Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist

I found this book worthwhile, especially as it is so short.

The author, C. G. Crisp, gives a much more objective interpretation to Rohmer’s films, based on his reading of Rohmer’s interviews and criticism, than I had come to from only the films. Crisp sees the films as a narrative of a journey away from and back to a place in the normal order, an order both natural and moral. I had viewed them as an individual’s struggle toward self discovery. It is only in the last scene, and after many false tries, that it is apparent what the person trully desires. Our usual condition, then, is to be caught up in self deception, making ourselves miserable while trying  both to live out and to rationalize a way of life that does not suit us.

The book dates from 1988, so it does not cover the more recent films, but that hardly makes a difference.

The Fountain

I saw The Fountain on Blu-Ray. Despite advertising that made it seem to be a gnostic film, it is not; the line used “the body is a prison for the soul” comes from the Catholic inquisitor who is an enemy of the film’s protagonists. The message of the movie is that the meaning of life is to become compost for trees, and we should feel liberated by that idea.

This shallow message is carried forward by a lot of imagery and some heavy handed editing. The main character is played by Hugh Jackman, who looks and acts as though his destiny is to play a young doctor on a daytime soap.

This is the third Darren Aronofsky film I have seem. The first, Pi, was quite good. Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain are clinkers.

Irma Vep reissued

The new DVD of Irma Vep is out, this time from Zeitgeist Video.  At last it is an anamorphic transfer, giving significantly better picture quality, but the sound is better too, resulting in more intelligible dialogue. It is stereo with the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Extras include a commentary track (which I have not listened to yet), A “behind the scenes” feature, also with an optional commentary, and a short silent “Portrait of Maggie Cheung” by Assayas. There is also a twenty page booklet with essays “Regarding Maggie” and “Louis Feuillade” (the maker of the original Irma Vep) both by Olivier Assayas, and “The Rapurously Mobile Eye” by Kent Jones of Film Comment.

The behind the scenes feature is not the usual Making Of studio publicity documentary, but footage shot by someone who followed film people with his camera, sometimes to their annoyance, and tried to get them to talk to him. Some of it is at the film production, but some is “here are some film actors coming out of a restaurant”.

Gnosticism in the Cinema

The article on gnostic films is out: Christianity & Society, Vol. XVIII, No.1, April 2008.

http://www.kuyper.org/main/uploads/volume_18_no_1.pdf – p. 48

This article is more or less background to several posts here. It is, however, more about gnosticism than film. The movies are examples of the ideas discussed. I wanted to get past the empty way the label “gnostic” is thrown around, often really meaning “esoteric”, “neoplatonic”, or “I hate this guy, so I will call him a name.”

Back to movies

I hope to get back to movies soon, having spent some months in genealogical and family history research, where I found far more than I expected. Also I have been busy with photo restoration.  I keep thinking I should write something about A Price Above Rubies (Boaz Yakin, 1998), which stikes as a much more revealing film than its creators probably intended.

Saved! and Jesus Camp essay.

The essay on Saved! and Jesus Camp, updated from the earlier web site are in Christianity & Society Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter 2007)

http://www.kuyper.org/main/publish/journal.shtml#118

Goya en Burdeos

Goya en Burdeos (1999), written and directed by Carlos Saura, also uses the imagery from Kubrick’s 2001. This is all the more striking in that throughout the movie the scenes not only display his paintings, and show the creation of his paintings in context, but they sometimes come alive as tableuxs to become scenes. Yet for the death of Goya the available material would have been the early (1788) St. Francis Borja at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, and this is not what Saura wanted.

Instead we find Adam’s gesture copied by Kubrick from the Sistine ceiling. (See the image in the September 3 post below.)

Goya says: “My life has gone by like a gust of wind. I’ve forgotten how I was as a child, I’ve forgotten how I was as a youth, and now, Who am I now?”

He raises his hand further into the light and uses it to cast a shadow, and draw a spiral around his own face with the shadow of his finger. Spirals recur throughout the film. In fact, from here there is a cut to a shot up a spiral staircase down which is daughter runs to come to him.

Where in 2001 and in Soderbergh’s Solaris the finger in the image points to a creator/savior figure, here Goya designates himself, but with an enigmatic spiral movement that fits the “Who am I now?”

Next, where the monolith in Kubrick’s image would be, at the foot of the bed, a figure appears off camera and casts a shadow over the bed and over Goya. We know who this figure is because in a earlier scene the figure walked out of a painting and toward Goya’s bed, and Goya addressed it as Death.

At this point Saura does allow himself a quotation from The Impenitent. (Notice the similar position of the right arm, and the two pillows with frills around them) But by inserting it into images from Kubrick, and other insertions, he has altered the meaning. Where the demons appear in The Impenitent, there is now Goya’s daughter and her shadow, and St. Francis Borja has become Death.

Saura’s film then disolves to an empty white bed, similar to the 2001 fetus on the bed shot, but without the fetus, and then to a scene of birth, where a camera enters the room from falling show outside through a window to this view:

This is the last shot in the film, and is parallel to the star child image in Kubrick’s.

Saura’s film closes with a card quoting Andre Malraux: “After Goya modern painting begins.” Saura, then, is pointing to the birth of something new. With the death of Goya comes a discontinuity and modern painting appears.

The meaning of artistic references in 2001 and Solaris

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) famously ends with the astronaut Dave pointing toward an alien monolith using the gesture with which Adam reaches toward God on the Sistine chapel ceiling in the portrait of creation. The aliens who sent the monolith, then, are man’s creators through their interference with the evolutionary process and by recreating man free of his bodily limitations at the end of the film.

 

 

Andrei Tarkovsky decided to reply to this in his Solyaris (1972), ending with an image of human reconciliation taken from Rembrandt’s The return of the prodigal son. (This painting is in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg). The difference is in the diagnosis of man’s problem and the direction of its solution. Kubrick is interested in the disparity between man’s nature and his aspirations. Since the problem is in his being (his physical constitution) what he needs as a re-creation on a better model. Tarkovsky starts with man’s moral brokenness, which precedes the problems of his physical nature, though they are related. The physical context, which Kubrick saw as the problem, must be restored before man can approach a moral reconciliation.

 

Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) returns to Kubrick’s image from 2001. Why is that?

In this picture the psychologist Chris Kelvin, sent to fix the failed mission at a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, reaches out to the hominid created by the planet. By this time in the film these hominids are seen as extensions of the planet’s consciousness, with a particular mission to man, making them analogous to the alien monoliths in 2001. These hominids, patterned on human memories, have a self-identity, but it is only as complete at the available memories of them seen from the outside viewers who remember them.

The images in 2001 and Solyaris occur at the end of these films. Soderbergh, however, uses his a little earlier, when the space station is being absorbed into the planet. Then the real ending starts and it is there that the topic of reconciliation is taken up.

Kelvin seems to have returned to earth but it turns out that he is a hominid replica of his original self (which presumably was not able to survive physically on Solaris with the destruction of the space station). The replica of his dead wife, which Solaris had first created on the space station, also appears. He asks her:

“Are we alive?”

To which she answers:

“We don’t have to think like that any more. Everything we have done is forgiven. Everything.”

Here, then, is the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation. But it is only presented when the two can relate as replica to replica. These characters have been recreated, on analogy with 2001, with new bodies for which the problem of mortality is solved. Free of mortality, the picture suggests, there is an easing of the human predicament. The existential crisis is lessened, and with it the problems of meaning and of guilt.

Soderbergh, then, sides with Kubrick. Man’s problem is not in the first place moral and relational, but a problem with his physical nature, which cannot support the aspirations of his mental or psychological nature. When these inner states are made to survive in an indestructible body and environment, sustained by the godlike planet Solaris, man’s problem is eased, if not resolved.

The incoherencies in this are: 1) Is this really Cris Kelvin and his wife, or are they dead with their original bodies, and what the planet has created merely models replicating them? 2) If we don’t “have to think like that any more”, that is, according to the ideas of life and its purpose as they were understood in the natural bodies, what else changes? Is there a place for human purposes, or would they go away with the human bodies and human situations? 3) What can it mean that everything is forgiven? Why does this change of being equate to forgiveness? Who forgave whom? Why does she say “is forgiven” as though a third party did it (the planet Solaris acting in the role of God)? Doesn’t she really mean that the old scores are irrelevant now?

 

El Gnosticismo en el Cine

The Gnosticism in the Cinema essay is now available in Spanish. El Gnosticismo en el Cine PDF (432 k). This is an expansion of the essay that was on the old web site. The English version is supposed to appear this fall in Christianity & Society. The screen shots illustrating the points are only in this online version.

This is an attempt to define and illustrate modern gnosticism, distinguishing it from the ancient type, using movies to bring out the characteristics of gnosticism. It is only secondarily a film essay. I do point to certain incoherencies in gnosticism, which become a problem for movies that seek to express the gnostic vision.

The Round Table

The Biblical Horizons conference has announced that they will be studying Eric Rohmer’s Percival this year. Now that science fiction has been mined out ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector ), the Federal Vision theology is turning to medieval romances about the Holy Grail.

As an antidote, try watching Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974), which deromanticizes this material.