Issue 8: Winter 2011
Concrete Instants: The Filmed Body in Recent Narrative Cinema
Tony McKibbin
There has been much talk in recent years of the body in cinema, as if somehow before we had film devoid of the corporeal, no matter if we have always been watching shadows thrown onto the screen. Yet isn't there something to be said for talking so much more about the body recently as opposed to fifty years ago, and how best can we make sense of the shift? Where we have had Gilles Deleuze's infuential notion of the 'undecidability of the body', Nicole Brenez's ideas of 'total opacity' and Steve Shaviro's foregrounding of the 'visceral, affective responses to film', we also have the comments from international filmmakers, proposing the significance of the body in cinema. French directors Philippe Grandrieux and Bruno Dumont, the Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel; Vietnam's Tran Anh-Hung and Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul all have interesting things to say about the body and their work. Grandrieux says what matters is 'the rhythm, the way bodies are framed and lit, that's when we start to lose ourselves, and cinema comes closest to what it essentially is: sensual experience of the world.' Dumont believes: 'Philosophical systems concern one part of our beings only - the head. Yet, our instincts, our body, our very presence on earth determine our thoughts...' 'This idea', Martel says, 'that I began developing, then, is the possibility of a social order which is in keeping with the body, that totally changes one's set of values'. Tran reckons 'I may not even know the story or the theme: the theme must give a physical sensation to the spectator.' Weerasethakul believes 'We tend to establish a certain logic when we watch movies. But for me they are more powerful and diverse than that.' 'I want to open up the mysteriousness of life,' he says, as if echoing Brenez's total opacity. 'You encounter things you cannot explain', he believes, 'and that's the joy of living.'
However, to ground the body in film, what we want to do is try and differentiate this bodily interest in modern narrative cinema from earlier film and to think especially of the collapse of mise-en-scene, the significance of the actor as corporeal being on screen, and the audio specificity that allows the body a much more vivid presence than before. Which filmmakers among those already mentioned seem to be central to this pursuit?
Perhaps Dogme filmmakers like Lars von Trier with The Idiots and Thomas Vinterberg with Festen, as well as the Dardenne Brothers, are especially useful when thinking of the classical sense of mise-ene-scene giving way to a contingent mise en scene. Mise en scene is of course basically screen space, and classic cinema created all sorts of rules and regulations to establish it in a manner that would not disorientate the viewer. Establishing shots, medium shots and close ups, the hundred-and-eighty degree rule that oriented us so that we knew where the actors were in relation to each other, editing that made it clear that a character had stopped talking or a scene was ending, blocking that laid out the scene to be filmed, including the ‘mark' the actor would hit to be in frame at the appropriate moment. We needn't exaggerate these conventions, and many great filmmakers deviated from the predictability of some of them without radically creating a new aesthetic. As Peter Bogdanovich said in a recent issue of Sight and Sound: "Hitchcock once said to me. "Never use an establishing shot to establish.'" Why? Bodgdanovich asked. 'Because it has no dramatic meaning.' Hitchcock insisted. 'Only use it when it has dramatic meaning in the story.'
The Idiots (Lars Von Trier)
However, numerous contemporary filmmakers have dismantled the apparatus of film form, so much so that in an issue of Film Comment at the beginning of the century, Raymond Durgnat and Richard Coombs saw nothing less than a 'decomposition of the image'. Meanwhile, Festen cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle noted that even the actors could become part of the compositional filmmaking. 'Yes, there is a nice little moment,' he says in The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, where he asked two of the actors 'to hold the camera while they waltzed together.' Von Trier says in Von Trier on Von Trier that 'The Idiots was a liberation from aesthetics'. In Rosetta one notices in the opening scene, with the eponymous character angrily refusing to leave the work place where she is no longer required, that not only the mise-en-scene but even the editing seems to come out of the actors' movements. As she runs from those chasing her, the Dardennes' camera stays very close to her body, so that when she opens a door and slams it behind her, it leaves the camera on the other side of the door and functions as a cut, before the next shot shows the camera chasing her again. Where in classical cinema the actor fits the frame; often in recent film the body dictates it.
All the filmmakers quoted in the opening paragraph seem interested, if not always in the actor dictating the frame, then at least in having a bodily priority within it. What do we mean by this? Perhaps, little more than that the body is not a narratively driven object of expectation, but a behavioural object of contemplation: the body is much more corporeally present than ever before. This isn't in itself especially new: critics believed in the sixties that Michelangelo Antonioni's films ushered in a cinema of behaviour, and Deleuze was referring chiefly to French films of the seventies when in Cinema 2: The Time Image he utilised the term the 'undecidability of the body'. However, where one often sensed in many of these films a reaction against narrative in the inertia of the postures, in the newer films it increasingly appears to be the texture, shape, and tone of the bodies on screen that interests the filmmaker. Dumont, as if taking Antonioni's interest in the painterly depiction of the body still further, says in Projections 12, 'I am more interested in how a painter speaks to me than a cineaste'. It is as though each shot is not a development in the story, or even its stalling, but a still life demanding complexity of observation. There are very much characters, but there isn't really a story, so that when critics asked him about the meaning of L'Humanité, he insists 'it is a very ‘open' work... There is not one single meaning that's concretely evinced by the film.' Often one observes the actions of his leading character Pharaon as he investigates a murder, but the investigation of the story by the character seems secondary to the investigation of the character by the film. In one scene we see Pharaon and another cop going to someone's house to ask a few questions. The person has nothing to say, and the film focuses chiefly on the various faces, including the young man's grandmother. Narratively, the scene is utterly superfluous, but observationally exploratory. It is ‘about' the body more than the story, and Dumont says 'one of my favourite aspects of L'Humanité is the way that Pharoan speaks - very slow, very strange.'
La Vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux)
In such instances film becomes a corporeal investigation more than a narrative one, and certainly films by Grandrieux also fit this description. At the beginning of Un Lac, the camera is so close to the actor's body that his simple action of tree cutting carries with it a purpose that feels so much greater by virtue of where the camera is placed. Just as the story disintegrates next to the concentration of character in L'Humanité, so the action becomes irrelevant next to the body in movement in Un Lac. However, where Dumont is given to static, often slightly removed framing consistent with his comment about being a painter; Grandrieux wants a haptic sense of proximity: that the camera is almost touching the body it films. While both directors are interested in corporeal observation, Dumont is more distant; Grandrieux more engaged. In a sex scene between two leading characters in La Vie Nouvelle, Grandrieux films as if the camera is part of the sexual feeling, almost bumping into the bodies as they hungrily make love. Dumont offers a corporeal aloofness; Grandrieux a corporeal immediacy. Both, however, are equally fascinated by the body. When Shaviro mentions visceral affective responses to film, Grandrieux would seem to be more relevant than Dumont, the Dardennes' Rosetta more pertinent than their The Child - which follows closely the illegal activities of central character Bruno as he scrapes a living as a fence, but creates more space between the camera and the actor: the establishing shots are still eschewed, but the filmmakers give us more breathing space to observe the filmic events. Shaviro's comment indicates a certain spatial claustrophobia; that we are so close to the body and the affective response that it leads to the decomposition of the image. Festen, Rosetta, Un Lac and much of La Vie Nouvelle possess this decomposition as the films' proximity to the body of the actors often obliterates the comfort zone assumptions of screen space. The corporeal has greater force than the narrational, so that actors are not placed in a narrative world of appropriate closeness and distance for the story but the most appropriate place for exploration of character, or, more specifically still, the body of the character. Whether this manifests itself in the extreme decomposition of the image in Grandrieux, or the painterly reserve of Dumont, the body is still the priority.
Two comments can help us understand the radical nature of this new level of epistemological intimacy: one from Gilberto Perez, the other from Spinoza. In The Material Ghost, Perez offers a chapter on The Narrative Sequence where he differentiates between Hitchcock and Renoir's narrative position. After talking of Hitchcock's 'knowing camera', Perez notes that 'neither omniscient like god nor knowing like the devil, Renoir's camera [in, say, The Rules of the Game] takes a human point of view. But it does not take an individual's point of view. To be human is to have limited knowledge, but not, with Renoir, knowledge limited to an individual consciousness...Renoir's style of narrative is singular in that it stays with no one character but ranges everywhere...the point of view is multiple but the view is partial nonetheless.' It is as though much recent cinema wants to play up partiality of perspective through not so much character specificity, but through body specificity, with conventional notion of character somehow too attached to the social (as in Renoir's work) where much recent cinema wants to find character not out of society but through the immediacy of the body. It is perhaps close to the Spinoza Deleuze finds so fascinating in his book on the 17th century philosopher. In Expressionism in Philosophy Deleuze quotes Spinoza saying: 'To determine what is the difference between the human mind and the others, and how it surpasses them, it is necessary for us, as we have said, to know the nature of its object, ie, of the human body....I say in general, that in proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once, so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once.' This leads to Deleuze saying, 'The question, "what can a body do?" must be taken as a model', and we could say that is exactly what much recent cinema has done. The body becomes not the decidable body of narrative film, but the undecidable finding its own purpose and motives, understanding its own thoughts and feelings.
Rosetta (The Dardenne Brothers)
When Martel talks of a social order in keeping with the body, is it not consistent with Spinoza and Deleuze, especially when the latter says 'But taken as a model, its primary significance is juridical and ethical.' In Martel's The Headless Woman we have a woman above suspicion who thinks she has run over a young boy and who wanders around for the rest of the film in an ethical daze, unsure of exactly what she has done (she may merely have run over a dog), but safely ensconced in her comfortable bourgeois life as the equally comfortable people around her make sure that any culpability will never be more than contained within her own body and its moral discomforts. At one moment near the end of the film Vero returns to a hotel she stayed in with her lover but the receptionist claims to have no record of her visit. As she tries to retrace her steps to find out what she may have done, so it seems her family has removed any evidence that could implicate her in the deed she believes she may have committed. Though filmed in a widescreen format, Martel often uses the frame not for the width it offers her but as a confining, horizontal frame with her central character disoriented within it. One notices when she returns to her house for the first time since the accident, that Martel frames her often in side elevation close up or in partial framing that makes her seem a stranger in her own home. Frequently Martel also films her against the light, or with her face partially lit. The social body will not face up to the consequences of a possible action, but will the personal body? In everything her body does, Vero takes up the slack of moral feeling that socially her family will not allow her to acknowledge. The wider social morality of society is ignored for what we might call a corporeal culpability: not so much Poe's Tell-Tale Heart but a tell-tale posture, with the film trying to find a correlative in framing and lighting for that self-confrontation.
The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel)
If in a number of the films we've talked about we've noted a sense of claustrophobia, part of this hemmed in feeling comes through the soundtrack. The great sound theorist Michel Chion in Audio-Vision has talked of ‘null extension', saying that null extension is 'when the sonic universe has shrunk to the sounds heard by one single character, possibly including any inner voices he or she hears.' Martine Beugnet in Cinema and Sensation has talked of a sound close-up, where sound reflects an intimate over a social audio universe. What one notices in many films concerned with the body is that the sensual takes precedence over the social, so that even if sound isn't at all subjective, it nevertheless reflects the non-narrative concentration on sound, and embodies it much more corporeally than the conventional use of sound which emphasises the audio needs of the story. (Indeed one of the sub-chapter headings in Chion's book goes by the name of ‘Towards a Sensory Cinema'.) If we think of films like Bullitt and Heat, we can see how they create a centripetal soundscape that attends to character goals. These films haven't been chosen completely arbitrarily: these are cop thrillers capable of stillness, but they still create sound that focuses the character in narrative space over embodied feeling. In the sequence in Bullitt where Steve McQueen chases the baddie through a hospital, each sound serves a clear function, whether it is a door slamming, clean sheets thudding to the ground from a shaft in the roof, or footsteps rushing down the stairs. Even the hint of centrifugal sound - the birds we hear faintly singing after the baddie has escaped and McQueen exits the hospital - indicate the banal everyday of a world that McQueen rarely lives in. In the famous scene in Heat where cop Al Pacino and robber Robert De Niro meet in a café, the sound of the diners around them become fainter and fainter as the conversation becomes more focused. The relative loudness of the conversations initially tells us that this is a place where they can talk as theirs will be a chat amongst others, but when the characters become increasingly engaged in the conversation, the hubbub around them, fades.
By contrast we can think of a moment in Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours where we watch a couple of people having sex in the woods. We hear the sound of the man's heavy breathing but also the sound of the birds singing in the background. While the director holds on a medium shot that focuses on the bodies, he equally makes audible the ambient sounds beyond them. If Weerasethakul had focused more on the groans rather than on the breathing, and faded the chirpings of the birds to the faintest of sounds, then one might sense more a narrative focus than a corporeal embodying. This is the paradox of embodied sound: often it combines the audio close-up with the ambient sound, and thus ‘kills' the middle ground of narrative progression that more story-driven films focus upon. This is the case even in Tran Anh-Hung's work, even though the director is someone who utilises in his work non-diegetic music, music that plays over the story and isn't contained within the story - ie. when a character puts on a record, or turns on the radio. Non-diegetic sound is often a way in which to kill ambient sound, to concentrate on the immediate screen space and to accept that peripheral sounds are exactly that. Tran Anh-Hung in The Scent of the Green Papya, as well as in At the Height of Summer and Norwegian Wood, wants sound that is embodied in the character, in ambient space, and also present on the non-diegetic soundtrack. As we watch the central figure in Papya move from room to room in the house in which she serves in 50s Saigon, so the director wants to capture a passivity of the body through its serene detachment from action and attachment to sound. The bird in a cage isn't only a symbol of her sense of confinement, it is also an ambient presence that paradoxically embodies her feelings of being hemmed in.
Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
What is interesting is that all the filmmakers we have talked about are essentially narrative rather than experimental filmmakers, but many of them are trying to find ways of making the story secondary to the character, and the character secondary to the corporeal presence itself. Two of the filmmakers in the British context most given to this attempt are Lynn Ramsay and Andrea Arnold, directors often mentioned in relation to Ken Loach, but who seem more concerned with the political body than the body politic: the sensual relationship with place over the political dimension, but that nevertheless hardly ignores the political. In an interview with Filmmaker, Andrea Arnold describes well the type of cinema she is interested in through an anecdote. 'For example, the other day I saw a woman walking up to the station. It was very cold, it had been snowing, and she had not enough clothes on for the weather. She had a load of kids and she was pushing a pram up the hill...she had some track suit bottoms on and they'd kind of slid down, and you could see this expansive flesh at the back.' It was 'such an intimate thing for me', a comment that might be made by any number of the filmmakers here. It resembles moments in Fish Tank when Michael Fassbender's character walks around in just his jeans, watched by his lover's daughter, or even the sudden rush of sexual chemistry in the lift between the leading character and the man she is supposed to loath in Red Road.
'I'm very interested', Ramsay says in Sight and Sound (Oct.99), 'in focusing on details and making audiences see things they don't normally see.' One might think of the manner in which Morvern Callar focuses on the fragility of the grandmother, reminiscent of the shots of fragile old-age in L'Humanité. Ramsay herself gives as an example a close up on the knee of one of her teenage characters in Ratcatcher. It's a bruised, bloody knee and Ramsay reckons, 'from that tiny little detail, that close-up of her body, I think you understand that she's a bit brutalised herself.' This is indeed the political body, and one needn't assume that sensuous detail negates the socially problematic. Indeed the Dardennes wanted in Rosetta to suggest that in contemporary life getting a job was like fighting a battle, and decided to invoke it through what they called a combat camera style.
In an article on the neo-realist film Umberto D back in the early fifties for Cahiers du cinéma, the great realist critic André Bazin believed, 'the narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very base.' For all Bazin's brilliant insights, drama wasn't destroyed, but the concrete instants became more possible in neo-realism. In the modern cinema of the body, this has become still more pronounced, through ever greater concentration on a contingent mise-en-scene, on a bodily led aesthetic, and an audio focus on the corporeal specifics.
Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journals worldwide.