The Long Gray Line, Golden Eighties, Bridges-Go-Round, Made in Hong Kong...
30th June - 5th July
Can’t promise I’ll always write this much…
The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955)
In Wagon Master, the most uplifting of the Ford’s I’ve seen, the movement of bodies, wagons, and peoples allows Ford to capture the formation and development of a society; two hundred years of American history distilled down to the differences and similarities of a group of people on the move. In The Long Gray Line Ford is equally transfixed by the movement of bodies; we too are transfixed by the endless grey march across the green field. hypnotised by the ordered, repetitive flashes from white to shade as hundreds of legs follow each other in motion. The grey uniforms are empty, uncoded. In these soldiers we see thousands of armies; many histories and one history. Where the wagon chain progresses outward, broadening its horizons, growing as it redefines the landscape around it, the marchers do not change. they churn endlessly forward and backward through the same green fields, past the same grey building.
Marty Maher’s wife Mary O’Donnell (Maureen O’Hara) too, is unable to draw herself away from the marchers. Her husband’s fifty year career, as for all intents and purposes a PE teacher, at West Point enables Ford to examine, what may be regarded in the pictures, as a mundane life that exists in parallel to a wider view of history. Almost in stasis, the Mahers watch an endless progression of young men enter and leave through the same stone buildings. From this fish bowl the cycles are viewable. We watch a young father leave for war and die. Fifteen minutes later we will watch his son leave for a different war. All the while the grey march continues.
I will briefly note here that The Long Gray Line is one of the most beautifully framed and shot films I have ever seen. Each scene presenting a masterclass in light, space and colour only more impressive in the deftly composed interior shots.
Approaching slapstick comedy in its first hour, as these historic repetitions become apparent they are increasingly subverted by moments of human contact, sharp and violent in their delicate intimacy — A hand on a shoulder, a tear on a cheek, one hand grasping another, a blanket laid with care across another’s legs. Joy, friendship and grief, not contrived but universal. To see Marty ease Mary into a chair with an unspoken knowledge of the end being near, is not to weep at the awfulness of a presented situation but at your own future.
At several points Marty resolves to break free but, just as Mary is ceaselessly drawn to the marching of white trousers on green grass, the cycle must repeat and he reenlists. In this environment he is impotent, unable to leave, unable to enact change. A visiting governor questions the unchanging nature of the academy. Marty retorts that West Point produces leaders of men: officers, generals, presidents. The film’s ultimate irony is that these men are not diversions to the current but silt on the bank. They are men who enable more men to go to war and probably die but maybe live and all is impotent, much is useless; there’s far more worth to being remembered in an embrace than a statue.
I also rewatched Ford’s The Searchers, inadvertently but somewhat appropriately, on the 4th of July; its small moments more beautiful and its truths even uglier than I remembered. The harrowing opposite of Wagon Master — cultural nationhood formed and repaired through hatred, sexual violence and genocide. A man looks into a doorway and turns back toward the desert.
Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986)
A giddy musical lit in cold electronic lights and seen through sheet glass, plastic and shrinking fabrics. A clothes shop and hairdressers divided by the drinks bar outside the shopping centre cinema. The arcade forming the stage for two love triangles. One between Robert (Nicolas Tronc), heir to the clothes shop, Lili (Fanny Cottençon) who manages the hairdressers owned by her older, married lover and Mado (Lio) who watches heartsick across the arcade. The other between Robert’s parents, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) and Monsieur Schwartz (Charles Denner), and Eli (John Berry) a newly arrived American visitor.
Both of these triangles, as well as the long distance relationship of the drink bar employee, are weighed down with layers of financial and social obligations. One example, Monsieur Schwartz wants to expand the shop by purchasing the lease for the hairdressers shop. Robert’s relationship with Lili may present the catalyst for this, however she seems an inappropriate match for a man who wants two safe pairs of hands for the future of the business. The love between Jeanne and Eli is presented — at least compared to the youthful flings — as a deeper love. The pain that can be read on Seyrig’s face can make it seem that she wandered in from a different Akerman film. Jeanne is revealed to be a camps survivor, nursed back to health by Eli in the aftermath of the war. Even in this reunion of ‘true’ love, there remains a something uneasily voyeuristic and sickly in the way in which Eli remembers her emaciated body. The danger of male predation omnipresent. Now they have found each-other again, the pain of the past together with her familial and economic obligations, render the relationship impossible for Jeanne:
“The love you’re talking about is for the young. My heart was never young.”
The choreography is not tight. The movements retain an approachable looseness, exuberant and heartfelt. The singing the same, bringing a grounded naturalism and rehearsal feel to the unreal environment. These bursts of song are frequent moments of pure exhilaration only out done by one discovered moment of transcendence — chewing gum ecstatically through her grin — Akerman’s own face reflected in the shop display glass.
Released one year after Edward Yang’s masterful Taipei Story, another examination of love and family under capitalism, the two films make an interesting comparison. Where Yang’s film captures the ennui of Taipei city life under corporate domination, in an unbearable realism that eventually breaks in a single devastating moment; the competing global influences of Japan and the USA pervading the character’s personal lives and environments. Akerman presents a pastel and neon fabrication, whose characters are alternately obsessed and disillusioned with the portrayals of love in the technicolour musicals which forebear it; it is not insignificant that when Jeanne and Eli meet for a rendezvous they do so in the shopping centre cinema. That is not to say it is purely a cultural influence — Monsieur Schwartz’s bemoans that regardless of what happens to the shopping centre it’s “the Americans making all the money”.
When we do finally break free of the soundstage it is a violent shift of the ground beneath us. An inversion of Yang’s breakage. The fabricated interior abruptly cuts an to actual shopping arcade, which in turn gives way to a busy Brussels street. However, the film’s most shocking moment precedes this transition, as Jeanne comforts the jilted Mado. At first reassuring her, and herself, of the possibility of love and happiness, in its final lines the speech turns. An awful reminder of the traumas persisting in this vacuum.
Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke, 1958)
We move from water to concrete and steel manipulated by hands into an endless network of industry, fabricated of the urbanity below it. Moving together and apart. An endless suspended highway. Broken by shocking shifts of colours and bursts of light. Two scores; one that playfully casts the images as an alien landscape, spanning above us, at once familiar and unfamiliar. The other, an uneasy vision of urban life about to fall in on itself.
(a somewhat lacking version on youtube)
Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, 1997)
“The government promo says “there are no retakes in life”. It’s all bullshit. That’s why I hate adults.”
A striking portrait of generational conflict in Hong Kong, independently produced and released in the around the 1997 handover. Moon (Sam Lee), is a teenage small time triad loan collector and chronic wet dream sufferer. As he makes his rounds he is joined by the intellectually disabled Sylvester (Wenders Li - Ah-Lung), who Moon protects from younger kids who savagely bully him. The two encounter Ping (Neiky Yim Hui-Chi), a terminally ill teenager, while hustling her mother, and who quickly becomes a fixation for both boys; her own queer sexuality coded throughout. Her mother owes money to various loan sharks. Money which Moon increasingly resolves to pay off himself. The trio are haunted by the death of Susan; a young girl whose bloody suicide notes are found by Sylvester and who begins to appear in the dreams of Moon and Ping.
These adolescent lives are played out in claustrophobic apartments, blocks and markets. It feels as if we only see the sky in the dreams that replay Susan’s death and a brief excursion the trio make to the cemetery; shouting in to the void as the fog encroaches on the hill. All three are defined by the abandonment of one or both parents and contrition with the remaining adults in their lives. A moment of humour that turns to startling violence, a teenager carrying a huge knife wanders into a public toilets passing Moon, also carrying his own sizeable knife. The younger boy approaches an older man and without hesitation bring the knife crashing through his right arm.
The film’s freeness of style is often invigorating but at times overly aesthetic. There’s something charitably endearing in the thought that it’s not just Moon enthralled with the Leon poster above his bed. Perhaps it’s because the rage and anger here feels authentic, with attention paid, but not laboured on, the political and cultural forces shaping these dismal lives. An Elephant Sitting Still, a more accomplished film, similarly captured its own miserable drudgery that felt inherently youthful.
By the end of the film every familial relation, real or adopted, has been separated either by death or abandonment. in the final moments we see a hazy vision of a one armed man cowering against dripping dark walls. To his right the silhouette of an armed child marches down the corridor toward him.
Other films I watched this week
Ausweg (Harun Farocki, 2005) - Advancements in commercial production and military tech always tied. Does the greyscale ‘Drone Eye’ war footage hide reality or prepare us for a reality where humans are removed from the decision making. Will probably write something once I’ve seen more of Farocki’s late work on ‘objective images’.
24 Frames per Second (Shirley Clarke, 1977) - Radiates the joy of looking, cutting, speaking, making. Prefigures the, often fantastic, work of Jodie Mack. (sample)
Wind Water (Raul Ruiz, 1995) - Short work presenting a Velaquez painting as the setting and subject for dialogue between the East, Middle East and West.
Wedding Loop (Moyra Davey, 2017) - felt like there were some holes where the connections (or maybe ideas?) should have been. idk.
The 3 R’s (David Lynch, 2011) - There are gems in Lynch’s short film work… but also a lot of shovel-ware…
uhh if you would like to watch any of these films drop me a line and i’ll see what i can do…
there’s a bench on the east wall of brockwell park’s walled garden which sits facing a cluster of flowers pollinated by honey bees. the flowers form in tall cones probing the air. rising from a muddy pink to a deep purple as they do. behind them is an ancient, stout tree. it slants at an almost right angled gradient away from the bench. the tree has begun to fruit. its branches are full of young robins, finches and magpies grappling, in and out of view, toward the berries. it is a good bench and probably the best thing i watched this week.
thank you so much for reading, it really means a lot right now. i hope you have a good week.
james
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