What you remember of films — sometimes; often — are just fragments of those films. Certain gestures and frames and movements that you can access (half-dredged) from your memory, even while the rest of it pulsates loosely; really a kind of soup of impressions. The further you move away from the moment of watching the film, the looser and more fractured those impressions feel. What remain are really just a few flickers, motes of dust. Sometimes I scroll through the films I’ve written about for this newsletter and the experience — looking at the thumbnail images — is like a kind of magic lantern show that produces (before my eyes) another kind of film entirely. I can’t say if it’s good or not. It is just a fact. We are on the edge of a new heatwave, and that’s also a fact. I don’t know if it’ll affect how many films I do or don’t watch.
— Body is knocked unconscious, jostled to the floor (against the flank of a car) – we see it unfold from a low angle, through dangling folds of white plastic; a woman reaches out of her car’s window and plucks (gently) a purple petal from the outside (window), balancing it on her fingertip; another woman extends her hand from a window, it is framed — strangely — against a bokeh of green and yellow, and she allows thick droplets of rain to fall onto her hand, her wrist (summer rain).
— Kore-eda’s skill — and I think it is a skill, a very pronounced one — is to be able to extract very specific moments from his films. They are a bit like folds of over-laid paint on a canvas – things that protrude very softly but also very noticeably from the surface of his films, almost like hinges or even thorns that you might prick your finger on. They are like the hands of Bresson, but over-determined to a point of really juicy excess. Each moment (a jostled body; a finger and a petal; a hand onto which rain falls) isn’t selected because it is necessarily important to the narrative (there are other more dramatic plot points), but because it signifies some unspecified, undetermined contusion in the lives of the film’s protagonists.
— They are almost unimportantly important. But they (the moments themselves, but also how they are framed) become almost very excessive. By this I mean they are shot in such a way as to appear quite sentimental and exaggerated, but the lack of surrounding determinacy (these moments are rarely accompanied by changes in the plot [its tempo, a moment of resolution], or by speech, or really anything) just serves to thrust them out from the surface of the film and to really expose them to examination. We look at them and think: this is a very poignant moment — but I don’t know why. Our interpretive apparatus, our visual apparatus, is thrown into overdrive. It spins and spins.
— I mean. You can pinpoint it and you cannot pinpoint it. For Bresson, the hand speaks to a kind of lack — a void of intimacy and the space created by (and around) desire. When Soo-jin plucks the petal from the window of her car, there is a sudden polyphony of readings, and they shoot everywhere. As gestures, you could call them anti-Bressonian; even while they drink from the same formal cup.
— Everybody in the cinema was very attentive. We were really having a good time – a sort of easygoing catharsis. Basically, there was a lot of good will in the kino. You almost forget that Koreeada’s subject — abandoned children, people trafficking – is actually very bleak. He wipes that away — not evading it so much as dislocating it, drawing focus elsewhere. His skill is in drawing excessive attention to things that don’t seem very important and might not actually be very important, but are nonetheless imbued with a real difference and sincerity.
— What’s funny is that when I look for these moments — when I look for screen grabs of them — I actually come up dry. If nobody else has foregrounded these particular moments, then was I the only person who fixated on them? Peter Bradshaw (lol) — who is almost never right about films, and is really a kind of big pompous smirk — says that “Kore-eda gets the tone wrong” and that it is “sudsy”, and this really just accentuates my point really doesn’t it? That the sentimental excess is kind of literally what Kore-eda is going for, formally. Yes you can make a very bleak and harrowing film about people trafficking, but that is also the easiest and most obvious thing to do. If you do the opposite — if you pursue a line of excessive flight, an almost dissonant tonality — then that is (I think) a formally interesting decision, and it’s one that largely comes off.
— Yes it might be a little emotionally manipulative and happy-clappy at times. I concede this! I explained to G yesterday that I was the most surprised of all to really like this film. Yet, I like it. I’ve not really even spoken about the film in terms of its plot or anything, but that’s by the by. The plot is really quite ordinary, in a way. Except that certain parts of it rattle about (like a coin in a washing machine).
— At the cinema, argues Schefer, we “experiment with a kind of ‘indifference’”. Here, “fragments of human beings belong to the world of objects” — I believe he means the surface-object-body of the screen, the light that arches over our heads, the ‘snow’ of flickering light, and it comes down to these fragmented-objects (like Bresson’s hands) — subject to the warp and weft of our perception (our seeing them) that they “generate emotion”.
— These images (fragments of bodies that become objects) are “not allowed to rest”, and they come to be defined as — experienced as — “a series of ruptures”, not adding to perception so much as replacing it, where “they begin to substitute for the world this impossible testimony of an invisible world”. This is how I experience Kore-eda’s gestures – fragments of bodies that, as ruptures, have become objects that are thrust out from the surface of the film and yet which whirl away; not resolving any kind of testimony about the world (‘this hand plucking a petal reminds me of this and that, means this and that’), but speaking (gesturing toward) some “invisible world” that remains entirely indefinite, an erased thing. When we glimpse the hand reaching through the window (with raindrops falling onto it), the hand seems to dislocate from any possible body; becoming like a separate, autonomous object-organ that flies away into irresolvability, even while it activates a very heightened part of our subconscious. This is important . . . but, why?
— In this way, Kore-eda’s film is reduced — for me — to the experience of a series of indeterminate ruptures rather than any kind of cohesive subject (or object) that makes immediate sense, or needs to. Unlike Bradshaw, it doesn’t matter that the motivations of the kidnappers are unbelievable, and it doesn’t matter that the film doesn’t cleave closely to any kind of reality. Because it is a film, it has already absconded from reality — and is passing before my eyes as a series of breaks and jolts that refuse to be resolvable. Schefer is trying to understand how the experience of cinema creates a kind of private “pact” with “an unexpressed part of ourselves”. All that matters is that I’ve hyper-fixated on this petal-reaching-hand; jostled garage body; hand-window-rain. Because the film moves so quickly (it keeps accelerating, exploding), I don’t have time to bind it all together. This is what writing about film is, really: an attempt to tie down a field of loose petals at the exact moment a tornado passes over it. Nico Baumbach reminds us that Schefer’s book (The Ordinary Man of Cinema) is a poem. Bradshaw is too concerned with the film as a completed object rather than an obliterated loop.
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