Robert Bresson: First Communion (by Dennis Cooper)

In the early '80s, a friend invited me to a screening of Robert Bresson's Devil, Probably, on the condition that, no matter what, I not say a word about it afterward.

He claimed that Bresson's films had such a profound, consuming effect on him that he couldn't bear even the slightest interference until their immediate spell wore off, which he warned me might take hours. He was not normally a melodramatic, overly sensitive, or pretentious person, so I just thought he was being weird–until the house lights went down. 

All around us, moviegoers yawned or laughed derisively; some even fled the theater. But, watching the film, I experienced an emotion more intense than any I'd ever have guessed art could produce. The critic Andrew Sarris, writing on Besson's work, once famously characterized this reaction as a convulsion of one's entire being, which rings true to me. Ever since, I've imposed basically the same condition on those rare friends whom I trust enough to sit beside during the screening of a Bresson film, and I'm not otherwise a particularly melodramatic, sensitive or pretentious person. 

Bresson isn't just my favorite artist. There's a whole lot more to it than that, though the effect he has had on me is too enormous and personal to distill. On a practical level, his work constructed my sensibility as a writer by offering up the idea that it was possible for an artwork's style to embody a kind of pragmatism that, if sufficiently rigorous and devoted to a sufficiently powerful subject, would eliminate the need within the work for an overt philosophical or moral standpoint. Every artist tries in some way to find that least compromised intersection of planes where his or her ideas meet and slightly exceed the world's expectations, but I don't think anyone has found a more perfectly balanced style than Bresson. His work communicates an unyielding, peculiarly personal vision of the world in a voice so sterilized as to achieve an almost inhuman efficiency and logic. The result is a kind of cinematic machine whose sets, locations, narrative, and models (Bresson's preferred term for actors) function together as an unhierarchical unit so perfectly self-sufficient that all that is revealed within each film is the disconcerting failure of the models to fulfill Bresson's requirements. Their emotions resonate, despite a conscientious effort on Bresson's part to make them move about and speak as though they have none. The fact that the actors, unlike any other aspect of Bresson's films, are driven by individual feelings draws attention almost by default, and creates a relationship with the audience so intimate that it's almost unbearable in its aesthetic restrictions. 

A full appreciation of Bresson's work requires moviegoers to approach his films as though starting from scratch. This is a huge thing to ask of an audience, which is why Bresson's films will always select their admirers with care and infrequency. But the films earn that degree of commitment because, despite their intensive demands, they ask almost nothing for themselves. They're too plain to be considered experimental or avant-garde, and require no suspension of disbelief. But they're antitraditional as well, although their respect for the tradition of storytelling borders on the fanatical. They're neither difficult nor easy to watch, at least not in the usual senses of those words. Instead of flaunting their difference, or feigning modesty by deferring to the conventions of Hollywood film, they offer up an art so unimpeachably fair, so lacking in ulterior motivation, that the effect is a kind of mimicry of what perception might be like were one capable of simultaneously perceiving clearly and appreciating the process by which perception occurs. The only thing these films ask is that one share a fraction of Bresson's single-minded concern for the souls of young people whose innocence causes them to fail at the cruel, irrevocable task of adulthood. 

Apart from his first feature, the comedy Les anges du péché, and perhaps the curiously terse if fascinating Une femme douce, Bresson never made a film that's less than sublime. For whatever reason, his early, black-and-white films, like Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Mouchette are his most celebrated. But, if anything, his later, less widely circulated color films – Four nights of a Dreamer; Lancelot du lac; The Devil, Probably; and L'argent – are the masterpieces among his masterpieces, to my mind. Many of the aforementioned stylistic tropes for which Bresson is alternately reviled and admired reached their full significance in this latter part of his oeuvre, as the lapsed Catholicism that gave his early, doomed characters the remote possibility of redemption and allowed viewers to interpret this work's introversion as a metaphor for religious self-erasure loses ground to an even more thoroughly hopeless notion of fate as the random and godless chain of events that structures a life. In Bresson's earlier films, the protagonist's almost inevitable suicide is a tragic segue into the comforting delusion of heaven; in the later films, suicide is the inexorable outcome, given the bleak circumstances; and the staggering numbness induced by Bresson's cold, mechanical witness to these deaths forms the least opinionated, and therefore only accurate depiction of, suicide's consequences that I've ever come across. 

アストラル人形//ASTRAL DOLL//YOSHIDA RYO

"And then I take my dolls along with me in my further search for a world of fantasy in the act of photographing them. The instant that I get a glimpse of the fantasy of involving them in a playful story, giving my dolls another dimension of life, is the time when I experience an additional new ecstasy.

In the midst of this fantasy, my dolls are easily dissected and displayed. Sometimes they are thrown out into the snow, sometimes they are baptized in flame, sometimes they become dress-up dolls, sometimes their sleeping form is gazed upon, and sometimes they are stripped to reveal their challenging naked forms. These dolls that are devoid of emotion take on various expressions under circumstances such as these. It may be due to the very fact that they are expressionless that they become mirrors that reflect the heart s of people who view them. This life force is stressed even further in dissection play with these articulated dolls."

– Ryo Yoshida, "Dissection Play" from Articulated Doll

I was in San Francisco two days ago, at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japantown, when I saw this small photo book "Astral Doll"

http://www.amazon.com/Astral-Doll-Ryo-Yoshida/dp/4757208650

 I picked it up and started to page through it – the photographs contained were of articulated dolls by an artist named Ryo Yoshida. Below are the pictures I managed to take of the book before my cell phone died.

Here's links to his website/facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Art-of-Ryoichi-RYO-Yoshida/167327626633926

Ryo Yoshida's Website

Resurrecting Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's 'Last Year at Marienbad'

Introduction:

Fig. 1: Astor Films poster.

Fig. 2 Warning distributed in Astor Films Publicity Packet

In a baroque, ornamented hotel, ghostly bourgeoisie float about, idly play games, and make idle conversation (the weather, statues, pictures) . . . there is a mysterious man, X (Giorgio Albertazzi), a beautiful woman, A (Delphine Seyrig), and her gaunt companion M (Sacha Pitoef) – designated by these letters in the script, all unnamed in the film. X tells A they met the year before. According to him, they had a love affair, but A would not leave with him. She asked him to wait a year. A denies all of this; she cannot remember ever having met him

What happened last year, what is happening right now, at Marienbad? (or was it Karlstadt? or Baden-Salsa?) As the warning above suggests, there is no definite answer; or, as Robbe-Grillet himself puts it, "such questions have no meaning" (FaNN, 152). This is because Marienbad's fundamental subject is the act of narration itself; as X is trying to make A remember, his voice narrates flashbacks and flash-forwards, realizing their story on the screen in present-past, present-future, and present-conditional time. Past, present and future: onscreen, all contradictory, co-mingling, created in the labyrinthine hotel by X's erotic fixation, A's resistance to his narration, and M's guarding omniscience. In this garden à la francaise of forking paths and paradox, the only truth is dialetheic.

Fig. 3: New York Times, Jan. 3rd 1962

By 1960, the crest of the New Wave had broken in New York City with the fervent reception of a diverse group of French films, ranging from Camus' Black Orpheus to Truffaut's The 400 Blows. In America, these films produced high-minded excitement by not only crafting radically new formal methods of cinematic expression, but also by reflecting the intellectual and cultural currents in Europe. Post-war existentialism banished bourgeoisie illusions of security, charging films with an eroticism that was an intoxicating and heady alternative to the heavily censored Hollywood mainstream. Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour was among this first wave, making Resnais a director to watch. After winning the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice film festival, Marienbad went on to explosive critical and commercial success in Paris, with "[Parisians] lining up in record-breaking queues from 2 o'clock in the afternoon" (NYT) to watch the film, sparking lively debates in reviews and among the general populace. By the time Marienbad arrived in New York, its reputation preceded it – Robert Alden noted that "the press here has devoted more space to this picture than any other in recent memory". When released at Carnegie Hall, the film was lauded as essential viewing among the intelligentsia, running for 33 weeks and grossing $250,000 on that initial run (for perspective, the film cost a little over $500,000 to produce).

The critical reaction to the film was overwhelmingly positive. Bosley Crowther called it a "[unique and intense] experience such as you've never had from watching a film" and a "cinematic symphony"; Dwight MacDonald called it the "Finnegan's Wake of the movies". MacDonald perceptively went on to describe the way that "the reflexes to which we have been conditioned by fifty years of cinema are constantly being stimulated, but we are frustrated as Pavlov's dogs". All the cues for suspense, emotions and plot were provoked, but without resolution – a theme we will return to later. The Astor Films marketing kit developed for the national release of the film (figs. 1 and 2) emphasized the adjectives accumulating around the film's enigma: "HYPNOTIC, BEAUTIFUL, FASCINATING", each word with a photo of Delphine Seyrig next to it, typographically equating these characteristics of the film to the mythic enigma of femininity. Since the film was not given a national release immediately, by its wider release by Astor in 1963, critic William S. Pechter was complaining that his experience of the film was wholly over-determined by these critical accolades and marketing materials (such as the "Marienbad game" of Nim [matchsticks] from the film being sold in the lobby after the film). When re-released in 2008, reviews were still characterized by a attenuation to the embodied experience of the film – as Anthony Lane puts it, "Seeing the film again, and succumbing, like a dance partner, to its gliding moves, one has to ask: how could a film this beautiful ever have been thought unapproachable?".

A cold sensuous beauty, no doubt, but what do these elusive, gliding moves mean in terms of the relationship between the film and the viewer? What formal techniques lead to the experience of Pavlovian frustration described by MacDonald? Adorno's well-worn dictum on the culture industry seem to perfectly describe the way the film "endlessly cheats consumers out of what it endlessly promises". Sontag proposes a solution to the paradox when she writes in "Against Interpretation" that "the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form" (9). Instead of attempting an analysis of the film's labyrinthine, serial structure – that is, a formal schema resembling an excel spreadsheet of the film's spatio-temporal incompossibility (see fig. 4) and its repeated themes and motifs (a shoe with a broken heel, the clothing worn by the characters),  – my thesis attempted reading of the film, mirroring the ambiguities situated in the "biological dialectic" (Resnais' own term for his collaborations) between Robbe-Grillet and Resnais with those created by the film, arguing that Marienbad's deep structure is a very exact re-capitulation, even parody, of the primordial consciousness of sadism and masochism situated within film spectatorship. These figures are re-articulated in the positions of the characters themselves; X's sadistic narrativizing of A, A's eventual submission to his story, M's possible masochistic pleasure in observing this dynamic. The film pushes and pulls the viewer between these spectatorial positions of sadism and masochism. We experience both the masochistic position of "submitting" to its confusing moves, and the sadistic position of attempting an epistemological conquest, a knowledge of the fiction's "truth". My claim is that Marienbad's active generation of these varying discursive positions for the spectator is cognitively beneficial, creating the possibility of a new type of film-going subjectivity in the spectator.

Fig. 4: La Dernière Clé de Marienbad, published in the special issue of Cahiers du Cinema devoted to Marienbad, shows us the sheet created by script girl Sylvette Baudrot to keep track of all the different timelines in the film. Resnais asked to have it printed upside down.

Alain Resnais: an Illustrated Primer

Alain Resnais on Wikipedia

Alain Resnais was born in Brittany in 1922, and came to filmmaking by way of his early interests in comic books and theater. After training as a film editor, his career as a film réalisateur started in the 1940s with films dealing with the representation of artworks – Van Gogh (1948) and Guernica (1950). 


"The problem was to find out if painted trees, painted houses, and painted characters could, by way of montage, fulfill the roles of real objects and if, in this case, it was possible to substitute for the observer the interior world of an artist for the world that photography revealed" (qtd. in James Monaco's Alain Resnais)




Van Gogh (Alain Resnais, 1948) by Leboc


Van Gogh attempted to re-create the subjective experience of the artist through capturing different elements of the paintings and voice-over – in effect, vivifying the paintings themselves, and making sense of Van Gogh's post-impressionistic brushwork. This same technique was used to explore the fractured representation in Picasso's Guernica.


Resnais - Guernica by Morpheus51100


His next major work was Night and Fog (1955), a documentary which engaged with the issues about representing the Holocaust cinematically. Resnais juxtaposed footage of concentration camps with footage of the empty ruins of Auschwitz as they stood in 1955, seamlessly blending historical past with present into documentary diegesis.

"'Useless to describe what went on in these cells' and 'Words are insufficient,' we are told again and again in the voiceover narration. No description, no picture can reveal their true dimension. And: 'Is it in vain that we try to remember?' Meanwhile, the viewer is calmly given information about the Nazis extermination procedures. Thus the dialectic is set up between the necessity of remembering, and the impossibility of doing so." (Lopate, Criterion Collection)

"Something is being inhibited in our viewing. . . Night and Fog suggests that there may be no
"object" of representation – by which we do not mean that it ever puts into question the existence of the camps. . . but rather suggests that wanting a documentary knowledge of Nazism may be a way of refusing to confront our implication in it." (Bersani/Dutoit 21)

As we see, Resnais filmmaking solidifies in this early period, with his attention to the mechanisms by which the film spectator is involved in the film, what the director can make the audience believe and experience through the blending of voiceover, image, and music. In this case, the experience can be one of a dual consciousness – tempting the viewer to approach the Holocaust "sadistically" as an object of epistemological conquest, but simultaneously refusing to allow the viewer to treat the event as a distinct object.



From these films, Resnais began work on two of his most diagrammatic films, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and Le Chant de Styrene (1958). Both envision the construction of materials – the former, knowledge in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the latter, plastic. Toute la mémoire especially foreshadows Marienbad in important ways – the long tracking shots down the hallways of the library, passages through time and space emphasize the physical reality of the library as a type of rational computer or mind for knowledge, just as the long tracking shots at the beginning of Marienbad create the film-reality of the subjectively contingent fantasy space of the hotel co-created by A, X, M, and the viewer.





The dialectic between historical memory and reality, between documentary fictions and facts, that Resnais created in Night and Fog would again be the focus in his first feature film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959).



By no longer working with these themes within the discourse of the documentary, Resnais was free to explore the possibilities of narrative film fiction. By staging a fiction within the broader context of historical facts, even blending staged fictional footage with documentary footage in the first 20 minutes of the film (and, of course, Emmanuelle Riva's character Nevers is herself an actress, perhaps in that very film). The one night stand between Hiroshima and Nevers, a banal situation, takes on a further significance simply because of its happening here, in the city where the bomb was dropped. The bomb becomes an overwhelmingly unrepresentable object (like the Holocaust in Night and Fog); Hiroshima and Nevers must confront their own separate, limited knowledges of their wartime experiences together in the face of the unspeakable – and yet, as Kaja Silverman points out in her essay "The Cure by Love", it is precisely through speaking and seeing that Nevers and Hiroshima reach the point of psychoanalytic transference.

Alain Robbe-Grillet's Phantasmatic Imagination

By the time Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay for Marienbad in 1960, his four published novels had garnered him a reputation as both a distinct, challenging artist, and chief provacoteur of the left-bank literary scene. In his own words, his first two novels were met with "reproachful half-silence" and "massive and violent rejection by the newspapers" respectively. The first, Les Gommes (1953) was an oedipal detective story where the detective pursues a series of clues to a murderer, only to commit the murder himself. His next novel Le Voyeur (1955) focuses on the mysterious circumenstances surrounding the mutilation and rape of a thirteen year old girl, an "absent event" scrubbed from the narrator's perspective, reminiscent of X's repression of the absent rape scene in the film. Thematically, the concerns with narrative structures are similar to those embodied in Marienbad. Here though, I'd like to touch briefly upon some of Robbe-Grillet's techniques for narrative focalization. Take for example this early short story, "The Dressmaker's Dummy" taken from the collection "Snapshots". 

"Behind the table, the space above the mantel holds a large rectangular mirror in which may be seen half of the window (the right half) and, on the left (that is, on the right side of the window), the reflection of the wardrobe with its mirror front. In the wardrobe mirror the window may again be seen, in its entirety now, and unreversed (that is, the right French pane on the right and the left on the left"
 –The Dressmaker's Dummy

Here, as the reader works to picture the scene, he is forced into a determined perspective. Importantly for Robbe-Grillet, this perspective is one which is unfiltered through a human consciousness. This is one of the ways in which Robbe-Grillet plays with our linguistic spatial perception – it seems that without a grounding consciousness to relate the room and scene to, the readers ability to picture exactly a given perspective ends up leading to a sort of inhibited spatial immersion (see Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 127). In Jealousy, this technique is taken further – to the length of a novel, where the only narrative movement and time is determined by description, and the slight variations in repetition.

Robbe-Grillet's work in film is a different matter however. He believed that Marienbad was, in some sense, the easiest film that anyone could see – one addressed "exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling." (LYAM, 14). However, the film's constant evocations of time and story, perhaps due to Resnais's direction, place the viewer in a position of split consciousness, as "the image keeps us from believing what it affirms, like description can keep us from seeing what it shows." (151).

Precedents:  Pandora's Box, Invention of Morel, Vertigo

Inside the Erotic Dream Machine


"For Resnais conceived Last Year . . . like his other films, in the form of sheets or regions of the past, while Robbe-Grillet sees time in the form of points of present. If Last Year . . . could be divided, the man X might be said to be closer to Resnais, and the woman A closer to Robbe-Grillet. The man basically tries to envelopthe woman with continuous sheets of which the present ins the narrowest, like the advance of a wave, whilst the woman, at times wary, at times stiff, at times almost convinced, jumps from one bloc to another, continually crossing an abyss between two points, two simultaneous presents . . . [their understanding is based on] the coexistence of sheets of virtual past, and a simultaneity of peaks of deactualized present, [the] two direct images of time itself." (105)

Suture: Theorizing Narrative Involvement and Narrative Comprehension

The two central aspects of one might call naive film spectatorship are involvement and comprehension. Comprehension is best described by the cognitive processes of cue elaboration – we cross-reference any on-screen character or situation with the library of generic types created by the viewing of other films. Different types of narrative films encourage different kinds of cue-responses, which is why a New Wave film that consciously works against those cues is different than an easily comprehensible Hollywood thriller. Involvement in a narrative is accomplished by means of the suture, the connection of viewpoints in the film in such a way to create different types of focalization. Žižek describes it as such:

"Firstly, the spectator is confronted by a shot, finds pleasure in it in an immediate imaginary way, and is absorbed by it. Then this full immersion is undermined by the awareness of the frame as such: what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see. I am in a passive position, the show is run by the Absent One (or rather, Other) who manipulates objects behind my back. What then follows is a complementary shot which renders the place from which the Absent One is looking, allocating this place to its fictional owner, one of the protagonists. In short, one passes thereby from imaginary to symbolic, to a sign: the second shot does not simply follow the first one, it is signified by it. (Žižek, 32)"

The key concept here is that moment of signification – it is the second shot that allows the viewer to have a sense of control or involvement as in "this shot was taken from this character's perspective". 

Before we see a single diegetic image, we hear a voice. As the opening credits roll, X describes 

"... Silent rooms, where one's footsteps are absorbed by carpets so thick, so heavy, that no sound reaches one's ear, as if the very ear of him who walks on once again, along these corridors, through these salons and galleries in this edifice of a bygone era, this sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, gloomy hotel ..."

As the credits end, his voice fades into the hotel's mute, non-signifying space, only to return reverberating in hallways with the long tracking shots across the ceiling and walls. These first shots are taken at awkward angles, tracking with a mechanical smoothness, further emphasizing the disjunction between the narrating voice and on-screen image. The introduction of the image conjoined to these repetitive descriptions – sometimes describing what is seen, sometimes what isn't – destabilizes the relationship between unseen narrator and onscreen space. Each image fails to be sutured to an Absent One, and is instead continuing to create an infinite space. Rather than reinforcing an anthropomorphic relationship between spectator and onscreen space, the voice, the body generating the voice, and the gaze of the viewer are all lost in the labyrinth.

Reading Laura Mulvey's germinal essay "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema", I realized that Marienbad, more than any other film I've seen, dramatizes the struggle to create a narrative – prefiguring this essay to demonstrate a sophisticated formal awareness of the normal mechanisms of visual pleasure in cinema, and then subverting. Mulvey theorizes the male gaze in relationship to classic Hollywood cinema. In these films, it is usually the male protagonist who assumes an active role, taking pleasure in looking, while the female is made passive, the beautiful object of the male gaze. Women are often the focalizing point of visual pleasure, but it is important to note that in Mulvey's terms this overwhelming visual pleasure (Imaginary) is a disruptive force in the development of the narrative (Symbolic). To counteract this powerful force that woman has, it is the male character who "controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the 

spectator" (716). 

In Marienbad, X's role as the active constructor of narrative is made obvious through his nearly constant voice-over, attempting to persuade both A and the spectator of the truth of his version of the story. Unlike the classical Hollywood film, A resists from within the confines of her determined position within X's narrative. Early in the film, X speaks in voiceover while we see a shot of A:

"It was in the gardens at Frederiksbad. You were alone, to one side. You were standing a slight angle against a stone balustrade on which you rested your hand, your arm half-extended. You were looking down a central path. You were turned towards me now. But you didn't seem to see me. I looked at you. You didn't make a move."

As X describes her movements, A moves into the positions described:

We have here a dramatization or re-enactment of the Mulvey's theory: the gaze of the masculine characters captures and attempts to narrativize the female character. At this early point in the film, A is easily subjected to this – she follows X's orders. But, later in the film, when X is approaching the absent rape scene, and entering into her room, she is more resistant to being narrativized. The sequence is introduced by shots of X and A wearing the same clothing, in two different spaces, looking to the left off-screen and right off-screen:

The next shot is of A, standing in her room – half in daylight, half in night. She is now occupying a liminal zone of sexuality, where in a sense her "choice" – her choice to remember, to not-remember, to consent or not-consent to sexual intercourse with

That is the secret of aesthetic sublimation: to present fulfillment in its brokenness. 

(Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 111)



Selected Bibliography (with links to full articles):

Articles:
Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. "Sadism and Film: Freud and Resnais." Qui Parle 6.1 (Fall/Winter, 1992): 1-34. full text

Bordwell, David. "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice." Film Criticism IV.1 (1979). limited access


–––––. "Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism VI.2 (1992): 183-198. full text

Clayton, John J. "Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Aesthetics of Sado-Masochism." The Massachusetts Review 18.1 (1977): 106-119. full text

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." (1975) full text

Silverman, Kaja. "The Cure By Love – Hiroshima, Mon Amour" full text

–––––. "Suture" The Subject of Semiotics. full text