The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal/Jesus of Montreal (Canada, 1989) had even more impact. The story of a drifting young actor (Lothaire Blutheau) who is hired by a Montreal priest to stage the city’s annual Passion Play, it depicts Blutheau’s researches into the life of Christ as the intellectual process of finding form for narrative. The result is a radical reinterpretation of the biblical story, a theatrical experiment which audiences love but which scandalizes the church. Again, hypocrisy is blasted and the social commentary is caustic. Some of the actors in the play dub the dialogue in porn movies. Blutheau’s character is concussed during a police raid on the production and starts to think that he himself is Jesus Christ.

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE 1980S: GOLDEN AGES IN CHINESE, TAIWANESE, SOVIET, EASTERN EUROPEAN, AND AFRICAN FILMMAKING.

  Filmmaking in other non-English language countries more than matched Canada’s achievements. In the same year that Tsiu Hark re-invigorated Hong Kong commercial cinema, a more poetic film from mainland China heralded a new era in filmmaking in that country. Nothing like it had been seen for years. Mao’s Cultural Revolution had forced the country’s main film institution, the Beijing Film Academy, to close from 1966 to 1976. As it was unique among film schools in advancing its intake to graduation before considering taking on new students, it had trained relatively few directors over previous years. The last filmmakers to emerge were the Fourth Generation. In 1978, after not having taught anyone for over a decade, the Academy began doing so again. What would famously come to be called the “Fifth Generation” graduated in 1982. The first of their films to make its mark was Huang Tudi/Yellow Earth (China, 1984).

  It was a complete rejection of Western film schemas. Set in the late-1930s, it is a fable about a Communist soldier studying folk songs in the Shaanxi province of the country. He settles in the home of a farmer who still worships God and prays for a good crop. The farmer and his two children are quietly suspicious of the newcomer but, gradually, the fourteen-year-old daughter in particular, who has a beautiful singing voice, open up to him. These human connections cannot survive the tensions between communism and village traditions, however, and tragedy ensues.

  Director Chen Kaige and cinematographer Zhang Yimou, who would himself become a successful director, pictured this story of rural poverty using the traditions of Chinese painting. Most shots are very wide. The body is seldom the central compositional element. Space and landscape weigh as heavily within the frame as the human elements. The closest approximations in Western cinema are American Westerns of the 1950s.

  The compositional style of Yellow Earth grew out of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism. Unlike Maoism, which pictures a clear moral opposition between the good, victimized workers and the bad exploitative owners and managers of industry, and unlike Confucianism in which masculinity is noble and femininity is not, Taoism is philosophically more relative and less clear cut. Morally, it sees good within bad and vice versa. For it the feminine is a virtue as, crucially for artists, is emptiness.

  The story and style of Yellow Earth evinced such ideas. Through the relationship between the soldier and the farmer’s daughter, the film, for example, praised Maoism for liberating women, but denounced it for its moral simplifications. More abstractly, by tilting the camera up at the sky or down at the Earth, Chen and Zhang often excluded the vanishing point so central to Western picture-making (315). Thematically at least, these ideas were shared by other films of the Fifth Generation. Chen’s own King of Children (China, 1987) was an anti-macho tale in which a teacher teaches his students to think for themselves and reject the black-and-white ideas of Mao. Other films incorporated Yellow Earth’s stylistic use of blank space.

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  Wide shots, broad, open landscapes and excluded horizons defined the visual originality of Yellow Earth. Director: Xie Jin. China, 1984.

  As well as the innate quality of these films, what was moving about the new movement was how they managed to overcome the painful dislocations of recent Chinese political history to find a human synthesis of the best bits of the country’s traditional and modern identities. As well as Taoism, the humanity of Yellow Earth had a cinematic precedent, one which most film historians had long forgotten. Kaige had made a film reminiscent of one of the great Chinese films of nearly half a century earlier: Yuan Muzhi’s Street Angel (1937) in which a young trumpeter falls in love with a Manchurian tavern singer. Yellow Earth’s attempt to synthesize traditional and communist values was not mirrored in the country’s regime. Five years after the release of Chen’s film, while he was on a three-year sabbatical in the US, came the Tian’anmen Square massacre.

  The island of Taiwan off the south-east coast of China was lost by the country to Japan just as cinema was born in 1895. It remained Japanese until 1945, was taken in 1949 by the Chinese Nationalists, and has remained independent of mainland China ever since. Filmmaking in Taiwan had been sporadic and action-oriented in the 1970s but, as on the mainland, it blossomed in the 1980s. A film festival and archive were founded in 1982 and, stimulated by these, a more philosophical and less commercial approach to filmmaking emerged. Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien were its standard bearers, with Hou the more distinctive of the two.

  Of the ten films he made in the 1980s, Beiqin Chengshi/City of Sadness (Taiwan, 1989) is perhaps the most revealing. Set in those crucial four years between 1945 and 1949, it uses the Lin family as the lens through which to picture the complexity of life on the island and the birth of the modern Taiwanese nation. The oldest of the four brothers, for example, turns a Japanese bar into one called Little Shanghai. Hou’s family had emigrated to Taiwan in 1948 and this film, like most of his others, is autobiographical.

  What is immediately striking about it is that, like Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, it uses long held shots to enact this remembering. Unlike Davies, these shots are usually static. The film lasts 158 minutes and contains only 222 cuts, meaning that the average shot length is an astonishing forty-three seconds, longer even than those of Mizoguchi in Japan in the 1930s. The effect is almost a repudiation of the kinetic cinematic style of the island’s neighbour Hong Kong. Where Tsui Hark imported American shooting and editing techniques, Hou’s film is a meditative longing for the past and, as he said, “A screen holding a long-shot [ie long take] has a certain kind of tension”.11 Though the Hitchcock of Rope (USA, 1948, see page 194) would certainly have agreed with these words, Hou does not refer to the issue of narrative suspense or dread. Instead, the tension in his films lies in their ability to contain such complex portraits of rural Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s in such rigorous, minimal formal structures. The dread is that the structure will collapse. An example of such rigour is how consistently Hou films certain locations in City of Sadness. After the second oldest brother in the film returns from a tour of duty in the war and has mental health problems, he is treated in a local hospital. As has been pointed out by other critics,12 each time he returns to that hospital Hou shoots from exactly the same camera angle, there is no variety, there are no reverses or alternatives. In Hou’s spare conception of cinema, there is only one way to film a place. Or, rather, since these are films about remembering, places and visual memories of them are the same thing.

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  The story of the birth of modern Taiwan, City of Sadness’ static shots were influenced by Ozu. Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Taiwan, 1989.

  The one body of work which profoundly influenced Hou in choosing to film in such an understated way is Yasujiro Ozu’s. Hou admired not only the formal rigour of the Japanese master, but also the philosophical repose of his work. Like Ozu, Hou seldom uses close-ups and limits camera moves. Space in Hou – the filming of the hospital in City of Sadness again works as an example – is not something to move through at speed, to activate, as it was for most 1980s directors. Instead, again like Ozu, it was something to contemplate and balance.13 This makes Hou the great classicist of cinema’s modern era. In tribute to his master, the Taiwanese director uses an excer
pt from Ozu’s Late Spring (Japan, 1949) on a television set in his later film, Haonan haonu/Good Men, Good Women (Taiwan, 1995).

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  Aleksei Kravchenko as Florya ages before our eyes as he witnesses the atrocities committed by the Nazis in Belorussia in Elem Klimov’s Come and See. The film’s sound design, which captures Florya’s tinnitus, was among the most effective in film history; its green-grey visuals and square-on framings (by cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov) made many scenes memorable; and seldom have young actors given such physically committed performances. Soviet Union, 1985.

  In the Soviet Union the appointment of the modernizer Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 led to a new spirit of openness. In the same year, a fifty-one-year-old former engineering student, Elem Klimov, who had see many of his previous films shelved by the authorities, released Idi i Smotri/Come and See (Soviet Union, 1985), a masterpiece about a teenage boy in Byelorussia in 1943 who witnesses the Nazi atrocities committed on his country and its villages. In its use of deadening sound to represent tinnitus, its glimpses of piles of naked corpses as the boy traverses bleak landscapes, its portrayal of his attempts to kill himself by forcing his head into the sodden earth (317), and the accumulation of horrors so appalling that his hair turns grey, Come and See distinguishes itself as one of the greatest war movies ever made. The tragedies of real life within the Soviet Union matched those depicted in the film. The following year, a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl exploded, sending radiation around the world. Two years later, in 1988, over 100,000 were killed in an earthquake in Armenia. When Elem Klimov was appointed first secretary of the Union of Filmmakers of the Soviet Union he almost immediately – on the back of Gorbachev’s reform programme – initiated the rehabilitation of banned films. In the years which followed, a treasure trove was opened. The film with the most direct effect, Pokjanide/ Repentance (Soviet Union, 1984, released 1987), heralded huge changes. Directed by the Georgian Tengiz Abuladze, it depicts how, after the mayor of a small town dies and is buried, a local woman angry about the crimes he committed in the name of Stalin, continually digs up his body (318). Abuladze based his film on a true story: “A man who had been unjustly sent to prison was finally released …” he said later, “…when he came home he found the grave of the man who had sent him to jail. He opened the coffin, took out the corpse, and leaned it against the wall. He would not let the dead man rest. This awful fact showed us that we could show the tragedy of an entire epoch by using this device.”14 The film made thought-provoking viewing for Gorbachev who was encouraged to see it by Edvard Shevardnadze, the future President of Georgia. Gorbachev approved its release and millions saw it. Never before had a single film so contributed to a country’s debate about its own horrific past. Films which had been on the shelf much longer than Repentance were also finally released. For example, Kira Muratova’s Short Meetings (1967) and Long Goodbyes (1971) (see page 307) finally established her as one of the great directors of the 1970s. And new films addressed taboo subjects such as environmental pollution, drugs and AIDS.

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  Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance daringly used the dead body of a brutal mayor as a symbol of the iniquities of Stalinism. Soviet Union, 1984.

  Back in the communist countries of Eastern Europe, these events were watched closely. In Hungary Istvàn Szabò had been marrying French New Wave stylistic elements to political themes since the mid-1960s. In Mephisto (Hungary, 1981) he turned his attention to Germany during the war and the character of an acclaimed leftist actor who compromises with the Nazis. The film was an international success. Also in Hungary, Márta Mészáros, the ex-wife of director Miklós Jancsó (see pages 302–03) made a trilogy of films – Náplo gyermekeimnek/Diary for my Children (1982), Náplo szerelmeimnet/Diary for my Loves (1987) and Náplo apámnak, anyámnak/Diary for my Father and Mother (1990) – which represent not only the country’s greatest films of the decade but the best ever about women living in the shadow of Stalin.

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  The physical brutality of murder was unwatchably vivid in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing, which contained elements of Hitchcock and Klimov. Poland, 1988.

  It’s very seldom that a filmmaker comes along who uses the medium as originally as Dovzhenko or Jean Vigo, but in Poland in the 1970s, that’s exactly what happened. Krzysztof Kieslowski was born in Warsaw in 1941, studied in the famous film school of Lodz just as Roman Polanski had done, made documentaries in the early 1970s and became the most distinguished figure in the movement called “Cinema of Moral Unrest” which had been initiated in 1976 by Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble. After several fiction features he cemented his reputation with The Dekalog (1998) ten one-hour films on the theme of the Ten Commandments, justifying this by saying that “millions of people have died for these ideals”15 All are set around the same apartment block – “it is the most beautiful housing estate in Warsaw… It looks pretty awful so you can imagine what the others are like”, said the director,16 and each explores one of the biblical injunctions. None literally so, however. Instead the films are like parables, using reversals of fate, family taboos, social unease and the recurring appearances of a young man who perhaps symbolizes death, to explore human values in modern Polish life.

  Two of the ten were expanded into features and one of these, Krótki Film O Zabijaniu/A Short Film about Killing (Poland, 1988), became Kieslowski’s best work to date. In it a depressive teenager kills a taxi driver, is represented in court by an optimistic new lawyer and is hung for his sins. The two death scenes are amongst the most excruciating ever filmed. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak underexposes and uses puce green filters as if the light of God has abandoned the earth (319). The death of the taxi-driver is awkward and brutal; as he is hung by the neck the student defecates.

  In the early 1990s, Kieslowski undertook a new film series, the trilogy Trois Coleurs: Bleu/Three Colours: Blue, Trois Coleurs: Blanc/Three Colours: White and Trois Coleurs: Rouge/Three Colours: Red, based on the colours of the French tricolor and the three elements of the French Revolutionary ideal “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. Blue (France–Poland–Switzerland, 1992) explored the theme of liberty obliquely by telling the story of a young wife widowed when her composer husband dies in a car crash. So great is her grief that she literally blanks out at times, at others she – and the movie screen – is misted with blue light (320), again by Slawomir Idziak. Red filters have occasionally been introduced into film imagery in the past to represent anger or fever, for example in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (UK, 1948). Here, in the decade in which American cinematographers started using coloured light derived from music videos simply to make their imagery trendier, the effect powerfully represents her losses of consciousness. Throughout the film, and in the final triumphant montage, extreme close-up and wide-angle lenses distort intimate moments in the lives of the widow and the other characters. We hear the widow’s husband’s music, which she co-wrote, and a voice sings:

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  In his Three Colours: Blue, Kieslowski found a new filmic way to show his character Julie Vignon (Juliette Binoche) dipping out of, then back into, consciousness. France–Poland–Switzerland. 1992.

  Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,

  And have not charity, I am become

  As sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

  And though I have the gift of prophecy

  And understand all mysteries and all knowledge,

  And though I have all faith

  So that I could remove mountains,

  And have not charity, I am nothing.

  Thematically these words – from St Paul – are a near facsimile of the ending of another great and deeply felt work of European cinema, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (France, 1964) (see page 275), in which the final lines of the poem quoted are:

  Look at me. Am I living?

  No. But I have known love.

  The widow in Blue cries as we
hear the final lines of St Paul. She has liberated herself from the pain of grief.

  So far the story of film in the 1980s has been that of the absorption of the aesthetics of the video age, of the multiplexing of cinemas and of sporadic dissidence and innovation. One continent however, bucks this trend entirely, and that is Africa. In the sub-Saharan countries at least, the breakthroughs of the 1970s led to a relative explosion of innovative production. This did not come about as a result of a new era of financial self-sufficiency, far from it. Throughout the 1980s, African countries mortgaged their economies to the International Monetary Fund. Their currencies fell by factors of up to 150. The effect on film production was dramatic. Producers found that their budgets could buy on average only one-twentieth of the amount of film stock as previously. They could no longer afford to edit and complete the sound of their films in superior editing suites in other countries. Instead, in order still to keep standards high, they had to enter into co-production relations with those countries, thereby ceding complete ownership of their finished films.

  This state of affairs did not impede the growing maturity of African film language, however. Jom (Senegal, 1981) was co-produced by the German television company ZDF yet, more than any African film before it, adapted the centuries-old oral storytelling traditions of the “griots” to the medium of film. In this case the griot relates the tale of a local Prince who once killed a French colonial administrator then killed himself rather than face colonial justice, to a present-day strike where the same theme of resistance with dignity is relevant. The word Jom itself means dignity or respect. In the final section of the film, the griot sings traditional songs of unity and reconciliation. Director Ababacar Samb-Makharam said in his press notes of the time that the technique of the storyteller “is also an endless source where painters, writers, historians, filmmakers, archivists, storytellers and musicians can come and feed their imaginations.”17 Film form here is drawing principally, not from varying stylistic norms, but from a rich, pre-cinematic well of cultural motifs and philosophies.