Blood of a poet (1930) — Jean Cocteau
https://archive.org/details/JeanCocteauLeSangDunPote1930
This first film by the extraordinary artist, poet, filmmaker — Jean Cocteau is a 50 minutes long sequence of surreal imagery powerfully laced together with haunting sounds. The film has no straight narrative or story structure, but things happening according to an apparent symbolic order.
It starts with the following text:
“Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered.”
This sets the context of the film that the following images are something to be deciphered individually by the viewer and leaves the scope for multiple interpretation. It’s divided into four parts –
Episode 1: The wounded hand or the poet’s scars
Image: It starts with a tower collapsing, artist drawing on a canvas cut to a tattoo on his scarred back, music, knocking on the door, lips start moving, rubs off the mouth, somebody comes in and jumps back off, removes the wig, washes hands, line drawing of face revolving, surprised — appear on the hand. Voice seems to be coming from the lips, goes to the window and then kisses it open eyes painted on closed eyes. Mask revolves — name of the filmmaker — being trapped in one’s own film — statue hand on mouth, veins on the hand, statue starts smiling, top shot from the ceiling, dialogue
Sound: Non diegetic — narrator’s voice, acousmatic sound of canons going in the background, music accompanying the movement of characters, sound of cock to show morning
Episode 2: Do walls have ears?
The statue starts talking to the artist about escaping the room through the mirror, he jumps off to the other side and swims in the darkness, enters hotel of lunacies, looks through a keyhole and sees a mexican man dying in slow motion and reverse shot of standing up straight, another hole — china’s mysteries, shadows of hands smoking, next door says flying lessons and there’s a woman scolding and beating her trapped child, next door there appears a sofa with a illusionistic wheel and shoes of a woman and man outside, looks like desperate meeting of hermaphrodites, the sign showing “mortal danger”, somebody hands a revolver and he shoots himself — “eternal glory”, comes back out of the mirror and destroys the statue, scene cuts to outside where some boys are having a snowball fight and torturing one kid.
Sound: clock ticking, heart beating, sighs
Episode four: Desecration of the host
The boy dies with blood oozing out of his mouth, the artist and his muse play cards on a table just beside him, the woman says ‘unless you hold the ace of hearts, you’re doomed” — Bourgeois people in the balcony above. Black man appears with wings and covers the dead boy, the screen fades and he shoots himself again, blood oozes out and people in the audience clap. In the end, the woman becomes a statue again and parades around with the globe and the harp. “The mortal weariness of immortality”
The film is essentially an exploration into the creative process of an artist full of dreams and adventures; a self-conscious exploration of the subconscious, even the unconscious. Cocteau uses symbols to narrative the myth of a poet’s trouble with life and death, his longing to create something that lasts beyond his life and desire for love, lust and immortality. The shots are a mix of what Lyotard describes as “Tableau vivant” and Epstein’s idea of close ups to get the best facial expressions of the dramatic actor in specific setting.
Unwilling to endure the solitude required for creativity, he attempts to pass his muse into a statue, which exacts its revenge by condemning him to a series of disconcerting adventures into his memories and dreams. The theme of suicide goes along with the theme of narcissism and applause of the audience as essential in the making of a great art work. The problem here though is the protagonist is male and the film ignores any ideas of a female poet, although there’s a shot pointing towards the androgynous nature of the artist’s perception of himself.
His use of mirrors, trick perspectives, reversed footage and animation to approximate the dream state is inspired and it’s tempting to disregard his anti-allegorical protestations and seek intellectual significance in the stream of narcissistic images that elongates the time it takes for a building to collapse to explore the agony and the ecstasy of creation.
The Perfect Human (1967) — Jørgen Leth
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9kls6bMkRo)
“Today too I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days”
The recurring dialogue in this slick, stylish, black & white film is a comment on the nature of experience and understanding of ourselves through it, the relation of cause and effect and the creation of a self, distinct from others. It explores our obsessions with our self and the image we create for ourselves in order to reach some kind of true perfection according to social and personal systems of ideals. Anything not shown in the film like disability, other races, ugliness, and other attributes of human condition that do not abide by the this idea of perfection is left out. Human is reduced to his performance of everyday rituals and actions that
The camera looks at the actors in a detached manner, ‘functioning’ in a white boundless room, as though they were subjects in a zoo. This othering gaze on us which probes us to reflect on our banalities provides a sort of comical relief to our existence. Repetitive narration and slightly mismatched word/picture relations creates an atmosphere of awkward feelings. The dialogue, although brief, is heavily weighted and contributes to the characteristics of how we view man and woman, their relationship, the imperfections that contribute to a man’s perfection, things man takes for granted, and what man truly longs for.
La Faim (The hunger) (1974) — Peter Foldes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwU3UARE6yc
This animation produced by National Film board of Canada is a morality tale about greed and gluttony in the (then) modern society. It is a satire on self-indulgence in a hungry world where man has no control over his desire for sex, food, and other products where everything is commodified including his own fetishes. This is the first computer generated animation film with rapidly dissolving, reshaping images creating a stark contrast between abundance and want. The film follows a linear narrative but the scenes shift from one to another in a surreal manner. The sounds are non-diegetic with music that increases and decreases according to the action.
The exception and rule/ karen mirza-butler
(https://vimeo.com/15908774)
Mirza/Butler’s The Exception and the Rule, filmed in Pakistan and India, is a complex bricolage of formal experiments, overlapping narratives, fictional collaborators and performative quotations that explore Bertolt Brecht’s concept of Lehrstcke so as to ask the simple but urgent question, ‘what is it to make a political film?’
The film starts with two English people sitting on the streets, cut to news and violence scenes from Pakistani TV. The narrator mention his intent to go and film in India which was denied and therefore making this film, the shot cuts to a fast motion footage shot somewhere in Karachi with interspersed images of public spaces, There white text on black background “This film is comfortable with otherness as long as it’s not really other.” There’s a voice of a woman introducing the other filmmaker who says choosing the position of the camera means to take sides and they will shoot both on film and video. There is an interview done with a common man in the market who recites about what politics and art means from the paper. Cut to political messages on the wall and newspapers double exposure, cut to a person describing how the people are reacting to the shoot happening at a location and whatever is happening in the frame. The screen turns to black while sound still goes on (in the wings effect) bollywood, local music, background sounds that take you back to a place, woman standing in the middle of the road and clapping with her slippers. The narrator then explains that they blame intellectuals to want to make films for the working class which they themselves don’t understand. If a worker makes a film on his vacation, it is political. Because we live under the reign of private property.
The intermission is at the Wagah border on the border of India and Pakistan., black and white footage of nationalistic marches cut to repetitive chant of narrator — “Images I wish I should’ve made but couldn’t”
The film employs a variety of strategies in negotiating consciously political themes. Avoiding traditional documentary modes, it frames everyday activities within a period of civil unrest, incorporating performances to camera, public interventions and observation. Using film, video, found footage and photography, it throws its own site, narrative and production into question, particularly through use of direct (though unacknowledged) citations, its ambiguous application of fictional elements, and through a use of text and spoken English or Urdu.
The ‘rule’ implies a legal language or a directive, while the ‘exception’ evokes being ungovernable or searching for an alternative to either the state or the free market. Together, they act as both a statement that ‘the rule cannot exist without the exception, and a question as to what a state of exception might be.
Conclusion
All the films mentioned above have a common thread of questioning what it means to be an artist and a human in the different societies and times. Using different techniques of combination of images and sounds, they all provoke the viewer to question their realities without telling a story. Even though they were made in different times and different places, they all have a common theme of what art can do in the modern society and what it means to make a film in such times.
