined to believe, following Fredric Jameson, that its the quintessential postmodern film. If one pays attention to how it severs cause from effect, or how parallel sequences have some sort of "causal" effect on without directly affecting each other, that's one of the key traits of postmodernity.

Looking back at my reworked review of Last Year at Marienbad, I've spent an inordinate amount of energy attempting to answer the question "What is the Image?". I've previously said that I do not believe in categorizing what FILM/CINEMA is from what it is not - but rather to question what effects it has on the aesthetic domain, and how it transforms the ideas, thoughts and emotions of man. Don't ask what cinema is, ask what cinema can do. If one is pressed to answer what makes cinema special, or why we indulge in cinema, we must answer that it is the power of the image. But what exactly is the image? Early critiques of the image, from Henri Bergson, focused on the fact that it disrupts the natural flow of time. However, that is because Bergson had conceived of the image as a representation of the mind's eye rather than a composite of moments (what I call events) that precede and give rise to the perceiving subject. In fact Last Year at Marienbad is one of the most brilliant films that presents to us images which are freed from the subject and of time. This realm is, unsurprisingly resembling that of the preconscious, also what many often describe as "dreamlike". Yet, so many films which are "dreamlike" fail to capture what it exactly means because they are shackled by the subject. On the other hand, Marienbad is as far from solipsism and is as objective and universal as it can get.

As we find ourselves right in the midst of an "AI driven revolution" in the arts and media landscape, let's take a moment to reflect about how we have to adapt as both 1) passionate advocates for artistic creation and expression and 2) media consumers influenced by machinic algorithms whose only logic is the logic of reproduction / becoming viral / unconscious privileging of hyper-speed content (a deadly mix of ADHD culture and outrage culture). As Nietzsche had already challenged us in the 19th century, the "real" world has long been replaced by a world of hyperreal (more real than "real") images without a fixed eternal center. No original, no essence, no true world that has existed in the first place. Instead of viewing postmodernity as a peril to what we falsely assume to be a deviation from a truer reality, we must embrace and see this condition as having already existed in pre-modern times. We cannot simply separate the true copies from the false copies (in Socratic/Platonic gesture), but embrace the totality of what's there and what's to come. In other words, any form of sui generis, inspired genius act of aesthetic creation has to exist within, or in between, the logic of the machinic algorithm. It also means - not necessarily pandering to outrage culture but to recognize the full spectrum of human emotions, not just fear and anger; and knowing that different Ideas have different speeds, placing such ideas in an unpredictable relationship of acceleration/deceleration (relative speed is key) with one another.