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‘A Cinema of Cruelty’: It Hurts So Good

Plenty of sex, death, and painful pleasure in this Vancouver Cinematheque film series.

Dorothy Woodend 9 Sep 2016TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

It is a curious relationship, that of filmmaker and audience. Sometimes it feels a little like a dark highway that we travel together, staring out the window at the white lines emerging out of the blackness like bits of Morse code. On such a journey, a third person can be a very helpful thing. That person is a critic.

This is Going to Hurt: A Cinema of Cruelty is a collection of films on offer at the Cinematheque in Vancouver. The series takes inspiration from critic André Bazin’s compendium of film writing, put together by his protégé and friend François Truffaut some 17 years after Bazin’s death.

In Bazin’s case, the critic isn’t simply someone who says this film is good and this film is bad — they are, or can be, a navigator or map-reader who tells the audience, and even sometimes the filmmaker, where they might be going and what they might see beside the highway. Picture then three people huddled together, staring out the window at the road rushing up to meet them, looking for messages about what lies ahead. But before this analogy bends, snaps and hits me in the face, let’s get rolling.

The Cruelty series includes Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho, Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video and Funny Games.

Like the cheery tagline says, it is “the feel-bad event of the year!” Feel is the operative word. These are films that get in your guts and your chest, racing up and down your spine, churning you inside and out. It is a distinctly physical cinema, bodily even, concerned not only with the wretchedness of animal suffering, but equally with spiritual degradation. Sex and death might be the twin pillars at the centre of the Cruelty series, but between these two things there is also pain, beauty, sacrifice, and evil Bob.

So, what to make of a series that states its intention so baldly? Do you go in expecting to have your skin peeled from your bones? Do you resolve, in grand masochistic fashion, to immolate on the altar of cinema?

To be blunt, you’re going to have to endure and yes, feel terrible. Viewed collectively, it can sometimes feel like you’re on the rape and murder express, as these two things occur with bludgeoning frequency. But there is something more, a higher purpose, you might say. Each film administers a shock to the system that opens your eyes, and perhaps your soul, to the realities that are the hardest to take. It is useful to remember Bazin’s thesis that “The critic’s function is not to present a nonexistent truth on a silver platter, but to prolong to the maximum the shock of the work of art on the intelligence and sensibility of his readers.”

Everyone has had one of those moments, when a film gets inside you and dislodges your understanding of the world and even shakes your sense of self. The Cruelty series has a great many, beginning with a double penetration of Buñuel and Hitchcock. It is fitting that Un Chien Andalou was the first film loosed from the gate; it is where it all began. The first time I saw Buñuel’s film was in a double bill with L’Age d’Or at the Van East Cinema in 1986. I remember it distinctly from the queasy sensation afterwards. Not simply from the eyeball and razor scene that everyone recalls, but from the feeling of leaving the movie theatre and forgetting who I was for a moment. Watching it again reminded me of the physical sensation of stumbling out of a theatre, so disoriented and obliterated that it took a while for the thing to fade, and for me to come back to myself.

Nathaniel Dorsky wrote about the experience in his book Devotional Cinema. I wrote about it for The Tyee in the context of seeing a really crappy film, but it is useful to consider the comments again for work that is great.

“One of the most curious sections of the book is devoted to Dorsky’s first memory of going to the movies as a nine-year-old kid. He recounts a six-hour omnibus of features and shorts and cartoons that lasted from midday till early evening. Upon finally being released from the movie house, he found himself oddly changed. Or maybe the world itself had suffered a transfiguration of sorts. Dorsky writes: ‘I remember having the oddest sensation. The texture of the sunlight seemed strange and people’s voices sounded distant. Quite suddenly, the normal things that were my usual reference points, everything that had been familiar to me in my hometown, all the archetypes and icons, became eerie and questionable. I felt alien and estranged.’”

Dorsky describes this dislocation as a type of interruption, a tear in the fabric that allows us to stop and peek inside to see what lies beyond the frame. In the case of films such as those collected in A Cinema of Cruelty, this experience should come with a cautionary warning like “Don’t ingest before breakfast.” The whole world will look papery thin, like so much printed cotton covering over a squirmy, writhing darkness that threatens to break through at any moment.

For example, it is not a good idea to watch David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me first thing in the morning. I did that very thing, and then tried to get on the SkyTrain and go to work. It was, shall we say, a bit of a surreal experience.

But the ultimate statement that Dorsky makes in his essay is this one: “If we do relinquish control, we suddenly see a hidden world, one that has existed all along right in front of us. In a flash, the uncanny presence of this poetic and vibrant world, ripe with mystery, stands before us. Everything is expressing itself as what it is. Everything is alive and talking to us.”

What exactly is it telling us you might well ask? You might expect that the answers would be readily apparent, as each of these films has been parsed, dissected and analyzed to such an extent that they’re almost threadbare from so much attention and close observation. But weirdly enough, kind of the opposite is true. Each one of them somehow resists being fully understood. This is especially true in the case of David Lynch, described by some as the first populist surrealist, and thus an inheritor of the surrealist tradition that Buñuel embodied.

Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive was recently voted The Greatest Film of the 21st Century in a recent BBC poll. Fire Walk With Me probably won’t garner many similar accolades, but the two films are sisters in many ways. The same cinematic Lynchian language of sound and image is applied.

But in some ways Fire Walk With Me is a stranger work, concerned as it is with destroying its maker. By which I mean the Twin Peaks television phenomena. As Shaun Inouye, the curator for the Cruelty series, quite rightly pointed out, the TV show with its quirky cast of eccentric characters and kooky one-liners about cherry pie and coffee was built around an atrocity, the incestuous rape and murder of a young girl by her father. Fire Walk With Me returns Laura Palmer to the centre of the story, so that we are forced to look at the dark heart at its very core. If you want an encompassing and obsessive rereading, Grantland did an excellent job on the 20th anniversary of the film.

There is a reason that people return again and again to a film, trying to ferret out its truth with analysis and discussion. Look only at the cult of obsession that has grown up around Kubrick’s film The Shining, wonderfully captured in Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237.

It is a curiosity to me, quite literally, why we are so drawn to brutality and violence. In each one of the films, there occurred a moment when I did not want to watch, but I did watch. In the case of Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, it is scene in which 12-year-old Anaïs witnesses her older sister being sodomized by her new boyfriend. In Haneke’s Funny Games, it is the tipping of a bound and gagged woman into the dark waters of a lake, with a kiss on the cheek and a casual “Ciao, bella,” from her murderers. Sometimes I don’t want to really know what I am looking for. That shock to the system, that feeling of being drenched in cold water, can sometimes drown out the more mysterious truth, but it comes creeping back, occasionally years later, wanting to be acknowledged and understood.

Sometimes the connections between the films are more oblique. Dreyer and Lynch both share a desire to look so closely at things that the human face becomes almost a landscape. So too, Bresson’s close observation reveals more truth than you can bear sometimes.

Music also plays a pivotal role throughout many of these films, sometimes as a perverse counterpoint (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and Chopin) and sometimes as means of glorious liberation. Think of the angelic voice that ascends during Laura Palmer’s death scene, with its overt reference to final scene in Faust where the heavenly hosts interrupt the devil and take up the fallen woman to heaven. Even in Un Chien Andalou, where the strains of Liebestod (literally, love death) from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde provides a rising orgiastic force to the power of Buñuel’s images. Again, so much sex and death, but also something else.

As Inouye pointed out in his introduction to the series, many of these films are about the suffering of women — raped, murdered and sacrificed. But the other thing that is quite clear is that death is not the end. From Mouchette to Laura Palmer to Joan of Arc, these characters are not broken and destroyed. Rather they are transfigured and strangely triumphant in the end, escaping their captors, tormentors and even their makers, to live free. Maybe this is fanciful, but by the end of rewatching some of these films, to me it is less a cinema of cruelty and more a cinema of redemption. But first you must pass through the darkness and keep going, out on that lonely highway, all by yourself.  [Tyee]

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