The Pagan Agenda

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As Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights opens and closes, the same bluesy chorus purrs: “the story has been told before”. Clearly there is a higher significance to the lyric, in the way that it alludes to the recurrence of not merely prevailing themes of alienation and longing in Kar-Wai’s romantic canon, but of particular scenes and scenarios, snippets of dialogue, even musical cues, finely ground and revisited in a way that weighs heavily upon those familiar with the director’s oeuvre. We know it has all been done before and yet we keep coming back and allowing ourselves to play out the self-configured archetypes of this – if not auteur – then at least incestuous cinema. I appreciate My Blueberry Nights on this meta-level as one section of a larger tableau where pronounced story elements fix upon certain key events (perhaps of a biographical nature) that characters return to in earnest pantomime.

To speak of this film is to speak of its interrelations to its predecessors. Elizabeth (Norah Jones) and Jeremy (Jude Law) are the metaphoric reincarnation of any number of lovers in Kar-Wai’s universe, their actions, and the actions of the characters that are met along the way all evoke a déjà-vu that is entirely intentional. When a Norah Jones track is played twice in quick repetition we are reminded of California Dreamin’ in Chungking Express, When Elizabeth asks Jeremy to hold onto the key of a past lover we are reminded of cop 633 asking the same of Faye, when Arnie (yet another cop) watches his adulterous wife Sue-Lynn enter the bar it is a virtual superimposition of the same scene in Chungking, as cop 633 and the stewardess awkwardly say their goodbyes in the convenience store, the new beau waiting outside. Kar-Wai’s last film, 2046, was even more obviously a mash-up of material laid out in Chungking Express, In The Mood for Love, The Days of Being Wild, Happy Together, and with this history in mind and with My Blueberry Nights own persistent recurrences, such an inclusion ceases to be anything like an Easter egg for the cinephiles, as far as I am concerned, it IS the movie.

Any ability for this film to operate smoothly without foreknowledge of this atmosphere of recurrence, which is to say any ability for this film to be the break-out American debut of the director’s work, is stymied by this hermetic preoccupation. As a garden variety love story of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, the film pays only lip-service, and despite the outward façade of this kind of film with familiar faces like Jude Law and Natalie Portman, something mercurial waits in the wings, the lucid filmmaking that is Kar-Wai’s signature with slo-mo dissolves and smudgy rain-soaked visuals in cahoots with deceptively random musical cues and poetic bursts of narration, has nothing to do with conventional storytelling. (Continued)

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‘I remember Hiroshima’
‘You remember nothing’

The seemingly unprovoked pang of despair, a curious phenomenon of heightened sensitivity not unlike what the Japanese refer to as ‘mono no aware’. I think of it as a sensation of rebooting in response to some unknown complication in the machinery of life. For me the pang consists of both a deep-felt sadness and paradoxically a residual pleasure. I feel I am not alone in deriving a certain pleasure from the sadness, especially in a society like ours where the presence of a heightened emotional state alone is something to celebrate, a twitch of life to hold onto before apathy envelops us once again. When confronted with an existential pang I am compelled to excite it further by watching melancholic films. Again I do not think I am alone in this ritual, though it may be an exclusive club of masochists. If you are one of these masochists may I recommend the following: the next time the pang hits isolate yourself within a darkened room, preferably curled up in a blanket, and wallow in the melancholic opus that is Alain Resnais’ ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’

Now not any ‘weepy’ film will do in these cases; I want to make it clear that I choose ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ deliberately for what it does that so many films of the same ilk fall short of. This is not an exploitive melodrama which seeks only to trigger emotions without first earning the sentiment through the narrative. While much of the film will have an effect over you on a lower immediacy level (to borrow from Kierkegaard) by the sheer poignancy of the images and poetry it supplies, the art-experience potential of the film depends principally on the cerebral journey one takes to unlock the very meanings of love, loss, guilt, and madness. The substance keeps pace with the style, and Resnais has done a miraculous job of keeping the film wavering on the cusp of pretense in order to take advantage of the psychological effects which come from transgressions of narrative norms without going so far as to disrupt the trance the film is able to sustain. That said, ‘Hiroshima’ is punctuated with breathless visuals that are so fantastically beautiful and emotionally charged that they seem to push the envelope of what cinema is capable of. I am here thinking specifically of the climax scene in the Casablanca bar which with mere visuals alone is able to evoke the entire culmination of the narrative without need of dialogue. (Continued)

Herzog, for me, serves as a signpost on the road to realization, his films and the mythology he works within, a kind of password to that half-remembered clarity lately lacking in my aesthetic life. I can hypnotize myself if only for a short while whenever I take on one of his captured dreams and whether it be a feeling of joy from the recognition of what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’, or whether it be merely the relief from solitude that such shared remembrances bring: it is to my life a basic necessity. The signposts appear sparsely, in art and out. No matter how long I may stand before an uninspired masterpiece this same spark will not show, it has no patience for theory nor authority. Even if this realization is nothing but a charade of the subconscious, or a tick of the superego, I still obey. Herzog by any other name would still be Herzog.

Once, Herzog was merely endearing. He was an adventurer with stimulating tales to tell, and though he could steady his camera and squeeze a shot out, the finished product was often nothing more than a memento. His longtime editor had a similar disdain for the product and would lash out at him about the quality of material she had to work with. It is very easy to understand how to many, Herzog’s films are tedious endeavors elusive of any particular value. Likewise it is just as easy to give him a pass because someone like Roger Ebert has nothing but praise to bestow upon him. I find it challenging to pierce the grammar of filmmaking employed in something like Fritzcarraldo or Aguirre, Wrath of God; it almost wants you to underestimate it, and refuses to hold your hand.

Although film literate, Herzog sets his scenes with only the most tacit concern for stylization, letting the story direct itself in the ebb and flow that he sees fit. Filmmaking to him is ‘athletics over aesthetics’, and it is crucial for the life force of the film that one feels embedded in the story due in part to the tacit understanding that Herzog himself is embedded, that things are really happening and the camera is protruding into the drama. The screen is not a frame, or not merely a frame, it is a conduit to another world, a world of inner landscapes that depict our dreams, our ‘ecstatic truths’ that go so often unspoken and unaccounted for. Verisimilitude is not the aim, historical accuracy is not aim, and neither is stylization: the aim is to make dreams worthy of dreamers. That’s it. If a character’s costume inexplicably changes between shots, so be it. If the wake of the camera’s boat circling a raft appears due to the effort to capture a shot, so be it. If these sorts of things affect your experience, then Herzog’s films are not for you. His films come from a neurotically earnest place, a hyper-realm that has no time for the usual hang-ups of filmgoers. That Herzog claims to have no ironical sense of humour speaks volumes for the approach he has and his penchant for serious drama (though not entirely without a sense of humour as is apparent from some of the great wry observations made in his documentary voice-overs).

In His Minnesota Declaration, Herzog made the distinction between fact and truth in film, issuing the notion of ecstatic truth. As he states, cinema has the power to depict not merely the accountant’s truth, the truth of real world documentation, but of our dreams of the world, and that the proper manipulation of facts can agitate an ecstatic truth realization that would have not existed otherwise. He says that it is up to the poets to provide us with adequate images, and this is so urgent nowadays as we are overwhelmed by the saturation of the mundane, and with so many avenues for communication set before us we remain victims of greater solitude. Our understanding remains dumbfounded and art is needed to reacquaint ourselves with our dreams. It is a beautiful bit of dreaming in its own right, and for this and for the imagery of his films, I write this.

Up until this point I have seen the following of his works: Fritzcarraldo, Aguire: Wrath of God, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. I have recently finished the entirely engrossing ‘Herzog on Herzog’, and have bought the Herzog/Kinski boxset. My idea of Herzog is admittedly vague; a more thorough examination of his oeuvre will hopefully remedy this.