The Downpour of the gaze in Tsai

The Downpour of the Gaze:
Contingency, Chance and Contiguity in Tsai’s The Hole

The generative centre of the film is a plague/epidemic which has afflicted the city. Official dictates heard over the radio on the soundtrack urge the public to evacuate. Those who remain do so in flagrant defiance both of logic and the law. It is this liminal state that Tsai locates his narrative: a spatio-temporal co-ordinate /locus from which whereon/in normativity is in abeyance.

This is of course a frequent recourse in cinema: war, plague, cataclysm...these ruptures in normative civil management offer the filmmaker an opportunity to explore a limit situation wherein the organisation of the social body breaks down and begins to spawn mutating and transformative alliances and ruptures.

In Deleuze’s concept of naturalism it is often the building which offers a link with nature - a primordial undifferentiated continuum measurable only in intensities. Tsai’s film clearly belongs to this tradition with its dual onslaught of rain and pestilence. The rain establishes a relentless and univocal backdrop, a continuum. The hole which appears between the two floors of the apartment block enables, ultimately, the downward gaze and voyeurism of the man.

Within the gaping space of the evacuated city - the man steadfastly continues to open his stall in the abandoned market - is opened up also, however, a ludic possibility. Via the widening hole the man and woman play out a strange and mute courtship (any reading of the film which insists on viewing the hole in a predominantly sexually symbolic register as orifice to be penetrated is missing much). As the downpour persists and as all continues to precipitate (notably the bags of rubbish which plummet to the ground throughout the film), the film offers its own ruptures in that continuity in the form of the song and dance sequences in the elevator and along the walkways of the building (the entire film is dedicated to the Hong Kong chanteuse Grace Chang). The economy and the traffic human and otherwise of the film takes place within these thoroughfares, only one of which is the hole.

Tsai’s film seems to acknowledge, with Jean-François Lyotard, that in the contemporary megalopolis there is “only transit, transfer, translation and difference. It is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the shepherd’s hut, it is in passing that we dwell” [The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991) 198]. The film can be located within this economy of ‘passage’.

Losing touch with the image

A rejected abstract for a conference paper.

On serait tenté de dire que la pensée est toujours locataire: toujours en un lieue, toujours dans le lieu et l’avoir-lieu, mais jamais comme propriétaire, ayant sa propriété dans le transport et dans le déménagement. (Jean-Luc Nancy)

According to the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy thought rents a place but never owns it. Its property and its properties inhere in transport, in moving from place to place. In an era characterised by fluidity of boundaries, in an era identified by pre-set obsolescence, by new velocities demanding a new ethology (in Virilio’s terms, a dromology), the era of dislocation is in full flow. The discipline of film studies is subject to a particular trauma in this context. As books such as Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film suggest, on the one hand its specificity as understood in a certain historical context is, in the eyes of some, already in the past, while for others that specificity is feast moveable through new supports and channels of viewing. In the first case what remains for writing and teaching in the area of film studies is a thanatographic enterprise, in the second a potentially problematic neutrality. What if the object of scrutiny – cinema -, the exemplar intended to stand in for the vanishing discipline (of Film Studies underpinned by ‘Theory’) were obstinately to remain lost in its out of joint “conducts of time” (Alliez), were itself intermittent (to use a Rancièrean formulation), or interstitial (to use a more Deleuzean vocabulary)? This paper attempts to sketch an answer to these questions by returning to an idea put forward by Raymond Bellour some twenty years ago but explored afresh in the light of key films in the intervening period where the ‘touch’ of video (and other media) and film takes place. It will be suggested that this ‘touch’ represents a challenge to the teaching of film studies as well as suggesting the exigency of film theory in the face of cognitivist and other declarations of abandonment. The argument will draw, inter alia, on examples from Rivette, Egoyan, Godard, Sissako and Gordon and Parreno.

The moustache of Jean Ferrat

I think I picked up my cassette version at a French motorway service station en route to Tuscany via Geneva in 2002. It is the destiny of the cassette to remain in the car, resilient in the face of all manner of maltreatment. It is a magnificently defiant analogue.

Jean Ferrat’s moustache on the cover of the Master série collection (vol. 1) seems about to take flight from his upper lip. The mouth of which the latter forms precisely 50% of the surface is arranged in an expression of earnest and inquisitive gazing skyward as if at a satellite or a bizarre conflagration at the zenith. There is s truly remarkable replication by his left eyebrow of the fold of his eyelid which both curl in mimicry of the moustache’s corresponding extremity. The head of hair frames the face, a central spiral protrudes from the centre of the forehead with superabundance. The wrinkles at the extremity of the eyes curl upward. Cheekbones prod out of the flesh. It is a complex face worthy of 'Au printemps de quoi revais-tu?'

Author author

Reading Gilbert Adair reminiscing about his two meetings with Alain Robbe-Grillet in last Saturday's Guardian reminded me of my own failed attempt to join with the then mere 70 year old nouveau romancier on a tour of the late night watering holes (a limited range of which existed in those days) of a small provincial city. The arts centre had hosted the bearded one for a talk and screening of L'homme qui ment I think, and I had foolishly attempted to ask him a question in French following his talk. Even more foolishly it was something about the represenatation of women in his films. I was attempting in French to stir a bit of controversy with AR-G. In some respects it was fortunate that my self translation rendered the question meaningless to him, while the interpreter deliberately made it even more innocuous, in a distinctly ideology-free version of whatever it was I had concocted merely in order to feel I had participated in an important event. (Subsequent years have hardly lessened the engrainment of this particular trait, it has to be said.) Undaunted I repaired upstairs to the bar and, after a nervous wait observing AR-G and his host from the other side of the room, I eventually encroached on their space, mumbling something along the lines of "admired your....", "always found your...", ..."extremely...", "great honour" etc. The host somehow failed to take advantage of my no doubt endlessly stimulating company on behalf of AR-G and so I skulked back into my corner. Bumping into the host a couple of years ago I attempted to get him to regale me with the tale of the night AR-G hit the town's hotspots. Neither was he amused by my prying, nor, it seemed, had his sense that I had no right to participate even in the most vicarious manner (which was, after all, the merest scrap I had left of the non-event) dimished.

Godard at 70

Did I really have time to pen such missives? I post this as a reminder of how much time I used to have to send letters to newspapers and magazines. Of course they didn't print it: must have been The Guardian or Time Out. Godard must be 80 in two years. Will he get a better treatment this time. of course he will. The hacks will read the biographies by McCabe and Roud.

The article (November 26) printed to mark Godard’s 70th birthday inadvertently gestures towards its own more pervasive shortcomings by way of several glaring errors. Godard was not the only director associated with the Nouvelle Vague to avoid simply “renewing traditional cinema” - as anyone familiar with the work of Varda and Rivette would attest. The surname of Godard’s second wife is Wiazemsky (not Wiamensky). As to whether she can be said to be “dull”, one can only speculate about the criteria the unnamed author of the article uses to judge humans - but presumably they are of a piece with those which permit him or her to dismiss Godard’s entire output of the 1980s and 1990s as offensive, callow and boring. Myriem Roussel, and not Juliette Binoche, played the lead role in Godard’s Hail Mary. If the author of the piece cared to check the archives he or she would find copious evidence that the condemnation which greeted the film in some quarters was far from universal. Regardless of the opinion one might have of Godard’s work it deserves better treatment than this. After all, according to the anecdote related in the article, even Godard at least did Brody the courtesy of one interview before denying him a second.

Letter to the void

Pedantry is irresistible but always runs the risk of more precise pedantry. Is this why The Guardian wouldn't publish the following missive?

While the Coens (‘Stars and Gripes’, The Guardian Weekend, Saturday October 13) would like Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Spectre (1971-1972, but released in 1974) to be remade in order, they quip, to be shortened (from its actual 255 minutes), they seem to be unaware that the director got there first, his 1972 film being itself already a ‘remake’ (or, more precisely, re-edited version) of his Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) which, in its rare public screenings, comes in at 12 hours and 40 minutes. At its first public screening in Le Havre in 1971 and at the NFT’s retrospective in 2006 the longer work was presented over two days (the work was at first intended by Rivette for television broadcast). According to Rivette specialist Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rivette cut 10 minutes from the film after a 1989 Rotterdam screening, which would mean he has ‘remade’ the 1971 original not once but twice.

Priest with i-pod

An abeyant fiction

Mnsr Gribaldi adjusted the position of his ecclesiastical in-ear headphones and raised the volume of the Gotan Project’s second album, Lunatico, prior to fastening the clasp of his leather accordion briefcase , fixing his frock coat, securing his hat, and exiting the train at Kings Cross City Thameslink. No one know why it was still called that since the train company running the service between Luton and Sutton was no longer Thameslink but First Capital Connect. It also connected Gatwick and Luton airports on occasion, and it was from the former that he had journeyed, inserting his all-in-one ticket into the barrier at Gatwick with some trepidation, since the junior clerk at the Vatican who took charge of travel arrangements had been preoccupied of late with various papal excursions. Indeed the furore which greeted the pontif’s then recent affront to the Muslim tradition during his visit to [deleted detail] had the curious but highly localised effect of launching the travel office into the limelight not seen since the globetrotting days of PJPII. As the novice elongated his person to an upright position the gaze of several passengers both alighting and remaining, along with that of several joining the train or awaiting the next, were trained on him. Some fixed on his headwear, others on his complexion framed by the latter, others on the impressive frock coats with their many pleats. A few noted his elaborate black fabric belt, others still his general bearing, anachronous and geographically out of context appearance. Not a few were caused to pause for a second of false recognition, only to realise that what they recognised was their television screen staring back at them in the shape of an advertisement for Stella Artois. But many knew immediately what had caught their eye: all of the above compressed and set off by the dense symbolism and iconic status of the I-Pod.

Aside from the Gotan Project’s second album, a much misunderstood work in the music press due to the association of their first album with so-called chill out periods post clubbing. The experienced musicians involved had not made any such associations when they trawled Argentinian tango for beats and rhythms, the iPod’s repository featured sundry Latin American artists including Joyce, an Italian jazz quartet whom he could never decide were talented or not. Their cover version of [deleted detail] was affecting in its way, though less curiously so than the version of a track from the soundtrack of Emmanuelle which featured on the Gotan Project’s debut recording.

He disembarked and strode out into King’s Cross rain. The traffic at the junction of and the Pentonville Road was locked in the vice-grip of a cantilever bus. He dodged it by inserting himself perilously between its rear and the throbbing frontage of the one hard on its wheels. The driver revved and allowed the vehicle to lurch forward fractionally, a frequent amusement for some sadistic bus-drivers when faced with slaloming pedestrians frustrated by the rash of blocked pedestrian crossings brought on by the introduction of the so-called bendy bus.

Onward he plod, noting that since his last visit the lights at [deleted detail] had been changed so that now the island was dangerously full with pedestrians trapped by the seemingly excessive green on traffic turning left into [deleted detail]. He steered a course between the Amnesty International clipboard holding individual and the purveyor of London Lite and their direct competitor in the world of free newspapers. and headed into the building site that was the Euston Road. He passed the entrance to what would soon be the underground access under St Pancras. Adhesive backing was being peeled off some of the London Underground signage as he passed by. Further on the redevelopment of the Great Northern Hotel was proceeding with the entire facade now held in the skeletal embrace of an estimated [deleted detail] metres of scaffolding. He enjoyed crossing [deleted detail] where no traffic save for the odd construction vehicle now interfered with crossing pedestrians and went on past the ever-present Big Issue seller past the now closed Chapters coffee shop under the grim bunker entrance and into the courtyard of the British Library.