Issue 3: Spring 2009
DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
Maximilian Le Cain
Different Directions, Ireland's only festival dedicated exclusively to experimental film, took place in Galway at the start of last December. This first edition, conceived and programmed by Fergus Daly and Tom Flanagan, consisted of two days of mostly very well attended events. These screenings presented a heady array of works dating from the ‘20s up to the present decade. In making the selection, extreme and baroque mutations or variations of cinematic narrativity were generally favoured over pure abstraction or the detachedly conceptual. More than simply an indication of curatorial taste, this particular ‘direction' taken seems the product of a tactical reasoning based on two factors: the inaugral status of the 2008 festival, and the general visibility and appreciation of experimental cinema in Ireland, which can often seem comparatively close to nil.
Ciel eteint! (FJ Ossang, 2008)
A crucial number of these ‘different directions' take the history of narrative cinema, and narrative cinema in history, as a starting point- films in which cinema takes stock of itself, analysing and rewriting its history rather than announcing a clean break with it. Central to this design, and to the whole programme, is the imposingly monumental presence of Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-98), discussed at length elsewhere in this issue. Projected in its entirety, this epic subjectification of the first century of cinema through cinema is, as has often been stated, an ambiguous act of mourning for the medium's ‘failure', essentially a failure to bear adequate witness to the worst events of the 20th century.
Like Godard, Francois-Jacques Ossang seems beached by the outgoing tide of that century, creating works variously engaged with sifting and evaluating its legacy. The Festival's guest of honour, Ossang is a fascinating figure deserving of far wider international recognition than he currently receives. A child of the punk generation, he is also a poet and novelist, as well as lead singer of the band Mesagero Killers Boys. The Different Directions mini-retrospective included one of his three features, Docteur Chance (1997), and three more recent shorts, all projected in 35mm at the Town Hall Theatre. He describes Docteur Chance as a ‘monument' to the 20th century but, unlike Godard's Histoire(s) in which the filmmaker presides over a ritual autopsy in a museum, Ossang insists on the necessity of a ‘live' and thus more vulnerable state to experience the last century's death-rush. His 20th century is the century of speed, of the machine, of the Futurists, Burroughs, cinema (especially silent cinema) and Rock'n'Roll. Of ‘no future', where oblivion is precisely that and what is spent is spent. This is the source of his vulnerability when compared to the older Godard, who has entombed himself to examine the leavings of Time from a perspective almost outside its flow, a voice from Beyond whose body becomes the images it has witnessed. Ossang in Docteur Chance still requires a body moving in space for time to run out on, and, more importantly, to experience and even initiate speed. The breathless, fragmented road movie-thriller world of Docteur Chance, Ossang's only colour film, is a South America of the mind where the viewer always feels a step behind the action. Myriad cultural references come in to play, giving the hero's flight the scope of a century- Georg Trakl sells potions from his chemical laboratory, William Burrough's guiding voice issues from aeroplane radios, and the mysterious missing comrade at the end of the quest could only be played by Joe Strummer. It's as if Ruiz had decided to make a Peckinpah film.
Ossang in action!
And since? As we have said, unlike the enclosed Godard, Ossang still requires space. (This is not the same as place, which remains important to Godard in his post Histoire(s) work but fulfilling an indexical function rather than introducing expansiveness.) Maybe this is why Ossang's recent short works, his first films since Docteur Chance, still seem to be wandering, now searching for origins, not least the origins of cinema. The austere Silencio (2006), exqusitely shot in b/w 16mm, is essentially a mobile contemplation of space and light to the strains of Throbbing Gristle. A spectral female figure comes and goes in the grainy twilight, but it is essentially a film of landscape which, for all its melancholy, can appear edenic- not an epithet one would ever dream of applying to his work of the ‘80s or ‘90s. The more overtly bleak Ciel eteint! (2008) returns to the apocalyptic spirit of his earlier films albeit in a more intimate vein. In this film, it feels as if Ossang's search has left him cornered at the end of the world as the story of an alienated couple drifting in and out of reality unfolds on a lonely island. This cinematic ‘search for origins' strongly echoes the images and mood of an earlier such search, the ‘return to zero' aesthetic of the Zanzibar Group in the late ‘60s. The third Ossang short screened, Vladivostok (2008), is very slight and not really worthy of this otherwise terrific programme of Ossang films.
Peter Tscherkassky's Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) is less concerned with reconfiguring broad ideas of film history, operating instead on the potentials secluded in the body of one film, Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Employing his usual techniques of reframing, recutting and multiple exposing images from the original, Tscherkassky orchestrates an investigation into dynamic properties latent in Leone's images. Or, as Tscherkassky put it, transforming a Roman western into a Greek tragedy. In this version, Tuco, the bandit played by Eli Wallach, is a prisoner of the film, unable to escape its lethal confines. As in his previous works of the past decade, Tscherkassky has created an experience of surpassing audio-visual intensity, proving again his mastery in the field of found footage cinema.
‘Found footage' of a different kind is central to Jose Luis Guerin's greatest work, the delicate and deeply haunting Tren de Sombras (1997, produced by Pere Portabella). Taking as its conceit the mysterious death of a Parisian lawyer and home movie maker beside a Normandy lake in 1931 while seeking the ideal light for a shot, Tren de Sombras is a poetic, multi-layered exploration of the memory-charge contained by film. It is presented in several distinct sections: after a brief prologue, the reels of family home movie footage the lawyer has left behind him unfold. Then there is an atmospheric documentary segment detailing the contemporary aspect of the sleepy village where the lawyer's house is, followed by a truly extraordinary sequence exploring the space of that house as day turns to night. Beams of light, latterly provided by the glow of passing headlights, penetrate it, bringing the disturbing phantasm of cinematic projection and motion into the tomb-like stillness of the apparently untouched house. Then Guerin returns to the footage from the ‘30s, speeding up, slowing down, reframing, repeating, wordlessly opening it up to the audience to scrutnise not only for clues concerning its author's demise but also the tensions besetting the whole family. Finally, the fluid camerawork and colour images of the house's grounds so far associated with the present day become peopled by characters from the old footage, now composed in theatrically stiff tableaux irresistably reminiscent of the conclusion of Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).
Tren de Sombras (Jose Luis Guerin, 1997)
Guerin is interested less in examining his ‘found footage' for factual information than in scanning it for the interpersonal subtleties it has preserved perhaps unbeknownst to its filmer. Rather than a solution to the mystery of his death, Guerin is concerned with uncovering still more mysteries, those contained, unconsciously or otherwise, in moment-to-moment human expressivity and pinned down in flight by the inevitably paranoid eye of the film camera. But he is not Martin Arnold; there is more. The old film, as a physical presence in its cans, seems charged with a ghostly aura that interacts with its surroundings, surroundings which also seem imbued with events past. The infinite patience with which Guerin allows his camera to discreetly glide through the deserted house results in numerous allusions to projection emerging from the stillness, most obviously the car headlights penetrating the house's darkness.
There is a haunting, certainly, but a unique one in that it never completely reveals itself or becomes specifically linked to any apparition or explicit event, the unseen death notwithstanding. Instead, space itself is caused to vibrate with the potential contained in past events, a potential which resists reduction through the sort of narrative explication that inevitably whittles down possibilities. Instead the viewer's senses are awakened to an atmosphere of mystery that is concentrated in the old film, but is also ineffably present throughout the space which contains it. Unusually, this atmosphere is not overtly ominous, but rather full of gentle enchantment, at once unsettling and seductive. What is sinister in the story the old film recounts remains clearly present but just beyond our grasp.
Ultimately, what makes Tren de Sombras such a creepy experience is the lack of a clearly defined witness to what happens. The home movie footage was shot by the lawyer; it preserves his viewpoint. But who is reviewing it? The house is an echo chamber of memory. But who is remembering? In materialising vision through cinema, it seems that the dead filmmaker has unbound perception and sensory experience from the human subject. It now belongs completely to the cinema, whose power to cause time to fold in on itself and dissolve in an image of memory that transcends the event-specific has seldom been anywhere near as fully realised as it is here.
In their films selected for Different Directions Godard, Ossang, Tscherkassky and Guerin are all, in different ways, concerned with remembering through cinema- and remembering differently, reshaping the accepted memory or memory-functions of film. What better way to open an audience's mind to the more extreme possibilities of cinema? A mind now ready to be flooded by the other delights on the programme: Patrick Bokanowski's L'Ange (1982), a baroque Kafkaesque masterpiece combining animation and live action; Pierre Clementi's glorious ode to psychedelia and the spirit of '68, Visa de censure no X (1967); Dimitri Kirsanoff's astonishing silent classic Menilmontant (1926); and the pure abstraction of The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels (1999), one of Stan Brakhage's late hand-painted films.
And with so many other ‘different directions' still to be explored in future editions, Galway can at last boast of a forum in which to observe cinema melting in the heat of its own possibilities.
Visit the Different Directions website: www.differentdirections.ie
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinéphile living in Cork City, Ireland.
Website: http://lecain.blogspot.com