Rambling Thoughts on Film : The Resurgence of Narrative

I've seen two remarkable films lately and thought I'd use them to indulge myself here with a few thoughts on film, if you will. I've heard it said that film is the most pertinent medium of our era (with an unparalleled ability to effect the senses). And while I suspect it's simply a precursor to truly ensconcing media (think virtual reality installations), there's no doubt its widespread popularity is due in no small part to its ability to "take us away." Of course, folks once gathered around a radio for the same escapist purposes, but...

In as much as film is so utterly accessible that, more than any other other single medium, it grants access to people from wholly different cultures and spoken languages, though, it has had a rough passage into the ranks of widely appreciated "fine art." This paradox seems due in great part to the fact that whether through an aversion to having it seen as too much like mass culture offerings or simply an insistence that it was required to convey the vision of the artist, experimentation for its own sake and an aversion to the conventions of storytelling have been hallmarks of fine art offerings in film. I mean God help you if, when dabbling in more traditional narrative, there weren't enough tell-tale signs of your fine art status to more or less overshadow your narrative efforts. As a result, far too often, IMHO, such efforts convey nothing so much as an incipient refusal to tell a story well, denying the medium (at least in part) of its essence.

Lately, though, it's seemed to me that eschewing the traditional narrative is no longer a hard and fast rule for the fine art set. Quite the contrary, there seems to be a renewed interest in its potential.

A few high-profile precedents got us here. First was Barney's "major release" style stagings and length (albeit with hardly traditional narratives). Then Schnabel's more-or-less straight storytelling with just enough visual innovation and lushness to remind you you're not watching a Spielberg flick, but both of these filmmakers seemed, still, a bit too uncomfortable committing whole-hog to what I consider the inevitable "hybrid" that seamlessly blends both. Embracing narrative is a key here, I believe. At least until the next level is reached.

Enter Steve McQueen.

I'm sorry to do this to you, but it looks like today is your last chance to see McQueen's staggering effort, "Hunger" at the IFC Center at West 4th and 6 Avenue. Visually stunning, as well staged as any action adventure film you'll ever see, and heart-achingly moving, this film is raw rage and human frailty as I've never seen them conveyed. The exchange between imprisoned IRA fighter Bobby Sands and the priest he tells he's going to lead a hunger strike to protest the British Government's refusal to bestow political status on him and his fellow IRA members behind bars is such an engrossing achievement, it's nearly impossible to believe McQueen pulled it off. I want to believe it was done through sophisticated editing, but all signs indicate that it was done through a spectacular feat of documented theater and daring. You don't have time to appreciate you're watching an "art film" as you do in too many other efforts in that category. You're as engaged on every level as you could possibly be. That is McQueen's triumph in "Hunger" and an indication to me that this is only the tip of the iceberg with regards to the potential power of the hybrid.

The other film that I thought represented a new achievement in embracing narrative came from a documentary filmmaker (not a fine artist, per se, but then again, I won't split hairs here having seen this) who recently debuted his first effort in fiction, a film called "Tulpan." Sergei Dvortsevoy is a highly acclaimed Kazakh director who swept the international film festivals with his simple, but (in my opinion) simply flawless story of a herdsman who seeks a wife in the vast open steepe of an unrelenting Central Asian landscape. To call this region desolate is to employ absurd understatement (see this trailer). Admittedly, it's a bit hard for me to observe this film entirely objectively, as much of it looks like footage shot when Bambino and I traveled to the outer regions in Kyrgyzstan (the family in the film live in a yurt and eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and live in much the same lifestyle as people we visited), so I didn't absorb it all as entirely unexpected (the New York Times review said "the milieu and the characters will seem almost impossibly exotic.")

Still, the authenticity achievement in this film is beyond belief. I scoured it intensely looking for some anachronism, any anachronism (in either prop or gesture or even facial expression). I found none. And it's this flawless accuracy in telling the story of these people's lives that lifts this film above the throng of other such efforts. Again, as with "Hunger" it was this film's ability to transport you to this place so completely, such that you stopped feeling voyeuristic, despite the raw intimacy of being right there, in the the yurt, with this family and felt miraculously invisible in their midst.

More than that, though, in "Tulpan" (and I was in "Tulpan") I realized I had stopped being aware of the act of viewing at all. I was living with this family. It may have taken Dvortsevoy's years of filming documentaries to make him a keen enough observer to pull this off, but he and McQueen also relied heavily on filming (rather than staging) actual events (in Hunger the actor truly loses a frightening amount of weight and in "Tulpan," well, as the New York Times put it, you see "a milestone in cinematic ovine obstetrics, [which] is both crucial to the story and a tour de force, the kind of thing a director like David Cronenberg or Takashi Miike would attempt only with prosthetics or other special effects. In “Tulpan” you see it for real, a perfectly ordinary event that is also something of a miracle"). (You simply must see that bit to believe it, even if you grew up on a farm, you won't believe he got that scene, with that actor, in that place, on film.)

I'm not sure that's not a weakness in both, to be honest--relying so heavily on actual events-- but then again, that's film's potential. In the right hands, under the right conditions, it can stun us with its truth. Consider this an open thread on the strengths and/or limitations of narrative in fine art film.