Predivan filmski blues. Sam film kao metafora i raspadanja/nestajanja i otkrivanja tajnih odnosa iza vidljivog. Samo sjene i sablasti mogu otkriti ono što od samog življenja pravi sjenu.
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On November 8, 1930, amateur filmmaker Gérard Fleury stood on the shores of Normandy's Lake Thuit, watching the sun rise in preparation for an upcoming shoot that would never take place; he died later that day under mysterious circumstances. Out of this information, Guerín constructs a haunting meditation on the photographic and cinematic image, on loss and decay, on the passing of time, the recounting of history and the blurring of fact and fiction. He uses both re-enactments and decayed images to render ambiguous past and present, historical record and speculation, and to make poetry out of loss. - hcl.harvard.edu/
It isn’t life, but its shadow, it isn’t movement, but its silent ghost.… This, too, is a train of shadows.– Maxim Gorky
José Luis Guerín’s fourth feature-length film, Tren de sombras, is, like so much of the Spanish director’s work, a challenging and mesmerising hybrid – part genre piece, part structuralist experiment, part city symphony. The film is built on a provocative premise: Seventy years after the unexplained death of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian attorney, family man, and amateur filmmaker, several reels of his home movies have been unearthed, and someone, the unnamed author of the film we are watching, sets out to restore and recreate them, thereby embarking on an investigation into this long-forgotten mystery. That synopsis, however, paints a misleading portrait of Tren de Sombras, which is more concerned with the texture of images and the fickle nature of memory than with gumshoe detecting or intrigue. To borrow from late-20th century critical parlance, this is art about art, a film about film. Much to his credit, Guerín, as he’s proven throughout his career, is among the handful of directors today who possess the wit, poetry, intellectual rigour, and technical command of the medium necessary to transcend cliché and reinvigorate discussions about the relationship between image-making and meaning-making in our post-Matrix, pop philosophy discourse.Tren de sombras begs comparisons with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and also, I suppose, with all the other narrative films that followed suit by revolving their plots around some formal aspect of the cinema (mise en scène, editing, sound design, etc.), thus foregrounding it in a self-reflexive, self-critical, and, one might cautiously add, postmodern way. Films like Blow Up, The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) and, more recently, the work of Michael Haneke (Code inconnu [2000] and Caché [2005], transform filmic materials into forensic artefacts, physical evidence to be meticulously examined and deconstructed. Attention to form is the hallmark of Guerín’s cinema, as demonstrated clearly in his latest films, the companion pieces Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia and En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (both 2007). The former is a silent, autobiographical, essay film constructed mostly of still, black-and-white, documentary photographs that harkens back not so much to Chris Marker, who famously used a similar technique in La Jetée (1962), but to Eadweard Muybridge and other 19th century innovators of the “moving image”. In Unas fotos, Guerín wanders the streets of Strasbourg, chasing the ghost of a woman he met there more than twenty years earlier. Each photograph reconstructs and, in a sense, supplants a particular memory, transforming it, like one of Muybridge’s horses, into a single, extended frame in Guerín’s slow-moving picture. En la ciudad de Sylvia is a more traditional narrative film, shot in colour 16mm and blown up to 35mm, but it’s no less concerned with form. Here, Guerín again re-enacts his search for lost love in the streets of Strasbourg. However, the act is now made multivalent – curious, humane, nostalgic, voyeuristic – not unlike cinematic spectatorship in general.
Likewise, the very subject of Tren de sombras allows Guerín to explore, both literally and metaphorically, the meaning of images. In Fleury’s footage, we see his extended family at their large home near the village of Le Thuit in Normandy, relaxing as if on holiday. They hike to a site overlooking a lake and picnic there. The children ride bicycles, play with dogs, and perform magic tricks. On several occasions the family poses for portraits. It’s only in the second half of Tren de sombras, after the author of the film begins to re-sequence shots, blow-up images in order to reveal lost details, and freeze particular frames, that we begin to detect something amiss among the Fleury clan. As in Antonioni’s film, there’s a fetishistic thrill to watching the clues become revealed through real, mechanical processes. Gérard Fleury rarely steps out from behind his hand-held camera, so nearly all that we witness in the old footage is from his first-person point-of-view (it’s similar to Unas fotos in that respect). The “author” first becomes fascinated by and suspicious of Fleury’s sister-in-law and pays particular attention to two shots of her, one on a swing, the other in a passing car. The author rewinds those shots, slows them to half speed, juxtaposes them in a split-screen, enlarges her face, and freezes the frames in which her eyes make direct contact with the camera (and by analogy with Fleury). What shared secrets are revealed in that glance? The mystery appears to be on the verge of revelation.
Guerín, however, pushes the experiment even further than Antonioni, veering out of narrative filmmaking altogether and toward the truly avant-garde. To say that Guerín is fascinated by the texture of film is a literal truth. Near the end of Tren de sombras, the author’s use of Fleury’s footage becomes more playful, the pace of the jump-cuts more frantic, and the relationship between images more unpredictable and fractured. In a word, everything begins to disintegrate – the Fleury family relationships (or our tentative understanding of them, at least), the satisfying order the author had briefly conjured with his editing, and the literal, physical record of what we are studying – that is, the film itself. In Tren de sombras’ most compelling sequence, Guerín moves into pure abstraction, finding a Stan Brakhage-like beauty in the scratched and disintegrated material of the found footage. It’s a fascinating modernist turn for Guerín, a kind of escape from chaos into the aesthetic realm. In this sense, Tren de sombras would be at home programmed alongside the work of contemporary avant-garde filmmakers such as Jennifer Reeves, Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky, and David Gatten.
Like Guerín’s return to Strasbourg decades after his first encounter with Sylvia, Tren de sombras is also structured around a return to the scene of the crime: the village of Le Thuit and the estate where Fleury’s footage was shot. The author brings with him actors in period costumes and recreates scenes from the decayed home movies. He reverses angles, finding new clues and new shared glances. But even more interesting are the contemporary shots that seem totally unmotivated by the through-line of the plot. Again with one foot in the avant-garde, Guerín devotes considerable screen time to images of abstract beauty found among the prosaic. Several shots from a long sequence that takes place in the old home at night during a rainstorm would not be out of place in a Nathaniel Dorsky or Jim Jennings film. And one image in particular, the light cast by a passing car moving slowly along an interior wall, not only returns multiple times in Tren de sombres but also in the opening moments of En la ciudad de Sylvia, evidence that Guerín is still haunted by a train of shadows.- Darren Hughes
En construcción [2001]
Souvenir (1986)
Correspondències: José Luis Guerín - Jonas Mekas
DEBAT // José Luis Guerin i Jonas Mekas, en conversa (VO) na Vimeu
As one of Europe's most influential and innovative non-fiction filmmakers, José Luis Guerín (1960–) occupies a unique place in the vibrant and still largely underappreciated history of Catalan cinema. A brilliantly original director and a professor at Barcelona's prestigious Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Guerín has brought a new dynamism and experimental spirit into Catalan and Spanish cinema. Together with his colleague, the radical documentarian Joaquim Jordà, Guerín has transformed the Documentary Program at Pomeu Fabra into one of Europe's most important centers for experimental non-fiction work and inspired a new generation of young filmmakers, such as Mercedes Alvarez (El Cielo Gira).Guerín's films purposefully confound narrative and documentary traditions, discovering rich narrative threads woven into the tapestries of his real life subjects and unraveling mysteries without solutions that nevertheless leave the viewer deeply satisfied. Guerín's masterworks such as the radical Tren de sombras and his most recent triumph En la ciudad de Sylvia possess a meditative and deeply cerebral quality without being overly intellectual, manipulating narrative, sound and off-screen space with a sophisticated sense of playful experimentation reminiscent of both Chris Marker and Raul Ruiz. An omnivorous cinephile since his childhood during Franco's regime, when foreign films were extremely difficult to see, Guerín openly acknowledges the profound debt owed by his films to those masters who he so carefully studied during his "education" at Barcelona's Filmoteca – not only directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks and the Lumière Brothers, who are quoted and referenced throughout Guerín's films, but also those who Guerín boldly sought out and befriended such as Bresson, Ruiz and Philippe Garrel. Like the films of Pedro Costa, Guerín's films capture tropes of cinematic classicism embedded in the real world, discovering and reinventing, for example, the Hawksian symmetry between friends on the streets of Barcelona in En construcción or refining the patient Lumière long take used throughout En la ciudad de Sylvia.
Obsessed with the essentially cinematic qualities of travel and motion, Guerín's films lead the viewer on a voyage of discovery to a "foreign" place, such as his evocative search for John Ford's Innisfree in his eponymous film. Together Guerín's peripetatic and wonderfully curious films create a singular mode of cinema that revels in visual and sensual beauty even as it boldly experiments with narrative structures and provocatively intermingles documentary and fiction, memory and desire. Little known in the United States, Guerín's visit to Harvard is a historic event and a rare opportunity to discover one of Europe's most important filmmakers.
En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia)
Purple Gaze by
How to film the ethereal without losing sight of the concrete? In a recent article in Cities in Transition, a book on the city in film, François Penz proposes that most films use the city as a backdrop and only the occasional filmmaker finds ways to respect it either as a character within the film, or, if used as a backdrop, a backdrop to be logistically respected. Indeed why should filmmakers pay it much attention: according to the findings of media psychology researchers, after various experiments on viewer perception, "film viewers have only minimal commitment to the particular details that inhabit filmic space." But then there are always filmmakers who expect from the viewer a higher degree of commitment to particular details than most. Penz explores how Jacques Rivette's Pont du Nord (1981) is a good example of utilising Paris as a character within the film, while Eric Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife (La Femme de l'aviateur, 1981) is a film entirely respectful to Paris in its utilisation of backdrop. In Rivette's film, the director shows us a Paris that gives rise to narrative events as the leading characters read all sorts of signs and meanings into the city's sights as they wander around. This is the city offering space for the fantastic flaneur, for the sort of walking fantasist who doesn't walk purposely from one place to another, but casually from place to place and gains meaning from the chance situation and by projecting onto the world they see as they defy topographical accuracy for peripatetic flights of fancy. As Penz says, "we observe the characters accomplishing great leaps across the city regardless of the topography within a very tight time frame." In Rohmer's film, Penz documents the characters' movements with complete respect for the city's spatiality. "...the main character, indicates in the conversation that he is about to go and drop a note at his girlfriend's flat, number 56 Rue Rennequin (17th arrondissement). He then proceeds to take a metro and re-emerges at the Peireire station on the Place du Marechal Juin, which is indeed the closest station to the Rue Rennequin" etc. The characters won't transcend real space through film space, where the story dictates the characters' direction. No, in Rohmer's film the city to some degree, at least logistically, dictates the character's actions: as in Rohmer's Paris set debut feature The Sign of the Lion (Le Signe du lion, 1959) there is a documentary aspect to the film that makes it interesting as a time capsule As Penz points out, Rohmer has always been fascinated by architecture; once saying that "if I hadn't become a film director, I would have been an architect". Indeed in the late sixties Rohmer made a number of documentaries on French new towns, as well as Le Béton dans la ville (1959) with the great topographical theorist Paul Virilio.
This leads us to José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia, 2007) - a film that seems to offer a space between Rivette's fascination with the fantastic elements of the city and Rohmer's documentative specificity. It is the sort of film that so richly captures a sense of location that to ask where the film is set doesn't feel like an idle question. But at the same time it is a film that brings out the mystery of place as it works from the projective subjectivity of its central character, played by Xavier Lafitte. As Lafitte wanders around the town or sits reading, writing or sketching in his room and a cafe, we may wonder what it is that he sees and what it is that he fantasises, but Guerin's resolutely plausible mise-en-scene gives to the subjective a mysteriousness perhaps much greater than the generated mise-en-scene of a mannerist utilising a studio for similar effects. As he films in Strasbourg, what he does is make the city his own through his character's perspective, and at the same time leaves the city almost completely untouched. In a lengthy café scene outside the acting school in the city, it seems as if Guerín is documenting the people his central character watches, while at the same time he films Xavier Lafitte.
This is really the question we want to broach, taking into account the comments by Penz on the city: what is it to film and what is it to document? The former suggests a determination, the latter its absence. One contains the desire to shape; the other the need to capture what is passing. Many films minimise the passing and emphasise the shaping, so that all that is left of the documentative is the actor's visage and a few stray details of the period: the clothing, the cars the characters drive, the furnishings. But in general such films care little for the singularity of the time, date and place. Whether it is an Argentinian film like Nine Queens (Nueve reinas, Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) or a German film like Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1998), or a British film such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), all set quite specifically in the cities of Buenos Aires, Berlin and Edinburgh, there is nevertheless no question within the setting that asks what is Buenos Aires, Berlin or Edinburgh. They all lack the documentative because the documentative within fiction film is also a question about the city. Nine Queens, Run Lola Run and Trainspotting all recognize specificity of place in relation to subject (no matter if Trainspotting was partly filmed in Glasgow), but not as aspect. They film the city to contain the story, but Guerín seems almost to tell the story so as to document the city: to capture its aspect. It makes sense that a film about heroin in the eighties should set itself in a city famous at that time for its number of heroin addicts, but this also shows Trainspotting taking the path of least resistance in relation to its subject. By zeroing in on the expected, the subject is covered but not the aspect.
But how to film the aspect, and has this question been central to much of Guerín's other work, including Innisfree (1990), a film about the making of The Quiet Man (1952) on the west coast of Ireland, and En construccion (2001), focusing on the gentrification of a poor district of Barcelona, films where Guerín films patiently, as if waiting for the location to yield itself to him? To do so the filmmaker cannot assume that the city is a given within the story, so that it can become anonymous backdrop or prominently fore-grounded in key moments: as we find in an early scene of Renton running from the police in Trainspotting, in some of the scenes where Lola runs from place to place in Run Lola Run. In each instance the city is a backdrop with an occasional foregrounding. But others like, for example, two great New York films of the seventies, Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), seem to ask of the city what it means to characters that, in very different ways, are absorbed by the place in which they live. In Taxi Driver the aspect is dystopian; in Manhattan essentially utopian: this is the same city but the strength of the aspect upon it radically transforms it. Scorsese utilises an expressionist yet nevertheless plausibly realist colourism that infernalises the city, Woody Allen a muted, melancholic monochrome to create the city as an intimate, emotionally focused space. They remain great films of the city by virtue of finding in that city an aspect that makes the space the filmmaker's own, without in any way denying the scope of the place in which they film.
But what is Guerín's aspect on Strasbourg; what does he want this small French city near the border of Germany, home to an illustrious acting school, an 11th to 15th century cathedral, and of course the European Council, to illustrate? It seems first of all to be a liminal place, and when Laffite first walks out of his room and onto the streets we hear both French and German as we try to locate ourselves, as Guerín makes the space familiar and at the same time obscure. With great attention to sound, and an attentive sense of observation, Guerín insists the viewer sink into a space that at the same time cannot quite be our own: it is the indeterminate relationship between the city as given and the imaginary relationship the character has with the space that he is in, that makes the film a Symbolist work without symbolism, a Surrealist work without surrealism.
But what do we mean by such apparent paradoxes? Maybe invoking the great late nineteenth century novel, Bruges-la-mort, by Georges Rodenbach, and also Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), will help. Both are works that invoke symbolism within a notion of the real: for both are cities of the mind as well as cities of reality. Bruges-la-mort is a rare novel illustrated with photographs from Bruges, though the narrator's relationship with the town and the woman who resembles his dead wife, is hardly without a strong imaginary dimension. Meanwhile Hitchcock's most fantastic film, the film most given to the oneiric, with the richest colour scheme, and with the most fixated of central characters, is also the one that most vividly gives the viewer a sense of place: from Golden Gate Bridge to the hilly, windy streets of San Francisco, this can only be one city in the US. The director utilises actual spaces to bring out the imagination of his central character, just as the writer in Bruges-la-mort vividly depicts actual spaces to focus the yearning his character feels for his late wife and the woman whom he falls for who passes through the same streets years later.
But why do we invoke and reject the symbolic and the surreal? We do so because in all three works - in Bruges-la-mort, Vertigo and In the City of Sylvia - the relationship between character and city is offered as a dialectical tension between the imagination on the one hand and the brute existence of place on the other. If the works were simply symbolic - and Bruges-la-mort is often viewed as a masterpiece of Symbolist writing - that tension would dissolve into the imaginary as place becomes secondary to character. The other characters and the location would become less important than the imagination, and a street would symbolise a character's feelings and lose its topographical significance to symbolic import. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, Symbolists believed that "underlying the materiality and individuality of the physical world was another reality whose essence could best be glimpsed through the subjective emotional responses..." The same sort of dissolution would be true of a Surrealist work, where the actions would become increasingly dreamlike as the topography became denaturalized. It is as though we need a different term to describe the intertwining of space and place to make sense of this intertwining of the imaginary deeply activated and the space vividly depicted, and the ‘interfacial resistance' as they cannot give way to each other.
What happens here is that they mutually underscore and undermine each other. Think of the scene in In The City of Sylvia where our central character follows the young woman around the town centre and gets lost in the labyrinthine streets that make up so many of France's old towns, from Avignon to Montpellier, from Cherbourg to Nimes. These are streets where it is easy to lose one's bearings, but Lafitte's character is also someone who may want to lose those bearings. He arrives in the town as a stranger and, in the early stages of the film, we see him looking at various faces as he sits outside the cafe he frequents, as if simultaneously looking for the past and searching out his future. Perhaps he really is looking for someone from his past; but that doesn't mean the past was finally in this town, more that the town gives him the possibility to lose himself in the tranquil beauty of both the place and the faces he projects upon. As he looks in the lengthy café scene from face to face, as Guerín holds on numerous faces as if to ask which one will become Laffite's potential lover, the film proposes as much the potentiality of place as remembrance of things past.
When we use the term interfacial resistance it is to try and describe the way the film dissolves categorical meaning partly through refusing the symbolic and surrealist. It doesn't want to push the subjectivity so that it becomes imaginary or oneiric, but the place isn't simply realist either. Why so many physically crippled characters passing across the frame, why so many beautiful young women and obese, exhausted looking older men? Perhaps the best way to describe it is that a character lost in his own thoughts comes to a place where he finds those thoughts in such a way that he can hold onto his imagination, and the place complements that imaginary possibility without itself being changed by the subjectivity applied upon it.
This leads us to a key question the film addresses, and central to why we've so determinedly rejected both the symbolic and the surreal, the dissolution of character or the dissolution of place. It is the question of how do we find places in the world - cities, towns, villages, buildings, flats, seascapes, landscapes, whatever it might be - that capture the demands of the soul. How do we find spaces that we don't transform with our minds, but that coincide with our thoughts. From a narrative point of view Guerín's film may seem an insubstantial account of a young man looking for his past in a small French city, but it is much more rewarding from a spiritually adventurous point of view where the filmmaker wants to search out places that assuage our existence without us transforming them, or them transforming us. Should not this be the point of travel; that we travel not to find the places that we read about in books, magazines and newspapers and that demand yet another look of awe as we gawp at the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, La Sagrada Familia or Buckingham Palace, but instead a place that brings out feelings that we couldn't quite have anywhere else and yet belong to a place that we couldn't readily guess would generate them within us? Guerín is ‘obsessed with the essentially cinematic qualities of travel and motion' the Harvard Film Archive proposes, but we would claim even more that his fascination resides in finding places in which thought can exist, and immanent qualities become apparent. As Gilles Deleuze once proposed in a ‘Letter to Serge Daney', "so what reason [for travel] is there, ultimately, except seeing for yourself, going to check something, some inexpressible feeling from a dream or a nightmare..." That is, to find within oneself that which is out there, somewhere, a place that we don't alter and which doesn't especially alter us - but in some curious way expresses us, our moods, our hopes, our desires. Gaston Bachelard, speaking of the house that he sees as a "privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intmate values of inside space", adds, later, "this being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Can the same be said of certain towns and cities? Guerín's enigmatic work, with a central character who barely speaks, and whose feelings we must intuit chiefly through his regard, is a fine exploration of this obscure need for the possible in all its topographical elegance. In Guerín's fictional essay on feelings and space Strasbourg really does manage to become a character in the film. -
How to film the ethereal without losing sight of the concrete? In a recent article in Cities in Transition, a book on the city in film, François Penz proposes that most films use the city as a backdrop and only the occasional filmmaker finds ways to respect it either as a character within the film, or, if used as a backdrop, a backdrop to be logistically respected. Indeed why should filmmakers pay it much attention: according to the findings of media psychology researchers, after various experiments on viewer perception, "film viewers have only minimal commitment to the particular details that inhabit filmic space." But then there are always filmmakers who expect from the viewer a higher degree of commitment to particular details than most. Penz explores how Jacques Rivette's Pont du Nord (1981) is a good example of utilising Paris as a character within the film, while Eric Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife (La Femme de l'aviateur, 1981) is a film entirely respectful to Paris in its utilisation of backdrop. In Rivette's film, the director shows us a Paris that gives rise to narrative events as the leading characters read all sorts of signs and meanings into the city's sights as they wander around. This is the city offering space for the fantastic flaneur, for the sort of walking fantasist who doesn't walk purposely from one place to another, but casually from place to place and gains meaning from the chance situation and by projecting onto the world they see as they defy topographical accuracy for peripatetic flights of fancy. As Penz says, "we observe the characters accomplishing great leaps across the city regardless of the topography within a very tight time frame." In Rohmer's film, Penz documents the characters' movements with complete respect for the city's spatiality. "...the main character, indicates in the conversation that he is about to go and drop a note at his girlfriend's flat, number 56 Rue Rennequin (17th arrondissement). He then proceeds to take a metro and re-emerges at the Peireire station on the Place du Marechal Juin, which is indeed the closest station to the Rue Rennequin" etc. The characters won't transcend real space through film space, where the story dictates the characters' direction. No, in Rohmer's film the city to some degree, at least logistically, dictates the character's actions: as in Rohmer's Paris set debut feature The Sign of the Lion (Le Signe du lion, 1959) there is a documentary aspect to the film that makes it interesting as a time capsule As Penz points out, Rohmer has always been fascinated by architecture; once saying that "if I hadn't become a film director, I would have been an architect". Indeed in the late sixties Rohmer made a number of documentaries on French new towns, as well as Le Béton dans la ville (1959) with the great topographical theorist Paul Virilio.
This is really the question we want to broach, taking into account the comments by Penz on the city: what is it to film and what is it to document? The former suggests a determination, the latter its absence. One contains the desire to shape; the other the need to capture what is passing. Many films minimise the passing and emphasise the shaping, so that all that is left of the documentative is the actor's visage and a few stray details of the period: the clothing, the cars the characters drive, the furnishings. But in general such films care little for the singularity of the time, date and place. Whether it is an Argentinian film like Nine Queens (Nueve reinas, Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) or a German film like Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1998), or a British film such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), all set quite specifically in the cities of Buenos Aires, Berlin and Edinburgh, there is nevertheless no question within the setting that asks what is Buenos Aires, Berlin or Edinburgh. They all lack the documentative because the documentative within fiction film is also a question about the city. Nine Queens, Run Lola Run and Trainspotting all recognize specificity of place in relation to subject (no matter if Trainspotting was partly filmed in Glasgow), but not as aspect. They film the city to contain the story, but Guerín seems almost to tell the story so as to document the city: to capture its aspect. It makes sense that a film about heroin in the eighties should set itself in a city famous at that time for its number of heroin addicts, but this also shows Trainspotting taking the path of least resistance in relation to its subject. By zeroing in on the expected, the subject is covered but not the aspect.
But how to film the aspect, and has this question been central to much of Guerín's other work, including Innisfree (1990), a film about the making of The Quiet Man (1952) on the west coast of Ireland, and En construccion (2001), focusing on the gentrification of a poor district of Barcelona, films where Guerín films patiently, as if waiting for the location to yield itself to him? To do so the filmmaker cannot assume that the city is a given within the story, so that it can become anonymous backdrop or prominently fore-grounded in key moments: as we find in an early scene of Renton running from the police in Trainspotting, in some of the scenes where Lola runs from place to place in Run Lola Run. In each instance the city is a backdrop with an occasional foregrounding. But others like, for example, two great New York films of the seventies, Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), seem to ask of the city what it means to characters that, in very different ways, are absorbed by the place in which they live. In Taxi Driver the aspect is dystopian; in Manhattan essentially utopian: this is the same city but the strength of the aspect upon it radically transforms it. Scorsese utilises an expressionist yet nevertheless plausibly realist colourism that infernalises the city, Woody Allen a muted, melancholic monochrome to create the city as an intimate, emotionally focused space. They remain great films of the city by virtue of finding in that city an aspect that makes the space the filmmaker's own, without in any way denying the scope of the place in which they film.
But what is Guerín's aspect on Strasbourg; what does he want this small French city near the border of Germany, home to an illustrious acting school, an 11th to 15th century cathedral, and of course the European Council, to illustrate? It seems first of all to be a liminal place, and when Laffite first walks out of his room and onto the streets we hear both French and German as we try to locate ourselves, as Guerín makes the space familiar and at the same time obscure. With great attention to sound, and an attentive sense of observation, Guerín insists the viewer sink into a space that at the same time cannot quite be our own: it is the indeterminate relationship between the city as given and the imaginary relationship the character has with the space that he is in, that makes the film a Symbolist work without symbolism, a Surrealist work without surrealism.
But what do we mean by such apparent paradoxes? Maybe invoking the great late nineteenth century novel, Bruges-la-mort, by Georges Rodenbach, and also Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), will help. Both are works that invoke symbolism within a notion of the real: for both are cities of the mind as well as cities of reality. Bruges-la-mort is a rare novel illustrated with photographs from Bruges, though the narrator's relationship with the town and the woman who resembles his dead wife, is hardly without a strong imaginary dimension. Meanwhile Hitchcock's most fantastic film, the film most given to the oneiric, with the richest colour scheme, and with the most fixated of central characters, is also the one that most vividly gives the viewer a sense of place: from Golden Gate Bridge to the hilly, windy streets of San Francisco, this can only be one city in the US. The director utilises actual spaces to bring out the imagination of his central character, just as the writer in Bruges-la-mort vividly depicts actual spaces to focus the yearning his character feels for his late wife and the woman whom he falls for who passes through the same streets years later.
But why do we invoke and reject the symbolic and the surreal? We do so because in all three works - in Bruges-la-mort, Vertigo and In the City of Sylvia - the relationship between character and city is offered as a dialectical tension between the imagination on the one hand and the brute existence of place on the other. If the works were simply symbolic - and Bruges-la-mort is often viewed as a masterpiece of Symbolist writing - that tension would dissolve into the imaginary as place becomes secondary to character. The other characters and the location would become less important than the imagination, and a street would symbolise a character's feelings and lose its topographical significance to symbolic import. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, Symbolists believed that "underlying the materiality and individuality of the physical world was another reality whose essence could best be glimpsed through the subjective emotional responses..." The same sort of dissolution would be true of a Surrealist work, where the actions would become increasingly dreamlike as the topography became denaturalized. It is as though we need a different term to describe the intertwining of space and place to make sense of this intertwining of the imaginary deeply activated and the space vividly depicted, and the ‘interfacial resistance' as they cannot give way to each other.
What happens here is that they mutually underscore and undermine each other. Think of the scene in In The City of Sylvia where our central character follows the young woman around the town centre and gets lost in the labyrinthine streets that make up so many of France's old towns, from Avignon to Montpellier, from Cherbourg to Nimes. These are streets where it is easy to lose one's bearings, but Lafitte's character is also someone who may want to lose those bearings. He arrives in the town as a stranger and, in the early stages of the film, we see him looking at various faces as he sits outside the cafe he frequents, as if simultaneously looking for the past and searching out his future. Perhaps he really is looking for someone from his past; but that doesn't mean the past was finally in this town, more that the town gives him the possibility to lose himself in the tranquil beauty of both the place and the faces he projects upon. As he looks in the lengthy café scene from face to face, as Guerín holds on numerous faces as if to ask which one will become Laffite's potential lover, the film proposes as much the potentiality of place as remembrance of things past.
When we use the term interfacial resistance it is to try and describe the way the film dissolves categorical meaning partly through refusing the symbolic and surrealist. It doesn't want to push the subjectivity so that it becomes imaginary or oneiric, but the place isn't simply realist either. Why so many physically crippled characters passing across the frame, why so many beautiful young women and obese, exhausted looking older men? Perhaps the best way to describe it is that a character lost in his own thoughts comes to a place where he finds those thoughts in such a way that he can hold onto his imagination, and the place complements that imaginary possibility without itself being changed by the subjectivity applied upon it.
This leads us to a key question the film addresses, and central to why we've so determinedly rejected both the symbolic and the surreal, the dissolution of character or the dissolution of place. It is the question of how do we find places in the world - cities, towns, villages, buildings, flats, seascapes, landscapes, whatever it might be - that capture the demands of the soul. How do we find spaces that we don't transform with our minds, but that coincide with our thoughts. From a narrative point of view Guerín's film may seem an insubstantial account of a young man looking for his past in a small French city, but it is much more rewarding from a spiritually adventurous point of view where the filmmaker wants to search out places that assuage our existence without us transforming them, or them transforming us. Should not this be the point of travel; that we travel not to find the places that we read about in books, magazines and newspapers and that demand yet another look of awe as we gawp at the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, La Sagrada Familia or Buckingham Palace, but instead a place that brings out feelings that we couldn't quite have anywhere else and yet belong to a place that we couldn't readily guess would generate them within us? Guerín is ‘obsessed with the essentially cinematic qualities of travel and motion' the Harvard Film Archive proposes, but we would claim even more that his fascination resides in finding places in which thought can exist, and immanent qualities become apparent. As Gilles Deleuze once proposed in a ‘Letter to Serge Daney', "so what reason [for travel] is there, ultimately, except seeing for yourself, going to check something, some inexpressible feeling from a dream or a nightmare..." That is, to find within oneself that which is out there, somewhere, a place that we don't alter and which doesn't especially alter us - but in some curious way expresses us, our moods, our hopes, our desires. Gaston Bachelard, speaking of the house that he sees as a "privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intmate values of inside space", adds, later, "this being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Can the same be said of certain towns and cities? Guerín's enigmatic work, with a central character who barely speaks, and whose feelings we must intuit chiefly through his regard, is a fine exploration of this obscure need for the possible in all its topographical elegance. In Guerín's fictional essay on feelings and space Strasbourg really does manage to become a character in the film. -
How to film the ethereal without losing sight of the concrete? In a recent article in Cities in Transition, a book on the city in film, François Penz proposes that most films use the city as a backdrop and only the occasional filmmaker finds ways to respect it either as a character within the film, or, if used as a backdrop, a backdrop to be logistically respected. Indeed why should filmmakers pay it much attention: according to the findings of media psychology researchers, after various experiments on viewer perception, "film viewers have only minimal commitment to the particular details that inhabit filmic space." But then there are always filmmakers who expect from the viewer a higher degree of commitment to particular details than most. Penz explores how Jacques Rivette's Pont du Nord (1981) is a good example of utilising Paris as a character within the film, while Eric Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife (La Femme de l'aviateur, 1981) is a film entirely respectful to Paris in its utilisation of backdrop. In Rivette's film, the director shows us a Paris that gives rise to narrative events as the leading characters read all sorts of signs and meanings into the city's sights as they wander around. This is the city offering space for the fantastic flaneur, for the sort of walking fantasist who doesn't walk purposely from one place to another, but casually from place to place and gains meaning from the chance situation and by projecting onto the world they see as they defy topographical accuracy for peripatetic flights of fancy. As Penz says, "we observe the characters accomplishing great leaps across the city regardless of the topography within a very tight time frame." In Rohmer's film, Penz documents the characters' movements with complete respect for the city's spatiality. "...the main character, indicates in the conversation that he is about to go and drop a note at his girlfriend's flat, number 56 Rue Rennequin (17th arrondissement). He then proceeds to take a metro and re-emerges at the Peireire station on the Place du Marechal Juin, which is indeed the closest station to the Rue Rennequin" etc. The characters won't transcend real space through film space, where the story dictates the characters' direction. No, in Rohmer's film the city to some degree, at least logistically, dictates the character's actions: as in Rohmer's Paris set debut feature The Sign of the Lion (Le Signe du lion, 1959) there is a documentary aspect to the film that makes it interesting as a time capsule As Penz points out, Rohmer has always been fascinated by architecture; once saying that "if I hadn't become a film director, I would have been an architect". Indeed in the late sixties Rohmer made a number of documentaries on French new towns, as well as Le Béton dans la ville (1959) with the great topographical theorist Paul Virilio.
This leads us to José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia, 2007) - a film that seems to offer a space between Rivette's fascination with the fantastic elements of the city and Rohmer's documentative specificity. It is the sort of film that so richly captures a sense of location that to ask where the film is set doesn't feel like an idle question. But at the same time it is a film that brings out the mystery of place as it works from the projective subjectivity of its central character, played by Xavier Lafitte. As Lafitte wanders around the town or sits reading, writing or sketching in his room and a cafe, we may wonder what it is that he sees and what it is that he fantasises, but Guerin's resolutely plausible mise-en-scene gives to the subjective a mysteriousness perhaps much greater than the generated mise-en-scene of a mannerist utilising a studio for similar effects. As he films in Strasbourg, what he does is make the city his own through his character's perspective, and at the same time leaves the city almost completely untouched. In a lengthy café scene outside the acting school in the city, it seems as if Guerín is documenting the people his central character watches, while at the same time he films Xavier Lafitte.
This is really the question we want to broach, taking into account the comments by Penz on the city: what is it to film and what is it to document? The former suggests a determination, the latter its absence. One contains the desire to shape; the other the need to capture what is passing. Many films minimise the passing and emphasise the shaping, so that all that is left of the documentative is the actor's visage and a few stray details of the period: the clothing, the cars the characters drive, the furnishings. But in general such films care little for the singularity of the time, date and place. Whether it is an Argentinian film like Nine Queens (Nueve reinas, Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) or a German film like Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1998), or a British film such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), all set quite specifically in the cities of Buenos Aires, Berlin and Edinburgh, there is nevertheless no question within the setting that asks what is Buenos Aires, Berlin or Edinburgh. They all lack the documentative because the documentative within fiction film is also a question about the city. Nine Queens, Run Lola Run and Trainspotting all recognize specificity of place in relation to subject (no matter if Trainspotting was partly filmed in Glasgow), but not as aspect. They film the city to contain the story, but Guerín seems almost to tell the story so as to document the city: to capture its aspect. It makes sense that a film about heroin in the eighties should set itself in a city famous at that time for its number of heroin addicts, but this also shows Trainspotting taking the path of least resistance in relation to its subject. By zeroing in on the expected, the subject is covered but not the aspect.
But how to film the aspect, and has this question been central to much of Guerín's other work, including Innisfree (1990), a film about the making of The Quiet Man (1952) on the west coast of Ireland, and En construccion (2001), focusing on the gentrification of a poor district of Barcelona, films where Guerín films patiently, as if waiting for the location to yield itself to him? To do so the filmmaker cannot assume that the city is a given within the story, so that it can become anonymous backdrop or prominently fore-grounded in key moments: as we find in an early scene of Renton running from the police in Trainspotting, in some of the scenes where Lola runs from place to place in Run Lola Run. In each instance the city is a backdrop with an occasional foregrounding. But others like, for example, two great New York films of the seventies, Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), seem to ask of the city what it means to characters that, in very different ways, are absorbed by the place in which they live. In Taxi Driver the aspect is dystopian; in Manhattan essentially utopian: this is the same city but the strength of the aspect upon it radically transforms it. Scorsese utilises an expressionist yet nevertheless plausibly realist colourism that infernalises the city, Woody Allen a muted, melancholic monochrome to create the city as an intimate, emotionally focused space. They remain great films of the city by virtue of finding in that city an aspect that makes the space the filmmaker's own, without in any way denying the scope of the place in which they film.
But what is Guerín's aspect on Strasbourg; what does he want this small French city near the border of Germany, home to an illustrious acting school, an 11th to 15th century cathedral, and of course the European Council, to illustrate? It seems first of all to be a liminal place, and when Laffite first walks out of his room and onto the streets we hear both French and German as we try to locate ourselves, as Guerín makes the space familiar and at the same time obscure. With great attention to sound, and an attentive sense of observation, Guerín insists the viewer sink into a space that at the same time cannot quite be our own: it is the indeterminate relationship between the city as given and the imaginary relationship the character has with the space that he is in, that makes the film a Symbolist work without symbolism, a Surrealist work without surrealism.
But what do we mean by such apparent paradoxes? Maybe invoking the great late nineteenth century novel, Bruges-la-mort, by Georges Rodenbach, and also Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), will help. Both are works that invoke symbolism within a notion of the real: for both are cities of the mind as well as cities of reality. Bruges-la-mort is a rare novel illustrated with photographs from Bruges, though the narrator's relationship with the town and the woman who resembles his dead wife, is hardly without a strong imaginary dimension. Meanwhile Hitchcock's most fantastic film, the film most given to the oneiric, with the richest colour scheme, and with the most fixated of central characters, is also the one that most vividly gives the viewer a sense of place: from Golden Gate Bridge to the hilly, windy streets of San Francisco, this can only be one city in the US. The director utilises actual spaces to bring out the imagination of his central character, just as the writer in Bruges-la-mort vividly depicts actual spaces to focus the yearning his character feels for his late wife and the woman whom he falls for who passes through the same streets years later.
But why do we invoke and reject the symbolic and the surreal? We do so because in all three works - in Bruges-la-mort, Vertigo and In the City of Sylvia - the relationship between character and city is offered as a dialectical tension between the imagination on the one hand and the brute existence of place on the other. If the works were simply symbolic - and Bruges-la-mort is often viewed as a masterpiece of Symbolist writing - that tension would dissolve into the imaginary as place becomes secondary to character. The other characters and the location would become less important than the imagination, and a street would symbolise a character's feelings and lose its topographical significance to symbolic import. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, Symbolists believed that "underlying the materiality and individuality of the physical world was another reality whose essence could best be glimpsed through the subjective emotional responses..." The same sort of dissolution would be true of a Surrealist work, where the actions would become increasingly dreamlike as the topography became denaturalized. It is as though we need a different term to describe the intertwining of space and place to make sense of this intertwining of the imaginary deeply activated and the space vividly depicted, and the ‘interfacial resistance' as they cannot give way to each other.
What happens here is that they mutually underscore and undermine each other. Think of the scene in In The City of Sylvia where our central character follows the young woman around the town centre and gets lost in the labyrinthine streets that make up so many of France's old towns, from Avignon to Montpellier, from Cherbourg to Nimes. These are streets where it is easy to lose one's bearings, but Lafitte's character is also someone who may want to lose those bearings. He arrives in the town as a stranger and, in the early stages of the film, we see him looking at various faces as he sits outside the cafe he frequents, as if simultaneously looking for the past and searching out his future. Perhaps he really is looking for someone from his past; but that doesn't mean the past was finally in this town, more that the town gives him the possibility to lose himself in the tranquil beauty of both the place and the faces he projects upon. As he looks in the lengthy café scene from face to face, as Guerín holds on numerous faces as if to ask which one will become Laffite's potential lover, the film proposes as much the potentiality of place as remembrance of things past.
When we use the term interfacial resistance it is to try and describe the way the film dissolves categorical meaning partly through refusing the symbolic and surrealist. It doesn't want to push the subjectivity so that it becomes imaginary or oneiric, but the place isn't simply realist either. Why so many physically crippled characters passing across the frame, why so many beautiful young women and obese, exhausted looking older men? Perhaps the best way to describe it is that a character lost in his own thoughts comes to a place where he finds those thoughts in such a way that he can hold onto his imagination, and the place complements that imaginary possibility without itself being changed by the subjectivity applied upon it.
This leads us to a key question the film addresses, and central to why we've so determinedly rejected both the symbolic and the surreal, the dissolution of character or the dissolution of place. It is the question of how do we find places in the world - cities, towns, villages, buildings, flats, seascapes, landscapes, whatever it might be - that capture the demands of the soul. How do we find spaces that we don't transform with our minds, but that coincide with our thoughts. From a narrative point of view Guerín's film may seem an insubstantial account of a young man looking for his past in a small French city, but it is much more rewarding from a spiritually adventurous point of view where the filmmaker wants to search out places that assuage our existence without us transforming them, or them transforming us. Should not this be the point of travel; that we travel not to find the places that we read about in books, magazines and newspapers and that demand yet another look of awe as we gawp at the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, La Sagrada Familia or Buckingham Palace, but instead a place that brings out feelings that we couldn't quite have anywhere else and yet belong to a place that we couldn't readily guess would generate them within us? Guerín is ‘obsessed with the essentially cinematic qualities of travel and motion' the Harvard Film Archive proposes, but we would claim even more that his fascination resides in finding places in which thought can exist, and immanent qualities become apparent. As Gilles Deleuze once proposed in a ‘Letter to Serge Daney', "so what reason [for travel] is there, ultimately, except seeing for yourself, going to check something, some inexpressible feeling from a dream or a nightmare..." That is, to find within oneself that which is out there, somewhere, a place that we don't alter and which doesn't especially alter us - but in some curious way expresses us, our moods, our hopes, our desires. Gaston Bachelard, speaking of the house that he sees as a "privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intmate values of inside space", adds, later, "this being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Can the same be said of certain towns and cities? Guerín's enigmatic work, with a central character who barely speaks, and whose feelings we must intuit chiefly through his regard, is a fine exploration of this obscure need for the possible in all its topographical elegance. In Guerín's fictional essay on feelings and space Strasbourg really does manage to become a character in the film.
This is really the question we want to broach, taking into account the comments by Penz on the city: what is it to film and what is it to document? The former suggests a determination, the latter its absence. One contains the desire to shape; the other the need to capture what is passing. Many films minimise the passing and emphasise the shaping, so that all that is left of the documentative is the actor's visage and a few stray details of the period: the clothing, the cars the characters drive, the furnishings. But in general such films care little for the singularity of the time, date and place. Whether it is an Argentinian film like Nine Queens (Nueve reinas, Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) or a German film like Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1998), or a British film such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), all set quite specifically in the cities of Buenos Aires, Berlin and Edinburgh, there is nevertheless no question within the setting that asks what is Buenos Aires, Berlin or Edinburgh. They all lack the documentative because the documentative within fiction film is also a question about the city. Nine Queens, Run Lola Run and Trainspotting all recognize specificity of place in relation to subject (no matter if Trainspotting was partly filmed in Glasgow), but not as aspect. They film the city to contain the story, but Guerín seems almost to tell the story so as to document the city: to capture its aspect. It makes sense that a film about heroin in the eighties should set itself in a city famous at that time for its number of heroin addicts, but this also shows Trainspotting taking the path of least resistance in relation to its subject. By zeroing in on the expected, the subject is covered but not the aspect.
But how to film the aspect, and has this question been central to much of Guerín's other work, including Innisfree (1990), a film about the making of The Quiet Man (1952) on the west coast of Ireland, and En construccion (2001), focusing on the gentrification of a poor district of Barcelona, films where Guerín films patiently, as if waiting for the location to yield itself to him? To do so the filmmaker cannot assume that the city is a given within the story, so that it can become anonymous backdrop or prominently fore-grounded in key moments: as we find in an early scene of Renton running from the police in Trainspotting, in some of the scenes where Lola runs from place to place in Run Lola Run. In each instance the city is a backdrop with an occasional foregrounding. But others like, for example, two great New York films of the seventies, Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), seem to ask of the city what it means to characters that, in very different ways, are absorbed by the place in which they live. In Taxi Driver the aspect is dystopian; in Manhattan essentially utopian: this is the same city but the strength of the aspect upon it radically transforms it. Scorsese utilises an expressionist yet nevertheless plausibly realist colourism that infernalises the city, Woody Allen a muted, melancholic monochrome to create the city as an intimate, emotionally focused space. They remain great films of the city by virtue of finding in that city an aspect that makes the space the filmmaker's own, without in any way denying the scope of the place in which they film.
But what is Guerín's aspect on Strasbourg; what does he want this small French city near the border of Germany, home to an illustrious acting school, an 11th to 15th century cathedral, and of course the European Council, to illustrate? It seems first of all to be a liminal place, and when Laffite first walks out of his room and onto the streets we hear both French and German as we try to locate ourselves, as Guerín makes the space familiar and at the same time obscure. With great attention to sound, and an attentive sense of observation, Guerín insists the viewer sink into a space that at the same time cannot quite be our own: it is the indeterminate relationship between the city as given and the imaginary relationship the character has with the space that he is in, that makes the film a Symbolist work without symbolism, a Surrealist work without surrealism.
But what do we mean by such apparent paradoxes? Maybe invoking the great late nineteenth century novel, Bruges-la-mort, by Georges Rodenbach, and also Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), will help. Both are works that invoke symbolism within a notion of the real: for both are cities of the mind as well as cities of reality. Bruges-la-mort is a rare novel illustrated with photographs from Bruges, though the narrator's relationship with the town and the woman who resembles his dead wife, is hardly without a strong imaginary dimension. Meanwhile Hitchcock's most fantastic film, the film most given to the oneiric, with the richest colour scheme, and with the most fixated of central characters, is also the one that most vividly gives the viewer a sense of place: from Golden Gate Bridge to the hilly, windy streets of San Francisco, this can only be one city in the US. The director utilises actual spaces to bring out the imagination of his central character, just as the writer in Bruges-la-mort vividly depicts actual spaces to focus the yearning his character feels for his late wife and the woman whom he falls for who passes through the same streets years later.
But why do we invoke and reject the symbolic and the surreal? We do so because in all three works - in Bruges-la-mort, Vertigo and In the City of Sylvia - the relationship between character and city is offered as a dialectical tension between the imagination on the one hand and the brute existence of place on the other. If the works were simply symbolic - and Bruges-la-mort is often viewed as a masterpiece of Symbolist writing - that tension would dissolve into the imaginary as place becomes secondary to character. The other characters and the location would become less important than the imagination, and a street would symbolise a character's feelings and lose its topographical significance to symbolic import. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, Symbolists believed that "underlying the materiality and individuality of the physical world was another reality whose essence could best be glimpsed through the subjective emotional responses..." The same sort of dissolution would be true of a Surrealist work, where the actions would become increasingly dreamlike as the topography became denaturalized. It is as though we need a different term to describe the intertwining of space and place to make sense of this intertwining of the imaginary deeply activated and the space vividly depicted, and the ‘interfacial resistance' as they cannot give way to each other.
What happens here is that they mutually underscore and undermine each other. Think of the scene in In The City of Sylvia where our central character follows the young woman around the town centre and gets lost in the labyrinthine streets that make up so many of France's old towns, from Avignon to Montpellier, from Cherbourg to Nimes. These are streets where it is easy to lose one's bearings, but Lafitte's character is also someone who may want to lose those bearings. He arrives in the town as a stranger and, in the early stages of the film, we see him looking at various faces as he sits outside the cafe he frequents, as if simultaneously looking for the past and searching out his future. Perhaps he really is looking for someone from his past; but that doesn't mean the past was finally in this town, more that the town gives him the possibility to lose himself in the tranquil beauty of both the place and the faces he projects upon. As he looks in the lengthy café scene from face to face, as Guerín holds on numerous faces as if to ask which one will become Laffite's potential lover, the film proposes as much the potentiality of place as remembrance of things past.
When we use the term interfacial resistance it is to try and describe the way the film dissolves categorical meaning partly through refusing the symbolic and surrealist. It doesn't want to push the subjectivity so that it becomes imaginary or oneiric, but the place isn't simply realist either. Why so many physically crippled characters passing across the frame, why so many beautiful young women and obese, exhausted looking older men? Perhaps the best way to describe it is that a character lost in his own thoughts comes to a place where he finds those thoughts in such a way that he can hold onto his imagination, and the place complements that imaginary possibility without itself being changed by the subjectivity applied upon it.
This leads us to a key question the film addresses, and central to why we've so determinedly rejected both the symbolic and the surreal, the dissolution of character or the dissolution of place. It is the question of how do we find places in the world - cities, towns, villages, buildings, flats, seascapes, landscapes, whatever it might be - that capture the demands of the soul. How do we find spaces that we don't transform with our minds, but that coincide with our thoughts. From a narrative point of view Guerín's film may seem an insubstantial account of a young man looking for his past in a small French city, but it is much more rewarding from a spiritually adventurous point of view where the filmmaker wants to search out places that assuage our existence without us transforming them, or them transforming us. Should not this be the point of travel; that we travel not to find the places that we read about in books, magazines and newspapers and that demand yet another look of awe as we gawp at the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, La Sagrada Familia or Buckingham Palace, but instead a place that brings out feelings that we couldn't quite have anywhere else and yet belong to a place that we couldn't readily guess would generate them within us? Guerín is ‘obsessed with the essentially cinematic qualities of travel and motion' the Harvard Film Archive proposes, but we would claim even more that his fascination resides in finding places in which thought can exist, and immanent qualities become apparent. As Gilles Deleuze once proposed in a ‘Letter to Serge Daney', "so what reason [for travel] is there, ultimately, except seeing for yourself, going to check something, some inexpressible feeling from a dream or a nightmare..." That is, to find within oneself that which is out there, somewhere, a place that we don't alter and which doesn't especially alter us - but in some curious way expresses us, our moods, our hopes, our desires. Gaston Bachelard, speaking of the house that he sees as a "privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intmate values of inside space", adds, later, "this being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Can the same be said of certain towns and cities? Guerín's enigmatic work, with a central character who barely speaks, and whose feelings we must intuit chiefly through his regard, is a fine exploration of this obscure need for the possible in all its topographical elegance. In Guerín's fictional essay on feelings and space Strasbourg really does manage to become a character in the film.
In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia)
American film critic and regular contributor to ‘The Village Voice, J Hoberman sums up quite well what I also think Guerin is trying to do with this wonderfully bold and enigmatic film:
In the City of Sylvia is pure pleasure and pure cinema. The fifth feature by Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín (shown once at the 2007 New York Film Festival) celebrates the love of looking, while placing a crafty minimalist spin on the Orpheus myth.
I have to agree as this film is entirely about the process of looking, studying and gazing at people’s behaviour. In that sense, it is deeply psychological cinema that offers very minimal dialogue and relies greatly on a hypnotic series of subtle, understated camera movements that are barely noticeable in many of the scenes. The story is as slight as the invisible directorial style; a young man’s fixation with a long lost love called ‘Sylvia’ whom he is searching for in an unnamed city. Some critics have pointed out the various cinematic allusions to films like ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Rear Window’ but I failed to spot anyone of these. (A second viewing may help). The main leads are extraordinarily beautiful and Guerin’s aesthetically motivated casting works to ensnare our gaze completely, which perhaps underlines how the act of gazing is something quite natural in cinema but how in reality it can complicate relationships. The decision to shoot at the height of summer also lends the film a laid back atmosphere that is quickly established in the opening sequence with our grungy romantic intensely scrutinising the faces, gestures and demeanour of a group of people relaxing at a summer café.
The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw’s praise for the film which he inappropriately and obviously describes as a ‘date movie with a difference’ picks up on some other noticeable cinematic influences that Guerin draws upon for his romantic tale:
It has a Bressonian attention to mood and moment, weirdly combined with Alfred Hitchcock's brazen knack for suspense. These two names have in fact been widely invoked by admirers since the film first surfaced in 2007; to them I would tentatively add those of Richard Linklater, for his Before Sunrise and Before Sunset movies, and Eric Rohmer, for A Winter Tale.
Though I am not entirely sure about the Bressonian similarities, the influences of a film maker like Eric Rohmer have appeared more frequently in the films of recent American film makers like Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach than the new generation of European directors. Interestingly, Rohmer seems to be more widely respected and recognised as a director of considerable importance in America than he does in France. Rohmer may just be the allusive missing link in the language of romantic cinema today and his unpretentious style has already influenced world cinema directors like Wong Kar Wai. It is encouraging to see a specialist film with a challenging narrative like 'In the City of Sylvia' receiving distribution in the UK but the fact that it was made in 2007 hints at the likely problems it faced in finding a willing distributor.
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Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia
Directed by José Luis Guerín, Appearing in Person
Spain 2007, video, b/w, 67 min.
Spanish with English subtitles
This remarkable companion piece to In the City of Sylvia offers a Spain 2007, video, b/w, 67 min.
Spanish with English subtitles
compendium of images recorded by Guerín in Strasbourg while searching for the traces of a (fictional?) brief encounter some years earlier with a young woman named Sylvia. The beautiful black and white digital cinematography alternates between moving and still images, stitching together a unique kind of film journal, a cinematic sketchbook for In the City of Sylvia, a reworking of the photographic and documentary roots of cinema, and something absolutely new. A must-see.
Work In Progress (En construcción)
Directed by José Luis Guerín, Appearing in Person
With Juana Rodríguez Molina, Iván Guzmán Jiménez, Juan López López
Spain 2001, 35mm, color, 125 min. S
panish and Catalan with English subtitles
Spain 2001, 35mm, color, 125 min. S
panish and Catalan with English subtitles
Guerín's Work In Progress takes place in his native Barcelona. The film's ostensible subject is the construction of a building of condominiums in the city's "El Xino" quarter. This rough neighborhood is a home to workers, immigrants, squatters, prostititutes and drug dealers. The construction site represents an attempt to "improve" the neighborhood – by pushing some longtime residents out. Such is the backdrop to the film, which is made up of staged and semi-staged episodes featuring neighborhood residents and workers at the construction site. Guerín magically spins spellbinding cinema from the simplest elements of urban interaction.
José Luis Guerín By
“The film’s theme is those smiles, that shared gaze. This film truly speaks to me about a relationship, a friendship between two people: one in front of the camera, and the other behind. The director is not onscreen, but he is revealed through those images, those smiles, those looks of the characters. And you can see, between the lines, the meaning of this relationship. Beyond the ethnographic document, and whatever multiple perspectives I have on it, the film I end up watching is this: the account of a friendship that builds up all through the filming.”— José Luis Guerín on Nanook of the North
It’s no coincidence that the opening image of Guest registers an obscured moon as seen from a moving train: everything in the films of José Luis Guerín is informed by the twin symbols of filmmaking’s inception—Méliès’ moon and the Lumières’ train—and their subsequent tendencies toward fiction and documentary. Deliberately “dipped in monotonous grey,” Guest name-checks Maxim Gorky’s premiere encounter with movies, a now charmingly antiquated sentiment about cinema as a kingdom of shadows that nonetheless confirms its intrinsically spectral nature. That Guerín is keen to employ cinematic allusion may seem woefully academic, but his body of work evinces a rigorous, playful, and profound execution of its irreducibility. Namely, that cinema, however modern, is subject to a state of eternal return, forever enclosed by its precedent of process.
In In the City of Sylvia (2007), Guerín used the figure of a forlorn lover in delusional pursuit of a phantom woman as an expansive surrogate for the act of looking and its discontents. With Guest, a documentary by name and substance (no pretense of incidental fiction here), Guerín takes advantage of his status as a guest on the incessant film-festival circuit to turn his gaze upon that which is happening beyond the pageantry of the festival. Unlike in In the City of Sylvia, the POV is undoubtedly that of the director, initially fixed on the winged lions of Venice, rolled into place by festival hands while the director cavorts with his beautiful actresses in a hotel room. The expectation—a notion typically undermined by Guerín’s methodology—is that the documentary proceedings of his travelling actors may afford a curious counterpoint to their previously assigned narrative roles, and between these may open a fortuitous conceptual ambiguity driven by the forces of contingency. Or, similarly, that the film festival is a parallel universe: detached from reality and more fictional than the sum of its constituent narratives.
Not bad conceits, though they’re quickly disposed of by another, which finds Guerín taking to the streets, often public squares in South American cities (where Spanish colonial legacy is still met with popular residual resistance), to allow subjects to appear to him: poets and portrait-makers, evangelists and soldiers, musicians and vendors. Without a script or clear agenda, avowedly “open to all encounters,” Guerín amasses footage and waits for enduring signs from the social margins. The “latent revelation” he may not necessarily seek but unwittingly finds: misery loves company, especially when it travels with a camera.
Implicit, of course, is that the film festival is irrelevant to the lives of its poorer inhabitants, a fate that the festival-bred Guest, however well intentioned, cannot itself escape. While In the City of Sylvia contained a critique of its own voyeuristic tendencies, Guest attempts to maintain an ironic position with regard to its privileged line of inquiry. The punctum (to use a term favoured by Roland Barthes in relation to photography, as that which “pierces” the viewer) to Guest’s touristic approach is derived from the casually reproachful presence of certain subjects. In Havana, Guerín records a bored teenage girl who is not impressed enough by her “guest” to budge from her bed, yet whose interrogative address “Do you have a home?” awakens the film to a recognition of its implied provider of content, the host. That Guerín’s lodgings are luxurious is a disparity registered in her look of politely withheld disdain, something the director is wise not to omit from his finished product (her assessment of Titanic as “sad” furnishes Guerín with the regrettably sententious consolation “Isn’t life sad?”, which only confirms just who the more astute critic is).
The sense that the film is composed of insights gleaned by Guerín’s diaristic peregrinations inevitably invokes questions of agency, whereby the autonomy of his subjects exists only by dint of representation, which is itinerant at best. Paradoxically, the further afield the film strays, and the more stories it accumulates, the more ineffectual and diluted it becomes. In Lima, a street vendor of chocolates competes with a barking proselytizer for customers, but he laments that even with Guerín’s camera in tow he can’t drum up sales. (“You’re filming but nobody’s buying,” the man shrugs.) Later, in his home, it is revealed that most of his family has perished at the hands of Shining Path, a reality that threatens to overwhelm the quality of concern extended to such portraiture.
It’s easy to subject Guerín’s project to that fundamental critique, levelled at any documentary practice, of an aestheticization of suffering, or more vernacularly, mere slumming. The problematic aspect of Guerín’s undoubtedly humanist agenda seems more a matter of scope and the limits of what it can accommodate. In rural Colombia, Guerín fixes his camera on a woman hanging laundry and concedes that he would like to make a recording, a “short portrait” of her, to which she demurely smiles while staring back into the camera. It’s a radiant moment, which Guerín indiscreetly seizes by framing her in an old-fashioned iris, typical of silent film. Cut to another day, as Guerín assures her that in his film she will play herself, and “your neighbours would be your neighbours.” In an opportunistic moment the women are seen discussing the difference between documentary and fiction, but the reality is that soon they will be moving, and their neighbours will no longer be their neighbours. “Not here,” the woman exclaims, effectively shutting down the potential for Guerín’s extemporaneous mise en scène to go where it pleases. It’s the actuality of displacement that the film’s schema can’t abide with any measure of sustained fidelity.
Guerín’s above-quoted treatise on Flaherty offers up a curious insight in relation to Guest: the director is revealed through its images, through the look of its characters. But what, ultimately, is revealed of them? This incommensurable gap between them constitutes Guest’s impasse. The reciprocity implied in the “shared gaze” is here taken for granted, and it is in stark contrast to the gravity of certain socio-economic realities that Guerín’s ruminations on cinematic affect feel weightless. Among them is the director’s symbolic notebook, once a mere blank canvas, its pages filled with ideas and flickering film-like in the breeze; and the recurring invocation of Guerín’s work as hewing neither to fiction nor documentary but existing in a transitive state, a distinction scarcely exceptional in the ever-mutating film climate.
To identify Guerín as a global flâneur would be unfair, of course, as Guest entails an act of commitment that mercifully refuses to indulge the pomp and vacuity that practically defines the branded film festival (which is more than André Bazin could claim in his essay “The Film Festival as Religious Order,” in which he savours the opportunity to describe the ritual cocktail hour). Guest instead traffics in its own share of lyricism, some of it typically luminous. Another street scene in Lima captures an incessant volley of vendors and carriers; it feels like a vintage Magnum photograph brought to teeming life. And the film’s spiritual destination—only natural considering the ubiquitous evangelists on display—finds Guerín in a car headed for Jerusalem. Here he tags along with Palestinian boys eager to show him their former schoolrooms, now wasted and vacant. One boy, a quite sympathetic character, wants to know when the film footage will be televised. Guerín’s response of two years is understood to mean two o’clock, a misunderstanding that speaks directly to the film’s paradoxical project. Is it a reassuring disparity or an irreconcilable difference? That the director should take credit for the resonant ambiguity would be bad etiquette indeed.
Innisfree
Directed by José Luis Guerín, Appearing in Person
With Bartley O'Feeney, Padraig O'Feeney, Anne Slattery
Spain 1990, 35mm, color, 110 min.
English and Spanish with English subtitles
Guerín travels to the Irish town of Innisfree, where his beloved John Ford shot The Quiet Man, to explore the still echoing changes since Ford's visit years before. Revisiting the past using re-enactments with an imagined Maureen O'Hara, Innisfree explores the difference between then and now in order to chart the interstices between memory and history, between imagination, fantasy and reality, and between classical narrative cinema and contemporary, observational documentary.With Bartley O'Feeney, Padraig O'Feeney, Anne Slattery
Spain 1990, 35mm, color, 110 min.
English and Spanish with English subtitles
José Luis Guerín – Innisfree (1990) Description:
A documentary focused on the modern-day village of Innisfree, the location used by legendary director John Ford for his Irish romance The Quiet Man.
Innisfree (from the Gaelic Inis Fraoich, the heather island) is the name of a tiny island in Lough Gill, to the south east of Sligo town, which was immortalised by Yeats in one of his best known poems, ” The Lake lsle of Innisfree ” (The Rose, 1893). Written at a time when the poet lived in London with his family, and “felt very homesick” (Kirby, 1977: 46), “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” expresses a nostalgic longing for a simple country life apart from the stresses of urban life that places it within a pastoral tradition.
…(J.L Guerin) realised that whenever he asked Spanish people about lreland they invariably resorted to The Quiet Man as their main referent, mentioning the country’s beautiful Technicolor scenery and her people’s fondness for drink and rnusic, but failing to perceive the repeated hints provided by Ford that give the lie to the emigrant’s drearn of lreland.
Following a visit to the village of Cong, Co Mayo, the location Ford had chosen for his film thirty seven years earlier, Guerín would also realise the potent effect the shooting of The Quiet Man had had as “a late colonising wave which changed the economic, social and mental structures of the county”.
In fact, the inhabitants of the area have almost come to see themselves in the way the film portrayed them. And not only has the place deliberately kept an old world feel, but it has even appropriated as part of its lore alien elements that were introduced by Ford and his film crew during the shooting of The Quier Man such as the Aran caps they wore, the ballads John Wayne used to sing, or expressions such as Michaeleen’s “The horse’s more sense than I have.”
Indeed, the first half of the film, which includes many references to Ford’s film,
has no discernible chronology. Significantly, though, once a group of children finish summarising the plot of The Quiet Man, and we see “The End ” on the screen, there begins a certain temporality, an intimation of everyday routine in the community.
Another visual image of great evocative impact Guerín resorts to is that of the cottage.
On the one hand, the film opens with the derelict cottage of the O’Feeneys, i.e. John Ford’s family, who emigrated to the States. Then there is the cottage used in The Quiet Man, i.e. the materialisation of an emigrant’s dream of home.
And finally, there is the fake reproduction of the cottage set up by a local publican for the sake of the tourists who flock into the village to buy souvenirs, and who, incidentally, are shown a false version of The Quiet Man. The ruins of an actual Irish cottage, its idealised image and a commercial forgery illustrate how far representations of Ireland have strayed from reality.
The continual misreading of The Quiet Man and the fact that Guerín’s Innisfree has gone largely unnoticed reflect the recalcitrance of cinema audiences to acknowledge any discourse which challenges stereotypical views. - worldscinema.org/
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