Category: Film

Bruno, Bruno Stroszek. Everything is concentrated in his figure. All the secrets of the world, of the end of the world. Everything that is to happen, that will happen. Fate, the secret of fate.

He speaks of himself in the third person, which is already a sign. In the third person as if he were also someone else, another person, away from him. As though he were already away from himself, displaced. As though he somehow happened to himself, as all events happen to him. As though he suffered himself, befell himself, lived – and died – as his own fate; no – as fate, not his own fate. As fate.

Bruno suffers … he suffers in advance of whatever will happen to him. He's a kind of prophet, but what sees is doom, not salvation. He knows in advance that it's all going to fail. We're going down: he knows that. The descent has begun: that he knows.

He's not even resigned – that's not the word for it. It's not as if he knows his fate and then resigns himself to it. He's not a man dead in advance. All hope has not been hollowed from him. It's rather that hope, his hope takes place amidst fate.

He knows it will end, that it's all coming to an end, but he hopes nonetheless. He hopes nevertheless, against himself and against fate. He can still enter into life, or at least part of him can. But there's another part, which is what he speaks of in the third person. It's why he speaks of himself in the third person, he must do. Because what he is is divided, there where he should be one. Divided, right there, as hope and despair are divided …

Berlin, winter. Bruno S., Bruno Stroszek is released from prison. He's warned not to drink – it's drink that gets him in trouble. But Bruno knows that it's got nothing to do with drink. There are cycles in which he gets caught up. Cycles of life which catch him out. What can he do, Bruno, to change things? He is only Bruno …

Bruno speaks of himself in the third person. He's a spectator of himself. He stands to one side; he barely occupies his own place. He suffers; he undergoes life. It happens to him from without and he even happens to himself from the same place, from the same non-place: without.

Who is Bruno S. but one to whom things happen? Cycles, always cycles. And isn't it these cycles that lead him straight to a bar for a drink? Aren't these same cycles what lead him to bring her back to his apartment (Bruno S.'s real life apartment), which is being looked after by his elderly neighbour, Mr Scheitz (played by a Mr Scheitz)), who has a strong belief in animal magnetism (as Mr Scheitz in real life had a similar belief in animal magnetism)?

But Bruno loves to play music. There is something he loves, something which makes him feel less lonely. He plays the piano (which Bruno S. bought with his royalties from a previous film) and the accordion. He plays handbells. A moving sequence: watching Bruno perform a Berlin street song with his accordian in a back alley. (That was how the real Bruno S. performed on the weekend – in gardens, playing nineteenth century ballads in back garden. During the week, he would drive forklift trucks to make a living). 

He sings, he plays, and appears to disappear into his singing, his playing. (Later, in real life, he would claim to transmit songs, rather than perform them. To transmit them: this too would be part of fate, happening to Bruno from without). Is music part of a cycle? Or is it what allows him to escape the cycle – a kind of reprieve? When he's beaten up by Eva's pimps, he is so on the piano, on the handbells. A strange crucifixion. What does it mean? Has he lost his music? Has fate interposed itself between him and his music (but it's barely his music)?

Mr Scheitz tells him his nephew in Wisconsin has invited him to live with him. A decision: Bruno has made a decision: they should all go to Wisconsin, says Bruno: he, Mr Scheitz and Eva. Yes, it's time for them to start new lives, Bruno says. They should go! They must go! A decision: perhaps Eva has given him hope. Eva who will share his bed, even as she prostitutes herself to earn enough money for them all to go. A decision: is Bruno really standing up to fate? Is he really raising himself against it?

And there they are in Railroad Flats, Winconsin (it was really Plainfield, Ed Gein's home town, which Herzog had explored on a previous visit) … Of course, things go awry, as Bruno knows they must. Everything is fate to him. Everything comes from without. He happens to himself. He occurs in his place, in the place he cannot take. There's only music – fate? Something like counter-fate, or another part or face of fate. But here he is in America, far from his apartment, his piano, his music.

And now the decline, the terrible lability, and who is he to resist? Depressed, penniless, what life can he offer Eva? She closes her door to him. She sleeps with lorry drivers, disappears with them. Ah, fate has caught up with him, Bruno! He tried to stand up to fate, but fate broke him apart. Now the downward spiral, now the road to the end …

In real life, Bruno S. would say 'they threw him away' of what happened after his film success. He never acted again; he couldn't speak of Herzog except with great pain. They threw him away, but he still performs, he still sings and plays.

Bruno S., Bruno Stroszek, knows it's going to turn bad. He knows it's heading in the wrong direction. Things were set in motion long before he appeared. Someone's put money in the slot. He'll do what he should. He'll dance like the chicken in the arcade – it's his fate.

What can he do but dance? And it's not even dancing. It's what he has to do. It's the only thing he can do, just like Kafka's hunger artist, who has no choice but to starve. He has to pick his feet from the hot plate, or they will get burnt. He has to act, he has to do things, otherwise there'll be trouble.

What if had let Eva be mistreated by her pimp? What if he hadn't brought her back to his apartment? Trouble followed her, of course. They roughed up Bruno. He had to leave. It was the best thing to go with Eva and Mr Scheitz to live in Wisconsin. What choice did they have? To have stayed would have been madness. And to move … Bruno has to move. He's like the dancing chicken.

And what could he do, while in Wisconsin, but find somewhere to live for Eva and himself? They couldn't live on the plains of Railway Flats after all, could they? The mobile home – a double width 1973 Fleetwood mobile home – was the obvious choice. Bruno deserved a little luxury. A console TV. The Winsconsin plains were the hot plate. 

But didn't he know, even as he signed the contract, that he would have to make payments – payments he was in no way capable of making? Of course – but what could he do? There was a hotplate underneath him. He moved – he danced. He twitched, that was all. It was a reflex – and how could he be blamed for that? It was going to turn bad, he knew. Things always turned bad … 

It wasn't as if they were cruel to him, the Americans. Clayton, Mr Scheitz's nephew, was nice. Bruno works for him as a mechanic. So was the bank official, who seemed embarrassed to bring up the subject of money, but who warns Bruno nevertheless about the dangers of repossession.

But Bruno's bored with his job. He can't pay his bills. He becomes depressed. Eva closes her door to him. She sleeps alone now. And eventually, the mobile home, which came in towed by a truck, is auctioned off. Where's he going to live? It's all falling apart, as Bruno knew it would. It had to fall apart. How could it be otherwise?

Desperation: Bruno and Mr Scheitz are convinced there's a conspiracy against them. They have to act! The hotplate again. So they take a rifle and go to rob a bank. Only the bank's closed. They rob the barber shop next door instead. They net 32 dollars. Then they head across to the supermarket, Bruno picking up a frozen chicken.

Mr Scheitz, with his rifle, is arrested. Bruno drives their getaway car, which they'd left running, to an amusement arcade. He leaves his car running in circles outside. He feeds quarters to make a real rabbit ride a fire truck, a duck play a bass drum, and a chicken dance. Then he goes off to ride on a chairlift with his frozen chicken.

What else could he do? Off he goes, his chicken on the seat beside him. We hear a gunshot. Bruno's shot himself. And we return to the chicken. We watch the chicken dancing, the chicken made to dance on its hot plate, Sonny Terry's harmonica on the soundtrack.

‘Beware of writers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation’, says E. M. Cioran. But how, otherwise to begin? In my notebook, the words, writing as life, and I remember Ferdinand in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (admittedly, I do so through Brody’s book, which is beside me here on my desk …) the fugitive who, having reached the idyll of the seaside, writes dreaming of a great Joycean book that would contain all of life. And Marianne, beautiful Marianne, fellow fugitive beside him in the sea crying up, ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do!’, and Ferdinand says ‘Silence! I’m writing!’

How ludicrous! A man with a notebook on a boulder, with Anna Karina wading beside him. Brody, anyway, tells us a marvellous story about Godard’s impossible love for his actress. Read the chapter on Alphaville, for example:

Most crucially, when Natasha asks Lemmy the fateful question – ‘Love: what is it?’ – Godard answers the question himself, cutting to an extraordinarily intimate close-up of Anna Karina, her face illuminated by velvetly indirect sunlight, almost out of character. It is a brief short of breathtaking beauty that shows what love is: the emotion, on the part of a filmmaker, that gives rise to such an image.

What romance! And Godard had already lost Karina by this time (I think). If I was to review Brody’s book (no time!) love would be the red thread I would follow through its pages, all the way up to Eloge de l’amour, whose love story, says Brody, ‘is Godard’s least inhibited and most ardent’. Is it possible to love a film that was almost impossible to watch (so boring, so difficult to follow, I who can barely tell the characters apart in an ordinary thriller)? Is it that I watched this film because I wanted to have watched it so as to read and write about it? How ludicrous! How stupid!

Brody’s book, anyway, carried me happily through a difficult time. Sometimes books can do that, and they’re worth looking out for, joining up hours and afternoons and days that would otherwise fall apart. Sometimes you need to find a power of narrative that is more powerful than you, and sweeps you up in its own arms. And when you finish it, you’re locked out, and there’s no way in again, except to read back where you’ve annotated it, and perhaps copy our parts of it, the better to remember what happened.

A dream: beneath any narrative you might write, there is the counter-narrative of writing. Beneath and behind the narrative, but also touching it at each moment of its development, the narrative against narrative, that lets the story hover out over 70,000 fathoms and voids its episodes from within.

How can it itself be brought closer to the surface, as a drowned body to the surface of the ice? How can it be made to pass close to the ice but beneath it, moving away from you but there?

Dream of a narrative so faintly written that another narrative can pass beneath its surface like a body under ice. A narrative so faint, so broken, that the other narration is also there and speaks in its own voice, far and distant. Its own voice but that is also yours, the unfamiliar sound that comes from you when, like the narrator of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (just before the starting credits) you are able to say, ‘I can speak now’.

‘I can speak’ – but can you? For it is not what you can say that matters, but also what says itself by means of that saying. And I think of Tarkovsky’s film again, the newsreel clips, the Chinese at the Russian border waving the little red book; the girl in an evacuation who turns to the camera; the troops in Crimea, still cheerful, crossing the mud.

What says itself by means of film? By means of it, but holding itself into its own means, its own capacity? Even as it cannot own itself, or that it is what disowns itself from you as a filmmaker in your finished (unfinishable) work of art?

Imagine this instead: the artwork that cannot resort even to newsreels, or continuity shots that Ozu loved. That presents the bareness of the narration, of a narrative voice that says nothing. The breaks in Bergman’s Persona, perhaps.

Is it possible to say even Tarkovsky was afraid of abandonment, that he sought to fill the void from which speech comes and to which it returns with historical footage; that even when his camera pans across abandoned items in the water during Stalker (the same items as were on Stalker’s nightstand earlier in the film; the same, but sea-changed, become image …) his cinema is still an attempt to avoid what abandons itself in narrative. And isn’t Bergman’s Persona, despite its breaks, still too ‘psychological’, still a descendant of Strindberg’s theatre (his chamber pieces in particular)?

And now, idly as usual, I think of Bacon’s attempt to strip his paintings of any narrative. Ah, but that is the good fortune of the painter, whose work needs much less time to unfold, that unfolds across space (crude analogy) and not through time; that is not obliged to narrate. That can be, in some sense. That stands on its two feet.

What would a film be that told despite narration, across it? Images, now, that are set loose from any particular story? Think of Duras’s remaking of India Song … what was its name? But wasn’t it too boring? Didn’t it fail to carry you along, even though you saw only the briefest excerpt.

Idle thoughts. Perhaps we must all be like Tarkovsky and Bergman, who stumble upon the ‘break’ – that other narration. Perhaps it can be spoken of ‘despite’, in negligence, happenstance, and according to those contingencies where something else speaks by way of what unfolds.

Think of Tarkovsky again. Tarkovsky, editing Mirror over and again, looking for – what? It fell together, after long effort, all at once, and there it was: broken narratives, though interconnected. Broken, though, and just enough to let something else shine through.

Shine? I imagine instead the body under ice, the drowned one Tarkovsky also was as he made his film. As though the whole film was seachanged like the items from Stalker’s nightstand. The whole film – and perhaps, too, if we can read it autobiographically – Tarkovsky’s life, his whole life as it had been offered as a sacrifice. A sacrifice, as it had been made to speak of that other who drowned beneath him, under ice …

‘Ingmar Bergman’s dead’, I say over the table which is spread out, as it never was, both leaves folded upward, in the middle of the room, ‘I’ve been thinking of him a lot recently’ – and I have, getting hold of his DVDs. ‘Dead! Imagine that!’ I tell my Visitor I’ve been waiting most of my adult life for him to die. ‘I was always sure he’d go off at any moment’. She’s reading a book on Existentialism, and is surprised I only seem to realising now that death happens.

It was the same with Blanchot, I tell her, and he lasted until he was 95! 95! Imagine! And I thought Bergman should at least have made it until he was 90!, I tell her. Of course his parents died a lot earlier – the father in his 70s, the mother in her 80s, if I remember, I tell her. Bergman was always ill, I muse. Blanchot was very ill, of course. My Visitor is unimpressed.

I should write something about Bergman, I tell her, as I fill the washing up bowl and leave the dishes from last night to soak. I pace up and down the living room floor. But what? Ah Bergman!, I think to myself, not wanting to disturb my companion. Wasn’t he my earliest image of what it was to be an artist? He was very humble, I think to myself, and spoke savagely of his own work.

I’ve always admired that, I think to myself, as if by so doing he pushes his own films away from him and lets them become something else. As though his loathing, his apparent indifference, frees them. And he spoke savagely of himself, too. He was unsparing, I think to myself, and was even unsparing about his being unsparing. How marvellous!, I think.

He was a contorted human being, bent back over himself as though his spine was broken. So many affairs, several marriages, what a drama! His exile to Germany for alleged tax evasion. His return to Sweden, his last film and then retirement! Perhaps we should watch one of his films tonight, I say to my Visitor, who is busy working. She agrees.

It was to be The World of Apu tonight, but what instead? – Fanny and Alexander? I think she might like it, my Visitor. Has she seen it? No she hasn’t she said from the kitchen, where she’s gone to do the washing up. I was going to do it!, I said. Too late, she says. There’s no washing up liquid! There is, she says. She turned the bottle upside down. I was going to go out and buy some. No need, she says. I wanted to walk down the road and think about Bergman!, I say. Go on then, she says.

Bergman!, I think to myself as I surf the net. ‘Bergman obituary’ into Google. Entries for Ingrid Thulin, who died in 2004 at the age of 75, for Sven Nykvist, who died in 2005 at the age of 83. Max Von Sydow is still alive, I think to myself. He played Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. How old is he now? And Bibi Andersson. And Liv Ullman, of course. They’re still alive, from the old ensemble. Only Bibi says she never speaks to Bergman now, I think. Never spoke to him, I correct myself.

Imagine it! Bergman! Dead! Wasn’t he my first vision of what it was to be an artist? There was a season of his films – when? in 1987? Before I saw Tarkovsky … And always the sense for me that Bergman wasn’t as great as the others, that his writing, his direction, was too theatrical! And the sense that it was for something about him, Bergman, that drew me to his films, viewing them as a long Bildungsroman.

All those overlapping names, I think to myself. The same surname in film after film. The sound of water draining from the tank that is here behind louvre doors in the living room. My Visitor washes up and I am typing. It was The Touch I always wanted to see, I reflect. Wasn’t it in English? Bibi Andersson and … who else? Eliott Gould?

My Visitor has assembled the mineolas to feed into the juicemaker, which I don’t know how to operate. The Touch, I think to myself. When did I read the script? What was the name of the protagonist? David Kovacs, was that it? I’ve written about him before, I’m sure. So negative. Broken backed, turned in upon himself. And indulged by those around him. Thoroughly indulged, I think to myself, as could only happen in Sweden.

In Sweden! With a welfare state! And lots of space! And big houses! Room for drama that us Brits do not have. We’re not as self-dramatising, I think to myself. We can’t take ourselves as seriously as Bergman’s Swedes. And now he’s dead, Bergman, I think to myself. There on BBC news online.

The tap’s running in the kitchen. I should be more helpful around the house. Be of more use. I’m sitting at the computer to do – what? Well, it’s forgotten now, now that Bergman’s dead. I should write something about that, I think to myself, Bergman’s death. He was always so frank about himself!, I think. He pushed himself. He struggled.

He and his father went scouting for locations for Winter Light, I remember. Father – an old priest – and son, scouting together, after long periods of estrangement. His mother had an affair, I remember. She was ferociously intelligent. In his old age, retired to his island, Bergman went through her diaries, dramatising them. And Bergman himself kept diaries, I know that. Diaries that recorded his wife’s death from cancer, 10 years ago. They’ve been published in Swedish, I think to myself. When will they be translated? Will his death mean more translations? Will documentaries be shown?

Alone on his island all those years, I think. Like the narrator of Faithless, I think. I always liked him. The film’s not so great, but he didn’t direct it. Played by Erland Josephson, he of two Tarkovsky films. Is he still alive? Is he? He must be in his 70s! When he dies, and Liv Ullman, and Bibi Andersson, who’ll be left?

Bergman! Dead! The smell of peeled mineolas. What are mineolas, as opposed to satsumas, oranges and the like? I buy the fruit, this is the arrangement. I bring home big bags of fruit. My Visitor goes across the Moor to the delicatessen, and I buy the fruit, bringing it back everyday.

And now the noise of fruit being fed to the juicer. I just brushed my teeth – the wrong move! The taste will be wrong! Bergman, I think to myself. On his island. Writing his diaries. Diaries in the plural because he stopped and started them, in my imagination. Sometimes his children would come out to visit him. From Stockholm, by ferry.

Where did he die?, I wonder. On his island? In a Stockholm hospital? It’ll be big news in Sweden, I think to myself. Are they tired of him over there? How long did I have to wait to see Bergman films? Let’s see – I bought The Magician when it came out on video. £17 – an unimaginable amount, back in the early 90s. Friends bought other videos; we swapped them; we watched them round one another’s houses.

But I still haven’t seen The Touch. Or From the Life of Marionettes. And then there’s the theatre – will they show some of his productions, which I know were filmed, some of them, for TV? And Saraband, the last film. I only saw Scenes From a Marriage last Christmas, I think. And that was the short version for cinema, I thought, though there was no way of telling from Amazon. You can get the long version now, I think to myself. I should watch that and then Saraband, I think to myself. With – who? – Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson? That must have been moving, I think, making that film with Ingmar Bergman. He must have been 84 or 85 – imagine.

Bergman, dead at last, I think. Did his demons subside as he grew older? Was he calmer? Some kennels keep old dogs apart from young ones, housing them in a ‘contemplation room’. Did Bergman contemplate at the end of his life? Was he more content, less fiery? What was his last wife like? He found happiness with her, didn’t he? or did he? Happiness – and for Bergman?

My visitor cleans the juicer before she serves glasses of juice. She’s washed the dishes from last night, and done the juicing, which I wouldn’t know how to do. And what have I done? Bergman’s dead, I think to myself. What was I supposed to be doing this morning? What was I supposed to be writing? Never mind, I think to myself. Bergman’s dead.

Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine is so-called because it was to present only a sketch of a film, only a beginner’s lesson in filmmaking. Kitano thought of himself as an apprentice, but it is as though, in his film, he had seen everything and knew everything and what he saw through his camera was only a segment of everything he had seen.

Sonatine‘s style: wide, long shots of motionless, emotionless characters and then short, quick ones in confined spaces: gun battles, sudden and horrifying. Characters filmed flatly: faces seen from the front or in sharp profile or from the back. No clues as to what they are thinking. Few close ups. Neutral music. No facial expressions. His characters have seen it before: victims and perpetrators are weary. Dying, killing, it is all the same; the roundplay will continue.

Kitano plays Sonatine’s yakuza boss Murakawa. He is a man who has not died once but a thousand times. He is a man who missed his appointment with death; what remains is the beach, the sand, that place where the waiting game can be played out. He is waiting for death to keep its appointment.

The beach is a hide out, a place where Murakawa and his henchmen come after taking bloody revenge. Some, battle-scarred, are waiting for the showdown. Others, younger, are only playing at being yakuza. An interval: a fun and carefree time. The gangsters become pranksters. A young woman joins them when Murakawa kills her rapist.

Days pass. Idle hours of conversation and horse-play. Sumo games, Frisbee, target practice … this is the interval before death. Before the real business of life, which is to say, death. Death dealt out or death received. Soon, the other gang will come. Meanwhile: the beach, the flat expanse of land and sea.

The gangsters come. Gun battle. Murakawa survives; death has not come. Then he must give death to himself. Earlier he said: ‘When you are afraid all the time, you almost wish you were dead’, but it is not fear that makes him take his own life. It is sense that death is everywhere. That everything is a pause between now and death, but that death is everywhere, waiting. That death is there in the sand, the sea, the sky.

The yakuza are numberless. More will come, Murakawa will have to kill them, or they will kill him. If he survives, still more will come. Then more still, from now until the end of time. This is why he laughs as he brings the gun to his head. Has he defeated death, the multiplication of death?

A smiling Murakawa brings the gun to his head. Pulls the trigger. Now an empty shot. View of the beach. Which joins the other empty, trailing shots of the film. The silence before and after action. And now we know: the beach is what remains before and after death. It is that expanse upon life and death are played. It is what saw itself when Murakawa saw it. The beach knew itself in him. The beach opened its eyes in his eyes. The beach raised the gun to his temple.

And Takeshi Kitano? his suicidal despair in this period is well recorded. His deliberate attempt to wreck his career. His motocycle crash. His drinking. He dies in his characters. But he survives as the beach survives, witness to all. He survives in the film as it watches itself being watched. The film is what knows itself in us as we watch it.

Godard’s In Praise of Love, Eloge de l’amour is an elliptical film, fragmented, we hardly see the actors, they speak from outside the frame, they are half glimpsed in hotel interiors. What are their motivations? What do they want?

Watching, rewatching the film is to find the plot slowly emerging. Part one – black and white. Auditions for a film about the four stages of love. The young woman with whom the protagonist, a director, is fascinated, has killed herself. She had tuberculosis; she spared herself suffering. The director, Edgar, had been working with her for a film on Simone Weil.

Part two, in supersaturated colour: two years earlier – Edgar’s trip to Brittany, where he first met her. We meet her grandparents, too – French Resistance fighters. Edgar admires the way the young woman, ‘Elle’ resists Spielberg and associates, who are trying to buy the rights to make a film about the Resistance. The old couple embody the project Edgar was working on when we met him at the start of the film: the four stages of love.

I will have to watch it again (and again). It is still not alive for me in the way Tarkovsky’s films are alive; it will be (how many times have I watched Pierrot le Fou?) Still – how to write this? Memory, loss, chance, fascination … what is given to me when I watch the film? It is as if my entire life has been lived again, as if I have been caught in the wave of a great repetition. – But also as though that life were not mine, or that I have been opened to what was not mine about my life. Not my life, but a life which I live again. In this way, the future opens amidst everything else that is about to open.

Tomorrow, I know what I will do … teach, mark essays, fill out forms. But tomorrow is as it were infused with the future. This is what the film gives me and continues to give me because it does not press a story upon me. Lost in Translation is, in the end, another Hollywood film. Listen to the music – trace the story’s arc. The film has no space for you. Why complain? Because there is no air left in film – it’s suffocating. The work does not allow us to breathe, to draw breath. To be inspired.

Bland conclusion: this is an age of the worst classicism. There is no work, nothing indeterminable in the work of art. Nothing escapes – nothing permits us to escape. The culture industry, Spielberg and associates, make films which buy our memories and our lives.