Even before Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni was already demonstrating the powerful tool of perception that is a photographer’s eye, angling his camera at the oppressive structures of modern civilisation. By placing one such artist at the centre of a psychological mystery though, the question is raised as to whether this intensive scrutiny may also give birth to fabrications, imposing form and purpose on an existence ungoverned by cosmic harmony. This is not necessarily an inherent human weakness – our storytelling sets us apart from less developed lifeforms after all – but to mistake a collection of unrelated artefacts for reality will only ever lead to further distortions, revealing more about the mind of the observer than the observed.
When fashion photographer Thomas begins developing the film stock of an impromptu shoot in a local park, we too find ourselves swept away by the tantalising prospect of conspiracy. Laying his celluloid strips over a light table, he passes a magnifying glass across them frame by frame, before projecting negatives onto photographic paper and submerging the undeveloped prints in a chemical bath. This is a process to be undertaken alone, methodically dedicating one’s utmost attention to each step, and yet it is only after he has meditated on these photos for some period of time that something catches his eye.
Thomas approaches his art with methodical purpose, and Antonioni uses this sequence to similarly raise our own suspicions without a single line of dialogue.
In the first photograph, the female subject, Jane, is leading her partner by the hand. In the second, they are holding each other in a tight embrace. When it is enlarged though, he can see her eyeline directed elsewhere. He sections off the small section of bush where he believes she is looking, and then blows that up as well into an abstract array of black and white smudges that still don’t make much sense. Nevertheless, the more he pieces together fragments of his photos, the more previously hidden details begin to emerge – until he unveils the face of a third party hiding in the shadows, and a pistol pointing directly at the male subject.
Flitting between two black-and-white images until we, like Thomas, begin to impose our own contrived ideas onto them.Thomas literally caught between the two blown-up photos, both becoming the object of his obsession.Antonioni plays with the pareidolia effect – the tendency to see patterns in random stimuli, and piece together meaningful conclusions. Of course here, it is the static array of black and white smudges which tangibly form evidence of a murder.
Antonioni’s construction of this sequence is tightly measured, alternating between the photos, close-ups of Thomas’s sweaty face, and wide shots of his frantic pacing through the studio. That last photo may have saved the man’s life, he decides, seeing as it coincided with the exact moment Jane realised they were being watched. No doubt her persistence in later charming him into handing over the negatives is only further proof of her guilt, he believes, though perhaps her erratic behaviour is conversely what put the idea in his mind to begin with. Either way, such fervent curiosity is hard to stop once it is set in motion, setting Thomas down a path of obsessive investigation.
Blow-Up is Antonioni’s second film shot in colour, and he immediately flexes an impressive control over its stylish potential.
It is no great surprise that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window should play such a crucial role in Antonioni’s direction of Blow-Up, which itself would inspire more paranoid thrillers in years to come such as The Conversation and Blow Out. Even beyond the compelling mystery narrative, Antonioni is using his camera to manipulate our point-of-view, voyeuristically peering through frame obstructions at the subjects of our focus. The use of a deep focus lens also takes notes from Hitchcock’s classic masterpieces, staging Jane in the distance of one shot that also eyes off Thomas’ sought-after camera in the foreground, thus drawing great suspense from her concerted attempt to steal back whatever secrets it contains.
Hitchcock would often use deep focus like this to create tension, though here Antonioni is also impressively creating a split screen effect with his meticulous framing.
Even with these influences in play though, Antonioni’s established style of incredible architectural designs remains dominant, melding perfectly with his depiction of the Swinging Sixties as an era of vibrant self-expression and profound existentialism. Thomas’ studio is a handsomely chaotic mess of colours and textures, the centrepiece of which is a long stand of vibrant ostrich feathers running from the floor to the ceiling, and outside his location shooting continues to find a geometric synchronicity in London’s natural and manufactured aesthetics. Patterns reveal themselves in the repetition of objects, organically framing Thomas through a symmetrical line of trees and segmenting a backdrop of city streets with Venetian blinds, while negative spaces ease the weight that these shapes impose upon the mise-en-scène.
Thomas’ studio is a handsomely chaotic mess of colours and textures, the centrepiece of which is a long stand of vibrant ostrich feathers running from the floor to the ceiling.Antonioni reveals his photographer’s eye in his immaculate framing and location shooting, using these evenly spaced trees to design this shot.Venetian blinds segment a backdrop of London’s streets – geometric synchronicity in manufactured aesthetics.
Architecture is of course not all about physical buildings for Antonioni, but rather extends to the composition of bodies, ornaments, vehicles, and vegetation in any given shot, taking on the quality of a still life artwork in their representation of something larger – a social critique for instance, or a subtle paranoia. Especially when actors are partially concealed by their environments, we often find ourselves leaning forward and filling in the missing information, consequently adopting the perspective that drives Thomas forward in his quest for a greater understanding of an uncertain world.
Posing bodies in the frame like models, turning them into part of the mise-en-scène.Obstructions force us to fill in the missing visual information.Thomas’ reality warps as his obsession grows, trapping him in these magnificently designed shots within his own studio.
This is what it means to adopt the eye of a photographer, Antonioni posits – recognising that what remains unseen is just as significant as that which is visible. When interpreting a piece of art, one must essentially become a detective to unearth tangible proof of one’s hypothesis, though which comes first makes all the difference. It is difficult to dispute Thomas’ discovery of the body at the crime scene for instance, now convincing him that the murder was successful, just as the trashing of his studio by an unknown perpetrator suggests he is getting too close to the truth. Nevertheless, when evidence seems to evaporate into thin air, Thomas’ reality seems to collapse into paradox.
Such is life in the British counterculture of the 60s though, bleeding with metaphysical contradictions. While Thomas indulges in the sexual liberty and consumerism of the fashion industry, so too does he engage with more socially conscious pursuits on the side, photographing the homeless people of London for a book project. Subscribing to both escapism and performative activism is all one can do to avoid confronting the dread of Cold War-era politics, and even when seeds of existential doubt do begin to sprout, parsing truth from deception remains extraordinarily difficult.
The Swinging Sixties bleed into Antonioni’s pop aesthetics, indulging in the sexual liberty and consumerism of the fashion industry.Thomas’ attempts reach a more authentic truth by way of addressing social issues only results in more artifice.
As such, this artist suddenly finds himself unable to trust his own eyes and ears. Is that the sound of someone stepping on a twig at the park, or is his paranoid mind playing tricks? Does the unexpected absence of a dead body suggest that he was only imagining it the first time around? With the negatives finally being stolen, the prospect of reassessing evidence to arrive at some definitive conclusion is ruled out as well.
Perhaps there really is a grand conspiracy manipulating Thomas’ perception of the world, or maybe he has just convinced himself of one. There is no doubt that there is at least some sort of illusion at play, though this knowledge doesn’t help in exposing it, as Antonioni demonstrates in his confounding final scene. Lost for answers, Thomas finds himself wandering by a tennis court where a troupe of mimes silently act out a game, and soon overcomes his confusion to participate in the imaginary act. We are not exemption from this mirage either, following the invisible ball’s arc through the air and even hearing it hit the make-believe racquets.
A reality-defying finale as Thomas reaches the tennis game performed by mimes, eventually engaging in their imaginary act – the metaphoric implications upon the rest of his story are sweeping.
The effect is disorientating, and yet to accept a collective fantasy is to find one’s home in a false reality, fading tangible truths into non-existence. That this should also be Thomas’ fate in a narrative that already keeps us at arm’s length from decisive answers is perfectly enigmatic, undermining whatever confidence we have left in identifying where Blow-Up’s slyly crafted illusion starts and ends. If nothing on its surface is a true representation of itself, then there may ultimately be very little keeping us too from becoming distortions in the eyes of others, spuriously skewing our very identities to the point of uncanny, elusive abstraction.
Thomas too becomes little more than a distortion in the eye of the observer, eroding his very identity in the confounding final shot.
Blow-Up is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
Through the twenty years of Ingmar Bergman’s career leading up to his crowning achievement Persona, his long running fascinations with the human face had manifested in some of the art form’s finest close-ups. It is “the great subject of cinema,” he believed. “Everything is there.” He didn’t need David Lean’s extraordinary panoramas or Michelangelo Antonioni’s modern architecture, though he certainly demonstrated a fine control over both visual devices whenever a scene called for it. To him, faces were landscapes on their own, with the potential to be shot in an unlimited number of angles, lighting setups, and arrangements within ensembles – and that isn’t even considering yet the incredible facial expressions reliably delivered by his troupe of recurring actors. In profile shots, the curves of the face become valleys and mountains, while front-on portraits might be partially hidden by shadows or visual obstructions.
Faces become like landscapes to Bergman in Persona, with slopes, crevices, and mountains – entire worlds of expression.
As such, there is an inherent tension between any character’s outward communication and internal emotions in a Bergman film. Not necessarily at odds with each other, but at least working in conjunction to create a mask of some kind. One which Carl Jung might describe as “designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” Or to put it even more simply, a persona.
Therein lies the case for why this film may stand as the finest formal synthesis of Bergman’s intimate visual style and his deeply psychological subject matter, examining the perplexing duality which simultaneously defines humans as social beings and distinct individuals. All abstract truths conceived in one’s mind must be filtered through some sensory expression to reach the outer world, and Bergman does not discount his own film from that inevitable distortion. The raw materials of cinema itself become integral to Persona’s very form, opening and closing with montages of film reels, flickering lights, a penis, a cartoon, a silent comedy sketch, and a dying sheep, among other images. Even the very final shot of the film after Bergman’s camera pulls back to reveal his crew shows the film reel running out, and the incandescent arc lamp of a projector slowly dimming, signifying the end.
Bergman is playing with the raw materials of cinema in Persona – light, illusion, entertainment, all tying into his meditations on identity and artifice.
Much like everything else we witness in this film, these are but mere representations of reality, only possible through illusions of light produced by machines. And yet like the young boy we see at the start reaching out towards a giant screen featuring blurred images of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s faces, we too might find ourselves suspending our disbelief during Persona, convincing ourselves on some subconscious level what we are watching is not art, but truth.
A boy reaches out to Ullmann and Andersson’s faces in the opening montage, trying to grasp the illusion of the cinema screen.
Perhaps it is a similar recognition of this artifice which prompts theatre actress Elisabet Vogler to become voluntarily mute as she stands onstage, simultaneously rejecting both artistic and verbal forms of expression, and setting off the events of the film. To her nurse Alma, Elisabet’s mental strength to wilfully remain silent inspires great admiration, though the head doctor describes her philosophy from a far more nuanced, understanding perspective.
“The hopeless dream of being – not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others, and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures.”
One of the great all-time female performances arrives through Ullmann’s magnificent silent acting, marking the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with Bergman.
Here lies the key to unlocking many of Persona’s confounding mysteries, moving us closer to the core of one character who conceals her identity with silence, and another who conceals her own with speech. It is one of the finest monologues that Bergman has penned, but it also takes a turn halfway through as the doctor begins to apply pressure to Elisabet’s belief, questioning her methods to separate herself from the world’s superficial facades.
“But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.”
With this diagnosis, the remedy becomes apparent – a short stay for both Elisabet and Alma at the doctor’s summer estate. Like so many other Bergman films, his home island of Fårö plays host to this retreat, isolating the two women on beautiful, stony coastlines surrounded by the Baltic Sea.
Bergman’s home island of Fårö plays host to this retreat, isolating Ullmann and Andersson in its stark, beautiful scenery.
The dynamic contrast already set between Alma’s endless talking about her life and Elisabet’s patient listening continues here, drawing formal divisions in their characterisations as a submissive, emotional woman and her more assertive, rational counterpart. At the same time, there is also a subtle blending of the two which begins to take place. As Alma recounts a memory of sunbathing nude with her friend, making love with two strangers who approach them, and cheating on her partner, she also confesses a mental guilt which directly conflicts with her physical actions. “Is it possible to be one and the same person at the very same time – I mean, two people?” she wonders aloud, considering both halves of her mind as separate beings.
Personal secrets begin to spill out, and a power dynamic is set – Alma as the caring, expressive nurse, and Elisabet as the silent, judgemental patient.
Through Bergman’s blocking of their faces, this relationship continues to manifest in visual compositions he had played with many times before, specifically that which half-obscures one face with another in a representation of symbiotic duality. Not only is Persona his greatest stylistic accomplishment to date, but his cinematographer Sven Nykvist too deserves a great deal of credit for his camera’s sensitivity to the delicate movements and expressions of these actresses.
This is an immense accomplishment for cinematographer Sven Nykvist as well as Bergman, offering up some of the finest compositions of faces in both their careers – and cinema history.
When Elisabet enters Alma’s bedroom one night like a spectre, there is a surreal ethereality to the soft wash illuminating their slow, strange embrace, letting them caress each other’s faces and hypnotically gaze right at the camera. Later as they bring their heads together and look downwards, Bergman shrouds them in darkness against a white background, tracing the outlines of their intersecting, virtually indistinguishable profiles. While the emphasis on Elisabet’s face is her shrewd, perceptive eyes, only Alma’s mouth is visible, declaring that “I’ll never be like you. I change all the time. You can do what you want. You won’t get to me.” Once again though, her words are telling a different story to the corresponding reciprocals being depicted onscreen. One is of the head, the other is of the heart, and both might as well be two parts of a single, indivisible woman.
An ethereal night time meeting, lingering on the edges of consciousness as both women embrace and stare cryptically at the camera.This could very well be the shot that defines Bergman’s entire career, catching both faces looking downward in silhouette, but there is also incredible formal detail with the emphasis of Andersson’s mouth.
Bergman could not have cast two more suitable actors for these roles either, with both Andersson and Ullmann bearing visual similarities, yet expressing totally inverse personalities. Andersson brings a spontaneous vivacity to Alma’s lengthy monologues throughout Persona, speaking whatever thoughts come to her mind, while initially staged in the foreground of Bergman’s frame as the primary subject of our attention. Meanwhile, Ullmann often sits behind her, watching with an impassive face that refuses to reveal even the slightest passing thought. She may have been late to joining Bergman’s company of regular actors that Andersson had already been part of for years, but in time she would prove herself be among his most integral collaborators, starting with her tremendously silent performance here.
The chemistry between both Andersson and Ullmann only continues to grow more complex as the well-defined dynamic between them starts to break down. When Elisabet first speaks off-screen and encourages a tired Alma to go to bed, the nurse sits up in confusion, not quite believing what she heard. Rather than accepting that her patient has actually spoken, she simply repeats her words, as if verbalising an inner voice. Later when she discovers during their stay that her private life has in fact been the subject of Elisabet’s own supercilious study, the balance of power flips entirely. The observer has become the observed – the last place she wants to be. Acting out of spite for the first time, Alma leaves a shard of broken glass in the open for Elisabet to cut herself on. When she does, the silent eye contact they both share from a distance is full of mutual, contemptuous understanding. This island has turned into a battlefield of identities.
Bergman breaks the illusion of cinema as the status quo disintegrates, burning up the film reel as if it too can no longer bear the weight of its own illusion.
At this point in Persona, just as the status quo has been disrupted, Bergman rips us from his story and back into our own heads. The film reel burns, as if unable to sustain the disturbance that has taken place, and another montage of seemingly random images plays out. In some ways, the formal experimentation Bergman is carrying out here isn’t terribly different to the self-reflexive diversions from conventional narratives that Jean-Luc Godard was also exploring in the 1960s, but the purpose it serves in Persona is far more rooted in Bergman’s own cerebral curiosities. As his characters gradually transcend the limiting identities they have chosen for themselves, so too does his film break down its own façade of truth. When we do eventually make a return to the main story, there is no simple reversion to how it was before. Alma has turned in her white attire for Elisabet’s black, and the tension between them has fully manifested in an outright tangle of personas.
Seeking to draw out a raw, emotional reaction from the composed Elisabet, Alma pushes her to the brink of her patience in a physical confrontation. The threat of boiling water provokes a scream of fear, emerging from a place of honest emotion she has suppressed, and which Alma thrives on – “No, don’t!”. Conversely, the arrival of Elisabet’s husband on the island elusively switches out these women in the other direction, with the visiting man approaching Alma instead of his wife. Bergman’s deep focus blocking once again lifts off in this scene, bringing Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand’s faces together in sweet reconciliation over past misgivings, as Ullmann’s face imposes itself as a silent, detached presence. Whatever her conflicts have been with her husband, it is not her silence which heals old wounds, but rather Alma’s warmth and connection. Her words from a few scenes prior about the importance of such affectionate openness begin to make even more sense here.
“Is it really so important not to lie, to tell the truth, to speak in a genuine tone of voice? Can a person really live without babbling away, without lying and making up excuses and evading things? Isn’t it better to just let yourself be silly and sloppy and dishonest? Maybe a person gets better by just letting herself be who she is.”
Crisp, deep focus as Alma slides into Elisabet’s role in her relationship, patching up old wounds while Elisabet remains emotionally disconnected in the foreground.
Still, how long can Alma really keep up this act of being a kinder, more considerate Elisabet? “I’m cold and rotten and indifferent. It’s all just sham and lies,” she cries in the man’s tight embrace, just as Bergman pans his camera to the side to reveal a daunting, front-on close-up of Elisabet. In her silent gaze that stares right down the lens, we see these same insecurities manifested as introspection, rather than the outward expression native to Alma’s personality.
At this point, deeper truths about both women and their ever-shifting traits begin to unravel quickly, building to a monologue that plays out twice in a row and pays off on the dual patterns woven tightly into the film’s structure. Alma may be the one who is delivering it, and yet the second-person perspective she speaks from pins the anecdote squarely on Elisabet, verbalising the mute woman’s unspoken thoughts. In this moment, the psychoanalysis which Elisabet had tried turning on the nurse now reverts back to the patient, as Bergman interrogates another false persona adopted by countless women in society – the image of the warm, caring mother. Like many of the characters she has played during her career as an actress, this is just another role she felt she must perform, composing herself with dignified grace while internally torn apart by fear and repulsion.
The traditionally uninspired shot / reverse shot film techniques finds new life in Bergman’s hands, mirroring a single monologue across the speaker and the listener. Even the lighting is inverted on both their faces.
The first time Bergman plays out this monologue, it is Elisabet’s face which we hang on, its left side cloaked entirely in shadow as she listens in subdued shame. When it comes to an end, a sudden, atonal bang on the piano throws us back in time by a few minutes, and repeats the exact same scene in the mirrored reverse shot. We sit now with Alma as she speaks, her face tightened in attentive focus, and its right side covered in darkness. The distinction of whose story is really being told barely matters at this point – like the two halves of the human brain, we are simply given conflicting perspectives of a single experience, visually expressed through the spliced close-ups of the left and right sides of their faces.
An eerie spliced close-ups of both women’s faces, emphasising their similarities and revealing both as equal halves of a whole.
Even by Bergman’s standards, this is unusually experimental filmmaking, though this profound interrogation of human duality asks for nothing less than intellectual patience. When it is time to pack up and leave the estate, there is notably one less woman in the household – has Alma’s decisive rejection of Elisabet pushed the manifestation of her insecurities deeper into her subconscious? Has she absorbed that alter ego into her own personality, and emerged a more balanced being? Or is Alma in fact the figment of Elisabet’s mind that has taken over her life, as we saw with her and Björnstrand’s romance?
The following montage of Elisabet on stages and sets doesn’t quiet help in any search for answers, but it does serve to remind us as Persona comes to its obscure end that these characters have always been little more than artificial constructs, holding no inner lives other than what Bergman instils in them. His film is both deceitful in its purposeful manipulations, but also intricately designed to evoke truths through bold, symbolic expressions, fully recognising the impossible task of creating any pure representation of reality. With the ubiquity of such pointed polarity, Bergman reaches deep into our psyches and exposes our greatest internal paradoxes, creating an avant-garde masterwork that is as entrancingly elusive as it is invasively intimate.
The camera pulls back in the final seconds to break the illusion of cinema for the last time, transporting us back to reality where Persona is just a film.
Persona is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Those going into Au Hasard Balthazar looking for a one-to-one allegory between the trials of its long-suffering donkey and the Bible will come out confused and disappointed. Robert Bresson would never be so obvious – his style is one of understated minimalism and archetypal iconography, fitting nicely into what Paul Schrader would later call ‘transcendental cinema.’ He seeks not to attach his film to classical narrative structures, but to design his own modern parable that is both grand in philosophical contemplations and humble in scope.
Balthazar the donkey is representative of three main figures: Christ passing through the Stations of the Cross towards his unjust death, the same-named magus who visited the infant Jesus bearing myrrh, and also just a mindless, innocent ass who we imprint emotion upon through some well-placed close-ups. His pain is a wholly human experience, mirrored in his many owners who thoughtlessly exploit, abuse, and occasionally caress him. Over these succinct 95 minutes, we see the same familiar figures in Balthazar’s rural French village enter and exit his life, and Bresson positions us right there next to him as a passive observer of their cruelty and hardships.
A crown of flowers given to Balthazar by Mary, representing Christ’s mother. This is a tale full of powerful theological symbolism.
Balthazar begins his small, insignificant existence on a family farm. He is baptised by the children in a mock ceremony, blessing him with “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” before they go off to play together in the hay. Their neighbour Marie joins in too, treating him with love and eventually taking him in. She decorates his head with flowers and sticks reminiscent of Christ’s crown of thorns, but this adornment carries much greater affection than the Roman instrument of torture and humiliation. It is no coincidence either that her name directly evokes Mary the Mother, being the sole character to show absolute kindness and care towards him, though she also becomes an empathetic companion to him as their respective journeys move in parallel directions, seeing her passed from one man to the next.
Au Hasard Balthazar is not an exceedingly stylish film, but Bresson’s blocking of his actors in the frame is often impressive.
And yet it is not Marie’s perspective we are given, but the animal’s, torn from the stability of any single home or purpose to serve the fickle needs of humanity. A circus teaches him cheap tricks, a merchant puts him to work at a mill, and Marie’s nefarious boyfriend Gerard uses him as his own personal punching bag. On the occasion that he does act out independently, he bolts for freedom, and Bresson resorts to a rapidly increasing montage of his hooves and the wheels of the wagon he is pulling until it overturns, setting him loose. The sequence is a fast-paced release from Au Hasard Balthazar’s meditative, elliptical narrative, though its editing is just as meticulously considered as those long dissolves which delicately bridge one scene to the next, drifting the donkey down an unpredictable yet fateful path.
Bresson’s editing is essential to the progression of his elliptical narrative, connecting scenes through long dissolves and every so often building the pace to a crescendo.
Bresson may not display the sort of audacious stylings his contemporaries were experimenting with at the peak of the French New Wave, and yet his attention to visual detail here is far from nil, crafting elegant medium shots that linger on his actors’ hands. It is a versatile formal device which is present through so many of his films, and while it cannot be put down to a singular interpretation, they do frequently manifest in Au Hasard Balthazar as icons of influence and control. When the donkey’s hooves are painfully branded, one farmer’s hands sturdily grip his leg in position, while the other holds the iron tight. As Marie sits in a car with Gerard, a shot of their torsos reveals his hand slowly creeping around, suggesting a sexual assault when we eventually cut away.
Hands torturing, assaulting, caressing – Bresson’s close-ups on these actions build both character and story.
Given Balthazar’s low line of sight towards his masters, it makes sense that this is the part of humans that Bresson focuses on. Even beyond his perspective though, he frames hands the way Ingmar Bergman shoots faces, studying their subtle contours, purposeful movements, and blocking within environments, such as a slow reach for an object or direct interaction with it. Unlike Bergman’s faces though, these hands assert an active presence, rather than reactive, distilling his characters down to their appendages which shape the course of events. There is certainly emotion conveyed in these shots, but it is very deliberately muted, matching Bresson’s direction of actors which strips away both artifice and realism to turn them into models upon which he imprints a new kind of honesty – one that is in service of the film and its subtle shifts in tone, rather than the bleeding authenticity of any specific moment.
As such, the subdued tragedy of the film comes not through what Bresson explicitly depicts, but from what is held back, making it absolutely fitting that his favourite actors may indeed be animals. We can take what we like from the blank canvas of Balthazar’s emotionless face, to which we gradually attune our own sensitivities until we can swear that we see some flicker of sorrow in his eyes. Even his slow death from a gunshot while crossing the Spanish border comes across as simply another sad, trivialised development in his life. His injury is purposefully reminiscent of the spear wound in Jesus’ side as he hung on the cross, and even the contraband which Gerard strapped to his back burdens him with the sins of man.
The donkey is a perfect actor for Bresson – a blank canvas of a face upon which he imprints emotion.
Unlike Christ though, there is no grand legacy he is leaving behind as he lays dying in an open field, surrounded by sheep and the sound of their meagre, tinny bells which ring in place of those which toll at church. In his final moments, Bresson imbues his wide shots of Balthazar’s quiet death with a gentle beauty, granting him the time and attention which no one else could afford him in life. Perhaps his peaceful resignation to the predestined path set by a God far wiser than him is a choice in itself, though the line between free will, primal impulse, and divine fate remains as obscure as ever. In Bresson’s restrained austerity, such metaphysical questions are spared the insult of easy answers. There is grace in the meditation spurred on by the Bible’s parables, and through Au Hasard Balthazar’s elliptical progression of preordained encounters and archetypal icons, Bresson conjures a similarly pensive consideration of suffering and salvation.
The death of Balthazar paralleling the death of Christ – a cruel murder of an innocent, a wound in the side, and a submission to God’s will.
Au Hasard Balthazar is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Most citizens of the world will only get one chance to live their life according to how they envision it, but for the elite few who go under the knife at the enigmatic ‘Company’ in Seconds, rebirth into a new body and life does not need to be some intangible, far-flung dream. In this absurd, Kafkaesque nightmare, plastic surgery has advanced far enough to transplant one’s entire life, and banking executive Arthur Hamilton is the latest to take up the offer, being immensely dissatisfied with his passionless marriage, tedious office job, and estranged relationship with his grown child. What sounds like the basis of a high-concept science fiction story is effectively transformed into a psychological horror under the steady hand of John Frankenheimer, whose intrusive, distorted camerawork carves out existential musings over the source of human misery.
This eerie tone is set right from the opening credits that visually warp extreme close-ups of an unidentified man’s facial features to the ominous sound of an organ and strings, breaking them down into fragments disconnected from his vague identity. In Arthur’s everyday life too, it remains equally difficult to orientate ourselves, continuing to isolate parts of his body by tracking his face, legs, and back of his head through a subway station, though this time with a wide-angle lens that places him at the centre of a world he no longer feels part of. Time, wealth, and ennui has turned him into a solipsist, absorbed in his all-consuming self-pity and showing little regard for others, making him a prime candidate for the Company’s procedure of rebirth. All it takes is a recently deceased doppelganger to be dug up and their death staged to appear as if the client themselves has perished, effectively ‘killing’ their previous identity and creating a new one.
Eerie, extreme close-ups setting an unnerving tone over the opening credits.Frankenheimer carries through with the extreme close-ups here too, though this time pairing them with rigid tracking shots.
The path to the Company’s hidden headquarters is itself laden with misdirection, leading Arthur to a dry cleaner, an abattoir, a truck, and eventually a misshapen hallway of patterned walls and checkered floor tiles, looking like a scene ripped straight from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Even more broadly though, it is Orson Welles’ absurdist quest for nonsensical answers in The Trial which exerts an influence here, with James Wong Howe’s deep focus photography heightening the impact of his low angles and tracking shots through bizarre set pieces to his final destination.
This journey to the Company isn’t far from the endless wandering from one location to the next in Orson Welles’ The Trial – completely Kafkaesque.German Expressionism in the absolute madness of this distorted hallway’s warped lines.
Inside the Company’s operating theatre, the man we once knew as Arthur Hamilton becomes Tony Wilson, and the dashing Rock Hudson takes the place of the slightly older John Randolph in the role, fluently adopting his constrained mannerisms. During his recovery, mirrors surround him everywhere he goes in the facility, reflecting his freshly constructed, Frankenstein-like visage back at him before the stitches come off and he is released back into civilisation. His dreams of becoming a painter are closer than ever, and a beachside community in California becomes his new home, finally wiping his slate clean for him to embrace a new, carefree life on the other side America without the baggage of his old one.
Fantastic work in Frankenheimer’s mise-en-scène, surrounding Arthur/Tony with mirrors as he gets used to his new face.
Frankenheimer’s commitment to the metaphor of rebirth carries through to the unofficial baptism during his community’s wine festival, where our leading man finally manages to shed Arthur’s inhibitions and accept Tony’s love of life. The rigid camera movements that once set him on straight paths give way to a liberated, handheld camera, wildly cutting around the dancing nudists crushing grapes beneath their feet and Tony’s apprehensive face, isolated from the crowd. A mere few seconds though after his free-spirited love interest, Nora, pulls him into the pool of grapes, his protestations give way to laughter, accepting the joyous christening of the juices being poured over his head. The calm, romantic dissolve from his ecstatic face to the calm beach where he cradles Nora in his arms might have marked the end of a character arc for anyone else, but for Tony, bitterness and regret are ingrained deeper in his psyche than his mere surroundings.
This fast-cutting, handheld scene of baptism and rebirth is heavily juxtaposed against earlier scenes of stiff tracking shots, marking a point of a transition for Tony.Long dissolves bleeding through a sweet but short-lived romance.
It isn’t long before we see Frankenheimer’s camera sitting on Tony’s shoulder again, intently following him through a party, and this is really our first sign that old habits are rising to the surface again. Suddenly, this community doesn’t seem so idyllic after all, with dauntingly staged shots pressing the attention of the guests in on Tony’s irresponsible behaviour. It is evident that this is not the life for him – but if his old one wasn’t either, then where else is there to go? He isn’t exactly overcome with nostalgia when he revisits his previous home in New York, but there is a wistfulness in his expression as his new face is faintly reflected against a framed picture of his old one. The conversation he has with his ‘widow’ doesn’t make it any easier either, offering an alternate perspective to which he had been obstinately blind while living as Arthur.
“I never knew what he wanted, and I don’t think he ever knew. He fought so hard for what he’d been taught to want, and when he got it, he just grew more and more confused. The silences grew longer. We never talked about it. We lived our lives in a polite, celibate truce.”
Confronting arrangements of actors as Tony’s new friends crowd around him and the camera, helped a great deal by James Wong Howe’s deep focus photography.A wistful reflection of Tony’s face over Arthur’s photo.
Really, this path to disillusionment that she describes seems no different to the path he is on now, pursuing a dream that he never truly desired and thus never finding the fulfilment he expected. He could go on forever, taking on new faces, growing bored, and moving onto the next, but according to Frankenheimer, such is the nature of our modern, material desires for more than we have. It takes human intervention to bring these cycles of constant dissatisfaction to a close, and in its own dark way, this is what the Company seeks to fulfil.
It is a genius narrative twist which Seconds lands in its final minutes, wheeling Tony away down a corridor to the operating theatre again as we move with him in a menacing low angle, though this sterile room is not the last thing he witnesses. Instead, we see a beach much like we have seen before, though in place of lovers, we glimpse a silhouette of a father and his children walking into the distance. If this is a realisation in the last few seconds of Tony’s life of what he truly desired above all else, then it comes far too late. Just as distorted footage brought us into Seconds, so too do we leave it with this dream gradually warping into surreal oblivion, tragically slipping away from view before it even gets a chance to be born.
A glimpse of what Tony truly wanted all along? Perhaps, but it quickly warps into oblivion before he even gets the chance to grasp it.
Seconds is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
When Diouana is first picked out by ‘Madame’ as a nanny for her children back home in France, she can hardly believe her luck. Among a crowd of women desperately scrambling for a job on the streets of her Senegalese village, she is the only one not pushing her way to the front, trying to beat the others out. At first the decision to pick her, the quiet, patient one, seems gracious. Clearly Madame sees the virtues of a good worker in her, she believes, even if she does not have any experience. In hindsight, it is an obvious red flag – of course a bitter, domineering woman like Madame was going to choose whichever Black woman looks the most subservient. Confusion, regret, and loathing boil within Diouana over the course of her slavery-adjacent employment, and through her voiceover memoirs, Ousmane Sembène leads us into the heart of her suffering.
In its acute examinations of racial oppression, Black Girl stands proudly as a tentpole of both African cinema and Sembène’s directorial career, evoking the stylistic sensibilities of the French New Wave in its handheld camerawork and location shooting in Dakar and Antibes. Visually, Sembène defines both cities by their architecture, recognising their colonial parallels while drawing a sharp distinction between his camera’s immersion in either. Back home in Senegal, Diouana walks through streets as a free citizen, set against gorgeous backdrops of streetlamps and bridges. In France, the urban environment merely manifests as views from the windows of Madame and Monsieur’s home. As she looks out at the city drenched in darkness, she recalls the promise she was given for a better life.
“The mistress told me: ‘You’ll see, Diouana, there are lovely ships in France.’ Is France that black hole?”
It quickly becomes apparent that the French dream of liberty and equality is not reserved for people like her, as Sembène trades out Dakar’s streets for the closed-off interiors of the family home. He stages his scenes here with a constant sense of oppression, in one shot letting the family relax in the foreground with only Madame’s feet in the frame up on a table, while Diouana is wedged between walls in the background, shrunken and subjugated by the boxes drawn around her.
When it isn’t the physical infrastructure dominating the frame, it is the condescending, disapproving expressions of white people, caught through vulnerable point-of-view shots that land us in Diouana’s eyes. In a pair of extended flashbacks, she recalls the set of circumstances that led her servitude, and with her employers taking it upon themselves to respond to her family’s letters, she comes to feel even more cut off from her own past and identity. All that is left is that tiny prison, which quickly becomes her entire world.
“Back in Dakar they must be saying ‘Diouana is happy in France, she has a good life.’ For me France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and my bedroom.”
The only mark Diouana has on the space is a single African mask, standing out in Sembène’s black-and-white photography as a dark imprint against the blank wall it hangs upon. It is a gift she brought to her employers, though one which they accept as little more than a decorative museum piece, cheapening her very presence and contribution to the household. As her treatment grows worse, so too does her depression, and her contempt for Madame eventually erupts in a struggle to reclaim that mask she had so courteously offered them.
The foreshadowing Sembène lays out in Diouana’s anguish makes her suicide no less upsetting. It is at this point that her pervasive voiceovers that have accompanied every step of her journey cease, thus ending our primary vehicle of insight into her mind. Within the broader French society, her death manifests as a mere headline in a newspaper, read by people relaxing on beaches. For Madame and Monsieur, it is similarly nothing more than a disturbing disruption to their privileged lives. Not long after, the bathroom that Diouana slit her throat in is entirely spotless, all traces of her existence and demise completely erased from their home.
In depicting the ease with which the racial trauma of Black Girl is swept under the rug, the post-colonial allegory that Sembène puts forward fully comes to fruition in its final act. Monsieur’s voyage to Dakar to return Diouana’s belongings to her family and pay them out is a weak attempt at compensation, and one that they have no trouble seeing through. Much like the young boy who dons her old mask and stalks Monsieur through the streets, so too does the memory of Diouana and France’s colonial history at large haunt him with a lingering guilt. In this tensely edited sequence, there is no end to his running. It can be wiped from physical records, but memories of the atrocities committed against the African people do not fade.
Black Girl is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
