THE BURMESE HARP (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

About the effect of war’s horror on a sensitive combatant in the Second World War, The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto) is universally regarded as Kon Ichikawa’s masterpiece. It’s perhaps the most humane of all Japanese war films—indeed, of all war films whatever their country of origin. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari (1953) may be a formally more perfect film, and a film that has more to say about the nature of war, but its chill beauty is far removed from the warm humanity and the reverence for life that Ichikawa’s so movingly conveys. The Burmese Harp won the San Giorgio Prize at Venice. Its U.S. release, delayed by eleven years, was likely prompted by the American sixties peace movement, which embraced it.

Here is a film of eloquent simplicity, befitting its literary source: Michio Takeyama’s 1946 novel aimed at introducing to children the tenets of Buddhism. The film opens with a shot of a barren and desolate landscape, a visual rendering of the bleakness and inhumanity of war. Dirge-like music is heard on the soundtrack. Image and sound combine, then, to suggest a vast graveyard, implying the equation of war and human death. Titles appear, in context a kind of epitaph: “Down in Burma, soil is blood-red. So are rocks.” Now a reflective voiceover replaces the titles: “It’s such a long time since the war ended. The war has left many sad stories indelibly in our heart. By July 1945 the war was going badly.” Thus the memory of war becomes the “life” of the film—life, that is, commemorating the lost and the dead. This will be the style of the film throughout: a surface of utter clarity and simplicity revealing in its depths below a complex of associations. The result is a film of sheer poetry.

The sound of an explosion ends this hypnotic introduction.

Past the introduction, the opening movement introduces Inouye Company, the platoon of soldiers among whom is Private Mizushima, whose constant companion is his lute patterned after a Burmese harp. Its plaintive sound helps establish the symbolism of music so central to the film, and by the way the relationship between Mizushima and his commander. Captain Inouye has studied music; he has earned an advanced degree in this field. The outbreak of war, however, diverted the course of his life; but he chose to maintain a fingerhold on the continuity of this course by teaching his musically unschooled men to sing. The beauty of their choral endeavors suggests the haven of humanity they perpetuate in the midst of their grueling and violent existence; their songs are nostalgic and sentimental ones transporting their souls to home. Inspired by Inouye, Mizushima handcrafted his simulated “Burmese harp.” Its restful sounds are the repository of the men’s embrace of life in the midst of so much death. The music expresses their souls. There is, though, a wider reference to it than the coping and survival mechanism it provides; the music by its spiritual and heartfelt expression counters the imperialist motive of war, the power of governments that discounts the humanity of the ordinary people who become the soldiers and the other victims of war. Mizushima will take in the course of the film a highly individual and transformative journey; but we should not forget—and we never do forget—that in some sense he is the extension of his comrades, including Inouye, whose love of music in the first instance inspired him.

A momentous encounter completes the film’s first movement. The company is pressing forward to the Thai border. The elderly leader of the village into which the starving company stumbles explains: “The Himalayas are the homeland of our soul. Our wish is to see them once.” Music; mountain: one restfully looking back to the commonplace ties of human affection, the other looking beyond to the lasting peace of a final rest. Music and mountain: the ties that bind; the ties that unbind. Music and mountain: life as communal and existential; life as solitary, and preparatory for death. Of course, this ‘food for thought’ given a young Japanese soldier coincides with the more immediately sustaining food to eat given him and his comrades. Thus the film posits a divided human motive, a pair of contrary needs, if you will. For a moment, though, both of these seem to be headed, disastrously, for a common resolution. The women flee the village leader’s shack, the communal meeting-place; British soldiers approach. The two platoons, each to the other the enemy, are about to meet.

What to do? The Japanese soldiers, like sitting ducks, are on the verge of being massacred. Is there any hope? Inouye proposes that they sing, as if untroubled—ironic, this: when ever have they sung when untroubled?—in order to convince the British that they, Inouye Company, aren’t aware of any danger. Outside the shack is a cart loaded with explosives. If they can procure that, wouldn’t they stand a chance of defending themselves against the enemy’s imminent attack? Still singing as a ruse, the men venture outside and turn the cart around, as if in play though in fact terrified, knowing all the while that a single British shot into the store of explosives will blow them all up—a scene of suspense comparable in force to those of the trucks carrying nitroglycerine in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953). But what happens is unexpected. Inside, in anticipation of the final deadly showdown, Inouye and his men, abetted by the harpist’s playing, start singing “Home, Sweet Home”; the British do likewise. Tentatively, each side approaches the other out in the open, both sides given over to thoughts of home. There will be no battle here. The war ended three days earlier.

An idea familiar to antiwar material informs this terrifying, ultimately heartrending passage: that the fighting men on both sides in a war are identical in their humanity. Do both groups of soldiers not dream of an end to the fighting? Do they both not dream of going home? However, to the victors belong the spoils—the human spoils. Inouye Company is headed for a concentration camp; the war over, the crushing defeat of Japan has only just begun. Now prisoners of war, Inouye addresses his men, expressing the uncertainty they all feel. Will they be killed? He cannot say; but he can tell them how the war ended, about the ultimate atomic bombing of their cities. In order to advance the notion of the shared humanity of citizen soldiers on both sides, it is thus necessary for the enemy that captures them to be British, not Americans. There is an enormity of war that defines war by going well beyond what even war has been known to be. Ichikawa, through Inouye, refers to this scientific American barbarism in less than a sentence; it’s a passing reference, like a snowflake on a sunlit rock. It summarizes the monstrousness of war and the human cost of war.

It turns out there is still one last battle. On Triangle Mountain a Japanese troop, perhaps unaware that the war has ended, continues to fight the British. Mizushima’s last official mission is to approach these holdouts and convince them to lay down their arms. The plan, therefore, is his separation from the troop that had become his second home, the execution of the mission on Triangle Mountain, and his reunion with the imprisoned Inouye Company in Mudon. Why Mizushima? The symbolism of his lute provides the key. Mizushima’s haunting music, full of nostalgia, might entice the last Japanese warriors out of their warring mindset with the promise of returning home. It isn’t so simple or assured a mission, however, especially since the British soldiers, when Mizushima arrives at their entrenchment, will give him a scant thirty minutes to attempt convincing the holdout Japanese. “Good luck,” the impatient British commander, poised for tea time, tersely concludes, as though already inflicting doom. In the holdouts’ cave, Mizushima makes his pleas. The men will hear none of it! What difference that the war has already been lost? Surrender? That breaks faith with dead comrades! How can Mizushima be such a coward? Mizushima’s lute is tossed to the floor of the hideout; there is a quickly edited closeup of the instrument. Privately, Mizushima, who knows the loyalty and patriotism of his countrymen, laments, “If only I had more time!” The thirty minutes alotted to him are all but up; he will leave, not in defeat or failure, but to persuade the British to give him a little more time. The other soldiers, incensed by the white cloth he is waving, prevent his leavetaking. The war thus exacts yet another round of horror. After the British attack, closeup after closeup reveals one after another incident of human death. A long shot discloses a battlefield of slaughter. There is only one survivor: Mizushima. But even his spared life is a kind of death, weighted as it is by the deaths of the others he failed to prevent. Indeed, Ichikawa films Mizushima’s “coming to” in a telling way, showing a shaft of light into the cave to suggest Mizushima’s initial uncertainty as to the state he inhabits: the living or the dead. Unbeknownst to him, Mizushima has awakened to a clearer vision of things, and there is yet greater clarity to come.

This is only preparation for what will become of Mizushima. His odyssey has only just begun. It’s a journey that will symbolically echo that of Siddhartha, the cocooned prince whose discovery of human suffering launched his long, incremental transformation into the Buddha. In the midst of these men whose lives he did not save, Mizushima has taken a baby step along the path to his becoming a Buddhist monk.

The beginning of the next movement of The Burmese Harp reestablishes the connection between Inouye and Mizushima, providing in the aftermath of the first movement’s conclusion a thematic basis for the connection. The new setting is the town of Mudon; a gray day finds rain falling on and dripping from the barbed-wire fence surrounding Inouye Company. The fence does more than indicate the confinement of these prisoners of war—a point that the flying British flag in the foreground of another establishing shot underscores. Shots of villagers either at rest or engaged in various activities remind us of the foreign nature of the Japanese soldiers’ confinement, but the twisted wet fence—a metaphor for war—also indicates the platoon’s separation from one of their members, Mizushima, who after ten days has still not rejoined his comrades. An elderly village woman who brings food to sell to the prisoners contributes a good deal to the passage. Her arrival is greeted by a shot; she quips that it was probably a Hindu who failed to recognize her—a subtle reminder of the nationalistic differences and (in this case minor) antipathies that provide supporting beams for those conflicts that have the potential for escalating into war. Although fleeting, like much else in a film that is “packed” for all its apparent simplicity, the point is this: the war over, humanity is still the same. It is more cruel, in fact, than even the villager’s remark suggests. The men are trading their belongings for items of food in the basket she has brought; one man trades a bamboo flute he made for this purpose only the night before. Given the symbolism of music in the film, this reduction of music to mere barter discloses the pathetic nature of the defeat these soldiers endure. And why must they sell anything to secure food? Indirectly the film thus reveals the continuing cruelty of the Allied forces, who clearly have no intention of meeting their moral and humane obligation to provide their prisoners with the necessary means for survival. (This is in addition to the forced labor they extract from their prisoners.) This failure to provide sustenance—a condition reversing the bounty of food that the company, starving, received in the village where they were so recently captured—is a denial of the prisoners’ humanity: another reminder that, having learned nothing (they rarely do), the victors perpetuate the underpinnings and causes of war. (On an immensely reduced scale, this simple denial of food to prisoners—this callousness—echoes the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) By contrast to the captors’ implied baseness and the old villager’s being all-business, Inouye presses again the question of Mizushima’s whereabouts. The woman had promised to inquire at hospital, but she keeps forgetting; she promises afresh. (When one of the men verbally assaults her for her forgetfulness, Inouye chides him, saying there is nothing to be gained by anger.) Where could Mizushima be? There is the sense that Inouye feels divided from a part of himself: “I should have gone [on the Triangle Mountain mission] myself.” Their connection also exists from the vantage of Mizushima, who will teach a Burmese boy to play the harp as Inouye once taught him.

Indeed, throughout the film the alternation between closeups of members and tableaux of the whole company in long shot stresses the identification of individuals and the group, and vice versa. Mizushima is attempting to reunite with his comrades in Mudon. However, the different course that is his will extend the experience of the others, including Inouye. The path Mizushima takes will atone for his failure to save lives, and this, by extension, will atone not only for his own participation in war but also for the participation of his comrades. His is the path that will keep the music alive for them all.

The next time Inouye and his men see the old woman, she brings news of their comrade, relating the whole sorry episode that occurred on Triangle Mountain. Nearly everyone was killed; it is assumed that Mizushima was among the dead. But an odd event earlier occurred, one that had about it an aura of premonition: the appearance of a Buddhist monk, his shoulder adorned by one of the five parrots the old woman’s husband had caught the day before. Inouye had thought that this man resembled Mizushima. One of the five birds remains unsold. Inouye and his men buy it. The bird, for them, symbolizes Mizushima, whom they presume dead.

He is not. Indeed, the “monk” with the parrot (whom we see from the back), we will discover once we catch the achronological nature of this part of the narrative, is Mizushima. We pick up on his journey through a bewitching Burmese countryside: one of the most hauntingly beautiful depictions of Nature imaginable, rendered very much this-worldly though very subtly infused with the otherworldly by Minoru Yokoyama’s black-and-white cinematography—throughout (like Akira Ifukube’s music), one of the film’s most highly expressive and deeply moving aspects. Now Mizushima commits an impulsive act that allows him to discard his military outfit for another that might safeguard his journey to Mudon. While the Buddhist monk is bathing in a river, Mizushima steals and dons the man’s clothes. He falls to the ground in terrible hunger, but soon after, mistaking him for the monk that his robes profess he is, farmers bring him food and bow to him in perfect humility. Now he falls to the ground to devour his bounty. His next discovery is one of the film’s startling ironies: a vulture flying up, seemingly at him, from the hillside below. It and other vultures have been, like him, devouring their bounty on the ground: a massive slew of corpses, proceeding all the way down to the shore. Mizushima has stumbled onto a killing field; the sights and smells now below and before him disgust him and move him, but as yet he doesn’t know what he can do about this except burn the first batch of bodies he finds in order to disperse the vultures. However, unbeknownst to him, the humbling that near-starvation as well as the unearned reverence of the farmers have wrought upon him has inched him along on his transformative journey.

I am reminded here of a beautiful shot from John Ford’s underappreciated The Fugitive (1947). In a Latin American country where the practice of faith has been outlawed and those Catholic priests who’ve been caught have been executed, one fugitive returns to his church, opening wide its two doors with outstretched arms. What we see is his shadow; the arms of this shadow remain fixed in their outstretched position a heartbeat too long. Thus Ford exposes it as a posture of pride—the appearance rather than the substance of humility, the product of the man’s martyr-complex. It remains for the rest of the film to chart the padre’s stumbling journey as he incrementally translates the posture into reality by shifting the focus of his attention from himself, and from the self-pity engendered by the disfavor into which the practice of his faith has fallen, to the needs of others oppressed by the current regime. (To quote Tennyson: “ . . . merit lives from man to man,/ And not from man, O Lord, to thee.”) Without being conscious of his own transformation, the priest eventually becomes what he once only appeared to be. Mizushima, too, is on the path to becoming what he now appears to be.

This is critical. In either a sanctified or a psychological universe, the appearance or posture of humility, while an impediment to attaining the reality, also signals the possibility of this attainment. It’s no mere coincidence that the theft of a man’s simple outfit will help transform Mizushima’s human substance to suit these clothes. It is the path that Mizushima will choose; it is the path that will choose Mizushima. Mysteriously, a person appears in a boat making its way to shore; the rower, this figure informs Mizushima, will take him to Mudon. This is the vessel, then, that delivers Mizushima, disguised as a monk, to the town where Inouye will see him with a parrot on his shoulder. But at this point Mizushima has every intention of dispensing with his priestly garb and rejoining his imprisoned comrades and eventually returning to Japan.

Why this stroke of achronology (and not the film’s first, either), this wrenching of linear narrative? By cross-cutting between Mizushima and the rest of Inouye Company, Ichikawa risked holding our attention on time, either as sequential (first this happened to Inouye Company, and then this happened to Mizushima, etc.) or parallel and simultaneous (this happened to Inouye Company, and at the same time this happened to Mizushima, and so forth). But by rippling the chronology in this way, Ichikawa shifts our focus from any time scheme to the characters involved and their interconnectedness. At the same time, he lends the film one of its several shimmering notes of mystery, the purpose of whose accumulation is to suggest the spiritual nature of the universe in which the characters move and perform even the most mundane tasks.

In Mudon, Mizushima’s larger mission becomes clear. Witnessing a British burial service for an unknown Japanese soldier, he is ferociously humbled. Images of carnage—all the corpses on the hillside and the beach that he so recently abandoned—return to him: images he had brought with him; but seeing these as rooted in his heart, and not simply occasioning disgust and horror, required another step of his journey. Mizushima decides to devote himself to honoring the Japanese dead by burying them. He is en route to returning to the actual corpses so he may bury them—we see closeups of his suddenly rained-upon steps—when he crosses the bridge on which, headed in the opposite direction, is Inouye Company. We see again the earlier moment of Captain Inouye’s not-quite-recognition as Mizushima, of course recognizing his companions, keeps his head down so that he is not diverted from his course. On the other side of the water, he buries the anonymous dead with his hands as silent Burmese men, lined in a row, watch transfixed as though encountering a sacred ritual. In long shot, Mizushima provides the only movement we see beneath a vast, desolate clouded sky. This changes. First one of the mute observers and then the others join the “monk” in burying the corpses. Mizushima by his example has directed this. This is not the same thing as being given food, as had earlier happened to him, because of the stolen garb. These strangers, equipped with shovels, aren’t moved by his appearance; they are moved by his devotion. Mizushima’s spiritual substance has thus begun to suit his priestly appearance. Long ago, when I first saw The Burmese Harp, I wondered: How could these men be ready with shovels in hand? I misunderstood, thinking, they themselves had come to bury the dead. I thought therefore literally rather than in the symbolical mode in which Ichikawa’s film breathes. The shovels in the strangers’ hands show humanity’s readiness to follow an example of reverence, devotion and humility. Here is perhaps the single most gracious moment of the film—the kind of moment into which all others in a film may drift and for which an entire film lives.

One thing more extends and (forgive the pun) crystallizes this extraordinary moment. Mizushima finds in the sand a Burmese ruby. At last one of the Burmese men speaks: “It is the spirit of the dead.” Standing now, Mizushima clutches the stone, drawing it in a fist to his heart while bowing his head and tightening his shut eyes. Piercing.

A mysterious find, this stone, and the brief exchange of dialogue (in the stranger’s language) between the Japanese Mizushima and the Burmese man create a vibrant instance of the living executing their sacred obligation as the guardians of the dead. Indeed, the participation of these strangers for whom one of their members speaks releases the image from a nationalistic box. By extending him, these non-Japanese transform Mizushima into the guardian of all the dead. (Later, Mizushima visits the British War Dead Repository in Mudon.)

Immediately following the transformation we’ve witnessed of “monk” into monk the film cuts to a Buddhist temple in Mudon. The shots of temple spires and closeups of statuary Buddha faces, Eisensteinian, are deeply mysterious, and the subsequent shots of ordinary people at prayer comingle the mysterious and the commonplace, the eternal and the mortal. Visiting the temple are Inouye and his men, and the juxtapositon of the transformed Mizushima and his comrades, separated by distance, reaffirms their connection. Still, the connection between Inouye himself and Mizushima is stressed. That evening, in their quarters of confinement, Inouye sits apart from his men, now typically despondent, his companion the parrot (which he has named Mizushima) that further suggests the connection. Inouye also, ironically as a result of his unshakable thoughts about Mizushima, has grown more contemplative, more private, more inward, like the harpist he no longer is quite sure is really dead. For earlier, at the temple, he and the men heard a Burmese harp being played in the distinctive way that Mizushima played. Oh, of course it’s the beggar boy who plays “Home, Sweet Home” for British coins. But who taught him to play like that? Before they can question the child, their curfew descends, locking at least Inouye in a vault of perplexed wonder and profound disturbance. We grasp the full extent of his wish for Mizushima to be alive; not only does Inouye desire this for Mizushima’s sake but for his guilty own since it was he who chose Mizushima for the mission on Triangle Mountain that presumably led to his death. The film is so simple, and beneath the simplicity so complex; for the idea accumulates by the continually stressed Mizushima-Inouye connection that at the same time that Mizushima is being born to a new life his former commander is imaginatively—spiritually—willing him back to life. What binds these two events in separate dimensions is precisely the death of Mizushima’s former self that must precede either his rebirth or Inouye’s wishfulfilling resurrection of him. In some mystical way, the divided Inouye and Mizushima, each in his own anguish in search of serenity, are existing and behaving in concert even as they “miss” one another on one real bridge and other metaphoric bridges. Their connectedness is somehow the mystery at the heart of the film. In a sense, hasn’t Inouye been transformed, too? In a sense, didn’t he also “die” on Triangle Mountain?

Their separation, though, gives the film a troubled complexion. Mizushima’s chosen path must divide him forever from his former comrades and his homeland. Inouye and Mizushima “meet” again twice in darkness, where they are invisible to one another, though each is aware of the other’s presence. Mizushima and Inouye Company, however, “meet” again in spectacular sunshine and amidst both Nature’s floral beauty and various statuary Buddhas (humanity’s “beauty”: art), with Inouye (relatively listlessly) leading the men in song; within a temple shrine Mizushima is close by. He has come to bury the ruby. The choral singing of his former comrades inspires Mizushima to accompany them on his lute. The men hear this and swarm the impenetrable frontal exterior of the shrine, clamoring for their comrade. Mizushima identifies each voice, speaking softly, so only he himself can hear, the name belonging to the voice. The assault on the sacred cannot continue, and Inouye leads his men away as Mizushima watches from a circular high dugout window, his hands enormous, and helpless, in the forefront of the shot. There can be no mistaking the shot’s import: Mizushima is watching the last vestiges of his former life depart. From now on there can be no turning back. His will be a hard, humble and solitary life. The day before the men are to return to Japan they gather outdoors as, with the barbed wire and some distance between them, Mizushima and the beggar boy stand side by side. Both parrots adorn Mizushima’s shoulders, the old woman having pledged to give Mizushima the returned “Mizushima” should she come across the priest. The company sings “Home, Sweet Home” as Mizushima accompanies them on the lute he takes from the child’s hands. He then plays them the Japanese song of farewell. This is the last they will see of him, however long they carry in their mind’s ear the plucked strains of his music.

What precisely is the meaning of Mizushima’s life in relation to the other members of Inouye Company? For one thing, the already ongoing secularization of Japan that the American occupation only deepened makes of those individuals who devote themselves to monastic Buddhism a repository of part of Japan’s past and some of the culture’s deepest currents. But surely the path that Mizushima has taken speaks most directly to the issue of the war. Given the mystical connection amongst people that Ichikawa’s film premises, Mizushima’s devoted commemoration of the war dead—his atonement for the inhumanity of war—enables his former fellow soldiers and citizens to get on with their lives. His future is bound up in their recently ended war experience; now others can move ahead, unburdened by the obsessive responsibility he has assumed. They can get on with the business of resurrecting Japan. His life will ensure, at whatever remove, the survival of Japan’s soul, for which most others will have no time in the economically obsessive times ahead. Moreover, his comrades extend Mizushima no less than he extends them. He will never set foot on Japanese soil again, but through his returning comrades his spirit is headed home.

The day of the men’s departure a letter reaches them from Mizushima; Inouye reads it aloud during the shipboard journey home. In it, Mizushima explains why he cannot go home, no matter how he might wish to. “I cannot leave the bones lying scattered on the hills.”

The Burmese Harp thus ends on a note of trenchant irony, for the members of Inouye Company will themselves “scatter” upon reaching Japan yet will remain spiritually connected through the agency of Mizushima, his music and his mission. This lyrical and humanistic film is so different in style and tone from the horrific (and brilliant) film about war that Ichikawa would make three years hence, wherein cannibalism is a metaphor for war: Kagi (Fires on the Plain, 1959). The Burmese Harp reveres the living by revering the dead. Its extended flashback in effect makes possible Japan’s future by locating the burden of the past in one character, by extension, a definite group of people rather than everyone. In this the film faithfully follows Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece of the medieval Italian countryside, Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester; The Flowers of St. Francis, 1950), at whose conclusion all the Franciscan monks disband and “scatter” in order to spread the message of their faith in Jesus Christ. Their leader, St. Francis of Assisi, will in effect live on in their faith and humility. So it is with Mizushima, who will persist in his comrades’ memory and continue to inspire them.

The connection between these two radiant films is deeper than that. (Incidentally, both Francesco, giullare di Dio and The Burmese Harp are among the 45 films that in 1995, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of cinema, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications listed as especially meritorious.) Both these films exist at the crossroads of the humanistic and the religious and spiritual, two motives often misrepresented as contrary or incompatible. The thematic point at which they merge, as each film in its own way shows, is the spiritual connectedness of human beings.

With The Burmese Harp Ichikawa, the former animated cartoonist, joined the ranks of the finest Japanese film artists, armed with a thoughtful script by his perennial partner, wife Natto Wada, and a splendid cast headed by Shoji Yasui as Mizushima and Rentaro Mikune as Inouye. Beneath the old-man makeup, let me add, the village elder hankering for the Himalayas is Yunosuke Ito, the actor who plays the novelist, a stranger, to whom Kanji Watanabe opens up in a bar, disclosing his terminal cancer, in Akira Kurosawa’s incomparable Ikiru (1952).

RANCHO NOTORIOUS (Fritz Lang, 1952)

A fascinating Western noir, Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious is propelled by a recurring ballad of “hate, murder and revenge.” The images seem to elaborate on the song, “Legend of Chuck-A-Luck.” Therefore, the song (with music and lyrics by Ken Darby) seems to attribute the film to a legendary domain, pointedly distancing us the viewer from the unfolding drama. This deepens the distancing achieved by the remoteness of the Western setting sometime in the 1870s and the use of color. (The cinematographer is Hal Mohr, whose specialty is dreaminess: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1935; Phantom of the Opera, 1943.) Flamboyant yet elusive, convoluted in the machinations of its meanest characters yet as persistent as a train going down a track, Lang’s third and final Western—the other two are The Return of Frank James (1940) and Western Union (1941)—altogether seems a dream existing in a dream. Along with You Only Live Once (1937) and Clash by Night (1952), it is Lang’s finest American film.

Even the meaningless title, imposed over Lang’s objections by RKO studio head Howard Hughes, fits the material perfectly. (Lang had wanted the film to be called Chuck-A-Luck.)

What sets the narrative wheel in motion is the rape and murder of Beth, a girl alone at the counter one day in her father’s general store in a small Wyoming town. Set to marry her in eight days, cowboy Vern Haskell is left with a gaping hole in his psyche, which instantly is filled with hatred for the anonymous wrongdoer and a determination to exact revenge. Michael E. Grost, an Internet film critic, thus finds the film to be “deeply feminist, in taking with great seriousness the horrible crime of rape.” This is certainly possible, so long as we admit that Vern’s course of action divorces him from a feminist impulse. Vern’s pursuit of “justice” objectifies the victim all over again, consigning her memory to the status of mere touchstone for his vicious, oppressive rage, and implying that the crime committed is one of a violation of his property rights. By extension, one may infer—although, of course, he himself would be incapable of such a formulation—that Vern felt only he, as her husband had she lived, was entitled to rape Beth. There is a sourness to the tone of all this psychosocial complication that, while not excluding the possibility of frustrated feminism on Lang’s part, suggests that other meanings may be more central. Indeed, the film’s Langian sense of determinism all but requires the rape and murder of Beth—hardly a felicitous springboard for feminist inquiry. In addition, at some point the pun contained in Vern’s last name, Haskell, likely kicks in: has kill, as in has to kill, may imply that Beth’s fate is mere pretext—rationalization—for Vern’s murderous impulses and vengeful mission, making the death of his beloved, in fact, a matter of convenience for him. Perhaps her end spares Vern the forfeit of his idealization of Beth; this cancellation of their wedding spares him the ordeal of embracing the reality of her with which marriage would have confronted him. Vern has been left with an image of Beth that he hopes to hold onto—and an image of himself, as her avenger, that may tighten the psychic grip necessary to accomplish the task.

Underscoring the theme of possessiveness is the glittering brooch that Vern pins on Beth at their last meeting and which her killer confiscates as a memento of the rape. In effect, Vern is after this prize to reclaim it as his own. This all but identifies Vern with Beth’s (as yet) unknown rapist and killer. Certainly Vern’s quest fails to characterize him as any sort of shining knight, for as the ballad tells us, “ . . . deep within him burn the fires of hate, murder and revenge.”

Different viewers will interpret Vern’s tenderness toward Beth differently. Some may take it at face value. But, for me, what is so startling about that opening scene between the two on the threshold of their wedding is its unreality, its adolescent nature. It’s a purely conventional moment between young lovebirds that’s undercut by a curious remark Vern makes. When giving Beth the brooch, Vern boasts that the person who sold it to him said the brooch came all the way from Paris. Later, this ridiculous comment will connect the brooch to the world of an outlaw and gunslinger named Fairmont, who goes by the nickname Frenchy. Initially, though, it strikes us as juvenile that Vern seems to be unaware he has been the victim of a merchant’s puffery; he seems to believe that the piece of jewelry crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the U.S. just to flatter his ego as gift-giver and to adorn his soon-to-be-bride. This is a presumably grown man speaking, but his impossible innocence here reflects on the impossible purity and innocence to which he has mentally consigned Beth. It is he who has thus made her, at least symbolically, ripe for rape.

Of course, the exchanges between Beth and Vern are no less realistic for being giddily foolish. It is often the case that in wooing a girl, after all, a man is after a prize that marriage will suddenly convert into a flesh-and-blood woman—one who cannot help but contest the ego that her succumbing to his wooing previously nurtured and stroked. Weddings consummate the wooing; marriage is another matter entirely. The fact that Rancho Notorious is prevented from ever reaching Vern and Beth’s wedding, let alone their nuts-and-bolts, two-human marriage, is one of the film’s dream, even fairy-tale, elements. One is reminded here of Much Ado About Nothing, whose merry romp stops short of Beatrice and Benedick’s wedding, sparing them (and us) the undoing of their love that marriage, according to Shakespeare, would likely have brought about. In tune with this idea, at the other end, is Ingmar Bergman’s film Scenes from a Marriage (1974), which shows a couple who become friendly, finally, after divorce, after marriage.

Whatever its nature, Vern’s quest involves the unravelling of a mystery: Who assaulted and murdered Beth? If, as I have suggested, in some sense (out of Sophocles’s Œdipus Rex) the answer to this is “the quester, or detective, himself,” then a significant motivation on Vern’s part is to deny this truth by pinning the rap on somebody else. Like Œdipus and Hamlet,* Vern Haskell looks outside himself to keep looking too closely or carefully within. In part, the fatalism of the film derives from the fact that, afflicted with a lack of self-knowledge, Vern cannot help but do this. All the while he is searching for the solution of the mystery at hand, he is venturing deeper and deeper into fantastic territory that removes him more and more from the truth about Beth’s death, their planned wedding, and himself. Unlike Œdipus, Vern—and Lang’s film along with him—will remain embedded in a dream. Vern will never face the truth because something in the American experience denies him tragic dimension and renders him, instead, cheap, evasive and dishonest. In many ways, Rancho Notorious is, thematically, the mirror-opposite of, four years hence, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), which also centers on a quest, but one that is tragic regarding its quester, Ethan Edwards, and the America he represents—a film in which self-discovery and self-awareness are results of his quest.

From an old man, the partner whom the rapist-killer (the projection of Vern’s denial of responsibility) has shot in the back, Vern gets this clue as the man expires: “Chuck-A-Luck.” This is the film’s Rosebud, Grost notes; if only Vern can find out what Chuck-A-Luck means, he will learn, he believes, everything. Of course, chuck-a-luck is a gambling game involving a wheel of fortune and bets placed on color-coded numbers on a board. The game was popular in the Southwest, into which Vern rides ever deeper and deeper in search of his solution. Instinctively, however, he knows that the dying man’s utterance refers to something other than the game, to a place, perhaps, where he will learn the identity of Beth’s assailant. It is worth noting that the game chuck-a-luck derives from the French roulette. Vern’s trail is littered with things French.

As Vern questions people along the way, he encounters a series of recollections and accounts that come to us as dreamlike, exaggerated, borderline surreal flashbacks—dreams within the housing dream of the quest. They involve a fabulous woman of mystery, the powerfully alluring and unforgettable Altar Keane, who has seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Keane, which sounds like Kane, as in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), tweaks us a bit, given that Chuck-A-Luck has already asserted itself as a facsimile of Rosebud from that film. It turns out that, years earlier, with Frenchy Fairmont’s help, Altar Keane, a saloon singer, right after being fired, made her fortune at the chuck-a-luck table in the saloon and has since retreated to her (relatively) palatial domain, a horse ranch which hills hide in its valley, and which is also called Chuck-A-Luck. Vern gains his entrance to this world-within-the-world by befriending Frenchy Fairmont, an outlaw, “the fastest gun in the West,” and Altar’s longtime lover, and by helping him escape jail. Vern’s first distant view of Chuck-A-Luck, on horseback from on high, identifies it as a dreamlike vision—as glittering as the brooch that will reappear there, worn by Altar. The place is a dream within a dream.

Indeed, the film questions its own reality, shifting its images to dreams. I noted the flashbacks that are conjured for us by people’s recollections or accounts of Altar Keane. Are the images in these real? Dreams? How much is accurately remembered, how much exaggerated, how much wishfully invented? (In a deputy sheriff’s account, for instance, Altar is lasciviously riding him, as if he were a horse, in a saloon race, in which she is wearing a fall, a golden faux-pony tail that rounds out an impossible portrait conjoining corruption and innocence.) Daniel Taradash’s splendid script (from a story by Silvia Richards) pokes at us with these possibilities as some of those invoking Keane make comments such as these: “I don’t swear this is true, because I wasn’t here. But this is how they tell it.” “I was told a story . . . If you want to believe what you hear . . . I don’t know if it’s true, but . . . .” Those familiar with the rhetorical strategies of the trickster narrator in Billy Budd will recognize American author Herman Melville’s method for throwing into question military officialdom and its pronouncements, as well as the instant history, the so-called truth, promoted by newspaper accounts.** But Lang’s aim in Rancho Notorious is somewhat different. Lang is questioning the reality, as well as the morality, of the rags-to-riches American experience that Altar Keane represents. Keane got her gains through Frenchy’s cheating intervention and she has used the money to build her own Chuck-A-Luck, a hideout for thieves 10% of whose stolen acquisitions she appropriates. The façade of American capitalism, that wealth is won by honest work, is a dream, according to Lang’s film; the sordid reality lies underneath.

The night she met Frenchy Fairmont at Baldy’s Palace, Altar, according to the flashback, was dressed in red and black. A wall painting is an abstract design consisting of red, white and black. The chuck-a-luck wheel is red, white and black. Moreover, when first we see Frenchy in his jail cell, he is dressed in these colors, and the same colors, in a more subdued incarnation, dominate Altar’s residence and place of operations, Chuck-A-Luck. Without doubt, this color scheme is a parody of the red, white and blue of the American flag, but the virulence of Lang’s parody fully kicks in only when we recall that red, white and black were also the colors of the Nazi flag, which was adorned by a swastika instead of a brooch. Half-Jewish, Lang fled Nazi Germany once Hitler came to power. Interestingly, his first stop on his eventual journey to the United States was France, the nation that produced Stendhal’s (Marie-Henri Beyle’s) novel Le rouge et le noir, in which the color red is identified with the military and black is identified with the Church. I don’t know quite what to make of all this, but it’s interesting, in this context, that Keane’s Christian name is Altar. In another context, she is so named because she is a constant reminder to Vern of the wedding that did not take place owing to Beth’s brutal death.

Lang’s cinema had always been fatalistic; in light of the Holocaust, it could scarcely become less so. The nightmare of Nazism haunts Rancho Notorious as Lang addresses, and attacks, the dangerous nature of idealistic national myths, whether they are promoted in Germany or the United States. Vern’s lack of self-knowledge is an index of the delusions that such myths generate, and his grimly hilarious series of wrong assumptions as to who killed Beth from among the suspects at Chuck-A-Luck underscores his incapacity for self-criticism. Like the Nazis, this film implies, McCarthyite America pins its problems on “the Other.” The Nazis had their Jews to scapegoat; the Americans, their communists. (Actually, the Nazis also scapegoated communists.) In the latter case, the film further implies, the scapegoating is a distraction from America’s delusional foundation in myths about enterprise and financial success. Chuck-A-Luck, a parody of the American Dream, represents the nightmare of capitalism, which entraps human lives in a circle of luck and unfair competition, with its hidden or denied elements of advantage and disadvantage, and which promotes itself as providing fair, open opportunity. One shot is trenchant in this regard: Altar Keane, dressed in lavender, riding triumphantly in an open carriage, her black maid, dressed in black, sitting right behind her, shielding her from the sun with a black parasol.

Arthur Kennedy is good as Vern, who betrays his friendship with Frenchy by becoming Altar’s lover, Mel Ferrer is (for a change) excellent as Frenchy, whose reputation as a fast gun, it turns out, exceeds his actual skill, and Marlene Dietrich, who had had a brief affair with Lang a lifetime earlier, is brilliant as Altar Keane, whose land, Vern roughly points out to her, is a graveyard. The film implies, I am afraid, we Americans are all buried there.

* See my Hamlet essay, “The King’s Caught Conscience,” Ball State University Forum, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (Spring 1978), 3-11.

** See my essay “Preinterpretation and Billy Budd,” Essays in Literature, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1986), 103-113.

MOUCHETTE (Robert Bresson, 1966)

From the 1937 novel Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos, Robert Bresson’s austere, elliptical Mouchette begins with a woman seated alone in a spare church who wonders aloud how her family will manage after her impending death. We hear her footsteps trailing as she exits the shot in which she had occupied the foreground. The camera stays fixed; it is the steadfastness of God, perhaps, who oversees the exiting of mortals from the human scene. One might as well give God a name for this occasion. Call him Bresson. We are left with one thing in the frame, one thing in the church that is constant, that is to say, that we witnessed in the background of the shot even when the woman was present: a simple empty chair facing in the opposite direction from the camera as the woman had faced. Even though we have just met the worried mother who has just departed, the emptiness of the chair suggests to the quick of our hearts her soon-to-be-vacated life. We are implicated in her illness, her dying, her death and her family: three children, one of them an infant, and a spouse. The film will end with what appears to be, and may be, the suicide of her daughter, 14-year-old Mouchette. In fits and starts Mouchette rolls down a hill, entering and departing frames, the camera pausing to remain on the vacated scene rather than following her, just as it had done with her mother in the beginning in church. (Chords of Claudio Monteverdi’s Magnificat—the two brief bursts, the film’s only background music—further connect the opening and the close of the film.) We miss the point of entry when Mouchette tumbles into the river, but we note the evidence on the surface of the water. Some will say that Mouchette has fulfilled her mother’s concern and apprehension. Others will think otherwise, saying instead that Mouchette has redeemed her mother’s soul of part of the burden of her concern and apprehension. To know for certain which it is one would have to know the ways of humanity and the ways of God.

The setting is the provincial village of Saint-Venant in northern France. The pre-credit opening introducing us to Mouchette’s mother raises an expectation that the first scene following the opening credits will show us the family over whose fate the unidentified woman has expressed such concern. This doesn’t happen. The camera has shifted from indoors to outdoors, from inside the church to woods at the outskirts of the village. The intricacy of leaves in daylight has replaced the church’s dark, spare interior. Three characters participate in this scene, two humans and an animal. We do not yet know the identities of the two men, just as we have yet to learn who the woman at the outset is. One, hidden from view from the other, is the game warden, Mathieu. Our surrogate as we also observe, hidden from view, he is silently watching—what we see of Mathieu, in silent inserts, are his eyes espying—Arsène, a poacher. We hear the rustle of the poacher’s footsteps on the ground of the woods. Arsène is using a twig and looped string to trap a game bird by the leg. It works. The bird, caught, flutters desperately. After Arsène leaves, Mathieu extricates the bird from its “noose” and lets the bird go. The bird flies away, the sound of its flutter echoing its anxious flutter when caught, perhaps hinting that its vulnerability to capture renders constant its painfully qualified freedom. The juxtaposition of this passage with the pre-credit one may seem to associate the bird with the mother, presaging her death as freedom from sickness, but soon afterwards we finally see Mouchette as she is walking home, alone, from school. Now we associate the caught bird with her—Mouchette, whose name means “little fly.” Her earthly freedom will come at the end: the moment of water covering her. Does God “test” and torture Mouchette, as well as the rest of us, before letting us go?

This suggestion would make Mouchette Bresson’s most (Emily) Dickinsonian film. However, the ending, with its Godly suggestion, is not the only context that the film provides for the association of Mouchette with Arsène’s trapped bird. Later, a drunken Arsène will rape Mouchette, after giving her shelter in a rainstorm, and then himself let her go. How does what we see early on in the film relate to Mouchette’s fortunes and fate? Is it the case that we are complying with Bresson’s clues leading us to the truth, Mouchette’s association with the caught bird? What if—what if Bresson is challenging the whole literary notion of such symbolism on the grounds of its reductivism when applied to cinema? What if, in addition, he means to imply that the associations that we draw in reality are often a “misreading” of the clues that experience, or God, seems to leave for us to decipher? What if in fact Bresson is pressing us to attend to Mouchette’s humanity rather than cobbling together an understanding of her from what in fact are random associations and meaningless clues? Throughout the film, Mouchette almost invariably will wear a blank, sullen expression. Perhaps this “mask” of hers reflects the burden of associations that have been projected onto her by the communal hostility that we will see in detail. Perhaps Bresson is prodding us to penetrate the mask, to see the humanity of the girl that lies behind it—the humanity that she keeps hidden as a means of self-protection. Or has Mouchette been thoroughly dehumanized by her environment? Bresson once said: “Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.” Very shortly before her own death, Mouchette observes a rabbit on the ground in its death throes. Is she identifying with this creature behind her blank expression?

I confess: I have long associated—at times, even identified—Mouchette with an animal myself: Balthazar, the donkey in Bresson’s immediately previous film, Au hasard Balthazar (1966), about which I have written the following:

A very strange and moving film, Au hasard Balthazar is the pilgrim’s progress of a saintly, downtrodden donkey in rural France. Indeed, Robert Bresson’s austere black-and-white film shows our world, or some segment of it, from Balthazar’s perspective. This world, the scene of the animal’s serial suffering, is cold, spiteful, cruel and criminal. Most people do not behave in ways worth emulating. One only hopes that the note of grace that Balthazar interjects reveals a more hospitable eternity beyond our world’s borders.
   The donkey, which is expressionless, has been described by critic J. Hoberman as “pure existence.” We follow the course of its life, from birth to death, as it passes from hand to hand, and sometimes back again, in what might be described as a portrait of perpetual orphanage. Briefly, Balthazar is featured in a circus, but the rest of its existence is an anonymous, hidden ordeal. The human characters, who also are inscrutable and expressionless, treat one another poorly, too, and may in some sense be kin to Balthazar.
   Formally, the action is conveyed through a lightning series of elliptical scenes that suggest a depth of experience beyond our capacity to plumb—or do I mean, beyond Balthazar’s capacity to plumb? In any case, only Balthazar demonstrates the perfect humility of Jesus that Christianity calls upon its members to emulate.
   The same year as Au hasard Balthazar, Bresson also made Mouchette, from Bernanos, a wonderful film about a human Balthazar, an abused rural teenager, who, experiencing rare liberty, rolls off a hill into a river and drowns herself.
   Both are exacting in their vision of human nature and among the most compassionate films ever made.

At some level, this association of Balthazar and Mouchette is banal and incontestable; both lead lives of incredible challenge and hardship. Now I am no longer sure, however, that the association between them works at all levels of Mouchette. Bresson may also mean for us to test and contest this association.

It is certainly the case that Mouchette is an object of derision among her peers, her schoolmates, as well as among adults, whose cruelty that of the children likely reflects. Mouchette’s family is poor, her father, who routinely smacks her, a drunkard (one piece of her mother’s deathbed advice to Mouchette is to steer clear of men who drink alcohol); above all, it is the poverty that is most troublesome as a threat to others. The village is, overall, not one of means, and the poverty of one family threatens other families with its looming possibility at some point for themselves. However, I am struck by an interesting discrepancy between the derision with which we think that Mouchette is targeted and the actual amount that comes her way. Typical of this is a trenchant schoolroom scene in which the teacher torments Mouchette who perfectly sings a song but for a single off-pitch note. The teacher presses Mouchette’s head down to the correct piano key, which she strikes again and again into Mouchette’s face—an extraordinary pedagogical assault. We see what Mouchette, her back towards them, can’t: her classmates are appalled by what their teacher is doing to her, fearful, perhaps, at their own vulnerability to such mistreatment. (Later in the film, Mouchette poignantly sings the song perfectly.) However, feeling humiliated before them, Mouchette assumes a solidarity among her peers and their teacher. Outside, Mouchette pelts classmates with dirt, which they do their best to ignore. Now we recall that, in an earlier scene at the end of another schoolday, a classmate had called out to her, “Mouchette!” and Mouchette ignored the girl and her likely friendly entreaty. Mouchette’s alienation, Bresson wants us to understand, is partially the result of pride and of her own making.

Indeed, Bresson sensitively explores telling discrepancies as a matter of course. In The Diary of a Country Priest (1950), also from Bernanos, for example, the young cleric consistently misunderstands himself and others, and misinterprets reality in other ways. The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) is largely constructed on the chasm between Joan’s invisible interiority and various misperceptions of her. Two other “discrepancies” involving Mouchette also have to do with how this teenager is misperceived. The image of her as “dirty” floats about in the village; this is normal scapegoating procedure (“dirty blacks,” “dirty Jews”), but it is undone by what Bresson actually shows us: a well-groomed girl whose mother has taken obvious care to dress her in clean, simple, handmade clothes. Certainly Mouchette stands out alongside the other girls in their store-bought clothes, but it is not for being dirty. (Nor can Mouchette make the others dirty; when she pelts classmates with clumps of dirt, none of the soil sticks!) Ironically, the more stylishly dressed other girls appear as a result more sexually precocious, but it is Mouchette who is branded a whore after she is raped. There is also a way in which we may misperceive Mouchette, assuming her incompetence as a maternal fill-in now that her mother, incapacitated, lies sick and dying. Although it is difficult to gauge at what emotional and mental price this is so, Mouchette is hugely competent at nearly all that she attempts to do. (At most, she gets a single note wrong here and there.) One example of this is her nearly simultaneous readying of four cups of coffee for her family and herself. Another is her feeding the baby milk, which she does in a manner both nurturing and efficient, at her mother’s instruction from her deathbed. Mouchette may feel overwhelmed by the additional burden of responsibility she shoulders at home due to her mother’s illness; but, to my eye at least, it doesn’t show.

Mouchette is, after all, highly adaptable, and she takes what comfort and pleasure from her world as she can find. Consider her rape by Arsène, whose epileptic seizure so unmans him that this rape of a girl he had been helping and sheltering becomes his means of restoring a sense of command in the universe. During the rape, at first Mouchette resists with all her might; however, then she wholly participates in the sex, as we can see from the relaxation of her hand on Arsène’s back and then her hugging him. Mouchette is drawing unaccustomed warmth from the experience, and the next day she even refers to Arsène, naively, as her “boyfriend.” (Or am I the one who is naive? Perhaps Mouchette refers to him as such only as a way to say “Fuck you!” to the world.) Earlier, at a makeshift amusement park, some kind soul places a coin in Mouchette’s hand that allows her to participate in a car bombardment ride. It breaks our heart when we finally see Mouchette smile, and broadly too, as she gleefully throws herself into the event. On the other hand, her sensitivity and pride sometimes keep Mouchette from enjoying all she can in life. After her mother’s death, one creepy adult acts kindly toward Mouchette, extending condescending charity from which Mouchette understandably recoils. But following that, someone extends genuine kindness to her, which includes giving her dresses that Mouchette will be holding onto during that ultimate roll of hers, and Mouchette treats the elderly woman unkindly, as though she were still reacting to the other woman who had treated her unkindly. (Sometimes we wrongly perceive unkindness as a result of anticipating unkindness.) Like the rest of us, especially when we are young, Mouchette isn’t always fair, and this plays out to her detriment.

I cannot say why Mouchette commits suicide, or even if she does commit suicide. (Her “suicide” may be a misperception of her death; it is possible that volition is not among the elements which catapult Mouchette into the river.) There are unknowable things in Bresson’s film, just as there are unknowable things in life. But one thing that makes Mouchette’s death so shattering is precisely the fact that we never see her body enter the river. Let me explain. Like Bresson films generally, Mouchette is a thing of materiality; Bresson’s film stresses objects, parts of bodies (such as the shot at the amusement park when the gift of the coin passes from hand to hand in closeup), and overall thingness. Mouchette herself is represented throughout the film by her clogs, which become a kind of synecdoche, as though these clogs aren’t things she wears but a part of her. We know her clogs by their sound, which Bresson has amplified as a disruption of silence correlative to Mouchette’s sense, and the community’s sense, that Mouchette is an irritant, somehow alien, someone who doesn’t fit in. The shoes, hand-made rather than store-bought like her outfits, mark Mouchette’s poverty and, to the ear, assume the aspect of a defiant child’s curse. Late for her music class, Mouchette’s disruptive entrance is summed up by the loud sound of the invading footwear, and we note the teacher’s irritation, which erupts in cruelty once Mouchette is off-pitch in her singing; in effect, it is the discordant sound of Mouchette’s wooden footwear that anticipates the bad note her voice hits. Why does Mouchette stomp one of her clogs as she, her older brother and her father are about to enter church? Possibly it is a respectful gesture clumsily executed, an attempt to rid herself of dirt for the sanctity of the hallowed building. Perhaps, too, it is intentionally disrespectful, an off-note of derision aimed at the notion of this sanctity and of authority in general. When her father assaults her in plain view for what she has done outside the church, it is clear that he believes that his daughter’s act assails his authority. But, most intriguingly, the clog becomes a silent thing in another scene, when in the rainstorm Mouchette loses one of her clogs to the ravenous mud below and Arsène retrieves it for her, rescuing it as indeed he is rescuing her by providing her with shelter from the storm before, that is, the yonic symbol (a displaced vagina) that the clog also is (Bresson’s Mouchette possesses great affinity with Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana from five years earlier) kicks into Arsène’s unconscious an element of sexual provocation, especially when he feels compelled to redress the sense of imbalance between himself and the girl caused by the loss of control he incurred by his epileptic seizure on the floor of his cabin, with this pariah-child in humiliating attendance. The whole scene anticipates Mouchette’s extraordinary end in reverse, the fits and starts of her hill-rolling unconsciously mimicking Arsène’s fit, and her entrance into the river a purified visual echo of the temporary loss of a clog to the rain soaked earth. In the cinema of Robert Bresson, the accumulation of materiality exerts a pressure on this materiality that yields an unexpected store, or discharge, or realization of spirituality.

Typically, Bresson’s style is analytical rather than either lyrical or sentimental. Bresson rounds up the usual suspects: closeups of parts of people (eyes, hands, backs) and things (shoes, cups, bottles). The style of his editing is equally analytical, often enlivening our participation by short, quick shots, often in succession to illustrate the same action or event from different perspectives, whether physical or psychological, or both. It is this style, a breaking-down of things, that lends such overwhelming force to the second of the black-and-white film’s two long-held shots, with the camera held back a bit (the first such shot is the opening one, as the dying mother expresses concern for her family in church): the close, as the surface of the river, glimpsed by us at an angle through and around a partial barrier of trees, records the drowning below of the dead mother’s child and family surrogate. In this peaceful setting, Mouchette escapes the crash of her clogs, her father’s slaps, the baby’s cries that mimic her own inner cries—ironically, in the baby’s case, for being wet. Perhaps Mouchette, for the first time, is going home.

OUI NON (Jon Jost, 2002)

“But yes, the end is always death, no?”

“As life, the spectacle of shadows of the cinema dissolves before our eyes.” — Jon Jost’s Oui non

“The targeted numerals of the ACADEMY LEADER were hypnogogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film.” — William Gibson, science-fiction author, coiner of the term cyberspace

The visual countdown prior to the beginning of a movie: these numbers, along with the accompanying rotating swipe, are distributed throughout Jon Jost’s Pirandellian Oui non, with a flurry of seasonally titled vignettes towards the end that culminates in a surprising, tragic and very funny resolution: the death of a young acrobat. It is the slapped-on commercial “happy ending”—only here, if taken literally, a most unhappy one. An “improvised love story” in Paris and in French, Oui non attends to a boy and a girl, James and Hélène, the circus acrobat and a musically inclined aspiring actress, as the two actually fall in and out and possibly back in love in front of Jost’s indefatigable video camera, although the final phase, before the boy’s fall to his death while celebrating (in dance) his amorous joy, is riotously suspect. (In the fictional film-within-the-documentary film, James is called Jérôme.) The girl gets the boy to say that he loves her by asking him what is it that he cannot say! Je t’aime. (Shades of the joking exchange between Ginger Rogers and Alan Marshal in the private plane in Garson Kanin’s Tom, Dick and Harry!) Well, all’s well that doesn’t end well; how the girl howls and cries as the boy takes his off-screen tumble. Adding to the confusion—conflation?—of reality and cinema, James really did take a debilitating spill during the course of shooting, resulting in the loss of six months’ worth of work and pay. One assumes that this isn’t being passed off as the character’s fatal fall; but one doesn’t know. Here and there, Jost’s film is as playful and mischievous as another Pirandellian work: Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

A good deal of this enchanting piece of work is cloaked in mystery. A well-traveled American born in Chicago, Jost has made a French film that is officially listed as coming from Italy. Jost bemoans (in the film, in onscreen script) that he lost his film as a result of James’s mishap, which presumably helped shortcircuit the pretend/real romance, and gained a “guilt complex” in its place—Wellesian guilt for the lost film, more guilt for the undermined romance, and terrible guilt, I should think, for James’s injuries. In lieu of the classical theme of the failed feast, we have here a “failed film”; reality just wouldn’t let “things happen” as Jost wanted them to. He imposes the death on his material as a means of regaining some sort of control and composure, half-heartedly asking whether death isn’t the end of everything. Well, no, it isn’t. There are “ends” of all sorts that anticipate what James Joyce calls “the last end.” But being playful with death, as Jost is at the end of Oui non, is a way of temporarily eluding its grip. It works for a while. James/Jérôme’s make-believe death postpones for a while Jost’s thinking about his own sometime-upcoming last end, while paving the way, as it happens, for a real-life coda: subsequent to the film, Jost’s unsuccessful attempt to regain contact with James Thiérrée, who plays James or is James, or plays Jérôme or is Jérôme, depending on one’s point of view. Or is it possible, given his unreachableness, that James, taking full advantage of the “death” that cinema has granted him, is “James,” or “Jérôme,” no longer?

Especially since the advent of the nouvelle vague, films reflect on self-aware human experience. Informed by (some would say in the grip of) cinema, as well as by literature, painting, music and television, life has become increasingly fictional. In some instances we fictionalize life as we live it in order to understand it and deal with it better; in other instances we do this to consign its messiness and frightening unpredictability to predetermined narrative patterns that may also generate the illusion that at least some of our hopes and dreams are being realized—a defense against life’s tragedy and futility; and in still other instances we fictionalize life in order to reverse its monotony and boredom. Cinema has turned our lives into films that unreel in our head and, from there, spill over into time and space. In Oui non, Thiérrée and Hélène Fillières fall in love for real—we are in Paris, after all—while playing at falling in love (which selfconsciously, of course, is how we all fall in love). “This film,” Jost has stated, “is about how we turn reality into fiction, and create reality from fiction.”

The film opens in Paris—a place; a state of being; a state of mind. It is the Paris of another world: a montage of black-and-white photographs from the early twentieth century: elegant, unadorned, humanistic glimpses of time: humanistic because of the people in some of them but also because of their orientation: there, don’t you see, is where people walked; here is the public sculpture that they looked at; here is where people congregated; there is where they banked. The photographs, all outdoor ones, are by Eugene Atget, and the pensive music that accompanies the montage—the cumulative effect haunts—reflects the loss of this older Paris to time, Atget’s being an orphan, perhaps (was his adopted Paris a kind of mother for him?), and the neglect into which his brilliant work fell after the First World War. (Jost may identify with Atget on this last point.) But human accomplishment and activity have their limit, as human lives do, redefining this sample list as follows: there is where people walked who have since passed away; here is the public sculpture that they looked at and can no longer look at; and so forth. We “create reality from fiction” in order to keep it from dissolving before our eyes.

As the delicate music from the preface, revived, acts as a bridge, Paris past segues into Paris present (or, from the opening vantage of the past, a dream of a future Paris): a freeze frame, including a haunting upside-down reflection of the Eiffel Tower: a composition that seems to be another photograph as its silence (the music having abruptly stopped) vanishes into the sound of traffic, its black and white disappears into muted color, and its stillness finally disappears into motion: people walking, cars moving—and at a remove of one kind or another, in an angled composition with moving figures in the deep background, for instance, or cars behind a large poster in the foreground, or cars and people visible through a door that opens onto the street. These shots connect with the earlier upside-down reflection, which also presented the city’s reality at a remove. In a city, a female voiceover states matter-of-factly, partially relaxing even the specificity of Paris: the reality that is the dream that is the reality of Paris. Paris out-of-doors seems to be in transaction with a dream in our own head and with Paris’s own past, as underscored by the uneven flow of the appearance of slow motion actually achieved by the “strobe” setting on the video camera, Jost has informed me,—here slight, there pronounced—that is applied to walking feet and moving cars. (This effect is generally on view throughout the film, achieving haunting results, its dreaminess at times tempered by the reality of the continuous street noise or other sounds with which it is combined.) The reality is a dream, and vice versa, and each exists simultaneously both outside and inside us as we, wherever we may be, become one of the “four million souls,” “four million ghosts,” who (the voiceover informs us) inhabit the city. A myriad of stories exists within each of these souls, the voice tells us, which implies that one soul’s story crosses at least one other soul’s story, becoming (however differently perceived) the story of each. This dreamlike fluidity of “stories” counters the tyranny of rigidly plotted narrative cinema, wherein a story is always one character’s story, with the other characters in it mere objects in relation to this subject—without importance except in relation to this subject: the supporting cast of characters as subsidiary characters, as though they have no right to lives of their own. Moreover, the voice relates the “myriad” stories of the “four million souls” to natural cycles by noting that the stories begin, end, and begin again and begin again—natural and mythic, with some sense, but for the slapped-on ending, of an eternal return. This also counters conventional narrative, in which the one and only story proceeds by faithfully connecting dots between start and finish. Within the larger thematic context, transactions between each soul’s actuality and fiction, and between one soul’s and another’s actuality and fiction, detail a dimension of experience that is volatile, irreducible and in flux. To underscore the point, the visuals that accompany the voiceover are superimposed city sights, with one thing or another constantly coming into sharper focus; a combinate image of perpetual transitions; passages.

According to the voiceover, Paris is a city of “dreams, illusions, hopes, delusion”—a remark that is inflected by what the camera at this point shows: a drab, scuzzy, peeling wall. Hélène is an actress—the one we see in the film, but one who—or does this biography belong to her character?—has been acting for ten years. For her, “life is like a film, a dream . . . with a happy ending.” (She, not the voiceover, discloses this.) While each is on the phone in an adjacent transparent booth, James notices Hélène and is immediately interested. When she leaves, he follows her down the street. (Later in the film, post-breakup, it is Hélène who notices James and follows him down the street calling, “Jérôme!”) Jost plunges us into the middle of what seems to be their getting to know one another in a restaurant. It probably isn’t. Their give-take-give unfolds in a split screen that projects the equality of the girl and the boy (out of the “myriad,” two equal “stories” have crossed one another), but the division performs double duty; even as their worlds have been brought together, each exists in his or her own space, and the distance between them is underscored by gradation of light: Hélène’s space is relatively light, while James’s is relatively dark. Indeed, the mismatched dialogue and facial expressions, as well as the delayed disclosure of apparently other voices, eventually reveal that the two are not yet talking to one another but are instead each talking to someone else. But convention dictates that Hélène and James will become a couple. We learn that James hates his work even before we learn what that work is. James is an acrobat—sometimes, a trapeze performer. (He is currently an actor—the actor we see in the film.) On the ground, Hélène has her head in the clouds; closer than she to the clouds, James is on the edge, prone to a disastrous spill. We ourselves are poised to expect that the two will come together and take a tumble. Already we are rooting for them. Both are impossibly beautiful as well as young—but Jost has wittily covered this matter. Earlier, at the sight of an old woman’s legs, the voiceover explains that the “story” we are about to see wasn’t going to be that old woman’s. Explanation: “This is a film.” Later, denied her happy ending, Hélène will flatly state, “This is not a film.” The blurred line between fiction and reality, it would appear, does nothing to deaden human hurt and pain.

James describes his purpose as follows: to “construct a universe, a folding tent, a folding life,” and to bring pleasure to the public. His is a tragic disposition, but his own denial of this is sweet and ebullient. (One thinks of The Fool in Fellini’s La strada, especially since the faces and expressions of both are similar.) James’s defense against the heightened possibility of injury, even young death, is both gauche and heartbreaking: “We all die.” One suspects that romance for such a boy is one more defense against keen mortal awareness, and that rudely quitting romance is a subterfuge for preserving a sense of autonomy and invincibility. Even before James has been introduced, daunting long shots in which people seem very small down below evoke James’s aerial danger, his risk. Whereas Hélène often seems sensitively reserved, James, who is at least as shy, is farcical, at times close to manic, as though his very life depends on cloaking his vulnerability. Because Hélène makes fewer demands on us (and herself), we are more comfortable in her presence. We would prefer that a sequel to the film be about her, not James. Of course, it would have to be, now that James, or at least Jérôme, is “dead” and in any case cannot be found, cannot be reached.

But Oui non is its own sequel insofar as at many junctures the film seems to restart, or a new, related film seems to begin. The film is about Hélène and James’s romance—only, it isn’t. There are two aspects to this isn’t. One is the fact that the two are suddenly a couple, sitting together, holding hands, on a public bench, without any of the normal narrative chronology that usually attends the development of romance in a movie. It is an act of will that it occurs—Jost’s will; the pair’s own. But it is the other isn’t that is most decisive in making this (as Jost has called it) “farewell to cinema” the rich thing that it is. Oui non loses the romance now and then to a stream of images, both “the poetry of everyday life”—this is the phrase that the voiceover uses—and images that are mysterious, ambiguous, frequently gorgeous. (“What is this image?” the voiceover now and then asks.) We are given a veritable kaleidoscope of impressions, of street scenes and restaurant scenes, with people visible to us both directly and indirectly, such as reflected on glass surfaces and in mirrors. Often these are passages of superimpositions, transitions—passages of passages. In a marvelous snapshot, a man sitting at a café table looks out the window observing; the voiceover notes that he is being observed observing, and at least it appears, fleetingly, that he observes himself being observed while observing. (Oui non has some affinity with Pierre Kafian’s extraordinary 1961 film Mint Tea, also shot in Paris.) In a glorious instant, then, Jost visually encapsulates postmodernism, wringing self-reflexivity from modern humanity’s entrapment in self-awareness. Let us complete the image: We the audience observe this man observing that he is being observed while he is observing others—these others being, at some level, our surrogate. In losing “the story,” Jost finds the soul of his film. Periodically his camera finds another woman, someone other than Hélène that the film might have been about, and the voice asks: “Why not this woman?” Always the answer is the same, however differently worded: “Because of cinema.” Oui non’s “story” is precisely there to be lost, to deny our impulse to reduce reality to fiction or to turn fiction (sentimentally) into a kind of reality, a reality-substitute. Oui non is on the verge of a tidal wave of Keatsian negative capability, of the kaleidoscope-of-life-and-humanity sort that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Äkerman’s masterpiece, D’Est (1993), achieves: in its slow rush of images, Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.”

The creaking, pulsating strobe effect that is nearly used continuously throughout Oui non does more than keep us aware that we are watching a film. It acutely expresses Jost’s anxiety about letting completely go of conventional moorings. Curiously the shot with which this technique most closely connects is delivered in real time: a closeup of a man’s hand, palm up, opening and closing, like the pumping of a heart. There is a breathtaking shot, of James, I believe, that follows the boy as he descends by rope from a trapeze to the ground. It isn’t a vast descent, but still we are surprised to see no safety net below. Conventional narrative is the safety net of cinema. But some artists take risks, and all such risks are correlative to—and, out of the abstract, genuinely result in—intensified mortal awareness. Creativity comes at a cost. Oui non honors the expense and celebrates the artistic gain.

Because the story here exists to be lost, the conventional elements exist to be overturned. Reality complies by tossing the romance into the waste paper basket. One day, we learn, James just left town, without advance word to Hélène or even a telephone call afterwards. He folded up his tent and split. He returns, crashing a barrier of sorts between fiction and actuality by t/making his actual fall. (Or is that the right chronology? Is there a “right” chronology here?) A direct address from Jost to us ensues as script on the screen. James incurred a serious injury from an acrobatic accident while he, Jost, was recording James. Humanely, Jost doesn’t include the grave spill in Oui non but notes that the actual affair between Hélène and James “quickly went sour” and James lost six months of work as a result of the accident. Jost confesses the feeling that he “lost [his] film” because of this serious unforeseen accident. He did not; rather, he found a richer film than he bargained for. What unifies Oui non is precisely loss: Paris of the past lost to time; people lost to crowds in restaurants and on the street; the canceled love affair between the two actors; James’s loss of work; and so forth. Formally, the film goes into a marvelous tailspin: order lost to chaos, but a chaos, it turns out, we can live with—and must.

Like Shelley and Dickinson, and Joris Ivens and Mannus Frånken in Regen (1929), Jost is a poet of evanescence, and he is experimental; at times, Oui non resembles a silent experimental film from the 1920s. Jost is also fond of split-screen technique, his use of it here proceeding from the ironically conjoined words of the title that the initial (rhetorical) question that he poses—see the top of this piece right below the title—indicate. While his split screens may juxtapose one-half of two different conversations, or both halves of one conversation (I think!), in one wonderful passage it duplicates a silent slapstick stage presentation that may or may not involve—my use of “pause” and “zoom” while watching the DVD cannot corroborate this—James; in any case, a door at the point of partition teases us with the possibility of transaction between the identical boxed-in actions. Other split screens show James at talk and James at work on his circus ’cycle. A full-screen repetition, both at different times of the film, shows either two young musicians or music students; the first refers to filmed actuality, while the second refers to this occurence in the film-within-the-film. Again: perhaps. The filmmaker brings to bear his Keatsian negative capability on the proceedings, and viewers of Oui non must bring their own.

I hope that Jon Jost doesn’t really believe that he “lost” his film. It irritated me no end while watching his Marlene (1986) that Maximilian Schell wrongly believes in the course of shooting the film that Marlene Dietrich is ruining his documentary by refusing to appear on-camera. In truth, her refusal left her friend with a film many times better than the one he had bargained for. Oui non has turned out better than perfect. Life gets a pass then, and Jost gets a pass of his own. He has made a perfectly wonderful film that should delight anyone who doesn’t require the nonsense of a nailed-down plot.