The Fastest Gun Alive is an ingenious Western written and directed by Russell Rouse for release in 1956. The movie stars Glenn Ford and Jeanne Craine. Ford's performance is eccentric -- the film was part of a wave of so-called "Adult Westerns" that captured the screen in the fifties: these movies undercut mythic archetypes by providing the characters with idiosyncratic psychological motivations. (The most characteristic of these films is Arthur Penn's The Left-handed Gun in which Billy the Kid is imagined to be acting-out homosexual impulses -- the film was written by Gore Vidal.) Glenn Ford channels, unsuccessfully it must be said, the stammering, murmuring, wounded style of James Dean -- he seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It's an interesting performance but Ford doesn't have the acting chops -- he looks too steadfastly simian and his fundamental personality is too staid and conventional for the devious hoops through which he leaps here. The Fastest Gun Alive is entertaining and exceedingly clever -- but, ultimately, the psychological Western was a self-defeating genre. It denies too many of the fundamental pleasures of the form -- it's hard to stage convincing horse scenes with mighty steeds galloping across the desert when the action is mostly interior, the gunfighter wrestling with his demons in the dark night of the soul. In this context, The Fastest Gun Alive supplies characters with intricate and tormented back-stories -- even the heavy, Broderick Crawford, looking doughy and a little off-balance, is given a sad story to recount from his youth. This material clogs up the narrative and undercuts the fundamental pleasure of seeing men and beautiful horses arrayed against the sublime landscapes of the American West. John Ford always staged at least one scene showing cavalry crossing a river -- perhaps, he was punning on his name, but he understood the elemental appeal of seeing horses in great numbers colorfully splashing through water beneath red sandstone buttes. In The Fastest Gun Alive, the trio of bad hombres pauses to water their horses at what seems to be a little ooze under some bedraggled cottonwood trees. The pond is about six feet long and the horses and men drink from it and, then, ruinously splash in the water -- but it's not a western river under red rock formations, but rather just a tub-shaped indentation on a grassy hillside. This doesn't exactly stir the heart.
Glenn Ford plays a General Store merchant who has named himself George Temple to escape his reputation as "the fastest gun alive." He's sober, hardworking, with a beautiful pregnant wife. (Jeanne Craine is so fantastically beautiful that she makes all of her scenes completely lifeless -- they become nothing more than exercises in contemplating her fantastic mannequin-like gorgeousness. She has only one expression, a sort of astonished, inert horror, an affect that she shows in just about every scene in the movie.) But Temple, despite his success, is unhappy -- selling candy and arguing with cantankerous female customers about the color of store-bought dresses ordered from New York has abraded his soul to the point that he can't bear his placid life any longer. He gets drunk and shows off his spectacular prowess with a six-gun. (This exhibition is triggered by an account of a bad man, Vinnie Howard, Broderick Crawford's character, who has gratuitously gunned-down a man in a nearby town -- Vinnie Howard is obsessed by achieving fame as the fastest gun alive and he is willing to kill to attain this objective.) The people in town realize that it is a calamity to have in their midst a gunfighter renowned as the fastest gun in the West and, so, in a church service they swear a solemn vow to never tell anyone about George Temple's lethal skills. But just as they are swearing this vow, Vinnie Howard with his henchmen rides into town, fleeing a posse that is pursuing them after a bank robbery in which a townsperson was killed. Howard learns from an admiring little boy (who is playing hooky from Church) that there is a fast gun in town and he wants to duel with the man. When the townspeople, true to their oath, refuse to reveal that they are harboring Temple in the church, Howard sets out to burn the village to the ground. Of course, this threat forces Temple to reluctantly reveal himself, striding down main street with his six-gun strapped to his leg for the climactic duel with the half-mad Vinnie Howard.
The film is full of interesting minor characters -- there's a garrulous Irishman who saw Howard kill the gunslinger in the nearby town; he repeats the story ad nauseum driving Temple to drink and his display of shooting skills that triggers the film's climax. An ornery female customer turns out to be kind and generous when the chips are down. The town's bar owner discourages people from drinking. There's a blind Swede in the opening scene who pronounces doom on Vinnie Howard and the bad man's two accomplices, one of them played by Noah Beery, are convincingly nasty but, also, vaguely endearing. True to form, the film is overly lit, depicting a series of neat geometric interiors, the exact opposite of the squalor shown in Westerns made a decade later -- here the Old West is exceedingly neat and tidy with everything in its place. The town folk are all well-meaning bourgeois -- it's not clear how the village supports itself in the barren desert. Everyone has their reasons and the characters are fully and roundly humanized. Broderick Crawford's lethal rage has to do with being humiliated when his wife ran off with a faro dealer -- the gun is clearly a substitute for his inadequate phallus. The film has some remarkable twists and turns. Ford's character sweats up a storm -- his forehead is always beaded with perspiration. It turns out that not only is the mousy little storekeeper a great gunslinger but he is also a coward to boot -- this adds an additional level of suspense to the final shoot-out. The music by Andre Previn is overly emphatic -- it insists on finding climaxes about every six minutes in the film.
The most remarkable aspect of the film has nothing to do with its plot and, in fact, is a weird distraction from the movie's themes. Russ Tamblyn plays a young man seen courting a girl in an early hoe-down scene. People urge him to dance and dance he does -- he hurls himself around the barn climbing walls, swinging on ropes, using a see-saw to throw his partner twenty feet in the air. Some of his dance moves look like parkour -- he dives off obstacles and lunges over feed troughs and, then, hopping atop shovels does a bizarre and spectacular dance using the tools like stilts. Tamblyn apparently could really dance and this elaborate sequence is shot in only three or four extended scenes -- all from middle distance without anything faked. Glenn Ford was reportedly miffed by the sequence saying that Tamblyn "was doing a Donald O'Connor all over the walls." He wanted the scene cut, but it was simply too brilliant to be excised and so it sits in the middle of the movie, an island of song and dance, that has nothing to do with anything around it.
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Monday, July 15, 2019
Film Program note on Le Bonheur and Agnes Varda
Agnes Varda and Le Bonheur
...the film has grown away from me even though its topic remains true (what does one do about the other’s desire?) and its treatment fits the storytelling (with different color pallettes); but I feel I have dropped a bouquet of flowers somewhere, then turned around and walked away.
Agnes Varda commenting on Le Bonheur in 2006
Last (wo)man standing
Agnes Varda died this year (2019). In her penultimate film, the documentary Visages Villages (2017), released in English as Faces/Places, the elderly filmmaker travels through France with an artist named JR. This man makes photo-murals and, then, posts them on landmarks in the small villages that the couple visit. Of course, it’s an “odd couple” movie – Varda is nearly 90 and losing her vision. (She endures several injections into her eyes during the movie). JR is forty-five years younger, but they seem to be kindred spirits in a way.
At one point, Varda wagers with the terminally hip JR that she can get him to remove his glasses. She recalls a short film that she made almost 60 years earlier in which she prevailed upon Jean-Luc Godard to remove his trademark sunglasses, revealing what Varda calls his “sad eyes.” This anecdote leads the couple to embark on a trip to see the reclusive Godard at the village on Lake Geneva, Rolle, where he lives in Switzerland. After many adventures, the two reach Rolle. Godard refuses to meet with Varda, despite his earlier promise. Instead, he leaves a message written in scribbled magic marker on a note taped to the door of his home office suite. Godard says that he doesn’t want to traduce the memories of a happier day when Godard with his wife, Anna Karenina, vacationed in Nice with Jacques Demy and his new wife, Agnes Varda. (For several years, the foursome had been meeting each Sunday for breakfast.) Varda is very hurt that Godard has refused to see her. She calls him a “dirty rat.” Later, she tricks JR into removing his sunglasses.
Agnes Varda is the sole female member of a group of celebrated filmmakers who came of age in the late fifties and founded the cinema movement known as the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). Francois Truffaut was the first to die – he was killed by a brain tumor in 1984. Jacques Demy, Varda’s husband, died in 1990 after a thirty year marriage. (Varda made a documentary about her film maker husband called Jacquot de Nantes in 1991). Louis Malle died in 1995 in Beverly Hills. (He is the director of the 1964 film Viva Maria! a comedy starring Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve – this is the film that the couple discuss attending in Le Bonheur.) Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer died in 2010. Jacques Rivette, the great theoretician of the New Wave, died in 2016. This left surviving Jean Luc Godard and Agnes Varda. Varda is now dead, leaving the famously reclusive Godard, as the sole survivor of the Nouvelle Vague. Godard is still active – he released a film The Book of Images earlier this year.
Biography
Agnes Varda was born in 1928 in Brussels to middle class parents. She died at 90 on March 29, 2019. Varda’s father was an engineer. Her mother was a Greek immigrant to Belgium. After the war, she studied psychology at the Sorbonnes and, then, learned still photography at the Ecole du Louvre. She didn’t like Paris as a young woman and describes the city as cold and unfriendly.
In 1954, she received an inheritance and borrowed some money from her mother to make her first feature film, the movie is the semi-documentary La Pointe Courte, a film about a fishing village on the Normandy coast. (Another New Wave luminary, Alain Resnais edited the film – Resnais, most famous for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad died in March 2014.) The movie was a critical success and is now regarded as the first true example of New Wave cinema. But the picture lost money and Varda was not able to make another full-length movie until Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961). The movie about a young woman whiling away two hours while she waits for the results of a test for breast cancer is universally acclaimed and thought to be one of the best and most distinctive pictures made during the first flush of the New Wave. (Between 1954 and 1961, Varda had been supporting herself largely through still photography in the form of photo-journalism and wedding work.) Varda married Jacques Demy in 1961. (She remained married to the French filmmaker – he specialized in musicals – until his death in 1990.) She wrote and shot Le Bonheur in 1964. The movie is disturbing on many levels and wasn’t financially successful – but it established Varda as an uncompromising feminist film maker.
Varda turned to documentary film with her contribution to the highly political anti-war picture Far from Vietnam (1967). When her husband was hired to make an American film, Model Shop, she moved to Los Angeles. In Hollywood, Varda made no less than seven documentaries on various subjects – one of them is about the Black Panthers. She socialized with Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper and enjoyed herself thoroughly. The most well-known of these films is Mur Murs (“The Wall Whispers”) about the murals painted along the boardwalk at Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Returning to France to raise her two children, she remained, more or less, out of sight until she released one of cinema’s quintessential feminist films One Sings, the Other does not (1977) – a movie about two women whose lives take very different forms. (The year before she made an effective documentary about the people living around her apartment on the Rue Daguerre – Daguerrotypes.) Critics have contested the question of whether Agnes Varda is properly considered a feminist film maker. Certainly, she considered herself in that category. Some feminists have rejected that description. Claire Johnston declares that Varda is a “reactionary and certainly not a feminist.” She was next celebrated for the harrowing Vagabond (1985), a film about an aimless female clochard. The movie was shot along the Normandy coastline (Herault) during a bitterly cold winter – the film begins with female beggar’s body frozen stiff in a highway ditch. The picture features an astonishing performance by Sandrine Bonnaire. I saw the picture in a theater and recall the movie as a wrenching experience.
Varda continued working on films with difficult subjects. Her 1987 picture Kung Fu Master is about a woman who falls in love with a teenage boy. (Jane Birkin plays the woman – and appears in several documentaries that Varda made simultaneously, including one about Birkin herself.) An interesting aspect of the film is that Varda casts her son, Mathieu Demy, as the teenage boy. Jane Birkin’s two children, daughters Charlotte Gainsborough (later famous for her work with Lars von Trier) and Lou Doillon, play Demy’s siblings in the movie.
Jacques Demy died in 1990 – Varda celebrated his life in three documentaries. Her later films are all non-fiction. (She also wrote an excellent autobiography Varda by Agnes, published 1994, and, apparently, partially filmed as her last picture in 2018.) The Gleaners and I (2000) is an excellent documentary about people who live by foraging their food – it is tough-minded, politically astute, and compassionate. (A quote from the movie: “To bend down is not to beg.”) The Beaches of Agnes (2008) commemorates her happy memories of the beaches in Los Angeles and her life-long interest in the sea-coast and people who work at sea. In her eighties, she traveled the world conducting master classes in film making and devising museum installations incorporating aspects of her films. She worked with the mural-maker and photographer JR in Faces/Places (2017). Varda received a Governor’s Award at the Oscars in 2017. She told a German interviewer that she had spent her life as “a little queen on the outskirts of cinema.” She completed a final documentary in 2018, Varda by Agnes debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. The film uses clips from her movies to survey her life as a film maker.
A month before she died, Agnes Varda was planning to fly to Abu Dhabi to conduct a master class in film making with Saudi Arabian women. A diagnosis of late stage breast cancer caused her to cancel the class. She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.
I have not seen any photographs of her other than images in which seems either fantastically alert and engaged or exceedingly happy. Even when Godard stands her up in Faces/Places she’s teary only for a few seconds and, then, immediately cheers up.
Resonances
Varda’s films, often, seem resonant with mythic themes. This effect is curiously elusive. Varda doesn’t overtly allude to mythology or archetypal psychology. But aspects of her more important, and thoroughly realized, films feel embedded in ancient structures of meaning. In Cleo from 5 to 7, the viewer accompanies a beautiful woman as she wanders through a maze. The maze is comprised of the streets and parks and public monuments of Paris. As the film progresses, the woman, who is about to learn whether she will live or die, encounters becalmed landscapes that imply the Underworld – a mortuary pall hangs over some aspects of the woman’s wanderings. The person watching the film may feel that he or she is a witness to some rite of passage, an occurrence akin to Persephone’s abduction by Hades into the underworld. So, similarly, Vagabond invokes primitive rituals – at one point, masked men surge around the outcast woman and threaten her. The protagonist is also trapped in a funereal maze that can lead only to her death.
It’s hard to characterize the sense of foreboding and gathering doom that lurks within the brightly colored images of Le Bonheur – something, it seems, is about to happen that is decreed and that has always happened. The cruelty of Le Bonheur, intrinsic to the narrative, is that the pleasures of nature and, even, love are indifferent to human beings – after the young woman has drowned, the world remains as beautiful as it was before. There is an order of meaning in reality, encoded by bright colors, that is radiant, gives pleasure, and that doesn’t care whether we live or die. Mozart’s music is abstractly beautiful – it gives pleasure but doesn’t console. The autumnal woods at the end of the film is elegiac. Nature revives and dies – human beings vanish and are gone for ever.
The film suggests, but doesn’t explicitly cite, two similarly mythic sources: Vertigo and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (from which the Hitchcock film derives in some ways.) When the first little blonde woman dies in Le Bonheur, her husband stoops to pick her up, hoping, like Orpheus it seems, to revive her – his gesture of bending toward his wife’s inert body repeats, gets caught in a loop. The repetition of the image has a twofold effect: it sears the picture of the dead woman and her hapless husband into our memory, creating a painfully indelible effect, but, also, suggests a repeated effort at resuscitation, at reviving or retrieving the dead woman from the darkness into which she has fallen. In Vertigo, the plot seems absurd because it is mythic, less a matter of film noir or a crime picture, and more an aspect of a cruel and inhuman legend. A man loves and, then, through his negligence, loses the woman that he loves. Unable to bear her loss, the man reconstitutes the woman, recreates her out of the flesh of another woman. When his creation is complete, he is doomed to lose her again. Francois loses Therese. But Emilie is her double in some respects, comes to fill her role in his life, and revives, as it were, the dead Therese. This resurrection is temporary – the woods in which the family wander at the film’s end reeks of mortality.
Orpheus loved Eurydice, his young wife, with all his heart. One day, when Eurydice strolled along the river, a viper bit her and she died. Orpheus, then, sang so sweetly that Death was charmed and allowed the hero to enter the Underworld to retrieve his wife. (There was one condition: he could not look at her until the couple had reached the sunshine and breeze of the world of the living.) Orpheus finds Eurydice and takes her hand to lead her from the realm of shades. But he can’t resist looking at her – or she is vain and demands that he gaze upon her – and the spell is broken: Eurydice turns sadly and retreats, following the winding path back to Dis. In some versions of this myth, Eurydice is snake-bitten because Aristaeus, the demi-god who invented beekeeping and many other useful arts, saw the young woman, desired her, and pursued her along the fragrant path by the river. The handy Francoise with his tools and his skill at making houses, a carpenter, is a bit like Aristaeus.
In other versions of the story, most importantly the narrative that Plato provides in his Symposium, Orpheus is negligent – his indifference drives Eurydice away from him and, so, she is fatally injured. Orpheus is impious in descending into Hades to retrieve the young woman – he violates the laws of God and nature. Plato puts the blame for Eurydice’s death on Orpheus and condemns his attempt to resurrect her from the dead as wicked and irreligious.
Cinecriture
Varda characterized herself as practicing something called “Cinecriture” – she had a life-long love of puns and portmanteau words. Cinecriture means Cine-writing. In the words, she expresses the notion that she is not so much a director as one who uses cinema as a means “to write”.
Le Bonheur
The film critic Isabel Stevens characterizes Le Bonheur as “caustic, strange, and claustrophobic.” Happiness exists only to be inevitably dashed into pieces. The film’s tight ensemble of actors is closely observed – there is no escape from the destiny that the film proposes.
The four family members who appear in the film are not necessarily acting – or, at least, not acting all of the time. They are, in fact, members of a family. Francois is played by Jean-Claude Drouot. His wife, Claire, plays Therese, and the two children are siblings, Sandrine and Olivier Drouot. The movie was shot in a southwest Paris suburb Fontenay-aux-Roses. Documentary elements pervade the film, including the use of bystanders as extras – in 1971, Varda made a fiction film called Documenteur – a pun that could be translated “Docu-lie”. The film raises the question as to what extent it is a “Docu-lie?”
Vincennes where the hero travels and where he meets his girlfriend, Emilie, is only about 10 miles from Fontenay-aux-Roses where the family lives. The movie seems to suggest that this is a significant distance for the character to travel– but, of course, Vincennes is closer to Fontenay-aux-Roses than Albert Lea is to Austin.
In one scene, the characters are shown watching TV – the program is a broadcast of Jean Renoir’s late film Dejeuner sur l’Herb (“Picnic on the Grass”), released in 1959. The movie involves a young woman who wishes to have a child, but dislikes men. She contacts a eugenicist who offers to arrange for her artificial insemination. There’s a picnic, a bit similar to that shown in Manet’s famous painting (although without the naked woman) and, when a mistral suddenly blows out of nowhere, the violent storm has the effect of forcing the characters into uncomfortably close and intimate contact. The intervention of the storm is similar to the tempest that intervenes in Renoir’s most lyrical film A Day n the Country (1936). Throughout Le Bonheur, Varda refers her imagery to the great Impressionist masters – most particularly Auguste Renoir (Jean Renoir’s father).
Varda encodes the film with curious motifs – I’m not sure if these are symbolic or simply graphic elements that provide for the film a visual structure. Francois works making cabinets and furniture – he is a skilled craftsman employed in a family business. He is associated with wood. At one point, someone says that “(Francoise) smells of wood.” Francois is building a playhouse for the children. The film’s domestic architecture is loving detailed – this, perhaps, explains the enclosed or, as some note, “claustrophobic” aspect of the movie. Notice how Emilie stacks sticks to create a sort of house – or, at least, what she calls a house in the end of the film. This activity, nesting or home-building, seems to rhyme with the carefully constructed shelter in which the small children nap when their parents make love in the park. The essence of the domestic is shelter and the film indexes various types of shelter – the empty apartment to which Emilie movies, the confined phone booths in the post office, and, of course, the home in which Francois and Therese live.
Another significant visual rhyme is the film’s graphic scheme is the saw dust produced in the furniture shop. In several scenes, the amount of sawdust shown in the shot seems surreal – there can’t possibly be waist-high heaps of the stuff lying around. I think the huge piles of sawdust are intended the visually correlate with the pile of similarly brown colored dirt heaped up next to Therese’s grave in the funeral scene. The reduction of trees or wood to sawdust seems metaphorically related to Therese’s drowning and the way that she is discarded (and replaced) by the film’s narrative.
Throughout the film, the two women are shot so as to emphasize their physical similarity. In the sex scenes, it’s not always immediately clear who is bed with Francois. Some critics have uncharitably compared Emilie and Therese to the Stepford wives, indistinguishable female clones, perfectly contrived and submissive to the pleasure of the male protagonist.
In general, Vardas narrative technique is elliptical and parametric. The most startling example of parametric staging may be found in the dance scenes. Varda shows the women dancing with various partners including Francois at the same tavern – the shots are designed to look like Renoir paintings. However, she movies the camera rhythmically back and forth across the fulcrum of a tree – the tree is cognate with wood and, therefore, seems to designate Francois (the worker in raw wood) as a central body between the two women. Similar effects mirror the abstract graphic design embodied in the film’s opening – the alternation between the three sunflowers and the single sunflower.
The movie is shot in luminous Eastmancolor with densely saturated colors. The only film that I know that features fades to some color other than black is Bergman’s Cries and Whispers in which the shots fade to red. Varda, however, uses a number of colors for the fades in her picture. In classical film-making, the audience is not supposed to really notice a fade to black – it’s a kind of punctuation but one to which viewers are acclimated by habit and don’t typically notice. Varda though wants the viewer to notice the fades – she wants the viewer to grasp that the movie is making an elision between different times and locations. The colored fade-out, therefore, foregrounds an element of film grammar that we would not ordinarily notice and draws our attention to the surface (graphic) characteristics of the movie – the rhythm of its cutting, the carefully designed fields of color found on hoardings and advertisements, the disposition of colors within a composition, all of these things are integral to Varda’s design.
A Quote
I will respond with other formulas: “Happiness is mistaken sadness and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit – an exquisitely colored peach – with a worm inside. Happiness adds up, torment does too. “Happiness is not gay.” These are the words we hear at the end Max Ophuls Le Plaisir.
Agnes Varda on Le Bonheur (1965)
A Painting by Magritte
Agnes Varda once compared her marriage to Jacques Demy to a famous painting by Rene Magritte. In that painting, two lovers with their heads swathed in burlap sacks attempt to kiss – the painting is called Les Amants. Varda says that as time passed, the two lovers drew apart and removed the sacks covering their heads, that is, overcame their willful and self-imposed ignorance about their partners.
Demy was, apparently, gay. He died of AIDS.
Varda never acknowledged this publicly, although, most likely, everyone knew this to be the fact. One year before Demy died, his lover had succumbed to AIDS, and so the film maker’s death was a foregone conclusion.
Varda obviously loved Demy without reservation. (The imagery and colorful fade-outs in Le Bonheur seem to refer to the super-saturated color films that Demy was making at the same time – 1964 was the year he directed and released The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, his most famous musical.) Varda’s devotion to Demy is demonstrated by the three documentaries she made about his life after he died. Varda also was a staunch advocate for the restoration and reconsideration of Demy’s films. Probably, on the basis of her advocacy, Demy has enjoyed a recent resurgence of fame, particularly with respect to his later films, some of which can be read as “queer.”
Does this information affect how we view Le Bonheur?
An Infernal Machine
Some works of art raise grave and insoluble problems as to morality and ethics. Ultimately, these works illustrate dilemmas that arise in the context of justice. As you will recall from our study of Plato’s Republic, questions relating to justice are particularly intractable – what is justice? who is entitled to justice? how should justice be administered? Ultimately, these issues seem insoluble, at least, when considered in abstract terms or isolated from the facts of particular cases. (The fact that we can’t reliably answer questions relating to justice suggest that this is something wrong with the premises upon which these questions are posed. Justice itself, although a concept fundamental and, perhaps, definitive to human nature, may well be something that doesn’t exist in any stable form and that can not be effectively defined.)
Examples of art works that raise particularly insoluble interpretative questions are Melville’s Billy Budd on the subject of crime and punishment, Sophocles Antigone (on rights and religious duty), Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (about the relationship between a man and his community) and the exceptionally simple and straightforward Le Bonheur, a movie with a plot that could be comfortable inscribed on a matchbox cover but that poses questions of abysmal and unsettling profundity. These works are characterized by viewpoints that are incommensurate but each fundamentally possessing an indisputable claim of rectitude. Tragedy is not the clash between good and evil. Tragedy is the clash between one thing that is indisputably good and another thing equally good – the only arbiter of such a conflict is justice and Plato demonstrates that we don’t what justice is. Works of art successfully devised to embody these sorts of irreconcilable conflicts are both perfect and, also, infernal machines.
Le Bonheur dramatizes tragic conflicts that arise in the context of romantic love. If I truly love you, then, my love is unconditional. An aspect of unconditional love is that I must desire that you be happy. Therefore, I am arguably (and all of these propositions are debatable) obliged to desire unconditionally your happiness. Your happiness, you may assert, will not be complete unless you can enjoy a sexual liaison with another. Let’s posit, for a moment, that this liaison will not decrease your love for me but will merely add happiness to happiness. Do you have the right to say simultaneously that you love me wholly and unconditionally and, yet, deny me something that will add to my happiness? Immediately, complex issues of justice arise. Now, you may wish to deny the dilemma – you may say that having this sexual liaison will not add to your happiness, but will instead be a source of sorrow. But, if you make this claim, then, we must ask why will the sexual liaison be a cause of sorrow? If it’s because you will be angry with me and treat me harshly, then, perhaps, you don’t really love me as fully as you profess. If it’s because you think that my happiness will not be real with the other person, you are substituting your judgement for mine. By what right, do you substitute your judgement for my judgement? Would you agree that I substitute my judgement for yours and make decisions for me? Presuming you would not agree that I make decisions on your behalf, then, it seems that you can’t make decisions for me as to what constitutes my true happiness and the best means of pursuing that happiness.
These questions are particularly poignant for Americans, unique in the world, because our founding documents guarantee us the “pursuit of happiness.” Am I allowed to pursue happiness if it causes you pain?
Le Bonheur is also disturbing in that implies an order of meaning that is wholly amoral and indifferent to questions of justice. Mozart’s music as it underlies the film doesn’t judge – it draws no moral and suggests no ethic. The film’s brilliant colors, carefully deployed by Varda, into a graphic compositions that are exceptionally beautiful don’t propound any moral truths except, perhaps, the most abstract – light is beautiful and living things thrive on light and the glory of light is intrinsic to the pleasures of sight and vision. We may turn to these beautiful things for solace and, indeed, they may suggest to us the Epicurean principle that the only true thing in the world is pleasure and that only fools don’t live for pleasure. This notion is attractive but where does it lead? The aesthetic pleasures of the eyes and ears are quickly indistinguishable from bodily pleasures. And if bodily pleasures are intrinsic to living well, then, by what justice would we deny ourselves or a loved one the right to pursue physical (carnal) pleasure.? Note that the film’s idyllic beauty is abstract in many respects – the camera cuts between one sunflower and three sunflowers, all of them slightly wilted, and, in the background, we see four humans approaching – father, mother, and two children. Three plus one = four. But who are the three and who is isolated as the fourth? Can we add the one sunflower to the other to equate them to the foursome in the family? Are joys and pleasures purely additive as Francois contends? Therese is last glimpsed (by the bystanders) engaged in a aesthetic act – she is picking flowers. This is for several reasons. Following my mythic interpretation of the film, Therese is like Eurydice who is like Persephone, as Milton tells us, “picking flowers, herself the fairest flower” to be picked by the gloomy Lord of Hades. But, on another level, the characters in Le Bonheur are most happy when enjoying beautiful things and, so, it is not surprising that Therese would seek to assuage her sorrow or confusion by gathering flowers in the moments before she drowns. Perhaps, she slips into the stream while reaching for a particularly beautiful and remote blossom; perhaps, her pursuit of beauty causes her to be lost. We don’t know and it’s certainly not clear that she has committed suicide – indeed, the film shows her in a brief, almost subliminal, shot trying to pull herself out of the water. Life is too beautiful to be simply cast away. We must imagine that in her final instants, Therese desired to live among the beautiful things that the film shows and tried to save herself from the consuming waters.
...the film has grown away from me even though its topic remains true (what does one do about the other’s desire?) and its treatment fits the storytelling (with different color pallettes); but I feel I have dropped a bouquet of flowers somewhere, then turned around and walked away.
Agnes Varda commenting on Le Bonheur in 2006
Last (wo)man standing
Agnes Varda died this year (2019). In her penultimate film, the documentary Visages Villages (2017), released in English as Faces/Places, the elderly filmmaker travels through France with an artist named JR. This man makes photo-murals and, then, posts them on landmarks in the small villages that the couple visit. Of course, it’s an “odd couple” movie – Varda is nearly 90 and losing her vision. (She endures several injections into her eyes during the movie). JR is forty-five years younger, but they seem to be kindred spirits in a way.
At one point, Varda wagers with the terminally hip JR that she can get him to remove his glasses. She recalls a short film that she made almost 60 years earlier in which she prevailed upon Jean-Luc Godard to remove his trademark sunglasses, revealing what Varda calls his “sad eyes.” This anecdote leads the couple to embark on a trip to see the reclusive Godard at the village on Lake Geneva, Rolle, where he lives in Switzerland. After many adventures, the two reach Rolle. Godard refuses to meet with Varda, despite his earlier promise. Instead, he leaves a message written in scribbled magic marker on a note taped to the door of his home office suite. Godard says that he doesn’t want to traduce the memories of a happier day when Godard with his wife, Anna Karenina, vacationed in Nice with Jacques Demy and his new wife, Agnes Varda. (For several years, the foursome had been meeting each Sunday for breakfast.) Varda is very hurt that Godard has refused to see her. She calls him a “dirty rat.” Later, she tricks JR into removing his sunglasses.
Agnes Varda is the sole female member of a group of celebrated filmmakers who came of age in the late fifties and founded the cinema movement known as the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). Francois Truffaut was the first to die – he was killed by a brain tumor in 1984. Jacques Demy, Varda’s husband, died in 1990 after a thirty year marriage. (Varda made a documentary about her film maker husband called Jacquot de Nantes in 1991). Louis Malle died in 1995 in Beverly Hills. (He is the director of the 1964 film Viva Maria! a comedy starring Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve – this is the film that the couple discuss attending in Le Bonheur.) Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer died in 2010. Jacques Rivette, the great theoretician of the New Wave, died in 2016. This left surviving Jean Luc Godard and Agnes Varda. Varda is now dead, leaving the famously reclusive Godard, as the sole survivor of the Nouvelle Vague. Godard is still active – he released a film The Book of Images earlier this year.
Biography
Agnes Varda was born in 1928 in Brussels to middle class parents. She died at 90 on March 29, 2019. Varda’s father was an engineer. Her mother was a Greek immigrant to Belgium. After the war, she studied psychology at the Sorbonnes and, then, learned still photography at the Ecole du Louvre. She didn’t like Paris as a young woman and describes the city as cold and unfriendly.
In 1954, she received an inheritance and borrowed some money from her mother to make her first feature film, the movie is the semi-documentary La Pointe Courte, a film about a fishing village on the Normandy coast. (Another New Wave luminary, Alain Resnais edited the film – Resnais, most famous for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad died in March 2014.) The movie was a critical success and is now regarded as the first true example of New Wave cinema. But the picture lost money and Varda was not able to make another full-length movie until Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961). The movie about a young woman whiling away two hours while she waits for the results of a test for breast cancer is universally acclaimed and thought to be one of the best and most distinctive pictures made during the first flush of the New Wave. (Between 1954 and 1961, Varda had been supporting herself largely through still photography in the form of photo-journalism and wedding work.) Varda married Jacques Demy in 1961. (She remained married to the French filmmaker – he specialized in musicals – until his death in 1990.) She wrote and shot Le Bonheur in 1964. The movie is disturbing on many levels and wasn’t financially successful – but it established Varda as an uncompromising feminist film maker.
Varda turned to documentary film with her contribution to the highly political anti-war picture Far from Vietnam (1967). When her husband was hired to make an American film, Model Shop, she moved to Los Angeles. In Hollywood, Varda made no less than seven documentaries on various subjects – one of them is about the Black Panthers. She socialized with Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper and enjoyed herself thoroughly. The most well-known of these films is Mur Murs (“The Wall Whispers”) about the murals painted along the boardwalk at Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Returning to France to raise her two children, she remained, more or less, out of sight until she released one of cinema’s quintessential feminist films One Sings, the Other does not (1977) – a movie about two women whose lives take very different forms. (The year before she made an effective documentary about the people living around her apartment on the Rue Daguerre – Daguerrotypes.) Critics have contested the question of whether Agnes Varda is properly considered a feminist film maker. Certainly, she considered herself in that category. Some feminists have rejected that description. Claire Johnston declares that Varda is a “reactionary and certainly not a feminist.” She was next celebrated for the harrowing Vagabond (1985), a film about an aimless female clochard. The movie was shot along the Normandy coastline (Herault) during a bitterly cold winter – the film begins with female beggar’s body frozen stiff in a highway ditch. The picture features an astonishing performance by Sandrine Bonnaire. I saw the picture in a theater and recall the movie as a wrenching experience.
Varda continued working on films with difficult subjects. Her 1987 picture Kung Fu Master is about a woman who falls in love with a teenage boy. (Jane Birkin plays the woman – and appears in several documentaries that Varda made simultaneously, including one about Birkin herself.) An interesting aspect of the film is that Varda casts her son, Mathieu Demy, as the teenage boy. Jane Birkin’s two children, daughters Charlotte Gainsborough (later famous for her work with Lars von Trier) and Lou Doillon, play Demy’s siblings in the movie.
Jacques Demy died in 1990 – Varda celebrated his life in three documentaries. Her later films are all non-fiction. (She also wrote an excellent autobiography Varda by Agnes, published 1994, and, apparently, partially filmed as her last picture in 2018.) The Gleaners and I (2000) is an excellent documentary about people who live by foraging their food – it is tough-minded, politically astute, and compassionate. (A quote from the movie: “To bend down is not to beg.”) The Beaches of Agnes (2008) commemorates her happy memories of the beaches in Los Angeles and her life-long interest in the sea-coast and people who work at sea. In her eighties, she traveled the world conducting master classes in film making and devising museum installations incorporating aspects of her films. She worked with the mural-maker and photographer JR in Faces/Places (2017). Varda received a Governor’s Award at the Oscars in 2017. She told a German interviewer that she had spent her life as “a little queen on the outskirts of cinema.” She completed a final documentary in 2018, Varda by Agnes debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. The film uses clips from her movies to survey her life as a film maker.
A month before she died, Agnes Varda was planning to fly to Abu Dhabi to conduct a master class in film making with Saudi Arabian women. A diagnosis of late stage breast cancer caused her to cancel the class. She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.
I have not seen any photographs of her other than images in which seems either fantastically alert and engaged or exceedingly happy. Even when Godard stands her up in Faces/Places she’s teary only for a few seconds and, then, immediately cheers up.
Resonances
Varda’s films, often, seem resonant with mythic themes. This effect is curiously elusive. Varda doesn’t overtly allude to mythology or archetypal psychology. But aspects of her more important, and thoroughly realized, films feel embedded in ancient structures of meaning. In Cleo from 5 to 7, the viewer accompanies a beautiful woman as she wanders through a maze. The maze is comprised of the streets and parks and public monuments of Paris. As the film progresses, the woman, who is about to learn whether she will live or die, encounters becalmed landscapes that imply the Underworld – a mortuary pall hangs over some aspects of the woman’s wanderings. The person watching the film may feel that he or she is a witness to some rite of passage, an occurrence akin to Persephone’s abduction by Hades into the underworld. So, similarly, Vagabond invokes primitive rituals – at one point, masked men surge around the outcast woman and threaten her. The protagonist is also trapped in a funereal maze that can lead only to her death.
It’s hard to characterize the sense of foreboding and gathering doom that lurks within the brightly colored images of Le Bonheur – something, it seems, is about to happen that is decreed and that has always happened. The cruelty of Le Bonheur, intrinsic to the narrative, is that the pleasures of nature and, even, love are indifferent to human beings – after the young woman has drowned, the world remains as beautiful as it was before. There is an order of meaning in reality, encoded by bright colors, that is radiant, gives pleasure, and that doesn’t care whether we live or die. Mozart’s music is abstractly beautiful – it gives pleasure but doesn’t console. The autumnal woods at the end of the film is elegiac. Nature revives and dies – human beings vanish and are gone for ever.
The film suggests, but doesn’t explicitly cite, two similarly mythic sources: Vertigo and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (from which the Hitchcock film derives in some ways.) When the first little blonde woman dies in Le Bonheur, her husband stoops to pick her up, hoping, like Orpheus it seems, to revive her – his gesture of bending toward his wife’s inert body repeats, gets caught in a loop. The repetition of the image has a twofold effect: it sears the picture of the dead woman and her hapless husband into our memory, creating a painfully indelible effect, but, also, suggests a repeated effort at resuscitation, at reviving or retrieving the dead woman from the darkness into which she has fallen. In Vertigo, the plot seems absurd because it is mythic, less a matter of film noir or a crime picture, and more an aspect of a cruel and inhuman legend. A man loves and, then, through his negligence, loses the woman that he loves. Unable to bear her loss, the man reconstitutes the woman, recreates her out of the flesh of another woman. When his creation is complete, he is doomed to lose her again. Francois loses Therese. But Emilie is her double in some respects, comes to fill her role in his life, and revives, as it were, the dead Therese. This resurrection is temporary – the woods in which the family wander at the film’s end reeks of mortality.
Orpheus loved Eurydice, his young wife, with all his heart. One day, when Eurydice strolled along the river, a viper bit her and she died. Orpheus, then, sang so sweetly that Death was charmed and allowed the hero to enter the Underworld to retrieve his wife. (There was one condition: he could not look at her until the couple had reached the sunshine and breeze of the world of the living.) Orpheus finds Eurydice and takes her hand to lead her from the realm of shades. But he can’t resist looking at her – or she is vain and demands that he gaze upon her – and the spell is broken: Eurydice turns sadly and retreats, following the winding path back to Dis. In some versions of this myth, Eurydice is snake-bitten because Aristaeus, the demi-god who invented beekeeping and many other useful arts, saw the young woman, desired her, and pursued her along the fragrant path by the river. The handy Francoise with his tools and his skill at making houses, a carpenter, is a bit like Aristaeus.
In other versions of the story, most importantly the narrative that Plato provides in his Symposium, Orpheus is negligent – his indifference drives Eurydice away from him and, so, she is fatally injured. Orpheus is impious in descending into Hades to retrieve the young woman – he violates the laws of God and nature. Plato puts the blame for Eurydice’s death on Orpheus and condemns his attempt to resurrect her from the dead as wicked and irreligious.
Cinecriture
Varda characterized herself as practicing something called “Cinecriture” – she had a life-long love of puns and portmanteau words. Cinecriture means Cine-writing. In the words, she expresses the notion that she is not so much a director as one who uses cinema as a means “to write”.
Le Bonheur
The film critic Isabel Stevens characterizes Le Bonheur as “caustic, strange, and claustrophobic.” Happiness exists only to be inevitably dashed into pieces. The film’s tight ensemble of actors is closely observed – there is no escape from the destiny that the film proposes.
The four family members who appear in the film are not necessarily acting – or, at least, not acting all of the time. They are, in fact, members of a family. Francois is played by Jean-Claude Drouot. His wife, Claire, plays Therese, and the two children are siblings, Sandrine and Olivier Drouot. The movie was shot in a southwest Paris suburb Fontenay-aux-Roses. Documentary elements pervade the film, including the use of bystanders as extras – in 1971, Varda made a fiction film called Documenteur – a pun that could be translated “Docu-lie”. The film raises the question as to what extent it is a “Docu-lie?”
Vincennes where the hero travels and where he meets his girlfriend, Emilie, is only about 10 miles from Fontenay-aux-Roses where the family lives. The movie seems to suggest that this is a significant distance for the character to travel– but, of course, Vincennes is closer to Fontenay-aux-Roses than Albert Lea is to Austin.
In one scene, the characters are shown watching TV – the program is a broadcast of Jean Renoir’s late film Dejeuner sur l’Herb (“Picnic on the Grass”), released in 1959. The movie involves a young woman who wishes to have a child, but dislikes men. She contacts a eugenicist who offers to arrange for her artificial insemination. There’s a picnic, a bit similar to that shown in Manet’s famous painting (although without the naked woman) and, when a mistral suddenly blows out of nowhere, the violent storm has the effect of forcing the characters into uncomfortably close and intimate contact. The intervention of the storm is similar to the tempest that intervenes in Renoir’s most lyrical film A Day n the Country (1936). Throughout Le Bonheur, Varda refers her imagery to the great Impressionist masters – most particularly Auguste Renoir (Jean Renoir’s father).
Varda encodes the film with curious motifs – I’m not sure if these are symbolic or simply graphic elements that provide for the film a visual structure. Francois works making cabinets and furniture – he is a skilled craftsman employed in a family business. He is associated with wood. At one point, someone says that “(Francoise) smells of wood.” Francois is building a playhouse for the children. The film’s domestic architecture is loving detailed – this, perhaps, explains the enclosed or, as some note, “claustrophobic” aspect of the movie. Notice how Emilie stacks sticks to create a sort of house – or, at least, what she calls a house in the end of the film. This activity, nesting or home-building, seems to rhyme with the carefully constructed shelter in which the small children nap when their parents make love in the park. The essence of the domestic is shelter and the film indexes various types of shelter – the empty apartment to which Emilie movies, the confined phone booths in the post office, and, of course, the home in which Francois and Therese live.
Another significant visual rhyme is the film’s graphic scheme is the saw dust produced in the furniture shop. In several scenes, the amount of sawdust shown in the shot seems surreal – there can’t possibly be waist-high heaps of the stuff lying around. I think the huge piles of sawdust are intended the visually correlate with the pile of similarly brown colored dirt heaped up next to Therese’s grave in the funeral scene. The reduction of trees or wood to sawdust seems metaphorically related to Therese’s drowning and the way that she is discarded (and replaced) by the film’s narrative.
Throughout the film, the two women are shot so as to emphasize their physical similarity. In the sex scenes, it’s not always immediately clear who is bed with Francois. Some critics have uncharitably compared Emilie and Therese to the Stepford wives, indistinguishable female clones, perfectly contrived and submissive to the pleasure of the male protagonist.
In general, Vardas narrative technique is elliptical and parametric. The most startling example of parametric staging may be found in the dance scenes. Varda shows the women dancing with various partners including Francois at the same tavern – the shots are designed to look like Renoir paintings. However, she movies the camera rhythmically back and forth across the fulcrum of a tree – the tree is cognate with wood and, therefore, seems to designate Francois (the worker in raw wood) as a central body between the two women. Similar effects mirror the abstract graphic design embodied in the film’s opening – the alternation between the three sunflowers and the single sunflower.
The movie is shot in luminous Eastmancolor with densely saturated colors. The only film that I know that features fades to some color other than black is Bergman’s Cries and Whispers in which the shots fade to red. Varda, however, uses a number of colors for the fades in her picture. In classical film-making, the audience is not supposed to really notice a fade to black – it’s a kind of punctuation but one to which viewers are acclimated by habit and don’t typically notice. Varda though wants the viewer to notice the fades – she wants the viewer to grasp that the movie is making an elision between different times and locations. The colored fade-out, therefore, foregrounds an element of film grammar that we would not ordinarily notice and draws our attention to the surface (graphic) characteristics of the movie – the rhythm of its cutting, the carefully designed fields of color found on hoardings and advertisements, the disposition of colors within a composition, all of these things are integral to Varda’s design.
A Quote
I will respond with other formulas: “Happiness is mistaken sadness and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit – an exquisitely colored peach – with a worm inside. Happiness adds up, torment does too. “Happiness is not gay.” These are the words we hear at the end Max Ophuls Le Plaisir.
Agnes Varda on Le Bonheur (1965)
A Painting by Magritte
Agnes Varda once compared her marriage to Jacques Demy to a famous painting by Rene Magritte. In that painting, two lovers with their heads swathed in burlap sacks attempt to kiss – the painting is called Les Amants. Varda says that as time passed, the two lovers drew apart and removed the sacks covering their heads, that is, overcame their willful and self-imposed ignorance about their partners.
Demy was, apparently, gay. He died of AIDS.
Varda never acknowledged this publicly, although, most likely, everyone knew this to be the fact. One year before Demy died, his lover had succumbed to AIDS, and so the film maker’s death was a foregone conclusion.
Varda obviously loved Demy without reservation. (The imagery and colorful fade-outs in Le Bonheur seem to refer to the super-saturated color films that Demy was making at the same time – 1964 was the year he directed and released The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, his most famous musical.) Varda’s devotion to Demy is demonstrated by the three documentaries she made about his life after he died. Varda also was a staunch advocate for the restoration and reconsideration of Demy’s films. Probably, on the basis of her advocacy, Demy has enjoyed a recent resurgence of fame, particularly with respect to his later films, some of which can be read as “queer.”
Does this information affect how we view Le Bonheur?
An Infernal Machine
Some works of art raise grave and insoluble problems as to morality and ethics. Ultimately, these works illustrate dilemmas that arise in the context of justice. As you will recall from our study of Plato’s Republic, questions relating to justice are particularly intractable – what is justice? who is entitled to justice? how should justice be administered? Ultimately, these issues seem insoluble, at least, when considered in abstract terms or isolated from the facts of particular cases. (The fact that we can’t reliably answer questions relating to justice suggest that this is something wrong with the premises upon which these questions are posed. Justice itself, although a concept fundamental and, perhaps, definitive to human nature, may well be something that doesn’t exist in any stable form and that can not be effectively defined.)
Examples of art works that raise particularly insoluble interpretative questions are Melville’s Billy Budd on the subject of crime and punishment, Sophocles Antigone (on rights and religious duty), Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (about the relationship between a man and his community) and the exceptionally simple and straightforward Le Bonheur, a movie with a plot that could be comfortable inscribed on a matchbox cover but that poses questions of abysmal and unsettling profundity. These works are characterized by viewpoints that are incommensurate but each fundamentally possessing an indisputable claim of rectitude. Tragedy is not the clash between good and evil. Tragedy is the clash between one thing that is indisputably good and another thing equally good – the only arbiter of such a conflict is justice and Plato demonstrates that we don’t what justice is. Works of art successfully devised to embody these sorts of irreconcilable conflicts are both perfect and, also, infernal machines.
Le Bonheur dramatizes tragic conflicts that arise in the context of romantic love. If I truly love you, then, my love is unconditional. An aspect of unconditional love is that I must desire that you be happy. Therefore, I am arguably (and all of these propositions are debatable) obliged to desire unconditionally your happiness. Your happiness, you may assert, will not be complete unless you can enjoy a sexual liaison with another. Let’s posit, for a moment, that this liaison will not decrease your love for me but will merely add happiness to happiness. Do you have the right to say simultaneously that you love me wholly and unconditionally and, yet, deny me something that will add to my happiness? Immediately, complex issues of justice arise. Now, you may wish to deny the dilemma – you may say that having this sexual liaison will not add to your happiness, but will instead be a source of sorrow. But, if you make this claim, then, we must ask why will the sexual liaison be a cause of sorrow? If it’s because you will be angry with me and treat me harshly, then, perhaps, you don’t really love me as fully as you profess. If it’s because you think that my happiness will not be real with the other person, you are substituting your judgement for mine. By what right, do you substitute your judgement for my judgement? Would you agree that I substitute my judgement for yours and make decisions for me? Presuming you would not agree that I make decisions on your behalf, then, it seems that you can’t make decisions for me as to what constitutes my true happiness and the best means of pursuing that happiness.
These questions are particularly poignant for Americans, unique in the world, because our founding documents guarantee us the “pursuit of happiness.” Am I allowed to pursue happiness if it causes you pain?
Le Bonheur is also disturbing in that implies an order of meaning that is wholly amoral and indifferent to questions of justice. Mozart’s music as it underlies the film doesn’t judge – it draws no moral and suggests no ethic. The film’s brilliant colors, carefully deployed by Varda, into a graphic compositions that are exceptionally beautiful don’t propound any moral truths except, perhaps, the most abstract – light is beautiful and living things thrive on light and the glory of light is intrinsic to the pleasures of sight and vision. We may turn to these beautiful things for solace and, indeed, they may suggest to us the Epicurean principle that the only true thing in the world is pleasure and that only fools don’t live for pleasure. This notion is attractive but where does it lead? The aesthetic pleasures of the eyes and ears are quickly indistinguishable from bodily pleasures. And if bodily pleasures are intrinsic to living well, then, by what justice would we deny ourselves or a loved one the right to pursue physical (carnal) pleasure.? Note that the film’s idyllic beauty is abstract in many respects – the camera cuts between one sunflower and three sunflowers, all of them slightly wilted, and, in the background, we see four humans approaching – father, mother, and two children. Three plus one = four. But who are the three and who is isolated as the fourth? Can we add the one sunflower to the other to equate them to the foursome in the family? Are joys and pleasures purely additive as Francois contends? Therese is last glimpsed (by the bystanders) engaged in a aesthetic act – she is picking flowers. This is for several reasons. Following my mythic interpretation of the film, Therese is like Eurydice who is like Persephone, as Milton tells us, “picking flowers, herself the fairest flower” to be picked by the gloomy Lord of Hades. But, on another level, the characters in Le Bonheur are most happy when enjoying beautiful things and, so, it is not surprising that Therese would seek to assuage her sorrow or confusion by gathering flowers in the moments before she drowns. Perhaps, she slips into the stream while reaching for a particularly beautiful and remote blossom; perhaps, her pursuit of beauty causes her to be lost. We don’t know and it’s certainly not clear that she has committed suicide – indeed, the film shows her in a brief, almost subliminal, shot trying to pull herself out of the water. Life is too beautiful to be simply cast away. We must imagine that in her final instants, Therese desired to live among the beautiful things that the film shows and tried to save herself from the consuming waters.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Wozzeck (Des Moines Opera Company)
Many 19th century operas feature so-called "mad scenes." These are episodes in which a singer, usually a high strung soprano, illustrates her range and vocal technique by simulating madness on stage. Verdi has scenes like this in his Nabucco and Macbeth; Donizetti specialized in these kind of coloratura displays, particularly in the famous "mad scene" in Lucia di Lammermoor. Mozart pioneered this species of aria in Idomeno and, as recently as Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten made one of his characters go luridly mad. It's form of excess and, since opera, is an art that thrives on excess, therefore, particularly suited to music-drama in its most florid form. Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925) doesn't feature a "mad scene," rather the entire opera, from first note to last, is madness embodied. Accordingly, it's fortunate that the opera is only about 90 minutes long -- even at that length, the opera is exhausting: it would be wholly unendurable if it were any longer.
Wozzeck is based on the fragments of an incomplete play written by Germany's literary Wunderkind, Georg Buechner. Buechner was a political radical, playwright, and formidable prose stylist. He was as gifted and precocious as Mozart. Buechner died when he was only 23 -- typhus killed him mid-pen-stroke in February 1837. It's impossible to imagine what Buechner would have accomplished had he survived even into his middle-age. By the time, he was 23, he had written an alarmingly vehement and celebrated political tract (his response to the French Revolution), an astonishing Shakespearian play about Danton's death, a bizarre comedy, also intensely Shakespearian in form and diction (but, also, it seems a precursor to the Theater of the Absurd"), a prose masterpiece, also about insanity called "Lenz", and, finally, the terrifying and fragmentary Woyzeck. This latter work, which almost perished with its author's untimely death, is written on 12 sheets of paper, inscribed in microscopic handwriting with scenes arranged arbitrarily, in no particular order -- no one knows exactly what Buechner intended for the play's final form and what we have is clearly incomplete. The play wasn't deciphered until the 1870's. When Berg saw the play performed in a conjectural edition in 1914, study of the text was still vestigial -- people misread the name "Woyzeck" as "Wozzeck." This misreading of Buechner's tiny script also confounded an understanding of the drama's source -- Buechner had studied trial transcripts and court documents relating to the proceedings against a murderer named Woyzeck, the last man to be beheaded in 19th century Leipzig -- Woyzeck who was an ex-soldier and a barber/wigmaker was convicted of killing his girlfriend, the mother of his illegitimate child. The case intrigued German intellectuals because it involved the defense of insanity. Buechner, who was training as a medical doctor, was fascinated by the question of free will. Woyzeck's lawyers had claimed that the defendant was overcome by madness and couldn't control his actions. Medical proof presented on this issue was rejected by the Court and Woyzeck was convicted and duly executed. Buechner's thesis is that the Court erred. The play, at least what was completed in the writer's hand, is a thoroughgoing brief dramatizing the notion that free will is an illusion. Woyzeck acted as he did on the basis of a complex of circumstances that wholly deprived him from the ability to make any meaningful voluntary decisions -- he is poor and trapped by his poverty; he is a soldier and, therefore, subject to the insane orders and demands of his commanding officer; he is superstitious and fears ghosts and "freemasons" among other things; he has been subjected to bizarre medical experiments (a monstrous doctor makes him eat only beans) that have eroded his will; he is jealous and has a girlfriend who can't resist a handsome man -- she has eyes that "let her look through seven pairs of leather trousers" and pursues an affair with a big leonine and vicious "drum major"; and, finally, Woyzeck broods, he thinks too much. All of these circumstances combine to force him into an insane state in which he cuts his unfaithful girlfriend's throat and, then, drowns himself in a haunted pool where people have seen a severed head ('very much like a hedgehog') floating over the dismal waters. Buechner's text is lightning quick, disjointed, written in a torrent of wild prose that simulates madness and employs often astonishing metaphors. How exactly he was able to imagine this bleak and horrifying theater piece that seems more radical today than Brecht is impossible to understand -- in fact, aspects of the text anticipate and, even, exceed Beckett in their confrontation with the most bitter aspects of human alienation, loneliness, isolation, and sheer panic. Berg's music is huge, using an immense orchestra with all possible expressionistic resources at the composer's command -- it's scrupulously atonal, but, nonetheless, imitates the action on stage. The more wild and discordant the words, the more lacerating the expression, the harsher and more insistently ferocious the music. Berg composes most of the libretto in "Sprechstimme" -- a sort of super-inflected sung-speech in which each syllable is given a hollow, rising note, an interrogative inflection so that the words seem to dissolve into a series of harried, anguished questions.
I have never seen this opera performed. It is terribly difficult. There's no melody for the singers to memorize. Somehow, they have to learn constellations of notes arranged in tone-rows that seem arbitrary to the ear. The music makes sense only as a continuous hysterical scream of indignation and horror. But this is consistent with the opera's text and, so, Berg's music, in fact, fits the terrifying imagery in the libretto like a hand in a tightly fitted glove. The Des Moines Opera Company's performance of the piece seemed to me close to flawless. From beginning to end, the opera is a barbaric howl of despair. The set was a complex barricade of black, seemingly timbered panels set together in a diagonal jigsaw pattern. Portions of the set could be opened to reveal interior spaces -- for instance, in the opening scene, Wozzeck shaving the fat, grotesque commander in an angular cubical revealed by winching up one of the angular panels in the set. Much of the action occurred in front of the proscenium arch -- the Blank Performance Center in Indianola where I saw the show is a thrust stage with a deep elevator shaft at its center. The orchestra played from an underground pit that the characters stalked around or, even, fought at its edges -- this sort of stage creates a continuous sense of menace and threat (you fear that someone is going to plunge into the pit). A mattress was thrown into the elevator hole for a scene in which Wozzeck says that the ground underfoot is hollow and swampy (sinister mushrooms are growing in the woods where a murder was committed). The stage simulated by the mattress, in fact, visibly yielded underfoot. In another scene, the enormously tall, stork-like and hideous doctor (he has a pointed witch's chin) straps Wozzeck in a chair and lifts him high in the air -- Wozzeck has his head enclosed in a vise-like sort of box. A stark and barren hill with some shadow shrubs at its edges leads diagonally to a sort of precipice. We see the large mob of supernumeraries, playing whores and soldiers, sometimes marching up the this diagonal landscape. At the base of this steep ramp, there's a rocky formation with a sort of tub-like vat of water -- this is the pond where Wozzeck drowns himself at the end of the opera. Clearly, staging this opera, which is rarely performed in this country, was a labor of love -- the large cast all strutted around like grotesque marionettes, everyone drunk or demented throughout the whole show. Wozzeck's son, a small blonde boy, is seen in the last moments of the opera -- he has been riding a stick horse in a circle next to the dangerous-looking orchestra pit. The music rises to a shriek like a tornado bearing down on the opera house. One of the older boys looks over a panel and sees the child's mother with her throat slit. He calls out that the little boy's mother is dead. The little boy rides a few hops on his horse, (the orchestra underlining the motion with froglike belches) pedals his tricycle c few feet and, then, stands impassively, his fists trembling slightly but no expression on his face. My only criticism is that the Blank performance space is quite small and Berg writes in either an almost imperceptible whisper or a howling fortissimo -- the loud notes, which signify insanity, were very, very loud: ear-splitting in fact. The effect was powerful but painful as well.
Wozzeck is based on the fragments of an incomplete play written by Germany's literary Wunderkind, Georg Buechner. Buechner was a political radical, playwright, and formidable prose stylist. He was as gifted and precocious as Mozart. Buechner died when he was only 23 -- typhus killed him mid-pen-stroke in February 1837. It's impossible to imagine what Buechner would have accomplished had he survived even into his middle-age. By the time, he was 23, he had written an alarmingly vehement and celebrated political tract (his response to the French Revolution), an astonishing Shakespearian play about Danton's death, a bizarre comedy, also intensely Shakespearian in form and diction (but, also, it seems a precursor to the Theater of the Absurd"), a prose masterpiece, also about insanity called "Lenz", and, finally, the terrifying and fragmentary Woyzeck. This latter work, which almost perished with its author's untimely death, is written on 12 sheets of paper, inscribed in microscopic handwriting with scenes arranged arbitrarily, in no particular order -- no one knows exactly what Buechner intended for the play's final form and what we have is clearly incomplete. The play wasn't deciphered until the 1870's. When Berg saw the play performed in a conjectural edition in 1914, study of the text was still vestigial -- people misread the name "Woyzeck" as "Wozzeck." This misreading of Buechner's tiny script also confounded an understanding of the drama's source -- Buechner had studied trial transcripts and court documents relating to the proceedings against a murderer named Woyzeck, the last man to be beheaded in 19th century Leipzig -- Woyzeck who was an ex-soldier and a barber/wigmaker was convicted of killing his girlfriend, the mother of his illegitimate child. The case intrigued German intellectuals because it involved the defense of insanity. Buechner, who was training as a medical doctor, was fascinated by the question of free will. Woyzeck's lawyers had claimed that the defendant was overcome by madness and couldn't control his actions. Medical proof presented on this issue was rejected by the Court and Woyzeck was convicted and duly executed. Buechner's thesis is that the Court erred. The play, at least what was completed in the writer's hand, is a thoroughgoing brief dramatizing the notion that free will is an illusion. Woyzeck acted as he did on the basis of a complex of circumstances that wholly deprived him from the ability to make any meaningful voluntary decisions -- he is poor and trapped by his poverty; he is a soldier and, therefore, subject to the insane orders and demands of his commanding officer; he is superstitious and fears ghosts and "freemasons" among other things; he has been subjected to bizarre medical experiments (a monstrous doctor makes him eat only beans) that have eroded his will; he is jealous and has a girlfriend who can't resist a handsome man -- she has eyes that "let her look through seven pairs of leather trousers" and pursues an affair with a big leonine and vicious "drum major"; and, finally, Woyzeck broods, he thinks too much. All of these circumstances combine to force him into an insane state in which he cuts his unfaithful girlfriend's throat and, then, drowns himself in a haunted pool where people have seen a severed head ('very much like a hedgehog') floating over the dismal waters. Buechner's text is lightning quick, disjointed, written in a torrent of wild prose that simulates madness and employs often astonishing metaphors. How exactly he was able to imagine this bleak and horrifying theater piece that seems more radical today than Brecht is impossible to understand -- in fact, aspects of the text anticipate and, even, exceed Beckett in their confrontation with the most bitter aspects of human alienation, loneliness, isolation, and sheer panic. Berg's music is huge, using an immense orchestra with all possible expressionistic resources at the composer's command -- it's scrupulously atonal, but, nonetheless, imitates the action on stage. The more wild and discordant the words, the more lacerating the expression, the harsher and more insistently ferocious the music. Berg composes most of the libretto in "Sprechstimme" -- a sort of super-inflected sung-speech in which each syllable is given a hollow, rising note, an interrogative inflection so that the words seem to dissolve into a series of harried, anguished questions.
I have never seen this opera performed. It is terribly difficult. There's no melody for the singers to memorize. Somehow, they have to learn constellations of notes arranged in tone-rows that seem arbitrary to the ear. The music makes sense only as a continuous hysterical scream of indignation and horror. But this is consistent with the opera's text and, so, Berg's music, in fact, fits the terrifying imagery in the libretto like a hand in a tightly fitted glove. The Des Moines Opera Company's performance of the piece seemed to me close to flawless. From beginning to end, the opera is a barbaric howl of despair. The set was a complex barricade of black, seemingly timbered panels set together in a diagonal jigsaw pattern. Portions of the set could be opened to reveal interior spaces -- for instance, in the opening scene, Wozzeck shaving the fat, grotesque commander in an angular cubical revealed by winching up one of the angular panels in the set. Much of the action occurred in front of the proscenium arch -- the Blank Performance Center in Indianola where I saw the show is a thrust stage with a deep elevator shaft at its center. The orchestra played from an underground pit that the characters stalked around or, even, fought at its edges -- this sort of stage creates a continuous sense of menace and threat (you fear that someone is going to plunge into the pit). A mattress was thrown into the elevator hole for a scene in which Wozzeck says that the ground underfoot is hollow and swampy (sinister mushrooms are growing in the woods where a murder was committed). The stage simulated by the mattress, in fact, visibly yielded underfoot. In another scene, the enormously tall, stork-like and hideous doctor (he has a pointed witch's chin) straps Wozzeck in a chair and lifts him high in the air -- Wozzeck has his head enclosed in a vise-like sort of box. A stark and barren hill with some shadow shrubs at its edges leads diagonally to a sort of precipice. We see the large mob of supernumeraries, playing whores and soldiers, sometimes marching up the this diagonal landscape. At the base of this steep ramp, there's a rocky formation with a sort of tub-like vat of water -- this is the pond where Wozzeck drowns himself at the end of the opera. Clearly, staging this opera, which is rarely performed in this country, was a labor of love -- the large cast all strutted around like grotesque marionettes, everyone drunk or demented throughout the whole show. Wozzeck's son, a small blonde boy, is seen in the last moments of the opera -- he has been riding a stick horse in a circle next to the dangerous-looking orchestra pit. The music rises to a shriek like a tornado bearing down on the opera house. One of the older boys looks over a panel and sees the child's mother with her throat slit. He calls out that the little boy's mother is dead. The little boy rides a few hops on his horse, (the orchestra underlining the motion with froglike belches) pedals his tricycle c few feet and, then, stands impassively, his fists trembling slightly but no expression on his face. My only criticism is that the Blank performance space is quite small and Berg writes in either an almost imperceptible whisper or a howling fortissimo -- the loud notes, which signify insanity, were very, very loud: ear-splitting in fact. The effect was powerful but painful as well.
Monday, July 8, 2019
Andrzej Zulawski and Possession (Film Program note)
“Bring me back my beautiful beast.”
This is what Marlene Dietrich said at the end of Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast. In the movie, the heroine falls in love with a furry, velvet-eared, and sad-eyed beast. At the film’s climax, the beast is turned into a conventional hero, indeed, the French matinee idol, Jean Marais. Dietrich lamented the beautiful beast’s disappearance from the film.
Sometimes, the creature is better than the hero.
A Divorce and Revenge Porn
Adolf Rudnicki was a Polish Jew and survivor of the concentration camps. He was famous in Poland for his holocaust novels, particularly The Merchant of Lodz. Rudnicki was married to an artist named Barbara Baranowska. Rudnicki coined the term epoca piecow (“epoch of the stoves”) to describe the Holocaust era in his native country – that phrase remains widely invoked. Baranowska was much younger than her novelist husband and she was unfaithful to him. She left Rudnicki and married her lover, the Polish film maker, Andrzej Zulawski. The marriage failed and Zulawski and Baranowska divorced. Zulawski, then, married an actress, Malgorzata Braunek. They had a child, a boy Xawery. (He was five years old when his parents separated). Braunek was unfaithful to Zulawski and the subsequent divorce involved allegations of violence and child neglect. Braunek’s boyfriend, whom she later married, was a Zen Buddhist and a sort of mystic – under the influence of her lover, she became a Zen practitioner herself. The parents contested custody of their son. The proceedings were intensely painful to Zulawski and, even, today he describes the situation in highly emotional terms.
The story of Zulawski’s collapsing marriage with Malgorzata Braunek and their divorce affords the basis for Possession (1981). Zulawski has described the film as autobiographical and, even, documentary in many respects. Uncharitably considered, Possession might be viewed as an expensive (2.4 million) and particularly vivid form of “Revenge Porn.” This is a species of bad behavior in which a spurned lover posts to social media embarrassing video or digital images of his ex-girlfriend. These images may include nude shots or, even, compromising sexual footage. The purpose of Revenge Porn is to expose the ex-girlfriend (most practitioners of this form are male) to shame and ridicule. Zulawski’s commentaries on Possession are crystal clear on this point: Anna is a portrait of his ex-wife, Bob stands in for the director’s small son, and Heinrich represents his wife’s lover. Dismissively, Zulawski notes that Anna, as shown in the film, is “much more intelligent than (his) ex-wife.” He makes the same remark about Heinrich, a character that Zulawski says that he “loathes.” (Zulawski describes his wife’s Zen buddhist lover as a particularly reprehensible example of the Polish “counter-culture”, a sort of hippie or flower child as well as a vicious seducer.) The misanthropic Zulawski says that he doesn’t like working with children – “I respect them too much,” he asserts, “unlike actors whom I do not respect at all.” In light of the extreme nature of his films, Zulawski says that he worked with a child-actor on only one occasion, Possession, because the presence of the boy in the context of love-triangle was “actual, what really happened.” (Remarking on the little boy’s performance, Zulawski says that the best performers are dogs, but children are a close second – although “you have to get everything on the first take. The second take, which is less instinctive, is always no good.”)
Most spurned husbands don’t get the opportunity to show their counterpart on film murdering their wife’s lover. Zulawski, however, stages the death of Heinrich in a way that is particularly degrading – he drowns the poor bastard in a toilet bowl in a sleazy tavern – “I did it that way because I hated Heinrich,” the director notes. Similarly, most aggrieved ex-husbands don’t have more than two million dollars budget to post video-nasties under the category of “my crazy ex-wife” showing the woman copulating with a gooey tentacle monster or miscarrying a fetal octopus in a pool of pus on the floor of a subway tunnel.
Zulawski
Andrzej Zulawski was born in 1940 in Lvov, then Poland but now located in the Ukraine. His family was distinguished: both his great-uncle and father were well-known novelists. Zulawski’s little sister died of starvation during the war. When asked about the apocalyptic subject matter of many of his films, Zulawski says: “I don’t notice it. I was born in an apocalypse.” The war killed all of his extended family – grandparents, uncles and aunts all perished. Zulawski remarks: “It was some kind of miracle that I survived.” When his parents divorced, Zulawski moved with his father to Czechoslovakia where he was raised. Zulawksi, then, emigrated with his family to Paris where he attended film school. Returning to Poland after his education, he worked as an assistant to the grand master of Polish cinema, Andrezj Wajda, initially helping the famous director with his historical film about the Napoleonic wars, Ashes (1965). Zulawski served as personal assistant to Wajda through 1970, working with him on four or five movies. It was while employed by Wajda that Zulawski saw a performance of a theater-piece by Jerzy Grotowski, the avant-garde Polish theater director. Although Zulawski denies the influence of Grotowski on his own films, echoes of Grotowski’s techniques and style are ubiquitous in the film maker’s work – and Zulawski has acknowledged that Grotowski’s theater work deeply affected him.
While working on Wajda’s holocaust movie, Landscape after a Battle (1970) Zulawski met Malgorzata Braunek (who was in the film) and married her. They had a child, but divorced in 1976. Zulawki’s first film The Third Part of the Night (1971) was made for the Polish National Film Production Company. (Braunek is in the movie). The film involves Nazi atrocities, a young man who joins the resistence, and encounters what seems to be Doppelgaenger of his wife who was killed by the Germans. While working in a typhus hospital, where the hero is serving as a test subject in lice studies, the protagonist sees someone who looks like himself dying painfully. This reconciles the hero to his past. Although the film is reputedly difficult to follow, it received respectful reviews and afforded a basis for Zulawski making his next movie, The Devil (1972). This picture is a wild historical fantasy involving a young man’s pact with a mysterious stranger. The movie is set in 1790 and involves a lurid sequence of orgies, near-incest, murders, rape, and castration. All of this mayhem is accompanied by poetic, metaphysical dialogue. The movie is highly regarded today but in 1972 the picture could not be released – most likely the picture couldn’t be released under any economy or regime. Zulawski says bitterly that Polish authorities “imprisoned” the film. It dropped into obscurity and was not re-released until 2007 when a DVD version was issued.
Zulawski moved to Paris and made The Most Important Thing: Love in 1975. The film, an inside view of French show-business, was a huge success. The movie’s leading lady, Romy Schneider, was awarded a Cesar (the French equivalent of the Oscar) for best actress. Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director, has highly praised this movie and dedicated one of this pictures to Romy Schneider’s performance in the film. On the heels of the movie’s success, Zulawski was emboldened to return to Poland where he began work on his magnum opus, an adaptation of his great uncle’s science fiction novel On the Silver Globe. Zulawski spent two years working on this film, shot at a variety of location in East Germany, on the Baltic sea, and in Poland and the Ukraine. The movie is a lavishly produced story about intergalactic explorers for are marooned on the “silver globe”. They film their exploits on the planet where they are trapped with video cameras. Ultimately, the colony succumbs to religious mania. The sole survivor of the massacres on the “silver globe” becomes a Messiah figure and, ultimately, leads an uprising of oppressed people on another planet. Polish authorities were intensely suspicious of the film and appalled by Zulawski’s budget overruns and profligate shooting style – parts of the film were shot in the high Tatra Mountains, a Silesian salt mine, and the Gobi desert in Mongolia and the final cut was reputedly planned for 3 and ½ hours. While the film was being edited, Polish censors impounded all known prints of the film and its outtakes and destroyed them. The censors dug a hole and buried all of the film’s complex and stunning costumes; the sets were not only struck but burned to the ground. Remarkably, a partial negative survived and the movie was reconstructed (with still shots for missing sequences) in 1988. The picture was premiered to great acclaim. I have seen the movie which runs 168 minutes even in its incomplete form – it is incomprehensibly confusing, shot in an intentionally disorienting manner, and features wild-eyed expressionistic acting. The players mouth lines that sound as if they were written by Hegel – large chunks of the movie’s dialogue is unbearably complex and poetic. I found it impossible to understand what any one was saying and couldn’t detect a story in the film’s spectacular and surreal imagery. (When Martin Scorsese saw the picture, he was astonished and reportedly said: “How many billions did that cost?” – although the film wasn’t expensive by Hollywood standards, it was the most costly Polish film ever produced up to that date.)
Dismayed by his treatment in Poland, Zulawski returned to Paris where he had previously enjoyed success and good box-office receipts. He pitched an autobiographical film about his divorce but the money-men were lukewarm. Zulawski, then, went to Hollywood and lived in Los Angeles for a couple years. There, he pitched his divorce film to various Hollywood production companies also without success. One afternoon, he had lunch with an executive of Gulf-Western (Paramount). He told the man he wanted to make a horror film about “a woman who fucks an octopus.” The executive told him that he was crazy but that the company would authorize a small budget (by Hollywood standards) for the picture – Zulawski was given two million dollars and a free hand to make the movie. The result is Possession (1981). (Zulawski who is poor historian gives, at least, three versions of this story. As far as I can tell, the director is a self-aggrandizing inveterate liar. The movie was, in fact, produced by a Parisian film company using French money. The scenes in Berlin were subsidized to some extent by the Senate of Berlin which Zulawski regards as the “co-producer.”)
Possession proved to be an unmarketable picture – it’s too artistic and slow for horror fans and too horrific for the art house crowd. Nonetheless, Isabel Adjani was acclaimed for her performance in the picture and was awarded a Cesar for her acting. (She also won a best actress award at Cannes; Possession was shown in competition with Wajda’s Man of Iron, a political film about the Solidarity movement in Gdansk and Zulawski’s picture lost to the movie made by his old mentor.) The movie did reasonably well in Paris but was denounced as incoherent and the work of a mad man everywhere else. In Britain, Possession went straight to video – it was reviewed as a particularly demented form of “video nasty.” The film, in the director’s cut running 122 minutes, was edited to 81 minutes for showing at southern Drive-Ins and 42nd street “grind houses” in the USA. If the film is confusing and difficult to understand at 122 minutes in the director’s cut, one can only imagine the chaos on-screen in the horror film version hacked down to two-thirds of the director’s final form footage. Possession was the kind of calamity that would have ended most film maker’s career, but, in fact, Zulawski was resilient and he persevered.
1984's The Public Woman, a free adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Demons, was a modest success in Paris where the film was produced. It could be marketed as a erotic thriller and made enough money for Zulawski to direct Mad Love, another modestly budgeted film that could be packaged as an erotic suspense movie. (Zulawski married his leading lady Sophie Marceau, making four films with her – the relationship ended in 2001). Mad Love failed commercially. My Nights are more beautiful than your Days, featuring bizarre rhyming dialogue, was released in 1989 – it was met with incomprehension. Zulawski then made a film adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov – the film sank without a trace. All of Zulawski’s films were shot economically on small budgets – after the debacle of On the Silver Globe, none of these movies had shooting schedules lasting longer that 35 days and all, including Boris Godunov which required complex post-synchronization of its sound-track, were edited in less than 9 days.
By this point, Zulawski was a persona non grata in the international film industry. Although he had trouble getting films financed and produced, he traveled widely and served on many juries at international film festivals – his name still had significant cachet, particularly in light of the rediscovery and re-release of his film maudit, On the Silver Globe. Little is reported about Zulawski’s 1991 movie, The Blue Note. In 1996, he managed to produce Szymanka (The Shaman) a film about an anthropology student who takes his studies a bit too literally – he uses mushrooms to induce hallucinations. The experiment goes too far and he gets his brain eaten by his girlfriend. The film was written by a radical Polish feminist who admired Zulawski’s work with his actresses. Fidelity (2000) is a reimagining of Madame de Lafayette’s 17th century novel The Princess of Cleves – true to form, Zulawski puts some cannibalism and organ smuggling in the film. The movie was reasonably well-received and won some peculiar awards – first place at Romance Film festival and a technical prize, Best Steadicam Shot. Zulawski’s last picture Cosmos is a surrealist venture based on a well-known novel by the great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz – it was made in Portugal and was the first film that Zulawski was able to finish in the fifteen years following Fidelity. The picture was premiered at the Locarno film festival and received respectful reviews. By this time, Zulawski was dying of cancer. He died in Warsaw on February 17, 2016.
Photographs of Zulawski show a young man who is stunning beautiful. As an old man, he was handsome with a great head of silver hair. Beginning in 2007, Mondo Video began releasing Zulawski’s back catalog of films. Zulawski aided with the restoration of the films and contributed witty and amusing, if somewhat pretentious (and deceitful), commentaries to several of the pictures.
Sam Neil
Sam Neill was first known outside of his native Australia for his work in Gillian Armstrong’s My Beautiful Career (1979). Possession was his second film and, of course, his performance, although eccentric is noteworthy. He played the son of the Devil in The Omen, Part Three (1981) and has been in a number of successful Australian and New Zealand films including The Piano and A Cry in the Dark as well as more recently Children of the Revolution. He is most famous for his performances in the Steven Spielberg franchise Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequels. Neill has been in British TV (Peaky Blinders) and auditioned for the part of James Bond after Roger Moore’s retirement – he lost out to Timothy Dalworthy. He was in The Horse Whisperer, The Hunt for Red October, and a host of Hollywood pictures. Zulawski in his commentary says that it was a pleasure to work with Neill because of his professionalism and intelligence – “he is very literate man with whom you can discuss anything,” Zulawski says on the commentary to Possession. Like many successful actors, Neill was afflicted with a stutter when he was a child and says that he has never wholly defeated this ancient enemy.
Isabel Adjani
Isabel Adjani (now 64) is the daughter of a Berber emigrant to Paris and a German-speaking mother who never really learned to speak French. She was raised in modest circumstances – her father worked as a mechanic in garages in the Paris suburbs. From age 12, she was recognized as a great beauty and began acting professional in films when she was 15. Adjani became internationally famous as a result of her starring role in Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. In that film, Adjani plays the formidable daughter of Victor Hugo who conceives an obsessive love for a man who is not her equal – she idealizes the object of her passion so intensely that when he comes face-to-face with him in the end of the movie, she doesn’t recognize the man to whose worship she has devoted her whole life. Adjani was only 19 when the movie was made in 1975 – no less a critic than Pauline Kael pronounced her acting “prodigious.”
Werner Herzog recognized the ethereal, somewhat unworldly aspect of Adjani’s beauty and cast her as Lucy Harker in his remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu. She is exceedingly spooky in that 1979 film, a movie in which she has sexual intercourse with the loathsome vampire to save her lover, Jonathan. Adjani won the Cesar award for her double role in Possession. At the time of the making of Possession, Adjani’s marriage with the cinematographer, Bruno Nuytten, was collapsing. Adjani had a small son with Nuytten and Zulawski mercilessly exploited the resemblances between the actress’ private life and her role in the film. Zulawski implies that Adjani cuckolded Nuytten by having a casual affair with him – it’s not clear whether this is true. In any event, Zulawski recalls that Adjani was a diva and difficult to manage on the set. He says that she treated her husband, who was shooting the film, with “savage cruelty.” Adjani later divorced Nuytten and began a fifteen-year long relationship with Daniel Day-Lewis (with whom she has a daughter).
Zulawski says that Adjani was a consummate actress in all aspects of her life. On the set of Possession, she developed an allergy to the green contact lenses she had to wear when playing the part of her good persona, Helen, the virtuous elementary schoolteacher who always appears in white in the film. Zulawski saw Adjani in the make-up room. Her entire face was red and puffed-up and her eyes were almost swollen shut; she looked “hideous.” Zulawski told Adjani to “knock it off” and that if she wasn’t willing to shoot that day he would “kill her.” (The film was made on a very tight schedule.) Adjani called him some names and, then, appeared on the set fifteen-minutes later resplendently beautiful. (True to form, Zulawski gives different versions of this story which sounds like it is derived from similar anecdotes told by Werner Herzog about Klaus Kinski. In the most elaborate version of the story, Adjani is inspired to disobedience by a homosexual make-up artist who whispers to her that the contact lenses “disfigure” her beautiful face. Zulawski gleefully imitates the make-up man’s fey manner, tells us that he can recount the story because “he’s dead anyway from AIDS,” and, then, explains that he pinned the actress behind a heavy door and said he would crush her to death if she didn’t agree to appear wearing the contact lenses.)
Adjani refused to watch “rushes” of the footage in which she appears in Possession and said that she regarded the entire movie as “emotional pornography – it shows things that should not be shown on film.” When she saw the finished film, Adjani attempted suicide. Zulawski dismisses the attempt as “acting” – she sliced into herself “only a couple of millimeters,” he comments dismissively.
Adjani has had a long and very successful career. She is the only French actress to have been awarded five Cesar Best Actress awards – in addition to Possession, she won the award for the 1983 One Deadly Summer, a huge hit in France (the synopsis suggests its kind of erotic thriller). She won her third Cesar for Camille Claudel (1989), a feminist picture in which she plays Rodin’s long-suffering assistant and mistress who was a great sculptor in her own right – this movie was directed by her ex-husband Bruno Nuytten. Another Cesar was awarded to her for her work in Patrice Chereau’s lavish historical epic, Queen Margot (1994) and, finally, was given the Cesar for her appearance in a feminist comedy Skirt Day (2009).
Adjani is politically active. She engaged in a well-publicized controversy with the Pope over birth control. She signed a petition defending Roman Polanski, with whom she had worked, when he was ordered extradited to the United States for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. She publicly opposes vaccination. She has made only one film in the United States, Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978). She appeared in that movie because she though Hill was “an heir to the American action tradition exemplified by Howard Hawks” and admired his picture Hard Times (1975).
A photograph taken at the Cannes festival in 2018 shows her still preternaturally youthful and beautiful.
Carlo Rambaldi
As a precondition to Gulf-Western’s financing package, Zulawski had to agree to use the services of Carlo Rambaldi, a very famous and successful effects director who specialized in devising “creatures.” (Although Zulawski makes this claim, it is suspect – in fact, the Parisian production company put up the money and other witnesses say that the Polish director was so impressed by Ridley Scott’s Alien that he contacted H. R. Giger, who conceived that film’s monster, and tried to hire him. Giger was busy but referred Zulawski to his assistant Carlo Rambaldi.) Rambaldi who was born in Italy in 1925 was renowned for his work on Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1975) and his design for the extensor mandibles in the grisly mouth of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Rambaldi was thought to be “bankable” in his own right and the film was pitched to the financiers in Hollywood as a special-effects driven monster movie, something on the order of Alien. Rambaldi was an international figure – he worked with Fellini and, then, Mario Bava on a number of gory Giallo crime films produced in the ‘sixties. He also “cut his teeth” on devising creature-effects for sword and sandal films made by Cinecitta including a number of the Hercules fantasy pictures.
Rambaldi did some exquisite drawings for Zulawski and contrived a wonderful monster for the film. He arrived in Berlin where the movie was under-production, the afternoon before the creature effects were scheduled to be shot. Zulawski met with him and recalls that Rambaldi had brought a suitcase containing a man-sized pink lubricated “condom” that he intended to use as the monster’s skin. During their first meeting in Berlin, Rambaldi said that he thought he could get the monster ready for the camera in about two weeks – he mentioned that he had been on the set with Spielberg for Close Encounters of the Third Kind for about a month, working with second-unit directors to make test shots and configure the lighting to show the aliens in their best, and most plausible, light. Zulawski was horrified. He told Rambaldi that all the creature shots had to be completed in the next two or three days – “I don’t have a Hollywood budget,” Zulawski told him. At first, Rambaldi was distressed and said that he was defeated – “there is no way I can get this monster ready for you tomorrow.” Zulawski demanded that he perform and Rambaldi suddenly rallied – “I’m an Italian,” he said, “not an American and we Italians are resourceful.” Rambaldi with his assistants worked all night and got a version of the monster ready for shooting the next morning – the creature is made from glue, melted film-stock, and scotch tape. Rambaldi worked around the clock on these effects for the next forty-eight hours and the shots required for the film were completed. (Of course, today there would be no monster at all, just some CGI effects and a green screen.) Rambaldi’s monster is “practical” – that is, a real puppet. When we see the monster writhing on the bed, the creature is operated by technicians hiding inside the mattress and physically wiggling the creature’s tentacles. “Why does it have tentacles?” someone asked Zulawski. He responded: “It’s a monster. Monsters have tentacles.”
Rambaldi is most famous for E. T., the extra-terrestrial, 1982's cute cousin to the creature in Possession. He died in 2010.
(It’s obligatory to note that Zulawski’s account of his work with Rambaldi is highly tendentious and partly untrue. Zulawski seems defensive about the appearance of the monster. In fact, Frederic Tuten, who worked as co-writer with the director on his script – the film was written and shot in English and, then, dubbed into French – remembers that he counseled Zulawski to keep the monster out of sight. Zulawski seemed to agree and the script was written with the creature mostly off-screen. But Zulawski, who spent some time in Rambaldi’s shop in Los Angeles, was, in fact, fascinated by the monster – in my view the revenge porn aspects of the movie are incomplete without the “money shot” of Isabel Adjani having coitus with the creature. Rambaldi came to Berlin with “five caskets” full of creature parts since the monster is shown in different stages of its development at different times in the film. The French producer recalls opening the caskets for the Berlin customs agents who were shocked at their contents. The “condom” monster as Zulawski derisively calls the creature is shown in one shot – it is penis-shaped with little green eyes. Zulawski claims that he scoffed at the monster when he first saw it: “I wanted the thing to suggest genitals, not to simply be something you might find in your underpants,” he says. But photographs show him gleefully examining the “condom” monster in LA and so his contention that the creature’s appearance surprised him is disingenuous.)
Marget Carstenson
Marget Carstenson is a German actress with an impressive resume. She worked extensively with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and has the starring role in that director’s extraordinary The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). She was part of Fassbinder’s repertoire company and appeared in many of the director’s most famous films, particularly those made for TV – she stars in the mini-series length Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972) as well as in the 16 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). She is also famous for playing the part of the wife in Fassbinder’s profoundly sado-masochistic Martha (1974). Cartenson was used to working with abusive directors – no one was worse than Fassbinder – and, so, she had no difficulty with Zulawski. Zulawski calls her character “a fool” and “ a naive idiot.” Cartenson remains active in the German cinema to this day.
Heinz Bennett
Heinz Bennett plays the role of Heinrich. Bennett was a stage-trained actor employed by the repertoire company of the Schiller Theater in Berlin. His expressionistic performance is one of the remarkable things in Possession. Zulawski claims he had to remedy Bennett’s “rather stiff acting style” that the director blamed on the performer’s background with the conservative and staid Schiller Theater.
Bernhard Wicki
Bernhard Wicki was cast in the film and one day of footage was shot with the actor. Then, Zulawski rewrote the script to eliminate the role. Wicki was a prominent post-war German film director, best known for his movie The Bridge (1959), a picture about a group of German school-boys conscripted to defend a bridge in the waning hours of World War Two. (The results are predictably tragic.) Wicki was an alcoholic, according to Zulawski (whose credibility is often suspect) – he says Wicki was drunk from dawn to dusk, hadn’t learned his lines, and was all wrong for the part anyway. So Zulawski simply scrapped the role.
Originally, Wicki was cast as Abe, Anna’s previous husband. This role was a reflection of the fact that Zulawski’s erring wife had earlier been married to a Jewish novelist and holocaust survivor much older than her. In its first conception, the film begins with a prologue in which Abe tells an anecdote about a Russian count whose wife betrayed him by taking a lover. The Russian count set about writing a novel about the woman’s betrayal in which the wife is portrayed as fat and ugly – her lover is revealed as a bumptious dimwit. The Russian count was not satisfied with his first draft of the story and so he rewrote the text again and again. The book became longer and more complex. Although the book first was told from the perspective of the aggrieved and betrayed husband, the novel shifts perspective and, finally, is narrated from the point-of-view of the adulteress, who has now become witty and beautiful. Of course, the Russian count is Leo Tolstoy and the book in Anna Karenina (“Anna” is the name of the adulteress wife in Possession as well). In the film’s original script, Abe was cuckolded by Mark. Mark, then, marries Anna and Abe remarries another much younger woman. A curious remnant of this backstory remains in Possession – in the penultimate sequence on the steps, a young blonde woman mysteriously appears. This is Abe’s wife as originally cast. Abe is no longer in the movie, but his young wife serves the role as necessary witness to the carnage at the film’s end.
Jerzy Grotowski
Zulawski denies being influenced by Jerzy Grotowski. But this seems disingenuous. Zulawski forces his principal players (Neill and Adjani) into dimensions far beyond conventional acting. He seems to manipulate the actors into disconcerting and naked self-revelation. Further, compared to a typical Hollywood production, Zulawski’s performers act with their whole body – every scene in the film shows gestures and collisions between the actors that we most associate with fight scenes or sexual encounters. In a Hollywood production, people act with their voices and,only when they fight or make love, deploy their bodies as a physical resource. Zulawski directs his actors to continuously perform with their whole body. Consider the scenes in which Mark confronts Anna’s lover, Heinrich. Heinrich caresses Mark and sinuously dances around him. Then Mark tries to strike him, Heinrich deploys a double handed karate chop and, then, draws back into praying mantis or Tai chih position. Later, when Heinrich is disoriented by the notion that there is another lover in the triangle (the creature in the decrepit building on Sebastian Strasse), he staggers around in delirious circles like a blind man. Anna is a sleepwalker, somnolent until she furiously strikes out with electric knife or broken bottle – she seems almost catatonic, a zombie but with fiercely coiled energy. Of course, Anna’s startling and discomfiting scene in the U-Bahn in which she wildly gulps air, smashes food to particles against the wall, and, then, squats to miscarry a monster on the concrete is less like movie acting and more a species of wild performance art. Zulawski’s use of the actor’s entire body and full register of their voices, from weird wails to whispers to enraged shrieks seems directly indebted to the theater of Jerzy Grotowski.
Grotowski was a Polish man of the theater born in 1933. In the late ‘fifties, Grotowski founded his Poor Theater. This ensemble used limited sets and costumes – the actors were directed to simulate with their own bodies any properties that were required. Grotowski’s most famous production in Poland was Akropolis, a work in which his actors mimed scenes from classical mythology while building with concrete blocks a crematorium around the enclosed audience. This was followed by a work that many regard as the greatest piece of theater mounted in the 20th century, Grotowski’s adaptation of Calderon’s The Constant Prince. Grotowski spent one year working with the leading man playing the Prince who is subjected to torture and martyrdom in the work. It is said that Grotowski altered the entire appearance and physical habitus of this actor, bending him into an uncanny and terrifying figure on stage. This was followed Grotowski’s adaptation of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, a show that was performed to great acclaim in the United States.
For the next five years, Grotowski worked on his magnum opus, Apocalypsis cum Figuren – the work illustrates images of the end of the world in scripture. At the same time, Grotowski obsessively rehearsed a presentation staging the Four Gospels – this last work was never publicly shown. Apocalypsis cum Figuren was staged in 1969. Grotowski was 36 years old. The theater work was his last production. For the next 13 years, Grotowski traveled the world studying theater traditions in non-Western countries. On occasion, he engineered or devised spontaneous happenings – the best documentation of these ephemeral works, called “bee-hives”, is Andre Gregory’s account of working with Grotowski (whom he does not identify by name) in My Dinner with Andre (1981), a film that is the exact antithesis of the Polish director’s techniques. Grotowski returned to Wroclaw, Poland where his theater works had been staged in 1982 – the Polish regime threatened him with arrest and, so, he sought asylum in the United States. With the help of Andre Gregory, asylum was granted and Grotowski moved to Manhattan – he taught for a year at Columbia, but, then, drifted into what are called “paratheatrical” studies. In effect, Grotowski worked with actors in a context that would have to be characterized as therapy – he applied Jungian depth psychology to his subjects and worked as a sort of shaman and healer. Later, he was able to return to Poland where he died in 1999.
Grotowski’s most influential theory was that of “total act” performance. Stanislavski, a theorist of theater widely influential in the early 20th century, imagined actors as preparing for their role by asking innumerable questions about their characters – questions that could not be answered from the text, but to which the actor would devise responses to guide his or her performance. What was Macbeth’s relationship with his mother? Where does he keep his money? Who was the person most influential in his childhood? What were his sisters like? What is his religion? Shakespeare doesn’t answer these questions, but Stanislavski felt that a profound performance of the role could only be achieved if the actor had rehearsed in his mind these questions (and many, many more) and attempted to imagine responses. Grotowski felt that Stanislavski’s method as expressed in his manual An Actor Prepares created a kind of schizophrenia: the actor was to don a mask foreign to himself and conceal his identity and personal concerns under that mask. By contrast, Grotowski advocated that an actor strip himself naked, depart from his own persona and discover within his own heart the archetypal character equivalent to the role he is performing. The player entrusted with performing Lady Macbeth doesn’t study medieval texts and Shakespearian performance practice to prepare for the role. Rather, Grotowski asked his performers to reveal nakedly the “Lady Macbeth” within themselves. Grotowski’s premise was that each of us contain multitudes (to cite Whitman) and that embedded within our psyches, and unique to each of us, are the archetypes of Faust, Hamlet, or Lady Macbeth. There is an aspect of our own soul that responds to these roles – acting is to open up that part of the soul and reveal it in an encounter with the audience. This encounter is transactional – the woman who shows herself in full disclosure as ferocious, ambitious, cruel, the opposite of maternal, a woman warrior accesses the Lady Macbeth within her own psyche and, then, in an encounter with the audience, a sort of transaction, reveals that figure or archetypal persona. The notion is to find the archetype for the role within the actor’s own psyche and, then, display that archetype in a relationship with the audience.
(Andre Gregory was profoundly influenced by this theory and his productions of The Masterbuilder by Ibsen and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya were filmed only after rehearsal periods exceeding one year in each case.)
As an adjunct to this practice, Grotowski advocated “Extended Vocal Technique” – this was another device to remove actors’ inhibitions and lead them to an inner truth correlated to the role that they were playing. Extended Vocal Technique involves teaching actors to use their voices as musical instruments. Grotowski’s player were urged to yodel, ululate, scream and growl. They acted in falsetto or used buccal speech (nonlaryngeal speech that sounds like Donald Duck). Sometimes, Grotowski had his actors inhale helium and, then, declaim their lines. He taught them the ancient Ainu practice of Rekuhkara in which two actors face one another, make a tube from their conjoined hands and, then, bellow into each other’s vocal cavities. Grotowski’s actors shriek, whisper, sing, rap, use Tuvan throat singing etc.
In Possession, Adjani is not acting the role of a woman who fucks an octopus. She is disclosing the part of her soul that would desire to do such a thing. Neill is not acting jealous – he is accessing the deep wellsprings of his own male rage and jealousy that he must ordinarily conceal.
Production Notes
Zulawski shot the movie with very wide angle 150 to 180 mm lenses. These lenses can not be used to selectively focus on a single narrow part of the frame – rather, these lenses yield an image with all parts equally in focus. Zulawski claims this requires very careful set decoration and composition to keep subordinate parts of the image from becoming unduly important to the viewer. The wide-angle lenses were necessitated by the extremely cramped quarters in which the film was shot. The two apartments are very small. The first floor apartment on Sebastian Strasse was only 16 feet from the wall and East German security forces engaged in close surveillance of the production. Many scenes had to be shot with from outside windows since the apartments were simply too small to accommodate the actors and equipment – the cameras and technicians were mounted on scaffolding set outside the building’s windows. Zulawski seems to have regarded the close presence of the Wall as a factor that induced tension in cast and crew and that contributes to the brooding sense of doom in the film. In several special effects sequences, Zulawski’s stunt men risked crashing through barriers and into East Germany, a mistake that would have had dire consequences for everyone involved.
The movie’s creature sequences and exteriors were shot in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood already dominated by Turkish immigrants. In fact, both apartments were homes where Turkish families were living. Zulawski’s wide-angle lenses would have scrupulously recorded any other figures on the streets where the exteriors were shot by the Wall. Accordingly, he had to persuade the Turks to stay indoors when he make his exterior shots. He did this by a simple expedient, telling the Turks that he needed their help because he was poor, even poorer than them, and that he didn’t have a Hollywood budget and required that they go indoors for the fifteen minutes when he was shooting outside. Zulawski worked very quickly and he got the shots that he needed – grim, empty streets under a forbidding sky.
The infamous Berlin U-Bahn scene was shot at three a.m. when the subways were inactive for the night. It was bitterly cold and Zulawski didn’t really direct Adjani’s seizure-like performance. He told her to “fuck the air.” Adjani did the shot on the first take but someone thought that, perhaps, a crew member’s foot was in the image. (This turned out to be a untrue.) A second take was made but it was less effective. Zulawski said that Adjani did what she had to do, performing admirably in the cold while sprayed with “sticky stuff.” But he remarks that he doesn’t find the shot exploitative. These actors are paid “millions to do this sort of thing,” Zulawski explains. (But Adjani, by Zulawski’s own admission, was paid “next to nothing”, “chicken-feed” for this movie. At the time, she picture was shot Adjani was deemed a liability because of her hot temper and diva-like behavior working on other movies. After threatening to kill her, Zulawski said he had no trouble with the actress.) Zulawski describes Adjani as being literally “possessed” in this sequence and that she was like a “voodoo priestess” possessed by one of the “divine horsemen”. He calls the effect “shamanistic” – Adjani is acting by revealing something hitherto concealed within her. “She deliver herself wholly to the camera.”
Zulawski is a great proponent of the Steadicam, although that technology didn’t exist when the movie was made. Many of the shots required complex track systems on which to mount the moving camera. A number of shots, including the subway sequence, are hand-held.
A crew of cheap Yugoslavian stunt men were on-set. They wanted to prove themselves to Zulawski by plunging off buildings or diving down flights of steps. One man showed his prowess by repeatedly banging his head on the wall. Zulawski says that these stunt men were staggering drunk at all times.
Zulawski revered John Ford. Ford developed a way of shooting that rendered his films largely exempt from studio interference. Ford never shot “cover” and tried to get the scene lensed in a single master take. He was careful to not create excess footage that could be used to re-edit his films. Zulawski mimics this approach to film making for two reasons – it saves money (Zulawski calls himself an exemplar of “poor man’s moviemaking) and, second, he began his career working in Poland where his films were subject to censorship. Therefore, he tried to make his movies in a way that prevented authorities from re-cutting and readily censoring his films. (This technique backfired on him in On the Silver Globe, the most expensive Polish film made to that date. The picture is conceived as an organic whole and shot in long takes to repel censors. But the film was so organically complete and so seamless that the Polish authorities couldn’t figure out how to salvage any part of the movie and, so, they simply suppressed the whole thing.)
Zulawski tells a good story about Ford. He was shooting in Monument Valley when there was blizzard. The production was shut down for eleven days. A producer was sent from Hollywood to confer with Ford about the delay. Ford said that he was behind schedule by about 11 days or fifteen pages of script. Then, he pulled out the script and ripped 15 pages from it – “there,” he said, “problem solved.” Zulawski claims he did something similar by eliminating Bernhard Wicki’s subplot from the beginning of Possession.
Bergman and Lars von Trier
Although Possession is remarkable for its often baffling combination of horror and intense psychodrama it is not unprecedented. The film can be correlated to certain other movies that it resembles to some degree. Always self-promoting (even in old age), Zulawski claims for the film a radical uniqueness that it doesn’t really possess.
Ingmar Begman, under the influence of Strindberg’s Dance of Death, produced Scenes from a Marriage (1973), a six-part made-for-Tv movie. The film involves adultery committed by both husband and wife (played memorably by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josefson) – the Swedish version is 260 minutes; it runs 167 minutes in the cut for the American film version. The picture involves horrific scenes of violence, extreme and scathing dialogue, and the last episode, “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World” has a title a bit like a horror film. The movie is a harrowing experience, autobiographical in form, and, certainly, seems to have influenced Zulawski. Other films by Bergman, also exploring the collapse of sexual relationships and mental illness, are explicitly indebted to horror films – consider the sea of floating corpses in Shame (1968), the nightmare scenes in Hour of the Wolf (1968) in which the lead character plucks out his own eyes, the schizophrenic fusions and fissions in Persona (1966) in which two women merge and become one another, and the scenes of self-mutilation in Cries and Whispers (1972) -- the heroine cuts her vagina with a piece of broken glass.
The absurdly extreme imagery in Possession is mirrored in several of Lars von Trier’s movies. In Melancholia (2011), a woman’s depression and incipient madness is mirrored in apocalyptic effects – the moon, symbolizing depression, literally slams into the earth. Anti-Christ (2009) involves a grieving couple who blame one another for the accidental death of their child – the husband and wife retreat to a remote cabin in the woods where they commit spectacular and mutilating acts of sexual violence. The effect is a bit similar to the scene in Possession in which both characters saw at themselves with an electric knife.
Of course, Possession also is related to the genre of films called “Body Horror” or “Biological Horror” movies. The Canadian director, David Cronenberg, made a number of films evincing deep and potentially pathological anxiety about the human body. Cronenberg has been called “the King of Venereal Horror”. His films include Shivers (1975) about a stomach parasite that causes “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease effects” so as to induce primal orgies. In 1977's Rabid, the porn star Marilyn Chambers plays a woman afflicted with a tumor under her armpit that contains a deadly phallic stinger. The Brood (1979) involves a woman who gives birth to murderous deformed dwarves from a “psychoplasmically induced external womb.” These films culminated in The Fly (1986), possibly the most excessive and disturbing of all biological or venereal horror films and, later, the more subtle, but equally distressing Dead Ringers (1988), about twin gynecologists who develop special tools for working with “mutant women” – in fact, it’s a story of madness and obsession.
It is no coincidence that much of this work arises from the period between 1975 to 1990, a time when a strange, hitherto-unknown, venereal cancer plagued the world. This was the epidemic of HIV AIDs that assassinated a generation of Gay men and threatened to make the human body, the image of God, a site of virulent anxiety and horror.
The Political Allegory
Zulawski’s hatred from the Communist regime was uncompromising, indignant, and outspoken. In his commentary on the film, he equates Communism with pure evil. Zulawski says that if his budget had been greater, he would have filmed the freshly formed body of the new Mark hovering over the Wall, seeing goodness on one side and total evil on the other. Communism made men into something monstrous – it was a hideous excrescence on political history. Zulawski equates his ex-wife’s adultery with the betrayal of human nature committed by the Polich Communist regime. The monster is the nightmare thing that the Communists have made, something that has detached itself from ordinary reality, and become a hideous self-sustaining creature that no one can control any longer. Notwithstanding Zulawski’s vehemently expressed repulsion for Communism and the monsters that it creates, he was, of course, raised within the system and taught to revere its principles. Similarly, Zulawski would have to concede that he once loved his now despised ex-wife, that she was once dear to him, and very extravagance of his present hatred measures the degree of his previous affection for her. Accordingly, the film is fundamentally ambivalent – the figure of betrayal is beautiful and remains desired by the filmmaker. Mark seems to love Anna without reservation even as he similarly hates her.
Frederick Tuten, the New York writer who worked on the script with Zulawski, was summoned to Berlin to help with the rewrites required when the subplot involving Abe was eliminated from the film. Tuten recalls that Zulawski took him to East Berlin for an afternoon. Tuten remembers the excursion with unmitigated horror. “I went into East Berlin, a leftist,” Tuten says. “I returned a moderate.”
Some interpretative thoughts
Critics regard the film’s delirious moving camera and its wildly expressionistic acting as literally “deranged.” Critics in the early 80's denigrated Possession for its hysteria. The film is now considered a cult movie. Writers in the last ten years have tended to admire Possession for its swooning film technique.
But what does it mean? Clearly, the film is about jealousy, “the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds upon.” (Iago in Othello... and note that Portia in Merchant of Venice refers to jealousy as “green-eyed.” It’s no accident that dopplegaengers spawned by jealousy in Possession have brilliant green eyes.) Sexual relations are productive. A man and woman’s intercourse may produce a child. Here it produces a monster. The monster is the third element in the triangle – at first, we think that the triangle is constituted by Mark, the CIA spy (Neill’s character), Heinrich, the Zen Buddhist lover, and the spy’s wife, Anna. But, in fact, her betrayal of the spy (a man whose whole existence is predicated on betrayal) creates the real triangle – the inhuman embodiment or materialization of psychotic jealousy represented by the creature.
Here are some propositions:
1. Freud tells us that the object of love is “over-valued” (uberschatzt) – we read this in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905 - 1915). We don’t need to agree with Freud’s arguments as to why this happens – of course, he ascribes this commonly known phenomenon to a regression to infantile sexuality. All that is necessary for our analysis is to recognize that this phenomenon occurs. The object of love is imagined as physically perfect, morally impeccable, and intellectually superior.
2. The German lover, Heinrich, sends Anna a card telling her that when he visited the Taj Mahal, he saw one-half of the face of God. Anna is the other half. This is a radical overvaluation of the object of desire;
3. Freud argues that the object of love will be tainted by the bestial spasms of physical intercourse. Thus, the lover must debase the object of his desire to possess her. This leads to degradation of the object of desire, something Freud calls Dirnenlieb (“whore love”). Again, we don’t need to follow Freud’s unconvincing arguments as to why this happens – we only need to note that in actual human relationships, the “madonna or whore” syndrome is often at play. A woman is a madonna until we have sex with her – then, she becomes a whore;
4. Mark imagines Anna having sex with Heinrich. He despises Heinrich and regards him as an amoral and vicious animal. Thus, Mark’s jealousy results in his imagining that Anna is capable of copulating with some sort of awful monstrous creature.
5. If Anna sexually desires a monstrous creature, she is herself a monster – thus, she gives birth to monsters.
6. Freud imagines male sexuality as being unstable – the lover fluctuates between regarding the object of his desires as Madonna or whore. This produces an either/or dilemma that is fundamentally insoluble, a “knot” of the kind Laing identifies as producing schizophrenia. The Catch 22 is that by having sex with the Madonna, the object of love becomes degraded to a whore (with whom emotionally satisfactory sex is impossible). Freud thought that this either/or dilemma resulted necessarily in impotence, an inability to perform sexually;
7. Subsequent commentators on Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality note that by positing the “either/or” dilemma, the psychoanalyst ignores an earlier discovery made in his epochal 1900 text The Interpretation of Dreams. In that book, exploring the “dream-work”, Freud proposes that for the unconscious mind the “either/or” theorem of “exclusivity (either this or that)” doesn’t exist. The unconscious always substitutes the copula, that is an “and”, for “either/or” propositions.
8. Thus, Anna becomes both Madonna and Whore. She is both “object of desire” and the consort of horrible deformed monsters. She is both the mother of the little boy, Bob, and the mother of the monster representing the thing she has produced with Mark, the gooey, hideous betentacled creature that embodies jealousy;
9. Ultimately, Mark’s mind can’t bear the juxtaposition of Madonna with whore. He fissions his wife into a Madonna figure (but with green eyes – Helen, the virtuous teacher) and a whore (Anna, the cruel teacher who fucks an octopus).
10. Mark’s production of two female figures from his wife is evidence of his own increasing schizophrenia. Mark’s schizophrenia is documented in the progressive deterioration of his physical environment, the clutter and debris that takes over his apartment. (This motif derives from Polanski’s horror film Repulsion made in 1965 and starring Catherine Deneuve.) At the end of the movie, Mark has also divided into two figures, one of them with green or blue alien eyes demonstrating his origin in the protagonist’s insane jealousy.
11. Walls are necessary. The wall keeps the capitalist West (virtuous, gentle and artistically free) from being contaminated by its opposite, the Communist regimes in the East. Berlin is where this division between two types of political being is made manifest. Both sides of the Wall imagine the political system on the other side as being nightmarish and monstrous. But the Wall keeps the two polities from destroying one another.
12. Walls are necessary in metaphysics as well. We need to keep God’s mercy and grace and goodness separated from the Devil’s cruelty, determinism, and evil. But as the film progresses, the wall separating Good from Evil (God from Devil) collapses – God becomes synonymous with the monstrous creature. Good and Evil, God and the Devil are dissolved into a single apocalyptic presence;
13. The film’s color-scheme is icy blues and jaundiced yellows. It can be demonstrated that blue represents goodness and love; yellow represents bilious jealousy and hatred. Blue and yellow combine to make green, that is, the green-eyed offspring of jealousy.
14. Jealousy is an unstable combination of obsessive love and obsessive hatred. Again, the wall has broken down separating states that sanity requires that we keep apart from one another.
15. In the end of the film, Mark (a figure who has penetrated the porous border between East and West) is associated with the catastrophic collapse of the walls by which we retain sanity. Green-eyed Mark demands to be let into the apartment. Bob recognizes that he is a monster and no longer his father – he screams that the man should not enter the apartment. At that moment, the walls symbolically collapse in the apocalypse: we hear bombs and jet planes screaming across the sky as the wall falls apart, East merges with West in a final desperate battle, God and the Devil are one, love and hatred dissolve into a single monstrous creature. “Either/or” collapses into a chaotic “both/and”.
The power of Zulawski’s film is to find implicit in a casual instance of adultery the end of the world. The collapse of a deeply felt relationship is like the end of days. It seems unimaginable that anything can survive the turbulence of feelings in which love disintegrates into divorce. Of course, Zulawski’s film is profoundly ridiculous and absurd. But when we love and hate, we are ridiculous and absurd beings.
Possession means to physically “possess” – that is, to take hold of the object of our desires. But it also means to be “possessed” literally by literally powers.
Zulawski’s commentary
Zulawski provides a detailed, if often wrong-headed commentary on the movie. He seems to locate the source of the disturbance in the world entirely in Anna and her betrayal. Remarkably, he seems generally unable to come to terms with the fact that Mark has gone completely insane as well. Although Zulawski seems to understand that Mark is crazy on some level, he can’t really ascribe actual insanity to his protagonist. Thus, his analysis of what he thought he was doing in making the film is curiously blind to Mark’s complicity in his wife’s madness and the fact that the husband has gone totally mad by the end of the movie. Zulawski ascribes rational motives to Mark which are not visible on-screen. Indeed, one account of the movie might be that the crazy person initially predominant in this folie a deux is Mark. It may be that Mark’s obscene jealousy precedes Anna’s adultery – as in Shakespeare’s great and obsessive studies in jealousy, perhaps, it is the man’s fear of being cuckolded that, in fact, provides the motive force for the adultery that, ultimately, transpires – or is perceived to transpire. Anna is not alone in her madness. Mark, perhaps, is crazier than she is.
Zulawski says --
Zulawski says: If a film lacks morals, this absence will be decisive. My films are moral.
Zulawski says: The evolution of film is toward a camera-penis that penetrates a woman. Fortunately, this was early accomplished. We call this pornography. Pornography brought film development to an end and freed us to do other thing with the medium.
Zulawski says: Life is a struggle between the Devil and Angels.
Zulawski says: Film comes from a simple vision: We are all unhappy.
Zulawski says: Communism evacuates from the body politic something evil that begins to live on it own. Anna imposes her madness, her reality, on her husband like Communism imposed its false reality on those living in Communist countries.
Zulawski says: Cinema is acting, doing. Speaking is just radio.
Zulawski says apropos commercial films: Nothing wants to bite anymore. Films want to lick.
Zulawski says: The staircase in the end is Jacob’s ladder. It leads from earth to heaven. After wrestling the angel, Jacob is given the ladder. All the staircases in my films are Jacob’s ladder.
Zulawski says: Mark has been away spying in Bulgaria or Rumania. That’s what the detail of the pink socks means. Anyone from the Communist bloc would immediately recognize this reference – I’m talking about a tyrant who thinks he is hip and modern because he wears pink socks. I don’t expect audiences not raised under Communism to understand this reference but this would be immediately apparent to a Pole. I’m not making the movie for Western audiences.
Zulawski says about Possession: It took 28 years for this film to find an audience. Recognition softens old age. It’s better than being bitter.
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