I could say more about Brook, formally, but I’m tired and it’s very hot. We’ll keep this short. But, I’ll be writing some notes from New Horizons Film Festival next week, from Wroclaw. Just very tatty/rushed impressions. Keep an eye out for those pieces.
— Several years ago, back in 2010, English filmmaker Peter Brook made an attempt at tracking down and restoring his ‘semi documentary’ of 1968 – Tell me Lies. Between his own (very damaged) 35mm copy and a stack of A and B reels recovered from the archives, he succeeded — with the help of Technicolor — in getting the film fully restored. This is a very technical and roundabout way of prefacing this writeup by saying that the restored film looks insanely good. With none of the blur and bloom – the sputzy cloud – that can fog up even the most beautiful of 60s films, Tell me Lies feels very immediate and fresh as a purely ‘seen’/observed experience.
— It is also a very silly and grandstanding film. If the Vietnam War is its subject (or: more properly, Britain’s political and military involvement in the American war), then so is the idea of individual action, protest, responsibility, and personal impotence. The story is a collage. It is a collage which consists of ten or so musical pieces and a cluster of loosely affiliated ‘scenes’. It was adapted from a stageplay, though rarely feels like a bit of filmed theatre. Brook is a very competent and a very innovative filmmaker, and the compositional style borrows a lot – it seems; or anticipates – Jean-Luc Godard and the New Wave. Is it an English New Wave film? Yes, perhaps; a sort of distant cousin. It slips between black and white and vibrant technicolor. News reel is inserted (the self-immolation of a Vietnamese monk). Rapid jump cuts slit about between variously rehersed statements; political and ideological expressions, and scenes in which two filmmakers (is one of them Brook?) debate the value of a political cinema (in one case, doing so semi-naked — leg hoisted on a gurney, watching himself as we watch him in his pants).
— Mark Jones plays the protagonist, a sort of quizzical interlocutor who passes between the scenes – singing; arguing – with a kind of petulant naivete. At a cocktail party in a Mayfair apartment, he challenges a group of politicians about their dogged militarism. Backing away from the room as it descends into a braying party (drinks are spilled; clothes are torn off), he runs into Stokely Carmichael. Later, I am sure I glimpsed Allen Ginsberg. Mark’s questions are naive. He becomes attracted to the monk’s sacrifice, going so far as interrogating a monk in his own country as to how he would feel if Mark himself set himself on fire. Later, he breaks into the American embassy and does precisely this – accidentally, while attempting to destroy diplomatic cables.
— Brook had been inspired by Artaud, the theatre of cruelty. He also drew on the thinking of Grotowski and Meyerhold. There are digressions on homosexuality (particularly among rural American conscripts in Vietnam), masturbation, suicide. It is ‘morally important’ and morally impotent at the same time. In the twilight years of England’s decaying empire, a well-intentioned but otherwise hopeless man seeks desperately to understand what can be done.
— Frequently, Brook returns to an image of a mother and her mutilated child – one of many such images that made their way from the battlefields of Vietnam and into the pages of Time magazine and Life and so on. Mark invites his friend to wonder how long he can look at the photograph before looking away. He glances for fifteen seconds. Mark invites him to consider how long he could look if the mother and child walked through the door. The camera cuts to the door, and waits. The presence of their absence (its potentiality) is fraught with a sort of dumb angst. The scene slowly erodes into brilliant white. The film ends here.
— Faces – head and shoulders – are routinely framed against walls. They speak and sing to us. Here Brook feels very Godardian. I thought about Godard’s La Chinoise of 1967, a film which also concerns the lives of a series of disaffected citizens, consisting of ideological statements, dialogues, and dramatisations. They feel both formally and spiritually very aligned. La Chinoise also concerns – to an extent – American foreign policy in Vietnam. Here is a rare continental moment in English cinema. A friend also likened the effect to Kluge’s collagist cinema of the 1960s, particularly his 1968 work Artists under the Big Top: perplexed. In each case, the filmmakers are leveraging cinema (its capacity to erupt, disrupt, to be ‘assembled’) to explore forms of perplexity and alienation. Where Kluge is more ‘newsy’, and Godard more intellectually curious, Brook’s film feels the most defeated and ironic. For each moment of cruelty (the death of the monk; the wounded child; the political suicide of Norman Morison, which Brook very chillingly and ambiguously dramatizes) there are moments of grinning theatricality. It vibrates between its poles.
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