Union
Chapel, Islington, London, Fri 30th May
The
annual
Kinoteka Polish Film festival closed this year with a UK
premiere from the Quay Brothers. 'Kwartet Smyczkovy'
featured a live accompaniment by the Arditti Quartet, and was backed
by their 1999 classic 'In Absentia'.
As the record shows, I am a huge fan of their
surrealist-influenced film-making, and so had seen 'In
Absentia' several times before. It hardly matters. Like the
classic Surrealist films by Bunel and Dulac, you feel like you could
watch it time and time again with it still coming up fresh.
However,
this time I discovered something new - an association I'd always made
turns out to have been a direct influence. The film focuses on a
woman in an asylum, obsessively yet hopelessly trying to write and
rewrite a letter. And yes, that furiously overwritten letter
was inspired by the 'Beyond Reason'
exhibition of art made by the commited insane. (Staged by the Hayward
back in 1996, and still live in my mind.)
Like
much in that exhibition, the film presents art not as self-expression
in that sense of encouraging parents pushing at children's elbows,
but as release - the only way to expurge your
inner demons. As William Burroughs once said, “I had to write my
way out.” And yet art is hard, and sometimes deceptive –
sometimes refusing to deliver what it seems to promise. So pencil
nibs break, works become smudged and smeared, lines written and
over-written in the hope that some sense might emerge soon. (The
fetish creature is wooden, and should I think be associated with the
pencil in some animist fashion.) Her lead-stained fingers pass over
the nape of her neck as though she herself is the paper, blotting her
own copy book.
The
two images that always stay with me are the pencil nibs placed on the
windowsill, planted like they might somehow bloom, and the posting of
the letters into a heavy dresser beneath a broken clock. A post box
with no collections.
For
the film to work on you the best you need to access those childhood
memories, not of the unbounded creativity adults like to remember but
of the action of writing being so frustrating. The pencil sitting
awkwardly in your hand, the marks appearing on the paper so defiant
of your intention – it all being such a compulsion and yet such a
seeming impossibility.
But
what makes it so involving is the way the themes are conveyed less by
the narrative or even the imagery, and more by the overall
mood. It becomes hard to work out how
its doing what its doing on you. First we have Stockhausen's
involving score. ('Two Couples', actually composed
independently of the film.) Though there's a few concessions to the
'rules' of film narrative, such as opening with an establishing shot,
it's essentially plot-less, conveying the woman in the room endlessly
repeating those same movements. In that way it's more musical in it's
structure, arranged around repeating motifs. (The brothers have said
“We much prefer to obey musical laws, because they're not
logical.”)
But
there's also the visual style. Images are indistinct, as if seen
through gloom. Light and shadow constantly play across the frame, as
though scenes are lit only by passing car headlights. At points the
light flares up, whiting the images out. The held image, the linking
vowel of film grammar, seems unable to adhere itself to the screen.
It's like the film has itself fallen to the virus it set out to
present. We see both worlds simultaneously, the woman writing in the
asylum, and the inside of her haunted mind. There's no framing, no
Doctors calmly discussing her condition, no sense of the rest of the
asylum as a smoothly running institution. There's just the madness.
In
classic Quay brothers style the opening shot provides no sense of
scale, and throughout tiny objects are framed as if gigantic, a
pencil sharpener the size of a tunnel. This adds to the skewing of
our perpections and heightens the sense of entrapment. This room is
the woman's universe, and all meaning has to be found within it.
You
know when something has affected you when, after you've seen it, the
incidental details of the world around you seem permeated by it. A
whiteboard message on the Tube had been inexpertly part-wiped,
fragments of letters still clinging to it. I found myself looking at
it like it was a statement about the failure of communication.
Though, come to think of it, that's the way I often feel about the
Tube. And anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself...
What
of the main film, the premiere, the thing we'd all come to see?
'Kwaret Smyczkovy' has a similar visual style to
'In Absentia', though also incoporating what looks
like vintage found footage. Arguably, it also has similar themes.
Part-based on a silent one-act play ('The Hour We Knew
Nothing of Each Other' by Peter Handke... no, I'd never
heard of it either) it focuses on the distance between a man and a
woman. At one point we see them in separate compartments of a tram.
Are they unable to make contact, or simply oblivious of one another?
Similarly, the woman of 'In Absentia' writes
undeliverable letters to her husband, while she and the asylum guard
who passes her pencils are never shown in the same frame. (This
aspect of the film may be underplayed by my focus on the desire for release. But
it's not a film you're ever going to pin to one reading.) Yet, while
'In Absentia' is very much about presenting an
inner world, this seems to play between exterior and interior.
When
a film has a live soundtrack, you cannot help but foreground it in
your mind. Which was perhaps unfortunate here as, unlike the
captivating Stockhausen piece, I found it hard to get to grips with
Witold Lutoslowski's string quartet. While a reliable source of gossip informs his intentions are to “build
harmonies from small groups of musical intervals”, my ears were
able to make out only the intervals from those skittering snatches of
sound. It sounded the way broken crockery looks. I was still waiting
for it to resolve itself when it abruptly ended.
There
is of course something of an irony in the work I went to see being
the one I have least to say about. 'Kwartet Smyczkovy'
is a film I need to see again, but next time I intend to push the
soundtrack further back in my mind.
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