Sunday, March 25

Movie since last post:

Monsieur Verdoux


I have only been able to see movie in the past 24 hours, and it feels odd, given how prolific it has been lately. It was a Charlie Chaplin talkie--I think only the second of those I have ever seen, the other being Great Dictator--and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Chaplin's work manages to do everything that other "unpretentious" directors--some say a group with as few as three or four, including Bresson, Bunuel and Ozu--manage by being as far removed as they can be from a typical Chaplin movie.

What is a typical Chaplin? Physical "low-brow" comedy touched off with a satirical wit worthy of an engaging social commentator? If so, then Monsieur Verdoux is just that. You can see the Chaplin of "City Lights," albeit a much better dressed tramp, and you can also hear the same sentiments as in the barber's speech in Great Dictator, when Verdoux compares himself, a convicted mass-murderer, to the great nations on earth, who are each an equal mass-murderer. It is funny in that old, sentimental, articulate Hollywood way, sparked by Welles and charmed by Chaplin.

This seems a good time to revisit L'Argent. I can't recall if I have seen another movie by Bresson. It is very likely that I have, but my memory isn't the best, and although I can remember characters or sequences when I don't need to be thinking about them, I can't remember them when I need to. Calvino writes that the act of searching for a particular memory must necessarily change it a little, because the land that searches for a grain of memory now isn't the same that placed it there a long time ago. I can't remember exactly what I was thinking about a particular instance in a movie now that I need particulars, now that the articulation of any idea depends upon finding specifics that can be meaningfully arrayed.

So, here's what I think of L'Argent now: like most cinema worth thinking about, L'Argent seems cleaved into two distinct halves: that before Yvon's prison stint, and that after. How does a man think of himself in this world, where he is but one among countless many, and where there is no telling whose actions will have the most devastating effect upon his life? Yvon pays the penalty for two crimes he never commits: actually passing on forged currency, and actually assisting armed robbers. Yet, he gets arrested in both instances. In both instances he blames circumstances, and so do I, as the audience, by sympathizing with his plight, by finding it cruel that Justice insists upon keeping all eyes closed.

Yet, the same man who tries to kill himself during his solitary confinement [punishment for something that, in another age, would have been required of a man], leaves the prison determined to kill. He kills for sport then, almost, and he kills a woman who suffers, on her own and to protect him, for nothing more than a little bit of money. He is a very different person that the one that we learned to sympathize with.

I suppose, with works of art that take time to finish, the artist meets a kernel of truth somewhere in the process, halfway through the journey, perhaps, which then requires him to deviate from what he had thought to be the original intent of his work, his veritable destination, so to speak. In Monsieur Verdoux, a charming widow-killer, suddenly becomes gray and haggard, and announces how his disabled wife and young child are dead now. "But they are much better off where they are," he says with a cold sigh, and we immediately know that he isn't without any guilt. In L'Argent, Yvon tells the woman who gives him shelter that he killed the hotelier for some money, but felt no remorse for it. He talks about the blood and the pleasure in it. And we know that he is without any guilt.

The man directly responsible for Yvon's misery, a man who tells the judge that he takes pleasure in robbing the rich and giving to the poor, and that he was "hoping to be acquitted and continue doing it," stands for us: those who think of themselves as, even if only marginally, gifted capable of taking advantage where there is opportunity, and continuing behind the smug bravado of someone who never falls. This is also the Yvon who cannot take being called a forgerer, and pushes the righteous waiter. Then there is the Yvon of the second half: in all honesty, a fantasy within ourselves. Behind each tranquil face is the fantasy of having the guts to go out and enjoy a bloodsport, to be able to harm those who harm us, and even more so those tho have never had anything to do with us.

Bresson's present-day heirs are perhaps the Iranian movies: so simple that they are hard to understand, lyrical in their restrain, baroque in their terseness, an eye turned manyfolds inwards that they leave the audience weary of being watched. Calvino writes about certain cinema being the anti-camera: as if the screen is actually capturing the essence of the audience, as if reality exists within the cone of light between the projector and the screen. I suppose, in that case, the audience exists for cinema to be possible: as if beauty is a vast conspiracy of the mind to ensure its perpetuation, and cinema, as the primal form of images and sound in motion, has conspired the thinking audience into being.

Or, perhaps not.