White Epilipesy and the 21st Century Problem

Leos Carax was back in New York not only ago, in discussion with Richard Brody about his movies. If anyone can offer an atmosphere condusive to Carax's interview phobia it's Brody. Both men appear to be on the same wavelength, defined by a reverence for cinema unrivaled by most. Across town at Lincoln Center a few days prior Carax's evil twin Philippe Grandrieux was in town with a new experiment to lay on our unprepared brains. I've written before that I think that Grandrieux is the best filmmaker alive; his last four features standing as testament not only to his unique powers as a director, but the very boundaries of cinema and a cinematic experience. Since the start of his feature filmmaking career, his work has just gotten stranger and more beautiful. He's slowly evaporated his narratives, turning them more and more elemental and bare; just enough to get from one end of a sensory journey to the other.  His latest and second in the span of a year is his aesthetic purified of all narrative. The beguiling White Epilepsy has no plot to speak of. It's a straight-up experiment and thus doesn't fit so neatly in his ouevre. His previous work, the documentary Perhaps Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve - Masao Adachi was very clearly his work, even if it told someone else's story. No one else sees the world the way he does. And as he now always holds the camera himself he is presenting a view of the world that is as close to how he sees things/how his brain translates the relationship people have to their environment as possible. The world may not appear as washed out mini-dv with high grain and contrast, but I have no doubt that this is what his brain makes of it. His films seem projected from the very recesses of his sensory perception. If it fails, as it has to many, it's because there is no reprieve from his vision this time out. No story of character to comfort a viewer adrift in this hopeless, dark landscape of primal instincts. I can't say I enjoyed this as much as his other work (it stands just above his debut doc Retour à Sarajevo, another journey with no parameters), but I wager few other films will occupy my mind the way this does.

It's purely an immersion, after your eyes, ears and unconscious mind. It doesn't go for the tactile the way Tom Tykwer might, or touch, smell and taste like only Cate Shortland can seem to. It's about presenting visions that seem to want you to look away. The motion of the bodies on display, already deliberate before being slowed in post, is there to play games with your perception of what's really in front of you. Their shapes merge like optical illusions. Strange designs and patterns appear in their skin as if drawn on by computers. Their fists seem to seamlessly penetrate their skin as if merging into the same form. But is any of that imagined shapeshifting real? Can't be, right? Grandrieux doesn't use digital post. Or anyway, he hasn't in the past. There's something pure about his vision (an acceptable purity I associate with Tsai Ming-Liang) that precludes the thought or even the notion that he'd fuck around with green screens. He tricks you the hard way, by simply showing you images, faces and bodies in the most extreme conditions imaginable. He shows them in forms so abject and close-up, they're barely recognizable. And he's playing the same game here, so it doesn't seem right that he'd deliberately write something in the veins of his actors. Not when they've gone so far into character; they've committed to their very bones. Yet it also seems wrong that I saw his female performer's navel appear to invert before my very eyes, but the image below confirms that I didn't imagine it. But is it real simply because it's there? As a work of hypnosis, something akin to Nolan's shared dreaming or the audience gathering to sleep in the opening moments of Carax's Holy Motors, it works splendidly. Indeed my perception of the film has shifted so much since watching it that I feel as though it put a spell on me and the effects still linger. Manoel De Oliveira and Alain Resnais produce this same effect, especially in their latest works, Gebo and the Shadow and You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, which tellingly do manipulate their environs through digital effects. Their characters and spaces are frequently unflinching, forcing our brains to move them and see more in them. But I believe they encourage viewers to drift off, to sleep and let dreams enter the equation. My girlfriend and I both nodded off for a brief second during Gebo, which only intensified the experience, and allowed us to leave the confines of the set and into the unreal world outside that Oliveira created. One of my greatest cinematic memories is of seeing Resnais' tricksy epic Stavisky at the Harvard Film Archive, a place I have the fondest memories of (I saw the bulk of Grandrieux's films there). My friend Laura and I went on a frigid night in January and as Resnais began holding up more and more mirrors to the story and its characters, beautiful streams of information flying all around us, we both drifted off and began dreaming along with the movie. We both woke up a few minutes later. It was more like communion than a simple viewing. It's more than a film and more than a dream. I fell asleep during my first viewing of David Lynch's sublime, final film Inland Empire, and upon awakening couldn't determine what was real and what was in my head. I can't help thinking this would please the man. It felt like tapping into the film's dreams. Takashi Miike says his favourite films are often the ones that put you to sleep. I think he's got something there. What are films but dreams we're awake for? Awake in the dark, as Roger Ebert put it.

The devilish thing about film now in the hands of masters like Resnais and Oliveira is that they've had time to consider the change. They put great deals of energy into how to use digital to their advantage, rather than simply adopt it. In their latest films, they go out of their way to prove that environments can become anything through digital manipulation; their landscapes are imaginary, as deep in the brain as memories. In Gebo and the Shadow we see a young man imagined by his family, standing alone in an imagined tableaux. Nothing but the boy is real. Similarly once the characters in You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet begin taking part in the drama they see onscreen, suddenly the world they actually inhabit becomes a green screen-aided studio set where a train can come by at any moment, killing an offscreen character. Anything becomes possible. When we dream, we can suddenly not imagine anything outside the realm of possibility, because they've taken away the safety of the concrete image. Grandrieux and Carax do the same but through rather less obvious means. In Holy Motors, Carax deliberately goes into a green screen studio to pull back the fabric of reality and admit that nothing could be real, but then sticks to the truth of an image he can actually provide. The trickery from then on is all in make-up and practical effects. Carax believes in the image's power, but knows it can be tainted, brings us right to the brink of the uncanny valley showing us its grotesque imitation and abandonment of the reality of the image and then retreats. Cinema and the purity of the image can no longer be trusted and so Carax's brand of cinema (frames so carefully chosen that they burn into your memory, as if your brain were celluloid and silver halide crystals) is now up against the challenges of the 21st century. Anything can be faked, so what's real? What was ever real? Grandrieux, Resnais and Oliveira are all masters at imprinting memories outside of the image in the mind of their viewers. They confront the 21st century problem by figuring out ways to say more than can be written. Is White Epilepsy really as simple as I recall the experience being? Or is it a devastating treatise on the conflicting instincts of the body vs the mind's search for order? It's probably both and if success is measured in what we make of the piece after it's done, it should be called one, even if I have no aching desire to rewatch and better understand the thing anytime soon, a first since Sarajevo.

 Weirdly, the film that I couldn't help thinking of a sort of analog, at least presentationally, was Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the sort of thing Carax so eloquently dismisses in Holy Motors. The facts of their creation: The Hobbit was shot in 3D at an unprecedented 48 Frames per second, a most unusual and supposedly groundbreaking format. White Epilepsy is shot in the same kind of lowlight that 3D unintentionally produces and in the slender frame usually associated with videos shot on an iPhone. These are two different acceptances of modern technology. The Hobbit came after an unsuccessful attempt at a new genre and was viewed by most critics and fans of the director's past work (though not necessarily fans of the idea) as a major comedown from the remarkable achievement of the first films in the series. White Epilepsy is a return to the experimental form of its director's three greatest successes after a diversion into documentary, and is seen by many as something of a comedown. The difference is that The Hobbit's changes have zero to do with the skills of its director, and everything to do with how we view them. Peter Jackson shows no overt signs of being a better director because his juggling of elements than when he took on the original Lord of the Rings films, so The Hobbit will play as stagnation to those who expected progress. In fact, to some it was viewed as devolution. By contrast, White Epilepsy is purposefully a devolution from narrative to simply a single event. So it is engineered as a comedown, in essence, even if I'm sure Grandrieux didn't make Epilepsy to be compared unfavourably to his other films, he was also very clearly following his mind to a place where his entire toolkit as a director was not needed or entirely welcome. The question that most interests me most now: which of these artists was taking the greater risk?

The best director alive

The way that some people show me the world is often as thrilling or more so than how I experience it. Minutes into It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi I was in another world. One of primordial darkness and disorienting passage from place to place, the world made flat so that Philippe Grandrieux's camera could pass over its surface with the ease of an air hockey puck across the table. He films the world with more perception, detail, grace and most importantly a sense of appreciation for what it all means in front of his camera. He gets more than we see. This may sound like a rather timid admission; the world's a beautiful, terrifying and stimulating place and I would never say that I'd prefer to see it on a screen than in reality (at least not all the time), but film can show you the world in a way that you can never experience it firsthand. Film can, in certain hands, show a version of the world that is aesthetically specific, and to my way of thinking, better than the way we experience it, if one can quantify these things. It's obvious enough to say that the way we see things will never be as crisp as the cinematography of Roger Deakins. But I mean to go a step further and say that the mark of the greatest filmmakers is presenting life in a sensorily recognizable fashion and doing our point of view and sense one better. In other words it's a version or vision of life that I wouldn't at all mind jumping into. Would that my vision were as clear as Emmanuel Lubezki's camera lens.

 Which is my way of saying I have a rather stiff set of criteria for great filmmakers. I want people whose versions of reality best anything I've ever seen. People who look through a lens and see something the rest of us can't. This leads us down a tricky path; style v. substance. What I'm talking about here probably sounds like I'm more interested in the way somethin shoots, rather than what they shoot. That's only partly true. A simple (if reductive) way of thinking about film is that there are two kinds of great director: John Ford and Orson Welles. Ford thought of the best way to tell the story, Welles used the cinema like it was one more device with which to perform his magic. His most distinctive films drip with his influence, as if he had simply extended his arm and recorded it with his hand like he was casting a spell. Ford had a painter's eye and a way with his actors, but he never threw himself into his work with the same youthful zeal as Welles. He never forced his camera uncomfortably close to his actors, never used the full potential of cinema. Ford does the best job possible; Welles was looking to explode the possible.  You know a Ford film just as you know a Welles film, but you'd never mistake the passion evident in The Chimes at Midnight for that in The Searchers. I love Ford and I love a sturdy, beautiful story, but what puts me in front of a movie screen is the possibility I'll see someone who knows something I don't; who uses the cinema in a way most of us have never dreamed of. If this person also tells a beautiful, sturdy story, all the better. I like a film that thinks, as Kent Jones puts it, that connects with history even as it writes it, a film that changes with every viewing.


So, what exactly are we talking about. There are directors who have a unique voice, whose fingerprints are all over the film, as if they'd sculpted the environs from clay. Wes Anderson, Godard (pre-68 and again post-78), Byron Haskins, Frank Tashlin and Kihachi Okamoto all have perfect, distinct handwriting; Whether through cutting, framing, design, all of those things or more, you know it's them. That's important to me, but what's more is that I connect with them. I appreciate Okamoto's sense of humour, his assured compositions, the way he frames people as if they were gods or jungle cats, I like his machine gun editing and that he shoots like he knows his films will move like someone were changing the reels with a baseball bat. I like that he did this in the face of a Japanese masterclass of filmmakers like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kinoshita and Ichikawa, whose respective styles weren't so much different from the viciousness of Okamoto's as they were reverse polarity. He engaged with recent Japanese history in a more brutal way than any one of his peers dared to. But what holds him back from becoming the best in my estimation is that he rarely conversed with other filmmakers and other films. He blazed his own trail and did a first rate job writing history in fire, but I'm too in love with the medium to ignore its place in an artist's output. You need to love the cinema as passionately as you make use of it. Okamoto flirted and joked with Japanese film, but the deadly serious business he got up to when he set his mind to it was insular from the tradition he stood outside of. Byron Haskins had a similar problem. Though he filmed with boyish enthusiasm and had an immaculate sense of how to capture his luscious production design, he was telling stories. Pure and simple. He just did it better than most.

I was asked lately who my favourite living director was. Luckily I'd just figured that out a few days ago after my first viewing of Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve. In my opinion, Grandrieux has the most vital point of view of any director alive. Every frame is his, through and through. And he's engaged with the medium. He speaks to it delicately while plowing through norms and constraints. His film on Masao Adachi and his plan to make more films about politically engaged filmmakers proves it beyond my assumptions about his influences. His films echo with the whispers of Jean Epstein, Krzyzstof Kieslowski, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Stan Brakhage, though his voice is loud enough to overpower them. He puts his camera in darkness and places no one else has ever explored. He allows no distance from subject and audience. Faces take up the entire frame, withholding secrets and revealing truths. He uses the medium like no one else on earth and seems to understand something about its potential that escapes the rest of us. In other words, a unique and neccesary voice. The artform would be poorer for his never having picked up a camera, though as I'm sure he'd tell you, that was never an option. That's not to say he doesn't have stiff competition. Terrence Malick essentially invented a kind of artistic American cinema that people will continue borrowing from for decades to come (I count myself among his acolytes/scavengers). Both Agnes Varda and Marco Bellocchio have a way with cutting and framing that makes even their slightest or most confusing stories seem absolutely thrilling. Not to mention that they've made more classics than are produced in a given year, respectively. Varda has a view into romantic and familial relationships that cuts to the heart of any issue, weaving impressionistic tales of longing from our inevitable foibles. Bellocchio has a bite that rivals Okamoto's, but a dark poetry in place of his Japanese peer's assaultive montage and bloody politics. Bellocchio plunges headfirst into troubled waters he knows he can't still; his aim isn't to find cures for the Italian political ills he dramatizes, merely to find an entry point in the discussion. He's essentially performing an autopsy on the Italy he grew up with, and hoping we can prevent the disease next time. But it's not all darkness, he sympathizes and humanizes even the strangest and lowest creations; look no further than Vincere, a story that really has no clear heroes, and see what he makes of every character. No one is simply a villain, nor is anyone without fault or blame. And then of course there is Tomas Alfredson. Having never been able to find a complete version of his first feature, I can't say for sure he's always been a genius, but I can tell you that he, like Grandrieux, gets something that the rest of us do not. His absolute control over his images is unquestionable. He seems to have directed the dust in the air around his characters. He owns all of it, quietly and without hubris or distracting pride. He examines the past and then recreates it perfectly. He makes the world cinematic while seemingly making it ordinary. That's a rare talent.

You can't exactly say "best" about anything, though god knows I do it all the time. Really, what's important is knowing about yourself what you're looking for. You learn a lot about yourself when you realize what you value in artistic expression. And furthermore if you figure out what you love recognizing in the work of others, you figure out what you want to say yourself. Studying Grandrieux and his influences has opened a world of possibilities I wouldn't otherwise know about. When you discover that there are still places unexplored, it revitalizes my (your, whosever) drive to tell stories unlike anything ever told before. I've seen them. I know that there are people making films in ways that I'll never know how to do. It's at times like those, when I've just finished a film by Philippe Grandrieux,  Terrence Malick, PT (and Wes) Anderson, Agnes Varda, Marco Bellocchio, Tomas Alfredson or anyone who pushes the medium into new direction, that I'm most excited to pick up a camera again.