Cinematic Overtures Page 5
The voice-over narration of the monk provides another narrative layer in Aguirre, bringing Herzog’s tale back to oral traditions. This voice will turn out to be deceptive: the narrator is killed before the end of the film. Aguirre shares with other masterful films the tension between a linear, progressive journey and a spiraling downward. Indeed, Apocalypse Now seems inspired by some of Herzog’s thematic and stylistic brio. The beginning of Aguirre can move from heaven to earth, but by the end of the film the camera only goes around in circles. The last shot is as striking as the opening: from the whirling camera we see the demented, lopsided Aguirre alone on his raft, in command only of corpses and hundreds of chattering little monkeys. It invokes the image of the whirlpool that dominates an earlier sequence. Listening to the film’s German dialogue provides another layer of meaning. When Kinski’s conquistador character says, “We need a leader,” using the word “führer,” the film becomes a postwar meditation on German guilt. He proclaims, “We’ll produce history as others produce plays.” If the characters in this primordial landscape search for gold, it is power that Aguirre really seeks. As Ebert wrote, “Of modern filmmakers, Werner Herzog is the most visionary and the most obsessed with great themes.… He wants to lift us up into realms of wonder. Only a handful of modern films share the audacity of his vision; I think of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Apocalypse Now.”6
When Werner Herzog visited my class at Yale University in the 1980s, he proposed that anyone making a film should try to fulfill two goals—to establish a new grammar of images and to define our human situation. These aims inform countless motion pictures, especially those that invite the viewer to grapple with images at the outset. Memorable opening sequences are not merely dazzling eye-openers but narrative guides that respect and reward active curiosity. Jane Campion’s work provides numerous examples, including the now classic Academy Award winner The Piano (1993) and the lesser-known Bright Star (2009). Economically as well as enigmatically, she introduces her female protagonists through visual and aural details—particles moving against a black frame—that need to be deciphered. In The Piano hazy vertical digits could be fingers or perhaps piano keys. As the female voice-over begins, a close-up of fingers covering a face—except for an open left eye—foregrounds the act of looking. The charged gaze will indeed recur throughout the film, often making voyeurism discomforting. As Campion crosscuts between the cryptic dark frame and the facial close-up (where a wedding band is noticeable), she creates a counterpoint between subjective and objective camera: in retrospect it becomes clear that the hazy verticals are from the point of view of the character simultaneously peeking through her fingers and hiding behind them. Her protagonist’s narration supports this duality: “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice but my mind’s voice. I have not spoken since I was six years old.” Ada (Holly Hunter) sounds childlike, with a Scottish lilt, perhaps because this voice has not been heard since she was six. Like Oskar in The Tin Drum—who chose to halt his growth at the age of three—Ada refused to completely enter adulthood. And if the German boy’s identity was inseparable from his drum, the piano is the voice of Campion’s heroine, expressing her lyricism, control, and passion.
FIGURE 3.4 The gaze of Ada (Holly Hunter) in The Piano (see clip)
We then see Ada seated under a tree, watching a little girl learning to mount a horse; her intermittent gaze might be that of a mother apprehensive for her child’s safety. The external landscape leads to visual expansion: the camera rises to a high angle, following Ada as she walks among the leaves. (The stunning cinematography is by Stuart Dryburgh.) The next shot establishes horizontal mobility as well: her daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), glides on roller skates through a corridor. Her skating engenders the fluid motion of the camera floating into Flora’s room, where Ada puts the skates back under the child’s bed. While the camera’s point of view is no longer that of Ada, it is an extended subjectivity that depends neither on the lens being identified with her eye nor on a close-up of her face, as her consciousness is expressed by the mise-en-scène. Ada’s voice-over reveals that she is embarking on a voyage for an arranged marriage. (The camera is revelatory as well: when she sits down at the piano, it circles around her to show that the actress is really playing the stirring music we hear, composed by Michael Nyman.)7
From Scotland we move to the rugged beach of New Zealand, where Ada and nine-year-old Flora are stranded with their heavy belongings. When her new husband, Stewart (Sam Neill), arrives, he says they cannot take the piano, which remains on the beach. As Columbia University student Christina Crisostomo wrote in an unpublished paper of May 2016:
Although there is very little in her life that she can control—having been sold to a stranger and unable to stop the sale of her beloved instrument—when she is seated before her piano, she is the master of herself. It’s why the scene of her husband ordering his men to leave the piano behind on the beach is devastating, as she is stripped of her true voice. The music that plays over this scene, as well as during several other high emotional points in Ada’s story, is arguably her theme song. It’s called “The Heart Asks Pleasure First” and it takes its name from an Emily Dickinson poem about choosing death over steadily increasing pain. This literary reference gains relevance when one considers the scene near the end, where Ada—grieving over the loss of her finger and thus, her true self (or what she perceived to be her true self)—nearly chooses to drown with her piano. The turbulent music embodies the passions simmering just beneath the surface of her character.8
Baines (Harvey Keitel), a tattooed neighbor who has adopted the Maori life, offers to bring her the piano—one black key for every lesson—if she allows him to do certain things while she plays it. First, Baines kisses the back of her neck. Then he sits under her lifted skirts. Later, the film’s eroticism blossoms as he removes his clothes. But Campion does not permit pure titillation. At the very moment that our voyeurism is most keen, their nude bodies are depicted from the perspective of Flora and then through the pained eyes of her husband. As a result, in humiliation Stewart almost rapes her in the forest. But the violation shown in parallel montage is even greater for Ada—Maori men playing her piano.
Ada sends her daughter to Baines with a wooden note plucked out of the piano, on which she has written that he has her heart. But Flora gives it to Stewart. His rage leads him to chop off one of Ada’s fingers—juxtaposed with the removal of a piano note (which returns us to the ambiguity of digits in the opening). This invokes a show that was staged for a Maori audience earlier in the film; it made them believe so completely in the illusion that they stormed the stage to stop a man behind the screen from bringing an ax down on a woman. We are perhaps no less impressionable, taken in by Campion’s spectacle, hoping to stop the ax. Perhaps like Ada in the opening scene, we simultaneously cover one eye and peer out the other.
Bright Star dramatizes the intense love affair that developed between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and neighbor Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Aged twenty-three, the shy, sickly poet seems a dubious match for the eighteen-year-old witty, gregarious seamstress/designer. But the heightened tactility associated with her from the opening shots—extreme close-ups of a needle stitching material as we hear voices singing in harmony—is later rhymed by the sharpness of his quill moving across paper (see clip). After the abstract shots of the needle piercing cloth, we see the woman seated to the left of a window that provides the only illumination in a dark room: Fanny wields her needle expertly. Although she seems to be alone, a shape on the right moves: her younger sister gets up from bed to watch her. Campion calls attention to the process of creation, whether the action is sewing fabric, crafting verse, or making a movie. The film is richly textured, both visually (as in an early tableau of white sheets waving in front of the house) and aurally (mostly Mozart). For example, a male a cappella chorus performs at a party—each section taking on the responsibility of an instrument—which provides a sound bridge to a scene of Fanny’s danc
ing lesson with a French instructor.
Bright Star is not just the tale of the brief but inspirational love of two engaging real-life individuals. As the second half of the opening sequence implies, Keats’s best friend—Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider), a Scottish poet—is a crucial figure. When Fanny and her family visit friends with whom Keats is staying, the verbal sparks between Brown and Fanny suggest that they are the real opposites who are attracting. “Ah, the very well stitched little Miss Brawne, in all her detail,” he needles, before blowing smoke. She responds by dismissing his poems: “They puff smoke, dissolve, leaving nothing but irritation.” Later in the film, she calls the color of his eyes “suitcase brown”; this leads him to send her a valentine, over which Keats explodes in jealousy. Although Brown claims it was a joke and always seems eager to banish Fanny from their writing enclave—“Desist or depart,” he commands—the intensity of their repartee suggests otherwise. Ultimately, Brown is perhaps the most tragic character. Whereas Keats dies young but having known love and penned sublime poetry, Brown has lost not only his best friend and writing partner but also his freedom and future, settling for marriage to a maid he impregnated.
FIGURE 3.5 Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) in Bright Star
As in The Piano, Campion’s focus is on a brave woman who is always accompanied by a young girl (Fanny’s sister, Toots). And the director once again uses cinematic language expressively. For example, a shot of Fanny before an open window, the curtain lifted by the breeze, suggests her emotional ascent through love. When Keats must leave, she—with her younger brother and sister—catches butterflies and keeps them in her room. They externalize the fluttering within her, while foreshadowing the short life of these winged feelings. Campion gives visual form to Keats’s achingly beautiful poetry: “Awake forever in a sweet unrest,” he says at Fanny’s breast, in a poem that will become “Bright Star.” And he could be speaking inspirational lines for filmmakers like Campion when he says, “Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
Although Campion is among the very few female filmmakers who have achieved international prominence, Agnieszka Holland is another beacon of hope, especially for her drama In Darkness (2011). She is not just one of Poland’s leading directors and screenwriters but also a truly international filmmaker: among her credits are the Oscar-nominated Europa, Europa and Angry Harvest (both primarily in German); the French-language Olivier, Olivier; The Secret Garden and Washington Square in English; and episodes of American cable TV series including The Wire and Treme. In Darkness is based on Robert Marshall’s 1991 book In the Sewers of Lvov, which expanded his 1988 documentary for the BBC, Light in the Dark—both of which inspired screenwriter David F. Shamoon. The film is magnificently photographed by Jolanta Dylewska—herself a documentary filmmaker, notably of Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising According to Marek Edelman (1993). While visually rich, In Darkness is far from sentimental. The focus of this true story is Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz), a Polish sewer worker and petty thief who ends up becoming a reluctant savior of eight Jews in hiding.9 It is set in 1943 Nazi-occupied L’vov, a Polish city that became Ukrainian thanks to the Hitler-Stalin pact. Unlike most Hollywood movies, the film has a linguistic authenticity, with characters speaking Polish, German, Yiddish, and Ukrainian.
As in Holland’s Angry Harvest (1985), the protagonist is initially enticed by material gain but ultimately risks his life when he grows to care about the victims (who are hunted by both the Nazis and the Ukrainians) during the fourteen months they spend in the sewers after escaping the liquidation of the ghetto. Reminiscent of Holland’s screenplay for Andrzej Wajda’s underrated 1990 drama Korczak, this portrait of a savior explores relationships between Polish Christians and Jews, undermining simplistic stereotypes about the former being anti-Semites or the latter being meek. (While Holland’s father was Jewish, she has often said that her appreciation of Jewish identity came from her Christian, philo-Semitic mother.) Some uneducated Christian characters don’t realize Jesus was Jewish, but Socha’s wife, Wanda (Kinga Preis), represents a basic level of decency, expressing pity for the Jews. Even though she and their daughter leave Socha because they fear his life-risking actions on behalf of the victims, she returns. Similarly, brave Jewish characters like Mundek (Benno Fürmann) lead Socha to acknowledge his misperception, “And I always thought Yids were cowards.”
The first image—a toy train and figurines, suddenly illuminated by the flashlight of a thief—introduces numerous elements. The contrast of light and dark is striking, establishing partial illumination of a dark frame as the norm (see clip). Self-reflexivity is heightened, as we are made aware of watching a miniature representation (and later in the film, an officer records a street near the L’vov Ghetto). When the younger thief, Stefek (Krzysztof Skonieczny), looks at the train with childlike amazement, the theme of innocence coexists with robbery and the eventual hell of sewers. Finally, the thieves are surprised by the sudden appearance of a Polish girl and her young Nazi boyfriend, who says his parents left nothing of value in the apartment. He tries to shoot the older thief, Socha, but the gun has no bullets. This abandoned apartment is a privileged space compared to the crowded ghetto dwelling in which the Jews will be introduced. Holland sets up a contrast, as most of the film’s dramatic action will be underground and in darkness: the victims remain below while the hero is able to descend and ascend (literally as well as figuratively). Socha succeeds where Armin Mueller-Stahl’s Leon in Angry Harvest did not—“These are my Jews,” he announces when they emerge from the sewers at the end of the war—but irony coexists with redemption: the end title states that Socha was killed a few months later in a road accident. The opening prepares for the visually high-contrast sharpness in the sewers, a result of authentic illumination provided by flashlights.
The second scene introduces handheld camerawork, whose inherent nervousness is effective throughout the film, beginning with Socha’s point of view in a forest: he glimpses naked Jewish women running and then being shot by the SS. Moreover, the lighting itself is expressive; for example, when a few of the Jews cannot be accommodated at a safer hiding place in the sewer, their likely death is implied by the light dimming on faces in close-up. Visually, In Darkness is reminiscent of Wajda’s Kanał, as well as the final sequence of Aleksander Ford’s seminal Polish postwar drama Border Street. (It is perhaps even more related to the Argentine Holocaust drama Under the World, where a Jewish family is as vulnerable to the natural elements as to human cruelty.) In an interview before the world premiere of In Darkness at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, Holland said, “I saw Ford’s film as a child, and didn’t remember the sewers. Wajda’s film is the necessary reference when shooting this kind of movie. I watched it several times during the prep. But we were working in color rather than black-and-white, and the mise-en-scene was very different. We needed real darkness, and I wanted to avoid the backlights coming from the tunnels.”10
FIGURE 3.6 Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) in the sewer of In Darkness
There is a relative absence of music, as the images carry the emotional weight. Occasional diegetic music works contrapuntally, such as a Viennese waltz at the Janowska concentration camp, which turns out to be played by a prisoners’ orchestra. Holland acknowledged, “With Antoni Komasa-Lazarkiewicz, my composer, we knew just after the first cut was done that this movie doesn’t need music to pump up the emotions or the tension. At the beginning, we were even thinking not to use music at all. Then Antoni came up with the idea of using the song from Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas,’ and one line of the music is building up to this moment.”11
Unlike other Holocaust films, Holland’s drama contains a surprising frankness about daily life—the Jews are flawed rather than virtuous—including sex: since the action is far from concentration camps, lovemaking is presented matter-of-factly throughout. Poldek gets into bed with his wife and makes love while their daughter sleeps in the next bed; Janek, one of t
he Jews hidden in the sewer, has sex with his mistress despite their dank quarters and lack of privacy. (Among women directors Holland’s films have a particularly hard edge, a result—or perhaps cause—of her work on a variety of male-themed HBO series.)
The postwar Polish cinema is one of the richest in film history, boasting such directors as Krzysztof Kieślowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Roman Polanski, and Wajda. In this context, Holland occupies a place somewhere between Wajda—whose spiritual faith illuminates films such as Katyn (2007)—and the more darkly ironic Polanski (whose Oscar-winning Holocaust tale The Pianist is less concerned with salvation than survival). It is understandable that Polish filmmakers return to true stories of World War II: what better historical era in which to explore the possibilities and limitations of heroism? “My goal was not to accuse or to show as innocent any nation,” Holland said in Telluride. “I wanted to show how thin is the line between good and evil in the human soul.”
Holland and Campion take their time to establish the manifold tensions their films will explore. With openings that invite a gaze sharply attuned to nuances of light and dark—or the revealed and the hidden—they build on the long-take style developed by Welles, Altman, and Herzog. While poetically packing the frame, these directors suggest that—from mise-en-scène to the human psyche—there is more than meets the eye.