The Long Take in Contemporary European Cinema

Home , Albert Lamorisse, Alexander Sokurov, Eternity and a Day, Francofonia, Landscape in the Mist, Long take

Melanie Robson

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

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School of the Arts & Media Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

December 2017 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: ROBSON

First name: MELANIE Other name/s: ROSE

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: School of the Arts & Media Faculty: Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

Title: The Long Take in Contemporary European Cinema

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This thesis examines the formal and aesthetic implications of the long take in contemporary European cinema. Ongoing debates around ‘slow cinema’ historically isolate the use of the long take by framing its appeal to viewers and filmmakers as a reaction to the quickening pace of Hollywood cinema. In so doing, these debates make insufficient acknowledgement of the long take’s evolution and principal function within contemporary cinema, and its fundamental connection to the history of film style. This thesis addresses this shortcoming by examining the long take from a formal and historical perspective, using case studies of four directors: Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke and Alexander Sokurov. First, I interrogate how form is connected to questions of meaning and interpretation. I argue these directors are unified by not just their aesthetic tendencies, but also their shared experience of significant political and social upheaval. Their adoption of radical cinematic technique reforms modes of representation involving the long take, which allows them to profoundly express their new experiences of reality. I argue this principally occurs in both overt and implicit stagings of meaning in the mise-en-scène that rely on the long take’s expanded duration. Second, I examine the formal heritage of the long take. To achieve this historical framing, I draw on David Bordwell’s work on the history of film style. Rather than positioning style as simply an aesthetic choice, Bordwell understands style as a solution to a practical problem influenced by political, technical and aesthetic limitations. With this approach, I argue that, through the long take, a narrative of stylistic progression can be traced through these filmmakers. By analysing the specific operations of the long take, this thesis questions what implications emerge for the film’s meaning in its negotiation of history, politics, and technological development when examined through the lens of a single technique.

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‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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Date PUBLICATIONS

Sections of this work have been published:

Robson, Melanie. “Complicity, intimacy and distance: re-examining the active viewer in Michael Haneke’s Amour.” Studies in European Cinema 14, no. 2 (2017): 103-117.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first thanks goes to my supervisor, Prof. George Kouvaros. He has provided me with unwavering support throughout my candidature, and has truly gone above and beyond the call of duty. I am hugely grateful for his dedication and patience in helping me shape my work, challenging my ideas, teaching me how to write, and for our conversations that have transformed the way I think about film. I’m thankful for his mentorship, not just through my doctoral candidature but also in the years before.

Thanks also to my co-supervisor, Dr. Michelle Langford, who provided invaluable feedback on numerous drafts. She has introduced me to cinema I’d have never otherwise encountered. I’m appreciative of the strong community of film students she has brought together in various forms, particularly the reading group at the start of my candidature.

I am grateful to the School of the Arts & Media and the admin staff, particularly Julie Miller, Dave Buckley, Katrina Plume, and Angela Bradburn. Thanks to the postgraduate co-ordinators during my candidature—Dorottya Fabian and Chris Danta—who have offered huge support and made the PhD experience a little easier. Thanks to Angelos Koutsourakis and Greg Dolgopolov, my annual progress review readers—your feedback was thorough, thoughtful, and valuable. I am grateful for receiving an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Research Excellence Award to support my research.

The Sydney Screen Studies Network seminars have helped me grow as a scholar— thanks to everyone who makes them happen. Special thanks to my fellow Network co- founders, friends, and colleagues, Jessica Ford and Phoebe Macrossan. Our chats, texts, gifs, and endless coffees have been everything over the past few years. I’m very grateful to those who’ve read and commented on my work, and been amazing writing retreat buddies—Sameera Durrani, Tanya Thaweeksulchai, Shaun Bell, Jayne Chapman, Klāra Brūveris, and Lisa Dowdall. Thanks to my Webster 257 labmates for all the drinks and moral support!

To my best friend and honorary sister, Maree Zaferis: I know you never understood exactly what it is I do, but thanks for all the cheese, lavosh, holidays, promises of holidays, (attempts at) making me physically fit, and progress-check texts.

I’m hugely indebted to my family for the invaluable moral, emotional and financial support. I couldn’t have done this without you. To my sister, Amelia: thanks for being my film festival buddy, and getting me to the cinema more than I could myself. Thanks to my mum for her advice and dedicated, tireless proofreading of this thesis.

iv ABSTRACT

v CONTENTS

Publications...... iii

Acknowledgements...... iv

Abstract...... v

Contents...... vi

List of Figures...... vii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE Affiliation and Resistance: Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist ...... 29

CHAPTER TWO Allegory and Autonomy: Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies ...... 76

CHAPTER THREE Complicity and Intimacy: Michael Haneke’s Amour ...... 111

CHAPTER FOUR Histor(icit)y and the Long Take: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark ...... 155

AFTERWORD ...... 195

Bibliography ...... 203

Filmography ...... 213

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. A shot using both deep focus and a long take in Citizen Kane (1941)...... 7 Figure 2. The opening scene of Elephant (2003), in which a boy acts as a guide for the camera. 16 Figure 3. A reverse shot of the ever-present camera in Kiarostami’s Homework (1989)...... 20 Figure 4. Louise and Donati framed below a mirror in The Earrings of Madame De... (1953)...... 23 Figure 5. The married couple framed next to Alexander and Voula in Landscape in the Mist (1988)...... 35 Figure 6. The horse’s head appears at the bottom of the frame...... 35 Figure 7. The wedding party appears behind Alexander and Voula...... 36 Figure 8. Two men wearing yellow raincoats watch the marble hand off-screen...... 38 Figure 9. The marble hand suspended in the air in Landscape in the Mist...... 41 Figure 10. Planimetric staging in The Travelling Players (1975)...... 48 Figure 11. Planimetric staging employed as the travelling players first appear in Landscape in the Mist...... 49 Figure 12. Planimetric staging in the funeral procession in Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004). .. 49 Figure 13. Multiple layers of staging activated in the police station in Landscape in the Mist...... 54 Figure 14. The static shot of the rear of the truck in Landscape in the Mist...... 56 Figure 15. Alexander and Voula framed frontally in another place of transit—the stationmaster’s office...... 66 Figure 16. Alexander and Voula receding into darkness on the highway in Landscape in the Mist.71 Figure 17. The circus truck’s headlights cut through the dark street in Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)...... 83 Figure 18. The corrugated pattern of the truck passes slowly by the camera...... 84 Figure 19. An example of a ‘walking shot’, during which the camera follows behind János for a minute and a half...... 87 Figure 20. Left profile view of György and János...... 88 Figure 21. The camera orbiting around the men, who are also in orbit...... 89 Figure 22. The ceiling light ‘sun’ in the foreground of the shot...... 90 Figure 23. The opening frame of János walking towards the camera...... 95 Figure 24. The final frame of the shot, demonstrating the increasing negative space around János...... 95 Figure 25. János centre-framed, but out of focus and blocked by György in the foreground. .... 97 Figure 26. János in the background (middle), showing the men’s frozen expressions...... 101 Figure 27. János enters the town square with the whale’s trailer to the left...... 106 Figure 28. György enters the now-destroyed town square with the exposed whale carcass...... 110 Figure 29. The final shot of Caché (2005), in which Majid’s son and Pierrot are discreetly framed in discussion at frame left...... 119 Figure 30. Anne and Georges in a scene of mundane domesticity before the onset of Anne’s stroke in Amour (2012)...... 126 Figure 31. Georges stands in the foreground, as both he and the viewer miss the moment of Anne’s stoke...... 127 Figure 32. The camera stages a dilemma: Georges walks down the hallway, but the camera remains in the kitchen with Anne...... 130

vii Figure 33. The opening frame of the Amour, which reveals the camera as temporarily entombed in the apartment...... 135 Figure 34. Georges and Anne’s conversation is divided by the doorway...... 137 Figure 35. Georges calming his wife with a story of his childhood in Amour...... 139 Figure 36. Georges committing the painful act of ending his wife’s suffering...... 140 Figure 37. Georges sitting with his wife after death...... 140 Figure 38. The perspective from the hallway at the beginning of the film. The kitchen and lounge room are visible through the door frame...... 149 Figure 39. Still in long shot, but darker lighting. The apartment is shown as ‘enclosed space’. . 151 Figure 40. At the end of Amour, the apartment is opened up again, and Eva is framed in the doorway...... 151 Figure 41. A static wide long take at the end of Amour that reveals three separate rooms and the now opened up apartment...... 152 Figure 42. The Stranger admires the elaborate walls before seeing the large Italian vase, at this point concealed behind the door in Russian Ark (2002)...... 159 Figure 43. The Italian vase is revealed, while the modern-day figures in the room remain concealed...... 160 Figure 44. The Stranger is finally framed among the modern-day figures, confirming the room’s transformation into a twenty-first century museum...... 160 Figure 45. Sokurov overtly marks the start of a flashback in Francofonia (2015) with visible soundwaves and the appearance of a clapper...... 164 Figure 46. The Stranger interacts with a World War II coffin-maker in Russian Ark...... 174 Figure 47. The younger Catherine II is glimpsed from a distance...... 178 Figure 48. The elderly Catherine II, assisted by her servant, recedes increasingly from the camera...... 179 Figure 49. The Stranger and the camera view history framed through a window...... 181 Figure 50. The mass exodus from the ballroom as all historical eras from the film come together...... 185 Figure 51. The Stranger waits in the next room for the camera to arrive, before he claps his hands to initiate the girls’ flee down the hallway...... 190 Figure 52. A man signals for the music to start in Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow...... 196 Figure 53. The dancers clear the stage for a fight to break out during the camera’s first circle. 196 Figure 54. Spyros enters the building to start the camera’s second circle...... 197 Figure 55. The dancers clear the stage again for Spyros and Eleni's dance...... 198

viii Introduction

This thesis examines the use of the long take in contemporary European cinema.1 In particular, it focuses on the operation of this device in the work of four leading directors: Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke and Alexander Sokurov.

Individually, each of these filmmakers exemplifies a different approach to the long take.

Examined as a group, they mark the continuation of a strand of modernist experimentation that emerged during the post-war period and whose leading figures include Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini and Miklós Jancsó. The four filmmakers examined in this thesis lend this tradition a contemporary pertinence. In their work, the long take is much more than just another technique; it is a touchstone for reflecting on cinema—its history, traditions and contemporary possibilities. This thesis will draw out this double dimension.

Although the long take does not adhere to any strict definition, it can be characterised as a continuous shot of unusually long duration. As average shot lengths have decreased throughout cinema’s history, the radically extended shots that linger on landscapes and meander through empty streets favoured by the directors listed above have become the focus of both critical and scholarly interest.2 Over the past couple of decades, critics such as Jonathan Romney and Matthew Flanagan have noted a marked increase in the use of the long take in contemporary cinema. Specifically, these critics have recognised the long take’s prominent employment in an emerging movement of

1 This thesis defines ‘contemporary’ as including the past thirty years, but it makes significant reference to events and artistic works outside this period for the purpose of contextualisation. 2 Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Lutz Koepnick, The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) (forthcoming); Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

1 films referred to as “Slow Cinema.”3 Romney, the leading proponent of the Slow

Cinema debates, proposes a specific definition of this movement. For him, it is a subset of contemporary European and American art cinema, in which the films share several key aesthetic features. These include “de-centred and understated modes of storytelling,” the use of a minimalist style, and an “intensified sense of temporality.”4

Central to this cinematic style is the use of the slow, extended rhythm of the long take to inform the overall pace of the film.

The popularity of this new brand of cinema has emerged because it offers a stylistic alternative to the heavily-promoted contemporary Hollywood cinema that prefers action to contemplation. With the dominance of Hollywood, in which the average shot length is constantly decreasing, the use of the long take is increasingly seen as a daring act on the part of the director. 5 In short, Flanagan defines Slow Cinema as being “in defiant opposition to the quickening of pace in mainstream American cinema.” 6 In response to this claim, Romney offers some explanations for the development of this alternative cinematic style in the twenty-first century. First, he places a focus on the viewers, acknowledging a distinct demand among cinema-goers for cinema that is “slow, poetic, contemplative—cinema that downplays event in favour of mood.”7 Second, he suggests that Slow Cinema, which places such a distinct focus on the experience of viewing itself, is a “thirst for abstraction at a time when immediacy and simultaneity…are tyrannical demands, forcing our aesthetic sensibility to seek ways of slowing itself down.”8 Further, Flanagan references the films of Erich von Stroheim

3 Jonathan Romney, “In Search of Lost Time,” Sight and Sound 20, no. 2 (2010): 43. 4 Matthew Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema,” 16:9 6, no. 29 (2008), accessed October 7, 2014. http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm; Romney, “In Search of Lost Time,” 43. 5 Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow.” 6 Ibid. 7 Romney, “In Search of Lost Time,” 43. 8 Ibid., 44.

2 and Robert Flaherty, recognising “a desire to not merely suggest time but instead show it, enabling the image fact to reveal itself in an apposite temporal field.”9 He refers here to the desire to maintain the spatial and temporal unity of the profilmic. Flanagan argues that this effect is “acutely magnified in the contemporary cinema, enlarged by extended duration.”10 Thus, in the debates around Slow Cinema, the role of the viewer is strongly emphasised as a key component of these films. No longer is the long take designed to merely capture a moment in time, but, for these critics, such films also “highlight the viewing process itself as a real-time experience in which, ideally, you become acutely aware of every minute, every second spent watching.”11

The Slow Cinema debates offer a preliminary account of the long take as connected to a broader artistic movement in contemporary Europe. Although the directorial styles of the filmmakers they discuss have a clear heritage in European filmmaking, Flanagan and Romney frame them as operating within an out-dated framework of cinema, and one in which their stylistic trend towards ‘slowness’ has emerged purely to counteract the quickening pace of Hollywood cinema and to appeal to viewer-generated demand. The nationalities of the filmmakers who are central to the

Slow Cinema movement reveal that it is not limited to one national cinema, or even to

Europe. Along with the filmmakers at the focus of this thesis, Gus Van Sant

(American), Abbas Kiarostami (Iranian), and Tsai Ming-liang (Chinese-Malay) are also often discussed in these debates, thus Slow Cinema has a cross-cultural pervasiveness.

Further examination of these filmmakers crucially reveals that the proliferation of the long take through their filmmaking styles has a more complex heritage than merely being a response to popular Western cinema or changing viewing practices. To this end,

9 Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow.” 10 Ibid. 11 Romney, “In Search of Lost Time,” 43.

3 the Slow Cinema debates in their current form are problematic: many of the critics involved neglect to acknowledge the origin or heritage of these filmmaking traditions, meaning they often overlook the political significance of the filmmakers’ stylistic choices.

Since the post-World War II period, directors have used the long take to reflect on and engage with their political and cultural environments. The filmmakers at the focus of this thesis, in particular, have used the long take to reveal relations between different historical periods (the impact of the past on the present) and to challenge traditional cinematic conventions of representation. In its most radical form, the long take has been used to challenge or question dominant political ideologies. As such, this thesis positions European forms of cinema, such as the many New Wave movements of the latter half of the twentieth century, as playing a crucial role in the evolution of the long take. While these movements have cultural and political differences, the long take and other radical formal techniques are shared and prevalent components of their cinematic vocabulary. The long take has played a significant part in New Wave directors’ rejection of the formal and narrative conventions of the mainstream. It allows filmmakers to interrogate and reform conventional modes of representation, as it generates an overt expression of ‘cinematicness’, a disruption of the causal chain of events, and it privileges the production of meaning.

In recent years, the long take’s capacity to reform these conventions of representation has changed, as a result of significant transformations in cinematic technology. The move from film stock to digital hard drives and a further increase in the portability of filmmaking equipment facilitated the increased prevalence of the long take, while a substantial shift in viewing practices towards smaller-screened devices hindered it. These changes have both improved the technical capacity of directors to

4 produce long takes and allowed for a heightened awareness of the technique amongst viewers. The employment of the long take can be sensed more acutely as a deliberate choice. Taking into account these formal developments, this thesis examines how filmmakers engage with the history of the technique and their stylistic predecessors, and the political circumstances for the long take’s use.

This thesis approaches the long take from both a formal and historical perspective. This perspective gives rise to two central questions. The first of these questions is concerned with interpretation: how is form connected to meaning and interpretation through the long take? The second question is how do style and specific formal techniques develop from particular historical circumstances? In this introduction,

I will map some of the key discussions that have developed through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries concerning the long take. To address this thesis’s first research question, I consider the long take as part of a broader history of film style. The following section charts the work of two film scholars who are key to this approach:

André Bazin’s influential theory of realism and David Bordwell’s historical model of film style. Included in this discussion is an examination of varying definitions of style proposed by key film theorists and how these definitions will inform the stylistic analysis undertaken in this thesis.

Historical Models of Film Style

From the earliest one-shot actualities, created during cinema’s infancy, the long take has functioned as part of a technologically determined set of conventions and formal tropes.

The creative decisions involving these conventions have pivoted on different factors, primarily aesthetic, industrial and technical. These decisions have had a profound effect on the historical development of film style. Perhaps the most influential account of the

5 long take’s place in this history is Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.”

In this article, he proposes that, just prior to World War II, cinema had begun to reach maturity, strengthened by the widespread success of American and French cinema.12

The dominant style in these cinemas was characterised by a reliance on montage, continuity editing, and narrative causality motivated by character development.

Cinematic style had, according to Bazin, reached equilibrium in the “complete harmony of image and sound,” which was enabled by the maturation of narrative forms and the

“stabilization of technical progress.”13

Bazin designates the year 1941 as the beginning of a revolution of a new cinematic style.14 Central to this revolution was the reintroduction of the long take and deep focus into the formal vocabulary of mainstream European and American cinema.

Starting with the release of Citizen Kane, these two techniques came to define Orson

Welles’s style (Figure 1). Bazin traces this stylistic development through the films of

Antonioni, Jean Renoir and William Wyler. Bazin’s justification for this change is “the introduction of new blood, of hitherto unexplored themes” in both the European and

American film industries.15 For Bazin, this movement was significant because it came after the development of sound film and also in the context of the classical Hollywood era. This is an era when, as Philip Rosen points out, Hollywood had developed a method of editing that “breaks down the profilmic into spatial fragments in order to subordinate it to the dramatic and psychological logic of the film,” providing the viewer with “a convincing illusion of spatiotemporal continuity.” 16 Montage had already established a strong foothold in Hollywood and was similarly prolific in European

12 André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 30. 13 Ibid., 29-30. 14 Ibid., 37. 15 Ibid., 29. 16 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 4.

6 mainstream cinema. But the directors whose films most strongly informed Bazin’s theories largely rejected montage as dominant technique, instead choosing to exploit the long take and deep focus in search of greater depths of realism. The cinematic techniques that came to define this new form of expression had been integrated into the styles of directors such as von Stroheim, Renoir and Flaherty in earlier times, before the introduction of sound. This revolution was a renewal of style rather than a technical development, and hence Bazin’s framework is not as linear as it is often characterised.17

Figure 1. A shot using both deep focus and a long take in Citizen Kane (1941).

While the four filmmakers Bazin associates with the long take and deep focus—

Antonioni, Renoir, Welles, and Wyler—all used the techniques substantially in their films, a distinction is evident in how each director uses these techniques. While working under the Hollywood system, both Welles’s and Wyler’s work maintained a distinctive

17 Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 27-30.

7 Hollywood style, in which the camera’s position and movement was largely character driven, and the films employed continuity editing and preserved a clear sense of narrative causality. In Citizen Kane, Welles disperses montage-driven shorter shots (five to ten seconds long) with longer shots of up to three minutes. In the film’s oft-discussed

“You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war” scene, the length of the shot (two- and-a-half minutes) is concealed by the dense, dynamic staging—the frame is consistently filled with characters who enter and leave multiple times throughout the shot—and Welles’s signature overlapping dialogue. Wyler’s films similarly interspersed long takes with shorter shots. Unlike Welles, who began his career with a long take style, this was a development in Wyler’s style. This is evident in Dodsworth (1936), and, to a greater extent, The Letters (1940), which features a two-minute opening establishing shot that tracks between characters, ends on the sound of a gunshot, and is followed by a short montage sequence of reaction shots.

Other filmmakers in Hollywood also employed long takes extensively. Otto

Preminger’s films, for example, feature a significant number of long takes, but the length and frequency became less so throughout his career. In Fallen Angel (1945), many of the shots are up to four minutes long and feature complex camera choreography. By the time of Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the camera choreography remains, but there are only three shots longer than a minute in length. Although Antonioni and Renoir worked predominantly in Europe, their use of the long take in this period shared much in common with their American counterparts. Like Preminger, both Antonioni and

Renoir’s films employ a significant amount of camerawork. Their films are more consistently long take-dominant, with only brief montage sequences. They were not, however, as heavily invested in the use of deep focus (or, at least, in staging in depth) as

Welles. This trend indicates that, at least in Hollywood, the 1940s signalled a change in

8 style that eventually reached equilibrium in shorter shot lengths and a lesser use of deep focus within a couple of decades.

Evident in the films of directors such as Welles, Renoir and Wyler is an attempt to both preserve the “ambiguity of reality” and find an alternative to the classical montage style of editing.18 Bazin recognises that, through the long take, the director is able to create a sense of “the continuity of dramatic space and…its duration.”19 This continuity is essential for creating the ambiguity of reality to which he refers. According to Rosen, this ambiguity can be defined as the indefiniteness of the film’s world, or the suggestion of “the actual existence of the profilmic prior to the act of producing meanings from it.”20 Rosen argues that this ambiguity that emerges through the use of the long take and deep focus is fundamental to a viewer’s engagement with the real. The form of ambiguity described by Rosen and Bazin is ruled out in montage because the meaning of each image is derived from the relationship between images, rather than within the mise-en-scène.21 Deep focus and the long take, on the other hand, retain spatial and temporal unity in a scene and reveal the proximity of two objects within one shot.

Countless instances of montage have shown that it can produce effects commonly associated with the long take, such as ambiguity; however, both Rosen and Bazin specifically refer to ambiguity produced by the continuity of duration and space and the privileging of the profilmic.22 According to Bazin, this capacity of the long take and deep focus make elements of the mise-en-scène, such as lighting, props and staging, even

18 Ibid., 37. 19 Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,”, 34. 20 Rosen, Change Mummified, 5. 21 Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 26. 22 Jean-Luc Godard’s work offers a prominent example of montage that both produces ambiguity and privileges the production of meaning. However, this is commonly achieved through techniques such as the jump cut and close ups, in which both time and space are essentially elided, rather than provide continuity.

9 more important than in montage-based cinema, as their positioning can more closely reflect their real-world counterparts.

The matter of authenticity is at the heart of Bazin’s characterisation of realist cinema. He belonged to a movement of critics who saw cinema’s vocation as the capacity to depict this realism on screen. A revolution of style that brought cinema closer to depicting realism was, for him, a way for the medium to assert its independence from other art forms. In cinema, the image “has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist.”23 The long take and the newly popularised deep focus worked to fulfil Bazin’s perceived vocation for the medium, since both techniques preserve the relations between elements in the mise-en-scene. His assertion that cinema progressively fulfilled its vocation suggests a teleological dimension to his theories based on technological and stylistic innovation. But Janet Staiger offers a more revealing interpretation of this position. She argues that Bazin’s conception of historical change in cinema is dialectical, not linear. She suggests that, rather than perceiving Bazin’s theories as purely related to the ontology of the photographic and cinematic image, “his teleology seems more one of progression of people interacting with and transforming nature rather than merely a movement toward a technological result and a stylistic impulse.”24 In other words,

Bazin’s belief that realism is the essence of cinema is a theory that necessarily involves the “history of man’s perception.”25

Bordwell offers an alternate—but also complementary—model of the history of film style. He begins from the assumption that style is “the result of choices made by

23 Ibid., 40. 24 Janet Staiger, “Theorist, Yes, but What Of? Bazin and History,” Iris 2, no. 2 (1984): 107. 25 Ibid., 104.

10 the filmmaker(s) in particular historical circumstances.” 26 Style is never simply an arbitrary collection of techniques, he argues, but rather a specific toolkit, bound and defined by the filmmaker’s political and historical circumstances. In a number of

Bordwell’s publications, he charts how cinema is shaped by the varying political, social and historical circumstances of filmmakers. Although he draws heavily on Bazin throughout his work, he differentiates himself by asserting “an intentionalist model that centers on filmmakers’ localized acts of choice and avoidance.”27 This concern serves as the impetus for a fundamental question in Poetics of Cinema: “How do particular filmmaking traditions create normalized options for visual style, and how have creative filmmakers worked with these?”28 By posing this question, Bordwell argues that through studying patterns in the history of film style, we can recognise particular conventions, norms and stylistic choices by which the filmmakers are contextually bound.

By disregarding the history attached to individual techniques and only examining them in particular instances, there is a risk of overlooking two important facets of film style: first, the historical, political and social relevance of that particular technique; and second, the history of perception, meaning and interpretation, or how that technique has shaped the way people read films. The first of these considerations forms a central part of Bordwell’s writing on film style. He characterises style as a “network of problems” that the filmmaker tries to overcome in both the film’s production and its aesthetics. He recognises that these “patterns of problem and solution can intersect with one another or with other factors (technological, economic, or cultural).”29 From this premise, he questions what options are opened up for filmmakers at different points in history as a result of their limited resources, political situations, particular influences, as

26 David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. 27 David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 16. 28 Ibid., 3, 15. 29 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 149-50.

11 well as technical limitations and freedoms. In this sense, style can be conceived of as the result of a practical as well as an aesthetic problem. Thus, by taking an historical approach to film style, we can recognise how filmmakers are a product of not only their current circumstances, but also what came before—their predecessors—and the range of techniques that their historical positioning makes available to them.

The second consideration in studying film style—the history of perception, meaning and interpretation—is examined by Bordwell in Making Meaning. He points to the difficulty of defining meaning and interpretation in terms of analysing film.

Bordwell’s definition of interpretation is about the “construction of meaning out of textual cues,” rather than applying personal readings of the film.30 By this definition, each film produces a finite number of possible interpretations, all of which are grounded in the fabric of the film’s style. For Bordwell, the process of meaning-making involves two crucial figures: the film, which holds the textual cues—techniques and stylistic choices act as cues for particular meanings—and the viewer. Just as particular historical circumstances open up options for stylistic decisions at the production stage, these “textual cues” open up options to the viewer for how to interpret them.

John Gibbs and Douglas Pye adopt a similar project of questioning how to interpret film through the lens of film style. They acknowledge that Bordwell’s approach allows for a greater diversity of interpretation, but that it also ignores the assumed homogeneity of the audience. They offer a useful analogy for illustrating what they see as the limitations of Bordwell’s approach to style and interpretation:

Works of art are not like shipwrecks on the sea bed which inertly form a home for different corals, but significantly organised artifacts which interact with and reflect upon culture. They are more like a well-designed house: not every

30 David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3.

12 occupant will choose to use the rooms in quite the same manner, but the building has been shaped to facilitate certain modes of living, certain ways of moving through it.31

For Gibbs and Pye, understanding how style operates involves interpreting what it does.32

In other words, they argue that what defines style is how these techniques work within an individual film, as opposed to the historical context of the film that Bordwell is interested in. They explain that “the content to which it gives form” gives the technique significance. Each technique in the film, they argue, forms a coded system or a web of techniques that can only be understood as a whole. 33 Their justification for this definition is that grounding analysis in the observable detail of film is necessary to sound critical debate.34 Gibbs and Pye contend that this method of analysis brings it closer to an objective view, thus precluding an infinite number of interpretations and meanings to be drawn from the film.

The distinction between the two definitions of film style offered by Gibbs and

Pye, and Bordwell, is crucial for a study that examines the connection between form and meaning. While the overarching methodology of this thesis is strongly influenced by

Bordwell’s historical and “problem/solution” approach to examining film style, this thesis is more invested in drawing from this analysis of style an understanding of the significance of the directors’ stylistic choices across their bodies of work, in their cultural contexts, and in broader artistic movements.

31 John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 7. 32 Ibid., 11. 33 Ibid. 34 Gibbs and Pye, Style and Meaning, 4-5.

13 Staging the Long Take

The pattern of development of these stylistic choices is illuminated by a more specific investigation into changing staging practices across the history of cinema. In the opening pages of his book, On the History of Film Style, he offers several examples of scenes from six films ranging from 1907 to 1972, which are all from different nations.35

He illustrates distinct differences in how each scene is staged more or less densely than the one before, the characters’ proximity to the camera and other stylistic features.36

Unexpectedly, these scenes do not tell a linear narrative of technical or stylistic progression. Bordwell points out that the staging in Pirosmani (Giorgi Shengelaya, 1972) looks remarkably similar to that of Accidents Will Happen (Walter R. Booth, 1907).

Rather, these shots reveal the gradual development of a conventionalised system of staging and framing shots that is uniquely cinematic. Each frame reveals a new form of staging that relies on the viewer reading the image in a particular way, for example, the increasing depth of staging, shot/reverse-shots, and the ‘logic’ of montage. While many of these techniques relate to available technologies, these “patterns of stylistic continuity and change” also demonstrate a development in what particular stylistic decisions allow viewers to do in terms of their interpretation of the image.37 Bordwell recognises that the spectator had to “cultivate viewing skills that [went] beyond those elicited by classical cutting.”38 The long take and, to a large extent, deep focus, demand a more active participation of the audience in the interpretation of the action on screen. More specifically, the implementation of the long take often allows the viewer to choose what

35 These films are Accidents Will Happen (Walter R. Booth, 1907), Red and White Roses (William Humphrey and Ralph Ince, 1913), The President (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919), Crows and Sparrows (Junli Zheng, 1949), Une Aussi Longe Absence (Henri Colpi, 1960), and Pirosmani (Giorgi Shengelaya, 1972) 36 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 1-3. 37 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 5. 38 Ibid., 65.

14 they focus on within the scene. Bordwell’s chosen progression of frames makes evident that as cinema matured, so too did the stylistic vocabulary of film, which allowed viewers to read particular textual cues gleaned from the shot length, depth of staging and the relationship between images.

Through studying staging practices associated with the long take, we can begin to track the “patterns of stylistic continuity and change” that describe the relationship between viewer and film, and camera and mise-en-scène. There are many instances in the films discussed in this thesis when the camera moves in a travelling long take through constantly changing mise-en-scène. Unguided by montage, the viewer must rely on carefully staged objects and characters as their guide. This kind of visual guidance is evident in a film like Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), which is inspired by the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. One of the opening scenes follows a student,

Nathan (Nathan Tyson), in two long tracking shots from the football field, through school corridors and ends with him meeting his girlfriend at the lockers. The character acts as a visual guide for the viewer; his positioning directly in front of the camera develops his character and slowly unfolds the physical space around him. Further,

Nathan’s red hoodie and the white cross printed on the back focuses the viewer’s attention on him (Figure 2). As we witness the apparently insignificant events occurring along his journey, it is clear that the purpose of this shot is not to stage an important event for the camera, but to position the viewer in a specific temporal relationship with the film. The viewer experiences these events with the character, and if something significant occurs, it is never explicitly signalled. The travelling long take moving slowly behind Nathan privileges the gradual unfolding of the mise-en-scene in the present.

This scene sets up a specific pattern of staging involving both camera and character that operates across the whole film, in which the events are not just represented in front of

15 the camera, but also re-presented such that their contingent unfolding in the present is made overt. The film’s affective potential—to generate empathy with the characters in the face of the horrific event to come—is translated to the viewer via this approach to staging. In this example, this method of staging reveals a complex network of assumptions made by the director about how viewers read films. It also reveals how the development of technology works in tandem with the development of style and, more specifically, staging. With the mobilisation of the long take, new patterns of staging practice have developed. These patterns gradually shape the ways in which viewers read films by making staging, rather than montage, central to the film’s production of meaning.

Figure 2. The opening scene of Elephant (2003), in which a boy acts as a guide for the camera.

16 While the long take frequently offers a practical solution, it can also introduce complexity that precludes or complicates its employment. In Figures Traced in Light,

Bordwell uses the filming of a hypothetical dinner table scene to highlight the technique’s practical disadvantages. His analysis suggests why the long take is often rejected by directors for montage. Primarily, the long take prevents the director from editing out slow or silent moments that may occur. If the shot is planned in advance to follow a particular trajectory around the room, or even to remain static, the placement of an edit could destroy the desired effect. In this sense, the long take limits the range of choice available to the director in the editing room. Also, such a shot often necessitates an extensive amount of rehearsal prior to the filming of a scene.39 In some cases, these staging difficulties can become a virtuosic spectacle, as revealed in a film like Russian

Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002). The elaborate production style and the large numbers of actors involved means the film’s success relies heavily on the precise co-ordination of hundreds of actors playing their part at the right time. All other production elements become secondary to the placement and interaction of the characters. Not only does this co-ordination allow for the long take to be used in such a way, but it also necessitates the use of the technique for the film’s success. With the use of the long take, the practical considerations of time, finances and logistics are even more imperative than with other stylistic decisions.

Bordwell argues that film criticism has largely ignored the aesthetic significance of staging throughout film’s history. Critics often demonstrate a preference for the technical aspects of film such as editing and special effects.40 His explanation for this oversight is that, in the early years of cinema, editing techniques were deemed the feature that distinguished film from theatre. With the introduction of editing, “the

39 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 1-4. 40 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 8.

17 filmmaker could flash us from one locale to another, step over stretches of time…and generate a rhythm purely out of shots of changing lengths.”41 Mark Le Fanu, writing in

1997, recognises a loss of the skill of using staging as the predominant producer of meaning for the near-twenty-first-century viewer. Unlike Bordwell, he attributes this loss to a change in the viewer, stating that we no longer have “the patience to look – that is, to linger, to explore, to risk boredom in the search of epiphany – that not so long ago was part and parcel of the serious cinema-going experience.”42 Despite this recognition of staging as being overlooked in both contemporary and early film practice, any examination of the long take must recognise that staging is crucial. This thesis engages extensively in analysis of staging to demonstrate that the long take and staging are inextricably linked in the production meaning.

Subjectivity, Modernism and the Long Take

Bordwell has shown how the patterns and conventions of film style are a product of historical circumstance. These patterns result in style being employed to address both aesthetic and practical needs of the film. But this thesis is also interested in films that employ style for the purpose of actively engaging the viewer and overtly positioning them in relation to the film. Specifically, as this section explores, the filmmaker’s effort to adequately portray the subject’s encounter with the world reflexively turns the camera back on itself and its viewer, making the viewer aware of their own act of watching. In doing so, it calls into question its means of production and its reliability. This kind of encounter the viewer has with cinema is common in modernist film. Gilberto Perez accounts for the precise nature of this cinematic portrayal of the modern encounter in

41 Ibid., 8. 42 Mark Le Fanu, “Metaphysics of the ‘Long Take’: Some Post-Bazinian Reflections,” P.O.V 4 (1997), accessed August 30, 2014. http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_04/section_1/artc1A.html.

18 his discussion of modernist art. He identifies three features of modernist cinema that define the viewer’s relationship with the film. He argues, “An art that calls attention to its means wants us to recognize it as a construction, a matter of choice rather than necessity, an order of human making rather than a higher order of things.”43 These three features suggest that what allows the viewer to be aware of the act of watching is our awareness of the deliberate construction of the film. The long take, more specifically, has the capacity to draw attention to the cinematic image as being both perceived by a thinking subject and unreliable in its depiction of the world.

Perez exemplifies the idea of the viewer’s awareness of themselves and the film’s construction in his discussion of Kiarostami’s documentary Homework (1989).

Throughout most of the film, the camera is positioned inside a classroom as children respond to questions about homework. 44 During the interviews, a second camera performs a reverse shot that reveals both Kiarostami (the interviewer) and the camera filming the children (Figure 3). Reflecting Perez’s definition of modernist cinema,

Kiarostami wants the viewer to recognise the film as a construction. Perez argues that the presence of the camera has such an influence on the children that it must physically appear in the documentary to account for the obvious lies that the children tell about doing their homework.45 Showing the physical presence of the camera enables viewers to be simultaneously aware of themselves and conscious of the way the camera interacts with the situation.

43 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 261. 44 Perez, The Material Ghost, 267. 45 Ibid.

Figure 3. A reverse shot of the ever-present camera in Kiarostami’s Homework (1989).

Perez’s discussion focusses on a tendency closely tied to a documentary tradition, in which the filmmaker feels compelled to explicitly reveal his or her method of production to expose the constructed nature of the film. In fiction film, however, this exposition of the medium’s tools is more profoundly evident in the deliberate choices of the filmmakers. The traditions of realism, modernism and the long take are united in these choices. Using another example from a Kiarostami film, Perez demonstrates how the modernist compulsion to draw attention to the film’s construction can be unexpectedly satisfied by focussing on naturalist detail. He describes a scene from Close-

Up (1990) when two policemen have arrived at a house to investigate someone impersonating a famous movie director. Shot in a classical style, the camera would follow the policemen into the house, thus following the central action of the film. But

Kiarostami chooses to keep his camera outside with the taxi driver, capturing him

20 kicking a can down the street.46 As the camera remains with the driver, the viewer gains access to a moment that would normally be elided from the film, and that therefore overtly announces the directorial decision involved. The attention to naturalist detail captured in this unusually lengthy scene, as well as the decision not to follow the action into the house, emphasises the ‘subject’ in the film: it acknowledges that it has a conscious viewer and that it is a product of “human making.”47

The deliberate denial of access operating in this scene highlights a crucial aspect of the relationship between modernism and naturalism where the long take is concerned. In privileging the naturalist unfolding of time, as is done in this particular scene, the viewer will always be excluded from some part of the diegesis, and thus be given the opportunity to engage in a critical questioning of the constructed nature of the film. Perez expresses this condition of naturalism:

[I]n the actual world we inhabit, where we can have no privileged access to what goes on, no ideal place from which to apprehend what takes place, we must acknowledge the means by which we actually manage our access, we must put into question the means our art employs for representing the world.48

As we are stuck outside the house with the driver in Close-Up, we must acknowledge that we cannot have privileged access to both the events occurring outside and to what we assume is the film’s main story occurring inside the house. “The point is not merely to tell us the story,” Perez argues, “but to make us aware of our path to the story.”49 The long take, in its privileging of naturalism, always faces the same dilemma of being tied to one place, denying the viewer access to something potentially crucial, and thus calling attention to its construction and its means.

46 Perez, The Material Ghost, 263. 47 Ibid., 261. 48 Perez, The Material Ghost, 263. 49 Ibid., 264.

21 While Perez’s analysis reveals how the long take is involved in the viewer’s awareness of the construction and limitations of cinema, an equally important facet of the long take and subjectivity is the role of the tracking shot in bestowing upon the viewer a particular kind of agency. In Daniel Morgan’s essay on Max Ophüls, he sets out three common functions for camera movements involving the long take: first, to show new things; second, to follow a character’s movement; and third, to take on a character’s point of view.50 Morgan argues, however, that Ophüls’s camera doesn’t entirely adhere to any of these three. While the camera often identifies with a character’s point of view, what it reveals in doing so is more than merely the character’s subjective state. It also reveals the unseeable: the characters’ supposed fate and their position within the social world. This offers the viewer with a dual perspective: one that is literal and another that is abstract. The role the long take plays in this perspective is exemplified in a scene from

The Earrings of Madame de… (1953), in which Louise (Danielle Darrieux) and Donati

(Vittorio De Sica), the protagonist and her lover respectively, are placed next to each other at a table during a ball. The table is positioned beneath a large mirror that reflects numerous couples dancing in a circular motion in the ballroom (Figure 4). The camera remains static, fixed on Louise and Donati. Morgan argues that the dancing couples reflected in the mirror behind them (and on perfect view for the audience) represent

“the socially prescribed form of circulation” and constant movement of the social world.51

50 Daniel Morgan, “Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2011): 132. 51 Morgan, “Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity,” 146-7.

Figure 4. Louise and Donati framed below a mirror in The Earrings of Madame De... (1953).

The duality in this scene becomes evident through the depiction of Louise and

Donati interacting with the guests and the abstract representation of their social world reflected above them. In this instance, the shot’s staging offers the viewer both an apparent real-world view of the film’s world and a kind of extra sight that is unattainable by the characters themselves. In Ophüls’s films, agency is enabled by the viewer occupying an external position that no character can occupy. This effect can only be obtained by this specific positioning of the characters, the mise-en-scène, and the distanced long take. It is in this duality that the scene takes on an ethical significance, encouraging the viewer to question the connections between the literal and the abstract. This level of duality operates in all of the films discussed in this thesis; each film involves either an historical, allegorical or moral dimension that functions in tandem with the literal

23 dimension of the film and that is only revealed through a particular interplay of viewer, camera and mise-en-scène facilitated by the long take.

This thesis also engages with the long take and subjectivity in terms of specific technological developments. Techniques such as the point-of-view (POV) shot have been significantly improved by developments in cinematic technology. In the pre-digital era, films such as Ophüls’s Le Plaisir (1952) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) used the long take POV shot to immerse the viewer in the film. Although the camera was perfectly positioned to emulate the visual perspective of a character, the limitations of film stock and heavy cameras made continuous subjective narration impossible.

Numerous films attempted to combat these technical limitations to employ the POV shot in a more extended capacity. In Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947), for example, the camera adopts the perspective of the protagonist, Philip Marlowe, for almost the entirety of the film. While the film offers an attempt at continuous subjective narration, it is also bound by restrictions of analogue cinema. It also encounters the problem of denying the viewer a consistent, visible physical embodiment of its protagonist. This thesis will reveal that, just as the long take has shaped the way people read and interpret films, it has also enabled us to recognise the limitations of the medium—what cannot be shown—that are placed on us as viewers.

* * * *

This thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which examines an individual director and, largely, one prominent film from that director’s oeuvre. The first chapter examines the films of Greek director, Theo Angelopoulos. It closely analyses his film, Landscape in the Mist (1988), which marks a stylistic turning point in his career. This chapter

24 principally explores what it means to occupy the position of a ‘belated modernist’ and the implications for film style. I argue that the Angelopoulos is engaged in a conscious balance of affiliation and resistance with his predecessors. The reciprocal relationship between the long take and cinematic staging is central to examining the implications of

Angelopoulos’s historical positioning. He uses this reciprocal relationship, as well as discontinuity in his staging, to explore the constant interaction of history and myth with the present. Angelopoulos’s particular use of formal strategies such as dedramatisation, temps morts and distanced staging are ways for the director to engage simultaneously with his cinematic predecessors, traditional Greek artistic conventions and issues of politics and identity. The long take is revealed to play a central role in re-examining the category of the late modernist filmmaker.

Chapter Two focuses on Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). Much like Angelopoulos, Tarr has lived through a period of significant social and political upheaval, namely the fall of communism in Hungary. This chapter examines

Werckmeister Harmonies as a product of post-communist Hungary, in which Tarr uses the long take to allegorise the experience of a community in crisis. It explores how this allegorical or figurative dimension is part of the form of the film itself. In each scene,

Tarr’s camerawork performs circular and repetitive movements that constantly gesture towards a figurative meaning that operates independently of character and narrative. As such, this chapter primarily focusses on the shared capacity of the long take and allegory to displace, defer and fragment the connections between the literal and figurative. It examines the temporal and physical disconnections revealed in the mise-en-scène by the long take, as well as the figurative and literal patterns created by the camera. Through this kind of formal analysis, this chapter addresses the question of how the long take

25 operates allegorically, and how it contributes to the idea of a meaning that never quite arrives.

In the third chapter, I use Michael Haneke’s film Amour (2012) to question how the long take can profoundly disrupt the viewer’s sense of their own position as spectator. Amour is about an elderly woman dying of a stroke who is cared for by her devoted husband. Haneke offers a moral problem situated in a closed, domestic space, effectively severed from the outside world. Although his cinema has frequently been categorised as a “cinema of ethics” that makes overt socio-political commentary, this chapter differentiates Amour from his earlier films by examining it through a different lens.52 Rather, I argue that Haneke implicates the viewer in this moral problem by positioning them as enacting a disruption of the private space of the characters. He achieves this by forming a tripartite relationship between viewer, character and film, in which the viewer’s engagement is always required and acknowledged in the framing and duration of the shot. As such, this chapter scrutinises the viewer’s conditional access to the diegesis: both what can’t be shown, and what is shown via the viewer’s privileged access. I use Haneke’s framing of the enclosed location to continue a theme from the earlier chapters in this thesis: the symbiotic relationship between the long take (a manipulation of time) and the resulting manipulation of space.

Chapter Four examines Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark. The film occupies a unique position in this thesis by comprising a single, unbroken tracking shot through the film’s duration. This chapter principally explores the perception and realities of the technical, philosophical and aesthetic freedoms potentially afforded the long take through this technological innovation. In this chapter, I argue that Russian

Ark’s particular utilisation of the long take is a reflection on different kinds of historical

52 The term “cinema of ethics” is borrowed from Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).

26 and cinematic experiences. These experiences shape the narrative, formal and temporal treatment of the film’s historic subject. The film showcases the performative nature of history as it is represented in film; in Russian Ark, history is explicitly selective, presentational and theatrical. The film is an exercise in staging history, not as a succession of clearly delineated events, but in and through the temporally charged present tense of the long take. Throughout the chapter, I pose two central questions: specifically, how does the long take bring historicity to the fore in its construction of history? And, what kinds of experiences of history are made visible by the long take?

The film’s formal construction of history, it is argued, expresses a profound instability of Russia’s identity in the past, present and future, through the film’s explicit erasure of the Soviet period.

The work of these four directors contributes to answering the core research questions of this thesis—the connection between form and meaning, and the development of style out of particular historical circumstances. Each filmmaker’s place in history is a crucial consideration. Producing their body of work predominantly between the 1970s and 2000s, they occupy an historical position distinct from those of their post-war predecessors, yet they share numerous stylistic features in common. They embody the legacy of a certain kind of filmic moment associated with the post-war period in Europe. Thus, this thesis is able to examine the legacy of post-war figures, such as Godard and Antonioni, through the style of contemporary filmmakers. Much like their post-war counterparts, these specific contemporary directors’ styles are informed by significant social and political upheaval, representing how form and style respond to these shifts in diverse cultural circumstances. The specific focus on Greek,

Austrian, Hungarian, and Russian directors marks a shift away from a plethora of literature on the long take, and European modernist cinema more broadly, that focusses

27 only on western European case studies. By focussing on eastern and Mediterranean films, a unique picture of the long take’s capacity to interact with a particular kind of culture and history can be built.

Each filmmaker’s work offers a different stylistic approach to the long take and the construction of meaning, for example, through allegory, adaptation of literature and myth, manipulation of the viewer’s position and the reconstruction of history. Their cultural diversity profoundly influences their use of the technique. In this sense, their contribution to this thesis is as much what distinguishes them from one another as what connects them. While Sokurov, Tarr and Angelopoulos are all explicitly connected through their respective representations of history, they are united with Haneke through their constant, modernist interrogation of the deliberate temporal and spatial construction of the shot. Specifically, their films illustrate how different kinds of duration interact, and what is concealed by the edges of the frame, which is evident in all the filmmakers’ work. Considered together, their work exemplifies the diverse ways in which overt stagings of meaning can be produced by the long take. The specific films chosen for discussion are all an exemplification of each director’s style, but they also all emerged beyond the midpoint of the director’s career, such that each film reflects on what came before: both the director’s predecessors and the director’s earlier style.

28 Chapter One Affiliation and Resistance: Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist

Style can so often look like a relatively simple recipe…Yet, in order to dispel this kind of misconception, we would also have to talk about the historicity of such techniques—their timing in the development of the cinematic apparatus generally—as well as the way in which they can be said to be rooted in the dynamics of social life, and to correspond to dimensions of the social content which had not yet found expression in the arts as such.53

In “Angelopoulos, or Melancholy,” David Bordwell describes Theo Angelopoulos as a director who, starting in the 1970s, “came belatedly to the modernist tradition.” 54 He examines the implications of this historical positioning. On the one hand, Angelopoulos was able to benefit from the stylistic innovations already made by directors such as Jean-

Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman; yet, on the other, his emergence a couple of decades after these directors brought with it a distinct challenge, namely, how to define his own contribution. The manner in which Angelopoulos incorporates the long take into his films exemplifies his attempt to negotiate this challenge. As Bordwell points out, prior to Angelopoulos’s emergence, European filmmakers such as Carl Theodor Dreyer and

Michelangelo Antonioni adopted the long take as a prominent technique in their film vocabulary. Through the long take, these directors found new expression for their unique (and rapidly changing) political and cultural contexts using cinema’s pre-existing set of tools. By the time Angelopoulos emerged, however, “certain technological factors that had encouraged long takes (sync-sound filming, heavy studio cameras) were largely

53 Fredric Jameson, “Theo Angelopoulos: The Past as History, the Future as Form,” in The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 81. 54 David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 144.

29 gone, so [the technique] could be sensed as a deliberate effect.”55 Angelopoulos’s adoption of the long take, therefore, operates as a distinctly belated stylistic choice.

In his own assessment of the director’s work, Fredric Jameson argues that, “the late modernist is presumably one who manages to invent a new style after stylistic innovation has been pronounced exhausted.”56 Angelopoulos echoes this sentiment in an interview with scholar Gerald O’Grady. In his very early career, Angelopoulos’s only familiarity with film was via American cinema. He refers to the cinematic innovations made in the post-war period in France, Italy and Japan, stating: “All these kinds of cinema revealed for us a variety of alternatives for writing films and for filmmaking in general. Without realising it, I found myself making certain choices.”57 Notably, he points out that Godard innovated stylistic tropes and techniques—including the jump cut—that were markedly different from the dominant Hollywood style at the time, and which helped to redefine European cinema as distinctly European. Godard chose to use cinematic techniques in a manner that was deliberately distinct from the American tradition in cinema, and he also introduced the possibility of this choice to European filmmakers. 58 As a late modernist, Angelopoulos learnt how to reinvent style by witnessing Godard’s innovations.

This chapter is principally concerned with Angelopoulos’s place in the history of film style. More specifically, it looks at how the director’s emergence at a particular moment in this history dictates how he uses the long take, and to what end. Of the directors discussed in this thesis, Angelopoulos established his career the earliest. The moment of Angelopoulos’s arrival is a particularly significant factor in identifying the

55 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 152. 56 Jameson, “The Past as History, the Future as Form,” 78. 57 Gerald O’Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” in Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, ed. Dan Fainaru (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 67. 58 Angelopoulos is non-specific about his use of the word “American,” but he refers to “detective stories, musicals, social drama, and melodrama” as the kinds of American films he was first introduced to. See O’Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” 67.

30 connection between this Greek auteur and the formal technique of the long take.

Bordwell indicates the importance of this relationship when he says, “by the early 1970s, the long take had a distinguished pedigree…[Angelopoulos] knew the debate about mise- en-scène that André Bazin had launched and that animated 1950s Cahiers criticism.”59

Angelopoulos belonged to a generation of European filmmakers who lived through immense political turmoil in their respective countries and were also intimately familiar with Bazin’s influential theories on the ways this new ‘reality’, as he saw it, could be expressed cinematically. Therefore it is not exactly that Angelopoulos invented a new style after stylistic innovation had been “pronounced exhausted,” as Jameson suggests, but rather, he renewed the relevance of an already exhausted style in a particular cultural context that facilitated this renewal.

Angelopoulos began his career with Reconstruction in 1970. This film was followed by three films, which together are referred to as the Trilogy of History. This trilogy comprised Days of ’36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1977).

These films are often characterised as offering an allegorical reflection on the political history of twentieth-century Greece.60 Landscape in the Mist (1988) is the third instalment of the director’s second trilogy, the Trilogy of Silence, which also includes Voyage to

Cythera (1984) and The Beekeeper (1986).61 Landscape in the Mist is the story of two children, five-year-old Alexander (Michalis Zeke) and eleven-year-old Voula (Tania Palaiologou), who run away from their home in Greece and embark on a quest to find their estranged father in Germany. Along the way, they meet Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou), a young actor who operates as a spiritual guide for their journey. It is the tenth of

59 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 182. 60 Vrasidas Karalis, “Theo Angelopoulos’ Early Films and the Demystification of Power,” in The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 114-15; Jameson, “The Past as History, the Future as Form,” 88-89. 61 This periodisation was defined by Angelopoulos himself. See Gabrielle Schulz, “I Shoot the Way I Breathe: Eternity and a Day,” in Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 117.

31 Angelopoulos’s films, all of which focus, either directly or indirectly, on Greece’s turbulent twentieth-century history.

Despite this thematic continuation from his earlier works, Landscape in the Mist marks a turning point between his earlier films, in which history and landscape dominate the narrative, and his films of the following decade, which feature a more well-defined protagonist. Contrasting with the Trilogy of History, the Trilogy of Silence is described by the director himself as one in which “history and politics move into the background...and the films focus more on the characters.”62 The Trilogy of Silence is a meditation on the idea of post-history—a response to the question of what comes after the turbulent political crises in Greece during World War II and the Greek Civil War, and an expression of uncertainty about the country’s national identity in the context of

Europe and the approaching downfall of communism. In this chapter, I argue that, unlike the director’s earlier films, Landscape in the Mist is not a depiction of a concrete historical moment, but rather about using specific formal techniques, such as staging and the long take, to deal with history and myth in an abstract sense. Landscape in the Mist is a significant case study for this thesis as it offers an example of a film in which the director finds unique expression in the long take for his sentiments about his country, its landscape, and its history.

The “timing” to which Jameson refers in the opening quote of this chapter is relevant to Angelopoulos in a multitude of ways. In this chapter, I argue that

Angelopoulos’s particular use of the long take is evidence that he occupies an unusual position in the history of film style, not necessarily as a modernist, but one in which he is engaged in a conscious balance of affiliation and resistance with the stylistic choices of his predecessors. To examine Angelopoulos’s film style and his representation of

62 Dan Fainaru, “Introduction,” in Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, x.

32 history, this chapter explores a key problem faced by the filmmaker: how to represent the continuous impact of the past on the present? The first two sections of this chapter examine the reciprocal relationship between the long take and cinematic staging. I question how this relationship contributes to a representation of history such as that described above, and how the physical spaces around the characters are negotiated to participate in this representation. I further argue that, by examining the role of the long take in Angelopoulos’s films, we can see distinct traces of his affiliation and resistance to his cinematic predecessors and Greek cultural heritage, and the complex position he occupies in his relationship with modernism. As such, the predominant inquiry explored by this chapter is what it means, in terms of an impact on film style, to be a late modernist.

Staging History, Myth and Discontinuity

Early in Landscape in the Mist, Alexander and Voula undertake a long train journey by themselves and arrive in a town at night. As the children walk through the centre of the town, they arrive at the intersection of two roads, laden with snow. Out of the silence emerges a yellow tractor, dragging behind it a writhing white horse.63 The horse is deposited in front of the children, they kneel down beside it, and it is left to slowly die.

The scene is captured in three long takes, the first of which is an extreme long shot capturing the children standing in the intersection as the horse arrives (Figure 5). The second shot is a medium long shot of the horse slowly dying, framed between

Alexander and Voula (Figure 6). About halfway through the shot, a wedding party emerges from a door in the deep background (Figure 7). In the third shot, a medium

63 Like many other moments in Angelopoulos’s films, the white horse operates as a decontextualised reference to an earlier film: in this case, Alexander’s horse in Alexander the Great (1980).

33 close-up captures Alexander’s drawn out tearful reaction to the suffering creature.

Despite the constant movement of the characters within each shot, the camera remains static. The unexpected arrival of both the tractor and the horse—distinctly rural symbols in an otherwise urbanised environment—means that their presence seems out of place throughout this scene.

The interplay of characters in the mise-en-scène reveals an inherent reciprocality between the long take and staging. Particularly in the first two shots, the distanced framing and the long duration of the shot reveal different levels of activity interacting.

In the first shot of the scene, Alexander and Voula enter from frame left and stand stationary on the intersection, facing away from the camera. A few seconds later, a groom chases a bride from a door in a building behind the children. The couple stop in the mid-foreground and embrace, before the groom leads the bride back into the building (Figure 5). While the two couples—the children, and the bride and groom— remain on screen, a form of split focus occurs as the shot captures two distinct groups of people who don’t acknowledge or interact with each other. After the bride and groom disappear into the building, the tractor carrying the writhing horse enters from frame right and, after depositing its cargo in the centre of the shot, exits again to frame left. The children run towards the horse and kneel down next to it. All of this action plays out in a series of static, distant long takes, which emphasise both the distinction and interaction of the disparate figures in the shot. This method continues in the next shot of the same scene.

Figure 5. The married couple framed next to Alexander and Voula in Landscape in the Mist (1988).

Figure 6. The horse’s head appears at the bottom of the frame.

Figure 7. The wedding party appears behind Alexander and Voula.

After the camera comes to rest on the children and the horse in medium-long shot, it remains static, despite the movement of the characters within the frame. The shot’s framing is such that Alexander, Voula and the horse only occupy the bottom half of the frame. During the shot, the horse’s head continues to appear and disappear at the bottom of the frame as it dies (Figure 6). After its death, the wedding party of the bride and groom emerge from the same door as before and dance in the background, occupying the top half of the frame (Figure 7). Throughout this scene, the characters move in and out of shot with apparent freedom, while the camera remains static.

Angelopoulos’s ‘stage’ remains constant, while the three points of activity move in and out of shot. Bordwell refers to this technique as “filling the blanks,” in which

Angelopoulos overtly moves the camera to an initially empty space and then fills it with

36 characters.64 He is not only filling the gaps, but also making the viewer aware that such gaps exist. This technique affirms for the viewer that they are witnessing a deliberate staging. Such a technique is employed not to emphasise the action of any particular party—the children, the married couple or the horse—but to make visible the connection between these different points of activity.

As well as revealing an interaction between the different levels of activity, these two shots are also marked by discontinuity. While the continuity in this scene is provided by the long take, a distinct discontinuity emerges in the physical disconnection between the figures in the space. This disconnection is exemplified by a few key interactions in the scene: the clash of the urban and the rural embodied by the tractor and horse juxtaposed with the environment, and the physical and emotional disjuncture between the children and the bridal party. Placed in the frame as fore, middle and background, their physical disconnection is made palpable. The interaction of these elements renders an experience of the present as comprised of not only different points of activity in the same frame, but also different experiences of time. While all the figures in the dying horse scene belong to the present, their physical disconnection estranges them from one another and allows them to operate as self-contained units within one scene.

Angelopoulos uses this technique elsewhere in Landscape in the Mist and his other films to suggest the co-presence of different historical moments within one scene. By tracing the pattern of staging across Landscape in the Mist, it is evident that the long take opens up the possibility for history and myth to emerge as moments that are fleetingly and fluidly woven into the present. The physical discontinuity at play in the staging of the dying horse scene is translated elsewhere into a distinct historical discontinuity. In this

64 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 182.

37 latter instance, different points of activity in the scene are revealed to belong to different historical epochs. With the fleeting nature of this form of history, each scene carries the weight of the past within its staging.

Figure 8. Two men wearing yellow raincoats watch the marble hand off-screen.

This process is most evident in a scene occurring about two-thirds through

Landscape in the Mist when a giant hand is lifted out of the sea by a helicopter. The scene opens on a shot of Orestes sitting silently on a dock with his arms wrapped around his knees. The shot cuts to a choppy blue sea and, gradually, a large unidentifiable object emerges from beneath the surface. Removed from any point of reference, its scale is indeterminable. In a third shot, a helicopter approaches the camera and lowers towards the sea, and the camera tilts downward to follows its path. A fourth shot shows

Alexander and Voula emerging from a hotel, while in the foreground, two men in

38 yellow raincoats sit stationary (or even frozen) on a bike (Figure 8). The children and the men join Orestes in staring off-screen as a fifth shot reveals the identity of the floating object: a giant stone hand. Four thin ropes have been attached to the back of the hand to be lifted upwards by the helicopter, which remains out of shot. The hand is lifted into the sky, revealing a missing index finger. As the shot continues, the helicopter carries the hand away from the camera and towards Thessaloniki across the water. The camera keeps both the helicopter and the giant hand in view until they disappear into the distance, and the camera slowly tilts down to reveal Orestes, Alexander and Voula on the dock watching the helicopter fly away.

Like the dying horse scene, this scene stages a particular level of activity as both connected to and discontinuous from the other levels of staging activity. In this case, the discontinuity in the scene is caused by a figure of history (the hand) as an interruption of the present. The disjuncture between the hand and the other levels of staging in the scene exists because the hand figures as a meaningful interruption of the story’s trajectory. The enigmatic sculpted hand is a de-contextualised fragment of history. While its origin is never revealed, it is evident that the hand has been removed from a larger sculpture, as though it is part of a suppressed history buried beneath the water and too large to be fathomable or complete in the present. Furthermore, the incomplete yet imposing nature of the giant hand is juxtaposed with the mundanity of the children emerging from the hotel and Orestes sitting on the dock. These two levels of staging placed together in the same scene emphasise the discontinuity between them, as well as the constant interaction between past and present.

In this constant interaction, however, the different levels of staging do not have equal status. The long take insists on the moment of the hand’s emergence from the water as a major narrative event that dominates the scene. Such an event is emphasised

39 by the sheer amount of time dedicated to the unveiling of the object from beneath the water and its subsequent transportation away from the camera. This sequence takes place across separate long takes; each one captures a different stage of the gradually emerging, mysterious figure of the hand. The event of the hand’s emergence is emphasised by the particular kind of staging used throughout the scene to mark the giant hand as not just an abstract figure, but a fragment of history that places an immense imposition on the present.

In order to achieve this imposition, Angelopoulos uses a technique of spatialising off-screen space, which exemplifies his self-conscious approach to staging.

Initially, the only element connecting Orestes, the helicopter and the mysterious object is Orestes’s glance down towards the sea. At this point, both the men and the children are positioned off-centre and their eyes are drawn towards the same event off-camera, which the viewer can assume is the recently-revealed object. Angelopoulos’s staging in this shot creates a gesture towards the events off-screen. The yellow-raincoated men’s bodies are three-quarter turned towards the edge of the frame (Figure 8). This staging makes the subject of the shot not the figures within it, but a significant event occurring off-screen. The second half of the sequence, in which Angelopoulos returns to a shot of the sea, revisits his off-screen technique. In this moment, the hand hangs at the top of the frame, with the source of its attached ropes still invisible (Figure 9). Repeating the technique he employed with the two men on bikes, Angelopoulos creates tension in his staging across the edge of the frame by hiding the central element of the scene from view. Angelopoulos’s staging method is evident to the viewer because it fundamentally contradicts our assumptions of typical film staging conventions. Bordwell proposes, for example, that the centring of characters in the frame is one of the key techniques in

40 guiding a viewer’s attention in a long take. 65 This off-centre/off-screen technique, however, makes an overt connection between the on-screen action and an apparent real-world off-screen space. The characters’ reference to this off-screen space in their staging is evidence of how Angelopoulos’s staging performs a constant interaction between the different levels of activity in the scene.

Figure 9. The marble hand suspended in the air in Landscape in the Mist.

As well as allowing fragments of history to interrupt the present, Angelopoulos also frequently performs the same function with characters returning from earlier films.

The Travelling Players and Orestes from The Travelling Players, and Spyros from Voyage to

Cythera (who appears playing his violin) all make an appearance in Landscape in the Mist.66

65 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 49-50. 66 Not all these characters are played by the same actors across these numerous films, but they are identifiable by common physical traits such as clothing and, for Spyros, a violin.

41 The men in yellow raincoats in the giant hand scene make two further appearances in the film and later in The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) climbing telegraph poles. The presence of these characters in the film creates a sense of a continuous narrative that weaves its way through Angelopoulos’s oeuvre. There is also a sense of timelessness in the sequences in which they appear: the characters from the past, some of them already dead in previous films, exist in an eternal present with Voula and Alexander. Most importantly, the interruption by these characters performs much the same function as the figures of history: they form discontinuous levels of staging. The long take stages the interaction between these different levels of staging and opens up an estrangement between them. Both the figures of history and the characters from other films operate as overt markers of discontinuity in the shot.

The estranged relationship created between different levels of staging is also evident in moments that reveal a mythical influence disrupting the flow of the narrative.

In a scene that occurs early in Landscape in the Mist, the children are sitting in the waiting room of a police station. Through the window, Voula sees snow falling outside. She leads Alexander downstairs and outside the police station. In a single tracking shot, the camera pans to the right to gradually reveal policemen, townspeople and workers in yellow raincoats scattered along the streets. They all stand frozen, looking upwards at the falling snow. This is a prime example of how Angelopoulos’s visual style straddles the real and the imaginary. Throughout the tracking shot revealing the frozen figures in the snow, the only movement and temporal reference is the children slowly creeping between the people and the constant movement of the camera. It is intermittently difficult to ascertain whether the image is frozen, or only the characters within it.

This scene, even more so than the giant hand scene, depicts unexplained phenomena that emerge from outside the logic of the film’s narrative. These

42 phenomena are what Andrew Horton refers to as the mythic or “fairy tale” nature of the narrative.67 The scene promotes a sense of constructed artificiality in the fake snow, the carefully chosen colours and the sudden introduction of the non-diegetic music. The employment of the tracking shot is significant here: it allows for a gradual revelation of the unusual staging of the shot as it slowly tracks sideways. As viewers, we discover the phenomena at the same time the children do, as they emerge from the police station door. Furthermore, the sideways movement of both the camera and the children, coupled with the stasis of the other people in the shot, creates a striking juxtaposition that further emphasises the unnatural composition of the people. Such phenomena can only take their full effect when staged alongside their opposite in a sustained shot: stasis as opposed to movement, the artificial as opposed to the real. Again, the staging of the scene emphasises the discontinuity between the different levels of activity through the creation of different experiences of time. The giant hand, the frozen figures and the recurring image of the yellow raincoats are all moments that allow the film to make a show of its own theatricality through an overt staging. These scenes require the viewer to develop a new understanding of historical representation that doesn’t necessarily exclude self-conscious staging. We are encouraged to see these scenes as history, myth and spirituality, filtered through the present.

Throughout his career, Angelopoulos maintained a complex approach to film language and history. In an interview, he said that his cinema is “a continuous dialectic presentation of historical moments, but at the same time preventing any factual relationship between them.” He continued, “There exists an accordion of time and space, a continuous accordion that lends a different dimension to the events being

67 Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 144.

43 shown on screen.”68 While this comment was about The Travelling Players, it reveals

Angelopoulos’s perspective of film and history, and his aims with respect to film language throughout his career. His reference to an “accordion of time and space” indicates a flexible and often non-linear conception of history, in which time and space are interwoven with one another. This conception of history is evident in his treatment of time in The Travelling Players, in which “the moving pattern of images does not lead to a chronological march forward as real time progresses, but to a doubling back of the past.”69

During the production of the Trilogy of Silence, Angelopoulos found the tools and methods he had relied on in the past were inadequate. While Landscape in the Mist continues Angelopoulos’s project to represent “a continuous dialectic presentation of historical moments,” it marks a turning point in his method for such a representation.

In this film, history is not represented in terms of distinct time periods. The “doubling back of the past” occurs much more obliquely than in his previous films. Although the characters’ narrative is played out entirely in what we can assume is the present, indistinct moments and references to history, such as the giant hand and the frozen figures in the snow, emerge and are staged within the same shot. In these moments, the long take aids in crystalising the relationship between the past and the present. This change in method has significant implications for the relationship between staging and the long take.

Angelopoulos’s change in method was the result of a political change, as well as being an aesthetically-motivated decision. In order to account for this change, we must return to Bordwell’s statement that film style is “the texture of the film’s images and sounds, the result of choices made by the filmmaker(s) in particular historical

68 Angelopoulos in O’Grady, “Angelopoulos's Philosophy of Film,” 72. 69 Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 58.

44 circumstances.”70 Bordwell points to the problem-solving capacity of style: style is the practical solution to a problem faced by the filmmaker. This capacity is reflected in

Angelopoulos’s formal response to a changing political environment in Greece. He is a product of both a politically turbulent period of Greece’s history and a movement of cinema that challenged the already-established conventions of cinematic representation.

Jameson breaks Angelopoulos’s filmography into two distinct periods, indicating that post-Alexander the Great (1980), “the very possibility of the historical film as such seems to have been momentarily or permanently eclipsed.”71 He justifies this claim through reference to the return to political stability for Greece. The nation had undergone a series of political upheavals since World War II, including the civil war, the collapse of the monarchy, the 1965 coup and the eventual restoration of democracy in 1974.72

Jameson questions, “is it possible that Greece itself belatedly reached an ‘end of history’…and that in this new ‘post historical’ atmosphere the persistent corpse of everything that made modern Greek history unique itself was lost from view?”73 This statement has significant implications for the filmmaker. It evidences his belief that a nation’s history as a linear, universally agreed upon set of events was no longer an acceptable model of history, particularly for cinematic representation. He had to rethink how to both perceive and represent history. His particular formal solution to representing history is thus dependent on his own historical and political circumstances.

Angelopoulos’s technique of building an interaction between the past, staging and the long take continued to develop into yet another form through the rest of his career. In Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998), he uses a unique form of flashback to connect the present with the past. In a scene in Ulysses’ Gaze, the

70 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 4. 71 Jameson, “The Past as History, the Future as Form,” 88. 72 Nicholas Doumanis, A History of Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 201-12. 73 Jameson, “The Past as History, the Future as Form,” 88.

45 protagonist, A (Harvey Keitel), steps off a train onto the station platform. A’s mother, who is inexplicably younger than him, walks into shot to escort him off the platform.

With a single step, A is transported from the present into his childhood. The transfer from present to past is indicated by both the simultaneous presence of contemporary characters with those from his childhood and the physical movement of the camera that tracks between his past and his present. This movement between time periods looks remarkably like the “double back of the past” encountered in The Travelling Players. But in Ulysses’ Gaze, A remains the same age as his present self in the flashback, akin to a time traveller, experiencing his childhood again. With minimal exposition, Angelopoulos stages a particular kind of interaction between past and present—the impact of memory on the present. While his films in this latter period have a less concrete and overt political engagement, it is clear, through close formal analysis, they are not ahistorical.

Rather, they deal with history with a degree of uncertainty and through a search for an alternative manner of expression. Reflecting this idea, Angelopoulos says, “what used to be History becomes an echo of history.”74 Angelopoulos’s project is to make a film not about history, but a film in which history interacts constantly with the present.

Dedramatisation and the Activation of Physical Space

Another significant aspect of staging in Angelopoulos’s films is his negotiation of physical space. This involves drawing on minimalist techniques such as dedramatisation and temps morts (dead time), popularised by modernist filmmakers. Dedramatisation, a term coined by Bordwell, is present in all of Angelopoulos’s films. Typically, it involves a lack of non-diegetic music, understated performances, and events unfolding at a

74 Andrew Horton, “‘What Do Our Souls Seek?’: An Interview with Theo Angelopoulos,” in The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 88.

46 distance from a static camera. Such framing ensures that the viewer is not only physically distanced, and therefore removed from the subject, but also given time to scan the image for subtle significant movements. Action that might be emphasised in heightened tension using fast montage and close-ups is significantly muted by physical and temporal distancing techniques. This form of minimalism is well-suited to the modernist agenda. As Bordwell explains, for many post-war European filmmakers,

“Real life…did not parse itself into tight plots and smoothly ascending tension. Cinema could break free of Hollywood artifice by rendering in detail the anticlimaxes and wayward incidents of everyday life.”75 Bordwell further distinguishes two forms of dedramatisation developed by these post-war filmmakers, both of which rely on the long take and are present in Angelopoulos’s films. The first is the use of suppressed emotion, not just in the performance style of the actors but also through distanced framing; the second involves “including moments their predecessors would have trimmed as waste.”76

The use of suppressed emotion is evident in Angelopoulos’s films through his staging. This effect is exemplified by his use of “planimetric staging,” which refers to the placement of a group of characters in a line along a single plane, either frontally or with their backs to the camera. This form of staging did not originate with

Angelopoulos, but it is a prominent component of his compositional techniques. In

Angelopoulos’s brand of planimetric staging, he frequently places characters at a distance from the camera, almost indistinguishable from one another. In his films, planimetric staging performs three crucial functions involving the long take. First, it performs a distancing effect in which the environment dominates and the characters become homogenised, contributing to the suppression of emotion. Second, it affirms

75 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 152. 76 Ibid., 153.

47 Angelopoulos’s method of narrating through stillness and slowness; the stakes are placed on the gradual unfolding of the image, and the production of meaning is entirely reliant on the static staging and the elongated temporal component. Third, this form of staging contributes to the theatricality of Angelopoulos’s cinema; these scenes are both staged shallowly and are a purely aesthetic element existing beyond the mere narration of character and story. An early example of this technique in Angelopoulos’s cinema is in The Travelling Players, when the players are frequently staged planimetrically, either statically or walking towards or away from the camera (Figure 10). Angelopoulos uses this form of staging the players as a way of signalling their re-introduction in Landscape in the

Mist. When the players first appear in the film, they walk down the road towards the camera, positioned next to each other in a line (Figure 11). In this particular instance, the staging is a self-conscious reference to a moment in The Travelling Players. Later, in

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004), planimetric staging is used during a funeral procession near the beginning of the film, as the characters dressed in black stand on rafts slowly moving towards the camera (Figure 12).

Figure 10. Planimetric staging in The Travelling Players (1975).

Figure 11. Planimetric staging employed as the travelling players first appear in Landscape in the Mist.

Figure 12. Planimetric staging in the funeral procession in Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004).

49 Angelopoulos’s use of planimetric staging is further evidence that his cinema is presentational. This technique is a legacy of Bertolt Brecht’s estrangement effect (or

Verfremdungseffekt). Originating in the theatre, the estrangement effect was intended to undermine the illusion of reality presented on stage, and thus draw the audience’s attention towards the work of representation. Further, it was designed to encourage the audience to look again at the theatrical scenario with a new perceptual awareness, which was distanced from any emotional involvement.77 This effect gained traction in cinema, initially, in silent film, and subsequently, it became a hallmark of avant-garde filmmakers such as Godard. Brecht admired such applications in cinema for their capacity to simultaneously maintain narrative continuity and overtly highlight the capacities of the filmic medium.78 Like the silent film, Angelos Koutsourakis argues, Angelopoulos makes frequent use of the tableau—an autonomous, deliberately staged moment—which emphasises a presentational ‘showing’ rather than telling. Koutsourakis further contends that such moments operate as a disruption of narrative unity.79

In this deliberate presentational mode, instances of planimetric staging recall the estrangement effect through their explicit acknowledgement of the work of representation. When the travelling players first appear in Landscape in the Mist and walk towards the camera, or the black figures in the funeral procession in Trilogy: The Weeping

Meadow stand in a line on their rafts, the individuality of the characters is removed. They appear rather as inert figures, whose position within the surrounding environment is

77 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 39. 78 Godard achieved the estrangement effect in numerous ways, notably by introducing extra- filmic elements to further break down the viewer’s emotional involvement (such as drawings and newspapers), overt reminders of the cinematic medium—the appearance of clapper boards, backstage areas, direct address to the camera and actors’ self-acknowledgement—and simplification of staging, colour and mise-en-scène. See Jan Uhde, “The Influence of Bertolt Brecht’s Theory of Distanciation on the Contemporary Cinema, Particularly on Jean-Luc Godard,” Journal of the University Film Association 26, no. 3 (1974): 29-30. 79 Angelos Koutsourakis, “The Gestus of Showing: Brecht, Tableaux and Early Cinema in Angelopoulos’ Political Period (1970-80),” in The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, 65-7.

50 emphasised. The unusual linear, frontal positioning of the characters draws attention to their overt staging, the deliberate construction of the shot clearly intended for a viewer, and the theatricalisation of an autonomous moment in the film. As in Godard’s films, these overt reminders of the cinematic medium temporarily disrupt or ‘estrange’ the viewer’s engagement with the film. The stasis and staging of these shots work in tandem with the extended duration to highlight the estrangement effect and the work of representation. In other words, the longer the viewer is granted to scan the image, the greater the effect of estrangement becomes. Angelopoulos’s acknowledgement of the work of representation is not as explicit as instances in Brecht’s theatre or Godard’s cinema, but the self-consciousness of staging recalls a Brechtian legacy with the director’s own distinct inflections.

While these forms of dedramatised long takes are frequently associated with moments of stasis, in Angelopoulos’s films their presence often paradoxically signals a heightening of tension and drama. Bordwell describes a scene in Alexander the Great, in which a dramatic death plays out at a distance from the camera. This scene employs the characteristic shallow staging, but, as Bordwell argues, the distance between the action and the camera subverts a well-established cinematic convention of a proportional relationship between the proximity to the camera and the significance of the action.80

This is the same effect that takes place in the scene with the dying horse in Landscape in the Mist. The distancing of the long take both sharpens the viewer’s sense of realism and mutes the emotional reaction of the children. This scene is one of many examples in

Angelopoulos’s cinema in which a combination of the tempo and the specific framing of the shot, as Bordwell asserts, “drains normal dramatic momentum out of the scene.”

The static long take in this scene ensures that “the spatial arc does not match the

80 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 177.

51 dramatic one.”81 Although in the second shot of this sequence the action takes place close to the camera, Angelopoulos places the dying animal partially off-screen, and the viewer’s attention is constantly distracted by the mundane action of the wedding party behind the children, thus reducing the emotional intensity of the scene. The capacity of the long take to draw attention away from the most emotionally-charged areas of the frame places the onus on the staging to carry the burden of meaning in the scene.

This capacity for tension building is key in demonstrating the importance of staging with respect to the dominance of the physical environment in Angelopoulos’s long takes. The presence of temps morts has a substantial impact on the viewer’s perception of the weight of time and the significance of a particular moment.82 These are moments of inaction when the often-static camera captures what might be termed

‘the moments in between’ action, in which the characters are doing seemingly nothing at all or, as Hamish Ford argues, “when the people have left the frame, leaving us with a non-anthropocentric image of the world.”83 András Bálint Kovács points to a link between the use of temps morts in Angelopoulos’s cinema and Antonioni’s early films: their “main characteristics are the use of long takes, very slow development of the plot, which is otherwise classically linear, and extensive representation of scenes where

‘nothing happens’.”84 These scenes where “nothing happens,” or temps morts, are termed as such because they don’t necessarily further the plot in any significant manner. Kovács continues, “Temps mort where nothing happens is therefore not a link between events. It

81 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 177. 82 András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 158. 83 Hamish Ford, “Antonioni's L’avventura and Deleuze's Time-Image,” Senses of Cinema 28 (2003), accessed May 23, 2016. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature- articles/l_avventura_deleuze. 84 Kovács, Screening Modernism, 158.

52 is the other way around: the remnants of what one could call an event separate the continuous sequences of temps mort.”85

In moments of temps morts, one of two phenomena takes place: either the dead time crystallises the tension created in the events before and after the moment, or the action or tension is to be found elsewhere from the main focal point of the shot.

Despite the inactivity of such scenes, they are the ones in which the viewer’s mind is the most active in seeking meaning in the images on the screen. For this reason, the long take is aptly suited to creating these moments of dead time. Angelopoulos argues that,

“the pauses, the ‘dead time,’ give [the spectator] the chance not only to assess the film rationally, but also to create, or complete, the different meanings of a sequence.”86 In other words, such moments force the viewer to piece together the visual cues and causal links through the duration of the long take to complete the sequence of action. As Ford points out, the term ‘dead time’ contradicts what really occurs in such moments. He argues: “It is not time, or space, which is dead; these violent primordial forces are never more alive and devastating than at such moments.”87 While Ford refers specifically to

Antonioni here, the relevance to Angelopoulos is evident. The ‘dead time’ is the time in which the viewer forms vital connections between character and environment.

The viewer’s active participation in the shot means that tension and meaning is built between multiple layers of staging in a relatively inactive, static shot. This effect is evident in the scene in which Alexander and Voula are sitting in the police station. At the beginning of the scene, the children are sitting to frame left. Angelopoulos uses deep focus to capture five distinct layers of action: the staircase railing in the foreground, the three people sitting on the landing (Alexander, Voula and an unidentified woman to

85 Kovács, Screening Modernism, 158. 86 Tony Mitchell, “Animating Dead Space and Dead Time: Megalexandros,” in Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 32. 87 Ford, “Antonioni’s L’avventura and Deleuze’s Time-Image.”

53 frame right), the door leading to the next room, the window on the other side of the next room and, finally, the snow falling outside (Figure 13). Importantly, Angelopoulos keeps the camera static for close to two minutes and builds the action in the scene through the interaction of these five layers of staging. The room in the foreground in which the children sit remains unchanged throughout the shot, leading to the sense of temps morts. This stillness is contrasted with the sudden flurry of excitement in the room behind them caused by the policemen’s elation about the falling snow. Once again, the shot’s central action is relegated to the background, and the foreground remains unchanged. It is not until the policemen run downstairs that the layers of the staging in the foreground are activated when Voula stands up, walks towards the stairs and the camera racks focus to blur out the background, leaving only Voula in focus.

Figure 13. Multiple layers of staging activated in the police station in Landscape in the Mist.

54 The lighting and staging of the scene is such that only the elements that produce meaning are visible. This is the predominant method through which the viewer is activated by the use of temps morts in this scene. For example, the door leading into the back room frames both the policeman and the snow falling outside in the far background. The room in the foreground is kept in relative darkness. As the policemen start walking down the stairs, their faces disappear above the top of the frame, indicating their unimportance to the shot. It is only when Voula stands up to look down the staircase that the camera tilts slightly upwards to keep her in shot. Further, the woman sitting to frame right forms another meaningful component in the shot. She is

Eleni (Toula Stathapoulou) from Reconstruction. Like the men in yellow raincoats discussed earlier, she is an intertextual reference who operates as another layer of meaning that is activated by the use of temps morts in this shot.88 Her prominent position at the top of the stairs, while Voula and Alexander are obscured by the balustrade on the left, and the soft key lighting on her face emphasises her centrality in the shot. For

Gilberto Perez, temps morts is crucial to this activation of the viewer. He argues that the effect of temps morts is “not merely to insist on [the frame’s] composition or content, but to encourage a perceptual questioning, a questioning that their succession alertly articulates.” 89 The effect of these temps morts moments throughout Angelopoulos’s cinema is not an overt furthering of the plot, but rather a demonstration that the significance of the framing and staging of such scenes can only be observed and questioned through these moments of apparent stillness.

88 Stathapoulou also appears as either an extra or a minor role in Days of ’36, Alexander the Great and Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow. 89 Perez, The Material Ghost, 239.

Figure 14. The static shot of the rear of the truck in Landscape in the Mist.

Angelopoulos extends his use of dedramatisation and temps morts to create tension by also making productive use of off-screen space. Much like the method witnessed in the scene above of pushing the dramatic tension to the background of the shot, the director also frequently pushes it off-screen. This is most evident in a scene that comes half way through the film, in which Voula is raped by a truck driver (Vasilis

Kolovos). After the children have hitched a ride with a truck driver on the highway, he parks the truck on the grass at the side of the road, forces Voula into the back of the truck, and leaves Alexander sitting alone in the cabin. A significant portion of the scene is shown through a three-and-a-half minute static long take of the rear of the truck, over which a thick green material hangs to conceal the truck driver’s actions (Figure 14). The concealed rear of the truck functions as unwitnessed but activated off-screen space.

Meanwhile, the on-screen space is dominated by a largely inactive landscape of mud, an

56 overpass under construction and a quiet highway. While, visually, “nothing happens,” this moment of inactivity is perhaps the most tense in the film. In this instance, the viewer is engaged by being made cognisant of what they do not witness; the effect of dedramatisation is thus heightened because of the productive use of off-screen space.

This form of dedramatisation is not unique to Angelopoulos. Antonioni’s films also engage with this kind of (in)action, in which the focus of action is consigned to off- screen space. The most prominent evidence of this process occurring in Antonioni’s films is in the penultimate scene of The Passenger (1975), when a tracking shot begins focused on the protagonist, Locke (Jack Nicholson), in his hotel room. In a seven minute long take, the camera slowly dollies towards the window, eventually excluding

Locke from the shot entirely. It tracks out the window, pans around the street outside and back through the window to reveal Locke lying dead on his bed. The prolonged focus on the people outside the hotel serves to ‘distract’ the viewer from the central narrative concern of Locke’s death in the hotel room. This moment of distraction initially appears to be extraneous to the narrative’s development, but it emphasises the possibility of action in each moment. From the moment the camera leaves Locke, the events witnessed through the window subtly narrate the moment of his death, without ever explicitly showing it: the arrival of the two government agents (one of whom is seen reflected in the hotel room window), the subsequent arrival of the police, and

Locke’s girlfriend’s evident distress as she waits outside. The time spent away from

Locke’s hotel room increases the tension as each event hints towards but never confirms his death until the camera returns to the hotel room. For Perez, instances in

Antonioni’s films when off-screen space is activated also reinforce something specific to cinema. He explains, “whereas a painting makes a world visible, a film leaves most of its

57 world invisible in each image on the screen.”90 Film always inherently involves absences, incompleteness and partiality. By relegating Locke’s death to the off-screen space,

Antonioni emphasises both the viewer’s inability to access this moment and the question of precisely how he died, which will remain inaccessible.

Similarly, in Voula’s rape scene in Landscape in the Mist, Angelopoulos uses the emptiness of the landscape to emphasise the potential for action. As the camera remains fixed on the back of the truck, a car pulls up on the side of the road a short distance away and a man steps out of it. Another car pulls up behind him and he walks over to talk to the driver, returns to his own car and both cars drive away. This is the first significant moment of action in the shot. Although the cars are positioned in the deep background, Angelopoulos’s typical distanced staging methods encourage speculation that this character might offer relief for Voula. The tension mounts as the cars drive away and the potential for Voula’s salvation is thwarted. Further potential is offered as

Alexander, after nearly a minute, emerges from the truck and calls for Voula, before running off screen to frame left. The constant movement of cars along the highway that continues uninterrupted for another fifteen seconds after Alexander’s exit emphasises the significant disparity between the landscape’s banality and the horrific event we assume is occurring behind the green material. The questions posed by the shot are not resolved until the final seconds when Voula emerges from behind the green material and we see blood on her hands. The potential for action that arises in such a shot differs from Antonioni’s method. Perez argues that Antonioni is the “master of the unresolved absence,” pointing to his tendency to offer no definite answer to the questions posed by his images, such as in Locke’s death scene.91 Such moments in Antonioni’s films “stem from the resonantly uncertain, the hauntingly unknown, not the knowingly withheld and

90 Perez, The Material Ghost, 256. 91 Ibid.

58 in due time disclosed.” 92 The outcome of this Landscape in the Mist shot is not

“resonantly uncertain;” there is little doubt throughout the shot of what is occurring behind the green material. Rather, Angelopoulos’s goal in moving the central action to off-screen space is to allow the uncertain elements of the scene to pose further questions and to emphasise the hopelessness of Voula’s predicament.

The use of one static shot in this and many other scenes contributes significantly to the creation of muted drama. Conceivably, such scenes could be broken into multiple long takes and numerous angles, and still maintain a sense of dedramatisation. But

Angelopoulos’s choice to capture these moments in a single, distanced long take affirms his interest in exploring the productive potential of extended duration. Articulating this view in an interview, Angelopoulos expresses his dislike for what he terms the

“American model” of editing, in which there are “multiple angles for every scene.” He argues that, for every shot, “there is one angle and one angle only.”93 Angelopoulos’s interest lies in the way duration alters the viewer’s perception of an event. In Voula’s rape scene, it is in the gradual unfolding of the shot that the scene’s drama is determined and developed. The static shot (as opposed to Antonioni’s tracking shot) magnifies this effect in particular because of its delimiting nature. The viewer can only access one fixed perspective within the predetermined boundaries of the frame.

Beyond restricting the viewer’s perspective, the fixed shot creates a sense of detachment and estrangement from the shot’s subjects. This estrangement is exemplified by the viewer’s position outside the truck, from where we are unable to see what is happening to Voula behind the green curtain or Alexander’s distress upon finding his sister missing. The distance maintained by the static long take in this scene ensures that a productive alienation is built through the duration of the shot. This form

92 Perez, The Material Ghost, 238. 93 Angelopoulos in O’Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” 73.

59 of detachment is further emphasised in other static shots in Landscape in the Mist, notably the police station scene. Once again, the viewer is physically distanced from the next room where the excitement over the snow is occurring, and we are also denied a more intimate perspective of Alexander and Voula in this scene. The fixed, distanced framing of these shots, combined with the use of temps morts, encourages the viewer to probe and question their own estranged position. Perez argues that, in watching film, the viewer is always experiencing this estrangement since our only access to the film’s diegesis is through a frame (of the camera). “By calling our attention to the frame, to the fact of our being divided from the world pictured,” he posits, the director is drawing attention to both the frame of the film image and the perspective of an individual viewing point, both of which constitute the essence of film viewing.94 The long take, through its extended duration, not only brings the viewer into a closer relationship with the film. It also gives the viewer the time to form a critical perspective that, at times, undermines the objectivity of the image and begins to unravel important stylistic, ethical and political questions regarding the long take.

The Individual’s Agency

Landscape in the Mist comes at an interesting point in Angelopoulos’s career. It marks a stylistic turn in his body of work, in which the temporal and spatial positioning of his protagonists shifts significantly from his earlier work. In the previous section, it was shown that the landscape appears to have equal importance to or dominance over the characters in Angelopoulos’s long take-dominated aesthetic. In his earlier films, the characters operated as figures in a vast landscape. The eponymous characters in The

Travelling Players, for example, are almost always framed at a distance, staged

94 Perez, The Material Ghost, 244.

60 planimetrically and individually indistinguishable. Michael Wilmington explains: “In his early films, people seem less individuals than groups, less groups than figures of the earth, lost in what surrounds them—the land, the sky, the sea.”95 Although Voyage to

Cythera is often cited as the first film in which Angelopoulos focused on the individual rather than significant historical events, Landscape in the Mist furthers this transformation through the centrality of Alexander and Voula to the narrative. Angelopoulos’s choice of children as the protagonists makes them subject to their environment, rather than dominant or in control of it. By placing two children at the centre of the narrative, the film reduces the protagonists’ agency, and instead their journey is predicated on a kind of uncontrollable fate.

In the trilogy of films that follows Landscape in the Mist, the Trilogy of Borders, the individual’s increasing centrality is evident in Angelopoulos’s changed approach to framing. The slowly unfolding, often static long takes are still present; many of the shots also initially depict an empty landscape, into which the characters later enter. But in these latter films, the agency of the individual is privileged by the long take. This is most evident in the trilogy’s final instalment, Eternity and a Day. It is comparable to Landscape in the Mist in its position as a road movie that follows two characters with only a vague sense of their destination. For the first time in Angelopoulos’s career, the character’s movement and position motivate the framing of the majority of the shots in a film. He largely dispenses with planimetric staging and, instead, individualises and empowers his characters by the close proximity of the framing. The director continues with his signature tracking shots across the landscape, but the camera frequently moves in towards the protagonist, rather than leaving him behind. This is reflective of the

95 Michael Wilmington, “Theo Angelopoulos: Landscapes, Players, Mist,” in The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 61.

61 protagonist’s changed position in this trilogy: each film is narrated from the perspective of an empowered, adult male character.

The clear distinction in style between the trilogies that precede and follow

Landscape in the Mist is not evidence of a sudden stylistic break in Angelopoulos’s career.

Rather, it is a gradual development that can be traced throughout the Trilogy of Silence, and is particularly evident in Landscape in the Mist. This stylistic change is motivated by a thematic development from a concern with history to a concern with space and place.

The focus on space and place in the Trilogy of Silence offers another way of presenting a particular historical narrative that accounts for the changing political situation in contemporary Greece. Greater than the concern for history in The Trilogy of Silence,

Les Roberts argues, is the motivation to depict a transnational Greece profoundly affected by the constant shifting of borders and the displacement of refugees from surrounding countries, such as Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Roberts suggests that Angelopoulos’s focus on the shifting borders of Greece has brought about “a growing preoccupation with geographies of displacement and tropes of travel.”96 While

Angelopoulos’s earlier films emphasise a distinct sense of place that exists within the borders of Greece, from Landscape in The Mist onwards, this sense of place becomes fractured and indeterminate.

It is through the lens of this fractured and indeterminate sense of place that the vulnerability and agency of Alexander and Voula become more apparent. These tropes are magnified by the child characters, through which we can recognise a negotiation of agency that mirrors a particular narrative of displacement and alienation. They demonstrate their agency through their decision to embark on a journey to find their

96 Les Roberts, “Non-Places in the Mist: Mapping the Spatial Turn in Theo Angelopoulos’ Peripatetic Modernism,” in Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett and Axel Goodbody (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 329.

62 father, but their fate is frequently at the mercy of the adults they encounter along the way. This balance of agency and vulnerability is negotiated through Angelopoulos’s camerawork, which subordinates them to the dominant landscape and emphasises their vulnerable position. At the beginning of the film, Voula’s narration reveals that her mother has told the children that their estranged father lives in Germany. Evangelos

Makrygiannakis points out that, “the two young protagonists believe that Germany lies on the other side of Greece’s northern border and they simply have to catch a train to get there.” 97 This belief forms the primary motivation for the children’s journey throughout the film. Although most of Angelopoulos’s protagonists undertake journeys,

Landscape in the Mist is the only one of his films where the journey is experienced through the eyes of a child. Alexander and Voula embark on their journey with only a vague sense of their destination. Through this journey, Angelopoulos draws an important parallel between two pursuits of an origin—both at a personal level (the children and their father) and at a national level (the country for an identity). Through the gradually developed relationship between the children and their surrounding environment, the director uses the child character as a conduit through which to explore the broader issue of national identity.

This sense of a metaphorical journey is reflected in both the staging and framing of the opening scene. The camera follows the children, in one unbroken shot, through the bustling corridors of a darkened suburban train station. Voula, wearing a small backpack, walks hurriedly alongside her brother, holding his hand. They emerge out onto the brightly lit platform to see a waiting train being loaded with passengers. The siblings inexplicably wait until the doors close and the train begins to move before they

97 Evangelos Makrygiannakis, “The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Voyage in Time” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008), 212, https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/4018/Makrygiannakis2009.pdf

63 run at the train, jump and quickly retire from the chase. This scene is replicated a few scenes later, save for the outcome, in which Voula and Alexander successfully board the train at the last minute. As the children walk through the train station in both instances of this scene, the camera follows them close behind in relative silence and thus, the viewer is not privy to their destination. This close following of the children in a long tracking shot allows the scene to appear like a recurring dream that eventually yields a different outcome.

The structure of this scene crucially demonstrates the relationship between the long take and staging in Landscape in the Mist. The first half of the scene—in which the children are walking through the train station—is a dimly lit and densely-packed mise-en- scène, full of other commuters rushing past them. The camera remains trained on the children’s backs throughout. As this is the opening scene of the film, the tracking shot utilised here, along with the close staging of the children in front of the camera performs a function frequently employed by modernist directors, in which the viewer is forced to ascertain the significance of the image’s content as it develops, and thus “the gradually unfolding image gain[s] extraordinary weight.”98 This shot emphasises the long take’s capacity to suspend the viewer in a kind of temporal stasis, experiencing the weight of the unfolding image. Angelopoulos’s staging in this shot accentuates the vulnerability of the individual moment, during which we experience the children’s fate of missing their train along with them. The travelling long take in the first half of the scene is a departure from Angelopoulos’s usual filming approach, but it forms a significant contrast to the second half, in which the children arrive on the near-empty platform. In one long take the viewer witnesses a distinct change in lighting, density of staging and a shift from camera movement to a stasis. These shifts highlight the

98 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 150.

64 uncertainty of the outcome of each instance of the shot. The recurring dream-like shots are like infinitely repeated instances of reliving a trauma.

This scene contributes to the overarching theme of displacement, travel and migrancy through not just the appearance of the train, but also the physical setting of the train station. Places such as train stations, roadside cafes and petrol stations are, by definition, places of waiting, but the uncertainty of Alexander and Voula’s journey emphasises the fact that their waiting will likely be fruitless. Angelopoulos’s choice of predominantly rural spaces where these places of transit appear highlights the themes of

“despair, alienation, and fragmentation” in these locations.99 Roberts refers to these places as “non-places of travel,” emphasising the contradictory stasis that accompanies each scene involving transit and travel.100 The moments that the children spend in places of transit are often marked by the use of temps morts. This is evidenced in scenes when

Alexander and Voula are sitting in the police station, the stationmaster’s office and on board the train itself (Figure 15). Particularly in the latter two, the children are framed alone, positioned frontally to the camera. The shot’s stasis and the lack of interaction between characters offer no indication as to what will occur next. The static long take, temps morts and the kinds of locations used in the scenes forefronts the experience of waiting, which is underscored by the despair and alienation of the scene. These places of transit “expose a world where ‘home’ is a landscape suspended between destinations.”101

As well as emphasising the hopelessness of the children’s individual journey, such moments also feed into a broader narrative of dispossession, exile and migrancy, which continues to develop through Angelopoulos’s more recent films.

99 Roberts, “Non-Places in the Mist,” 329. 100 Ibid., 337. 101 Ibid., 337.

Figure 15. Alexander and Voula framed frontally in another place of transit—the stationmaster’s office.

The narrative of dispossession and migrancy can be traced to Angelopoulos’s political views of his country. In an interview, Angelopoulos responded to a question about his typical character. He says: “They search for lost things, all that was lost in the rupture between desire and reality.”102 In Alexander and Voula’s quest to find their father, this dissonance is clear. It manifests in the desire to find their father, and the reality that they likely never will. More broadly, his statement refers to the disillusionment he feels about Greece and its government as a result of its apparent failure in the last century to fulfil its promises. He continues: “We are left with the experience of our failure, with the ashes of the disappointment of dreams that never materialized.”103 Such a statement is not an expression of nationalist loyalties; rather,

Angelopoulos refers to Greece’s identity, which is constantly in flux as a result of the

102 Angelopoulos in O’Grady, “Angelopoulos's Philosophy of Film,” 69. 103 Ibid.

66 country’s shifting borders through its history. Since the early nineteenth century, Greece has undergone a constant struggle to unify its regions into one nation.104 Throughout

Landscape in the Mist, this sense of immaterialised dreams is evident both in the children, whose dreams of meeting their father is never realised, and in Orestes, who seems caught in limbo, somewhere between his past with the travelling players and his uncertain future.

At the level of the shot, this perspective is evident in the sustained shots of figures receding into the distance throughout the film. In one of the final scenes of

Landscape in the Mist, when the children have left Orestes at a bar, they continue on their journey down a dark, empty highway. In a single shot, the camera follows at a constant and significant distance behind the children as they walk hand-in-hand into the darkness ahead of them. In one respect, this scene adheres to the “documentary-like realism” so often attached to Angelopoulos’ films, as the viewer watches the children walking, in real time, unguided by music, editing, dialogue or orientation.105 Conversely, the amount of time given to this event, and the careful positioning of the camera, allows the viewer to recognise the symbolic significance of the children walking into the darkness. The composition of the shot emphasises their physical displacement and the apparent hopelessness of walking into the dark abyss ahead of them. The moving, dark horizon in front of the children reminds the viewer that whatever they assume to be ahead of them in their journey cannot and will not ever materialise. The temporal elongation of the shot allows this symbolic dimension to emerge.

104 This struggle began with Greece’s gradual attainment of independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, during and after which time the country had to reinvent itself as an independent nation in terms of its religious and political powers, and its cultural and linguistic identity. It continued into the twentieth century with the attempted unification of mainland Greece and its ancient neighbouring island territories—Crete and Cyprus, for example—as well as the Asia Minor crisis in 1918, and the Nazi invasion during World War II. Each of these events both threatened and redefined Greece’s national identity. See Doumanis, A History of Greece, 156-60, 168-76, 194-201. 105 Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 144.

67 With the constant reminders of the protagonists’ displacement in the framing and duration of the shot, their agency is undermined and their status as vulnerable children emphasised. Their staging in Landscape in the Mist as an increasingly fractured unit isolated from their surroundings emphasises a detachment from place, or a search for identity, whether it is Voula and Alexander’s literal search for their father, or, more broadly, a national search for identity and unity. These conditions of dispossession are magnified in Landscape in the Mist by the child characters, who not only feel displaced by their unknown paternity but also lack the capacity for agency of the adults around them to fulfil their intended journey. What the long take contributes to the negotiation of agency in Landscape in the Mist is its most fundamental property: time. The duration of the long take allows moments such as the children’s subordination to their environment, moments of stasis and waiting, and figures receding into the darkness to unfold over time, emphasising their despair, dispossession and vulnerability. Their displacement is experienced temporally as well as physically.

Influence of Greek Theatre and Literature

While the genealogy of Angelopoulos’s contemplative, long take aesthetic is often traced to the neorealist and modernist cinema of post-war Europe, it is also significantly influenced by other artistic forms. This is where Angelopoulos’s emergence after the apparent end of modernism problematises the conventional definitions of the movement. Kovács characterises cinematic modernism as reflecting on its own traditions. He theorises, therefore, that cinematic modernism could not exist until the mid-twentieth century, with the arrival of a new generation of filmmakers emerged who could reflect on the traditions established by the previous generation. Kovács also argues that the goal of modernist cinema is to “isolate[e] its tools from those other art

68 forms.”106 These definitions suggest that modernism remains self-contained in its own art form. But Angelopoulos’s advantage of being a late arrival to the modernist aesthetic is that he was able to reflect on these cinematic traditions as well as to find new means of expression within the medium with which to build his unique style.

The most prominent of these non-cinematic influences were traditional Greek poetry and theatre. Angelopoulos made explicit reference to these influences throughout his career, in one instance stating: “It’s more accurate to say that I spent my youth with these influences, rather than with cinema. And perhaps I was slow to discover cinema, because in our culture, literature, especially poetry has always been first, and even music has been ahead of cinema.”107 Beyond his explicit confessions, the influence of Ancient Greek literature and theatre is evidence in his films at a formal level. The long take’s role as part of the standard ‘toolkit’ of European modernist filmmaking means that it is well placed to reinvent and adapt classical narrative forms.

His adoption of non-cinematic forms into his style is a culturally-motivated solution to a deficiency of cinematic language. His reference to theatre and poetry using the long take places him as reflecting on modernist conventions and also positions his directorial style as uniquely Greek.

Angelopoulos’s literary influence is evident in the narrative and thematic form that many of his films adopt, but the role of this influence emerges more obliquely in his visual style. In an interview, he indicated his conscious attempt to adapt the rules that govern literary expression into a cinematic form, stating, “I am influenced by a different space, where the act of writing is the dominant rule of the game. Consequently, I sought the same in cinema.”108 In Greece, this literary influence forms part of a culture that

106 Kovács, Screening Modernism, 16-18. 107 Angelopoulos in Horton, “‘What Do Our Souls Seek?’,” 107. 108 Angelopoulos in O'Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” 73.

69 connects the contemporary nation to their ancient predecessors. References to traditional texts can be found throughout the artistic output of a plethora of contemporary Greek artists, writers and filmmakers. 109 As such, Angelopoulos’s adoption of these narratives is not unique to him as a Greek filmmaker. Most notably, the plots of many of his films are loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. Horton points out that, unlike Odysseus, Alexander and Voula’s journey “is doomed, for, as we learn from their uncle (their mother’s brother), their mother has no idea who their father is...Part of the devastating effect of viewing the film is the sense of hopelessness this Odyssey without an Odysseus generates in the viewer.”110 Roberts connects the Odyssean theme to Angelopoulos’s work more broadly, citing characters like Spyros in Voyage to Cythera and A in Ulysses’s Gaze as modern Odysseuses who form on ongoing narrative of an

“exilic and existentially homeless” character. “Travelling from film,” Roberts suggests,

“this melancholic drifter charts a cinematic topography of displacement, alienation, and nostalgia for a lost vision of modernity.”111 The displaced, Odyssean figure common throughout Angelopoulos’s oeuvre evidences the metaphor for the ‘search for home’

(identity) and the narrative of dispossession.

This sense of hopelessness interwoven with extracts of the well-known epic is one example of influence from Greek literature that can be found translated into cinematic form in Angelopoulos’s long takes. We can again consider here the sustained images of figures receding into the distance that proliferate throughout Angelopoulos’s films. In the scene on the dark, empty highway, the children’s slow walk along the road away

109 Vrasidas Karalis points to the influence of Ancient Greek theatre in the films of Dimitris Gaziadis and Orestes Laskos, among others. Marianne McDonald and Martin M. Winkler also identify both a theatrical and literary influence in the work of Michael Cacoyannis. See Vrasidas Karalis, The History of Greek Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), 16, 25; Marianne McDonald and Martin M. Winkler, “Michael Cacoyannis and Irene Papas on Greek Tragedy,” in Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, ed. Martin M. Winkler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 72-74. 110 Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 40. 111 Roberts, “Non-Places in the Mist,” 326.

70 from the camera into the darkness emphasises the hopelessness of their journey. For the majority of the sequence, the camera is positioned at eye level and the children’s forward movement is repetitive and uninterrupted (Figure 16). The mise-en-scène reflects this repetition through the infinite flow of streetlights passing by on both sides of the frame. As the camera follows the children towards the empty horizon, the repetition in this mise-en-scène and the lack of physical reference points in their dark surroundings render it difficult to ascertain whether the children are moving forward at all. The black sky at the vanishing point, to which our eye is led, offers more certainty than any other shot in the film that their perception of home as their destination is only imaginary.

These sustained static shots of the children receding into the distance, coupled with the viewer’s knowledge of the hopelessness of their journey and Odysseus’s search for home infuse these moments with poignancy.

Figure 16. Alexander and Voula receding into darkness on the highway in Landscape in the Mist.

71 The influence of Ancient Greek theatre also figures strongly in Angelopoulos’s visual style. It is evident from moments such as the dying horse scene and Voula’s rape scene that he uses the mise-en-scène as a stage, in which a performance is played out in front of a static camera. We have seen throughout this chapter that, in such moments, the shot’s extended duration allows the performance in front of the camera to adopt the primary function of meaning-making. In an interview with O’Grady, Angelopoulos confirmed this theatrical influence on his work. Just like in Greek tragedy, he argued,

“all the important events take place on stage and never behind the stage.”112 This statement is indicative of how he expresses a sense of space in his cinema through the long take, both static and mobile. There is a direct correlation between how the ‘stage’

(or the space in front of the camera) is used in both traditional Greek theatre and

Angelopoulos’ films. According to Peter D. Arnott, theatre-makers of Ancient Greek tragedy had a consistent dynamic between on-stage and off-stage space. The majority of the narrative was acted out on stage by three actors (who often portrayed multiple characters) except for death scenes and other un-stage-able events, which always occurred off-stage. This convention was familiar to Greek audiences, and thus the un- stage-able event was an equally important part of the narrative.113 Angelopoulos adopts this technique in his cinema by creating a self-conscious relationship between on-screen and off-screen space. Like Ancient Greek theatre, Angelopoulos’s off-screen space is just as important as the on-screen space for articulating the relationship between figures in the film. The actual moment of death of the white horse, Voula’s rape scene in

Landscape in the Mist and the massacre of A’s friends behind the fog in Ulysses’ Gaze are all traumatic events that remain unwitnessed by the viewer, but are strongly alluded to by the static long take and how it is staged.

112 Angelopoulos in O’Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” 73. 113 Peter D. Arnott, An Introduction to Greek Theatre (London: Macmillan Press, 1971), 22.

72 Angelopoulos’s statement has two further implications for the connection between his use of the long take and the theatrical heritage of his films. First,

Angelopoulos’s staging is distinctly presentational, drawing the viewer’s attention to the deliberate construction of the shot. It is evident in his deliberate negotiation of on- screen and off-screen space, but it is clearest in moments of aesthetically-motivated staging such as when the children wander amongst the frozen figures in the snow in

Landscape in the Mist or when the men in yellow raincoats are framed atop the telegraph poles in The Suspended Step of the Stork. Such moments present a deliberately staged tableau designed to be gazed upon and to draw attention to their construction. Horton traces the theatrical influence of such constructions to a form of Greek folk theatre called epitheorisis. He argues that a key part of the staging of these productions was the audience’s awareness of the performance as a construction. He contends that, “so much of the effect of the acts depends on the audience’s not ‘suspending disbelief’.”114 For both the epitheorisis audience and Angelopoulos’s viewer, this awareness of the mise-en- scène’s construction ensures that the narrative work constantly plays with conventions of presentation, theatricality, reconstructions of history, and the presence of the audience.

Second, Angelopoulos’s statement—“all the important events take place on stage”—makes reference to not only the stasis of his long takes, but also the extreme temporality of these takes. Using theatrical forms in cinema has been a part of the classical tradition of cinema since its infancy. But contrary to this classical tradition— simple editing and the mise-en-scène positioned in shallow depth of staging—

Angelopoulos uses these theatrical forms in a way that opens up the physical space of the shot. Angelopoulos makes frequent use of the 360-degree tracking shot, which is designed to reflect the circular stage of “the ancient theater where all action was being

114 Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 54.

73 performed.”115 His use of real locations and travelling long takes allow the viewer to feel as though the mise-en-scène extends beyond the limits of the frame. Such a shot occurs in

Landscape in the Mist when Voula and Alexander wake up in Orestes’s caravan, walk out onto the beach and discover the travelling players scattered across the sand practising their lines for the play. The camera travels in a wide circular motion from the caravan, around each player and ends as all the players enter the shot together. While the circularity of this shot is distinctly theatrical, Angelopoulos’ execution of it is not. As the camera travels, each subsequent player occupies less of the frame and the landscape begins to dominate. For a brief moment, the camera traces the shape of the horizon.

This form of acknowledgement of the physical place of the mise-en-scène is unique to the film medium, but carries with it a distinct reference to traditional theatrical forms.

* * * *

It is in this complex negotiation of artistic forms that what it means to be a late modernist becomes clear. This chapter began by posing two questions: first, how the director’s emergence at a particular moment in history dictates how he uses the long take, and second, how the long take represents the continuous impact of the past on the present. Both questions interrogate the stylistic implications of Angelopoulos’s arrival as a filmmaker at a particular time in history. This chapter has shown that the long take’s capacity to form connections between the past and present, spiritual, imaginary, mythic and the real is contingent on a particular kind of self-conscious staging. Through the duration of the long take, this form of staging reveals the continuities and discontinuities between different moments of time and different figures in space. In

115 O’Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” 73.

74 revealing these relationships, the long take makes overt the impact of the past on the present, not just in historical terms, but also through Angelopoulos’s reference to the distinct stylistic tropes of his predecessors.

Thus, what we understand about modernist film after examining Angelopoulos’s cinema is that it is able to carry with it other forms of artistic legacy. We have seen that the execution of his long takes is always a confluence of cinematic, theatrical and literary forms that speaks to both his artistic and cultural position. This hallmark of modernism is deeply inflected by traditions, stories, and ways of viewing the world that are archaic.

After watching Angelopoulos’s films, we see that the long take is not just a device that dramatises an engagement with the modern world, but it reveals itself as capable of creating cinematic experiences that bridge the modern world with the ancient and the traditional, the new and the old. On one hand, Angelopoulos uses classical artistic forms, such as theatre and poetry, as a source of formal expression in cinema; but on the other hand, he is equally concerned with continuing the modernist project of creating a film style that distinguishes film’s tools from other forms.

75 Chapter Two Allegory and Autonomy: Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies

Adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), Béla

Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) tells the story of a small rural town in Hungary. The opening scene of the film begins with a close-up of a fire behind a metal grate, which is suddenly dowsed by the barman. Panning away from the grate, the camera reveals a bar occupied by ten men, one of whom is lying intoxicated on the floor. The camera moves forward, as does one of the men, meeting in the middle of the bar. The protagonist,

János Valuska (Lars Rudolph), enters from frame right. From the evident anticipation of the men, it is clear that he is something of a hero. He leads one of the men towards the centre of the bar as the others clear the floor of furniture. With the wiggling of his fingers, he demonstrates the flickering action of the sun for the man to copy. Using the man as his character, he begins a story: “You are the sun.” He then brings a second man in as his Earth, explaining: “And now, we’ll have a simple explanation that simple folks like us can also understand about mortality.” And one by one, János incorporates the intoxicated men into his play of revolving celestial bodies until he has a sun, an Earth and a moon revolving comically around each other. He concludes his narrative by describing a dramatic turn of events: “The air suddenly turns cold, the sky darkens and then all goes dark…And then complete silence. Are the hills going to march off? Will

Heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open up under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us.”

For a number of critics and scholars, the bleak monochrome world of

Werckmeister Harmonies is a meditation on post-communist Hungary. John Hodgkins, for example, insists that, like the celestial drama choreographed by János, “Krasznahorkai’s

76 town is teetering on the precipice of change.”116 He describes the town as “suspended in a kind of historical limbo: nameless, lightless, inhabiting an era that is modern…yet not specifically determinable.”117 In the film, the “precipice of change” is connected to the arrival of a circus, which consists of a single trailer housing a stuffed whale and an unseen man identified as The Prince. The circus’s arrival galvanises a sense of impending doom that bubbles under the surface and leads to a cultish uprising among the town’s citizens. These narrative events gesture toward a broader allegory of a community in crisis.

This chapter explores the role this allegorical dimension plays in the form of the film itself. In the opening scene, the combination of the circular movements of the camera (when it participates as another character in the mime), the orbital movements of the characters, and János’s story about the eclipse suggests a range of possible interpretations beyond a literal one. The question I explore is: how does the long take contribute to the idea of a meaning that never quite arrives? How does it constantly fragment, displace and defer meaning? This question will be pursued through a close analysis of the camera movements and extreme temporality of the film’s shots. This chapter engages with allegory as a process of interpretation, which, in the case of

Werckmeister Harmonies, is constantly undermined. 118 In Chapter One, we saw how

116 John Hodgkins, “Not Fade Away: Adapting History and Trauma in László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance and Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies,” Adaptation 2, no. 1 (2009): 50. 117 Ibid., 51. 118 This chapter adopts its fundamental understanding of allegory from Ismail Xavier, who argues that fragmented, enigmatic meaning is a crucial part of allegory. It explicitly calls upon the reader (viewer) to undertake a process of allegorical interpretation. He asserts, “The most interesting instances of allegory are those in which the surface of the text either gives unsatisfactory answers to readers’ interrogations or remains overly enigmatic, thus…mandating the search for the concealing meaning.” Furthermore, he proposes the idea of allegory as a process: the filmmaker implements an “intentional process of encoding,” which is made available to the “competent” (engaged) viewer for interpretation in a multitude of ways. For Xavier, meaning is never prescribed by the author, but rather extracted by the viewer according to their own cultural circumstances. Ismail Xavier, “Historical Allegory,” in A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 335-40.

77 Angelopoulos’s presentational style of cinema used the mise-en-scène to pose explicit questions about what is concealed by the long take’s framing. This chapter, in contrast, examines Tarr’s method of dissolving or obscuring the relationship between the cinematic image and what it stands for. There is no explicit representation, only a gesture towards meaning.

The film’s allegorical dimension is also examined through an analysis of the physical world in which the story takes place. According to András Bálint Kovács,

Tarr’s use of the long take is motivated by a specific problem: “How can one create the feeling of reality in an artificially created pseudo-world?”119 Kovács characterises the film’s world as standing apart from the viewer’s world. The pseudo-world, like allegory, both gestures to and withholds meaning. It is a world that stands in for a world on the precipice of enormous change—a world that, as suggested by the camera’s circular movements in the opening scene, is marked by feelings of entrapment.

The Socio-Political Conditions of Tarr’s Style

In a 2006 interview with Jay Kuehner, Tarr insists, “If you are listening to [Werckmeister

Harmonies], and simply watching, you will find there is little reason for speculation about the film’s meaning. This is why I have said: No allegories, no metaphors, no symbols, nothing.”120 In a more recent interview, he reiterates that his intention is not to make a political statement through allegory or metaphor, but rather to capture “real emotions” using “real camerawork,” and to express reality on the level of quotidian familiarity.121

119 András Bálint Kovács, “The World According to Béla Tarr,” KinoKultura 7 (2008), accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/7/kovacs.shtml. 120 Jay Kuehner and Béla Tarr, “Béla Tarr and ‘This Process of Making’,” Green Cine (2006), accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=279. 121 R. Emmet Sweeney, “Interview: Béla Tarr, the Complete Works,” Film Comment (Blog) (2012), accessed February 17, 2014. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-bela-tarr-the- complete-works.

78 This intention has led to the creation of a form of cinema that, as Elzbieta Buslowska argues, is principled on a re-evaluation of the category of reality itself. She continues,

“The long, slow, black-and-white time-image of Béla Tarr’s world…opens by re- evaluating the very category of ‘reality’.”122 By examining these statements about Tarr, it is evident that his particular mode of representing reality relies on the intervention of the camera and is thus opened up to non-literal or figurative interpretation.123 Thus, examining Tarr’s re-evaluation of reality involves not just what is revealed in his presentation of reality, but also what is concealed and what meanings are suspended in his choice of cinematic language. Regardless of Tarr’s stance, this re-evaluation takes place through a form of allegory or, in other words, a figuration of reality that is made overt through his camerawork.

This tension between realism and allegory can be traced to factors that are specific to the political, artistic and financial conditions that shaped Tarr’s production background. In the 1970s, Tarr worked in the Béla Balázs Studio. Launched in 1961, this government-sponsored studio initially funded young filmmakers to produce short experimental films. By the 1970s, the studio had branched out into two main movements: an avant-garde, experimental group and a documentary, social realist group.

Tarr’s earliest unreleased films belonged to the latter group. The studio’s experimental style was inspired and enabled by the New Wave movements in Western Europe.124

Tarr’s debut documentary-fiction film The Family Nest (1979) depicts the financial

122 Elzbieta Buslowska, “Cinema as Art and Philosophy in Béla Tarr’s Creative Exploration of Reality,” Acta Univ. Sapientia, Film and Media Studies 1 (2009): 108. 123 Ibid. 124 Kovács, “The World According to Béla Tarr.”; Bryan Burns, World Cinema: Hungary (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), 37; John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema from Coffee House to Multiplex (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 96-169. Tarr’s method and style was typical of the Béla Balazs Studio, even though he stated in an interview: “I don’t like this term ‘social realism.’ If you create a movie, you create a fiction. It’s something that looks real, but of course it’s not real because it’s created. For me, they are not political movies. The real art is to show real human conditions and relations, and that’s all I try to do” (Sweeney, “Interview: Béla Tarr, the Complete Works.”).

79 struggle of the working class under the communist regime and is highly critical of

Hungary’s ruling communist party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Its success at a number of festivals helped Tarr to secure a place in the Hungarian School of

Theatrical and Cinematic Arts.125 In 1980, he formed the Társulás Studio, an offshoot of the Béla Balázs Studio. Kovács argues that the new studio was launched with filmmakers who had a background in the “cinema direct” trend, which, stylistically, opposed the mainstream style of Hungarian cinema.126 This ‘direct’ style was adopted from North America in the 1960s, given traction by the New German Cinema in the

1970s, and found widespread popularity in Hungarian cinema throughout this latter decade. Unlike their North American and Western European counterparts, Hungarian direct cinema practitioners did not deal with “concrete social issues; rather, they showed the everydayness of ordinary life.” 127 This agenda was well-suited to a group of filmmakers who were disillusioned with the prevailing political system and wanted to find a way of exposing what they perceived as the harsh realities of the living and working conditions around them.

During his time at the Társulás Studio, Tarr’s output more closely resembled fiction than documentary. He took many of the formal techniques associated with the cinema direct style and used them in the representation of poverty in his immediate social and physical environment.128 As the political climate changed, Tarr encountered increasing difficulty in sourcing subjects to play themselves in his documentaries. Rather than producing documentaries, he made films that reproduced the conditions of the

125 Tarr’s admission into film school is significant considering that, only a few years before, the government had banned him from all Hungarian tertiary institutions following an anti- communist film he made in his teens. See Fergus Daly and Maximilian Le Cain, “Waiting for the Prince—an Interview with Béla Tarr,” Senses of Cinema, no. 12 (2001), accessed February 17, 2014. http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/feature-articles/tarr-2. 126 András Bálint Kovács, The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 9-10. 127 Ibid., 22. 128 Kovács, The Cinema of Béla Tarr, 21.

80 documentary, using non-professional actors, real locations, and formal techniques that privileged realism. Confirming his intentions, the opening titles of his first film, The

Family Nest, read: “This is a real story. It didn’t happen to the people in this film, but it could have.”129 This approach can be seen as a precursor to the kind of filmmaking Tarr employs later in his career that avoids overtly engaging with political issues yet insists on a connection to a specific social reality. The development of this method is particularly evident in three of his early films: The Outsider (1982), The Prefab People (1982) and

Almanac of Fall (1984). This method is an early form of Tarr’s gesturing towards and withholding meaning.

Tarr’s indirect engagement with social issues can be attributed to the immense political changes brought about by the downfall of communism in Hungary. This event generated changes that were felt at political, economic and social levels. The Hungarian government’s promise of economic reform, entailing the withdrawal of welfare provisions, divided Hungarians politically. Many Hungarians became aware of communism’s repressive nature by witnessing its gradual decline in surrounding nations, and welcomed its approaching demise in Hungary. Others, however, feared the threat of unemployment and the loss of financial security. 130 According to historian Robert

Weiner, there was a general feeling of uncertainty about the future amongst the

Hungarian population.131 Thus, what Tarr expresses in Werckmeister Harmonies is an apprehension about moving beyond a political system to which Hungarians had become accustomed, into a world with little promise of familiarity and financial security. As this chapter will continue to show, this apprehension emerges in his construction of form

129 Although this film was made prior to the formation of the Társulás Studio, it reveals a developing trend in Tarr’s style that moves away from a pure documentary form. 130 Patricia Dillon and Frank C. Wykoff, Creating Capitalism: Transitions and Growth in Post-Soviet Europe (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002), 186-7; Robert Weiner, Change in Eastern Europe (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 53. 131 Weiner, Change in Eastern Europe, 53.

81 that constantly but indirectly gestures towards an unresolved crisis. It is articulated in the film’s themes of circularity and entrapment.

Circularity and Entrapment

Early in the film, as János is walking home from György Eszter’s (Peter Fitz) house at night, a three-minute shot captures the arrival of the circus. The shot begins with a truck’s headlights cutting through the darkness of the street and moving slowly towards frame right (Figure 17). The camera pans towards the right to follow it. Only the driver’s face and glimpses of the corrugated box carried by the truck are illuminated; the rest is shrouded in darkness. The truck continues to pass by the camera until the side of the box entirely fills the frame. This moment is a key development in the shot since, at this point, the rest of the mise-en-scène is completely cast out from the shot’s frame; the only movement visible is the corrugated pattern rolling past the camera. János’s silhouette slowly appears at the bottom of the frame, until the rear of the truck disappears into the darkness. The camera pulls focus to János in the foreground, who looks overwhelmed by what he has seen. He walks forward briefly, before disappearing off screen, and the camera arrives at a poster announcing, “Fantastic!! The world’s largest giant whale. And other wonders of nature! Guest star: The Prince.”

Figure 17. The circus truck’s headlights cut through the dark street in Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

Tarr’s construction of a “perennial purgatory,” or pseudo-world, is introduced in this shot. It relies on forming a particular relationship between camera, viewer and mise-en-scène. This relationship is involved in a balance of concealing and revealing meaning, which is brought about by allowing the viewer to witness change occurring throughout the shot. This process is exemplified by this shot’s focus on the slowly passing, repetitive, corrugated pattern on the side of the truck (Figure 18). Although the viewer is aware that this pattern belongs to the vehicle’s cargo, the sheer length of time spent looking at it allows the slowly moving pattern to create a world of its own, severed from the narrative that contextualises it. In this moment, the enigmatic nature of Tarr’s long takes reveals itself. The viewer bears witness to a fragment of time occurring at a natural pace, and the subject (the truck) is made clear from the beginning. Yet, the shot’s unusual framing and the use of the long take indicate the existence of an implied meaning beyond the overt, literal meaning of the shot. Even in such a short moment, the framing makes it difficult to temporally locate the actions within the shot, and

83 determine whether or not the moving pattern is a repetition. In this instance, this implied meaning emerges through the use of repetition in the shot, but what this meaning is remains unresolved. Since the reason for this unusual framing is never revealed, Tarr establishes early in the film a figurative dimension at work in the composition and framing of every shot. The long take requires the viewer to develop particular strategies of reading the mise-en-scène that are independent of the development of character and narrative.

Figure 18. The corrugated pattern of the truck passes slowly by the camera.

Part of these strategies involves the viewer being aware of what is excluded from the shot. While all directors make the decision to include or exclude a character from the screen, Tarr importantly calls attention to his method through the shot’s framing and the camera’s movement. As the truck passes by the camera and the shot dollies in to only include the corrugated pattern and János’s silhouette, the rejection of the rest of the mise-en-scène becomes apparent. This is the precise moment when the viewer witnesses change, or the emergence of an implied dimension. The shot uses the

84 combination of framing and duration to produce an image of something recognisable that becomes unrecognisable; the gradual closing in on the truck exposes the process of displacing meaning. In other moments in the film, Tarr also employs this method by obsessively affixing the camera to one character or remaining in a room long after the characters have left. In all these instances, the tension of allegory and realism is played out within a single shot; these devices demonstrate the distinction between literal meaning and undiscovered or implied meaning. In doing so, the relationship that is created between the camera and mise-en-scène is one in which the camera’s presence is always apparent. Its constant intervention in the scene calls attention not only to what is captured, but also what is rejected.

Tarr’s method of overtly affixing or rejecting a figure from the camera’s view enables him to suggest socio-political meaning through the framing and duration of the shot. This technique adopts numerous forms at different stages of his career. His earliest films, The Outsider, Almanac of Fall and The Prefab People are set in apartments, where he constructs tight, overcrowded spaces overflowing with heightened emotions.

The camera contributes to this tightness of space by framing the characters closely, often in static shots, removing all reference to the world beyond the apartment. As well as creating a chaotic environment and building tension between the characters, this framing, as Jacques Rancière argues, also “transforms the ‘housing problem’ into a situation without exit—which is also to say, into a cinematographic situation.”132 This method recalls his early career at the Társulás Studio from 1980 to 1986, when the political climate made it difficult for filmmakers to directly address welfare problems such as inadequate housing. Stylistically, this earlier era of filmmaking is far removed from the era in which Werckmeister Harmonies was produced—wide-open spaces and the

132 Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, trans. Erik Beranek (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013), 12.

85 movements of a free-roaming camera dominate the film—but Tarr’s method remains much the same. The process of transforming a social problem into a matter of cinematic form has shaped Tarr’s film style from the beginning. Embedded within Tarr’s framing choices is always a hyperconsciousness of the social statement this formal choice makes.

He continues this process in Werckmeister Harmonies through his overt presencing and intervention of the camera. The constant gesture towards meaning using the long take emphasises this hyperconsciousness.

The camera’s intervention is most evident in the combined use of three distinct filming strategies: repetitive movement, extended duration, and constant mobility of the camera. Each of the three strategies work in tandem throughout the film to foreground the camera’s intervention in the shot. These strategies are exemplified in the numerous extended tracking shots that follow János between the same locations. Each time, his journey is captured in the same slow, ambling hand-held form, and punctuated by his arrival at a new destination. One such shot occurs about a third of the way through the film, when János is walking to Lajos Harrer’s (Alfréd Járai) house. The camera remains behind János at a distance long enough for his whole body to be in shot. It is not until he arrives at the garden door of the Harrers’ house that the camera tracks in towards the back of his head. The wide, distanced position the camera adopts and the long duration of the shot emphasise the character’s struggle, as the shot takes in the weather-beaten mud road and the long journey to his destination (Figure 19). After János enters the house, the camera departs from him and remains for a minute outside, as though

János’s recent presence on screen had only been accidental and his destination unimportant. In these shots, his destination is never revealed until he arrives. This method of filming goes against the grain of edited cinema. This shot’s focus on only the journey is a reminder of what might have otherwise occurred without the long take—

86 the revelation of only János’s departure and arrival. In the shot’s current form, however,

Tarr invites the viewer to participate in János’s journey; we question where he is going and why the director feels compelled to preserve this journey in the film. The film’s form engages the viewer in a mode of enquiry, but always withholds the answers.

Figure 19. An example of a ‘walking shot’, during which the camera follows behind János for a minute and a half.

The hyperconsciousness of framing in these scenes reveals the allegorising capacity of the long take. The most extreme instance of these ‘walking’ shots is when

János meets György and walks with him down the road, telling him of the circus’s arrival. The single tracking shot lasts for nearly five minutes, over two minutes of which consist of a left profile close-up of György’s and János’s faces as they walk in silence

(Figure 20). This shot serves as a perfect example of the way Tarr builds his world through the framing and movement of his camera. In other similar shots, János is framed within his environment, walking along the street or through the town square, both of which position the character in relation to a physical reference point. In the shot of György and János, however, Tarr draws his camera into the two characters such that

87 any spatial or physical reference point is erased from the shot. What remains is a decontextualised, laterally-moving shot, into which stasis (no perceivable movement in relation to their environment) and repetition (the repetitive bobbing of their heads and the lack of a distinct beginning and end) are interwoven. The shot operates as a fragment of time, preserved and repeated over a two-minute period. The tight frame, the repetitious movement of the characters’ heads, and the long duration of the shot once again contribute to the camera’s presencing. This is Tarr’s method of making his camera “cling to individuals,” cast out the rest of the world into the out-of-field and enclose his characters in a cinematically formed “perennial purgatory.”133 This scene demonstrates the tension of realism and the figurative function of the long take. While it maintains a documentary-like style in its handheld form with minimal exposition, the repetition and extended duration of the shot emphasises its enigmatic, implied dimension.

Figure 20. Left profile view of György and János.

133 Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 27; Adam Bingham, “Béla Tarr,” in Directory of World Cinema: East Europe, ed. Adam Bingham (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 209.

Figure 21. The camera orbiting around the men, who are also in orbit.

A similar process happens in the opening scene. This scene exemplifies many of the techniques discussed thus far, but its performative nature reveals an additional function of the allegorical long take. When the furniture is cleared and János takes his place with his ‘sun’ in the middle of the room, it is evident that this space will serve as the stage for his play. As the men’s solar system mime progresses, the camera tracks closer into the action until it is amongst the men, orbiting around them as though it is another celestial character in János’s play (Figure 21). Just like the intoxicated men, there appears to be little regularity in the movement of the camera. But as the scene unfolds, the camera’s movements reveal very precise choreographic logic. The camera begins by panning slowly from left to right, following the second man’s orbit. When the third man is introduced, the camera begins orbiting anticlockwise around the outside of the solar system. As the men’s orbiting stops, so does the camera’s, and it gradually pulls away from the men to again settle on a long shot of the inside of the bar. Framed within this long shot is a circular ceiling light in the near foreground that could stand for the sun in

János’s story. Importantly, the framing of the light in the shot causes János and the

89 other men to appear small and insignificant in the middle of the room (Figure 22). This scene operates as a staging on two levels: firstly, it is a physical performance by the characters of a tableau that occurs within the diegesis and, secondly, it is a performance of the constantly moving camera. This scene is an explicit demonstration of how the camera’s physical intervention emphasises its figurative role.

Figure 22. The ceiling light ‘sun’ in the foreground of the shot.

This gesture towards an implied meaning is marked by the inherent nature of the long take. Like allegory, the long take forefronts the interpretive intervention of the viewer. The viewer is always interpreting in cinema, but the long take conditions how we perform that interpretation. In the opening scene in particular, the camera’s unusual movement intervenes in the performance of the scene, both physically and figuratively.

At different moments in the scene, the camera alternates between two perspectives—a wide shot of the whole bar, and the more intimate orbital movements around and amongst the men (Figures 21 & 22). This alternation of perspectives even further forefronts the camera’s intervention. This is the method by which the presencing of the

90 camera occurs: the viewer’s consciousness of the construction of the scene and the rotational movements of the camera involves us as participants and gradually reveals an implied meaning. In this opening scene, the relationship between the literal and implied meaning is gestured towards, but the precise nature of this implied meaning is never quite discovered. The performative nature of the scene constantly defers meaning but equally constantly suggests it. Thus, Tarr uses this scene as a staging in which circularity, balance and repetition interact at the level of performance, camera work and the composition of the mise-en-scène. The relationship between these components is brought to the fore.

The technique of involving the camera as another character in the demonstration of the orbiting planets also reaffirms the theme of balance that runs through the film. It is not just János’s story that relates the order of the planets to a sense of universal balance, but the contrary clockwise-anticlockwise movement of the men and the camera around each other also demonstrates this relationship. When the camera itself becomes an orbiting planet in János’s play, the viewer witnesses both the chaos and the rhythmic movements of the men and the camera that ensue. As the camera pans out and János begins speaking the words, “the air suddenly turns cold, the sky darkens and then all goes dark…And then complete silence,” Tarr provides an immediate contrast between the balance of the planets and the quick eruption of chaos.

Importantly, this contrast, both visually and aurally, foreshadows two separate moments that occur later in the film: the first is György’s recitation of Andreas Werckmeister’s theories about the derivation of musical harmony from the balanced movements of the planets, and the second is when the peace (or balance) of the town is disturbed, sending it into chaos and culminating in the ransacking of the hospital. The careful staging of the nine-and-a-half minute tracking shot in the opening scene, therefore, is vitally

91 important in laying out the symbolic, narrative and visual groundwork that underlies the remainder of the film.

The performative nature of the long take in Werckmeister Harmonies also emphasises the theme of circularity and entrapment through the repeatability of the individual scene. Many of the actions in the film—the solar system mime, János’s walks through the village, the circling of the whale—are not only repetitive within the scene, but are also repeated later in the film. Much like a performance, the actions in Tarr’s pseudo-world are infinitely repeatable. The repetitive dimension of the film is evidence of the allegory of the downfall of communism. It emphasises, first, a crisis that cannot be directly engaged with, and second, the suspension of meaning in the form of every shot. The alternation of stasis and repetition embedded within every shot constantly gestures towards an unresolved crisis. Hodgkins offers an explanation for this repetitive dimension by explaining that after a traumatic, repressive event, people (and, by extension, nations) feel obliged to repeat or return to the events of the past in an effort to come to terms with them. “The awful magnitude of the event,” he suggests, “is such that it defies full understanding, thereby making it difficult…to psychically move beyond.”134 In Werckmeister Harmonies, the viewer is constantly made aware of how this crisis is framed, its timing manipulated and each moment fragmented and scrutinised, even though the outcome is never truly resolved. The circular nature of Werckmeister

Harmonies indicates the feeling of uncertainty referred to earlier, whether it takes the form of nostalgia for the past or a hesitance to embrace the future.

This sense of uncertainty and repression permeates Werckmeister Harmonies through the bleak, monochrome world in which the film is set, and the gradual build-up to anarchy and rebellion in the hospital scene at the end of the film. The suspension of

134 Hodgkins, “Not Fade Away,” 50-52.

92 meaning constantly at play at a figurative level is sensed, as something not only unresolved, but unresolvable. Each of the scenes discussed in this section reflect both

Hungary’s political crisis and the nature of allegory. Thus, they reveal that ‘circularity and entrapment’ operate at two different levels in the film: first, by reflecting the cyclical nature of apprehension experienced by the Hungarian nation and its individuals during the downfall of communism, and second, by revealing the process of both gesturing towards and withholding meaning. In each of these moments, the connection between the literal and the figurative is suspended; each moment uses the inherent properties of the long take to gesture towards an objective that never arrives.

Continuing the stylistic change that occurred through Tarr’s early career,

Werckmeister Harmonies demonstrates the increasing figurative dimension of his films.

The long take functions as a performance of circularity and entrapment in both its camera movement and its staging. Tarr affirms this sense of circularity and entrapment in the film’s form by severing the connection with the outside world and building a purgatory-like conception of time through capturing the repetitive, ritualistic actions of the characters in long, tracking shots. Both formally and aesthetically, the film’s diegesis is caught between two worlds: the modern and the pre-modern. The rural, weather- beaten mise-en-scène positions the film in a pre-modern world, contradicting the distinctly modern, free-moving autonomous camera and disjointed narrative. While Werckmeister

Harmonies is manifestly concerned with the present, the past is carefully interwoven, and a palpable urgency to remember, interrogate and reconcile past and present is always apparent. The unresolved relationship between past and present, literal and figurative, works to constantly displace meaning through the film’s form.

93 The Autonomous Camera

Tarr’s construction of reality is grounded in revealing the precise texture of the film’s environment. Such a process requires the camera to be committed to the viewpoints and experiences of the protagonist yet to also be able to establish a more detached perspective, exploring the world beyond the central concerns of narrative and character development. In Werckmeister Harmonies, the privileging of the mise-en-scène is at the service of world building. This world building is created by a camera that is allowed to come between character and environment. At times, this action allows the camera to depart entirely from János, neither following him in a sustained moving shot, nor cutting to a new location, despite the apparent importance of his actions to the meaning of the scene. While Tarr’s camera is fundamentally tied to János’s actions for much of the film, it explicitly and frequently asserts its independence from the protagonist.

One method of achieving this independence is by capturing the image of the absence of the protagonist. Tarr deliberately allows the environment to physically intrude between the character and the camera. To achieve this, he employs three methods: allowing the protagonist to leave the shot; the productive use of negative space; and the staging of physical objects to block the protagonist from view. The first of these methods occurs in a shot in which the camera is positioned at a low angle, looking straight down a darkened street lit by a single street lamp and the rising sun streaming down towards the camera. In this single, static shot, János enters from frame left and walks down the street away from the camera, silhouetted against the sun, before disappearing into the distance. Despite the appearance and subsequent disappearance of the film’s protagonist, the camera remains static throughout, seemingly unaffected by

János’s movement in front of it. In this shot, the camera remains fixed on the empty street for eleven seconds after János disappears. Tarr’s decision not to move the camera

94 to follow János allows the viewer to remain grounded in the protagonist’s environment after the protagonist has departed. It is a relatively short shot, but János is absent from it for longer than he is present. It is not simply a matter of splitting the camera from the character, but the character from the environment to heighten the physical realism.

Figure 23. The opening frame of János walking towards the camera.

Figure 24. The final frame of the shot, demonstrating the increasing negative space around János.

95 The use of distanced staging and negative space around the characters is evident in another street scene early in the film. In a one-minute long take, János walks toward a retreating camera. The shot begins as an extreme long shot and ends with János as a tiny dark figure on the screen. As the camera retreats away from him, the black space around him increases (Figures 23 & 24). The environment, although mostly black, engulfs the screen and increasingly interrupts the connection between camera and protagonist.

Although János begins as the central figure in the shot, he eventually becomes a barely identifiable figure in the distance. János’s relegation to the deep background of the shot occurs slowly, but the engulfing darkness quickly becomes a prominent part of the shot’s composition. This form of distanced staging exists for a different purpose than that which appears in an Angelopoulos film. While Angelopoulos’s distant staging is intended to mute the drama of the scene, Tarr’s employment of the technique confirms that his staging choices are almost always a function of the environment and demonstrate the dynamic and autonomous capacities of the camera.

Tarr’s third method for asserting the camera’s independence is achieved by placing an object or another character between the camera and the subject. An extended employment of this method occurs in a scene in György’s house. A one-shot scene opens on a shallow-focussed mid-shot of György, who is reciting a discussion of the musicological theories of Werckmeister into a microphone. The camera remains static for about twenty seconds, before János enters through a door in the background. The camera keeps György in sharp focus in the foreground, even though it follows János’s movements as he moves from frame right to frame left in the background. It is as though the camera is slavishly tied to the latter. As János disappears out of shot, the camera begins a series of movements: it rotates clockwise around György, keeping his head in focus throughout; it then comes to rest on a static shot of János sitting in a chair,

96 before commencing to rotate anti-clockwise around György. These rotational movements recall the camera’s planetary orbit in the opening scene, reinforced by the content of György’s script discussing musical harmony and balance. Throughout this shot, János is only ever briefly in focus, but he consistently motivates the camera’s movements (Figure 25). This shot exemplifies Tarr’s approach to staging the interaction of camera, protagonist and environment: rather than György being the true dramatic focus of this shot, it is as though he is interrupting the relationship between János and the camera. Tarr recognises the primacy of the protagonist in the scene, but he also asserts the camera’s independence from the protagonist by allowing the environment and other characters to interject in their relationship. All of these framing methods contribute to Tarr’s strategy of world building and confirm the camera as a distinct, independent entity.

Figure 25. János centre-framed, but out of focus and blocked by György in the foreground.

Tarr’s strategy of world building indicates that his decisions about camera movement and position are as much about developing the landscape around and beyond the character as they are about emphasising the character’s centrality to the

97 landscape. Not only does the long take have the capacity to reveal the time before, during and after a character is present, but it also has the capacity to build continuity between the physical space of the character and the environment around them. It is in service of this task that, in Tarr’s cinema, the long take finds its utility. Rancière argues that in Tarr’s mobile long takes, “there is no perceptive center, only a great continuum…The task of the filmmaker is to construct a certain number of scenes that allow for the texture of this continuum to be felt.” The sequence shot serves as the building block of this continuum, he adds, “because it is that which respects the nature of the continuum.”135 The scene in György’s office demonstrates this approach: when the camera begins rotating clockwise around his head, it overtly discards János from view, arcing around to reveal the whole room. The sudden glimpse of János in the background distracts the camera from its orbit and the shot ends on a static shot of him.

Tarr achieves this texture of continuum through not just employing travelling long takes, but also separating the movement of his camera from the movement of his protagonist and exploring the physical space of the mise-en-scène. Through this conception of framing and mise-en-scène, we can understand Tarr’s approach to world building. Tarr’s interest lies in the revelation of both continuity and discontinuity in the mise-en-scène. The absence of the protagonist, the use of negative space, and allowing physical objects to block the protagonist from view overtly reveal the continuities and discontinuities in the mise-en-scène.

The continuity and primacy of the film’s environment, however, has not been a focus of Tarr’s style from the beginning. His career can be divided into two periods through which this shift occurs: before and after Almanac of Fall. The earlier period is characterised by the social realist documentary style formed in the Béla Balázs Studio.

135 Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 66.

98 The main emphasis in these films is the representation of the characters’ relationships, and thus, Tarr’s filming method predominantly involves dialogue-driven static long takes.136 Although Kovács argues that the environment shares equal importance with the characters in Almanac of Fall—owing to its unnaturalistic lighting effects and the grim tone set by the claustrophobic, urban apartment setting—the framing of each scene is motivated by the position and movement of the characters.

Tarr’s latter period, which includes Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994) and

Werckmeister Harmonies, coincides with a move to rural spaces, where the natural environment adopts a more significant role. These films are dominated by framing methods and camera movements that privilege the representation of the environment over the characters. More often, Tarr’s camera departs from the protagonist and leaves empty spaces in the landscape. This stylistic change reflects a move between different subject matters. While his earlier films were original works that depicted urban problems, many of his later films, which are adapted from Krasznahorkai’s novels, shift away from this urban focus. Kovács argues that the literary source of the film allows for more stylised sets, dialogue, camera movement and conception of space.137 It is this form of stylisation that allows Tarr to build a world in which a new conception of reality can be explored, which is significantly different from his earlier films. This is a conception of reality in which the characters no longer have primacy and the texture and continuity of the environment are brought to the fore.

For this reason, Tarr’s method for finding a location for his films has changed since his early period in the Béla Balázs Studio. For his earlier films, the location used was often also where the film was set; in his later films, however, the location was somewhere the film could be set: a pseudo world that was simultaneously a real and

136 Kovács, The Cinema of Béla Tarr, 48. 137 Ibid.

99 imaginary place. In order to achieve the texture of continuum required for his later films, it is vital that they are produced in a particular kind of physical space. Tarr undertook a very specific search to find locations for his films. He visited numerous industrial regions from communist Hungary for Damnation, and many European ports for The Man from London (2007). Rancière refers to these locations as setting up a “play of expectations”: landscapes that establish a particular social milieu within which the characters operate. 138 This effect can also be felt in Werckmeister Harmonies. The combination of a bleak, rural setting and a free-moving camera produces a mise-en-scène in which the hardships of the communist regime aftermath could play out in a kind of constructed realism. Both aesthetically and symbolically, Tarr’s mise-en-scène is designed to stand in for the disillusioned, worn-down spirit of the rural citizens of post-communist

Hungary.

The specific nature of the environment and its independence from the characters determine how the camera moves independently through this space. In the first daytime scene in the town square, the setting is presented with the camera closely following behind János as he walks to the centre. This scene is the viewer’s first introduction to what could be termed the ‘stage’ or the epicentre of the film: the enormous open space of the town square, covered in ancient worn-down cobblestones.

The trailer housing the whale is positioned to frame left. Throughout the square, small groups of men are standing talking to each other. János’s positioning with his back to the camera and his black attire de-individualises him—he appears initially as an unidentifiable black figure in front of the camera. In this extended, continuously moving shot, the camera maintains only a tenuous connection with János. Both János and the camera roam amongst the group of men and frequently depart from one another.

138 Ranciere, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 70.

100 Although János acts as something of a guide to the camera’s movements, the focus and the function of these movements are in revealing the nature of his environment. The unidentified groups of men frequently come between the camera and János (Figure 26).

The men’s static positions and their unchanging facial expressions make them operate, functionally, as a faceless crowd through which both János and the camera weave. As the camera departs from János, the faceless crowd of men is repetitive and indistinguishable. This shot reveals the continuity of the landscape and the camera’s compulsion to remain closely connected to the environment.

Figure 26. János in the background (middle), showing the men’s frozen expressions.

Extended sequences of camera movement, such as the town square scene, allow the viewer to conceive of the mise-en-scène from multiple viewpoints and via multiple kinds of movements. Tarr’s mobile camera possesses its own form of movement that is explicitly cinematic. Gilles Deleuze uses an example from Vsevolod Pudovkin to demonstrate how camera movement is linked inextricably to the creation of a mobile mise-en-scène. “It is as if you climbed on a roof to see [a street demonstration],” Deleuze

101 explains, “then you climb down to the first floor window to read the placards, then you mix with the crowd.”139 A scene such as this in a film would be an attempt to imitate the movement and vision of the human eye, but “natural perception introduces halts, moorings, fixed points or separated points of view, moving bodies, or even distinct vehicles, whilst cinematographic perception works continuously, in a single movement.”140 Deleuze’s Pudovkin example reveals how the fluidity of the camera’s movement allows it to stand as a distinct entity to the almost constant movement of

János and other characters. Particularly in the town square scenes, the camera’s constant departure from János confirms these independent connections. At one moment, after

János has been inside the trailer to see the whale, the camera remains in the trailer looking out, while János stands in the town square. This is the first time such a vast amount of space has come between them, and it emphasises their independent connection to the landscape. Such character-camera positioning emphasises how Tarr’s world is framed and evidences the position of the viewer in relation to this framing. The camera has the capacity to build its own connection to the physical space of the film that operates independently from the characters’ connection to the space. Tarr’s camera performs distinctly cinematic acts, such as deep focus, long takes and, at times, juxtaposition with static shots, to confirm that this is a relationship between two distinct entities: camera and character.

The camera’s and János’s independent movements marks a significant point of departure from Tarr’s earlier cinema. A similar technique of freeing the camera from the characters occurs in Damnation, but the technique Kovács describes is slightly different to its later manifestation:

139 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), 22. 140 Ibid.

102 In most parts of the film the characters are stationary…Whether or not the image has a depth of space, the most typical effect of the mise-en-scène is the contrast of the slowly moving camera and the immobile characters. This contrast creates the feeling of someone walking slowly through a space where the people are frozen or stuck in their positions and cannot move away.141

Kovács’s description reveals a crucial difference between the two films. In Damnation, the only independent movement is performed by the camera, whereas in Werckmeister

Harmonies, the staging of János introduces a secondary parallel mobility that did not exist in Damnation. What the two films have in common is that Tarr’s ‘extras’ (or additional characters) often act as immobile characters and they operate as a part of the mise-en- scène, In Werckmeister Harmonies, this can be seen in György’s immobile role as he recites his musicology notes into the microphone, or in the repeated image of the immobile crowd in the town square. In Damnation, the camera’s slow track through a bar at night depicts the patrons as effectively frozen in place at their tables. Only the subtle movements of their hands and heads confirm that this is not a photographic illusion— they are living, cinematic figures. Both manifestations of the travelling long take in

Tarr’s cinema immerse the viewer in what Kovács describes as one of the most basic functions of a long take: that of “some feeling of participating in the space viewed.”

This participatory effect “provides the sensation of moving about in the space, the spectator discovering the space together with the camera.”142 In Werckmeister Harmonies, with the addition of János’s almost constant movement, the viewer is made more acutely aware of the freedom bestowed on the camera, as it frequently departs from the character to which it has been so closely attached in other parts of the film.

It is important to recognise that this secondary parallel movement enacted by the camera does not stand in for the viewer’s point of view; the camera is not another

141 Kovács, The Cinema of Béla Tarr, 57. 142 Ibid., 50.

103 character, although it frequently moves like one. Tarr’s assertion of the independence of his camera emphasises its role as a mediator between viewer and screen, one that provides a figuration of reality. The independence of the camera demonstrated in this section allows the environment and other characters to intervene between camera and character. This separation of entities, first, alerts the viewer to the constructed, cinematic nature of the space, and second, builds an allegorical world that allows the implied dimension of the film to emerge.

Cinema, Allegory and Fragmentation

Thus far, this chapter has focused on the environment in Werckmeister Harmonies predominantly in terms of its dominance in the aesthetic construction of the film and its relationship to the movement and stasis of the camera. The environment plays a further important role in the construction of allegory and the negotiation of past and present in the film. In Michelle Langford’s definition of allegory, she points to one of its primary features: the connections between the literal and figurative levels are fragmented and weakened. Allegory is inherently destructive; it fragments, dissolves and defers “the usual connections between…image and referent.”143 This fragmentation occurs, she argues, because the figurative level “suggests a range of possible interpretations” that requires the viewer to engage in a process of analysis.144 Furthermore, fragmentation exists because the allegorical or figurative element of the film is decontextualised from its social and cultural context. 145 On the other hand, allegory is also redemptive,

Langford argues, because it preserves the relationship between two entities and allows

143 Michelle Langford, Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Bristol: Intellect, 2006), 57. 144 Ibid., 66. 145 Ibid., 56.

104 the viewer to gain a new perspective on it.146 Allegory’s operation in film, therefore, often takes the form of deferred meaning, in which the connection between the image and referent is suspended.

The form of allegory that exists in Werckmeister Harmonies, however, differs slightly from merely a fragmented connection between the literal and the figurative. In each scene of the film, the camera’s movements form rhythmic patterns that explicitly draw attention to their deliberate choreography. These patterns—the solar system mime, the repeated walking shots and the sporadic use of temps morts—suggest an allegorical dimension. Unlike Langford’s definition of allegory, however, the kind at work in Werckmeister Harmonies destabilises the redemptive qualities of allegory; the meaning behind the figurative patterns and formal logics are destined to remain unresolved and inaccessible. This figuration encourages the interrogation of the viewer but it also constantly and inevitably undermines it by withholding meaning. As the opening scene of the film demonstrates, the long take has a particular capacity to develop these patterns over an extended period of time, while simultaneously drawing attention to its deliberate construction. This property of the long take makes the technique perfectly suited to revealing the dissolution of connections and the discontinuity between entities in Werckmeister Harmonies. The diegetic world of the film is conditioned on these disconnections, occurring at the temporal and spatial level, as well as at the level of meaning. At stake in unveiling this quality of the film is not just the existence of these disconnections, but that the long take has a particular capacity to make them evident.

146 Ibid., 57.

105

Figure 27. János enters the town square with the whale’s trailer to the left.

This capacity of the long take is evidenced by closely examining the enigmatic figure of the whale and the scenes in which it appears. One such example is the scene in which János wanders through the town square in the daytime. He enters the square, filled with excitement at seeing the grand, fabled creature of the whale. Everything in the shot, including the men, is static; a frozen image with no temporal reference. After a few seconds, János enters the shot from frame right: a black figure that blocks out much of our view (Figure 27). As earlier in the film, the camera follows close behind as he walks towards the closed trailer, stops in front of it, and the camera circles around to a close- up of his face looking up at the trailer’s large doors. Leaving the trailer behind, János turns and weaves amongst the static groups of men, walking up close, and inspecting them. Their faces barely flinch, and only their eyes follow János as he moves along to the next one. About halfway through the shot, a sudden grinding sound is heard that continues to slowly interrupt the silence. The camera turns to reveal the source of the sound: the large, rear door of the trailer is being lowered towards the ground. After the

106 whale is exposed in the trailer for the first time, all the men in the square suddenly turn to face it. This is the first time their stasis has been broken. In the moment that follows,

János enters the whale’s trailer, and the camera follows, encircling the whale’s preserved carcass in one uninterrupted shot as János inspects its vast body.

The discrepancy between the constant movement of János and the camera, and the stasis of the men and the whale, establishes a formal tension that bears on Tarr’s engagement with allegory. More specifically, he establishes an allegory for the relationship between past and present. In the scene described above, the idea of the past being constructed by the present is evident in the method by which Tarr’s camera captures the figures in the town square. As the tracking shot follows János around the square, each static man that enters the shot is picked up and quickly discarded by the camera. At play in this scene and throughout the film is not necessarily a distinction of past and present; rather, the discrepancy between movement and stasis gestures towards the existence of multiple temporalities. There is a clear disconnection between the figures that belong to different temporalities. Like the past/present dichotomy, these different temporalities are contingent on, and can only be read through, one another.

The disconnection between the entities in this scene, on both a temporal and a spatial level, makes clear the state of ruination of Tarr’s world. The tension of movement and stasis of the entities in the mise-en-scène reflect the fragmented connection between past and present. Like the opening scene, this moment in the film operates as a performance in which this state of ruination is played out. The enigmatic nature of the static men, the discrepancy between movement and stasis, and the way the whale is filmed all evoke a figurative dimension. This tension is a way of manifesting the idea of uncertainty about the present by drawing on the remnants of the past.

107 Both allegory and the long take, despite their redemptive quality, privilege temporality; hence, they always have the potential for loss through fragmentation. In the men’s stasis and fleeting presence on screen through this tracking shot, juxtaposed with

János’s almost constant presence, the capacity for loss is emphasised. More important for exemplifying this capacity is the whale: a tangible figure of death and decay, who, through its presumably physically decaying state, is an embodiment of the past and the loss of its supposed “greatness” (a term frequently used by János). As János first encounters the whale, we are only given a brief, close-up glimpse of it in the darkness.

Although the camera encircles the creature entirely in one continuous shot, it still appears fragmented and incomplete. Once again, the camera’s continuous sweep around the whale is in tension with the creature’s stasis. The whale is also evidently artificial, which further emphasises the uncanny façade of the circus maintained throughout the film. The whale marks a form of engagement with the past, but its presence is as awkward as the emergence of past and presence in the same shot. These moments of a decayed past co-existing with the present highlight the vast gap between what is now and what has been, or, what is irredeemable. What is being allegorised in Werckmeister

Harmonies is not a coherent narrative about how the world works, but a collection of ideas that are in a state of ruin. This is not only how allegory operates—allowing disconnections to be laid bare—but also how the long take creates a world by capturing it.

* * * *

In the final scene, after the destruction of the hospital, we are presented with a static shot of the town square. Once again, there is no character present in the opening frame and the metal trailer housing the whale sits alone in the middle of the square. But this

108 time, the sides have collapsed outwards, exposing the whale’s body; broken debris litters the cobblestones, the townsfolk have disappeared and a thick mist has descended.

Suddenly, György enters from frame right, as János did earlier, again as a black figure blocking out the shot (Figure 28). The camera follows close behind György as he walks along the right side of the whale, and moves towards its eye. The camera begins slowly circling around, keeping both György and the whale’s eye in view. Although the camera is close up, we are now provided with a more complete view. This is the first time we have seen the whole, complete body of the whale in the film out in the open of the town square, but the camera’s tracking along the side of the whale continues to fragment its enormous frame. If the viewer’s initial, fragmented encounter with the whale raised questions about its place or meaning in the film, this final encounter with it shows that it cannot offer any answers; now that we see it in full, it is no more revelatory about what it means. The now-exposed majestic whale, the broken debris left over from the anarchic rampage the night before, and the heavy mist surrounding the whale even more strongly separates the whale as a figure of the past from György as a figure of the present. The whale is the embodiment of meaning that never arrives. This scene demonstrates that film, and particularly the long take, is the perfect allegorical medium: its capacity to freeze change, to provide a defence against time, however fleeting, allows the past to weigh heavy on the present and to reconnect with a different time. After standing and looking into the eye of the whale, György turns and walks towards the camera, as it slowly retreats from the beast. In the final moments of the shot, György turns back, looks at the whale, and then walks off-screen. The whale remains in shot for the last segment and is slowly engulfed in the mist.

109

Figure 28. György enters the now-destroyed town square with the exposed whale carcass.

Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies constructs an image of a town that sits in ruin, at the periphery of society, a kind of antiquated world forgotten by the new. The town, as well as how it is captured cinematically, constantly gestures towards a figurative dimension, but leaves the connection between the literal and figurative unresolved. This chapter has revealed that allegory in film operates on another level beyond the simple dichotomy of a literal and a figurative dimension. It has demonstrated the specific role that form plays in the construction of allegory and, more specifically, how the long take, in this role, facilitates a constant suspension of meaning through its overt intervention in every shot. The film’s radical use of form demonstrates that it is not just the mise-en- scène that reveals the allegorical precipice on which society supposedly sits; but that this construction of allegory hinges on how the camera both reveals and conceals the relationships between past, present, mise-en-scène, character and camera.

110 Chapter Three Complicity and Intimacy: Michael Haneke’s Amour

Set in a small apartment in Paris, the narrative of Amour (2012) focusses on an elderly couple, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), who are both retired piano teachers. Near the beginning of the film, Anne suffers a stroke. Despite her medical needs, she refuses to stay in hospital, and Georges is forced to negotiate the dual and sometimes contradictory roles of husband and full-time carer. In the film’s pivotal scene, the camera is positioned statically on the right side of Anne’s bed as she lies in a state of physical pain, unable to communicate except through incoherent sounds. Her dutiful husband, Georges, sits in profile on the side of the bed facing his disabled wife. At the beginning of the shot, Georges tells Anne a story about his childhood experience of contracting diphtheria at school camp and his subsequent isolation in a hospital behind a glass wall, which prevented him from communicating with his family. He offers his own story of entrapment in order to sympathise with his wife, who is unable to communicate. Georges tries to ignore Anne’s pained, involuntary noises as he recounts his narrative, seemingly deriving as much comfort as was intended for his wife. A moment passes before Georges slowly reaches for a pillow on the bed, places it over his wife’s face and presses down on it until she becomes still. The camera remains in the same position for about a minute after Anne has died.

The value of the shot lies in this ‘minute after’. In many of Michael Haneke’s films, the most shocking or violent acts are usually both preceded and followed by a moment of temps morts. The scenes in which Majid commits suicide in Caché (2005) or when Erika stabs herself in the theatre lobby at the end of The Piano Teacher (2001), for example, reveal the apparently ‘empty’ moments of time before and after such horrific

111 acts. By witnessing the time before and after the action, we occupy a privileged position frequently denied the cinema viewer. But the caveat of this position is that we must find a way to reconcile and contextualise the violent act that follows. Through such moments, Haneke not only acknowledges the viewer as witness to these events, but, in doing so, he also implicates us in the violence of the scene. Such scenes exemplify

Haneke’s primary interest—the unique kind of complicity that is developed between spectator and film. Like Béla Tarr, Haneke is interested in more than the unfolding of a narrative; he is also concerned with engaging the viewer in an interpretive dilemma that lies at the heart of his films.

Most of his films address a particular moral issue—suicide, violence in the media, sexual repression—and, in doing so, implicate the viewer through his distinct construction of form. The long take plays a central role in this process of implication: it enables a tripartite relationship between viewer, character and film in which the viewer’s engagement is always acknowledged and required in the shot’s duration and framing. In this chapter, I explore both this relationship and the ensuing sense of violation that occurs in Haneke’s films. In particular, I examine how the operation of this relationship is developed in Amour. I do so by referring to two interrelated terms: complicity and intimacy. The operation of complicity and intimacy is evidenced in the euthanasia scene already discussed. In this scene the moment of suffocation and the immediate time after elicits a similar response to the sudden throat-slitting in Caché: the relentless gaze of the static long take through Anne’s death places the viewer in an inescapably intimate relationship with the action on screen. This effect is magnified by the continuation of the shot after her death, in which Georges’s helplessness becomes apparent. In this scene, the intimacy of the moment—referring to both the physical space and the intimacy between the characters—ensures that the viewer’s presence in the time before

112 and after Anne’s death is a violation. In turn, our violation of this space renders the viewer a complicit figure. In this sense, the terms complicity and intimacy are intertwined and will be discussed throughout the chapter.

In what follows, I argue that the viewer’s complicity in the film is conditioned upon three distinct factors that shape our engagement with the film and, importantly, manage how we access the diegesis. The first of these factors is the ‘active’ role of the viewer. I consider the various lenses through which the generic term ‘active spectatorship’ has been explored in the past and examine how this viewer activity operates in Haneke’s films. For Haneke, the viewer’s engagement (or even involvement) in the diegesis exists a priori, evidenced by consideration of some key opening scenes in his oeuvre. It is a condition of our arrival to the film that we are complicit in the action on screen.147 Second, I examine the negotiation of this complicity with the creation of intimacy and its opposite, distance. These three terms, considered together, allow for a more in-depth understanding of the viewer’s involvement in the diegesis as not just one of complicity, but also a violation, and a constant negotiation of our position as both distanced outsiders and implicated insiders. Third, I argue that the viewer occupies a position of conscious partiality throughout Amour. By being made aware of our conditional access to the diegesis, we are similarly reminded that film always denies access to the moment just beyond the shot. In this sense, Haneke allows the viewer to recognise the inherent unreliability of film. According to Gilberto Perez, this is a distinctly modernist phenomenon: he argues that “Modern art declares its means not because they are its only subject but in order to put them into question, because it feels

147 It is imperative to acknowledge here that the viewer’s complicity in the film’s action is not automatically engaged by the presence of a long take; nor do I wish to suggest that other forms could not produced complicity. It is possible, for example, that viewer complicity in some form could be enabled through montage and varying modes of proximity. This chapter argues, however, that the particular kind of long take employed by Haneke, in which we bear witness to the moment before and after, allows for both complicity and intimacy to jointly unfold throughout its duration in a way that is specific and vital to the narrative of Amour.

113 it cannot take its assumptions for granted in its search after truth.”148 Awareness of this unreliability is crucial in a film such as Amour that provokes a moral debate to which it never offers an answer. If the ‘assumptions’ on which the film is based are flawed— either formally or narratively—then the film itself is morally unsound. As viewers, we are reminded that our limited cinematic access might mirror a limited access to crucial parts of the protagonists’ predicament. But, more importantly, it also tests the long take in its capacity to both expose naturalist detail—the exposition of ‘truth’—and explicitly signal its own limitations.

The Complicit Spectator

Throughout his career, Haneke has frequently used the long take to encourage his viewer to become aware of their own position as viewer. This effect engages the viewer in what is frequently termed active spectatorship. This term, however, is rarely granted a concrete definition. Commonly, it is used to refer to the assumption that viewers are accustomed to reading films via a conventionalised system of editing techniques popularised by mainstream Hollywood. By utilising the long take and breaking from these conventions, the filmmaker encourages the viewer to use their own judgement in exploring the image with their own eyes, removing the viewer from a passive position.

This process maintains links with David Bordwell’s conception of the long take’s productive value: the technique “demands that the spectator cultivate viewing skills that go beyond those elicited by classical cutting. The viewer will have to scan the image, seek out salient points of interest, and integrate information into an overall judgement about a scene.”149 Similarly, André Bazin champions the long take and deep focus as techniques that encourage active viewing by exploiting cinema’s capacity to reproduce

148 Perez, The Material Ghost, 261. 149 Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 65.

114 reality. For Bazin, the process of inviting a more active mental attitude in a film’s viewer was to finally realise the essence of cinema: its capacity to reveal the fundamentally ambiguous and dislocating nature of the real.

The form of viewer activity invited by Haneke’s films, however, extends beyond the confines of Bazin’s phenomenological view of cinema. It is much closer to what

Catherine Wheatley calls a ‘cinema of ethics’: a relationship established between viewer and screen in which the viewer begins to question their own ethical position as viewers or, more specifically, reflect on what Robert Sinnerbrink calls “the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience.”150 Haneke has particularly expressed a desire to bring about this ethical engagement in his viewers. In his essay, “Film as Catharsis” he has insisted that his films

are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.151

The form of American cinema he refers to here is mainstream Hollywood cinema. With its increasing rapidity of edits, he argues, it leads to a loss of meaning and capacity for emotional engagement. Audiences of this form of cinema are, therefore, rendered

150 Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, 3-4, 194; Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Post-Humanist Moralist,” Angelaki 16, no. 4 (2011): 116. 151 Michael Haneke in Mattias Frey, “The Message and the Medium: Haneke’s Film Theory and Digital Praxis,” in On Michael Haneke, ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2010), 156. Haneke has also somewhat contradicted this statement. In an interview, he stated, “I never wanted to provoke, with the exception perhaps of a single film I made, Funny Games, in which it was an outraged reaction to a certain kind of cinema. But with my other films, they didn’t seek to be provocative; however when you maintain and follow a certain aesthetics then inevitably there’s a contrast to the conventional aesthetics that are in play. But it wasn’t ever my main preoccupation to provoke.” (Michael Haneke, interviewed by David Poland, “DP/30 @ Cannes 2012: Amour, Writer/director Michael Haneke.” DP/30: The Oral History of Hollywood. Online video, 29 May 2012, accessed 4 June 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFApyPLUTAs.)

115 passive and not complicit in the onscreen action. His reference to the “disempowerment of the spectator,” in particular, suggests a desire on Haneke’s part to re-empower his viewer by offering them choice, as opposed to the “consumption and consensus” he accuses American cinema of promoting. Haneke’s critique emphasises the element of time in determining the form of engagement established between viewer and screen. In an interview with Christopher Sharrett, Haneke placed the blame on television for changing our “habits of seeing,” arguing that the medium “accelerates experience.”152

He contends that television, with its heavy reliance on montage and quick editing, has begun to erode the emotionally-engaged active viewing experience.153 He goes on, however, to promote the long take in cinema as being capable of reversing these habits with its particular emphasis on duration and ambiguity.154 Haneke’s continual preference for using the long take against the current media landscape allows his films to remain steadfastly cinematic, not just in appearance, but also in execution and effect. As both the cinema and television he describes decrease in shot length, Haneke’s often static long takes have the capacity to appear slower and increasingly encourage the interpretive interaction of the viewer, engaging them in the kind of empowered position that

Haneke desires.

As well as encouraging a form of mental activity, the long take also has the capacity to bestow on the viewer a particular kind of choice in how the image is interpreted. John David Rhodes reflects on the concept of viewer agency and the long take in his discussion of Haneke:

152 Christopher Sharrett, “The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” Cineaste 28, no. 3 (2003): 31. 153 Haneke does not specify the genre of television he refers to, but from his description, it can be assumed he refers to the style popularised by mainstream American network television of the late twentieth century. 154 Sharrett, “The World That Is Known,” 31.

116

This form of cinematography is more like being in the world, which is to say, closer to a mode of being in which one acts as an agent and not an object. The invitation to activity, ‘personal choice,’ and ‘attention’ are all bound up with the third of this form of cinematography’s virtues, which is its reintroduction of ‘ambiguity.’155

By acting as an agent, Rhodes points out, the viewer is involved in a careful interplay of agency and constraint. The director’s intentional (or sometimes accidental) composition of the shot, the duration of the shot, and even off-screen elements, such as diegetic sound and light, have the potential to introduce an element of ambiguity that encourages the viewer’s individual interpretation. But the important point to add is that it is a constrained interpretation. The viewer is often coerced, rather than invited, into this active participation with the film; or, as Rhodes expresses it, “What begins as liberty ends as obligation.”156

In the following discussion, I consider how, by examining the viewer’s position in Haneke’s films as involving obligation, a more precise understanding of viewer complicity can be developed. Debates around active spectatorship, particularly those offered by Haneke scholars, frequently fall short of characterising this obligated participation of the viewer in his films. Wheatley makes some productive inroads into characterising the viewer’s complicity. Contrary to Rhodes’s position, her central thesis is that the film-spectator relationship in Haneke’s films is a matter of choice; for

Wheatley, the viewer is “willingly passive” and asked to consciously take responsibility for their part in the film.157 In characterising this choice, she argues that the viewer’s role in Haneke’s films revolves around “their tacit acceptance or denial of [their]

155 John David Rhodes, “The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke's Long Takes,” in On Michael Haneke, 89. 156 Ibid., 90. 157 Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, 36.

117 complicity.”158 She points out that each of his films “demonstrate an underlying concern with questions of guilt and responsibility” that reflect similar ethical concerns central to the viewing situation. I argue, however, that this choice is not offered to viewers; their participation in the film is required by the shot’s form in order to make sense of the drama on screen. Complicity implies more than the active spectator debates normally do: it implies an obligated engagement with the film that not only encourages viewer engagement, but also actually requires it for the film’s success. The viewer’s complicity in Haneke’s films is not a choice, but an obligation.

This form of complicity is most evident in Caché, since it offers a very explicit reflection on the cinematic viewing experience. In the first shot of the film, the viewer watches surveillance footage obtained from a video camera placed outside the protagonists’ house. The film opens on a static shot of the outside of a house, framed at a distance. The shot lasts for just over a minute, only at the end of which we hear conversation emerging from an unknown source. The next shot shows Georges (Daniel

Auteuil) walking across the street, followed by a return to the original static shot.

Suddenly, the familiar fuzzy stripes of a VCR fast-forward function appear on screen, followed by a cut to a new scene of Anne (Juliette Binoche) and Georges watching television in their lounge room. Only this second scene clarifies the indeterminable first shot: the protagonists are watching video camera footage that has been delivered to the their house. Haneke employs this technique several times throughout the film. After this first instance, the viewer is informed that the protagonists are watching the surveillance footage on their home VCR. With this technique, he places the viewer in an unstable spectatorial position in which they are never able to ascertain at the beginning of the shot which camera perspective is being used: that of the surveillance camera or the

158 Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, 10.

118 camera that is outside the diegesis. Occurring as the opening scene, the technique employed here ensures that the viewer has no resources to draw on, other than what is shown on screen and the suggestion of a video camera aesthetic that might provide a clue. The holding back of this crucial information relies on the viewer to engage in a potentially unsatisfying process of interpretation. Haneke always establishes a situation in which our involvement exists a priori in an event that has already happened, and frequently, this involvement renders the viewer complicit. Their involvement is almost always implicated by the opening shot, which effectively removes the viewer’s opportunity for choice in their complicity.

Figure 29. The final shot of Caché (2005), in which Majid’s son and Pierrot are discreetly framed in discussion at frame left.

Another method employed in Caché that confirms our implication in the film’s drama is leaving particular images open to multiple specific interpretive outcomes, as exemplified by the oft-discussed final scene of Caché. The static camera is trained on the outside of a school in a distanced long take (Figure 29). The shot captures students moving up the steps towards the school’s entrance, weaving around others who are

119 conversing. The shot’s narrative value remains unclear until Georges and Anne’s son,

Pierrot (Lester Makendosky), is seen making his way towards Majid’s son (Walid Afkir).

They converse briefly, before Majid’s son disappears off to frame right. If observed by the viewer, the exchange between the two boys suggests a more sinister dimension to the unresolved narrative we have witnessed earlier in the film. However, the chaotic density of staging and the distanced static long take employed ensure that this exchange is frequently missed on first viewing of the film. Rhodes questions whether it matters that, the first time he saw Caché, he missed this apparently significant moment. He says,

“I assumed that Haneke decided to let the film end on a note of radical inconclusiveness, and I approved of this ending.”159 The potential dual outcome of this scene is a particularly pertinent example of how the long take not only sustains reality, but also engages the viewer in the completion of the narrative. It also emphasises the potential ambiguity elicited by the distanced long take. Rhodes refers to the phenomenon of the viewer’s awareness of watching, promoted by the opening of Caché, in which the viewer begins to intentionally search for meaning in the image simply, because we are culturally trained to believe that meaning should exist. As Rhodes explains, “Haneke’s long takes give us sensuous, but also theoretical, evidence of the way in which value seeks constantly to insert itself into the image or to adhere itself to the image’s surface.”160 It is unclear whether a concrete meaning is to be gained from this moment or if the viewer’s complicity is exposed through our failure at ascertaining such an outcome.

The film’s frequent framing and reframing of the viewer’s position continually affirms our complicity in the action that takes place on screen. From the opening scene to the many other instances of surveillance footage shown in the film, the viewer is

159 Rhodes, “The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes,” 98. 160 Ibid., 100.

120 unavoidably implicated in a complex process of interpretation. The video camera aesthetic immediately ensures that the viewer is positioned as more involved than an assumed passive cinema viewer; we are voyeurs from the film’s opening moment. But of most importance is the fact that this video footage possesses no beginning or context.

The apparent “liberty,” to borrow Rhodes’s term, offered by the ambiguity of the long take is undermined by the constraints placed on the viewer in the use of the uncontextualised video footage. Haneke develops spectatorial scenarios in which we are rendered complicit in a struggle to interpret the repercussions of what we witness.

Haneke’s intentional implication of the viewer in the characters’ guilt, however, is not performed merely for its own sake. Although the entire narrative of Caché revolves around the discovery of the person who planted the surveillance cameras, it is evident that the source of this surveillance is not what is really at stake. Rather, the film is about laying bare what cinema can allow us to do as viewers, and the ways this can be achieved formally. The physical surveillance camera is never located, nor is a logical explanation for its existence ever offered, prompting David Sorfa to conclude that “the person who is sending the video tapes to the family is not one of the many possible intra-diegetic characters, but is rather the real audience in the theatre,” in their desire to bring about action in the film.161 Caché essentially performs the operations of a film: the director (the surveillance camera) demands a story (explanation or apology) from the character (Georges), which is witnessed by an uninitiated viewer; this set of relations can only be brought to the fore by immediately implicating the viewer through the ambiguous video camera footage in the opening minutes of the film. Martin

Blumenthal-Barby similarly suggests the presence of viewer complicity that surveys the characters’ guilt in The White Ribbon (2009). He discusses the scrutinising, probing

161 David Sorfa, “Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke,” Studies in European Cinema 3, no. 2 (2006): 102.

121 camera that not only conjures suspicion amongst the locals (“we observe the locals and the locals observe each other, in which, indeed, everyone observes everyone else”), but that, in its suspicion of guilt, implicates the viewer as witness to this guilt as well. 162

Blumenthal-Barby emphasises that both observer and observed are “at once the enactor

‘of’ and subject ‘to’ surveillance.”163 In both of these films, the question of guilt is brought about by the denial of access to the perpetration of the crimes.

Despite the probing, surveillant mode adopted by the camera in both films, the viewer is constantly reminded that the film is not interested in the dichotomy of guilty and innocent. Although Haneke establishes a narrative in which we are invested in the characters’ guilt, the viewer is not necessarily implicated in it. Rather, its interest lies in the interplay of relations between director, viewer and characters that can only be revealed by this dichotomy and articulated by the long take. This is what is at stake in

Amour, demonstrated through the viewer’s granted privileged access to the characters’ lives. The final scene of Caché, in which the two boys meet outside the school, does not produce a dual outcome purely to confuse the matter of guilty and innocent. Rather, this dual outcome is the intended result of our conditional access to the diegesis. This ambiguous image is an explicit expression of how the set of relations around the shot and the circumstances of its creation—the static long take-long shot and the avoidance of showing us the beginning of the action—frames, transforms and negotiates our relationship with it.

162 Martin Blumenthal-Barby, “The Surveillant Gaze: Michael Haneke's White Ribbon,” October 147 (2014): 99. 163 Sorfa, “Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke,” 99-100.

122 Intimacy and Distance

Thus far, this chapter has examined how complicity and intimacy operate in Haneke’s films. In order to extend this argument into a more precise engagement with Amour, it is necessary to introduce a new term into the discussion: distance. The distanced, static shot has become a hallmark of Haneke’s cinema. As evidenced by the opening scene of

Caché, this technique is frequently employed to draw attention to the act of viewing. By using the terms ‘intimacy’ and ‘distance’ in the case of Amour, however, I refer to not just the physical proximity between the camera and the subject, but also the emotional and ethical relationship established between the viewer and the characters. The duration of the long take, which allows access to otherwise inaccessible moments, forms an intimate relationship between viewer and screen. The inaccessibility of the moral dilemma in Amour, however, also enforces a distanced outsider position on the viewer.

The viewer is at once intimate with, and distant to, the diegesis and the characters’ moral dilemma. These additional considerations aid in forming a very particular relationship between viewer and diegesis that is negotiated by the long take’s duration, but doesn’t necessarily hinge on camera-subject proximity. In Amour, Haneke continues his project of providing the viewer some form of agency by using the long take; but by focussing on a very different moral dilemma than his earlier films, the viewer’s awareness of their act of watching adopts a renewed meaning.

In order to unravel what this renewed meaning is we must first define the specific nature of the moral dilemma depicted in the film. In Amour, Haneke tackles the question of “how to manage the suffering of someone you love,” a deceptively complex task.164 Haneke ensures that the outcome of this ethical question is addressed by

164 Scott Foundas, “Michael Haneke on Amour: ‘When I Watched It with the Audience, They Gasped!’,” The Village Voice, December 20, 2012, accessed April 12, 2016,

123 presenting to the viewer the end of Anne’s life at the beginning of the film: the opening shot reveals firemen and police breaking down the front door of Georges and Anne’s apartment and discovering Anne’s body lying on her bed in a funereal pose surrounded by flowers. This scene determines how we are made complicit in the couple’s drama; we enter the film mid-dramatic moment, uninitiated and given enough access (intimacy) to understand that a moral dilemma is being staged for us, but distanced enough to not understand what is at stake. Like the opening scene of Caché, this scene is not necessarily about a drive to know anything about the characters, but rather a drive to understand our own participation in the couple’s predicament. Once the viewer knows what will be the outcome, the film’s goal becomes a matter of investigating how this outcome occurs.

Amour questions whether a response to a particularly difficult situation is the ‘right’ response, or if a right response exists, and whether cinema can aid in accessing this resolution. The film implicates the viewer in the question of what can or cannot be known about the bond between two people, and how this bond can deteriorate in the face of a major dilemma when the couple’s intimacy is brought into question. The viewer is, at the same time, both included and excluded from the moral dilemma they are tasked with deciphering. Thus, the establishing of proximity is not just an aesthetic issue, but it also has broader implications for how the viewer responds to the narrative.

The matter of inclusion and exclusion primarily characterises the way the long take negotiates distance and intimacy. The nature and scope of the viewer’s access to the diegesis defines our viewing position. The film is constantly caught in a tension of conscious inclusion and exclusion. The former is exemplified in a scene near the beginning of the film in which Anne suffers her first stroke: a scene of mundane domesticity in the kitchen during which, before the onset of her stroke, husband and

https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/12/20/michael-haneke-on-amour-when-i-watched-it- with-the-audience-they-gasped/

124 wife converse in one long take while the camera remains largely static. The quotidian setting of this scene is reminiscent of a frequently discussed scene in Vittorio De Sica’s

Umberto D. (1952), which Bazin considers the exemplification of neorealism.165 In this scene, a maid walks into the kitchen in the morning, drowns an ant plague, and sits on a chair grinding coffee. Bazin argues that, in this scene, “The narrative unit…is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis.”166

This revelation of the succession of concrete instants of life is evident in the kitchen scene in Amour in the initial static shot, as Georges sits on the chair in the background, while Anne boils eggs in the foreground (Figure 30). While the apparent “action” of the shot is in Georges’s dialogue, Anne is placed in the shot’s foreground, going about the mundane actions of boiling the eggs, holding the pan under running water and making tea. These framed actions reveal to us portions of the couple’s life, none of which can be said to be more important than another. Any drama that might be present in the scene is ‘destroyed’ by foregrounding Anne’s mundane movements and the couple’s quotidian conversation.

165 André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur En Scène,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 76-77. 166 André Bazin, “Umberto D.: A Great Work,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, 81.

125

Figure 30. Anne and Georges in a scene of mundane domesticity before the onset of Anne’s stroke in Amour (2012).

Where the aforementioned tension becomes apparent in this scene is during the very instant of Anne’s stroke. During this moment, it is evident that Haneke’s intention is to do more than reproduce reality through the narration of successive instants of life.

With the camera placed in the same position as at the beginning of the scene, Georges stands up and walks towards frame left, busying himself in the pantry, while Anne sits silently at the dining table (Figure 31). The shot is still unbroken from when Anne stood at the sink. Some time during this moment, Anne suffers a stroke, yet both the viewer and Georges miss the exact instant of this occurrence. As Garrett Stewart observes, “it is as if [Anne] suffers from the principle of narrative ellipsis that Haneke so wilfully manipulates in his editorial style.”167 She is physically present, which is confirmed by the viewer, but, much like a cinematic ellipsis, her (psychological) absence goes unnoticed until Georges notes her lack of response later in the scene. The unbroken recording of

167 Garrett Stewart, “Haneke’s Endgame,” Film Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2013): 16.

126 the time before and after fool the viewer into believing they have had a privileged, unobstructed view of everything that occurs in the shot.

Figure 31. Georges stands in the foreground, as both he and the viewer miss the moment of Anne’s stoke.

The downplaying of drama during the precise moment of the stroke emphasises our conditional access to the diegesis. Anne’s unnoticed psychological absence from the scene reveals a strategy distinct to Haneke’s framing of this world: the revelation of what cannot be shown or seen by the viewer; a failure of the cinematic medium. Perez suggests that this failure is an integral part of the medium. He states, “in the actual world we inhabit, where we can have no privileged access to what goes on, no ideal place from which to apprehend what takes place, we must acknowledge the means by which we actually manage our access, we must put into question the means our art employs for representing the world.”168 By making us aware of what we cannot be shown, Haneke permanently undermines our own vision. This is a particularly confronting revelation, considering the apparent uninterrupted long take and the

168 Perez, The Material Ghost, 263.

127 deliberately wide shots favoured by Haneke throughout the film that tempt the viewer with a sense of apparent objectivity. Haneke draws attention back to the viewer’s role, in turn questioning the coherence of the ‘reality’ with which they are presented. This points to precisely what is unique about the viewer-film relationship in Haneke’s films: on the one hand, the viewer is provided with unusually privileged access to the diegesis—the temps morts discussed earlier—while on the other hand, this position encourages us to question how this access is managed and what further we are being denied access to beyond the cut that ends the shot.

This form of tension is also evidenced in another key scene in Amour, which serves to implicate the viewer in the film. In the opening scene, after the front door has been broken down, most of the policemen move immediately from the front door to the bedroom. The camera, however, follows another policeman for over a minute through to the lounge room, back into the front hallway and finally into the bedroom where Anne is lying. In following this particular policeman, Haneke avoids taking the most direct route to the bedroom. Even upon the policeman’s eventual entrance into

Anne’s bedroom, the camera follows him to the window, still avoiding the revelation of

Anne’s body to the viewer. The camera’s long journey from the front door to the bedroom replaces a narrative directness in favour of implicating the viewer: we, along with the policeman, have to ‘find’ Anne and, most importantly, the drama with which she is associated. Like Caché, the revelation of the context of the opening scene is suspended. From the beginning, this imposed search for the drama defines the nature of the viewer’s implication in the film. These two examples are evidence that Haneke uses the long take not just to aid narrative detail or reproduce realism, but to implicate the viewer by either denying or privileging our access at particular key moments.

128 Moments such as those described above reveal an inherent trait of the long take: it is always involved in interplay of intimacy (or immersion) and distance. This is emphasised by the film’s overt disruption of intimacy between Georges and Anne.

During the breakfast scene, the couple’s dull conversation about calling contractors to fix their broken front door captured in a static long take is punctuated by a series of shorter, tightly framed shot/reverse-shots between the couple sitting at the breakfast table, forming an intimate (in terms of character, dialogue and framing) moment between them. The moment of distanciation and detachment occurs as soon as Anne becomes unresponsive. Roy Grundmann characterises the couple’s initial conversation as intimate merely because of its “quotidian nature.” He suggests that, therefore, Anne’s attack is “all the more dramatic because it disrupts precisely one such conversation between them.”169

The significance of this moment is not just a matter of disrupting the couple’s intimacy. It also marks the first instance of the viewer’s disruption of intimacy with the couple. Until this point, we have always encountered them together, if not in the same frame, then in the same physical space. After Anne’s unresponsiveness becomes apparent to Georges, a couple more short shots occur before he stands up and hurries into the hallway towards the bedroom to dress in preparation for seeking help for his wife. A static shot, in which the camera is positioned physically in the kitchen gazing down the hallway, captures Georges’s retreat into the bedroom (Figure 32). This shot presents an aesthetic dilemma that questions each character’s centrality to the narrative: whether to remain with the unresponsive Anne, or to follow Georges into the bedroom, both of which threaten to deny the viewer access to one half of this vital event. The duration of this static shot opens up the opportunity to reflect on this dilemma, before

169 Roy Grundmann, “Love, Death, Truth—Amour,” Senses of Cinema, no. 65 (2012), accessed June 2, 2014. http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/love-death-truth-amour.

129 cutting to a shot of the bedroom where Georges is putting on his jacket. This scene highlights the conditional nature of the viewer’s complicity: we are forcibly implicated in the diegesis, but Haneke always makes us aware of what we might be missing around the edges of the camera’s frame by keeping us at a distance.

Figure 32. The camera stages a dilemma: Georges walks down the hallway, but the camera remains in the kitchen with Anne.

The disruption during Anne’s first attack is evidence of how complicity, intimacy and distance work in tandem to accentuate a fourth factor: the viewer’s act of violation. By making the viewer aware of our conditional access to the diegesis, it becomes clear that our violation of this private, intimate space is more highly charged: we are complicit to an unwitnessed event. Earlier in this chapter, it was revealed that

Haneke’s films almost always begin from a position of assumed viewer complicity. This complicity exists as a result of the viewer violating the characters’ private space, but never being privy to what has occurred before the beginning of the film. In this sense, our engagement with the film is always conditioned on some form of violence. In the case of Amour, this is not violence in the physical sense; rather, it takes the form of a

130 threat to our intimacy with the diegesis, the couple and their moral dilemma, as well as confronting our inability to access the ‘reality’ of their predicament.

Regarding some of Haneke’s earlier films, violence is theorised in terms of its confrontational capacity, which, as some scholars argue, encourages a critical engagement with the image; the violence on screen ‘shocks’ the viewer into a consciousness of their viewing position. Sinnerbrink attributes this depiction of violence to the “the distractible state of the spectator in societies of the spectacle,” in which

“spectators whose powers of decoding and assimilating visual information have become more acute but whose ability to understand, reflect upon, and assign emotional significance to this visual information has become more attenuated.”170 He asks the question:

[H]ow can film force us to engage with the image, to arrest the information flow and force critical thought in response to what we see, to deepen the emotional and intellectual impact of the images that surround us, while at the same time forcing us to reflect upon our desire for, and fascination with, images of violence, cruelty, and suffering, now consumed as entertainment?171

Sinnerbrink’s question speaks to Haneke’s overall intention in confronting his viewer: not to explicitly feed our desire for violence, but to make us acutely aware of our capacity to process the film’s confrontation. Thus, the kind of violence depicted in some of Haneke’s earlier films contributes significantly to our complicity owing to the method used to depict it. In Caché, for example, Majid (Maurice Bénichou) invites Georges into his apartment on the pretext of wanting to “show [him] something.” The camera, again adopting the video surveillance mode employed earlier in the film, is set up at the far end of the room at a distance from the door. The two men enter and stand in the

170 Sinnerbrink, “A Post-Humanist Moralist,” 119. 171 Ibid.

131 doorway before Majid suddenly slashes his own throat with a knife, splattering blood across the wall. In the same shot, Georges stands still in shock and then quickly leaves the room. The calm conversation between the two men, followed by the sudden shocking image of Majid performing such a violent act on himself in the same static shot, highlights Haneke’s typical approach to the long take: a formal technique that is used to confront the viewer through an immediate juxtaposition of images. The lack of montage and the presence of silence in these shots aid this process, in which the viewer is left unprepared for the violent act to follow. These moments of sudden, horrific violence are often the prime source of confrontation for Haneke’s viewers: the throat slitting in Caché, the doctor’s molestation of his daughter in The White Ribbon, and Erika’s stabbing of herself in the theatre lobby in The Piano Teacher. These examples all have in common a depiction of not just the violent act itself, but the moments before and after.

In the Caché example the viewer witnesses the perceptibly uncomfortable moment in the time immediately after Majid’s death. The long take has the unique capacity to continue recording beyond the event, and in doing so, allows the viewer to bear witness to a usually inaccessible, intimate moment. These moments confront the viewer with what cannot be known or represented in such situations. The long take that extends beyond the point of violence attempts to unravel what this violence leaves in its wake.

While Amour maintains a particular violent and confrontational mode, the content of these confronting moments differs significantly from Haneke’s typical depiction of physical violence and tabooed actions in his earlier films. Little violence in the conventional, physical sense of the term is seen, apart from the unexpected slap that

Georges gives to Anne in a moment of frustration. Rather, the violence lies in the depicted emotional struggle confronting not only the two protagonists, but also the viewer. In Amour, Haneke’s central concern is no longer feeding or reflecting on the

132 viewer’s sadistic desire for violence and cruelty, as Sinnerbrink suggests. But the former part of Sinnerbrink’s question—“how can film force us to engage with the image, to arrest the information flow and force critical thought in response to what we see”—is significant for Amour.172 The viewer is forcibly engaged and thus forcibly complicit in the protagonists’ predicament. In Amour, the physical violence of Haneke’s earlier films is relocated because the ‘violence’ of Amour is entirely bound up in our complicity in the film. Here, the violence is located in the gradual degradation of Anne’s health that can only be understood after the fact. Our engagement in the film, therefore, is predicated on our unwilling invasion of the characters’ private space.

Beyond the physical break-in briefly referred to at the beginning of the film, the act of invasion occurs on two different levels. On one hand, there is the invasion of illness into the couple’s apartment that fundamentally changes their lives, and on the other, what might be termed the ‘invited’ invasion of Anne’s visitors and carers, who are depicted as increasingly unwanted guests. The former highlights the universality of

Amour: this form of invasion could and probably will happen to everyone. A number of scenes exist in which the camera is placed in Anne’s room when she is bedridden and the viewer watches the daily, painful rituals undertaken by Anne, Georges and the incompetent nurses. The viewer’s inclusion in the same seemingly private space of

Anne, as she is cared for by her nurses, makes the viewer most strongly aware of their own uncomfortable and confronting position. One such scene involves the nurse violently brushing Anne’s hair as the camera is statically positioned at the end of her bed and front on. We see Anne’s pained expression as the nurse forces a mirror in front of her face, insisting that her patient “will want to look [her] very best,” despite her

172 Sinnerbrink, “A Post-Humanist Moralist,” 119.

133 permanent bed-ridden state. The viewer is, on the one hand, physically removed from the scene’s action, and on the other, an equal participant in the invasion.

The viewer’s implication in this physical invasion is particularly affirmed by the framing of the opening shot. In the first few moments after the opening credits, the screen is black and then suddenly cuts to the inside of the apartment door. The first cut of the film is performed on the loud crash of the door shattering under the force of the fireman’s axe. Already, our arrival is conditioned on a particular kind of violence.

Although occurring at the beginning of the film, this moment is the endpoint of both

Georges and Anne’s story, during which all the characters, including the viewer, have gradually entombed themselves in the enclosed space of the apartment. Perceived chronologically, this opening shot represents the first moment that the tomb has been opened since Anne fell ill and the viewer is granted access (albeit a brief glimpse) to the outside world. The parallel between the viewer’s complicity and a physical invasion is further emphasised when Georges and Anne return from the piano recital and point out a break-in of their home, which is never further investigated. These two scenes, placed in succession, construct a particular positioning of the viewer as an outsider invading private space of the characters. Haneke lures the spectator into the gradually retracting world of the protagonists without offering any opportunity for respite.

Like Caché, the first moments of Amour place the viewer in an a priori implication in the diegesis. The opening shot occurs after a significant event that we have not been privy to, but the particular framing of this shot—aimed at the inside of the front door— immediately implicates the viewer in this event (Figure 33). The viewer, as the invading outsider, is ‘framed’ for an unidentified crime from the opening shot, as the camera is initially sealed inside the apartment. This framing makes it immediately clear that the viewer is inextricably bound up in the play of relations that exist prior to our arrival.

134 Here, the interplay of complicity and intimacy becomes evident: for Haneke, the act of viewing is always an act of violation and we never adopt the role of viewer innocently.

In Amour, our necessary implication in the film disrupts not only the physical domestic space of the diegesis, but also the relationship between the characters and, more abstractly, the moral dilemma that plays out in the film. Our violation of these spaces produces the film’s drama.

Figure 33. The opening frame of the Amour, which reveals the camera as temporarily entombed in the apartment.

In a literal sense, Haneke frequently addresses the theme of home invasion. In films such as The Piano Teacher and Funny Games (1997), this invasion is perpetrated by one or two individuals, who violently corrupt the domestic space. Sorfa justifies the prominence of home invasion narratives in Haneke’s films, particularly Benny’s Video

(1992) and The Piano Teacher, as a way of “making sense of the category of home.”173 The figure of the other (the invader) must exist in order to make sense of this category. For

Sorfa, this figure introduces a sense of instability and the perception of a threat in the

173 Sorfa, “Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke,” 99.

135 domestic space.174 In Amour, this unstable position is established by a series of static long takes in empty rooms occurring the night of Anne’s first attack: the apartment’s entrance hall, the bedroom, the lounge room, the dining room, and finally the kitchen.

These shots are decontextualised, devoid of characters, and offer a rare, seemingly taboo glimpse into a moment between diegetic action. This moment further invites us to recall

Anne’s earlier comment after the discovery of the break in: “Imagine if we’re in bed and someone bursts in.” The camera performs the fear that has already been stated. The viewer’s position as outsider is further confirmed by the framing of at least two particular shots early in the film that deny the viewer access to the central element of the shot’s action. Immediately after Anne’s comment about burglary, she walks into the bathroom (off-screen) and Georges is framed by the doorway in the hall facing her

(Figure 34). This framing is almost exactly repeated a few minutes later (but more closely framed) when Georges walks into the kitchen after Anne’s first attack. In both instances, the viewer is denied access to one side of the conversation. As such, the framing of these shots invite the viewer to question their enforced distanced standpoint; we occupy the position of the ‘other’. In this sense, the viewer is positioned as an outsider who is never truly at home in the space of the couple’s apartment. This position is primarily the catalyst for the almost-always-distanced standpoint adopted by the camera throughout the film.

174 Sorfa, “Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke,” 99.

136

Figure 34. Georges and Anne’s conversation is divided by the doorway.

Amour attempts to reverse the long take’s inherent distancing effects, at least in part, by working against the explicit denial of sight present in Caché and The White

Ribbon. In the scene when the nurse is brushing Anne’s hair, as well as many other similar scenes of indignity, the viewer is not only invited into an intimate moment, but also invited to perform a surveillance of others’ guilt. These two positions, again, confirm the balance of intimacy and distance. Significantly, this scene is denied from

Georges, placing us in an apparently superior position. Grundmann argues that we are offered two contrasting perspectives of Anne: this scene partially occupies the first (that of the outsider) and it “defines Anne as a deformed spectacle of suffering.” The second perception, he argues, “develops in the course of the film and…rejects all that the first image is about and instead, one might say, it focuses on the beauty of her humanity.”175

Despite these dual, developing perspectives offered, the film is no more transparent than Caché or The White Ribbon about the solution to the character’s moral dilemma. It can be assumed that the inclusion of such scenes is to force the viewer to bear witness

175 Grundmann, “Love, Death, Truth—Amour.”

137 to the indignities imposed on the vulnerable Anne by both the nurses and her daughter, but the inevitable cut at the end of the shot decontextualises the scene: the viewer is made aware that, despite what we witness in the duration of the long take, we are always being denied view of something vital. The enclosed space of this scene, and the camera’s distance from Anne and the nurse, also evidences the viewer as being positioned as an invading outsider.

Here, I return to the matter of spectatorial intimacy/complicity: the two faces of

Haneke’s long take cinema. Through a more specific analysis of the euthanasia scene described at the beginning of this chapter, it becomes clearer how the viewer’s implication is constructed via the camera’s placement and the length of the shots. In

Thomas E. Wartenberg’s paper, “Love and Death in Michael Haneke’s Amour”, he discusses the morality of the act of euthanasia and, in particular, the choice of suffocation as the means of death.176 Wartenberg attributes this choice to Haneke wanting the viewer to be shocked by Georges’s actions and to prevent him from taking the easy way out. Grundmann proposes a more sinister motive on Georges’s part:

“Even when fueled by radical compassion and even in the arena of romantic love

[euthanasia] is never completely altruistic. Indeed, as becomes evident in the course of the narrative, it emerges as something that can rather be described as selfishness incarnate.”177 Both Grundmann’s and Wartenberg’s perspectives suggest this scene is a surveillance of Georges’s selfishness.

The formal choices made in this scene, however, reveal that Georges’s motivation is not as clear-cut as either scholar suggests. In this scene, the length of time and the shot’s stasis capture Anne’s necessarily lengthy death. Through the long take,

176 Thomas E. Wartenberg, “‘Not Time’s Fool’: Marriage as an Ethical Relationship in Michael Haneke’s Amour,” Cinema and/as Ethics, Cinematic Thinking Network (11 December 2013, University of NSW, Sydney). 177 Grundmann, “Love, Death, Truth—Amour.”

138 the viewer is exposed to the transition between storytelling (Figure 35), suffocation (Figure

36), the uncomfortable image of Anne resisting, and, finally, becoming still (Figure 37).

The moments of mundanity before Anne’s death, and in the silence afterwards, implicate the viewer in Georges’s actions. Our sense of violation of the couple’s interaction is made palpable by the unrelenting long take, yet we remain distanced by the scene’s ethical incomprehensibility. The formal construction of this scene shows that, rather than committing a selfish act, Georges has to struggle to kill his wife using this method, forcing him to share the pain with both his wife and the viewer. At this point, the film’s moral dilemma becomes even clearer: Georges’s options throughout the film are all inflected with struggle, including the care of his wife and her death, forcing us to question if his motive for killing her (which we may assume to be selfish) is actually to preserve her dignity or remove her pain. The viewer can only make this revelation because of the privileged position we occupy in the scene and, more broadly, throughout the film.

Figure 35. Georges calming his wife with a story of his childhood in Amour.

139

Figure 36. Georges committing the painful act of ending his wife’s suffering.

Figure 37. Georges sitting with his wife after death.

140 The Partiality of the Viewer

Haneke’s Amour places its viewers in a position of conscious partiality. The specific manner by which Haneke employs the long take in Amour, coupled with the film’s controversial subject matter, exposes the camera’s inherent inability to provide the viewer with an objective perspective on the couple’s predicament. This revelation is particularly important in the case of Amour, given that the film’s complex narration of a story about euthanasia necessarily draws its viewer into a morally ambiguous engagement. The long take’s role in this narration is in its appearance as a largely static non-discriminating observer. Haneke plays on the outward appearance of the long take as a technique that maintains objectivity. But through particular subtle cinematic gestures—changes in framing, mobilising off-screen space and distortion of space—

Haneke makes the viewer aware of the camera’s inherent partiality, their own subjectivity, and their inability to access all the facts, the existence of which are frequently undermined in the film.

The long take, in particular, is frequently associated with offering a more complete view of the world it captures. A director’s choice of a long take increases this effect, providing viewers with a more concrete connection to the profilmic. Despite the objective and unmediated mode of capturing action frequently associated with the long take, however, it is important to acknowledge that cinema is an inherently unobjective medium; the viewer is always manipulated into occupying a particular position. This position is not only negotiated by the physical positioning of the camera, but also by the type of lens used and the framing and duration of the shot. Stanley Cavell further problematises this assumption. He argues that, in cinema, this concrete connection to the profilmic is always overshadowed by the viewer’s awareness of both the camera’s presence and, by extension, their own position as viewers. Cavell suggests that, “one can

141 feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture: the one working now.”178 He continues, “If the presence of the camera is to be made known, it has to be acknowledged in the work it does…What is it the movie’s turn to acknowledge? The notion of self-reference suggests that the need is for the camera to tip its hand.”179 This kind of self-referencing would significantly undermine the camera’s appearance as an objective observer.

Throughout his career, Haneke has drawn attention to the viewer’s position as both a spectator and as being potentially always under surveillance through his filming techniques. To this end, Cavell’s statement seems suited to accounting for the aesthetics of Caché, throughout which the viewer comes to recognise the static long take-long shot as an indicator that we are viewing video-tape footage. The form is a code for the method, and as such, allows the camera to “tip its hand” without explicitly showing us the camera’s physical presence. Later in the film, when Majid invites Georges into his apartment and before he commits suicide, he says to Georges: “I wanted you to be present;” Majid is referring to both Georges and the viewer. Haneke wants the viewer to be present in their awareness of the act of spectatorship. Further demonstrating this overt presencing of the viewer, in Funny Games, the character Paul appeals to the viewer direct to camera, saying: “We’re not up to feature film length yet. Is that enough? But you want a real ending with plausible plot development, don’t you?” The viewer’s presence, as Haneke refers to via Majid, is constructed through the duration of the long take: the viewer is “present” after being called upon to reflect on the ambiguous and violent nature of these shots.

178 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 126. 179 Cavell, The World Viewed, 128.

142 This technique of making the viewer aware of their own position is, according to

Haneke, intended not to manipulate the viewer into a particular position, but rather to overcome their partiality. Haneke acknowledges that, “of course, film is always manipulation,” but he concedes that, “if each scene is only one shot, then, I think, there is less of a sense of time being manipulated when one tries to stay close to a ‘real time’ framework.”180 Haneke suggests here that his choice of the long take is a deliberate decision to reduce the manipulating effects of cinema. Furthermore, he has indicated elsewhere that his intention in using the long take is to open up more options for the viewer, and to allow freer interpretation of the image.181 Amos Vogel points out a flaw in this assumption, however, arguing that all cinema “inevitably implies a modicum of control.”182 He says specifically of Haneke that his “stated intention to have the viewer come to his own insights and explanations presupposed, in its purest form, a level playing field that cannot exist.”183 Vogel’s observation challenges Haneke’s objective: although Haneke’s filming style—static long takes and the explicit acknowledgement of the viewer—grants the viewer the power to reflect on their position as a spectator, this freedom can only be achieved within the parameters of the partial view we are granted by the camera.

The examples from Caché and Funny Games described above allow the viewer an awareness of the camera’s presence, but it is important to make a distinction between this process and the viewer’s awareness that they are only obtaining a partial view of the diegesis. This latter process is at the heart of Amour. As discussed earlier, in Amour,

Haneke is no longer actively making a commentary on our contemporary media landscape, and thus his intention is not to draw attention to the physical presence of the

180 Sharrett, “The World That Is Known,” 31. 181 Rhodes, “The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes,” 93. 182 Amos Vogel, “Of Nonexisting Continents: The Cinema of Michael Haneke,” Film Comment 32, no. 4 (1996): 75. 183 Ibid.

143 camera. Rather, the particular manner by which he employs the long take makes the viewer aware that they can only access the diegesis through the camera, which is inherently subjective. This partiality is emphasised by the paradoxically limitless and limiting nature of the long take. As Rhodes explains, “we are aware of the frame as an arbitrary and fluctuating horizon of potentiality. And yet we are as pained by what we do not see as by what we do.”184 In other words, the shot’s increased duration enables the viewer to further question both the reliability of their granted perspective and the extent to which they are being denied sight of something important. Opening up these questions at the level of the shot more broadly allows us to question our stance, in the case of Amour, within Georges’s and Anne’s moral dilemma: if our physical sight is no longer reliable, perhaps our sight of the situation overall isn’t either.

Specifically, this correlation between the long take and the denial of sight is evidenced in Amour in Haneke’s frequent combining of the long take and the static shot.

Although the viewer is afforded an almost consistent view of inside the apartment, moments in which the camera breaks away from either Georges or Anne act to emphasise the perspective we are being denied. Towards the end of the film, a scene takes place in the lounge room of Georges and Anne’s apartment. Georges is sitting in his armchair to frame left and his daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), is standing near the door, arguing with her father about being prevented from seeing her dying mother.

After Georges relents, Eva leaves the room through the door, and the viewer assumes she walks down the hallway to her mother’s room. The camera doesn’t follow her, but instead remains fixed in the lounge room on a shot of the door and Georges. Eva’s movements are central to the narrative of this scene, yet Haneke denies the viewer access to them, instead allowing us to assume what they might be. The stasis of this

184 Richard Williams, “Deep Waters,” The Guardian, 19 April, 2003, 19.

144 shot, as well as the temps morts created by the principal action occurring outside the room, opens up a space for the viewer to reflect on what we are being denied access to.

The unusual framing of this scene performs two key functions that pertain to the viewer’s perception of character dynamics in the film. First, the viewer, by virtue of being left behind in the room with the Georges, is made conscious of the world beyond the film’s frame.185 Second, Haneke confirms the viewer’s intended unflinching alliance with Georges’s and Anne’s predicament. Both of these functions illustrate the double meaning of the word ‘partial’. Regarding the first of these functions, Haneke builds a sense of the world beyond the static shot of Georges sitting in the lounge room alone by referring to Anne’s bedroom through Eva’s exiting of the room. In the previous conversation, Georges and Eva had discussed the detrimental effect that her visit would have on her mother’s health, after which Haneke denies the viewer from seeing this effect. In Amour, Haneke employs shots that, in their performance of the explicit rejection of the rest of the world, paradoxically allow the viewer to be more acutely aware of what is happening in the world that has been ‘cut out.’ This process emphasises the shot’s deliberate construction and thus, the inescapable partiality of the cinema viewer.

Cinema doesn’t necessarily perform a complete, explicit rejection of the world beyond the frame. Cinema differs from photography in its possession of both duration and sound, both of which allow for a continued connection to the off-screen space of the film. As was demonstrated in the discussion of Theo Angelopoulos in Chapter One, the duration of the long take is frequently used in cinema to avert the viewer’s attention away from the events on screen towards an imagined off-screen space. Rather than

185 The ‘world beyond the frame’ refers to Cavell’s discussion of the limits of the photograph. He suggests, “the world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world find its limits. We might say: A painting is a world; a photograph is of the world. What happens in a photograph is that it comes to an end” (Cavell, The World Viewed, 24).

145 rejecting this off-screen space, this kind of framing could be said to merely ‘mute’ what is denied to the viewer. András Bálint Kovács discusses this phenomenon in relation to

Robert Bresson’s minimalist style, which extensively draws on the effect of off-screen space. Kovács accounts for two reasons why a filmmaker might adopt this technique:

“One reason is to enhance dramatic tension, to raise the viewer’s curiosity…The other reason is to reduce information redundancy: part of the narrative information is conveyed by only two channels, not by three: either by time and sight (we see what is happening) or by time and sound (we hear what is happening).”186 This frequently occurs in scenes in Amour in which the viewer is made aware of the action occurring in a room of the apartment while the camera remains fixed in another, such as the one described above. Also, in one of the final scenes of the film, in which Georges is sitting in his office after Anne has died, he hears the sound of a tap running in the kitchen. The camera remains fixed on him for most of the shot, but the sound of running water can be immediately associated with the presence of Anne from earlier in the film. Thus

Haneke uses a non-visual indicator (“time and sound”) of the world beyond the scene’s visual framing.

This theme of showing and denial of sight is further emphasised by the language used in the scene involving Eva described above. Stewart points out Georges’s word choice—“none of this should be ‘shown’ (montre, rather than the more expected

‘seen’)”—which indicates a distinctly deliberate construction of perspective for the viewer.187 With this word choice, Haneke confirms the camera’s performative nature, the positioning and framing of which are explicitly designed to deny the viewer particular salient pieces of information in the narrative. Stewart also comments on the repeated phrase throughout the film of “What’s happened?” (“Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?”),

186 Kovács, Screening Modernism, 141-42. 187 Stewart, “Haneke's Endgame,” 16.

146 which uncovers an inequality in the knowledge afforded both viewer and character.188

This phrase is key to revealing Haneke’s method in manipulating what the viewer has access to. We can recall Stewart’s discussion of the narrative ellipsis, and the moment of

Anne’s stroke when her subtracted human presence goes unnoticed by both Georges and the viewer. The phrase, “What’s happened?”, not only bears relevance for the gap in Anne’s memory, but it also marks a revelation that the viewer has been denied access to the truth of what has just occurred, despite their apparent privileged position.

Similarly, in the opening scene, when Georges and Anne are sitting in the theatre facing the camera, Haneke’s framing enforces a deliberate denial of sight; the viewer is presented with an uncomfortable reverse shot of the audience, while denied access to the action on stage. The choice of language throughout the film—particularly “shown” rather than “seen”—is reflected in these moments of deliberate denial of sight and it constantly emphasises the viewer’s part(ial) view of both the diegesis and the narrative.

The viewer’s partiality is also brought out in the scene in which Eva leaves

Georges in the lounge room by emphasising our alliance with Georges. Haneke demonstrates that it does not matter what occurs between Eva and her mother, since the viewer will always be tied to Georges’s drama. This alliance is confirmed by the physical confinement of their apartment: a closed space outside of which the couple never ventures. The only exception is in the theatre scene before Anne becomes ill and during Georges’s dream sequence when he walks out into the flooded hallway.

Throughout the film, the director frequently positions Eva and all other visitors as invading this space. In an interview published in Time Out, Dave Calhoun proposes that

Amour is a “portrait of isolation.”189 Haneke responds to this term by explaining that

188 Stewart, “Haneke's Endgame,” 16. 189 Dave Calhoun, “Michael Haneke Interview,” Time Out, 2012, accessed June 2, 2014. https://www.timeout.com/london/film/michael-haneke-interview-3.

147 often elderly people confine themselves to the space of their home; “they shut out the world: it’s a challenge they can’t cope with.”190 Thus, the spatial dimension of the four walls enclosing the characters is a vital part of the narrative. The couple’s home is as much as place that they live as a defined boundary within which the narrative takes place. In isolating Georges and Anne from Eva both physically and through the framing discussed above, Haneke uses the camera to define this boundary. The viewer is made partial in the sense of being biased towards the couple’s predicament, which is enforced by our participation in these physical boundaries.

The apartment’s physical layout and the manner by which Haneke captures it expose the camera’s partiality. The film’s principle setting within the walls of the apartment familiarises the viewer with its layout: the long entrance hallway, the small kitchen and large living room, which feature frequently throughout the film. Although the static long take is predominantly favoured, changes in how these shots are lit, framed, and the balance between camera stasis and movement, significantly affect the appearance of the physical space of the apartment. With this distortion of space,

Haneke plays on the association between the long take and spatial realism. These changes in cinematography reflect the different stages of Anne’s illness, and they simultaneously distort the viewer’s perception of the couple’s predicament. Particularly at the beginning of the film, Haneke favours static long take-long shots that expose the apartment’s spaciousness. While Georges and Anne’s apartment physically confines them, it is noticeably spacious—almost too large for an elderly couple—and the camera’s placement makes it appear even more so. Haneke adopts what might be termed an efficient approach to framing, which is frequently employed in his other films

(notably The White Ribbon). He places the camera at a distance from its subject, taking in

190 Haneke in Calhoun, “Michael Haneke Interview.”

148 multiple doorways and glimpses of rooms through the doorways, allowing his camera to remain static while the characters move within the frame (Figure 38). With this approach, the static long take provides the viewer time to ascertain the layout of the apartment and the relationship between characters, and reduces the need for camera movement. Most importantly, however, the wide-angle lens used closely approximates the vision of the human eye, subconsciously suggesting a reliable perspective.

Figure 38. The perspective from the hallway at the beginning of the film. The kitchen and lounge room are visible through the door frame.

As Anne’s illness progresses and she is eventually bedridden, Haneke frames his subjects closer. At this point in the narrative, the scenes are lit darker, and closed doors and windows begin to appear in the frame. The once seemingly spacious apartment appears to retract inwards towards the couple, reflecting Haneke’s justification that,

“when you reach a certain age, then your life is pretty much reduced to the four walls you live in.”191 Scenes of dialogue between Anne and Georges adopt a greater intensity

191 Haneke, interviewed by Poland, “DP/30 @ Cannes 2012: Amour, Writer/director Michael Haneke.”

149 with the combination of the long take, the closer framing, and the longer focal length of the lens. This closer framing and darker lighting continues during the latter part of

Anne’s illness, through to her death. In one of the final scenes, Georges prepares

Anne’s body, tapes up the door to her bedroom and, in a static long take, captures an invading pigeon under a blanket. This shot is the culmination of Haneke’s gradually retracting apartment. Georges appears entombed in the apartment’s entrance hallway with the doors and windows closed around him and all natural light sources removed

(Figure 39).

After Anne’s death, however, Haneke’s filming approach reverts to that of the beginning of the film. In the final scene, the apartment is emptied of the protagonists for the first time, and Eva enters through the front door. The change in mise-en-scène is immediately evident; natural light floods the apartment and all the doors are wide open.

One particular long shot of Eva sitting in the lounger room, while the camera remains in the hallway, mirrors the framing of both Figures 38 and 39, emphasising the distinction between Haneke’s two filming methods (Figure 40). As Eva wanders through the different rooms of the apartment, we expect the camera to follow her closely as it had with Georges in the preceding scenes. But this time, the camera adopts a wide, static position in the lounge room. Haneke returns to his ‘efficient’ camera placement: the large double doors to all the rooms are now opened up, and in one static shot, we obtain a view of nearly the whole apartment (Figure 41). Where earlier Haneke’s camera work had distorted our perception of the size and layout of the apartment, with the removal of the couple, this sense of spatial perception is returned to us.

150

Figure 39. Still in long shot, but darker lighting. The apartment is shown as ‘enclosed space’.

Figure 40. At the end of Amour, the apartment is opened up again, and Eva is framed in the doorway.

151

Figure 41. A static wide long take at the end of Amour that reveals three separate rooms and the now opened up apartment.

It is in this sudden change that we realise our ‘blindness’: not only to the film’s physical space, but the couple’s and the viewer’s disconnection from the outside world throughout the film. At the end of the film, the viewer is reminded of the confined viewing that Haneke has placed them in through the film: long, static shots in closed rooms with no sense of the world beyond the apartment. Once again, the viewer occupies a position in the ‘time after’, but this time, it exists after everything we have known in the film so far. Our occupation in this empty space further confirms our continued implication in the film. With this technique, Haneke distorts the viewer’s sense of time by distorting their perception of space. There is no indication of how much time has passed through the film except by the clothes of the characters that change with the seasons. Further, the only time the film provides a glimpse of outside the apartment is at the theatre at the beginning of the film and during Georges’s dream sequence. Through the significant cinematographic changes that occur, the viewer becomes aware of the camera’s deceptively restrictive vision.

152 This lack of acknowledgement of the outside world is, in a practical sense, because the film’s production takes place in a constructed studio space, in which the few glimpses we see out the window are digitally composited. It allows Haneke ultimate control over how the space appears to the viewer: the studio set is customisable to the needs of Haneke’s shooting plan, such as the capacity to close and open the double doors, changing the layout of the apartment. The apartment’s spaciousness marks an important differentiation from Béla Tarr’s films, discussed in the previous chapter. His earliest films were set in crowded, chaotic apartments. The camera was placed “at the heart of the viper’s nest,” in which the close-ups and mobile tracking shots that often framed the characters in small doorways highlighted the housing problem and a class issue that was particular to Hungary at the time of production.192 Significantly, Tarr strived to find the perfect ‘real’ location to both recreate the documentary conditions of his film’s subject matter, and to allow the camera to observe the natural environment of the narrative.

In Amour, the setting, although still in an inner-city apartment, differs significantly from Tarr’s crowded spaces. Haneke suggests that Amour could have been made as a social drama like Tarr’s films, which would define the narrative as a product of a particular time and place and thus make a political comment, such as on the limited access to healthcare for the working class.193 Rather, Haneke chose to make a largely timeless and placeless narrative in order to focus on the universality of the couple’s predicament. The narrative is largely uncomplicated by external factors; its focus is on the moral dilemmas faced by Georges, Anne and their daughter Eva in the face of

Anne’s illness. Haneke states that he foregrounded this moral dilemma through placing

Anne and Georges in a socio-economic class that allowed them to afford home care for

192 Ranciere, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 12. 193 Haneke in Calhoun, “Michael Haneke Interview.”

153 Anne. He predicted that if he had characterised them as poor, the audience would question, “if only they had more money; if only they could afford to keep her at home and have private nursing, it would have been easier for them. Which, of course, is totally false.”194

* * * *

This chapter has shown how the long take is capable of producing a moral dimension. The relationship between the viewer and the long take in Amour parallels the moral dilemma facing Georges and Anne. Haneke’s use of long take constantly draws attention to the viewer’s inescapable role in a morally complex situation, while simultaneously exposing our inability to access crucial parts of the diegesis. The negotiation of intimacy and distance is not only about physical or even emotional proximity to the characters, but also how the form of the shot charges the scene with a moral dimension. Haneke negotiates a careful balance of revealing and concealing, such that the viewer is both violating an often-inaccessible cinematic space but is also forced to question their role in the characters’ drama. Close analysis of the viewer’s role in

Amour reveals that the form of viewer complicity historically associated with the long take works at a more complex level than the mere construction of realism and the invited participation of the viewer. Rather, viewer complicity can operate in cinema at a more fundamental level, in which the construction of form relies on the viewer as a required participant.

194 Haneke in Calhoun, “Michael Haneke Interview.”

154 Chapter Four Histor(icit)y and the Long Take: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark

And what if history were to happen only once, but as a repetition? What if history is nothing but this singular repetition, happening for the first time as its own doubling? An event recorded only in one take, only a singular and irreversible take one, cut and print? What kind of spectacle would be capable of reproducing such a taking place of history? What would it give or allow to be seen? The question that will have to keep us in suspense is whether such a historical configuration may be given to visibility at all. How can one see history?195

Of all the films discussed in this thesis, Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is the only one to be shot entirely in one take. This method of filming was complicated by the conditions of the production: the crew only had access to the State Hermitage Museum for three days for shooting and rehearsal, the camera was constantly mobile throughout the shoot, and the cinematographer was recording onto a newly available, non- rewritable digital hard drive that could only hold a hundred minutes of film. It broke the records for being both the longest feature length one-shot film and the longest continuous Steadicam sequence ever filmed. These limitations—both self-imposed and unavoidable—were the source of considerable discussion and debate around the time of the film’s release.196 Much of the critical response to the film has also focussed on the historical and political significance of the year of its release. Russian Ark was produced on the eve of the three hundred year anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg, at a

195 Dragan Kujundzic, “After ‘After’: The Arkive Fever of Alexander Sokurov,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21, no. 3 (2004): 219. 196 Roger Ebert, “Russian Ark,” RogerEbert.com, January 31, 2003, accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/russian-ark-2003; Stephen Holden, “New York Film Festival Reviews: All of Russian History, in One Glittery Unbroken Take,” The New York Times, September 28, 2002, accessed July 28, 2017. https://nytimes.com/2002/09/28/movies/new- york-film-festival-reviews-all-russian-history-one-glittery-unbroken-take.html; Peter Bradshaw, “Russian Ark,” The Guardian, April 4, 2003, accessed October 5, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/apr/04/artsfeatures9.

155 time when Mikhail Glinka’s national anthem had only recently been replaced by a revised Soviet anthem. The anthem’s replacement was commonly felt to be a revived allegiance to Joseph Stalin and further complicated the nation’s identity in the wake of the Soviet Union’s downfall.197 While the politics of the film’s rendition of history and the interpretations that have emerged are significant and interesting for the contextualisation of the film, they are not the central focus of this chapter.

The primary concern of this chapter is with the historicity of the long take and the film’s representation of historical experience. In his statement at the start of this chapter, Dragan Kujundzic points to two key aspects of this representation. First, he refers to the “singular and irreversible” nature of the Sokurov’s long take. His comments suggest that this irreversibility works in tension with the fundamental repeatability that defines film. Second, he highlights the film’s re-production of history, in other words, its retelling of three hundred years of Russian history. The interaction of these two representations—on the one hand, history as singular and unrepeatable and, on the other, history as the product of a process of re-production—is summed up in his opening proposition: “And what if history were to happen only once, but as a repetition?” This chapter considers how this idea of history happening “only once but as a repetition” is enacted in Russian Ark. Following on from the questions posed by

Kujundzic, I want to consider what it allows to be seen, about not only the nature of historical experience, but also the long take and cinema, overall. This chapter focusses on what is specific to the nature of historical experience produced by the long take, and how its rendering of duration constructs a unique engagement with history as something

197 The original version of the Soviet anthem was introduced by Stalin in 1944. Its revision in 2000, with new lyrics by poet Sergei Mikhalkov, was met with resistance by musicians, politicians, and athletes, who had to sing the anthem at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics. See Alter Litvin and John Keep, Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millennium (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 41-42; Philip T. Grier, “The Russia Idea and the West,” in Russia and Western Civilization: Cultural and Historical Encounters, ed. Russell Bova (New York: M.E.Sharpe, 2003), 23-24.

156 that is happening for the first time as its own doubling. The film’s examination in these terms has not attracted the same level of attention as its historical context.

In this thesis we have seen how, at the level of the scene, the long take has the capacity to both reveal and conceal its operations. In a shot that spans the entire length of the film, this capacity has broader implications for the film’s specific engagement with history. In the films of Béla Tarr and Theo Angelopoulos, for example, the long take expresses a significant instability in their nations’ histories, and proposes a possible continuation of a moment in history thought to be lost. Sokurov continues this project in Russian Ark, but his use of one continuous shot adds another element to the representation of history: it allows the co-existence of past and present in the narrative to resonate with the actual method and process of filming. In this chapter, I argue that

Russian Ark’s particular utilisation of the long take is a reflection on different kinds of historical and cinematic experiences. I examine three types of cinematic representations of history and the implications they have for the historicity of the long take. First, the film is about a particular span of Russian history, from the eighteenth-century reign of

Peter the Great to present day. I examine how this history is narrated, ordered and staged for the camera. Second, the film reflects on the performative nature of both cinema and history—history in Russian Ark is selective, presentational and theatrical.

This second section explores the theatrical dimension of the representation of history.

Thirdly, I explore the production of the film as a high stakes performance of history.

Throughout this chapter, I interrogate two central questions: what kind of historical experiences are made visible by the long take, and how does the long take bring historicity to the fore? The role of the long take’s historicity in Russian Ark has not been significantly discussed by scholars, but it illuminates a facet of the film’s construction that is crucial to both this thesis and an understanding of the long take’s operation.

157 History Re-staged

To interrogate the form of history that Sokurov narrates and how this is achieved, it is important to consider what history is and what options are opened up for its representation in film. While Sokurov makes no particular claim on reforming or reconstructing history, his method of forming synchronous interactions between two or more periods of history through the unbroken shot, as well as his deliberate selection

(and rejection) of historical moments performs a particular kind of reconstruction that cannot be removed from inevitable bias. William Guynn characterises history as always subject to the bias of the historian or narrator who can only “narrate what the historical record, with its biases, allows him to know or infer about the past. Moreover, he can only attempt to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivity [and] to counterbalance the weight of the present moment that can distort or displace his point of view.”198 Significantly,

Sokurov makes little attempt in Russian Ark to perform this act of counterbalancing.

The almost consistent off-screen diegetic voice of The Time Traveller in the film weighs heavy on the viewer’s perception of how history is presented. The explicit bias of

Sokurov’s historical staging is emphasised through the dialogue between the film’s two key characters, The Stranger (Sergei Dreiden) and The Time Traveller (Sokurov), and their gradually transformed perspectives on Russia’s history throughout the film.

The balance of historical periods depicted is principally demonstrated through the film’s staging. About a quarter of the way through the film, the camera travels down a narrow hallway as The Stranger looks up at the ceiling and elaborately decorated walls, admiring the artworks embedded in their design. In front of him are four people dressed in nineteenth century costuming, conversing with one another. Walking down the hallway, The Stranger turns to his right to look through a door. He raises up his

198 William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 145.

158 hands in excitement at something we cannot see behind the door (Figure 42). The camera pans to the right to reveal the room but also tilts upwards, only showing the ceiling, a large vase, and some paintings hung on the wall. The camera briefly pauses behind The

Stranger. He walks forward, his black coat shielding the viewer from the rest of the room (Figure 43). As The Stranger continues walking forward and begins admiring the vase, the camera tilts down. Only at this point the other people in the room become evident. Until now, the viewer has only encountered pre-twentieth century figures and the constant of the building’s eighteenth-century architecture surrounding them. In this moment, however, everyone except for The Stranger is from the twenty-first century and admiring the artworks in what appears to be a room in a museum (Figure 44).

Figure 42. The Stranger admires the elaborate walls before seeing the large Italian vase, at this point concealed behind the door in Russian Ark (2002).

159

Figure 43. The Italian vase is revealed, while the modern-day figures in the room remain concealed.

Figure 44. The Stranger is finally framed among the modern-day figures, confirming the room’s transformation into a twenty-first century museum.

Although the transition between the hallway and the museum room marks a transition between eras, the positioning of The Stranger, combined with the camera angle, serves to distract the viewer from the transition. Once we arrive in the hallway,

The Stranger’s almost constant gaze upwards and his focus on the vase as he enters the room ensures that the twenty-first century figures exist only at the periphery of the shot.

160 As the camera tracks further into the room, The Stranger walks away from the camera and, at this point, the shot is filled with other contemporary figures. For the first time in the film, the Winter Palace is transformed into the State Hermitage Museum. The seamlessness of this transition emphasises both the breaks and links between the

Palace’s role in Imperial Russia and its role as a museum preserving in the contemporary world.

This moment also reveals something important about the long take and

Sokurov’s specific method of staging: the viewer is required to read the image beyond the central focus of the shot. While the film appears to narrate history by presenting a series of historical figures emerging at different moments, Sokurov’s narration also relies on a particular method of staging that makes assumptions about how the viewer reads the shot and the placement of figures within it. In this museum scene, if the viewer follows the eye line of The Stranger, they will miss the transition from palace to museum. This scene establishes the idea that the film’s presentation of history is going to continue to subvert expected conventions of historical representation. His use of deep focus and a constantly mobile camera overtly stages the interaction between different historical eras. Each period of history emerges gradually into the shot without introduction, thereby cementing a constant dialogue between historical eras throughout the film that exists entirely within the mise-en-scène.

The staging of history in Russian Ark is further complicated by a dual and interwoven presentation of time. The film is, first, a linear narrative that follows The

Stranger through thirty-three rooms of the Hermitage Museum. The Stranger, being a figure from the past, is constant in his historical position. We accompany him in real diegetic time. Second, the film also traverses three hundred years of Russian history in a non-linear fashion. In this secondary temporal space, a collection of historical moments,

161 figures and tableau are weaved through the protagonists’ journey. We see past and present staged together in the same physical space. Yana Hashamova argues that,

“While the former constitutes identity, the latter unveils loss of identity and difference.”199 The former (linear historical time) can be conceived of as something like the ‘story’ of the film; the latter (non-linear time) is the narrative. The cyclical nature of this structure represents Sokurov’s efforts to narrate history in a manner that closely matches his conception of Russian identity.

For Sokurov, the vast numbers of historical periods represented in Russian Ark belong to the same “temporal space”; he does not believe that any of these times have ever stopped or ended. 200 On one level, this co-existence of historical periods is expressed in the film through the perpetuation of different historical figures represented as existing in multiple historical eras. On another level, this temporal co-existence is evident in how the film’s narrative does not move methodically from one era to the next, but rather moves randomly between historical periods and occasionally returns to one later. It is as though, within the continuity of the long take, these moments can occur in any order, since they are temporally contiguous with one another. This contiguity is confirmed in the final scene of the film, in which hundreds of figures from all the eras represented in the film move together down a grand staircase towards the building’s exit. In the film, these figures are brought together by the constant physical space of the Winter Palace/State Hermitage Museum. This unified physical space and persistence of vision through the long take allows for rendering of history as something that is not simply continuous, but more profoundly, unfinished.

199 Yana Hashamova, “Two Visions of a Usable Past in (Op)Position to the West: Mikhalkov’s the Barber of Siberia and Sokurov’s Russian Ark,” Russian Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 260. 200 Les Films Séville Pictures, Russian Ark. Press notes, 2002, 4. Accessed May 15, 2015. https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheNews/RussianArk_SevillePressNote s.pdf.

162 This reconstruction of history as occurring non-linearly and in the same space is specific to Sokurov’s conception of Russian history. In Francofonia (2015), he undertakes a similar project by depicting the history of France through the lens of the Louvre

Museum during World War II. Produced thirteen years after Russian Ark, Francofonia demonstrates a development of Sokurov’s style, in terms of technology, aesthetics and his narration of history. He persists with the integration of figures from the past into the present. This time, Napoléon Bonaparte is the viewer’s guide through the museum.

Apart from Napoléon’s involvement, however, there is a clear break established between past and present. Nearly all the shots of the museum are filmed at night, evidently after the museum’s closing time, which removes the vibrancy of the museum and the sense of contiguity of historical eras retained in Russian Ark. Furthermore,

Sokurov clearly delineates the flashback from the present. Each flashback is indicated by the appearance of grainy film and sound waves down one side of the frame (Figure 45).

With this method, Sokurov suggests that these flashbacks are an unreliable memory, distinct from the actual events of the past and non-contiguous with the present.

Dispensing with the one-shot film model in Francofonia, and utilising this flashback form, the fluidity between the historical eras and their co-existence are removed. The use of the empty museum allows Sokurov to explore how a nation tells its history through art, and how what remains of a culture (its art and architecture) is all that is available to construct a perception of its history. Russian Ark’s different form produces a different conception of history. The co-existence of, and dialogue between, historical eras suggests both continuity and disruption in Russia’s history through the film’s staging.

The non-linearity of the long take in which history is staged unveils the perceived instability of the Russian identity as it relates to the rest of Europe.

163

Figure 45. Sokurov overtly marks the start of a flashback in Francofonia (2015) with visible soundwaves and the appearance of a clapper.

In Russian Ark, distinct moments of history emerge in each consecutive room entered by both The Stranger and The Time Traveller. While the viewer may be aware of the chronological order in which these moments occurred in lived history, the temporality of their presentation in the film removes any sense of causality between these moments, thus also removing a clear, linear sense of identity. Russia is frequently discussed as possessing a problematic identity: one that is neither European nor Asian, neither an empire nor a nation-state. Russia’s imperial identity prior to the Revolution was interrupted by the Soviet era, which, in effect, led to the forging of a new identity that was subsequently again complicated by the downfall of the Soviet Union in the

1990s.201 Sokurov sees Russia as “a Eurasian country, a cultural space with an ‘amazing

201 Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7-12; Mark Bassin, “Geographies of Imperial Identity,” in The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume 2, Imperial Russia, 1689-1917, ed. Dominic Lieven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45, 48-53; Robert B. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1-8.

164 past’,” and the October Revolution of 1917 as a “catastrophe”.202 Russian Ark is a film about the crisis of history as much as it is a film that depicts history.203 According to

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, many films from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean “reveal the instability of geographical, historical, and cultural points of reference.” He continues, “By looking toward Europe, they examine the placement (or self-placement) of the ‘East’ in Europe’s master narratives…wherein ‘Easterners’ must struggle for national and ethnic identities that conform to notions of European statehood and culture.”204 At the level of dialogue, this instability and struggle is explored through the constant provocations of The Stranger and The Time Traveller, the former of whom expresses his distaste for Russian culture, praising the artistic achievements of Europe.

Through its narrativising of history, the long take performs this instability, achieved through two related methods. It does so, first, through the order of events that it captures, privileging those that position Russia as broadly European, rather than distinctly Russian. Second, it deliberately explores particular parts of the museum that challenge or confirm Russia’s European identity. Both of these methods rely on the assurance of continuity offered by the long take. With regard to the first method, the film traces a narrative that begins in the early nineteenth century and ends in 1913. In progressing towards this final temporal destination, the film moves non-linearly between both earlier and later periods than this range. The grand ballroom scene at the end of the film presents a cultural amalgamation of numerous European influences and figures

202 Isabelle de Keghel, “Sokurov’s Russian Ark: Reflections on the Russia/Europe Theme,” in Russia and Its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue, ed. Stephen Hutchings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 77. 203 While Russian Ark addresses this identity crisis most explicitly of all Sokurov’s films, it is a project that he has continued to explore throughout his career. In a review of his film, Faust (2011), for example, Nancy Condee argues that the film again questions, “[I]s Russia to be considered a European country?” See Nancy Condee, “Alexander Sokurov: Faust,” KinoKultura 37 (2012), accessed April 21, 2016. http://www.kinokultura.com/2012/37r-faust.shtml. 204 Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Floating on the Borders of Europe: Sokurov's Russian Ark,” Film Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2005): 18.

165 gathered in the same space, punctuated by The Stranger’s closing remarks of “I’m staying…Farewell Europe. It’s all over” as the camera drifts away from him and out the ballroom door. Gathered in the ballroom are figures from many different moments of history, primarily marked by their different soldier uniforms. By this point in the film, the viewer has witnessed not just isolated presentations of different periods of history, but the interweaving of figures entering in and out of the shot. This final scene is the culmination of this interweaving: not only all periods of history but also all European cultures exist in the same space.205 The vast three-hundred year history covered before this moment and the protagonist’s apparent nostalgia stands in stark contrast to what seems to be a fear of the future indicated by The Stranger’s reluctance to move forward in time at the end of the film. The distinctive finality of his closing words speaks to the lost capacity for continuation of ‘Russia’ as it once was.

The question that emerges from this narrativising of history is, how does the form of the long take produce a narrative out of disparate moments of history, rather than merely history as parataxis?206 With each temporal transition, the long take poses a risk to the continuation of the narrative by posing two disjunctive eras. This risk is clearly evident in the scene discussed earlier in which The Stranger walks down an eighteenth-century hallway and into a modern-day museum scene; this temporal jump poses a threat to the continuity of history-as-narrative. The matter of rewriting history as narrative in film is picked up by Jacques Rancière in his discussion of Jean-Luc

205 The music that plays behind the final scene is the mazurka from A Life for the Tsar by Mikhail Glinka. The Stranger is initially convinced Glinka’s music is German (“all composers are German”), further emphasising the blurring of the European identity. 206 I draw on Jacques Rancière’s interpretation of parataxis here, to mean visual, verbal or conceptual elements placed in juxtaposition, whose connections are ruptured or enigmatic. For montage, this refers to the sequential appearance of images that are apparently unrelated. For historical representation, this is the sequential appearance of two eras that are apparently disconnected. For a discussion on Rancière, Jean-Luc Godard, and parataxis, see Ted Kafala, “Mundane Hybrids: Rancière against the Sublime Image,” Film-Philosophy 11, no. 3 (2007): 149- 50. For original definition, see also Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 43-46.

166 Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998). Rancière uses Godard’s video project as an example of the reconstruction of history using the narrativising properties of cinema.

“With cinema images,” Rancière argues, “Godard wants to do what cinema itself has not done…By detaching metaphors from stories in order to fashion a different ‘history’ out of them, Godard fashions the cinema that has not existed.”207 Godard achieves this effect by using montage of news footage, film images, paintings and photographs brought together with the editing capabilities of the video medium to reconstruct history. At stake in this reconstruction is the creation of a new narrative of history that could not otherwise exist. Images that have previously not been associated with one another are pulled together, and one image is used to comment or “think” with the next. Sokurov does something similar with the long take: its continuity unifies a number of disparate stories, histories and eras into one continuous image, in which, on one hand, they are shown in progression of one another, and on the other, as contiguous and co-existing. The long take renegotiates the narrative causality of the discrete moments of history it represents by bringing them into connection with each other through the long take’s continuity, as well as through the kind of ‘thinking’ that it activates. The contiguity of historical eras represented is thus both formal and conceptual.

This method is affirmed by the carefully contrived nature of movement through the Hermitage. The unbroken tracking shot that comprises the entirety of Russian Ark traces what appears to be an exhaustive tour of the Hermitage Museum. The film begins and ends outside the museum and, throughout, moves methodically from one room to the next. Upon further investigation, however, it turns out to be a highly curated tour, or what Nancy Condee refers to as “the highly selective passage of the Hermitage

207 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 130.

167 through its European ‘self’.”208 The camera only travels through a selection of rooms and buildings in the Hermitage, specifically those that create a narrative of identity for imperial Russia that is broadly European, rather than distinctly Russian. The artworks contained in these rooms are largely from within the three-hundred year history of St.

Petersburg. These are predominantly Western European artworks from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and neo-classicist art that recalls Ancient Greek mythology.

What is rejected from the camera’s vision, although mostly Western European, sits outside the three hundred year history of St Petersburg. Sokurov also avoids three rooms of eighteenth century Russian tapestries, furniture and applied works of art that specifically showcase Russian artistry.209 There is nothing on display in the film from the post-revolutionary period. This deliberate distinction between Europe and Russia during the imperial period drawn by what is included and rejected on screen illustrates the elusive nature of Russia’s identity. While this curated order of the camera’s passage through the museum could be achieved with montage, this technique always brings with it the assumption that something has been left out. The continuity offered by the long take of the museum, in this case, conceals such exclusions.

The form of thinking on history activated by the long take emphasises the experience of loss. In doing so, it highlights the lost capacity for complete restoration of the past. Kujundzic argues that Russian Ark reproduces history “after history” has occurred. While the film weaves back and forth through time, there is an evident reliance on events that occur prior to the October Revolution, and, accompanying this,

208 Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, 176. 209 These Russian artworks are glimpsed briefly near the end of the film when The Stranger encounters Nicholas II and his family sitting at a dining room table. This room is one of many in the museum housing reconstructed ‘lived’ spaces, which contain a small selection of Russian art. The brief glimpse provided in the film is to offer a sense of the pre-revolutionary Romanov dynasty. The contents of the museum’s rooms are detailed in “Rooms of the Hermitage Museum,” The State Hermitage Museum, accessed 20 June 2017, http://hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/explore/buildings/rooms/?lng=en.

168 an expression of profound nostalgia for this period. Kujundzic accounts for this nostalgia by explaining that, “After the Soviet Revolution, a sense of loss occupies the space in Russian historical identity since the past prior to it becomes inaccessible for either historical continuation, restoration, or mourning.”210 In Russian Ark, history is presented as one continuous flow of time, but, by excluding particular moments of the past, history is shown to be fragmented and incomplete. On one hand, the bringing together of different times allows the viewer to see that this fragmented history cannot be restored, and never could be; it is an overt display of history’s incompleteness. On the other hand, the redemptive capacities of the long take position history as capable of being reconfigured in the present. It invites us to make connections that could not have otherwise been seen through a linear method. In this sense, the use of the long take in

Russian Ark is both recuperative and mournful.

The Erasure of History

If the film is intended to capture all of Russian history, art and culture in the ‘ark’ of the

Hermitage museum, then it effectively erases the post-1917 period from this history.

Ravetto-Biagioli argues that the “‘return’ to the nation-state…is more a product of imagination and dreams than an historical fact, since it involves rather forgetting the recent past (and even present) than recollecting a distant history.”211 He states further that in Russian Ark this form of nostalgia “often produces various forms of erasure and national myths of origin. It treats history not as fact but as a poetic construction that has drifted in and out of Europe via metaphor, allusion, and myth.” 212 This poetic construction of history is at the heart of Russian Ark: the tracking shot that wanders in

210 Kujundzic, “After ‘After’,” 220. 211 Ravetto-Biagioli, “Floating on the Borders of Europe,” 18. 212 Ibid.

169 and out of the rooms of the museum and historical moments is poetic, not just in form, but in its deliberate construction of history and its explicit rejection of a major and recent part of Russian history.213 This strategy exemplifies the kind of rethinking of history that is activated by the long take.

Involved in this explicit rejection of history is the elimination of a significant artistic development: the practice of montage. The choice of using the long take, not just as an occasional aesthetic feature but as a technique that permeates the entire film, effectively denies the involvement of montage altogether. This rejection is frequently framed as a political statement on Sokurov’s behalf. Isabelle de Keghel argues that,

“Sokurov rejects the process of montage because it does violence to viewers by manipulating them. He, by contrast, aims to depict the flow of time and to make a film without such internal violence” 214 The long take possesses similarly manipulative qualities, but montage is more strongly tied to the Soviet filmmaking practice of propaganda. Condee argues that the film’s effective erasure of montage form is a

“virtuosic retort to the Russo-Soviet montage tradition.”215 This retort is not an isolated case. Condee describes the series of provocations in Sokurov’s career, beginning with his controversial college diploma film adaptation of Andrei Platanov’s “Potudan’ River” and “Origin of a Master,” which was not only banned by officials from Moscow’s All-

Union State Institute of Filmmaking (VGIK), but also had its negatives and prints ordered to be destroyed.216 It is unclear whether Sokurov’s rejection of both history and

213 Cinematographer Tilman Büttner claims to have questioned Sokurov on his avoidance of representing the Soviet period in the film. He expresses his surprise at Sokurov’s explicit dislike of this period despite the Soviet’s production “of electrification, of railroad building, of industrial progress.” This avoidance of representing a period of enormous progress, then, supports Sokurov’s apparent romanticised vision of the pre-Soviet period. See Louis Manashe and Tilman Büttner, “Filming Sokurov’s Russian Ark: An Interview with Tilman Büttner,” Cinéaste 28, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 22. 214 de Keghel, “Sokurov's Russian Ark: Reflections on the Russia/Europe Theme,” 78. 215 Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, 163. 216 Ibid., 162.

170 form in Russian Ark is a continuation of the strong political statements of these earlier films, but the radical adoption of the long take assists in re-imagining the Russian identity as one for which the Soviet period plays a distinctly minor role.

Sokurov’s investment in using the long take, however, speaks more to his delivery of a particular kind of historiography than an explicit political statement. The production of this historiography raises the question of how form can create connections between previously disconnected periods of history. The long take is an overt cinematic gesture that works against the narrative rigidity associated with the montage form. The form of this particular long take is not only a distinctly cinematic gesture, but it also aligns Sokurov with the work of Andrey Tarkovsky who takes a similar approach. Tarkovsky firmly believed that the truth of the image emerges from the profilmic, since the montage form creates an imposition on the viewer by

“deform[ing] objective reality, deleting significant details and highlighting others.”217

Sokurov’s evident reliance on using the mise-en-scène to form narrative and philosophical connections without the aid of montage cements the Tarkovskian legacy in Russian Ark.

While the radical adoption of the long take effectively rejects the formal practice of montage, Sokurov’s philosophical approach to representing history also continues the legacy of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Both Eisenstein and Vertov used montage to revise history using film form. Eistentein developed ways of using

“intellectual montage,” encouraging the viewer’s formation of an intellectual connection between shots, which subversively produced new meanings. Philosophical and political ideas could be conveyed or suggested via the careful juxtaposition of images, thus allowing both filmmakers to recreate history and historical events using cinematic form.

217 Michael Russell, “Soviet Montage Cinema as Propaganda and Political Rhetoric” (PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh, 2009), 68, 78. https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/4084/Russell2009.pdf.

171 Each film, Eisenstein theorised, had the potential to convey one meaning in individual shots and a secondary meaning in the relationship between shots.218 In representations of history, this method allowed Eisenstein to propose or “assert” particular constructions of history, rather than imposing it on the viewer.219 Similarly, Vertov believed that montage could expose social realities and invisible truths; the camera’s

“process of documentation worked through montage brings forth a new historical image.”220 By taking this approach, both filmmakers posed the question of how cinema can best represent historical experience as open and continuous. Sokurov continues this subversion of cinematic conventions and norms in the spirit of answering this same question. Rather than reconfiguring history through the juxtaposition of images,

Sokurov employs this philosophy by placing multiple historical eras within one shot.

While Sokurov erases much of the Soviet era (and, thus, the twentieth century) from his film, his philosophical methodology speaks to a deep engagement with other Russian filmmakers of the last century. In this sense, Russian Ark’s framing of history cannot be purely characterised by what the camera captures or how it captures it, but also by considering the context of the director’s approach itself as part of that history.

The Soviet period as an historical era is not entirely erased from the film. In responding to Kujundzic’s question in the quote opening this chapter, “how can one see history?” a pertinent facet to examine is the moments in which Russian Ark does directly

218 Douglas Michael Priest, “Editing the Past: How Eisenstein and Vertov Used Montage to Create Soviet History” (Master’s thesis, State University of New York, 2008), 12-14. http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hst_theses/11. Guynn exemplifies this approach in a discussion of Battleship Potemkin (1925), which “brings together the dramatization of historic events that did not take place,…[by using] a carefully constructed mise-en-scène, a self-conscious aesthetic of composition, and editing—all rudiments of fictional and artistic practice that lead, ‘paradoxically,’ and in the absence of documented facts, to the truthful representation of a historical situation.” See Guynn, Writing History in Film, 67. 219 Damian Cox, “October and the Question of Cinematic Thinking,” Screening the Past, no. 38 (2013). 220 Andrew J. Hennlich, “Amnesty with a Movie Camera,” in Film, History and Memory, ed. Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109.

172 engage with this period and the ways this engagement is managed. The Soviet period emerges in the film at two key moments. One is when The Stranger is wandering through one of the galleries about half-way through the film. We hear the seemingly anachronistic sound of aeroplanes flying overhead. The second, occurring soon after the first, is The Stranger’s encounter with a World War II coffin-maker (Figure 46). Both of these moments reference the Nazi siege of Leningrad during the war.221 As The Stranger enters the room, the coffin-maker says, “only coffins and corpses here.” Much like the rest of the film, there is little immediate evidence of which period we have entered, apart from the relatively modern dress of the coffin-maker. But what is clear is the deliberate selection of history that occurs in this scene distinguishing it from other moments in the film. Immediately prior, the camera tracks through a grand hallway, around the top of a large staircase. The large ballrooms, drawing rooms and galleries portrayed thus far in the film are nearly all brightly lit and celebrating (or occasionally mocking) the grandiosity and beauty of Russian imperial life. Immediately before The

Stranger moves to push open the door to the room housing the coffin-maker, The Time

Traveller warns him not to open that particular door. As soon as the door is pushed open, we witness a darkened room with a blue tinge, the French doors are open to the outside—our first connection with the outside since the beginning of the film—and icy air blows snow in on the coffins. There are no more rooms beyond this point; this is a dead end. The only way to move forward (in film time) is to move backward (physically) into imperial Russia. The coffin-maker speaks rudely to The Stranger, and thus he retreats backwards out of the room, closing the door behind him. Significantly, this scene is the longest engagement with the Soviet era in the film and is the only time that

The Stranger is forced to return to the room from which he has just arrived. The

221 Manashe and Büttner, “Filming Sokurov’s Russian Ark: An Interview with Tilman Büttner,” 22.

173 movement of the camera, in this instance, traces out the philosophical positioning of both The Stranger and The Time Traveller.

Figure 46. The Stranger interacts with a World War II coffin-maker in Russian Ark.

The unbroken tracking shot has the potential to present a form of history that not only promotes a sense of contiguity between multiple historical periods, but one that is also constantly in flux. We can recall Angelopoulos’s flashback form in Eternity and a Day (1998), in which the camera begins a shot framing the protagonist in modern day, and then sweeps across the coastline in one unbroken shot, ending on an eighteenth century poet. The long take enacts the reversal of time, depicting a sense of fluidity between multiple time periods, and demonstrates the continuation of past time in the present. Sokurov stages a similar interaction of different historical periods through the long take. Unlike Angelopoulos’s model of flashback, in Russian Ark, history is re-staged non-linearly and inexplicitly such that different historical periods co- exist and are in constant dialogue with one another. In doing so, the film questions the stability of the Russian identity both prior to and after the October Revolution, as well

174 as the long take’s capacity to stage this history. The unbroken tracking shot allows for an otherwise inaccessible presentation of history, which exposes film’s overt staging of historical representation. It also crucially reveals how the long take can conceal its operations, effectively ‘editing out’ periods of history to suit a particular narrative or philosophical agenda.

History as Theatre

Near the beginning of the film, the camera enters a theatre in which Russian Empress

Catherine II (Maria Kuznetsova) is watching a play being staged for her. She leaps out of her seat and runs for the door, shouting, “I’m desperate for a piss!” but, seconds later as the camera emerges from the theatre in pursuit of Catherine, she is standing calmly by the window in the hallway (Figure 47). A moment later, she again darts out the door into an adjacent hallway. The Stranger and the camera follow her, but once again, she has disappeared. Pushing back the door, The Stranger exclaims, “Where’s the empress?

Gone! Russia is like a theatre.” The interaction between the camera, The Stranger and

Catherine in this scene is representative of the broader relationship between the camera and the presentation of history throughout the film, whereby the long take enables a cinematic experience of history that both stages an intimate engagement with it, and emphasises its inaccessibility. On one hand, the continuity of the long take draws disparate moments from Russian history together into a single narrative. On the other, the evident disjuncture between these moments opens up a relationship between viewer and film in which the theatricality of history is constantly brought to the fore.

This relationship becomes evident in the specific representation of historical figures encountered by The Stranger. The scene in which Catherine leaves the theatre exemplifies this duality. It stages a version of the Empress in which the camera appears

175 to interrupt a private, accessible moment—one that seemingly exposes her true self— followed by another in which her inaccessibility as an historical figure is emphasised. In one sweep of the camera through the theatre and out into the hallway (interrupted only by the opening of the theatre door), two contadictory portrayals of the same figure are played out: the first, intimate, and the second, distant. The connection between these two versions of Catherine is facilitated by the continuity of the long take between the theatre and the hallway.

Fredric Jameson argues that Sokurov frequently subverts the conventional way of engaging with historical figures in his films. To clarify this subversion, Jameson refers to György Lukács’s “two different ways of imagining history”: firstly, in “the historical drama, we see the great world-historical figures in person, on stage, larger than life,” as a famed public figure; secondly, “the historical novel,” which encounters the historical figure through “the mediation of an average character, who is given the opportunity to glimpse the great personages from afar and only for a moment to intersect with their fulminating trajectories.”222 Lukács is distinguishing between theatrical performance and an intimate, literary portrayal through the eyes of another character. Sokurov’s imagining of historical figures, Jameson argues, falls between these two options: “there seems to reign an utterly different conception of private life, one of a kind of schizophrenic dissociation, in which the great and powerful lapse back into senility or second childhood.”223 Although Jameson is referring to Sokurov’s ‘power tetralogy’ here, his imagining of history continues into Russian Ark.224 The absence of linear narrative structure and the enclosed space offered by the film’s setting ensures that the camera’s encounter with historical figures never plays out in a distinctly private or public

222 Fredric Jameson, “History and Elegy in Sokurov,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 4. 223 Ibid. 224 Sokurov’s ‘power tetralogy’ was made in the years surrounding Russian Ark consisting of Moloch (1999) about Hitler, Taurus (2001) about Lenin, and The Sun (2005) about Hirohito and, later, Faust (2011).

176 space. These figures are publicly recognisable and performing the role for which they are famed, but, simultaneously, they are undermined by the camera ‘happening’ upon them in frequently compromising and humanising positions.

The nature of these encounters is evidenced through their staging. When

Catherine runs out of the theatre, the viewer’s estrangement from her is confirmed as she exits, initially, through the theatre door, and subsequently, through the door at the end of the hallway (Figure 47). While the camera loses sight of her for only a brief moment, the viewer’s access to the continuity of her actions is severed, thus simultaneously severing our connection with her. This is a prime demonstration of

Jameson’s proposed conception of “private life” in Sokurov’s films. While Sokurov frequently revels in the grandiosity of Russian imperial life (particularly in Russian Ark), his apparently intimate exposure of the weaknesses and frailties of political power and those who possess it is a common theme across his oeuvre. His power tetralogy examines Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Emperor Hirohito in this light. Each of these depictions, however, maintains distance from his subjects. Supporting this interpretation, he has said that, “When we’re speaking about the Hermitage museum, we’re inevitably speaking about the people who lived in this place. Certainly, there’s a romantic approach to these people, but I prefer romanticism to an aggressive research into something I can’t access—their personal lives.”225 Sokurov suggests here that his presentation of these historical figures reveals an inability to access their lives, just as much as it reveals any insight. The viewer is privy to some form of private moment, which then reverts to a distanced engagement.

225 Hashamova, “Two Visions of a Usable Past,” 257.

177

Figure 47. The younger Catherine II is glimpsed from a distance.

This form of encounter is duplicated later in the film when Catherine II (Natalia

Nikulenko) appears once again. She is now elderly and hobbles out into the courtyard, assisted by a servant, and quickly gathers pace, eventually running along the snow-laden garden path, despite her earlier apparent frailties. The camera always remains just a few steps behind, hindering any close observation of the lives of those depicted (Figure 48).

The two moments involving Catherine—as a young woman in the theatre and elderly in the courtyard—in which an illogical passing of time occurs between the witnessed actions of the same character, confirm the viewer’s distanced relationship with

Sokurov’s presentation of history and the figures within it. The physical distance maintained in each of these encounters counteracts the potential of the long take, which offers a sustained engagement with the characters and the potential for intimacy. The continuity of the long take serves to reveal a larger experience of discontinuity in our engagement with the figures of history.

178

Figure 48. The elderly Catherine II, assisted by her servant, recedes increasingly from the camera.

This experience of discontinuity is further developed in the specific framing of these historical events. Throughout the film, various framing techniques are employed: doorways, windows, paintings and even rooms provide both a focal point for the camera and a way of ordering the otherwise disordered narration of history. As discussed in previous chapters of this thesis, in a long tracking shot the matter of anchoring the viewer to a particular focal point marks a specific formal challenge. Max

Ophüls, who uses a plethora of sweeping tracking shots in his films, addresses this problem by tracking alongside a particular character, occasionally transferring from one character to the next at crucial moments. Julian Murphet notes that in one particular tracking shot in Le Plaisir (1952) that tracks an elaborate path through a ballroom, “the camera is counterpointed by an insistence on the frames of glazed partitions, as if to announce the innermost constitution of its fluidity by stasis and framed cells.”226 This counterpointing of movement using doorways and windows similarly emerges in Russian

226 Julian Murphet, “Tracking the Modern: Camera Movement and Autonomy,” Cinema, Modernity and Modernism, Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (1 December 2010, University of NSW).

179 Ark. The camera’s ‘dance’ through each of the rooms is anchored to a clear destination.

The stasis of framed pictures, doorways and windows is as much a part of the film’s composition as the camera’s movement.

Each doorway entered by the camera performs two functions in the theatricalisation of history: first, it marks the beginning of a new ‘scene’. In a film that dispenses with the traditional distinction of scenes, each doorway in the museum breaks up the continuity of the shot, often marking the transition into a new era. Second, what occurs between each doorway operates as a discrete tableau, a performance for the camera initiated only as it crosses through the doorway. As the Time Traveller and The

Stranger travel through the various rooms of the museum, the nature of the characters’ actions is such that the camera appears to catch the action as it happens; yet, the choreography of the actors confirms that it is being intentionally staged for the camera.

When the camera enters the hallway in which Anastasia and her friends are playing, it is only upon the camera’s arrival that the girls begin dancing down the hallway.227 In the following moments, the snippet of conversation heard between Anastasia’s mother and the nurse about the son’s haemophilia provides another example of an instance intentionally staged for the camera. This kind of staging highlights the work of timing in the film. The entrance of the camera through the doorway is choreographed to both overtly mark its own existence and conceal its choreography. It both interrupts and confirms the sense of continuity perpetuated by the long take.

This framing of history using doorways, windows and paintings also performs a constant reframing of history throughout the film. Early in the film, when the camera arrives at the quarters of Peter the Great after encountering The Stranger for the first time, we witness through an internal window the tsar violently disciplining one of his

227 Anastasia is Grand Duchess Anastasia, confirmed by the subsequent distinctive appearance of her father, Nicholas II, and her mother’s discussion of haemophilia.

180 servants (Figure 49). Witnessing such an act performed by a famous figure through the frame of a window is a reminder of our position as observers. The camera then moves around the wall away from the window, such that the window no longer obscures our observation. Similarly, just before encountering Catherine for the first time, the camera enters the theatre from behind the scenes, and then tracks around to the stage towards the audience where Catherine sits. Later in the film, our vision is still undisturbed through the perpetuation of the unbroken shot between her first appearance as a young woman and when she re-appears in an aged form. All of these moments in the film capture the associated historical figures from two different angles or perspectives, tracking between them so that the viewer bears witness to this change.

Figure 49. The Stranger and the camera view history framed through a window.

In comparison, the two-dimensional renderings of the past (the paintings) adorning the walls of the museum appear like overly stylised and subjective captured moments, which provide us with only one angle from which to view them. Numerous scholars have observed the curious juxtaposition of the still, framed paintings in the

181 museum with the perpetual movement of the camera through its rooms. 228 This juxtaposition of stasis and movement reminds the viewer that the constant movement they are witnessing does not simply provide a journey through various historical periods, but also re-imagines these periods from a different angle. Unlike film, the paintings can only frame these figures from one angle in perpetual stillness. The contrast of stasis and movement marks the film as one re-presentation among many and is a reminder of the constant and irreversible pastness in the experience of the present emphasised in the camera’s perpetual movement. It emphasises the presentational nature of what we are seeing, while stressing that this history is over and done with.

This reminder of the camera’s subjectivity is reflected particularly in the camera’s subjective, point-of-view perspective and the relationship formed between the camera and the historical figure. It is this perspective that ensures the unconventional private-public rendering of historical figures outlined by Jameson persists in Russian

Ark. In a film that undertakes the narration of such a vast expanse of history, the two protagonists must always exist as separate entities to the historical figures depicted. The former are temporally out of step with these figures, resulting in a distanced perspective.

In Sokurov’s imagining of history, moments such as the depictions of Catherine II or

Peter the Great are what Jameson calls a “schizophrenic dissociation” from their public figures.229 But these depictions do not provide a convincing portrayal of their private lives either. This distancing effect is magnified by the subjective tracking shot employed in Russian Ark. Each of these encounters are a kind of performance of a private space, the theatricalisation of which is ensured by the always-one-step-behind subjective narrator to whom the viewer is tied. The persistence of movement and the invisibility of

228 Ravetto-Biagioli, “Floating on the Borders of Europe,” 20; Tim Harte, “A Visit to the Museum: Aleksandr Sokurov’s ‘Russian Ark’ and the Framing of the Eternal,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 46. Harte points out Sokurov’s “long-standing preoccupation with painting and its two-dimensional static image” in his earlier films (Ibid., 52-55). 229 Jameson, “History and Elegy in Sokurov,” 4.

182 the Time Traveller mean that he does not possess a physical presence with which the historical figure can interact, nor does he have access to the kind of ‘voice of god’ narration usually granted to a camera. The performative nature of these encounters becomes even more apparent in an example such as that described above, since the camera (and, thus, The Time Traveller) is left behind in the room after Catherine has exited. So, in this instance, the subjectivity granted to the camera actually limits the viewer’s access to the diegesis. Evidently the long take in Russian Ark stages a particular performance of history in which the viewer’s relationship with both the figures and the particular historical moments being portrayed always operates within a balance of intimacy and estrangement.

Cinema transforms history into a performance because it is made and curated for an assumed viewer. The Time Traveller is an embodiment of this viewer, questioning the curious theatricalisation of history. He verbalises this by asking, “Is all this being staged for me? Am I to play a role? What kind of play is this?” Unlike a conventional POV shot, the Time Traveller’s vision begins as ours does: at the beginning of the film. Gilberto Perez points out that, “Every work begins with an ellipsis, since it omits all that happened before the beginning”230 But in Russian Ark, this ellipsis is a complete erasure, as though the characters—the Time Traveller and The

Stranger in particular—are born into the opening minutes of the film. It is emphasised in the former’s opening dialogue, over an initially black screen: “I open my eyes and I see nothing…I just can’t remember what happened to me…where am I?” This sense of ellipsis is further accentuated by the scenes discussed earlier, in which the character’s action begins as soon as the camera enters the room. This staging is intentional for the camera, emphasising that nothing occurred before the camera arrived. While this

230 Perez, The Material Ghost, 234.

183 intentional staging is a factor in any non-improvised fictional film, the continual recording and linking of action emphasises the self-conscious staging of these moments.

The subjectivity of the camera confirms the performative nature of Sokurov’s presentation of history. In this performance, the Time Traveller is not quite a character, but rather an uninitiated observer-participant. He can only interact with The Stranger and cannot change the course of the narrative. The relationship between the Time

Traveller and the other characters he encounters is a self-conscious version of what cinema is in essence: the actors perform and the viewer can do nothing more than observe. This self-conscious relationship is reminiscent of the master of ceremonies in

La Ronde (1950), who embodies the audience’s desire to watch the staged ‘merry-go- round’ of characters’ interactions. The overtly theatrical dimension of the film is a reminder that the cinematic representation of history must always be selective, presentational and theatrical. The long take perpetuates this characteristic by bringing out the performative nature of this depiction.

Performing History

The theatrical dimension of the film extends to the actual moment of the film’s production. Fifteen minutes before the end of the film, the camera emerges out of a dark anteroom into a brightly lit ballroom. It wanders amongst the guests of the ball who, as mentioned earlier, are from different eras. At this point, the camera has lost sight of The Stranger for the first time in the film. The camera eavesdrops on a number of conversations, before Glinka’s mazurka begins and the ball guests begin dancing. As the dance continues, the camera weaves through the dancers, eventually finding The

Stranger, who has joined the dance. The camera continues its journey around and through the ballroom for the next ten minutes. As the music finishes, the doors at one

184 end of the ballroom open and the guests begin filing out. For the next five minutes, the camera follows the guests’ slow procession out of the ballroom, down a grand staircase, and along a hallway towards the front entrance of the building, where the film comes to an end (Figure 50). The sheer scale of this scene—hundreds of actors are involved over a sustained period of time in one unified space—and its placement at the end of the film evidences the high stakes of Sokurov’s filming method. Just as the film is a depiction of history and of the theatre of history, this scene also positions the filming method itself as enacting a particular kind of high stakes performance. The following discussion questions, what is at stake in this performance and how does it bring the historicity of the long take to the fore?

Figure 50. The mass exodus from the ballroom as all historical eras from the film come together.

Sokurov’s choice to make a film in one long take reflects two considerations that are central to the long take: the allure of realism and its inevitable disappearance, and a fascination with duration—to render and preserve the experience of time passing. These considerations are key to the connection between historicity, temporality and cinema more broadly. Mary Ann Doane distinguishes between two forms of temporality in

185 cinema that will illuminate the role of historicity in Russian Ark. She considers cinema as an archive. After filming occurs, “images are stored, time itself is stored…[and] ineluctably becomes the past.”231 More than this, the archiving of time also operates as the confirmation of a moment’s occurrence. Doane argues that, from the cinema’s invention, this feature fulfilled the “archival impulse of the nineteenth century” for preserving and containing a moment that can be re-watched and re-experienced. In contrast, she identifies cinema’s contingency—its openness to chance or the potential of a moment. She argues that cinema (an archived moment) is the “experience of presence,” but a presence that can be relived. 232 Cinema is an ephemeral art form that represents motion and temporal duration. Unlike fairs, vaudeville and magic theatre,

Doane argues, the cinema “directly confronts the problematic question of the representability of the ephemeral, of the archivability of presence.”233 She broadly identifies cinema as “a crucial participant in an ongoing rethinking of temporality in modernity.”234 Both of these factors—cinema as both archive and contingency—are magnified by the use of the long take. The long take is a profound and explicit archiving of a moment, but it also has the ability to perform a presencing of the camera and the moment being filmed. The long take’s extreme rendering of time passing emphasises the ephemerality of cinema.

The desire to take advantage of these properties of the long take has informed the work of numerous filmmakers and has produced a number of films that have experimented with pushing the boundaries of continuity as far as is technically possible.

Such films put forth the idea that a truly continuous, unbroken long take is the key to resolving the limitations placed upon the filmmaker. Films such as Andy Warhol’s eight-

231 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid., 25. 234 Ibid., 20.

186 hour film Empire (1964) have given rise to what might be perceived as an ongoing project in cinema to create a one-shot feature film.235 This film performs two functions that are vital for the continuation of such a project: first, it implements an ontological

(philosophical) interrogation of the limits of film, both temporally and in terms of the edges of the frame. Warhol’s experiment is an overt attempt to render the experience of time passing. Second, it encourages a pushing of the technical limits of film. These experiments with extreme duration have always been limited by numerous factors.

Technically, the analogue film technology prevented these films from achieving true feature film length in a single take. The standard reel of film has traditionally been twelve minutes, which explains why Warhol’s experimental short films are all twelve minutes long. Thus, despite the perceived spatiotemporal freedom of the long take,

Warhol’s experiments have encountered restrictions that have limited complete artistic freedom through the director’s choice of form.

While Warhol had the same technical goal and interest in duration as Sokurov, the stakes in the former’s experiments were not as high on two levels: Russian Ark’s technical and formal virtuosity, and its potential to reanimate cinema’s contingency through the long take. Sokurov’s choice of using an extreme long take is not merely a tool that grants the viewer access to the mise-en-scène, but a method that opens up another kind of temporal experience unattainable by other filming techniques. This distinction is clarified by Sokurov’s claim that, “Shooting in a single take is an achievement in formal terms, but more than that it is a tool with the aid of which a specific artistic task can be resolved. It’s just a tool.”236 This task to be resolved by the

235 Empire comprises approximately six hours of real filmed time, slowed to sixteen frames per second and, at least initially, was never allowed to be exhibited in an abridged form. Empire was created by stitching together multiple reels of film such that they appeared as one long take. A year prior, Warhol had made another similar experiment, entitled Sleep (1963), consisting of five hours and twenty minutes of a man sleeping. 236 Les Films Séville Pictures, Russian Ark. Press notes, 2002, 3.

187 filmmaker is to bring out the dual work of the long take to both archive an historical moment and create a sense of the experience of time passing. In reanimating the contingency of cinema through the long take, Sokurov wants to show that what is filmed could have been filmed one way or another, suggesting also that the history on display could have occurred one way or another. Kujundzic’s proposition, “what kind of spectacle would be capable of reproducing such a taking place of history?” will illuminate the following discussion as I consider not only what kind of spectacle, but also how this formal choice engages the viewer in this complex representation of history.

Throughout the film, Sokurov’s presentation (or re-presentation) of history works to capture the two experiences of temporality outlined by Doane, which emphasise a sense of both pastness and presentness in the film. From the opening moments of the film, these two temporalities are established. There is, on one hand, a constant stream of moments framed as ‘history,’ such as the World War II coffin maker or the ceremony involving the Persian Ambassador. Each of these moments is framed as interwoven representations of history, told from the perspective of a narrator in the present. They largely operate as fixed, complete and existing in a distinctly separate time from The Stranger. They confirm cinematic representations of history as ‘archive,’ or a detached re-presentation of an historic moment. On the other hand, the performance of

The Stranger is shown to be open to chance, constantly influenced by his surroundings and the passing of time. This position is confirmed by his interactions with the narrator and the figures he encounters. At various points in the film, he is physically pushed out of rooms, and disappears from the camera’s view for long periods of time, emphasising his ephemerality and his detachment from the representation of history. The Stranger is the viewer’s experience of presence, as opposed to the archived past with which he interacts.

188 More complexly, the long take frames both of these temporalities as operating in the present. As evidenced in the scene involving Anastasia and her friends, the long take is shown to constantly both undermine and conceal the work of staging. The film’s staging is undermined by its overt presentation. It presents these moments of history as deliberately staged for the viewer in the present—we witness the initiation of action as the camera enters the room—making the film’s contingency evident. The Stranger actually initialises the girls’ movement. He waits for the camera to arrive in the same room before clapping his hands (Figure 51). The work of staging is concealed, however, as each tableau operates as though the camera has ‘happened upon’ the action; each event is both an archive of history and a chance encounter with it. The apparently paradoxical staging methods—both overt and concealed—operate simultaneously in each scene. They confirm a particular experience of temporality by the way the camera captures each encounter with the past. The camera acts as another narrator or a lens through which the past is examined. Its duration allows the viewer to experience an extended moment that is fixed and recorded, but at the same time unfinished and undetermined as we watch it. The camera’s movements are equated with The Stranger and The Time Traveller, who are shown to operate in the film’s constant present. The long take galvanises a constant present in which the various temporalities in the film’s diegesis interact. Thus, both the continuity of the long take and its interaction with the film’s overt staging underscores the experience of presentness and is the embodiment of the film’s contingency.

189

Figure 51. The Stranger waits in the next room for the camera to arrive, before he claps his hands to initiate the girls’ flee down the hallway.

This sense of the film’s contingency operates in both its production and performances. As well as the film being a representation of history, the production itself was a precarious creation of an historical moment that aided in creating a continuous experience of the present. The ballroom scene, in particular, contributes to this experience. This scene is the recreation of the final ball held in Tsarist Russia for

Nicholas II in St. Nikolai Hall in the Winter Palace. The scene was filmed eighty-nine years after the event in the same room, at the same time, accompanied by the same orchestral music. The ballroom had not been used for dancing since the 1913 ball.237 As the camera weaves its way through the ballroom in the final fifteen minutes of the film, it is not only capturing the recreation of an historical event for a fictional film, it is also filming and performing history at the same time. The long take has a particular capacity to form this connection to history since, in the case of Russian Ark, the time of the performance and the time of the story are placed on equal terms. This equality emerges because the story and the performance occur at the same time for the same duration.

237 The final take of the film was achieved on 23rd December, 2001 and the Ball at St Petersburg occurred on 23rd February, 1913. See Ravetto-Biagioli, “Floating on the Borders of Europe,” 21.

190 What is significant about the unbroken long take in the case of the ballroom scene is that the specific moment in which it was filmed had a special relevance to the historical event it depicted. More than a re-creation, this scene, like the rest of the film, is a representation. In terms of the mise-en-scène, the scene brings together figures from multiple eras of history, and it is a filmed event staged for the camera. It is a deliberate re-staging of history, but one that has been significantly reconfigured and is reconfigurable.

Thus it is this scene, in particular, that evidences the high stakes in the film’s production of both representing a moment of history and producing an experience of the presence for the viewer.

The co-ordination of the performances within the film confirms another dimension of the experience of presence. The film contains the precise co-ordination of over a thousand actors and extras interacting and playing their part at the right time. In an interview, cinematographer Tilman Büttner indicated that, prior to filming, the only rehearsals that had been done were with the extras in a large hall many months previously. Together, Dreiden, Büttner and Sokurov had also stepped out their movements through the museum without the extras present. Sokurov has further indicated the precision in his direction of actors, precluding the opportunity for them to improvise in such a complex sequence: “When I give my actors instructions, I don’t wish to leave space for chance. The actor has to move very precisely in a particular way, put his hand like this, at this particular height, and so on.”238 Shot in montage, the film’s production could be achieved more traditionally, filming in blocks, and both cast and crew would be able to rely on re-takes and shorter rehearsals between scenes. The required precision of this choreography suggests that the film’s representation of history is devoid of a sense of contingency. However, the complexity of the production ensured

238 Jeremi Szaniawski, “Interview with Aleksandr Sokurov,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 20.

191 that numerous moments in the actors’ performance created indexical markers that tie the film to its moment of production. There are a number of occasions, for example, when extras are captured visually acknowledging the camera, such as the small bewigged child in Catherine II’s chamber, who looks straight at the lens, and other extras who stare nervously at the camera while descending the stairs in the final moments of the film. The complexity of the choreography means that the performance of the film, even if it technically could be filmed again, could never be repeated; each performance would always be different. The camera performs an action that has not, and cannot, have been done before. The film itself is a writing of history, or a form of historicity. Filmed using any other method or at another time, the connection between the time of filming and the historical moment it depicted would be lost. It is this factor that charges the film with a sense of being a high stakes performance of history that could not be achieved by using a classical cinema style.

Russian Ark is an uninterrupted rendering of time passing, in which the actual moment of filming, the time of the performance, and the duration of the film are all equated with one another; they are the same moment and are presented as contingent and open to change. In taking on Russian Ark as a highly precarious technical experiment, Sokurov unwittingly also took as his project the overt rendering of two experiences of temporality: cinema as archive and cinema as contingency. These are achieved through both the nature of his subject matter (a collection of historical moments), his co-ordination of staging and his particular method of filming, which forefronts the contingency of cinema. This discussion has shown so far that the long take is not simply a random choice of technique or formal expression of virtuosity, but a stylistic choice capable of reflecting on a particular experience of history and its presentness as rendered by cinema. Sokurov’s particular method of filming forefronts a

192 rendering of the experience of the present. This emphasises what Doane calls “the experience of presence…haunted by historicity.”239 What we witness in watching the film is the capturing and archiving of presentness. This action can only be achieved by the long take, which extends for the duration of the film. Any other method would negate the desired effect that this occurred as one singular ninety-minute moment.

Throughout the film, Sokurov’s highly precarious technical experiment presents history not just as a representation of moments of the past, but also as a contingent performance of history.

* * * *

This chapter began by reflecting on the question, what would the “singular repetition” of history “allow to be seen”? It has shown how the long take can shape, restage and reorder perceptions of history through film form. But, most importantly, this chapter has evidenced the long take’s capacity to produce a number of experiences of temporality and history. Russian Ark is an exercise in staging history not as a succession of clearly delineated events, but in and through the temporally charged present tense of the long take. The film demonstrates that the long take has a significant capacity for not just representing or depicting history, but also making a fundamental connection to the historical event itself. The archiving and representation of history is, simultaneously, the creation of history. Thus, what this re-presentation of history allows to be seen through the continuity of the long take is history, as not complete and over and done with, but as open, still to be determined, and continuing into the present. The long take is key in this presentation of history: it has the capacity to reveal the links and breaks between

239 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 23.

193 moments of history, and the present as temporally contiguous with the past. It marks a duality of temporal experiences. Finally, this staging of history is cemented by the one- shot film, which is always a performance in the present as well as a representation of a moment in the past.

194 Afterword

About half way through Theo Angelopoulos’s film Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004), a dance takes place in an old beer hall. The dance is run by a group of leftist musicians and trade unionists, and is to occur in secret. During this scene, the camera traces two circular movements around the inside of the building. The eight-and-a-half minute tracking shot captures a crucial interaction between the protagonists. Alexis (Nikos

Poursanidis), a struggling musician, and his girlfriend Eleni (Alexandra Aidini) are confronted by Eleni’s estranged husband, Spyros (Vasilis Kolovos), whom she had left at the altar many years prior. The shot opens on a man walking into frame in an empty room, with chairs piled up behind him. He looks off-camera and exclaims, “Music!”

(Figure 52). As the music starts, the camera retreats backwards and the man begins dancing by himself. The camera pans to the left into the next room, revealing Alexis sitting centre stage, playing his accordion, accompanied by his band. Eleni stands next to him, dancing by herself. The camera dollies backwards, revealing a large group of couples dancing, but it soon stops in anticipation of the action to come: a man walks into the middle of the dance floor and a fight breaks out. The couples scatter, leaving an empty space around the men (Figure 53). The fight is resolved, the music resumes, and the camera continues its retreat backwards, eventually turning right to face the doorway, as the men who started the fight exit back the way they came. This concludes the camera’s first circular movement around the building.

195

Figure 52. A man signals for the music to start in Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow.

Figure 53. The dancers clear the stage for a fight to break out during the camera’s first circle.

The second circle begins immediately as Spyros enters through the same door with an umbrella open above his head (Figure 54). The camera follows him as he turns right and walks through an empty hallway at the other side of the building. Spyros passes the pile of chairs and hesitantly edges towards the source of the music, evidently

196 looking at the dance floor off-screen. His slow trudging gait contrasts with the purposeful walk of the couples arriving for the dance. The camera continues on almost exactly the same path as the first time: it tracks through the dance floor and finds Eleni.

From this moment, the camera is positioned facing the stage, with Alexis in the middle.

As before, the couples stop dancing and clear the middle of the floor to witness the unfolding of a significant, yet understated moment in the film. Spyros steps in front of

Alexis and tells him, “play something, just for me,” before moving towards Eleni and taking her hand (Figure 55). The music resumes its steady melody, while Spyros dances with Eleni. Suddenly, Eleni steps purposefully away from Spyros and lets go of his hand—a definite rejection. Spyros walks acceptingly back into the hallway, stumbles, falls to his knees, and, here, the shot and the camera’s second circle ends with Spyros’s body lying lifeless on the wooden floorboards.

Figure 54. Spyros enters the building to start the camera's second circle.

197

Figure 55. The dancers clear the stage again for Spyros and Eleni's dance.

This shot crystallises a number of central claims made in this thesis about the purpose and functioning of the long take. In particular, it highlights the capacity of the long take to render an overt staging of meaning. In Chapter One we saw how in

Landscape in the Mist (1988) this involves an engagement with stories, myths and experiences of history that bridge the modern world to the past. The discussion revealed the way the unfolding of the mise-en-scène poses explicit questions about what is concealed by the long take’s framing. Chapter Two examined Béla Tarr’s method of dissolving or obscuring the relationship between image and meaning, and the long take’s pivotal role in the construction of allegory in Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). This construction hinges on the way the camera both reveals and conceals the relationship between past and present, mise-en-scène and character.

The third chapter continued to demonstrate the long take’s implication of the viewer in the film’s interpretive dilemmas, while simultaneously concealing from us crucial parts of its drama. Specifically, this chapter revealed that, in Michael Haneke’s work, viewer complicity can operate at a more complex level than the form of active

198 spectatorship historically associated with the long take. In Chapter Four, I returned to the matter of how these questions of interpretation and complicity are engaged with the representation of history. An examination of Russian Ark (2002) revealed how the long take can re-present history as a performance occurring in the present, thereby affirming cinema’s capacity to portray a moment of history as “happening for the first time as its own doubling.” 240

In the dance hall scene from Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, the long take’s capacity to not simply present history, but also to re-present it as occurring in the present lies at the heart of the scene’s affective dimension. In one sweep of the camera, with limited dialogue, the shot depicts one of the most important character exchanges in the film. As in nearly all his films, Angelopoulos uses dedramatisation and planimetric staging to ensure the drama in this exchange is reconfigured into an overtly choreographed encounter. Rather than express Eleni’s rejection through dialogue, Angelopoulos articulates it through the dynamic placement of figures in the shot. Without close scrutiny, the dance of rejection by Spyros and Eleni appears to be seamlessly incorporated into the movements of the other dancers. The party-goers’ parting of ways clears a space and creates a stage for the couple’s drama to play out (Figure 55). To affirm the significance of this method, we can recall here the scene in Landscape in the Mist, when Voula and Alexander encounter a dying horse. What appears to be a tragic encounter with death for the children turns out to also be the revelation of how the long take galvanises connections and disconnections between different layers of activity.

We can see that, in both these scenes, the long take produces a duality: Angelopoulos’s drive to both represent (the character and the needs of the film’s story), and to render overt the film’s presentational dimensions.

240 Kujundzic, “After ‘After’,” 219.

199 The camera’s choreography is also crucial to illustrating the presentational dimensions of the dance hall scene. In each circle the camera traces through the building, it adopts an almost identical movement, as though, like the couples on the dance floor, it is participating in a choreographed dance. Once it arrives on the dance floor, it is only static while Eleni and Spyros dance, before it continues retreating backwards. It is as though the camera ‘knows’ what is going to happen; its movement around the room is choreographed just as much as Spyros’s rejection and death is scripted and inevitable. Like the camera’s dance through the State Hermitage Museum in Russian Ark, Angelopoulos makes overt both the camera’s choreography unfolding in the present and his investment in the representational requirements of the character’s story.

This scene evidences the aesthetic and, ultimately, lyrical capacities of the long take. A plethora of elements in the scene—from Spyros’s silhouetted figure carrying a black umbrella, to the skilfully-planned complex movement of the camera—privilege the presentational, theatrical and aesthetic aptitude of the long take. Throughout this thesis, we have seen similar instances of directorial artistry emerging. Notably, Tarr’s monochrome tracking shots around the dead whale, ending on the image of its enormous eye, and the opening shot of the solar system mime, articulate a distinct and intentional lyricism through the moving camera’s relationship to the mise-en-scène. Each example has shown that the uninterrupted gaze of the camera can be used to bring to the fore both the intimacy of human interaction, as well as the large scale historical forces that shape and help determine the nature of this interaction. In doing so, each moment reveals itself as possessing multiple layers of meaning that exist in the actors’ performances, the composition of the mise-en-scène, the shot’s framing, and its duration.

All these moments bring out not only complex philosophical connections, but also the

200 director’s desire to bring about something contingent and irreplaceable in their use of the long take: the affective charging of the shot’s duration. The long take gives the unfolding of time a weight and a tension that emerges from the elongation of the shot.

This quality of the long take has a direct and significant bearing on how matters of history and the tension of the shot’s contingency are experienced by the viewer.

* * * *

This thesis began by posing two questions: how does the long take determine and structure a process of meaning making? And what role is played by specific historical circumstances in this process? This is to say that matters of filmic style cannot be examined in isolation as merely aesthetic choices; rather, they must be considered in terms of the historical circumstances of that choice and what the stylistic choice does in terms of the meaning of every shot. Each director’s investment in the long take is motivated by finding ways of capturing new realities—frequently created by political and social upheaval—with the pre-existing tools of cinema. This thesis has identified new ways of finding the connection between the long take and meaning. As each case study has shown, the long take allows particular connections and experiences to emerge that would not have occurred otherwise, and that cannot exist in other modes or styles of cinema.

Two further branches of enquiry have emerged out of this research: the first is related to the global expansion of the long take-dominated aesthetic into non-European cultures, exemplified in the work of Iranian filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami and Shahram

Mokri, as well as Chinese-Malay, Tsai Ming-liang, and Filipino, Lav Diaz. Examination of the long take in these cinemas would offer further revelations about the adaptation

201 and operation of style in other cultures. The second relates to technological improvements that have enabled expressions of virtuosity using the long take. This trend began with Alexander Sokurov’s experiments in Russian Ark, and in recent years has continued through films from both European and non-European contexts, such as

Victoria (2015) and Birdman (2014). The trend through all these films is a dual interest in both exposing the durational effect of cinema on the viewer and exploring the ever- expanding technical limits of film.

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209 CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS Ciment, Michel. “The State of Cinema.” Paper presented at the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco Film Society, April 2003, San Francisco. Guest programmer address.

Murphet, Julian. “Tracking the Modern: Camera Movement and Autonomy.” Cinema, Modernity and Modernism, Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand, 1 December 2010, University of NSW, Sydney. Keynote speech.

Wartenberg, Thomas E. “‘Not Time’s Fool’: Marriage as an Ethical Relationship in Michael Haneke’s Amour.” Cinema and/as Ethics, Cinematic Thinking Network, 11 December 2013, University of NSW, Sydney. Conference presentation.

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Grundmann, Roy. “Love, Death, Truth—Amour.” Senses of Cinema, no. 65 (2012). Accessed June 2, 2014. http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/love- death-truth-amour.

Holden, Stephen. “New York Film Festival Reviews: All of Russian History, in One Glittery Unbroken Take.” The New York Times, September 28, 2002. Accessed July 28, 2017. https://nytimes.com/2002/09/28/movies/new-york-film- festival-reviews-all-russian-history-one-glittery-unbroken-take.html.

Kovács, András Bálint. “The World According to Béla Tarr.” KinoKultura 7 (2008). Accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/7/kovacs.shtml.

Kuehner, Jay, and Béla Tarr. “Béla Tarr and ‘This Process of Making’.” Green Cine (2006). Accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=279.

Le Fanu, Mark. “Metaphysics of the ‘Long Take’: Some Post-Bazinian Reflections.” P.O.V 4 (1997). Accessed August 30, 2014. http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_04/section_1/artc1A.html.

Les Films Séville Pictures. Russian Ark. Press notes, 2002. Accessed May 15, 2015. https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheNews/RussianArk_S evillePressNotes.pdf

Orban, Clara. “Contextualizing History in Hungarian Films of the New Millennium.” AHEA: E-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 6 (2013). Accessed March 22, 2016. https://ahea.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/ahea/article/view/111/298.

Poland, David. “DP/30 @ Cannes 2012: Amour, Writer/director Michael Haneke.” DP/30: The Oral History of Hollywood. Online video, May 29, 2012. Accessed June 4, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFApyPLUTAs.

211 “Rooms of the Hermitage Museum.” The State Hermitage Museum. Accessed June 20, 2017. http://hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/explore/buildings/rooms.

Samardzija, Zoran. “Werckmeister Harmonies.” Scope, February 2003. Accessed May 5, 2016. https://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/filmreview.php?issue=feb2003&id=692& section=film_rev.

Sweeney, R. Emmet. “Interview: Béla Tarr, the Complete Works.” Film Comment (Blog), February 2, 2012. Accessed February 17, 2014. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-bela-tarr-the-complete-works.

Williams, Richard. “Deep Waters.” The Guardian, April 19, 2003. Accessed June 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/apr/19/artsfeatures.

THESES Makrygiannakis, Evangelos. “The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Voyage in Time.” PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh, 2008. https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/4018/Makrygiannakis200 9.pdf.

Priest, Douglas Michael. “Editing the Past: How Eisenstein and Vertov Used Montage to Create Soviet History.” Master’s thesis, State University of New York, 2008. http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hst_theses/11/

Russell, Michael. “Soviet Montage Cinema as Propaganda and Political Rhetoric.” PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh, 2009. https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/4084/Russell2009.pdf.

212 Filmography

Accidents Will Happen. Dir. Walter R. Booth, 1907. UK.

Alexander the Great (O Megalexandros). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1980. Greece/Italy.

Almanac of Fall (Öszi Almanach). Dir. Béla Tarr. 1984. Hungary.

Amour. Dir. Michael Haneke. 2012. Austria/France/Germany.

Anatomy of a Murder. Dir. Otto Preminger. 1959. USA.

Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin). Dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein. 1925. Soviet Union.

Benny’s Video. Dir. Michael Haneke. 1992. Austria/Switzerland.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu. 2014. USA.

Caché (Hidden). Dir. Michael Haneke. 2005. France/Austria/Germany.

Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. 1941. USA.

Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik). Dir. Abbas Kiarostami. 1990. Iran.

Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit Incomplet de Divers Voyages). Dir. Michael Haneke. 2000. France/Austria/Romania.

Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque). Dir. Junli Zheng, 1949. China.

Damnation (Kárhozat). Dir. Béla Tarr. 1988. Hungary.

Days of ’36 (Méres tou '36). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1972. Greece.

Dodsworth. Dir. William Wyler. 1936. USA.

Elephant. Dir. Gus Van Sant. 2003. USA.

Empire. Dir. Andy Warhol. 1964. USA.

Eternity and a Day (Mia aioniotita kai mia mera). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1998. France/Italy/Greece.

213 Fallen Angel. Dir. Otto Preminger. 1945. USA.

Faust. Dir. Alexander Sokurov. 2011. Russia.

Francofonia. Dir. Alexander Sokurov. 2015. France/Germany/Netherlands.

Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. 1997. Austria.

Homework (Mashgh-e Shab). Dir. Abbas Kiarostami. 1989. Iran.

La Ronde. Dir. Max Ophüls. 1950. France.

Landscape in the Mist (Topio stin omichli). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1988. Greece/France/Italy.

Le Plaisir. Dir. Max Ophüls. 1952. France.

Moloch. Dir. Alexander Sokurov. 1999. Russia.

Pirosmani. Dir. Giorgi Shengelaya, 1972. Soviet Union.

Red and White Roses. Dir. William Humphrey and Ralph Ince, 1913. USA.

Reconstruction (Anaparastasi). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1970. Greece.

Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg). Dir. Alexander Sokurov. 2002. Russia/Germany/Canada.

Sátántangó. Dir. Béla Tarr. 1994. Hungary/Germany/Switzerland.

Sleep. Dir. Andy Warhol. 1963. USA.

Taurus (Telets). Dir. Alexander Sokurov. 2001. Russia.

The Beekeeper (O Melissokomos). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1986. Greece/France/Italy.

The Earrings of Madame de…. Dir. Max Ophüls. 1953. France/Italy.

Family Nest (Családi Tüzfészek). Dir. Béla Tarr. 1979. Hungary.

The Hunters (Oi Kynigoi). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1977. France/Greece.

The Letters. Dir. William Wyler. 1940. USA.

The Man from London (A Londoni Férfi). Dir. Béla Tarr. 2007. Hungary/Germany/France.

214

The Outsider (Szabadgyalog). Dir. Béla Tarr. 1982. Hungary.

The Passenger (Professione: Reporter). Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1975. Italy/Spain/France.

The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste). Dir. Michael Haneke. 2001. Austria/France/Germany.

The Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat). Dir. Béla Tarr. 1982. Hungary.

The President (Præsidenten). Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919. Denmark.

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge). Dir. Albert Lamorisse. 1956. France.

The Sun (Solntse). Dir. Alexander Sokurov. 2005. Russia.

The Suspended Step of the Stork (To meteoro vima tou pelargou). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1991. France/Italy/Greece.

The Travelling Players (O Thiasos). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1975. Greece.

The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte). Dir. Michael Haneke. 2009. Germany/Austria/France.

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Trilogia: To livadi pou dakryzei). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 2004. Greece/France/Italy.

Ulysses’ Gaze (To vlemma tou Odyssea). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1995. Greece/France/Italy.

Une Aussi Longe Absence (The Long Absence). Dir. Henri Colpi, 1960. France/Italy.

Vampyr. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. 1932. Germany/France.

Victoria. Dir. Sebastian Schipper. 2015. Germany.

Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kythira). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 1984. Greece/Italy/UK.

Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák). Dir. Béla Tarr. 2000. Hungary/Italy/Germany.

215