Reborn

I have been struggling to understand Robert Bresson for some time now. This implies a level of bafflement I don't necessarily feel, but any time I watch one of his films, I usually do think "What is he doing here and why is he doing it?" at some point along the way. And yes, I'm aware that there's a wealth of material on the man and his work that I could read to ease myself along, but I've kind of taken Bresson on as a personal challenge. The actors, usually non-professionals, directed to be blank-faced and emotionless even in moments of extreme distress, the curious decisions to choose this image over that image, when that image would appear to be the point, and this image would appear to be irrelevant, and so on -- all of these aspects of Bresson's films have worked to both keep me at arm's length and demand that I move in closer. It's been too long since I've seen either Au Hasard Balthazar or Pickpocket, my first two, and probably most people's first two, Bresson films, for me to reliably record those experiences, but I do remember watching Lancelot of the Lake and feeling close to the level of bafflement that I earlier tried to deny. Why were his actors like this? The obvious choice in that case to scale the epic fantasy of King Arthur way, way down didn't really get at the heart of anything much, in terms of my own questions, and it left that film for me as a mysterious puzzle, one I chose to be dismissive of, because that's how knee-jerking works.

Later, L'Argent, his last film, did a whole different kind of number on me, and as I write this I wish I'd had a copy of that DVD handy, because I felt at the time, and still feel, that as far as my own connection goes L'Argent holds all the clues. It's such an astonishingly strange, and undeniably compelling, piece of work that it feels like it has a lot more hooks and ledges to grab onto. It also contains perhaps the apex of Bresson's style of directing his actors, in a courtroom scene with the murderous protagonist played by Christian Patey. A sentence has been delivered, and he spits out a condemnation of the court, then pivots like a robot to be escorted away. "Quit expecting me to stop doing this," Bresson seemed to be telling me. "This is why I'm here." Plus, too, I remember L'Argent containing more than the usual share of shot choices focusing on something ordinary -- a close up of a bowl of milk, or was it water? being passed from one person to another -- when more seemingly vital drama is occurring just over there, out of the frame. It became very clear to me as I watched L'Argent that Bresson wasn't dicking around, but perhaps I was.

I can't claim that I jump on any opportunity to revisit Bresson, but I certainly don't turn up my nose at them, either, and one has been provided to me by the good people at Criterion, who today have released his 1956 classic A Man Escaped on DVD and Blu-ray. I'd seen it before, probably around the time I saw Pickpocket and etc., and along with the whole of L'Argent and the occasional Python-esque violence of Lancelot of the Lake (as well as one of the least welcome sights I've ever encountered, about which I shall say no more, from The Devil, Probably), this one has lodged in my brain most securely. Watching it again, it's also by far Bresson's least mysterious, at least in my experience (I understand his earliest films are far more traditional and accessible than the films he'd become known for). L'Argent I suppose would be the Advanced Studies course, and A Man Escaped the 101 class, which is not a comment in any way on its achievement.

But it's all there, or nearly. A Man Escaped stars Francois Leterrier as Fontaine, a member of the French Resistance during World War II who has been arrested by the Germans for planting a bomb. He's facing almost certain execution, but whatever passed for due process among the Nazis still has to be seen to, foregone conclusion or no, so in the meantime Fontaine will spend his hours in prison, mostly among other Resistance fighters. Immediately, however, Fontaine is determined to escape, and A Man Escaped is, indeed, a prison break film, as well as a film about process, in this case the process of planning -- and re-planning -- that prison break. If you allow for some, or even a lot, of simplification, Bresson's style could be reasonably described as an ascetic one, and while it's not at all difficult to make an argument for its appropriateness in any one of his films, you'd have a hard time convincing me that it isn't most plainly at home in A Man Escaped, because what is prison but enforced asceticism? (So is poverty, hence its stylistic applicabality across much of his work.)

So we watch Fontaine endlessly, relentlessly, prepare to do what he is assured by his fellow inmates is an impossible task. The title of the film indicates where this is all going, but even without that you might figure it out anyway. A very stark form of Christianity -- which is not to say judgmental, but rather agonized -- was always part of Bresson's artistic make up, and if ever that hard faith softened, it's here, when Fontaine talks about his assumed escape (he never seems to doubt himself) as being "born again." Hard to miss the parallels, or the metaphor. What's so interesting about the way Bresson approaches this in A Man Escaped is that while he may directly explain that metaphor, he also refuses to give the audience what it would expect in terms of context. We of course know why Fontaine is a POW, and we know, one would hope, the basic history of the situation, but of Fontaine's past we know nothing, of Fontaine's spirituality we know nothing. If he had religion before, he didn't take it as seriously as he does the Religion of Escape. But of course, for those with faith, trauma can either demolish it or strengthen it, and without any context for Fontaine outside of his imprisonment it becomes easy to imagine the 100 minutes we see him contained in that cell as constituting the entirety of his life, with its grief and hope and dread and pain. He gets through it, and escapes. To what? If his imprisonment is his entire life (which, Fontaine being a fictional character who doesn't exist outside of this film, it is) then his escape, which ends the film, ends his life. And takes him to the next part.

In the interest of not completely disappearing up my own something-or-other here, I would say a less abstract comparison to all this is in C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, which chronicles his severe crisis of faither that followed the death of his wife. In that book (which feels like something we should not be allowed to read, but there it is) Lewis battles God and terror and loneliness and intense emotional pain, and then he breaks through it and begins to gather up the cards and rebuild the house (that's Lewis's metaphor, not mine; I merely restated it clumsily). This is what Fontaine goes through, with a great and admirable calmness. His blankness indicates only that he's smarter than those keeping him locked up.

For the Sake of Authenticity

The slaughtering of the water buffalo in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now has never bothered me. Not too much, anyway. It’s all rationalization, but I think the reasons for this are that, for one thing, I’ve been watching the film for decades now, I’m used to it, and I imagine when I originally saw it there was a certain morbid thrill inherent in seeing for the first time, as far as I knew, an actual living thing being actually killed. None of us are free from a certain morbid curiosity. More importantly, possibly, is that I was told that this water buffalo was being killed as part of a native ritual that was going to happen whether Coppola pointed his camera at it or not. This was helpful to me because it removed the responsibility of the buffalo’s death from Coppola and put it in the hands of a primitive culture that was, on a certain level, none of my business. In any case, I could compare it to watching a nature documentary.

Except that over the years I’ve come to realize that I don’t like those kinds of nature documentaries, and more to the point I’ve long understood now that the actual, unsimulated killing of animals, or torture of same, in films is my one big taboo. I can’t say I will avoid films containing such scenes at all costs, because that would be a lie, but it’s the one thing that will make me avoid a film to the point that if presented with such a film that I’m otherwise interested in seeing, I will consider actually never seeing it. I fully realize that I’m far from alone in this, and one of the dangers I’m trying to avoid in writing about this topic is taking on a judgmental, long-suffering, more-sensitive-than-you tone. But put it like this: years ago, when John C. Reilly dropped out of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay reportedly because Von Trier planned on killing a donkey on camera, I was fully behind Reilly’s decision, and kind of hated Von Trier, whose reaction to losing the actor was essentially “What’s the big deal?” But he was sort of -- sort of -- right. One of the reasons I need to watch my tone here is because if I get too self righteous about this, the levels of hypocrisy that will be in play the next time I cram a roast beef sandwich into my face or get bummed out because my steak isn’t rare enough will have become insupportable.

And anyway, for all my mostly internal anger towards movies that contain real animal killings, it’s not like I’ve been particularly good at avoiding them. Even once you get past the era of American film history when horses were regarded as disposable as matches, if you watch a lot of movies, and cast your film-going net as wide as I try to, you’re going to see some that were made in Europe. In European films, particularly those made in the 60s and 70s, all bets are off. Or can be off. But it really feels like sometimes an animal could be killed at any time in any given French or German or so on film. Rabbits and chickens and the like drop like flies in the morally rigorous films of Robert Bresson (exceptions to this include, oddly enough, Bresson’s famously bloody Lancelot of the Lake and the quietly apocalyptic L’Argent), with the nadir being reached in stock footage of a seal clubbing featured in The Devil, Probably, an image I haven’t been able to shake years after seeing it, and since in order to see that film I had to buy it I retain a vague and ridiculous fear that one day when I’m not around my wife, who likes this stuff even less than I do, will randomly decide to see what this The Devil, Probably deal is all about. And then, boom. I’m not really sure what the aftermath of that would be, so I’ll just say “boom.” More recently, Michael Haneke has shown no reticence about shooting pigs in the face, for example. I admire Haneke as a filmmaker (as I also admire Bresson, baffling though I sometimes find him), but the pig in Benny’s Video, just to take an example, makes the insufferable finger-wagging of Funny Games, which is plenty bad enough, even harder to take. I’m reminded of the pig in Godard’s Weekend, about which Pauline Kael said (paraphrasing here) that whatever moral judgments Godard wished to throw out to his audience, the pig was all his. This being the closest I’ve ever come to giving Kael the thumbs up. The upshot of all this being that while I’ve never seen any of Francis Veber’s light comedies, it wouldn’t shock me to learn that at some point in, say, The Dinner Game, there’s a shot of somebody scooping out the eyes of a live goat.

Which brings me, sort of, to my earlier point about avoiding such films when I can, and deciding sometimes to just bite the bullet. There are two films that I have specifically not seen for years because of this: Bela Tarr’s Satantango (which features no actual animal deaths I’m aware of, but instead apparent cat abuse, though Tarr himself has offered an explanation that I’m inclined to believe, but not yet to the point of watching the maybe-not-actual-cat-abuse unfold), and, on the less, I don’t know, aesthetically precise end of things, Ruggero Deodato’s infamous Cannibal Holocaust. Perversely, this is the one for which I decided to end my embargo recently. And it’s a terrible movie with lots of animal killing in it. As I say, Cannibal Holocaust is notorious for its various animal butcheries, as well as the fake (convincingly faked, but faked, which should maybe go without saying, I guess, maybe) torture and rape and evisceration of most of its characters.

Cannibal Holocaust’s turtle scene is the one that’s always talked about, but I can attest that none of these scenes are much fun to watch. Nor is any part of the rest of the movie. Deodato’s film is notable for being the first (among the first?) found footage horror movies, though it only becomes that towards the final third. The plot is, a group of American documentary filmmakers – supposedly extremely famous documentary filmmakers – led by Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) and his girlfriend Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi), are preparing to journey to the Amazon basin in order to film lives of the cannibal tribes to be found therein. When they don’t return, anthropologist Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman, a porn actor who interestingly gives the one decent performance in the whole movie) begins an expedition to go find them. Along the way, he sees all manner of atrocity, including the hideous rape and murder of a native girl, and is forced by the leader of the tribe in whose possession Monroe and his guides have found the remains, including cameras, of the missing filmmakers, to eat human flesh. Also a coatimundi, a kind of small mammal, has its throat slit and its stomach eaten. But he got the footage, so back to New York he goes, where the, I don’t know, TV network(?) is thrilled that the last film of these amazing filmmakers can be presented to the world. The fact that it’s known that all of these people were killed and eaten doesn’t seem to bug them too very much, and in fact they’re willing to slap that film, sight unseen, right up there on TV. But Monroe says “Well, let’s maybe watch it first?” so he and a network editor do so, and the found footage portion of Cannibal Holocaust begins.

And a lot of this is actually kind of hilarious. The point of this whole ridiculous thing is that, you know, sure these people are cannibals, but aren’t we, members of the civilized Western world, kind of really the savages? Yes indeed we are, because Alan and his crew are terrible people. The footage they shot shows them as initially callous and glib, and just kind of jerks when you consider how often they flip off the camera (they do it a lot, and Faye sometimes makes rude faces, too), and finally as rapists and murderers. Well, finally as ripped apart corpses, but as rapists and murderers immediately prior to that. It’s already been revealed to us, and to Monroe, that Alan Yates and his crew made a habit of staging events for their documentaries (though in the example shown to us, a section of a film called The Last Road to Hell, it’s not clear to me if the tribal murders depicted were urged on by Alan, or if the murders themselves were faked), and here we see them torching a village belonging to a cannibal tribe known as “the tree people” so that it can be blamed, in their film if not in reality, on a rival tribe. And Alan and Faye and the other Americans are whooping it up and laughing as they torch the place and shoot pigs and yell about how much money they’re going to make. The economic theory being consulted here must be an obscure one, but anyway we’ll never find out if it pans out for them. Pretty soon after that, Alan and company capture a native girl and gang rape her (here, for once, Faye displays some moral uncertainty) and then look in awe and amusement at the girl’s ultimate fate, a famous image from Cannibal Holocaust involving impalement, and I’ll leave it at that.

I must admit there’s a grotesquely funny moment here involving Alan’s reaction to this, but since moral indictment of some kind seems to be at the forefront of Deodato’s mind here, or at least he’d like us to think so, I’m left wondering who or what is being indicted. The American involvement in Vietnam, about which Yates once made a film, and which, in a lazy, sleepy kind of way seems to be the goal? Or filmmakers who would make documentaries about such a thing, which appears more explicitly to be the target, but can’t actually be? Either way, characters in the film, more than once, actually say things like “I wonder who the real cannibals are?” and “Maybe we’re the savages.” If the question is really “Who are the real savages,” can’t the answer be both? I mean, just going by what’s in the film, the Amazon cannibal tribes do a lot of raping and murdering and cannibaling themselves. It’s not like it’s revealed that all the eating of human flesh that we as a culture once arrogantly ascribed to these Amazon tribes was actually being done in secret by Alan Yates and his girlfriend. Maybe Deodato wanted us to leave Cannibal Holocaust thinking it was a tie.

But that’s all bullshit anyway. I have a hard time believing Deodato thought too hard about the politics of any of this. He cared only about showing the savagery. Because of its reputation, I watched Cannibal Holocaust in constant fear that the animals shown scampering or crawling through the jungle would suddenly be massacred, though most of it doesn’t occur until the found footage section, at which point it all comes in a rush. The animal deaths occur at such a rapid pace by this time that I started wondering why they were letting some animals off the hook. There was an alligator at one point, and I couldn’t figure out why nobody was in a tree throwing big rocks at its head. I entered this state of mind after the turtle scene, which is lovingly filmed, I must say, and is by far the most gruesome animal scene in the film. In truth, I watched each of these scenes with one hand ready to block out what I would very probably decide I’d rather not see, which still left me seeing almost all of it, including the turtle scene. The one I did not watch a second of was the monkey killing, and in all honesty I have to admit that this is because I love monkeys, I think they’re cute, and monkeys scream. Turtles don’t. I like turtles too, mind you, but what I’m getting at, and this will shock nobody, is that some animals, by virtue of their behavior and appearance, have a greater hold of our sympathies than others. It is another hypocrisy which I have to deal with that the killing of a monkey, which is cute, makes me angrier than the killing of a turtle, which is, from a distance, kind of like a rock. This isn’t a hypocrisy that lets Deodato off the hook, however, and in any case I’d like to be clear that none of the animal killings in Cannibal Holocaust strike me as any less bad than the others (there is, in fact, a particular aspect of the turtle scene that bothers me enormously and I wish I’d looked away sooner).

Except that perhaps the shooting of the pig, which I basically saw, feels worse than the others, because in the case of the others, the meat becomes food (actually becomes food, as far as I know) (and okay, not the snake) – this makes the deaths seem, almost, like what I call “farm killings,” a genre of on-screen animal deaths that is often what we’re seeing in Bresson, or, to take another example, Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien. The context of the pig killing, though, is basically “Hey everybody, watch me shoot this pig.” Gabriel Yorke, the actor who plays Yates, was supposed to shoot the pig, but he refused, and another actor took the job. There are a lot of stories about the making of Cannibal Holocaust that involve the actors balking at what Deodato was asking of them, and even clashing angrily with the director (among the stories is one about Francesca Ciardi, whose ideas about how to ease tensions, which having nothing to do with any kind of cruelty to any living thing, are nevertheless kind of alarming; Yorke, meanwhile, comes off as a normal, decent guy who probably spent a lot of time regretting the day he’d ever agreed to work with Deodato), all of which eventually pile up to make the filming of Cannibal Holocaust sound almost as ugly and shitty and morally ruinous as the film Deodato pretended he was making. At least I know who the savage is.