by Mark Cousins
Yuen’s work in The Matrix was indeed one of the key staging advances in computerera cinema, but there was another innovative component in the Wachowskis’ designs for the film, and it too came from the East. Japanese animation had, as we have seen, been hugely popular since the 1950s but, in its Original Anime Video (OAV) work of the 1980s, it had portrayed violent and sexual imagery in increasingly dynamic and explicit ways. In fight scenes in particular OAV had evolved fly-around shots which seemed to freeze the action so that you could see it from every direction, and video games followed suit. The idea of recreating this god’s-eye view of a fight appealed to the Wachowskis and the sensation-chasing Silver. What if they used Yuen’s staging techniques with OAV camera techniques? Was there any way that they could have actors leap into the air, have the camera swish right around them in a moment, then continue the movement? The fastest high-speed cameras could certainly film so many frames per second that the action would seem to have stopped, but what they wanted was for the camera to move as it was doing this. This could not be done. No camera dolly could track at the thirty or so metres per second – a tenth of the speed of sound – required.
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Mainstream cinema gets a new look in The Matrix. More than eighty stills cameras are set along the line of the desired tracking shot (top). The set is covered in green material and Keanu Reeves does “wire fu” (middle). A background is filmed and keyed into the green areas of the picture (bottom).
As has often been the case in the evolution of movie style, the question “How can we do this differently?” led to a breakthrough. First they filmed Yuen’s action with ordinary cam-eras in relatively fixed positions. Then they scanned the shot footage into a computer and from this worked out exactly where a camera would need to be at any moment in order to do the Anime-influenced fly-around. Then they went back to the set and installed sophisticated stills cameras all along the length of the curving camera movement that they wanted to create (342 top). Way back in the 1870s, the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge had used a similar line of cameras to photograph the galloping of horses and the movements of people as they ran. His strips of images became immensely popular and great-ly affected how painters portrayed movement thereafter.
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A moment from the scene filmed in the images on the previous page: The Matrix. Directors: Andy and Larry Wachowski. USA, 1999.
Things had moved on a lot by the mid-1990s. The Wachowski brothers didn’t want to fragment the action to see what was really happening, so much as stop time so they could gracefully fly around it. The next stage in achieving this was to have the actors redo Yuen’s fight movement within the arc of the stills cameras. The resulting still images created a series of snapshots of the overall effect, but without movement. These were then scanned into another computer that created the “missing stages” of the action. The computer was given moments A, D and G of the action, and created images to represent what happened at moments B, C, E and F. When the result was projected, the implied speed of the camera move was so fast that the result became known as “bullet time” (343).
Never before in movie history had mainstream Eastern cinema had more influence on mainstream Western cinema than in its headlong dash for new sensations. The influence continued in the film’s sequel, The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003). In terms of the language of film, not much new was added, but details such as the following revealed the grander conception that Warner Bros had for the Matrix over what is called “multiple media platforms”: when Keanu Reeves’s character Neo arrives in the underground city of Zion, an ardent young man runs up to him saying how glad he is to see him again. What is this “again”? The character did not appear in the first film. Instead he was introduced in one of a series of short animated spin-offs together called The Animatrix. The various manifestations of The Matrix were themselves becoming a matrix.
DOGME AND EUROPEAN CINEMA SINCE THE 1980S.
Whilst the Wachowskis and Cameron manipulated digital imagery to show audiences things they had never seen before, a group of filmmakers in Denmark in 1995 took a leaf out of the books of Bresson and Pasolini in arguing that far from becoming more technical and all-seeing, cinema had to become primitive again. Part marketing ploy, part “rescue action”, their “Dogme” manifesto knowingly echoed François Truffaut’s words (see page 254) in countering “certain tendencies’ in cinema today”.4 They argued that the 1960s New Wave inspired by Truffaut’s article “proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.”5 Commenting on the present, they said “Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of cinema.” To steer this democratization, the signatories of the manifesto – Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg – pledged a “Vow of Chastity” by adhering to the following daunting rules: No sets should be built, real locations should be used, no props should be brought to those locations, music should not be added, the camera must be hand held, no lighting added, no “superficial action” (such as murder) allowed, no flashbacks or genre elements permissible, the shape of the screen the old 4:3 one, and the director must not take credit.
By 2003, thirty-three directors in Europe, America, Asia and South America had bound themselves to these rules, the best of the resulting films being, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen/The Celebration (Denmark, 1998), Søren Kragh Jacobsen’s Mifunes sidste sang/Mifune (Denmark, 1999), and Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (USA, 1999). Festen in particular was a visual revelation. Shot with a domestic video camera in low or candle light, its fuzzy, yellow imagery by Anthony Dod Mantle broke all the rules of crisp cinematography, yet was remarkably readable and sensuous. Many of the Dogme films were weak and conventional but the comic-moral disruption they created in the world of cinema aesthetics had an even greater liberating effect on 1990s cinema than Oliver Stone’s textural experiments with Natural Born Killers. The diametrically opposed approaches of The Matrix and Festen illustrate the diverging possibilities of digital cinema.
Though a signatory of the Vow of Chastity, Lars Von Trier himself waited three years before he made his first Dogme film Idioterne/The Idiots (Denmark, 1998). Two years earlier he directed Breaking the Waves (UK–Denmark, 1996), a widescreen, hand-held, digitally shot film about a naive young Scottish woman who prays to God to have her Danish lover return from his work on an oil rig. He does, but with his neck broken. He then encourages her to take lovers and describe her sexual activities to him. At a time when most Western cinema was liberal and secular, Breaking the Waves was an endurance-testing work of Christian piety, directly inspired, as we have seen, by Carl Theodor Dreyer (see pages 112 and 246–47). Von Trier’s conception of his central character, Bess, took the simplest of catechistic forms, yet his moral implausibility was rooted in an astonishing, Dogme-inspired, filming authenticity. The actors were free to move anywhere within the rooms in which the filming took place. Trier did take after take, then edited together – using jump cuts as bold as Godard’s in A bout de souffle (France, 1959) – those moments of each take which seemed to him most true. In Breaking the Waves and Dogville (Denmark, 2003), he operated the camera himself, often touching Nicole Kidman, the leading actress in the latter, during takes of her frequent close-ups. This is unheard of in film history and again contributed to the moment-to-moment intimacy of her performance. As with Trier’s previous films, critics questioned his broader theme – in this case the tendency to violence in American society – but there was no doubting the radicalism of his aesthetic: Dogville was filmed entirely in a studio, with almost no sets or props (344).
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Lars Von Trier, the co-instigator of the Danish film movement Dogme, experimented with the idea of minimalism at the movement’s core. In Dogville he shot the whole movie on a sound stage, used almost no sets, instead symbolically marking out the position of walls and doors with white lines. The effect could have been very un-filmic but the intensity of the film’s performance and direction made
it triumphantly so. Denmark, 2003.
While Von Trier was the most innovative European director of the period, others had a far richer conception of human beings. The “cinéma du look” in France continued with films as diverse as Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Leos Carax, 1991) and Doberman (Jean Kounen, 1997), but other French-language directors such as Claire Denis, Mathieu Kassovitz, Gaspar Noé, Bruno Dumont and the Dardennes brothers, turned to working-class and disenfranchised characters to produce a powerfully innovative reaction against glossy 1980s cinema. Released in 1995, at the time of the election of a new right-wing government in France and two years after France negotiated a “cultural exception” to the free flow of commerce because “creations of the mind cannot be assimilated to simple products”, actor Kassovitz’s La Haine/Hate (1995) was a forerunner in this, taking as its starting point the real-life shooting whilst in police custody in 1993 of the sixteen-year-old Zairean Makome Bowole. In a calculated provocation of the tripartiate blue, white and red of the French flag, Kassovitz told the story of a day in the life of three youths, one Jewish, one Beur (Islamic) and one black African. They come from Paris’s impoverished peripheral housing estates, commit petty crimes, and one of their friends has recently been assaulted by the racist police. At the time, Kassovitz was compared to Quentin Tarantino, but his film was much more rooted in social realities.
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Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité was not widely seen, but the intensity of its stare and the blackness of its performances were as striking as Bresson or Pasolini. France, 1999.
Bruno Dumont was ten years older and far more philosophical than Kassovitz. His debut was La Vie de Jésus/ The Life of Jesus (1996) about the wasted lives of teenagers in run-down Northern France. His follow-up L’Humanité/Humanity (1999), was also filmed in static widescreen shots in northern France. It takes as its starting point a police investigation about the rape of a young woman. Far from being story driven, however, the film’s stare at its landscape and its people is ice-cold, like marble. The policeman, Pharoan (Emmanuel Schotté) is unblinking, nearly autistic and strikingly unusual to look at (345), like a character from a Pasolini film, his inexpressive acting inspired by Bresson. Where in La Vie de Jésus, young people with real faces and real bodies have sex in fields and express racist attitudes, the magnificent and spare first few minutes of L’Humanité make Dumont’s first film seem almost conventional. Shots are held for so long that we see the action and continue to look after it has finished, as if it will recur. Pharoan is locked in his own numb inactivity and loneliness. We see a mid-shot of the raped girl’s naked genitals. Later, in a direct echo of Pasolini’s film Teorema/Theorem (Italy 1968), Pharoan actually levitates in a garden. Such scenes established Dumont as a master almost the equal of the Iranians.
The Belgian former documentarists Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were as devoted to a transcendent view of everyday life. Like Kassovitz and Dumont, they took as their subject disenfranchisement in contemporary Europe. Rosetta (Belgium, 1999) is about a feral teenage girl who is desperate to get a job. The brothers’ brilliantly simple stylistic innovation was to have her run throughout the film and follow her with a hand-held camera. Like Dumont they rejected the closed romantic realist grammar of shot/reverse-shot, achieving instead a purity of screen direction – nearly always moving forward – and a unique sense of being at the shoulder of the girl during her quests. Their follow-up, Le Fils/The Son (Belgium, 2002), used the same unidirectional style to equally powerful effect.
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The startling moment when one of the characters in Funny Games rewinds the film and we see its horrific violence in reverse (bottom) is as conceptually provocative as the moment in Bergman’s Persona where the film burns. Director: Michael Haneke. Austria–Switerland. 1997.
Moving eastwards to Austria we find another filmmaker who uses a static camera to explore social malaise. Michael Haneke studied philosophy at Vienna University and started making films in 1989. Their story outlines speak volumes: his Benny’s Video (Australia–Switzerland, 1992) is about the boy of the title who, having watched a pig being slaughtered, videos himself committing murder. In Funny Games (Austria–Switzerland, 1997), two youths visit their neighbours to borrow eggs but end up brutally terrorizing them (346). At one point they address the audience directly and rewind the film. Code Inconnu: Recit Incomplet de Divers Voyages/Code Unknown (France, 2001) is a series of virtuoso long takes of a Parisian actor Juliette Binoche, attempting to avoid the violence of the city in which she lives. In La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (France, 2002), an exacting teacher of Schubert’s exquisite music cuts her inner thighs with a razor blade and sniffs the used tissues in porn cubicles (Austria–France, 2002). Each is set in a sophisticated, middle-class, highly industrialized society out of which the possibility of love has leached. Other filmmakers share Haneke’s pessimism but few find such rigorous formal analogues. In Code Inconnu, for example, the total lack of human connection in big Western cities is brilliantly echoed in the fact that each long take fades to black before the next emerges out of black onto the screen. Even the shots don’t touch. This was revolutionary. Haneke famously wishes audiences “a disturbing evening” when he introduces his films and talks about their portrayal of “reality losing its realness” (“Entwirklichung” in German). If there was a theme to ambitious 1990s cinema it was the extent to which this was happening. The American postmodernists thought so, and played with the implications of it; by contrast Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf in Iran were finding ways in their films to add realness to reality.
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Haneke’s La Pianiste in which Isabelle Huppert’s character is both sensitively tuned in to beauty and numbly desperate for sexual gratification and physical contact. France, 2002.
As we travel further east still, we encounter filmmakers grappling with the same question of the degree to which cinema can penetrate the nature of reality, but in the light of the collapse of communism. In Hungary, Béla Tarr applied Miklós Jancsó’s experiments with long tracking shots to the question of what the real world was like once Marxism ebbed. His massive Satantango (Hungary, 1993) is set on a failed collective farm. Its first shot, which lasts seven-and-a-half minutes, one-sixtieth of this seven-hour film’s total duration, attunes us to his world and shows how he extended Janscó’s aesthetic. The farm is barely visible in the morning gloom. Menacing music underscores. We track left past a building to cows that are being slowly herded. In the background there is the sound of bells from a Byzantine church. Satantango is a film in twelve sections; like Pudovkin in the 1920s (see page 106), Tarr used a musical structure. In a tango, the dancers take six steps forward, then six steps back. Cultural critic Susan Sontag called the film “Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours”, adding, “I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.”6 Sontag also admired a young German filmmaker Fred Kelemen, who had previously photographed Tarr’s Utazas az alfoldon/Journey on the Plain (Hungary, 1995). Kelemen’s Verhängnis/Fate (Germany, 1994) followed a Russian accordion player and then his girlfriend during one bleak endless night in Berlin. Filming on Hi-8 video, Kelemen used takes of ten minutes or more, sometimes static and brooding, other times serpentine, to tail his characters along dark streets, into bars, around public fountains, etc. The film’s smudged and under-lit visuals pre-figured Festen by several years and managed to make the bright new medium of videotape appear ancient. Kelemen’s follow up, the three-hour film Frost (Germany, 1998), about a woman and child on a journey across bleak winter landscapes, lacked some of the social rage of Fate, but was mythic and clearly derived from German Romanticism.
Unlike Western Europe, in the former Communist countries women directors continued to set standards. In Poland Dorota Kedzierzawska’s Wrony/Crows (1994) about a brusque nine-year-old girl who kidnaps a three-year-old boy and attempts to leave Poland by sea was as great a film about childhood as Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s House?. In the former Soviet Union itself,
master director Kira Muratova made what is perhaps her best film Uvlecheniya/ Enthusiasm (1994). Set in the racing world, its Fellini-esque story of a jockey, Sacha, and a circus performer Violetta, is treated with great sonic subtlety. On Wednesday 19 July 1961, 101 people – fifty-one girls, fifty boys – were born in Leningrad. One of them was documentary filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky. Thirty-four years later he undertook the momentous task of finding them all and making a ninety-three minute film – Sreda/Wednesday 19.7.1961 – to explore their lives, allocating less than one minute per person. One man stole a packet of cigarettes from his mother and was imprisoned, two died in the war in Afghanistan, many wanted no part in the film. Instead of being a hectic jumble, the tide of humanity portrayed, the economy with which Kossakovsky conjured these disparate lives was deeply moving.
Like the US directors, Russians were also looking to their cinematic past. Critic and theorist Oleg Kovalov’s Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography (Russia, 1995) used images from Eisenstein’s films, plus footage from the worlds he moved in to attempt to reveal the thought processes of the man in 1929 when he left the Soviet Union for the West, but also what the seminal director means to us today. Referring to Eisenstein’s bisexuality and using no commentary or captions, the film tried to apply the montage ideas of the 1920s in a modern context.
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Alison Steadman (right) as Wendy, the dancercise teacher, and Timothy Spall (left) as Aubrey, the owner of Regret Rien, in Mike Leigh’s incisive portrait of contemporary Britain, Life is Sweet. UK, 1991.