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 the Heideggerian concept of "un-ready-to-hand" which describes our fundamental encounter of the world as being perpetually mediated by the mode of familiarity/unfamiliarity. There is a parallel between Seyrig becoming unattuned to her familiar world of habitual dispositions and the audience noticing Seyrig's unheimlichkeit. 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?

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

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?