Sans Soleil!

Sans Soleil was exactly what I needed to watch at this point in the semester. The most engrossing topics of study in my classes recently have been The Left Bank filmmakers, especially Franju and Renais, in my French Cinema course, and the cultural devastation of nuclear warfare on the Japanese as discussed in my WWII Dialogues on Violence course. As was Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marker’s visual essay served as a crucial curricular vertex.

I found the film beautiful. Marker is a strong writer, unafraid to employ the enigmatic and express the inquisitive. His insight seems able to penetrate any cultural body, while also so phantasmal and ephemeral as to hover gently over it. While watching, it was sometimes difficult to discern if Marker’s anthropological observation guides the viewer towards an analysis of ethnic specificity or abstract universalism—not to say that these perspectives cannot coexist. Marker handles all his subject matter, I believe, with love. A love of contradiction, a love that recognizes the luminous orb in every person’s chest cavity, and knows it to be the very Earth itself.

The narration and imagery dance so harmoniously throughout the film. It was so very difficult to believe that Marker had managed to pair found letters and found footage into such an elegant symbiotic embrace—it simply had to be him. This deliberate formal method, creating for the viewer an experience of hearing a woman recall words from letters accompanied by an image, speaks strongly to the faculty of memory. The narration expands the information of the image, adding context, insight, anecdote. Likewise, the image mounts flesh onto the disembodied narration. The two are interdependent, and it is uncertain whether the image recalls the word or if the word recalls the image.

I was highly cognitively engaged throughout the film. In addition to visually following the images, I had to maintain aural focus in following the narration—often having to momentarily derail from it to explore the massive ontological spaces it produced, unsnarl its enigmatic coils—only to return to the narrative as it continued onward without resolving the quandaries posed. There is a lot to take in. What makes it even more challenging is that this visual/aural cascade flows over many, initially seemingly disparate, cultural platforms. The enterprise in Sans Soleil is to accompany a philosopher of dissociative identity as he teleports transcontinentally and intertextually—simple right?

I want to focus my attention on Marker’s portrait of Japan in the 1980s. Marker's portrait of Japan in many ways contests with the longstanding occidental derision of the nation as coated by procrustean homogenous culture—a derogatory framing of a Japan that rejects individualism and whose hubris lies in the fact that their citizens' hearts beat as one. Sans Soleil, airing almost forty years subsequent to the dropping of the bomb, illustrates a culturally inchoate Japan, whose palpitations are no longer synchronized but polyrhythmic. Wolfgang ball describes the work as Marker’s endeavor to capture the "meshing of cultural customs" in Japan, examining “which elements of Japanese culture will survive in a capitalist self-understanding and which will probably be abandoned." Indeed, Japan in Sans Soleil illustrates recognition of its diachronistic culture: samurai films, tea ceremonies, prayer, sumo wrestling, kimono dress—each, however, re-positioned within a new synchronic context. Japan’s historical chronology is difficult to view as a diachronic whole, as it contains ruptures marked by radical socio-industrial alteration. Japan was at one point an isolated, intranational feudal hermit, organized as a military-nobility caste system under a shogunate. Then, suddenly, it became internationally extroverted, and abruptly adapted itself as a modernist chameleon, championing the Early 20th Century Vogue of mass industrialism and colonial imperialism. For its Eurocentric mimesis, Japan was brutally castrated. In this way, Japan presents a rapid and condensed model of what was for other nations a glacial transition from pre-modern to modern to postmodern.  

Marker, interested in time and memory, shows an interest in understanding the current cultural state of Japan, trying to reconcile the “traditional mythic consciousness and perfection of society” as Ball describes. At times it seems critical—critical of whether the upholding of tradition is sincere or merely a pastiche that necessitates diachronic stability—critical of the future which Japan seeks, what it has built atop its bombed rubble. However, as I said before, Marker approaches his subject with love. I believe that the criticism is not positioned as occidental, haughty towards the orient, but rather, positioned with the orient and criticizing the etiology of toxic occidental ideology within Japan’s cultural and industrial structure. Ball writes, for example, that Marker examines "how Western cultural styles are being reproduced in television” in Japan - no judgement placed on the Japanese as perpetuator of Americanism, but sympathy towards Japan as victim to ongoing American imperialism. Ball describes Marker’s observation position of the “extra terrestrial” as one that “liberates [his] view for abstract concepts.” I concur that Marker, as a European in Japan, is not a superior, but does occupy a unique position to view Japan abstractly and examine how occidentalism has become increasingly manifest.    

Ball describes the television as something that “transmits and receives gazes/images” in Sans Soleil. It is in this way that Americanism is both industrial and cultural - implemented by the machine and reciprocally adopted and accepted by the population. Marker describes a kind of mis-en-abyme in which ubiquitous sentinel surveillance observes a mass populace who itself exercises panopticism over a perpetual manga panorama. The people simultaneously identify with the observer and the observed. Japan seems in many ways virtual. A great epitomization of this is the recurrent cartoon of the train which, as it approaches a break in the tracks, adapts and becomes an airborne vessel. The train, an archetypal symbol of modernity - its chugging a mechanic poetry. The viewer at the front of the train can see the tracks ahead - a linear perspective, the march towards progress, the objective certainty of the renaissance, a sense of time that advances forward through eureka and innovation. Just as modernist certainty lead to the ubermensch, The Third Reich, and the Manhattan Project, the tracks in this cartoon lead to a fatalist rupture. At this impasse, what option does the train have but to enter the virtual, the fantastical, to disavow its own death?    

In this regard, The Zone, the digitalization of images throughout the film, seems to me as a kind of necessary hyperreality. If everything has become an image, then what empowerment is granted by creating an image? Does associating the image with reality simply assimilate oneself to the ideological screen? By tampering with the image, by refusing it as a signifier of something but merely as a signifier - and, by obfuscating the original, making the resultant image a signifier of the mere signifier—the digitalization of The Zone in Sans Soleil allows the individual mastery over technology information rather than submission to it. It recognizes information as information, something that can, and is, manipulated, warped, and contorted.

I could talk about Japan all day, but I should probably wrap up this blog.

Overall, I found the film’s non-linear and transcontinental approach very interesting. Marker jumps, in a way that may seem mercurial, to various places and times without precedent. To me, this nonlinear approach is not meant to hinder our understanding, but expand it. The juxtaposed, disparate fragments allowing the viewer to construct a paradigmatic interweb between resonant syntagmatic elements. The resultant journey transcends travel itself, collapsing spatial boundaries. Any image is relatable to another, emphasizing a terrestrial and humanist unity. If one were to dissolve every shot of Sans Soleil into one, it would produce an image that approaches an integrous anthropological Earth. “Marker likes standing outside the spatial/temporal limits in order to observe the world from a different perspective,” Ball writes. Marker’s geographic range is in a certain sense limited in this film, but if he were ever given the resources to document the full anthropological gamut of Earth, he could have shown the universality, the cultural string theory, binding ever terrestrial.  

To the Wonder

I really enjoyed the editing style used in To the Wonder. It was my first Malick experience. Unlike the editing practice of Intensified Continuity emerging in cinema (Transformers, etc.) in which a short ASL drains the picture of richness, Malick's editing allows for an abundance of ideas and juxtapositions. Malick sequences shots under a narration in combination that you never thought would be syntadgmatically meaningful. Malick does not relate time in a conventional cinematic manner. I can't tell if it augments or diminishes the "standard" amount of time for a scene. For me, the film presented a plentiful variety of shots that each contained a weighty gravity of information. This, in one sense, emphasized a "nowness" like Dorsky, making it difficult to have an accumulated sense of time, since the totality of each shots is only a disparate collection of very brief moments. The syntactical negative space between these shots is unknown. However, the shots are often unconnected and from a variety of locations and time periods. The combinations of these shots form a synecdochical whole that is temporally cast. The negative space between, especially, allows for temporal fathoms, as the viewer constructs indefinitely vast narrative bridges to combine the disparate shots. Malick allows his viewers to practice their emotional intuition. He rarely provides a complete picture, often beginning a seen that seems already midway to fruition. The film has a documentary feel in this regard - the camera happening to be there to capture spontaneous events as opposed to rehearsed and premeditated scenes. Malick grants profundity to the quotidian and subtle. Anything that he shoots seems to serve as a strong symbol or important syntactical element. 

In terms of my experience watching To The Wonder, it was very painful! I suffered a great deal, it was hard to watch the characters struggle. This was especially difficult for me because I (you'd never guess) love to talk and express myself. I would be very fearful of being misrepresented in a situation. it's very challenging to watch a situation crumble due to communication issues. Just as the characters cannot find each other, we cannot find them. These films are the most brutal for me. Any violent film is escapist in the sense that I would not kill another human so to watch a murder in film is disaffecting and distancing, easy to watch. This film shows real pain, real regret. It shows situations I'm afraid of, nightmares that I've seen and fear I'll see again.

I would argue that this film reflects the essential style of Transcendental Cinema. Though not every charactr Transcends - in fact, no character ever reaches full bliss. It does, however, discuss despair, stasis, and how people respond to the conflicts of life. Ben Afleck's character (Neil) reflects the disparity of the transcendental style. Schrader describes disparity as a "growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality." In his case, Neil's existential schism forms a gash dividing his security regarding the endurance of his new family unity. Neil exhibits the symptoms of despair as outlined by Schrader. He persistently "negate[s] his emotions", and overall an inaccessible, stolid character. Though dialogically he is all but impenetrable, his solitary behavior, especially his job , suggest deeper aspects of his character. It is a valid effort to anything done by Neil in the film to be psychologically divulgent - or, moreover, that the transcendental style allows for fluid irrationality and emotional reality. Neil's occupation as an environmental inspector, for example, situates him within literal chasms in the earth. He is knee-deep in the muck and industrial carnage of violated nature, enunciates the Schrader's second level of despair that "all is not right with the banal world." Contrasted against the mud-play scene in Normandy at the film's beginning, the scenes of Neil rummaging through ruined fracking sites evoke a deep sense of terrestrial irresponsibility, a demystification of the natural. Malick's transcendental style allows for multitudinous dimensionality of any image. Neil's occupation, for example, invokes not only a literalization of his marital discord, but speaks to a larger discourse regarding differences between the American and European imaginaries and realities. When Marina and Tatiana move to America, it is framed as more spacious, freer, fantastical. The opening American shots feature carefree dancing through field acres, Walmart: the consumer good wonder emporium, high school football. However, as time elapses, America proves to be less-wild, less-mystical, more-constraining. On this macro level of film analysis, To the Wonder is very much in-keeping with the directorial themes and motifs of Malick's earlier works as analyzed in "All Things Shining" and "Poetic Visions in America." In "Poetic Visions in America," Patterson outlines a paradox often stressed by Malick in his films of “the impossibility of fulfilling myths that assert mobility and settlement, freedom and restraint, individualism and conformity.” In "All Things Shining," Mottram describes Malick's first three films as discourses on "the violence of natural in our world and in ourselves," "the bareness of contemporary American life," and "nature and the meaning of war." It was interesting to watch this film, as it lies subsequent to these analyses yet reflects the Malick themes highlighted in his earlier work. Neil and Marina's love is a war - the exodus of Europeans to America and the mounting cultural tension between the two now - American torpor, environmental exhaustion, bloated penitentiaries, high consumerism. When Marina and Neil go to a Sonic drive-thru and he smashes his car's side mirror upon learning of her affair, it is archetypal and transhistorical in so many ways. It's composition speaks to, almost the culture of imperialism and violence in America. The drive-thru speaks to the American malaise of mass consumerism, of business conglomerates that reinforce banality, of capitalism and its unrelenting competitiveness, how it will insert neon into a desert stolen from American Indians and underpay employees to service customer cars so they don't have to even enter the restaurant. Neil is unwilling to enter the mystical realm of romantic feelings, he is lethargic. As him and Marina go to a lethargic eatery, as Neil is forced to confront a mature situation regarding infidelity, his aggression becomes volatile. He does not confront her sexual identity, the crucial issues in their relationship - at a time of conflict, his lethargy proves to be a guise to cover his aggression. This notion of violence guised by lethargy should not be extricated from the more abstract notions of a larger American banality of violence addressed in Malick's oeuvre.

In many ways, Marina presents a transcendence of despair. Though the film never really indicates what specifically Neil is avoiding, it presents plenty of stress that Marina must overcome. Marina is a single mother who must take a huge chance beginning a new life with a emotionally uncertain partner. She must travel to a new country that turns out to reflect a radical cultural alterity to everything she knew. She is torn bureaucratically from her homeland and her new home. She must suffer the strife of her daughter, as she has a hard time making friends and feels unsure of Neil as a new father figure. Yet despite all this, she dances. Marina freezes the conflicts, and, in melancholic grace, embraces the universality of nature and love , unabashedly expressing herself and remaining open to the splendors of love despite fear. She is not a giddy character by any means, but she does something which Neil doesn't: she manages to stay warm and live atop a frozen stasis, at some points ambivalent and at others independent from her surroundings. Neil, on the other hand, forces stasis within himself, and does not transcend. At the film's conclusion, Marina tells Neil that she will keep his last name. She very much indicates an ability to feel an ease with the tumult of the past - to not drop the pain, as it is her, and she can accept it and move beyond it.

Dorsky's Tenets Will Improve my Quality of Life Profoundly

Dorsky: Arbor Vitae and Triste

A music instructor from high school once told me his **secret method** to sustained concentration. He explained that, unlike body nutrition, homeostasis, or other corporeal functions that provide motivational visceral signals, the ebb and flow of our focus does not communicate with our psychic circuitry. For the average person, when their focus is "hungry," they don't know how recognize it or feed it. He recommended to us that we take time in our schedule to take time to observe the organic patterns of natural phenomena - that they revitalize our metabolic rhymes. If you watch the movement of waves, for example, you can feel your ego being pacified, but subliminally, you can feel your subconscious registering the mathematics of the wave functions. The fluttering of leave sin the breeze, while placid to our conscious senses, presents very complex and harmonious visual information. We crave this organic flux, and after viewing it, we can tell that before watching it, we were not "now" and we were not focused - trapped in some void before or after the vivacious "now." 

I remembered this advice while watching Dorsky. Arbor Vitae and Triste were so relaxing; not because the films are still, but on the contrary - every shot is effervescent and animated, never still. Each shot is rich with organic entropy. Dorsky captures phenomenology that is completely outward from his manipulative control. He photographs flora and fauna, submitting to natural chaos. The natural truly is chaotic. It presents restless movement that, although seeming initially erratic, accumulates diagrammatically to reveal the harmonious and elegant mathematical patterns of our world. Watching these films was reinvigorating. It was one of the few times that I have watched something and never had a single thought regarding how long into the film I was or how long I had been watching it. After each film ended, I felt neither that it had been a long nor little time since I had commenced watching - I had been in a perennial present. 

I love the composition of Dorsky's shots. They each have their own distinct energy points and kinetic composition. There was never a still moment in a single shot - the sway of branches, the dance of shadows, the goading of the wind, flickers of light, rippling water, the natural wobbling of suspended objects, fluid mechanics, the drifting of clouds, even the (argued as impressionist) crackle of the celluloid itself and the apparent transmutation of the image as sequential photographs succeed one after another - the ever-changing environment of Dorsky's canvas was richly stimulating for me.

Under the confluence of cosmic waves and forces, nature never halts. Whether on an atomic or galactic platform, energy never dissipates, but experiences continual fission and fusion of its conserved self. This entropy is captured so beautifully by film, for film is dynamic by its very design. Film cannot be idle; the photograph is idle - the confluence of multitudinous photographs amounting to the gestalt of moving-picture cinema. The film strip is a vital organism in that every frame of its projected image marks further elongation of its survival - a survival accommodated by its digestive system: the photographic aperture's consumption of phenomenology and representation excretion. Watching the films, I found myself in agreement with Dorsky's quote: "the more we are able to relax and accept the absolute presence of our situation and then begin to recognize its formal qualities, the greater the chance we have to transmute it." For me, these "formal qualities" are the cinematic grace of the organic, the organic grace of cinema, and the organic cinema of human sight.

I found Devotional Cinema to be very elucidating. Dorsky discussed many epistemological concerns of sight/spectatorship frequently on my mind, such as the friction between the certain internal and the uncertain external. He related some important historical marks following epistemological criticism of seeing. His argument to resolve the Medieval perspective of seeing as internal and Renaissance perspective of seeing as external is so cool! Of the two, the former seems less prevalent in our contemporary beliefs. Though perspectivism or solipsism are disconcerting - feeling as if there is no external, that our mind produces our virtual spectacle - some though should be given towards the questionable transparency of our ocular physiology as a informative medium. I personally question the simplicity of my perception. Taking into consideration the dynamic chaos of quantum matter - how the modica of large visible structures are constantly whizzing and colliding - it makes no sense for their accumulation to be so geometrically stable. How can a table be so tactile and sturdy when its molecular infrastructure is in such flux? Another example is, how can you trust that an apple is red when, in reality, the apple reflects every electromagnetic chromatic frequency other than red? In brief, I always take into account that phenomenology is entropic, dealing in irrational numbers, and that my mind must, for the sake of its calculations, round its numbers and paraphrase the fractal-like maelstrom of the external world. Dorsky's films present images that are notably perspectival in how their composition utilizes depth of field. Images often include foregrounded objects, shadows of unseen objects, diffracted light, objects seen through windows with reflected images from things n the other side of the window, static foreground with mobile background, etc. The composition speaks to the position of the seer, but also effects what is seen. The resultant epistemological sensation is that though there is a 'image' that we view while seeing, it is negotiated by an intermediary, whose impression upon the visual image is just as integral to the resultant visual as that upon which it impresses. Though there is in one sense an objective externality, its ubiquitous total is intangible. You cannot see the abstract total form of "a bed," only a view of a bed from a particular observational position. To know that a large ball is round, you must observe its contortion as you circumambulate it. To see the totality of a room is impossible, you must navigate it The refusal of ubiquity to the human subject marks the parturition of time and space - space behind required in order to allow for the subject to see the ubiquity of an external object by synecdoche of every perspectival angle, and time required in order to move from any single perspective in space to another. Dorsky's shots do not present any kind of ubiquity. Each image is crucially affected by the position from which it is seen. This stressed subjectivity, along which the constant virtual entropy of the image, truly establishes the "nowness" which Dorsky stresses. I am so very much steeped in "nowness" while watching his films. The images, so often micro-spective, give the viewer so room to imagine what lies outside the frame. With there being no sound, or narrative, the images are temporally significant. They are everything for the duration that they are. The shots leave the viewer no desire to wander temporally or spatially from the current moment. The minutiae - the often quotidian or banal subject matter in the shot, augment and fill the space. The rattling of a fork on a table is now ambassador to the whole cosmos - it is all of spacetime for its limelight moment, and its effervescent dance on crackling celluloid is just as vivacious as anything else. Since watching these films, I notice my gaze wandering to highly kinetically stimulating vistas: micro-moments. The shaking of someone's foot at the library, the blinking and nodding of someone reading, fingers tapping, the way in which the floor looks as my head sway - all these things are, in their own focused context, galactic kinetic forces in of themselves. By never being still, by always being now, by viewing every space as oceanic whose energy is always fluctuating and never dormant, I find myself always now and never dead. I think it is important that Dorsky incorporates the modern and quotidian as well as the mystical and natural. By including images of money handling and store fronts, he thereby saves them, forgives them, refuses to exclude them from the devotion of the human experience.

WHAT AN AMAZING SCREENING IT WAS ALL SO GOOD BUT SOLOMON ESPECIALLY I LOVED SOLOMON

We enjoyed a generous serving of cinematic delights on Wednesday. I was fully prepared to delve into all that I had to say about Brakhage, until I saw Solomon’s work - the first film of his especially, Psalm II: Walking Distance. I wish to devote the entire blog to discussing the reactions to Psalm II. Along the nature of these films, my writing will deal in large abstractions and attempt to tackle both the galactic and zygotic.

I thought the aesthetics of Psalms II were incredible. The composition is so eroded, oxidized - seemingly descendant from the dead aeons. The celluloid withers and warps listlessly and fluidly, like the shaping of stone over millennia. The aesthetic seems so atavistic and primordial, the movement of the films topography does not seem to illustrate the hyperkinetics of modern minutia, but the movement of natural processes - glacial. Vague outlines of human figures appear amidst the sands of time - seemingly atemporal - the human archetype who dwells in the collective unconscious.

I heard some people say that they found these films disconcerting or scary. I didn’t find them scary. I saw them as alluding to the conduction of some sort of telluric orchestra. To be afraid of the image, even if it threatens to engulf my precious flesh into the oblivion in which the 21st century is but a blip, is to be afraid of that beautiful process which absolves the human individual of any divine encumbrance and returns humankind to the reasonable hierarchical rung of the animal. To me, it felt like watching the ocean. I felt calm in a placid environment. I fell into a kind of trance, which did not offer any lucidity until the film had concluded. Physiologically, it was a meditation. I would like to share some spiritual reactions to Psalms, though they are in many ways anchored in my belief of reincarnation and personal in nature.

Solomon’s Psalm II presents the archaic putrefaction of the symbolic image. It is a cinematic ossification that strips away the comforts of typical image epidermis to expose its dinosaur bones. It invokes a way of seeing that is either long-forsworn or long-pending - exploring the spectatorial terrain lying between the postmortem and the antepartum. The Psalms were richly ontologically evocative for me. I don’t believe that Psalms II presents an omnipotent view, but a revelation of ineffable truths accessible exclusively beyond hominid flesh, but emphatically discursive on the examination of human perception. As someone who subscribes to the notion of the reincarnate cycle, I’d like to think of the gestative period as liminal or mitigative between the incorporeal ubiquity after death and the singular individuality of the begotten human. The fetal subject, I believe, undergoes a purge of transcendental sagacity - the collective intelligence of incorporeality - so that it can re-learn organic pedagogy once-more -- how else could a divine body ascend higher other than re-learning the mortal lessons in a new being? The process of transformation from an immaterial being to a begotten one is therefore an exchange of the imaginary/universal truth for the symbolic/empirical estimation. The fetal dream vision is very interesting - it is superior to the visual language of the begotten as it is not constricted by the contours of the symbolic order - yet the fetal dream vision is less omniscient than the incorporeal body’s vision as its information is processed through the human mind, which, by the very definition of its mortal design, relays an intelligent scope much narrower than the breadth of astral body understanding. For beings who have not yet died, the gestative period is the most halcyon chapter - our visual period least inculcated into the choke-hold of symbolically ordered viewing. This, I think, is the goal of Psalm II: to present imagery so archaic as to entice us towards our primordial roots, to relate obscured tapestry that requires our automatism and subliminal perception - vision not as perception of external objects, but vision as internal elucidation. You will find sparse representation in Psalm II, just the nebulous silhouette of the human form contained within the terra firma. To me the images in Psalm II, of the human embedded within earthy strata. I assert, therefore, that both the form and content of Psalm II relate to the primordial state, challenging spectatorial symbolic vision and depicting primordial imagery - inviting us to recall the glyphs painted on uterine walls - the prenatal mirror-phase during which, as we saw anything and everything, it was a reflection of our conception and ability to command mental plastic.

This practice of encouraging gestative, pre-symbolic viewing, as I see it, reflects very much so the Brakhage tenets of hypnagogic viewing as outlined in his interviews. In “Brakhage at Sixty,” he describes close-eye vision as “a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes” - I couldn’t apply a more apt description to the symbolically desolate, psychologically-private visual landscapes of Psalm II. Many of the sentiments that I felt after viewing Psalms II resonated in Brakhage’s interviews. The deleterious influence of the symbolic order on the purity of the imaginary mind, and the ontological munificence of primordial vision, as I argued, are also argued by Brakhage. He asserts that the eyes are “tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic” and that he wishes to “imagine a world ‘before the beginning was the word.’” He laments our excommunication from the antepartum, the halcyon imaginary period, describing maturation in “Metaphors on Vision” as a “loss of innocence” - an innocence to which we “can never go back.” Brakhage is emphatic in his pursuit of unadulterated perception, seeking the primal. 

Thanks for exposing us to all these works, David