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The Sleep of Realism Produces Monsters: On Some Endings at Film Fest Gent 2023

Cerrar los ojos (Victor Erice, 2023)

EssayPart of Issue #21: Young Critics Workshop 2023 & 2024

Editor’s note: this essay was originally written just after the 2023 edition of the festival. It was only published at the start of 2025 for reasons other than authorial or editorial.

 

Film was in its infancy when Malevich and Matisse were waging the campaigns that would define Modernism’s capsizal of painterly representation. When Joyce published Ulysses, cinema’s voice had not yet broken, and the first talkie was still almost two years away when Artaud founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry. The medium that had to grow up faster than any of the others enjoyed its innocence for as long as it could, but though it exerted a significant influence on its older siblings it could not indefinitely evade the crises they had been facing since the late nineteenth century, which turned all the elements of the aesthetic into an open question.

Every new art form is necessarily experimental, and deviations always precede the eventual norm. But the effectiveness of the narrative grammar invented by D. W. Griffith and the other Hollywood pioneers, and the cultural juggernaut that resulted from its industrialisation, gave the medium a popular meaning against which all deviations are still defined. If Hollywood cinema, like pulp novels, preserved a world in which those difficult Modernist questions didn’t have to disturb a good story well-told, one explanation for the enormous significance film history ascribes to the French New Wave is that it saw the most outspoken and self-conscious (although not the first) confrontation of the Hollywood narrative-realist tradition with Modernism’s explosion of that tradition’s forebears and implicit coordinates.

Jean-Luc Godard’s solution was the most radical and is the most famous: refuse to find a solution, infect narrative with teratogenic viruses, shake representation until it turns inside out. But even his compatriots in the New Wave were largely unwilling to follow him down his lonely path, and the kind of ‘art film’ that plays in cinemas instead of galleries is still a descendant, however many times removed, of Griffith’s model. Nevertheless, the assumption of an inheritance that an artist has the wherewithal to feel a little unsatisfied with can be productively contradictory. Three movies that played at Film Fest Gent in 2023—one by a debutante, one by an established auteur, and one by a cinema elder—reflect in different ways on their own narrative-realist frames. In each, a volte face in the closing minutes turns the film around on itself, suggesting both the conviction that something in storytelling must go beyond the telling of stories, and the sense that this conviction is best expressed through a very specific formal choice.

Astrakan (David Depesseville, 2022)

I. Astrakan

Directors as various as Maurice Pialat, Pedro Costa and François Truffaut have started their feature careers with films about ill-starred tweens. What about this subject suggests itself as a leaping-off point? The reassuring presence of neorealism behind one’s shoulder surely has something to do with it, but there may be something more fundamental at play. In his 1971 article on the wider implications of the acclaim met by Joseph Losey’s adaptation of The Go-Between, Serge Daney suggests that, in the postlapsarian world from which von Sternberg, Ford, Mizoguchi and Tourneur have passed away, “if it is difficult to commit to abandoning narratives, it is also unsatisfying to entrust oneself to a story’s magical, resolutory value.”Serge Daney, The Cinema House & the World, I: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962-1981, translated by Christine Pichini (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2022), p. 128. A child is a good solution, “so small that he can go anywhere, but so ‘pure’ that he understands nothing”.Ibid., p. 129. He is our avatar, a vehicle for the naivety we need to accept the armature of the fiction, and the innocence with which he makes his discoveries mirrors the innocence with which we follow along.

This thesis would probably be difficult to defend in any generalised form, but it’s worth bearing in mind in the case of Astrakan (2022), David Depesseville’s debut feature, which tells the story of a preteen orphan, Samuel, in foster care. For an hour and a half, the film sits squarely in the post-Pialatian mode of Franco-naturalism—unsentimental, elegantly but unshowily photographed, largely prioritising the physical shape of events over freestanding compositions. There is a background rural brutality that strongly evokes Mouchette (1967), but the actors are directed more in line with the naturalism of a Dardenne brothers film than the automatism of Bresson’s models, the structure organised around understated but solidly conventional cycles of tension (generally, Samuel’s stoic silence) and release (generally, his foster parents’ anger and violence).

In the last ten minutes, things take a turn. After an act of desperate, misplaced violence, the needle drops on Bach’s ‘Agnus Dei’, from the Mass in B Minor. Samuel is in a therapy session, being asked to focus on an image. A closeup of his eye fades into an image of Luc, the brother of Samuel’s foster mother, whose air of creepiness has been curling around the movie’s ankles since the start. Cue a montage of ominous shots of the man, through which it becomes apparent that he has been sexually abusing both Samuel and his foster brother. Intercut towards the end of the montage is a shot of a juggler, its framing and blocking repeated from a scene earlier in the film in which Samuel visited the local fair with his family; this time, however, the juggler is doing his routine with his genitals out. Now, with the Bach reaching its climax, the scene shifts to the lakeside near the house Samuel lives in, where his foster family are picnicking. A black lamb appears on the rocks. Samuel’s foster mother, Marie, unzips her shirt; we cut back to the lamb; in the next shot, she’s cradling the animal, her breasts bared. The film ends with a sequence of Samuel thrashing about in the water, before swimming, calmly, towards his foster family on the shore.

The obvious criticism is that, insofar as this sequence functions as a ‘reveal’, it tells us what an engaged viewer ought already to have surmised. Aside from the aura around Luc, there have already been references to Samuel’s brother wanting a lock on his bedroom door, and at one point Samuel witnesses some kind of sinister transaction involving his uncle’s van. With its eleventh-hour disclosures, the film treads on its own tiptoes. Yet it’s not as though the filmmakers could have been unaware of the thread they had been weaving, nor will the idea that they may have lost faith in their audience’s powers of inference at this late point in the running time get us very far when the choices they make are so brazen in their own right.

It’s more promising to ask how this sequence functions in opposition to the narrative-realist style of the rest of the film. The fade from Samuel’s eye to the shots of Luc suggests a shift from third to first-person perspective, the images of his uncle representing Samuel’s memories (though they seem to be a combination of point-of-view and third-person shots). The moment recalls any number of fades from closeups to subjective montage in cinema, whose locus classicus is the dream sequence in Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound (1945). The Freudian connection is further suggested by the shot of the juggler, an objective image subjectively reprocessed by way of the spectre of fraught, threatening male sexuality. This device is not exactly anything unusual; the dream sequence, circumscribed from the objective narrative, is a vacation from realism that traditional cinema has been able to accommodate without too much trouble. It’s primarily its positioning at the end of the film and the lugubrious baroque strings that underscore it that make it seem like an argument against the formal framework that has preceded it, as if realism could not help but fall short of something that calls for a first-person testimony somewhere between direct experience and unconscious repetition. Nevertheless, trauma as a limit-point of narrative realism has enough precedent that it can find a stable place within the contemporary realist aesthetic.

What, though, of the final sequence, the lakeside Marian tableau that is sure to be the image audience members take from the theatre with them? It is harder to place the image of Marie cradling the lamb—a conflation of the iconography of the Madonna and Child with the Agnus Dei exulted on the soundtrack—as part of Samuel’s unconscious cavalcade, because it seems so removed from the mental life of the protagonist presented so far, swinging instead for a larger mythopoetic frame of reference. Much more, it gives the impression of a coup de foudre on the part of the filmmaker, detached from what has come before, virtually elbowing the rest of the film out of the way. Any number of meanings can be gleaned from it because it trades on the range of resonances accrued to the iconography more than the associations established with and among the characters. The film relinquishes the agency of image-construction to a more powerful and less personalised force.

As a result, although in the real-time of viewership the surreal logic of the dream-image allows a relatively frictionless slippage between subjective focalisation and free-stranding iconography, the impact of that iconography hides a failure of confidence in the realist narrative to communicate its own weight. And this allows us to see how, beyond just ‘quoting’ Catholic imagery, Depesseville’s departure from realism really is Catholic in form. In imposing pure symbology deprived of any embedding (typological, analogical or otherwise) in the realist narrative, in instituting this absolute break, the film refuses the mediation of metaphor: Marie and Luc are transubstantiated into the Virgin and the Lamb. Nothing could make more sense if we follow the argument whereby, as Fredric Jameson puts it, “Realism as a form (or mode) is historically associated […] with the function of demystification”, so that “all the great realists have thought of their narrative operations as an intervention in the ‘superstitious’ or religious, universalizing conceptions of life”.Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London/New York: Verso, 2015), pp. 4, 143. By inversion, at the end of Astrakan, the realist vision of the world has been reduced to a delineation of what must be transcended in order to reach the religious, universalizing conception of life; the film plays out the accession from the postlapsarian intramundane to the soteriological extramundane. Its interest in the body of its protagonist is reframed as the latest instalment in Catholic art’s mastery of fallen flesh, and it ends with that flesh obscured, submerged in a lake transformed into a Jordan. Here is one solution to the apparent limits of realism: the old one.

May December (Todd Haynes, 2023)

II. May December

The novel invented narrative realism as we understand it, but at the cost of a rupture between the narrative—the telling of the tale—and the realist—the evocation of a socially- and historically-situated milieu. Insofar as narrative had to give ground to the accumulation of realist texture through description, the two constituents could never fully coincide, and the ambitions of the form were split. Long hiatuses in action to make way for exhaustive description are a familiar feature of the nineteenth century novel, from Balzac to Dickens to Hardy, but even the most laconic realist writers have had to contend with this polarisation: the more space given to static verisimilitude, the larger the debt accrued to the dynamism of social transactions. Henry James put it best when he described “the odd inveteracy with which picture, at almost any turn, is jealous of drama, and drama (though on the whole with a greater patience, I think) suspicious of picture,” with the result that “each baffles insidiously the other’s ideal and eats round the edges of its position”.Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribners, 1934), p. 300.

With the motion picture camera came the promise of ambient facticity no longer as something to be struggled for but as an automatic by-product of the medium itself. It appeared as though stories could be immediately embedded in the reality in which they took place. There were then entirely new possibilities for integrating elements so that action and environment, character and setting, could fold into one another, mutually support one another, in the homogenous time of the moving image: manifestation, over and above expression. The management of this task—this historical destiny, as it seemed to the French criticism of the 1950s—is one way to define the mysterious cinephilia watchword ‘mise-en-scène’. For the critics who erected a halo above the term, mise-en-scène essentially meant the technics, beyond any particular technique, of narrative realism.

It is no coincidence that the heyday of those filmmakers regarded as the maestros of mise-en-scène—Ophüls, Lang, Ford, Preminger—is coterminous with the glory years of the American classical cinema, which come to an end not only as the studio system developed in the teens and twenties collapses, but at the same time as cinema itself becomes more self-conscious about its means and begins to explore them on the surface of the work, as techniques for the construction of meaning rather than as the invisible and seamless processes for meaning’s communication. From the 1960s on, mise-en-scène is not an enigma to be named but a name itself, even a rhetoric of itself. This is true not just of the trials through which Godard and Warhol put narrative cinema, but of the evolution of popular filmmakers hovering at the margins of what even the Cahiers considered auteurist cinema: in a virtuosic essay, Bruno Andrade has traced the historical mutations of mise-en-scène through a close examination of the career of Richard Fleischer, a B-movie graduate who has never received the recognition of coeval postwar cineastes like Ray and Fuller.See ‘Para acabar de vez com a mise en scène’, Foco (2016), <https://www.focorevistadecinema.com.br/FOCO8-9/fleischerbruno.htm>. Daney, for example, described Fleischer as ‘neither an artisan nor an auteur’; The Cinema House and the World, p. 69 (translation modified).

It is in this context that a filmmaker like Todd Haynes, who still appears to carry the questions of mise-en-scène with him, is worth attention. In a filmography that includes a deliberate exercise in imitating one of the great metteurs-en-scène (2002’s Sirk pastiche Far From Heaven) and a fairly studied, slightly stiff melodrama whose style trades on its 1950s setting (2015’s Carol), it is perhaps not surprising that Haynes was only able to integrate the astringency of his early work with the classicism in which he has become absorbed by equipping himself with a layer of armour. May December (2023) takes as its inspiration the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who began a sexual relationship with one of her students, Vili Fualaau, then twelve years old, in 1996. After she had served a seven-year sentence for statutory rape, Letourneau and Fualaau married, and remained together for fourteen years. The film retains only the outline of the story, changing the names, timeline, location, profession and other details. Its structural gambit is to sidestep a straight recounting of the story and instead take as its subject a research sojourn undertaken by actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who stays with the family of Letourneau surrogate Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) as she prepares to Gracie in a movie.

The film therefore raises itself to the second power, simultaneously enjoying the tabloid thrill of its subject matter and examining the construction of that enjoyment through its fictional representation. Is this a dialectic or just an alibi? Asking that question, however basic, could be missing the point of the bicameralism Haynes is attempting to run, which has been called high camp but is more accurately just irony, if the latter is defined, as Schlegel did, as “permanent parabasis”, the point being to tread the highwire for the whole running time, neither falling onto the side of the one nor the other. So, Portman’s character waxes about wanting her counterpart to “feel seen and known”, and tells her producer that she feels like she’s “getting really close to something true, something honest”; and the viewer can both laugh at her craven self-interest and appreciate Portman’s examination of what might lie behind the strange desire that drives an actor such as herself. For Haynes, irony is not only a mode of sincerity but the only possible one.

The film’s early reception reduced Haynes to Head Carpenter of the scenery the leads chew, but what is most interesting about his contribution is everything that distinguishes May December from an acting showcase. Of a piece with the picture’s structural irony is a cod-ominous leitmotif consisting of a slow, interventionist zoom, soundtracked with a four-note chromatic piano riff, which recalls the camp mannerism of certain 1970s gialli. But apart from the zooms, what seems like a unified style on Haynes’ part actually decomposes, on closer inspection, into quite a range of devices. There’s deep focus, which makes the characters into cardboard cutouts against the geometry of American interiors; there’s extreme shallow focus, gauzing up the background and suspending figures in a kind of impressionist slop; there’s canny use of verticals and horizontals, but no sustained reliance on line and division; there’s no preponderance of any shot distance over any other, no great brouhaha over whether the camera will move or not.

It is this fluency in the service of Haynes’ double-edged construction that makes the film’s coda, as gaudy a gesture as that with which Astrakan ends, somewhat hard to swallow. Suddenly, we are looking, from the perspective of an on-set actor, at a film crew engaged in the hurly-burly preceding a first take. Then we see three takes, in succession, of a scene from the film Elizabeth has been preparing for. It is, it turns out, a very tawdry affair. The actress dons a bad wig and fondles a snake – Gracie met her future husband while working in a pet store – while intoning bad double entendres at her clearly post-pubescent co-star. After the third take, the director wants to move on, but Elizabeth pleads for one more go: “It’s getting more real”.

Why is this here? Does the badness of Elizabeth’s film-within prove the moral bankruptcy of her increasingly intrusive behaviour throughout the film-without? Would that behaviour be justified if her film were good; as good, say, as May December? Is it possible that what appears as the apex of a self-reflexivity that has been running through the whole film is in fact the moment at which representation is bifurcated into good and bad varieties, with this film on the good side? But the point has surely been that the contradictions that attend representation—here specifically, converting a real chain of events, or perhaps merely the sort of chain of events that could plausibly take place, into a realistic narrative—cannot be sidestepped. As in Astrakan, the ending, because it is so clearly formally disjoined from the rest of the film, appears as the definitive authorial gesture. In this case it seems to interpose a real and circumscribed parabasis that undoes the sense of permanent parabasis underlying the rest of the film. The question of mise-en-scène is cast aside through the adoption of an obvious imitation of amateurish composition, complete with a fake production company watermark. And, again as in Astrakan, a gesture that is, in the moment of a first viewing, striking in its rhetoric and powerful in its effect, persists in the memory as something conservative, a kind of ostentatious retreat, scorching the earth as it goes.

At the same time, there is something undeniable here. The strange repetition involved in a filmic realism achieved through a process of ‘takes’ cannot be displayed in unbroken sequence in this way without having the effect of exposing a kind of ritualistic element to it, which in turn raises the question of what claim on reality is being made through such a peculiar activity. What does it imply when an entire artistic system aiming at true representation is practically realised by having the same words and actions performed in a reiterated sequence, which is only terminated by an enigmatic judgment about the success of one of these instances: “print that one”? This is a process whose only analogue within the reality cinema takes as its object is perhaps those obsessional repetitive behaviours which, attempting to master reality, unravel it in the direction of the oblivion, in the irrational drive that lurks behind those human actions least amenable to any sort of narrative marshalling. Is it therefore in the ritual itself, and not in the fruits it bears, that cinema comes closest to a real truth about human life?

Cerrar los ojos (Victor Erice, 2023)

III. Cerrar los ojos

Like Astrakan and May December, Cerrar los ojos (2023), Victor Erice’s first feature in thirty years and his first fiction in forty, welcomes the viewer into its world with soft film grain and warm, balanced light. The long first scene consists of a discussion between a man named Franch, whose profession is never specified, and Lévy, an elderly, dying Sephardi businessman who has summoned Franch to his estate, Triste-le-Roy (the first of the film’s litany of references to other works of art), in order to charge him with locating and returning his estranged daughter, Qiao Shu, the product of an affair with a dancer in Shanghai fourteen years earlier. As Franch leaves Triste-le-Roy, the frame freezes, and a voiceover tells us that what we have just watched is one of the last scenes completed by the actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado), who has been missing for twenty years.

Thus, like May December, Cerrar los ojos will refer to a film-within-a-film. The rest of the story centres on Miguel “Mike” Garay (Manolo Solo), the director of the film whose first scene we have just watched, The Goodbye Look. Mike has been asked to appear on a television programme about Arenas’ disappearance, and to provide the existing footage from the film for use in the programme. Returning to this unsolved mystery, which marked a caesura in Mike’s life from which he clearly has not recovered, leads to a series of interactions with people from his past. The extended last act begins when he hears that the administrator of a retirement home believes that a taciturn, amnesiac live-in maintenance man at her facility is the missing Arenas.

Cerrar los ojos is a rich, enigmatic film, deliberately paced over the course of its near-three-hour runtime but full of careful detail and dense with understated allusion. This essay will have to limit itself to those elements of the film that directly relate to the present discussion, and leave the rest to the critical treatments it deserves to receive. Of immediate significance is the aesthetic qualities of Erice’s images and mise-en-scène. Outside of the film-within-the-film, the cinematography is digital and antiseptic, even televisual. Erice withholds the independently ‘beautiful’ images of his previous films, choosing virtually anonymous locations: a coldly bright television studio, a beige museum café that could be found in any major city in the world, a rundown beachside caravan strip. Erice’s is not the cinematic Iberia of endless dusty plateaus, reflected back to Spanish cinephiles like Mike and his friend and former editor Max (Mario Pardo) in Hollywood epics and Spaghetti Westerns, but somewhere grey, rainy, unremarkable.Mike is shown translating Samuel Blumenfeld’s biography of Michał Waszyński, a mercurial figure who produced several Hollywood epics filmed in Spain, including El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. Erice’s mise-en-scène is equally austere—not the pronounced, stylised austerity of filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang or Béla Tarr, but a kind of stylistic parsimony, making do with the humblest Griffithian formal conventions: clearly delineated establishing shots, mediums and closeups; scenes arranged as simple shot/reverse shot sequences; closeups employed to underline emotional emphases. The viewer is unlikely to leave with many images imprinted in the memory that depend on the director’s compositional virtuosity over and above than the qualities of what is in front of the camera—Solo’s wide, tired, sad eyes, for example, which become the film’s abiding motif. It is virtually a manifesto against the ideology of the ‘perfect shot’.

Erice’s approach to realism therefore goes beyond both Depesseville’s unsentimental naturalism cum visionary Traumarbeit and Haynes’ fluent mise-en-scène cum thematic reflexivity, two approaches that, as we have seen, eventually depend on Manichaean divisions. He does not give himself the option of simply restoring beauty to reality by rendering it in gorgeous 16mm—as both Astrakan and May December do in order to set up an opposition to their thematic darkness—since for him representation of the world has also to do with the forms of representation the world puts at its own disposal. Erice does not only show the world of Spain in 2012 but the visual texture of this world as it presented itself to itself, which for him is inseparable from the way that world is lived in.We first see Mike at the bus stop outside Kinépolis Ciudad de la Imagen in Madrid, the largest multiplex in the world. Though the film makes no explicit references to the fact, it is pointedly set in the year of Spain’s sovereign debt crisis and subsequent bailout. The rural Spain of Erice’s previous films, in which personal questions intermingled with the national question of Francoism, is replaced with the Spain of economic austerity and Troika-mandated fiscal restructuring; in short, just another EU state compelled to occupy its proper place in the global economy. It is a mosaic of tabloid TV, nondescript institutions and sincere attempts at honest living in difficult circumstances.

This formal and historical anti-romanticism inflects the film’s self-reflexivity, its thematic treatment of film in general. In its reception, Cerrar los ojos was soon mistaken for a straightforward ‘love letter to the cinema’, which it is not. Its refusal of nostalgia is epitomised by Mike’s choice of an epigraph for one of his novels (he is more well-known as a writer than as a director), the famous first line of Paul Nizan’s Aden Arabie: “I was twenty. I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of your life.” It’s no coincidence that the filmmakers invoked at various junctures—von Sternberg, Nick Ray, Dreyer—are all figures tinged with failure or rejection or bitterness or self-sabotage or all of the above. And the points at which life and film meet are more sad than wistful: Mike wearing and then discarding the coat Julio wore during the making of The Goodbye Look; Julio keeping a photograph of Lévy’s fictional daughter, a prop from the film, and believing himself to have been to China, as his character Franch did. In Cerrar los ojos, film does not represent a lost golden age to gaze backwards upon, misty-eyed, but nor is it a fabric whose threads can simply be pulled at the way a cat plays with yarn. The film contains no straightforward critique—either transcendent or immanent—of film in general, but its slow procession of quiet scenes ends up in a slow dance around a cinematic void of some kind, around a question that is hard to formulate because it is never articulated outright.

Everything crystallizes, inasmuch as anything crystallizes, in the last sequence. Mike has hit on the idea that Julio might remember who he is if he sees himself on screen. He finds a shuttered cinema in a village near the retirement home and asks Max to bring the reel of the final scene—which, along with the opening, is the only part of The Goodbye Look that was finished. Julio is brought to the cinema along with many of the other characters we have met, the old projector is dusted off, and the scene begins. What happens can only be marred by summary. Julio’s character Franch brings Qiao Shu back to Triste-le-Roy. Overcome with emotion, Lévy plays a piano piece for her, from the depths of his Eastern memories, and then collapses, finally able to die the death he has been holding back until her return. She crouches by his side, and Franch joins her. They look into the camera. These moments are intercut with shots of the audience members looking up at the screen, including Julio himself. And then finally also at us, before, as the title predicted, the eyes finally close. The moment is just as startlingly unreal as the volte faces in Astrakan and May December, and yet it also feels like a culmination, rather than a repudiation, of the film’s narrative realism, a head-on confrontation rather than a look to the skies or a sidelong glance. In fact, encompassed in this instant is a series of frames of reference and relation that are impossible to register in the time of a viewing: the actors in The Goodbye Look look at us; we look at them; we look at Julio looking at himself; Julio is himself looked at by the actors, but also by himself; Julio looks at us; we look at him. It is as though Erice has taken Godard’s theoretical remarks on the dialectic of shot and reverse shot in Notre Musique and spun them out, mise-en-scène giving way to a mise-en-abyme in which all the fine points of the relationship between reality and its filmic representation tumble before us like dominoes, until we reach the final question: do the gazes meet? And let’s remember what Godard says directly before this commentary:

Try to see something. Try to imagine something. In the first case, you say, ‘look at that’. In the second, you say: ‘close your eyes’.


Seeing and imagining, opening your eyes and closing them, realism and abstraction, narrative and image…these are nothing more than names for the strands of a double helix which structures film as DNA does the organism. If Astrakan and May December suggest, with their concluding reversals, an identity of ontogeny and phylogeny—each film playing out in miniature the fate of film itself, as it hones and then transgresses narrative realism—then Cerrar los ojos reminds us that every realism is already a crisis of realism, that Griffith’s own yearning for “the beauty of the moving wind in the trees” is a yearning for the same immediate and absolute presence that Méliès thought he had seen in the background of one of the Lumières’ actualités in 1895, that the eyes are always closing and never close.