Alan Resnais was something of an over-achiever. Night and Fog, his thirty-minute examination of the aftermath of the Holocaust, has serious claims to the titles of both finest short and finest documentary ever made; Mon Oncle d’Amerique, which Resnais shot in Montreal, is frequently cited by Canadian critics as the best film ever to emerge from their country; Hiroshima Mon Amour became a monument in cinema history and sacred text to the French New Wave; and Last Year At Marienbad managed to be better than them all.
During my abortive college career, I once spoke to a friend about Marienbad, which we had both seen on TV the night before. Overhearing us, another student asked, ‘What’s Last Year At Marienbad?’ As I readied myself to reel off some pretentious claptrap about a haunting investigation into the ambiguity of memory that eschews conventional narrative and reinvents our expectations of the movie, my friend said simply, ‘A beautiful film.’ That, I realised instantly, was the perfect answer.
The geometric precision, what Ian McEwan might call the ‘mathematical grace’, of Marienbad’s set design and cinematography is astonishing. If you’re at all interested in photography, you could have a hell of time just watching this movie with the sound off. (And you’d probably understand as much of what’s going on as you would if you watched it with the sound on.) But beyond just being beautiful, this faultless photography is as important to the film as anything said or done by anyone in it, and moulds the mood and tone of the work as effectively as, in a novel, does perfectly crafted prose. The brilliant clarity of Resnais’s images (particularly notable when watching the digitally re-mastered DVD), doesn’t, as you would expect, make the scenes it shows us easier to comprehend. Instead, the clearness of what we see contradicts the fuzzy uncertainty of what we think about it, and further undermines the faith Hollywood has implanted in us that all films will be unchallenging to watch and easy to understand.
Alongside this, the jarring organ sounds (to call them ‘music’ would be stretching the definition) and stylised performances – which somehow seem both impassioned and emotionally distant – combine to create an onscreen environment unlike any we have seen before. It’s through them that, just as Brazil and Der Cabinet Des Dr Caligari manage to recreate on film something of the experience of dreaming, Marienbad manages to recreate something of the experience of memory.
If you’re suspicious of art house cinema and like your movies to have a gripping story, characters you can relate to and a neat ending that won’t leave you with more questions than answers – or any questions at all – you probably shouldn’t read the next sentence. Marienbad doesn’t really have a plot, it barely has a setting, and we don’t really learn much about its three main characters, who are identified only as A, X, and M. The beautiful A seems to be married to the stern M, and the peculiar X spends most of his time trying to persuade her that she had an affair with him a year ago in Marienbad. After introducing these quasi-characters the film then presents string of unanswerable questions about them: were X and A lovers? Is he lying? Is she? Were they ever together at Marienbad? Were they ever together at all? If you’d never heard of this movie before reading this, then ‘Do we care?’ might seem a more pertinent question. The answer, amazingly, is yes. Few art films are as captivating as this one, and very few are anywhere near as good.
As I’ve no doubt demonstrated, it is difficult to write anything worthwhile about Last Year At Marienbad. The film is so purely a work of a cinema that trying to describe it in words feels like trying to paint a picture to describe a piece of music. In fact, the only words really worth writing about Marienbad are these: watch it.
Austere yet enjoyable, difficult yet exciting, open-ended yet satisfying, Last Year At Marienbad is a treat you should allow yourself at least once. If all that sounds like pretentious claptrap, then just remember that Marienbad is, above everything else, a very beautiful film.
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Shoah (France, 1985)
One of the most moving scenes in cinema simply shows a man, middle-aged and unremarkable, standing in a field. The field was once the site of the Chelmno concentration camp and, of the 400 000 Jews shipped there by the Nazis, the man, Simon Srebnik, was one of only two who survived. ‘No can describe it,’ he says. ‘No one can recreate what happened here … and no one can understand it.’
In this excruciating scene, the first in the film, Srebnik expresses the ethos of the whole picture: no one can recreate the Holocaust on screen, and no one can comprehend it sitting in a cinema – but, that said, it’s vital we try. ‘I’m not in the mood to see a 4-hour documentary on Nazis,’ says Annie Hall when her boyfriend suggests they take in The Sorrow and the Pity. You have to wonder how she would fare in front of Shoah, a 9-hour documentary on the Final Solution.
Shoah contains no re-enactments, no archive footage, and little authorial narration. Instead, the film consists almost entirely of interviews with those who survived, witnessed, or perpetrated the Holocaust. As they talk we sometimes watch them, and sometimes footage of the sites where the events they describe took place: now-innocuous sections of the Polish countryside, the train tracks over which hundreds of thousands were driven their deaths, and the ruins and relics of the death camps themselves. (Even more unsettling than images of the disused concentration camps are shots of the places where life has carried on. Auschwitz, at least, has become a museum and an eternal reminder of what went on within it; far worse are the streets that now have no Jewish residents, and the towns where the locals are no longer sure if there was ever a synagogue.)
Because of its style, there is some debate over whether this is actually a documentary, with its director, Claude Lanzmann (who is, incidentally, professor of documentary film at the European Graduate School in Switzerland), chief among those who insist it isn’t. To me, the argument is irrelevant: whether we call this a documentary, a non-fiction film or an anthology of oral history is immaterial. What matters is what is onscreen – and what is onscreen is a miraculous picture, one that has the potential to alter anyone who sees it.
To create such a work Lanzmann employed a number of practices that would draw criticism had they been used to educate us about any other subject. He promised contributors (admittedly former Nazis) that not even their names would be mentioned in the film, and then secretly filmed them; he badgered interviewees (many of them Holocaust survivors) until they broke down and described experiences they were clearly beyond uncomfortable talking about; and he door-stepped people who categorically had no wish to be filmed. Few would argue that he shouldn’t have used these tactics: it’s through them that he manages to paint, better than any other filmmaker, a portrait of industrialised evil on an international scale grounded in the rawest experiences of the individuals involved.
Take, for example, the moment when Abraham Bomba, a Jewish barber put to work in Auschwitz, is hounded out of his tearful silence and delivers, with Lear-like intensity, a description of the fellow barber forced to cut the hair of his wife and sister without telling them that, moments later, they would be gassed. Now consider how much would have been missed had Lanzmann complied with Bomba’s request that he stop shooting 5 minutes earlier.
Of all Lanzmann’s debatable methods it is the secret filming that produces the most affecting material. At one point, convinced that no one beside Lanzmann can hear him, a former concentration camp guard named Franz Suchomes sings an upbeat anthem penned about Treblinka by one of his fellow guards. I would call it the most chilling moment I’ve ever seen on film, were it not for what follows immediately afterwards: Suchomes relaxing into his seat and announcing cheerily, ‘No Jew knows that [song] today.’
If you don’t fancy 566 minutes of the most unremitting horror you’ll ever hear about, I don’t blame you. But if you decide not to seek out Shoah ask two questions of yourself:
1) How many movies have you seen that genuinely had the power to readjust your perceptions of both modern history and the human condition?
and
2) Can you afford to pass on one that does?
Whenever I watch Shoah, I’m overcome by the idea that any other film I’ve ever called powerful or important is insignificant by comparison. That notion is nonsense, but it does indicate how overwhelming an experience Shoah is. I’m sure anyone who’s ever sat all the way through it (and I warn you: as 9½ hours of nothing but the naked realities of the Nazi death camps it’s as much of an ordeal for the emotions as it is for the arse) has at some time felt the hyperbole they usually throw at great films to be suddenly, and startlingly, insufficient.
I don’t believe in the concept of ‘must see’ movies. I could never suggest someone’s experience of cinema, or of life, could be invalidated simply by not having seen La Grande Illusion or Casablanca, much as I adore them. Subsequently, I’m not going to say ‘everyone should see Shoah’ – but I will say that I cannot imagine anyone who would not benefit from doing so.
In this excruciating scene, the first in the film, Srebnik expresses the ethos of the whole picture: no one can recreate the Holocaust on screen, and no one can comprehend it sitting in a cinema – but, that said, it’s vital we try. ‘I’m not in the mood to see a 4-hour documentary on Nazis,’ says Annie Hall when her boyfriend suggests they take in The Sorrow and the Pity. You have to wonder how she would fare in front of Shoah, a 9-hour documentary on the Final Solution.
Shoah contains no re-enactments, no archive footage, and little authorial narration. Instead, the film consists almost entirely of interviews with those who survived, witnessed, or perpetrated the Holocaust. As they talk we sometimes watch them, and sometimes footage of the sites where the events they describe took place: now-innocuous sections of the Polish countryside, the train tracks over which hundreds of thousands were driven their deaths, and the ruins and relics of the death camps themselves. (Even more unsettling than images of the disused concentration camps are shots of the places where life has carried on. Auschwitz, at least, has become a museum and an eternal reminder of what went on within it; far worse are the streets that now have no Jewish residents, and the towns where the locals are no longer sure if there was ever a synagogue.)
Because of its style, there is some debate over whether this is actually a documentary, with its director, Claude Lanzmann (who is, incidentally, professor of documentary film at the European Graduate School in Switzerland), chief among those who insist it isn’t. To me, the argument is irrelevant: whether we call this a documentary, a non-fiction film or an anthology of oral history is immaterial. What matters is what is onscreen – and what is onscreen is a miraculous picture, one that has the potential to alter anyone who sees it.
To create such a work Lanzmann employed a number of practices that would draw criticism had they been used to educate us about any other subject. He promised contributors (admittedly former Nazis) that not even their names would be mentioned in the film, and then secretly filmed them; he badgered interviewees (many of them Holocaust survivors) until they broke down and described experiences they were clearly beyond uncomfortable talking about; and he door-stepped people who categorically had no wish to be filmed. Few would argue that he shouldn’t have used these tactics: it’s through them that he manages to paint, better than any other filmmaker, a portrait of industrialised evil on an international scale grounded in the rawest experiences of the individuals involved.
Take, for example, the moment when Abraham Bomba, a Jewish barber put to work in Auschwitz, is hounded out of his tearful silence and delivers, with Lear-like intensity, a description of the fellow barber forced to cut the hair of his wife and sister without telling them that, moments later, they would be gassed. Now consider how much would have been missed had Lanzmann complied with Bomba’s request that he stop shooting 5 minutes earlier.
Of all Lanzmann’s debatable methods it is the secret filming that produces the most affecting material. At one point, convinced that no one beside Lanzmann can hear him, a former concentration camp guard named Franz Suchomes sings an upbeat anthem penned about Treblinka by one of his fellow guards. I would call it the most chilling moment I’ve ever seen on film, were it not for what follows immediately afterwards: Suchomes relaxing into his seat and announcing cheerily, ‘No Jew knows that [song] today.’
If you don’t fancy 566 minutes of the most unremitting horror you’ll ever hear about, I don’t blame you. But if you decide not to seek out Shoah ask two questions of yourself:
1) How many movies have you seen that genuinely had the power to readjust your perceptions of both modern history and the human condition?
and
2) Can you afford to pass on one that does?
Whenever I watch Shoah, I’m overcome by the idea that any other film I’ve ever called powerful or important is insignificant by comparison. That notion is nonsense, but it does indicate how overwhelming an experience Shoah is. I’m sure anyone who’s ever sat all the way through it (and I warn you: as 9½ hours of nothing but the naked realities of the Nazi death camps it’s as much of an ordeal for the emotions as it is for the arse) has at some time felt the hyperbole they usually throw at great films to be suddenly, and startlingly, insufficient.
I don’t believe in the concept of ‘must see’ movies. I could never suggest someone’s experience of cinema, or of life, could be invalidated simply by not having seen La Grande Illusion or Casablanca, much as I adore them. Subsequently, I’m not going to say ‘everyone should see Shoah’ – but I will say that I cannot imagine anyone who would not benefit from doing so.
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