![]() ![]() ![]() |
Hopefulness, Healing and its Contestation in Film
|
Writing
about the place of breath in cinema, the instances in which we might register
the sight or sound of the breathing body of a film’s protagonist or the
silences and stillness in film which correspond with a kind of rhythm of the
film’s ‘breathing body’, I started to think of this embodied state of being as
a phenomena intimately connected to emotion. (1) Here, a scene from Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier,
1994) perfectly calls attention to the breathing body of Bess, the film’s
heroine, the viewer’s ‘empathetic’ breaths and the film’s material ‘body’. As
Bess sacrifices her life in order to save her lover, the film reveals to us in
close-up her quickening breaths and exhalations, an outward display of her
emotional fragility and nervousness. Then, we can detect a shift in the
composure of the image: its focus dissolves momentarily as if the image’s
blurry perception of Bess is synchronous with her consciousness. When clarity
is restored to the image, it seems as if Bess also gains composure, soothed. It
is difficult not to become more aware of our own breaths as we watch this
scene, utterly distraught and ravaged by Bess’ harrowing story.
|
1.
This was the subject of my book The Place
of Breath in Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). This
study was especially led by the philosophical writings of Luce Irigaray and her
conception of breath as an intersubjective and embodied aspect of human
subjectivity – a more recent facet of her seminal work on sexual difference.
|
My
father died of lung cancer as I wrote. A wise friend had encouraged me to focus
on the syntactical and grammatical dimensions of my project, embracing the
safety of words rather than the subject I was thinking about. But this
predicament haunted me. (2) I needed to write because I had to finish. In the
end, the writing took shape as a weird form of meditation; as my tracking of
the cathartic dimensions of film viewing developed, the process was itself a
kind of salve. Years later, looking at Bess in Breaking the Waves, I have come to think of the sound and image of
those breaths differently. That shivering image of her blurred body is like a
little relief from the trauma of the film: it tends to engender a necessary
hope. I realise that this is what I want to think about now. This new enquiry
might lead me back, sometimes, to thinking about breath and its affective
power, its sonic and visual dimensions; but it is film’s gestures of hope to
now pursue.
***
|
2.
I had started to feel panic most of the time. A family member gave me their
elderly dog because of the therapeutic benefits of stroking animals. When not
writing, I dawdled down country lanes and walked as far as I could, exhausted
dog in tow.
|
Ideology
collapses, utopianism atrophies, but something great is left behind: the memory
of a hope. (3)
Emotions
are very much part of our ability to analyse – that is to say, to mobilise a
text. If we wipe them away or compartmentalise them, we end up reproducing the
view from above and from nowhere. (4)
|
3.
Henri Lefebvre, ‘On The Theme of the New Life’, in Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes,
September 1959-May 61 (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 91.
4.
Giuliana Bruno, ‘House’, in Atlas of
Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), p.
412.
|
There
is Hana (played by Juliet Binoche) in Anthony Minghella’s love story, The English Patient (1997). A young
nurse embittered by the horrors of war, a shell whose delicate hands tend to a
burned man, his physical wounds an inverted image of her inner turmoil. Hana is
led into a derelict chapel by Kip, a Sikh sapper in the British army. Quickly,
smoothly, smoke-encircled flares illuminate a beautiful fresco. They climb
hoists and move towards the shadows above them, into the crackling light and
then out again. Gliding to and fro, Hana’s face is lit like a Caravaggio. She
is all contours and highlights set against the dark gloom of night, skin as
luminous as limed plaster. Smoke, dust and heat swirl about the image. Smell
the sulphur. Hissing flares on the soundtrack. Now Kip is a conjuror,
transforming grief into joy. Hana looks on in wonder or, more specifically, in
hope.
|
In
Minghella’s conjuring of delight, surprise and joy, Hana’s hopefulness is
restored. Absorbing Hana’s delight, our perception of this moment awakens our
sense of being. We are viscerally inscribed within the motion of Hana’s
emotion. (5) It is this imbrication of hope within a traumatic context which
interests me most, its strange alchemy and its attraction, its brightness in
the gloom. The distraction of colour, beauty and the miracle of re-found art
holds Hana’s gaze, as it does ours, a look that is both restorative and open to
some kind of futurity. At the end of the film, Hana is driven away from the
villa that housed her dying patient and the camera travels up into branches and
towards sunlight. So, like an echo of the revelation in the chapel, something
brighter blooms. Hana moves onwards and away, her face resigned and composed, a
subtle smile spreading across her features.
|
5.
Ibid., p. 2. I have in mind here Bruno’s use of the term motion and its
emotional ‘pull’.
|
How
can a look be invested with hope? By this I mean a cathartic pleasure in
looking which throws into relief the trauma it originates from, very much like
the crackling light of Kip’s flares. I consider this through a series of
moments in film and other moving image media; these images are brought together
here in order to call attention to the treatment of healing and responses to
trauma in film. They are linked by their visual connotation of the drive
towards renewal, the desire to mediate pain.
|
Film
theory offers up numerous analyses of cinema’s conception of traumatic subject
matter whose disturbing images linger on in the mind of the viewer, affective
and uncompromising in their brutal truths. (6) Hopefulness is not often
something discussed in the field of Film Studies. Most recently, there are
inflections of hopefulness in the concept of the ‘astonished soul’ at the heart
of Kristi McKim’s book Love in the Time
of Cinema; and in the lucid reckoning with cinema’s palliative dimensions
in the work of Emma Wilson in Love,
Mortality and the Moving Image (7). But the notion of hope as the
restoration of goodness, as the awakening of being, rediscovered – and its
uniquely filmic articulation – is what is at stake here.
***
Conversely,
the opposite of hope is richly suggested throughout the films of Michael
Haneke. Indeed, Haneke invests his films with a particular way of looking which
comes to stand for the absolute contestation of hope. His work is important
here because it helps me to understand what exactly a filmic gesture of hope
might mean, in its registering of relief and pleasure. Haneke’s work is, here,
the dead zone, the black hole, a point of devastation through which I navigate
in order to trace the contours of more enlightened spaces. A consideration of
Haneke’s audiovisuality is vital in order to go on to explore its mirror
reflection in other kinds of cinematic maps of emotion, to recall Giuliana
Bruno’s incisive exploration of affective cinema and its resonant topographies.
|
6.
See, for example, the work of Cathy Caruth in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
7.
See Kristi McKim, Love in the Time of
Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Emma Wilson, Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
|
While Caché (2005) presents the undoing of
ideological values and a veneer of calm, order and morality, Funny Games (1997) is structured by a
sadistic ‘terrorism’ which even the film cannot escape, rewinding itself in
order to entrap the viewer and mock their hopeful sentiments when a happy
ending is cruelly undone in the edit. Yet, most memorably and alarmingly,
Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), which tells the tale of a family planning to commit suicide together,
adopts an unnervingly bleak and austere visual style in order to reject any
sense of compassion which might unsettle its careful sculpting of protagonists
as animate objects opting to disappear from the material world they inhabit. We
see daily routines and domestic activities, all inertly played out. The family
is arranged like wax dolls, cut up and objectified by Haneke’s framing. Their
home is a mausoleum, barren and devoid of intimacy or pleasure. Hope is
irrelevant here: death is infinitely mapped on to the image like a grainy video
whose magnetic surface has been recorded over too many times.
See
their hands laboriously preparing food. Remnants of orange
juice in a highball glass. Crumbs on a plate. No one speaks. A family around a table, framed by doorways
and a corridor, in limbo, adrift within their own home. Blank expressions. Still and motionless. Nothing is said or done. (If I could smell these images, I imagine they would
bear the waxy resin of soap and burnt toast still sitting in the toaster.)
What
have we missed? What has happened here? We want to leave. They want to leave.
|
Haneke’s
film is most jarring during its acute tracking of everyday gestures: hands
turning off alarm clocks (for they are about to enter an eternal slumber) and
preparing food, as if mechanised bodies work to merely process and slice their
way through space and time. Haneke’s tight framing of hands renders them
disembodied objects, uncannily resembling the things being assembled and
operated. The coloration of the images emphasises tones of skin as beige and
opaque, flat and synthetic like the plastic objects they manipulate.
If
Hana’s gaze in The English Patient constitutes her recognition of a moment which makes her feel alive, Haneke’s
protagonists are long dead and soulless, depicted as if in a perpetual
existential crisis of embalmed existence. In another scene, the family
assembles around a table and eats breakfast, arranged like props in a theatre
awaiting employment. Touching is inconsequential; the members of the family are
like satellites drifting through the vast spaces of their family home.
***
|
Sometimes
we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. |
Unlike
the visual representation of hope in The
English Patient – an expression found on the face of its protagonist – hope
and its implications for healing, for mediating trauma, is strongly suggested
through the opening images of Alain Resnais’ black-and-white feature film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Set after
the devastating effects of the Hiroshima bomb, a French actress (Emmanuelle
Riva) and Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) embark upon an affair and recall
their personal histories, memories textured by the tragedy of Hiroshima.
Indeed, the very fabric of the film is entwined around conversations during the
lovers’ time together in which they discuss Hiroshima as both an event lived
through and imagined.
Hiroshima mon amour’s opening sequence, in particular,
configures death and love, the one enmeshed in the other, in order to propel
both towards some sense of hope embodied entirely by the materiality of the
film. We view the lovers writhing naked beneath a sea of ash, a glittering
torrent of dust. Close-ups of two bodies, skin to skin and
entangled. The ash is shiny like little constellations of stars dotted
about the mise en scène, floating
like a ghostly topography over the dense materiality of the lovers’ bodies.
Such macabre confetti celebrates the union we witness while the discordant
soundtrack evokes the awkward, wriggling and writhing passion of the lovers’
embrace.
|
The
most controversial aspect of Resnais’ adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ prose,
the opening sequence prompts feelings of desire and revulsion precisely because
its erotic symbolism is charged with death. His use of a monochromatic colour
palette emphasises the differences between the textures of smooth skin and the
raining ash which mottles and indents the places it touches: abject matter
distorting flesh, prescient of the abject shadow of Hiroshima which will loom
over their love affair. As the sequence unfolds, a medium close-up reveals two
arms locked in an embrace, one more daubed in starry, sticky glitter than the
other. This, too, recasts the lovers as contaminated survivors of Hiroshima,
infected and malformed. Conversely, the gelling of surfaces calls to mind the
particular plasticity of clay models, flesh becoming one, sculptural, ossified
in time like the victims of the bomb.
The
act of love-making and its caresses – the gestures of love contained within
this opening sequence – function as the greatest marker of mortality, not quite
disavowing Hiroshima’s existence, but rather mediating its presence by the most
hopeful gesture we can become: love. In this, Henri Lefebvre’s thoughts are
especially resonant. His discussion of hope as a memory left behind after the
collapse of utopianism (the dream of love) and ideological conceptions of
culture and history (irrevocably altered by Hiroshima), relates closely to the
juxtaposition of decay and vitality suggested by Resnais. It is apt to suggest,
then, that the memory of a hope is projected on to these opening images by
Resnais.
***
|
Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament. (George in A Single Man [Tom Ford, 2009]) |
Love
and death are also ambiguously interwoven in Ford’s adaptation of Christopher
Isherwood’s novel A Single Man (1964), which tracks the daily rituals of a suicidal college professor. The
intention of George (Colin Firth) is to shoot himself at the end of his working
day. For George, the prospect of imminent death irrevocably alters his
perception of everything he sees and touches. Unlike Haneke’s cool, distancing
effects which permit us little empathy or intimacy with his protagonists, Ford
evokes George’s state of consciousness through lingering shots of faces,
objects and environs newly appealing to his senses. George’s embodied being is
thus synchronous with the film’s evocation of objects as existential phenomena.
In
extreme close-up, we see George’s eyes, framed by dark-rimmed spectacles, and
another pair of eyes – of a blonde girl whose face is partially overlaid by a
wisp of smoke. Then, we cross-cut between the two faces, the bridge of her
freckled nose, the symmetry of her eyes heavily lined with make-up, his head
slowly turning: an acknowledgement, or perhaps a tiny move closer. Here, a
micro-movement connotes George’s new-found appreciation and attentiveness to
the world around him. Elsewhere, we catch glimpses of bleached-out,
black-and-white close-ups of George and his recently deceased lover, Jim
(Matthew Goode), basking on sand, grains of it stuck to his beloved’s arms and
legs. Charley (Julianne Moore), George’s best friend, sways to music with
George, the images imbued with a melancholic yet boozy lull. Charley’s
red hair brushing over George’s shoulder as they dance. Giggling. A young college student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), enamoured
of George, wears a white mohair jumper, its fuzzy edges bristling against the
collar of a buttoned-up shirt.
|
Towards
the end of the film, George swims with Kenny. We see George’s body plunged into
blue and red tinted water, abstract and dense with kinetic energy, rather more
akin to a baptism than an erotically charged encounter. We see George’s
slightly wrinkled skin and pasty pallor wrestling with the waves, turning and
somersaulting. Feet kicking out and pushing against the waves. After the
invigoration of the swim, George experiences an awakening, realising there is
hope for a future beyond the pain of losing Jim. Collectively, the everyday
gestures and intimacies accumulated over the course of twenty-four hours are
transformed into fragile objects of hope, vital and ordinary, now
extraordinarily beautiful. Ultimately, George’s sudden heart attack at the end of
the film is dramatic irony of the highest order or, more likely, it is the
heavy price he pays for such knowledge.
Throughout
the film, colour plays an important part in its affective mechanisms; it moves
chromatically from beige and cream to deeper yellows, blues and reds as if each
of George’s varying moods were tinted. The beige-browns of the earlier scenes
possess a flesh-like quality, while the more abstract reds and blues are
heavily emotive, building as the film plunges into the depths of George’s
unconscious mind (the swimming sequence feels both real and imagined).
It
is a kind of hopefulness, then, which pervades the images of A Single Man. Close-ups of objects and
faces, textures of smoke and sand, drawing us into a microcosm intimately
connected to George’s consciousness. It could be said that these images come to
stand for George’s unconscious desire to resist suicide, a dimension of his
survival instincts. These close-ups literally ‘cling’ to life, reviving
George’s perception and resuscitating his vision. Indeed, viewing A Single Man requires a slowing down of
breath, a different rhythm which accords with the stillness of life that George
begins to appreciate. In the film’s closing minutes, we hold our breath as
George contemplates using the gun. Then, we sigh out when we register George’s
joy, overcome by the myriad of sights he has encountered throughout his day.
Thus, hopefulness finds acute expression through the drawing of breath and its
exhalation.
|
A
different rhythm of breath pervades the final sequence of Les quatre cent coups (The
400 Blows [François Truffaut, 1959]), in which the race to the coast is
filmed as an (almost) continuous take. (8) A boy, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre
Léaud), escapes beyond the walls of a reform school. The ambient sounds of ball
games being played within the school drift off into nothingness and are
replaced by the noise of Antoine’s flight. We hear the crackle of twigs and
leaves beneath his feet as the boy sprints through a semi-rural location, a
rhythm of shoes against the ground, onward, onward. A steady rhythm pervades
the soundtrack, a noise which comes to stand for Antoine’s state of mind,
focused and determined, impassioned: this is the film’s articulation of a kind of hope fuelled by resistance.
Soon, there is a dissolve to indicate the passing of time. Tiring, Antoine’s
pace slows down and he begins to jog. A lone figure framed by sky and land. He
reaches the edge of the coast and then we hear pebbles beneath his shoes.
Suddenly, the patter of movement ceases. He stops at the shoreline. The camera
focuses on the boy’s face and he glares at us in freeze-frame. Confronted with
this for the first time, I shrink away, just a little. It is not the end I was
expecting.
|
8.
For a fuller analysis of Truffaut’s film and its contextualisation as a key
example of the Nouvelle Vague, I recommend Richard Neupert’s A History of the French New Wave (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 177-187.
|
Face
to face with Antoine, we become his future, his potential for goodness.
Truffaut offers up a close-up of a gaze which unsettles us from our comfortable
position as passive spectators and posits us as witnesses to this boy’s unhappy
childhood: an ethical turn which disrupts the conventions of dominant cinema.
We seem to be responsible, now, for this youth. You, he seems to say (no matter
how many times I watch this sequence), cannot forget me. Here, the ideological
implications of Truffaut’s iconic contribution to the Nouvelle Vague,
especially the narrative’s indictment of the reform system, are made utterly
transparent. Léaud’s face in close-up, stalled forever in time, demands an
openness to the potential for change, hope for a better society, for a
revolution that is, as history tells us, certainly on the horizon.
The
move from imprisonment to a wide-open space demarcated by the sea is also
memorably contained within the last scene of The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994). Despite its
conventional approach to style, its employment of classical editing techniques
and narration, and its generic subject matter (heavily marketed as a prison
drama), the film breathtakingly counters the oppression and grief felt by the
protagonist Andy (Tim Robbins) in its concluding images. After a Houdiniesque
escape from prison, following decades of physical and emotional abuse, Andy’s
only friend, Red (Morgan Freeman), is released and walks toward Andy, now a
free man happily restoring a boat by the ocean. The camera pulls back, as if to
allow their reunion its own intimacy. Above all, Darabont pulls off a brilliant
trick in order to fully evoke the particular sensation of freedom: throughout,
the oppressive asphalt grey and brick red colour scheme emphasises the
claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison and its monotonous rigour; even when
Red is released back into the free world, it is tinted with the same hues found
within the prison walls, blue-grey, drab and alienating. As Red drives out of
the city and enters a pastoral landscape, something shifts. The film is filled
with light and air. Into the blistering heat and onto the sandy shores, Red
finally feels free. The closing image of the two friends on the shore,
unhurriedly moving towards each other, never fails to move me. It is
undoubtedly an image of hope, as Red’s letter to Andy reminds us. In
anticipation of their reunion, Red writes:
|
I find I’m so excited I can barely sit
still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man
can feel. A free man at the start of a long journey whose
conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope
to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has
been in my dreams. I hope.
|
At
last, the blue Pacific stretches out beyond the frame and the film seems to
‘exhale’ – as we do, too.
***
One
final image (I always smile when I see this one). A young woman struggles to
bear the weight of a man who appears to be suffering from exhaustion, partially
clothed, sinewy arms drooping and limp. Patience. Her
eyes are set on the dimpled and exposed chest her arms carry: a chasm of
musculature and bone. The man does not return her gaze. He sleeps. There appears
to be no sound but, if I listen very carefully, I think I can hear this pair
breathing, slowly gathering strength; their chests move with the fall and rise
of exhalation. I hold my breath. Will she drop him? I start to breathe with her. I notice her feet are
strategically positioned so as to afford her the best chance of bearing this
weight. Yet, the young woman’s muscles do not tense. It is as if he is
floating. The sinuous chest at the centre of the image contracts a little. The
woman’s hands do not move. I fidget a little. The spectacle of this image
begins to lose its gloss. A kind of intimacy is engendered as I sit in my seat
and watch her sitting on the steps.
This
kind of portraiture is, no doubt, characterised by duration. For nearly two
whole minutes, the couple loom on the staircase and I wait for something to
happen. Will she turn and abandon him on the steps or will he reach up and
touch her? Patience.
Sam
Taylor-Wood’s Self Pietà (2001) is a
reworking of Michelangelo’s depiction of Christ and the Madonna with Robert
Downey Jr in the role of Christ. His much-publicised rehabilitation from drug
addiction, coupled with Taylor-Wood’s recovery from cancer, feeds into the
logic of Self Pietà and its evocation
of redemption, healing and endurance. The celebrity status of both artist and
actor plays a special role here: we are more comfortable with the idolatry
associated with popular icons than with religious figures. Taylor-Wood channels
the grace and affirmation of Michelangelo’s figures as if to absorb its power:
her film is a ritual of hope and redemption.
|
How
can a look be invested with hope?
Think
of Hana’s face as she looks up at the mural. Two lovers entwined in ashes. A man’s final day on Earth. A boy by the
ocean. A reunion between friends. A modern-day Madonna and Christ.
Such
a look might be constituted by absorption, by the shapes and textures of an
image propelling us towards a more restorative kind of engagement with art. Or,
the filmic diegesis might tend toward representation, thematically conveying a
cathartic story. Emotion as conveyed by affective images might open up
questions relating to the nature of selfhood and survival. Hope might also be a
spiritual emotion, tending towards the transcendent and divine. Above all, film
matter – that is, its aesthetic style and material evocation of the world
around us – holds the potential to be transformative.
|
The author wishes
to thank Dr Sarah Cooper, JC and ABR for their support and encouragement of
this new project, which will take the form of a forthcoming book with Palgrave
Macmillan in 2015. Some of this work grew from seminars held during the MA
module ‘Place and Identity’ at Kingston University.
|
from Issue 5: Shows |
© Davina Quinlivan 2014. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |