Issue 2: Autumn 2008: Spanish Avant-Garde Film
The Cinema Has No Body: Oriol Sanchez's De la hospitalidad, derechos de autor
Maximilian Le Cain
"Two courses seem to be open to the cinema, of which neither is the right one. The pure or absolute cinema on the one hand, and on the other this sort of venial hybrid art"
- Antonin Artaud
De la hospitalidad, derechos de autor (Of Hospitality, Copyright, 2006) is a contemporary masterpiece of found footage cinema by Barcelona-based filmmaker Oriol Sánchez. It falls into three distinct parts, the first newly shot, the second interweaving footage from Erice's Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la colmena, 1973) and Kiarostami's Where is My Friend's House? (Khane-ye doust kodjast?, 1987), and the third mixing images from Rossellini's Europa '51 (1952) with Welles' unfinished Don Quixote. What emerges is a post-modern manifesto for a found footage filmmaking that directly confronts the giants of modernism and, whilst cheekily undermining the traditional fetish of the ritual of cinematic presentation, nevertheless invests the moving image itself with a quasi-mystical intensity.
This ‘confrontation' with an older generation of filmmakers could almost be described as face-to-face. This film's origins are in a workshop Sánchez attended with Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami as part of their joint exhibition Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences in Barcelona. A major part of this ‘correspondence' consisted of video letters between the two directors, a dialogue back and forth. What Sánchez does is, as it were, superimpose them, creating a dialogue between their films that detaches itself from their cinematic aims and ideas. Thus denatured, their images become representative of an uncanny filmic unconscious rooted in memory and, especially, childhood memory. This is far from random sampling, and in appropriating the films he chooses, Sánchez is testing the ‘hospitality' of images deliberately drawn from work quite opposite in outlook to his own, but imbued with thematic qualities ripe for his elaboration. Most important of these is the fairytale figure of the child alone before a mysterious world and its images.
As Alain Bergala, co-organiser of Correspondences, has noted: "Whatever the vast differences between their mutual cultures of origin, Kiarostami and Erice have always shared the taste for a cinema which takes the time to contemplate the things of the world, to look at human beings... a cinema of minute observation, of patience and attention to small things." (1). These naturalistic, phenomenological reflections on reality could not be more different from Sánchez's work which sets out not from an impression of the world but from images themselves. His films are rapid collages, intensely fragmented works geared towards neurophysiological impact rather than distanced contemplation. His first Super 8 film (and second film of any kind), the aptly titled Fragmentos, primera impresion en S8 (1999), is essentially home movie travel footage. It is the nearest Sánchez has come to a self-filmed account of the world before him. His first act is to fragment it into an infectiously joyous series of visual impressions- flowers, clouds, landscapes, faces, fireworks, architectural details, signs, and so on- running at most a few frames each. Sánchez has no interest in allowing his viewer to explore these frames and form a relationship of his or her own with them. Rather, he attempts to convey the sensory impact that they presumably had on him, a concatenation of perceptual peaks. His films, at their best, have already penetrated the body and mind and are at work on the nervous system. Indeed, his most recent and most accomplished work, Profanaciones (Profanations, 2008), an elaborate, three-screen found-footage hallucination in umbral black and white, seems to propose a cinema for an already pierced eye, an internalised host of phantom images from film history.
A viewer of Fragmentos might pick up on Sánchez's refusal to handle cheekily lascivious montages and appreciative shots of religious iconography differently- everything he films is swept along in the same wave of delight, the same joy of ‘first impressions'. But this even handed treatment of sacred and profane, high and low, solemn and humourous develops and deepens as his work progresses. Its subversiveness lies not in its daring to effect these combinations, but in the unquestioning manner he does so. Sánchez is swayed neither by superstitious respect for the canonical nor by peurile delight in mocking it. Rather, within the ideas that bind and drive his films, the baggage of given images is subordinated to the prevailing energy. The most obvious and conventional example of this is San Vicente (2001), which links found footage shots of religious and sexual ecstasy as conveying one transcendental impulse.
This levelling is not limited to the content of images, but also, crucially, to their medium of origin. Sketchbook 1 (2002) is pretty much what it claims to be, a montage of images that appeal to Sánchez, many of which find echoes in more substantial works. What's perhaps most significant about this sketchbook is the appearance of shots from Fragmentos within its loose collage of film and video fragments. The implication is that any image, even one filmed and previously given a firm context by Sánchez, is subject to reworking in line with a new concept- he is as willing to impose upon the ‘hospitality' of his own images as much as he is anyone else's. And, as he went on to prove with a series of often breathtakingly intense, visually overwhelming abstract films made around 2002, even the representational image is not prerequisite to carry the charge of his cinematic (im)pulse. Yet the unusually stately parade of kaleidoscopic patterns that make up his Estudio Cromatico en 16mm (1c) (2002) are markedly reminiscent of the mosaic designs he so lovingly films in Fragmentos. Both documentary and abstract images are ‘hospitable' to a graphic impression and its effect without becoming literally equivalent. If Kiarostami and Erice seek truth in the world they observe, Sánchez strives to give form to primordial inner sensations that voraciously seize hold of images, new or preexisting, for their embodiment. If the older filmmakers are engaged in reflection, Sánchez is chiefly concerned with effusion.
Before his encounter with them in De la hospitalidad..., he made a further significant advance in defining his approach to working with moving images in Copy Scream (2005). This ironically silent film is at once linked to the cinematic representation of male violence against women, specifically as it is found in- ‘copied' from- the horror film, and a hair-raising articulation of pure aggression in its own right. The central action of this black and white work is the rapid intercutting of extreme close-ups of a screaming male face, distorted with demonic fury and solarisation, and a reverse angle of a prone young woman recoiling and screaming in terror. This highly sexualized arrangement is interrupted by shots of the woman being apparently stabbed in the neck, presumably by the man. This dizzying sequence is repeated several times with slight variation.
The scream is the impulse, the ‘energy' articulated through this work of ‘copying'. First, it copies the scream, or the figurative idea of the scream, from the iconography of the horror film- a cultural memory, although in this case, not actually found footage. However, Copy Scream has little interest in engaging with horror film narrativity. Instead it loops a generic emotive peak with nightmarish obsessiveness. The next ‘copy' is within the diegesis, the transmission of scream from man to woman. This screaming scenario is in itself copied in the way Sánchez repeatedly loops it. Without entering into too much detail about the variations that take place from repeat to repeat- slight alterations of framing or sequence, scratches, the eruption of white frames within the montage, etc- the main progression to be observed is that it becomes increasingly apparent that the image is being projected onto a white surface. This surface becomes wrinkled, acquiring the appearance of a piece of crumpled paper. This paper then tears completely, giving way to an expanse of white wall, before the paper is apparently put back together again. This not a cinema but a copy of a cinema, a projection onto paper. And the quality of some of the versions of the loop would suggest a photocopy.
The key referent in Copy Scream is, of course, projection itself; the process of ‘copying' that takes place between projector and screen. Sánchez's embodiment of this dynamic as a scream of rage projected into a scream of terror within the context of sexualized violence between a man and woman is an interesting one when looked at in relation to materialist cinema. While highlighting the workings of the filmic apparatus, Sánchez invests this process with an extremely emotive metaphor. Rather than reducing it to a dry scientific function, he implies that the act of projection is bound up with extreme and markedly primal emotions. In the very act of ‘copying' the images by looping, and by the pop-cultural referentiality of these images, he seems to insist on an ontology of recurrence. But ultimately, Copy Scream sees this emotionalism, atavistically reinscribed in materialist terms, as transcending projection to seize and shred the various media- film, video, performance, paper- it comes into contact with. It is one of the purest examples of Sánchez's basic technique: the creation of a ‘magnetic charge' (joy in Fragmentos, rage here) that attracts and arranges the appropriate images it requires to flow through, irrespective of their origin.
Copy Scream opens with a brief montage: white leader dappled with the occasional detail of a woman's face, followed by a female body in a plain white smock seen from the neck down and, finally, a frantic chase from a technically primitive early animation in which a man chases a dog chasing a cat chasing a mouse. As well as announcing the theme of antic, endemic aggression, it links it to childhood. Childhood features prominently in De la hospitalidad..., a film that links cinema itself to the openness and wonder of childhood perception. The differences between Sánchez's work and that of Erice and Kiarostami are obvious, but perhaps their one point in common can be discovered somewhere in these lines by Bergala regarding the similarities between the two older filmmakers: "[there] are clairvoyant, silent children through whom Erice and Kiarostami seek to rediscover the infancy of their art and an as-yet primitive, magical vision of the mysteries of the world which was that of the children they once were. The projection of Frankenstein (1931) in The Spirit of the Beehive and that of the coloured lamps on the walls of the forbidden village in Where Is My Friend's House? are dependent on this same revelation of the enigma of oneself and of one's relationship with the world, in a mysterious visible dimension which is capable of provoking a formative shudder."
As with Copy Scream, Sánchez here sets up an intricate chinese box relationship between layers of filmed reality. If rage was the previous film's motor, this time it is a desperate search for the ‘spirit' of cinema on the part of the ghost-characters he summons up from film history. This search results in a vertiginous plunge into a proliferation of unresolvable mises en abime, with children forever lost between screens.
As we have noted, irreverent humour and solemn lyricism go hand in hand in Sánchez's work. On the basis of its first five or so minutes, it would be easy to mistake De la hospitalidad... for a gag, one perhaps directed mainly at Kiarostami. It opens with an interminable five-minute extreme wide shot of an unmistakeably Kiarostamian stretch of mountain road. This concludes with a sudden tilt down to a river with a branch sticking out of it. On top of this branch, crudely superimposed, is an ‘exit' sign showing the figure of a man running towards an open door and an arrow pointing scren left. This could be read initially as representing the audience's desire to ‘escape' this tedious shot. But even before this outrageous overturning of the impression of unvarnished reality captured, Sánchez was subtly undermining the shot's Kiarostamian integrity. There is a barely noticeable flashing light at the top of one of trees in the shot's background, as if someone was signalling to the camera with a mirror reflecting sunlight. This is not an open image of the world for us to explore and contemplate; there is something definite ‘out there' distracting us- in fact ‘projecting' at us. After the tilt down to the exit sign, and to the startling accompaniment of an alarm siren, the film moves to the interior of a cinema. But the ‘emergency exit' sign, a standard fixture of every cinema, implies that we are already in the cinema. Rather than looking out into reality, we find ourselves already imprisoned in the self-reflecting mechanisms of cinema. The usual cinematic setup of ‘invisible' projection from behind us creating a stable image of the world on a screen before us is already decentred- the rest of the film is a frenzied and vain attempt to locate the image, as it shatters across not only destabilised projection but also video monitors and even the oneiric void between the objectivity of materialist practice and the subjectivity of childhood dreaming. Cinema observes and dreams itself, tells itself fairy stories.
The cinema hall is full of children- shots from Spirit of the Beehive sped up to accentuate a mood of manic anticipation as they take their seats, yet somehow retaining the sense of enchantment found in Erice's original scene. The first image on the cinema screen is still, a tacky computer generated drawing of a grinning mouth, the facile seduction of spectacle. But when the film kicks in, it is a stunningly lyrical montage of shots from both Spirit of the Beehive and Where is My Friend's House? The young heroine of Spirit of the Beehive, played by Ana Torrent, is in the audience, watching herself on screen. Or screens. When the Iranian boy, played by Babek Ahmed Poor, first appears before the viewers, the cinema screen looks more like a giant flat screen TV. Thereafter, ‘clean', film-like images from both the Erice and Kiarostami films are mashed up with shots re-filmed and re-framed from a video monitor, creating a rich textural diversity. This becomes even more pronounced in the film's final third involving Don Quixote, but this article will remain focused on the Erice/Kiarostami derived middle third.
The main images in this montage are shots of both Torrent and Poor walking and running across barren landscapes or searching through apparently deserted buildings. These shots are often superimposed in gorgeous composite pictures. The atmopshere is of a sinister fairytale, the children appearing constantly anxious or fleeing. The Pandora Film logo is superimposed at one point, explicitly referencing the cinematic nightmares of German Expressionism as well as the Pandora's box that cinema can be to a young, impressionable imagination. On the soundtrack, Sánchez samples dialogue spoken by the little girl in Erice, lines which perfectly sum up the apparently contradictory stance his work takes in relation to cinema: at once adopting an anti-illusionist position in relation to its traditional functioning that is in accord with materialist filmmaking, and embracing a primal visionary power that film is particularly suited to accomodate.
"In cinema, everything's a lie, a trick" says the girl. The original story of Spirit of the Beehive concerns her quest for and encounter with Frankenstein's monster after having seen James Whale's film- the search for a powerful cinematic symbol of the imagination outside the cinema or even overflowing from the cinema which can reference it but not contain it once it has been witnessed. But in Sánchez she never finds this symbolic monster because "It's a spirit... it has no body... You can talk to him whenever you want. Close your eyes and call him." Over this last line, Sánchez cuts from a visually sharp shot of Torrent in bed opening her eyes to a fuzzy, re-filmed shot of her running away from camera into a barren landscape, cut as if she were watching herself from her bed. This implies a shift from and an equivalence between her watching herself in the cinema and in her bed, both dark spaces where the imaginary can hold sway.
The point is that for Sánchez the cinema ‘has no body'. This point of view includes but also goes beyond a postmodern embrace of a multiplicity of shooting and screening technologies. His quintessentially Artaudian conception of filmmakng firmly situates ‘cinema' in the psyche and body of the viewer, linking it to instinctual and imaginative impulses rooted in childhood that cinema is- or cinematic images are- capable of more than awakening. By highlighting the ways in which film images can spill over from the constraints of their native medium, he suggests the immanence of the impulses that are their subject. In turning this process back on the viewer, he is able to raise this ‘spirit' that cinema can represent to immanence.
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinéphile living in Cork City, Ireland.
Website: http://lecain.blogspot.com