“He is wise about the ways we balance our selfishness with the needs of others.” – Roger Ebert.
Category: Culture
Lola Montes
“The king must be obeyed. Otherwise, the monarchy makes no sense.”
Los Olvidados
The task is simple. In order to create a geography of hunger, we must throw away the ordinary map. Clear markers are gone. Lines of demarcation have been obliterated. Surveys are useless and contradictory. Boundaries become topography; topography creates new and surprising boundaries. We are forced to trace the characters on an entirely new trajectory and plane. This is where their lived reality occurs. This is the authentic space in which they (we) are forced to inhabit.
Tragedy + Modernity = Melodrama
Tragedy is a very difficult art form to master in the modern world. All too often the narrative can veer into contrivance. At first glance, the reason why isn’t straightforward. It’s not a problem of plotting, per say, but has more to do with cinema as a form of self-reference and self-understanding. More and more, we moderns come to understand the meaning of our lives through the lens of cinema. Our understanding of a particular film’s meaning is shaped by our past filmic experiences, connecting points inside a common shared space, a larger cinematic map we learn to orient along a plane. Tragedy is not the end result of a series of unfortunate events or plot points, but is framed within the larger context of this shared cinematic universe. It is a daunting task. The obstacles we place before our tragic heroes may well be too high for the audience to scale, and there is always a danger they will give up and refuse to climb along the journey. To experience the modern world is already an ironic gesture, a self-referential reification. The ironic pose of tragedy culminates in its highest expression: melodrama. But melodrama creates precarious footing upon which the narrative can slip beneath our feet. Every new ledge along the precipice, each toehold we create for safe footing becomes a tired well-worn path which advanced cinephiles like us reject as trite. Been there. Done that. The thirst for novelty threatens to plunge our story into increasingly strange and bizarre twists to keep the excitement level high. Melodrama is the addiction, but like all addictive drugs, we are forced to increase the dosage to maintain our high.
The Story of a Cheat
“She was perhaps the only woman I truly almost loved.”
Realism in Eustache
Ah! Here we have a proper tableau, placed upon an “invisible battleground of socio-psychological scars.” Atomization, alienation, fragmented communities, a pervasive loneliness, a vacuous intellectualism that cannot penetrate our inauthentic lives. Fabulist, phoniness, cinematic, play-acting, etc.
“I don’t think life can be like these strange worlds which bar reentry once the doors close.”
The Mother and the Whore
“I’ve never known how strangers can make conversation…It’s best to sit there in silence or talk a lot, which is the same…”
Slow Movement
In Tati, real life moves at a leisurely pace. It is a natural movement. It ambles, winds and weaves, hesitates, shifts, reverses course, then suddenly is dragged along by the undertow of contrary forces, jostled and shoved, this way and that. The movement is mimicked in both narrative and temporal form. Nothing is rushed. There is no punch line to get to, no hard set up in order to sell the joke. The gags are there but no cue card held high to remind the audience when to laugh. The humor emerges, stealthily, by our insipid attempts to thwart this natural movement by making it conform to the artificial patterns of modern life.
If real life is natural, modern life is steadfastly artificial. Modern life imposes artificial patterns that slowly strangle the joy of living. Modernity appears and is of no practical benefit (chairs are beautifully designed, but useless to sit in). We are forced to adapt to these artificial patterns in a clumsy manner (uneven hops along stepping stones) because modern life interferes with our natural movement. Children and dogs best embody this ideal, while Hulot is the grown up child bumbling his way through life, caught between two conflicting worlds. The conflict of pattern: this is Tati’s genius and the neverending source of his humor.
So where does such a finely ingrained sense of humor come from? Allow me a moment of speculation. The comedian sees the world as a well-choreographed dance. Only the dance partners keep stepping on each other’s toes. “Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables” (“Geometrical lines do not produce likeable people”).
Watching a Tati film (Monsieur Hulot ‘s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Playtime), a wide smile appears on my face, then grows into a grin, then slips into a chuckle, then finally overwhelms me in an uncontrolled fit of laughter. If you are in on the joke, there is no end to the joy of these films. But beyond the profound humor, beyond the biting satire against the cult of consumerism and the comedy of manners, there is something so grounded in Tati, so humanistic, something that so resembles real life, that an incredible feeling of familiarity and nostalgia takes hold.
Do not rush Tati. Do not insist we get to the joke in a speedy fashion. Live in his world. Act as the mischievous whimsical children and be swept along by the play of irreverent forces. Set aside your personal demands, your checklists, your projected desires on the screen. Be free. Be alive. Then carry that spirit into your real lives.
Ophuls’ Challenge
If life is movement, can we ever be happy?
The God Problem: Joy flows from movement. Happiness is mere contentedness. Begin the day in joy, end the day in happiness. Sorrow yields new joys.
Nostalgia
“Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence.” White Noise.
The Hack 