Beau Travail Claire Denis
On a recent rewatch at the cinema I got a lot out of allowing myself to 'feel' Beau Travail's images rather than constantly look for subtext or meaning within them. The film's sensuality and quietness had an enrapturing affect on me as a result. This time I found myself intrigued by simple and quieter images, such as one where a flicker of light is seen in the dark as a cigarette is lit. The hands of two male legionnaires meet around the flame in one of the film's more direct expressions of intimacy. The camera stays on the cigarette, and all we see is a little dot of light bobbing around in the dark. I love how Denis renders seemingly insignificant things incandescent and alluring, often to convey a sense of the magic of solitude.
Denis's habitual images of people dancing passionately on their own seems to exemplify this. I recently read an interview where Denis described these images as a 'solitary appeal to the empathy of the viewer', where 'unspoken correspondences' come to light. These images are a way of coming into contact with something 'intangible, mysterious and transformative.' I think this modest image of the cigarette in the dark can be read in the same way. It hints at an inarticulate solitude that is magical and beautiful, and it felt sublime to me.
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| A flicker of a cigarette: Beau Travail |
The Brown Bunny Vincent Gallo
The Brown Bunny follows a man (Gallo) as he aimlessly drives across various American states, and contains subtly beautiful images that distill loneliness and yearning. Many of the images are out of focus and awkwardly framed, often softly filtered through hair or a dirty car windscreen, to express the introspective fog through which Gallo's character views the world. This creates an emotional distance within the viewer, a kind of numbing, which gives you the sense that Gallo is so overcome by melancholy and loneliness that he has become a shell of a person, only able to feel subtle textures and colours.
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| Aimless driving: The Brown Bunny |
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Rainer Werner Fassbinder
When I watched Ali I was struck by how simple, but powerful, the film's portrayal of loneliness was. The film is about the relationship between an older woman and a migrant worker from Morocco, two outsiders who suffer the prejudice of postwar West German society. A sense of stillness pervades the film's images, with many shots of people sitting alone in empty spaces and encountering their own loneliness. A recurring example of this is an image of the woman resting on the staircase of her apartment building, which is where she encounters the judgement of her racist neighbours. The staircase appears as this liminal space that lies between the woman's interior world and the alienation of the world outside. The framing of the woman through the columns and pipes of the staircase directly communicates, in the most simple way, that the woman is trapped by her own loneliness.
An excerpt from an interview with Fassbinder: 'the viewer has an opportunity to flesh out the relationship when the story is simple. The simpler the stories are, the more the viewers can do with them... at some point films have to stop being films and have to come alive so that the viewers begin to ask themselves: what about me and my life?'
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| An expression of loneliness in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul |