Breaking the Waves

Breaking the Waves was an engrossing film. It had a way of making the viewer forget about its filmic material and feel genuine emotion towards the characters. I found the mis-en-scene in the film, actually, to be the most engrossing. The helicopter, the oil rig, the hospital—these locales seem like they would be difficult to obtain! There is actual work being done on the rig, and realistic-looking medical procedures in the hospital. Von Trier found such an ascetic church and solemn actors for bess's homeland. He really did create a world.

Physiologically speaking.... I cried! I found it immensely harrowing. Especially as someone who has had experience with love interrupted by long-distance circumstances. I also identify heavily with Bess. I am not a religious person, but I believe in spirits, in auras, in a collective conscious, in dimensions higher than this one and a universal law of love that creates and transmutes us.

I thought that the cinematography was great, especially long takes with flowing camera movement. When Dodo is giving a speech at the wedding and the camera moves in long pan whips between her and Bess and Jan! Also, as we discussed in class, Von Trier has a way of employing a histrionic type of editing. Shots will abruptly switch between radical changes in Bess's emotional states. Bess's glances at the camera, as we discussed in class, demonstrates a kind of awareness to and humorous acceptance of, the omnipresent surveillance of her.

Bess truly is under surveillance. As Makarushka argues, Bess is constrained by multiple institutions, the church, the family, the 'laws of marriage', the medical institution. Institutions are in a certain sense simply groupings of people. Their purpose is to aid individual's with the power of the collective. Bess's love has enormous breadth, and enjoins the church, the family, marriage because they contain, or have the capacity to contain, a wealth of love between persons. However, Bess transgresses the constraints of social constructed institutions when their parameters impede love, when it marginalizes autonomy or encourages judgement. I found Makarushka's that insight that when Bess speaks to God in church, she does so in "an empty church—a place where, owing to her gender, she is ordinarily forbidden to speak." To think of her going to church to talk to God as a transgression! In this way, as Makarushka describes, "speaking with god places Bess both inside and outside of the worshipping community." Here asserted there is a massive hypocrisy of the church. The church fails Bess in her quest to do good on Earth. To clarify, not the kind of 'good' that connotes the "culturally encoded expectations of femininity" of "submission and purity," but a desire to act on love, to honor a natural sense of compassion and mysticism. However, this pure wish is complicated by how law has been enforced institutionally. Makarushka argues that Bess's schizophrenic scenes in conversation with God illustrates her internalized sense of judgement from her environment. I believe that Bess is good, not only in how she perpetuates traditional models of goodness, but how she bravely transgresses social parameters in the name of love and her mystic intuition. These are boundaries that she not only had to break in the external world, but within herself too. Initially, the notion of infidelity as a medical panacea seems impossible to her, but she does it! And she risks excommunication from her community. In the end, I believe that Bess is willing to part from that which does not exercise love towards her. This is a good rule to live by, to use institution or tradition for their positive strengths, and to jettison the inequities, the ligature, the entrapment.

This is shorter than my usual blogging, but I'm completely enervated! Have a lovely break, David! See you in 2016.

Tarkovsky

To begin, I thought the cinematography was breath-taking. There isn't a single shot that doesn't brim with determination and careful planning. Many seem to have involved intricate premeditation, like my personal favorite Stalker's Dream shot scanning over the surface of the water in which a collage of symbolic junk and viscous oil miasma can be found. Others, such as the asbestos sea, or some of the fog shots, because of their evanescent content, imply that they must have been captured with a degree on spontaneity; but you'll never see spontaneity (pejoratively) reflected in the camerawork. There's not a single shake, not a single moment's halt in a dolly.  The film demonstrates unblemished, flawless technique, but it never boasts it. Certain directors are known for unveiling films that boast technical precision. Kubrick is an easy example—his films are technically flawless—but a kind of flawlessness that boasts—that invokes rigidity, perfectionism, OCD, an iron rule, Renaissance symbolic mastery of the world, solipsism—his films often feature tyrants as subjects whose stringency can be seen reflected in the technical perfection of the filmic composition. The confluence between auteur control and boyish solipsism has been explored more recently by Wes Anderson. Stalker, on the other hand, does not reflect this mindset through its cinematography. The question can certainly be raised—why go through the pangs of cinematographic perfection to capture a film in which a crucial theme is the value of human weakness, the inexorable flaw in human form being its most vital quality? Why not employ a handheld technique as Malick has, which registers all the minute shakes, the effervescence of the "human" cinematographer rather than the mechanical rig? To put it simply, the cinematography gives me hope, it reminds me that my spirit travels the Earth's topography, moving not by clunky footsteps but hovering in phantasmal fashion. I've frequently heard from spiritual mentors and mediums the virtue of treading lightly upon the Earth, which of course figuratively implies a lack of materiality, not to invest oneself to fully in Earthly matters (if you thrust your foot into the Earth to make it your home, declaring to walk no further, watch as it turns to quicksand and engulfs your body into a subterranean hellscape!) To love is to walk lightly. Fear, to not walk forward, will drown you and make you feel the madness of living death. Anger is to stomp, every step a pang. Guilt is to crawl, so close to the dirt as to see every insect, and you wonder how many you've annihilated by your mere travel. To walk lightly is to love, to travel in a way that can not fatigue or exhaust you, that never attempts you to stop, so light as to leave the ground un-trampled under you. It is this way that the camera travels in the film, lightly, so that not a footstep can be seen.

The following statement does not suggest that I dislike long movies, because I don't. A film is one of the most brief (comparative to novels or television series) invitations into a diegesis. So long as they are not made turgid by narrative gluttony, I enjoy films that, when executed successfully, allow the viewer a little longer in such a temporary world. With that prolepsis, I'll say that Stalker, in terms of physiological experience, was the "shortest" feeling "long" film I've seen. When I say that, I simply mean that I wasn't at all lost in a kind of torpor that one may fear to find in a 160-min feature. Seriously, I've seen 90 minute films that felt longer than Stalker. I was utterly consumed! The same can be said, (following along the typical complaints pertaining to art cinema), that Stalker is an easy "talkative" film to follow. I think that these two are common deterrents that keep many viewers (Americans?) from wishing to watch foreign (subtitled) Art Cinema. And again, it's my personal taste, but in my opinion the script for Stalker to be so thorough, unabatingly exploring the fields of Science, Literature, Art, Philosophy until these potentially esoteric or cold fields manage to form a huge ontological mammoth shape. It really did. It's difficult to describe stalker in words not only because "its visuals invoke majesty so ineffable to defy language" but additionally because it's script covers everything! After watching the film, I couldn't believe that Tarkovsky hadn't written the script (as the credits suggest.) It made much more sense to me when I learnt that Tarkovsky had for all intents and purposes written it—and on the brink of death! For scientists attempting to demonstrate that the brain is a mere vessel for the human spirit, a conductive organ such as the heart, many turn to the brimming lucidity of people on the brink of death. Even patients suffering from dementia often experience untold clarity during their last days. You can see this lucidity in the script for Stalker. Similar to the cinematography, this script doesn't carry an ounce of pretension. It does not allude to the sciences and the arts as a flaunting of cultural capital, no!—it addresses them seriously as the few artifacts at our disposal linking us to the Beyond—and such shabby bridges and bridge-makers they often are, as the film suggests! 
 
Stalker is radical–I can safely say that it is radical because it is so unlike any other work that I would describe as radical. In the Tarkovsky reading, he asserts that "the artist seeks to destroy the stability by which society lives." In almost any example, this "destruction" of stability has been literal, such as Suzuki, Cronenberg, Jodorowsky, Miike, Noe, Kubrick, Korine, Pasolini, Bunuel, so many radical directors critique society by presenting dialogues on violence, and patriarchy—but such a mass radical movement to discuss violence equates ultimately to an emulation of violence—a perpetuation and encouragement! I see so much of this violence as the director reflecting the patriarchal systems of power—"fighting"their way to fame and recognition through on-screen violence—desiring a recognition, a response, perhaps even to hurt the viewer (as the viewer's pain often generated praise of a director—how this masochism is abused!) Tarkovsky writes that art must be a service. It must be done out of sheer necessity of the artist to aid the world in some way. Just like the Stalker, who demands that no guns be brought into the zone, so does Tarkovsky prevent any aestheticized violence. Instead, there are the pangs of ere existence, or mortal questions that drive you mad! Is any more pain really necessary? The films seems selfless to me, without ego. The film has nothing to lose by you not understanding it. In fact, it presents characters that do not understand with which you can resonate. It merely provides, for those willing to hear the roar in the whisper, an invitation into series ontological contemplation. Films such as these can rescue from feeling isolated. How often does the vapid or flat nonsense of movies make me feel alien! Stalker reminds us that none of our conscious world is easy, that it is deliberately difficult and a mere sliver of a greater picture.      



I felt immediacy when viewing Stalker. Tarkovsky describes cinema as an"immediate art," requiring no symbolic explanation. Following suit, I haven't really attempted to define or describe the crux of the film. If it's okay with you, I think I'll keep the epiphanies of the film to myself for now, but, as it continues to sink in, I'll come to you to discuss it.