There is a moment towards the end of Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from 1956, when the hero, Miles Bennell, is rushing out of the town onto the motorway beyond. The town alarm is going, and the music comes in, strings beating in time, even seemingly in key, with the wail of the siren. The effect recalls the music of Edgard
Varèse, who had been complementing his orchestra with sirens since the 1920s. Varèse had a certain notoriety in America at that time, in the early years of the Cold War. On the one hand, some suspected him of communist sympathies; others claimed the scientists at Los Alamos listened to his music while working on the bomb. His public image, as Anne Schreffler has remarked, was less that of a musician, more some sort of mad scientist, "a prophet of the atomic age."
A similar thing happens in Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of the same film. There is no 'town alarm' here. Kaufman's film is set in San Francisco; not across the bay in sleepy Mill Valley. But composer Denny Zeitlin creates his own alarm, with jerkily alternating, high-pitched and dissonant synthesizer chords.
Zeitlin was and remains a professional psychiatrist, rather like Leonard Nimoy's character in the film. He is also a highly respected jazz pianist, praised by Down Beat and positively fawned over in Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties. Thelonius Monk once said of him, "He knows what's happening." In the years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers he worked with Joe Reposo on the music to Sesame Street, composing this gem while he was there (featuring Grace Slick on vocals),
Kaufman's film is a real delight, surely one of the best science fiction remakes of its time, with The Fly and The Thing still a few years round the corner. In a way, though, it resembles less any other science fiction film of the period than certain political conspiracy thrillers from earlier in the decade, like The Parallax View. Such films of which Fredric Jameson said they represent an attempt to "think a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves."
Its first act is full of these wonderful long takes, in which frequently next to nothing is really happening - or if it is, it is partially obscured, seen only in reflection or silhouette. But these moments are invested with incredible tension thanks to the minimal input of Zeitlin strumming piano keys, or easing out a low Moogy throb, or beating some strange and unidentifiable percussion instrument. Later in the film, these scenes are gradually faded out in favour of some increasingly repetitive chase scenes which never for a moment feel repetitive. This at least partly because of the strange things coming out of Zeitlin's band, which at one point in particular - just shortly before the scene mentioned above - starts playing decidedly free.
Even without Zeitlin's music, this would be a great sounding film. Ben Burtt, who provided "special" sound effects, had just finished work on the first Star Wars the previous year and had built up a tremendous library of synthesizers and concrète sounds in the process. Burtt's sound effects are so rich, so interesting, that they sound like music; while Zeitlin's instrumental treatments are so strange as to become like sound effects. At the score's finest moments, these extended techniques and electronic treatments will suddenly burst forth into a full lush orchestral sound, like life bursting out of some alien seed.
In order to survive, protagonists Bennell and Elizabeth Driscoll have to keep awake, guzzling fistfulls of speed along the way to help them do so. Before long, Driscoll is begging for sleep, "I can't stay awake anymore!" Things were evidently going much the same way for Zeitlin himself, who was so punished by the weeks of non-stop twenty-hour days working on the soundtrack that he refused to work on another film score again.
Since 2002's gruesome rape-and-revenge tragedy, Irreversible, the films of Gaspar Noé have often been grouped together with what James Quandt baptised the 'New French Extremity'. This term, introduced in the February 2004 issue of Artforum magazine, uneasily aligned (then) recent works by directors as diverse as Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux, Alexandre Aja and Leos Carax under a rubric “determined to break every taboo.” With the release earlier this year of Noé's latest film, Enter the Void, however, it may make more sense to examine this work by the Argentine -born director in terms of Fredric Jameson's conception of 'magic realist cinema'.
Jameson begins his theory of magic realism with Alejo Carpentier's “prologo” to El Reino de este Mundo, in which he relates the combinatorial mischief of surrealists to that of magicians. Discussing André Masson's drawings in Martinique, he describes how the marvellous truth of the subject devours the artist - a truth that comes into being only through an unexpected alteration of reality, related to miracles. “The marvellous,” he writes, “implies a faith.” The real maravilloso is an aspect of everyday life, but one still imbued with the “invocatory power” of folklore. Jameson describes Carpentier's theory in terms of “a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself – not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived.” (177) Later, and particularly since the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Jameson relates, magic realism has become associated with a certain movement in Latin American literature concerned with a kind of anthropology of the fantastic.
Drawing on Lacan, and Freud's conceptualisation of the “uncanny,” Jameson seeks to transfer this notion of magic realism from the realm of painting and literature to that of film, seeking in doing so an alternative to the late capitalist logic of postmodernism. The essay, 'On Magic Realism in Film', teases out its programme through an analysis of three films from Poland, Venezuela, and Columbia. With each of these films, it is through their specific relation to a certain historical referent, the way in which these films engage with history as such, that they find themselves opposed to cinematic postmodernism. Such that, in spite of the undeniable visual pleasure of the films in question, it is far from the case, as in postmodern 'nostalgia' films (such as The Godfather, The Conformist, &c.), that the viewer's engagement with history is confined to the consumption of a “surface sheen of period fashion reality” in the manner of some “visual commodity” (179).
To consider Enter the Void as a magic realist text now appears doubly strange: a French film set in contemporary Japan, it seems pretty far from either a work of Latin American literary anthropology, or of cinematic historiography. Its concern is neither with any historical referent, nor, for that matter, with magic (at least, in the strict sense). And yet, in spite of these apparently insuperable differences, there appear certain aspects of both Jameson's conceptualisation, and those of older writers, that seem to describe precisely the contours of such a film. In a French context, the appellation may not seem to strange, of course; when I interviewed Gaspar Noé earlier this year for The Quietus, he immediately related the notion of magic realism to that older term, poetic realism, usually applied to French cinema from the 1930s, such as the films of Jean Vigo, Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir (but for Noé, just as much a reference to Fellini). He described his film as “kind of a fairy tale” and yet at the same time insisted that it was “more realistic” than its brutal predecessor, Irreversible.
Of course, Noé himself can be understood in more than just a French context. He was born in Buenos Aires, the son of Argentine artist and writer, Luis Felipe Noé. Coming to prominence in the early 1960s, Noé Sr. can be seen as Marquez's contemporary in South America, and the aesthetics of the Otra Figuracion group, of which he was a key member, share with the latter a sense of reality transformed and surrealistically distorted. In the films Jameson considers, he describes a particular approach to the use of colour in terms of “a unique supplement, and the source of a peculiar source of pleasure, or fascination” (178) and the same could clearly be said of the bright, vivid hues of Luis Felipe Noé's paintings. It is in terms of colour that Noé Jr draws a link between his own work and that of his father, suggesting that the colourfulness of his latest film may be an attempt “to top [his father's] fluorescent colours.” A first-person perspective film about hallucinogenic drugs, seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Oscar, and set in the neon city of Tokyo, Enter the Void is characterised by a lysergic visual palette, and some of the more fantastic 'trip' sequences are comparable to the experimental films of Jordan Belson.
For what Jameson calls 'magic realist' cinema, it is not just a question of bright colours, of course. He speaks of an “awakening of fresh sight” (195) and here one thinks almost inescapably of the drug experience described in Noé's film, and of Aldous Huxley's reference to Blake's “doors of perception.” In a now famous anecdote, Noé has claimed the original idea for Enter the Void came to him whilst watching Robert Montgomery's (1947) first-person perspective Chandler adaptation, The Lady in the Lake, after consuming magic mushrooms. We hear of the disappointment of Noé's teenage self that the hallucinogenic drug experience had never been accurately rendered on film before. Enter the Void thus seeks in some way to redress this perceived imbalance. That a heightened, transfigured perception of colour forms a major part of this psychedelic experience - the “magic mirror” referred to by the character, Alex - should be self-evident, not least from the numerous aforementioned trip sequences in which colour quite literally detaches itself from being the property of some object to become a kind of free-floating – and “mesmerising” as Jameson (ibid.) puts it - quality in itself.
“I like showing the flesh of people,” Gaspar Noé told me. “Even the genitals or whatever. And when you shoot a car crash, of course you have to show that humans are made of flesh and that's how they come to this world and that's how they leave the world too.” Not just through colour then, but just as much in its relation to the body, Enter the Void enters itself within the orbit of Jameson's theory of magic realist cinema. Jameson speaks of a “reduction to the body” mobilising the “resources and potentialities of pornography and violence” (203) not just as constituent of this magic realism but part of a greater “de-narrativisation” of film (a term inspired by Stanley Cavell's “de-theatricalisation”). In Enter the Void, this focus on the body, and the body in its fleshiness, is taken to almost absurd heights, in for instance the long 'Love Hotel' sequence, denounced by so many critics as boring and pointless. It's very excess becomes its own rationale, its superfluity abstracting the flow of the narrative into something else – less like the telling of a story, more like the drug experience itself: lingering unnecessarily, gazing in rapture.
It is here, through the neutralisation of narrative into what Jameson calls “a seeing or a looking in the filmic present” (205) that we enter, finally, the film's relation to history. For though, Enter the Void is not set in any distinct temporal past – rather, in fact, following William Gibson's provocative remark in which “the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed,” we might call modern Tokyo a kind of spatial future – it nonetheless offers a kind of history of the individual subject, as seen through particular moments of bodily trauma (for example, the death of his parents in a car crash). And that history, experienced as it is fragmentarily, drifting through visions and memories in a psychedelic haze, is precisely Jameson's “history with holes, perforated history, which includes gaps not immediately visible to us, so close is our gaze to its objects of perception.” (179) Going further – think here of the cinematic fillip of using first-person perspective throughout: “a kind of bas-relief history in which only bodily manifestations are retained, such that we are ourselves inserted into it without even minimal distance.” (205)
It is here, through this manifestation of a scattered temporal history in the midst of a spatial future, that Enter the Void employs these tropes of magic realism in the service of a critique of a certain kind of ideology. For if the idea of magic realism implies a disjunction or overlap, between different historical temporalities, “precapitalist and nascent capitalist or technological” (190) this is precisely the dream of Tokyo as dreamt by Western tourists, which is what the central characters of the film, despite their somewhat dubious resident status, most clearly are. Towers of neon - but just around the corner, traditional wooden machiya; serene, ancient temples AND MacDonalds AND Starbucks AND nightclubs playing up to date techno music. Isn't this precisely the tourist fantasy of Japan? And right in the middle of this, the dubious presence of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, proffered approvingly by the stoned 'hippy' Alex, totem of the gaze of the Western “traveller” upon Eastern religious culture since, at least, the 1960s.
If the story seems at first to follow the spiritual passage of Oscar after his death at the hands of the Japanese police, leading up to his eventual reincarnation (and therefore confirming the narrative of the Tibetan Book of the Dead), this initial interpretation needs to be interrogated, if not rejected outright, on a second glance. In fact, everything in the mise-en-scène points towards, on the contrary, an extended hallucinatory fantasy from which Oscar may well wake up. “I'm an atheist,” insists Noé “So even if the movie portrays the dream of a guy who dreams that his soul can come out of his body, in reality you never know what happened. He gets shot. And at the end of the movie you don't know if he's dead, or if he's gonna wake up in a hospital, or if he's going to wake up in prison.” Enter the Void, then, uses these tropes of the magic realist cinema, to expose and deconstruct the Western imagination of Japan, and of Tokyo in particular.
The film thus seeks less to replicate the actual experience of taking drugs but rather to “reconquer that terrain by other, internally constructed means” (206). Hypnotic visuals, psychedelic music (Coil, Denis Smalley, Delia Derbyshire, Zbigiev Karkovsky, Toshiya Tsunoda, Alvin Lucier), are all marshalled to the service of generating a fantasy that can be perceived directly as such. The film alienates its audience even as it draws them deeper inside itself, through a kind of attraction/repulsion that is at the heart of Freud's theory of desire, and the Lacanian concept of the objet petit a. The peculiar orientalist fascination of Japan for the Western traveller is structurally equivalent to this Freudian 'Thing', offering itself as a “magic mirror” to the Western gaze, just like the DMT that Oscar takes at the start of the film. As Gaspar Noé says of film-making itself, “At the end, you are playing with a spectator who wants to play with you.” The very pellicular of the movie, its skin/surface, acts as a libidinal intensification of this unspoken content, and of the desiring gaze of the viewer – offering it back as disavowed fetishism, or “magic mirror.”
(all page references in brackets are to: Jameson, F. 'On Magic Realism in Film' in Signatures of the Visible, New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2007)
The song 'Dave the Moonman' by the Scottish band Looper concerns a character, the very 'Dave' of the title, who spends his time at parties biting people's ears of about the why the moon landings must have been a hoax, about dual light sources and the Van-Allen Belt, Kodak film and the impression left by footprints. "I thought he had a mission, Dave the Moonman, to prove to everyone that no-one had ever landed on the moon. But that wasn't it at all. He was telling everyone all this stuff he'd learned cause he was hoping someone could prove to him it was wrong, and it wasn't just a hoax. Cause dreaming was so much harder otherwise," the song ends. "Someone had managed to get there. Someone had managed to do that. A truly impossible thing."
The new film from Kutlug Ataman, begins with a reminder of its own impossibility, "You cannot tell this story. Not now," says the narrator over a series of stunning black and white photos that move slowly from the harsh landscape itself, through the ruins of a former culture, to occupied rural dwellings, and finally, people. This brief montage and its attendant voice-over meta-narrative (in as much as it doesn't just tell us a story, but tells us that it is telling us a story, and, even further, tells us about the telling of that story, that it is a story which should not or can not be told), do more than simply establish the film's setting. It establishes this setting as scene, and as "scene of a crime" where, following Fredric Jameson, "the scandal and the violence, the punctuality and irrevocability of "crime" is simply shorthand for the unexpected emergence of the Event as such." The plot then unfolds through a mixture of expert testimony and these beautiful high-contrast photos, of a village in Turkey's Erizincan province.
Set in 1957, three years before the military coup, a passing Democratic Party politician is forced by car trouble to stop in the village and decides to take the opportunity to engage in a little public speech-making. He boldly tells the villagers that he will bring modernity to them, that this small town will be the next Istanbul, the Paris of the East. He tells them about the Russian space programme and about Sputnik and makes them all sorts of promises. Of course, the villagers laugh and jeer at the man and his empty electioneering, but people from the neighbouring villages start to gossip, start to say that these villagers are crazy - that they think they are going to go the moon! Ultimately a group of the village's more eccentric or romantically inclined inhabitants decide that the only way to save the village's reputation is to do just that, and with the minaret from the local mosque and a couple of weather balloons they set about creating a rocket to take them to the moon.
Kutlug Ataman left Turkey at the age of 18, and spent fifteen years living in America, during which time he studied film in Los Angeles. Now living between Istanbul and London, and working in both fine art and cinema, he claims he is most interested in working in those "grey areas" between the popular and the aesthetic. Journey to the Moon drifts through a number of these grey areas itself, between fact and fiction (apparently at its premier screening at a film festival in Istanbul, half the audience believed the story to be true), art and cinema (it was initially made and funded as an installation, with the photographs and interviews divided between two screens), and between past and future. His recent work, he claims, is moving from "dealing with issues of perceived identity and cultural identity as a construct. Now with this film, I am looking at history as a construct, and I wanted to look at the artificial construction of history." The interview subjects are real academics invited to pontificate in the manner of their respective disciplines on this fictional story, and the villagers are all (bar one) non-professional actors who lived in that village, but the story and the photographs are entirely staged - and even, at one point, photoshopped.
The director cites two principal reasons for presenting the film as it is, one was practical - photos are cheaper than film, and the project could only get funding from art institutions - the other to do with verisimilutude. "There is a rupture," he claims, "between frozen images and frozen history on the one side and the moving image - as soon as it starts moving it becomes less real, it becomes reconstruction." Black and white photos with added discourse is usually our mode of access to history. To return to Fredric Jameson, there is a peculiar dialectic to photography, especially in black and white, that makes it at once both always "realistic", even when openly fictional (in as much as the Vitorian genre of "fiction photography" nonetheless points to a certain historical reality of 19th century bourgeois life), and always "modernist", always drawing attention to its own frame, its production process and its author. "The event registered by the camera," Jameson continues, "includes history in the form of death (or the passage of time): photography is thus already a philosophically "existentialist" medium, in which history is subject to a confusion with finitude and with individual biological time; and whose costume dramas and historical records are therefore always close to the borderline between historicity and nostalgia."
Of course, cinematically, this combination of narration and stills with a sort of science fiction story cannot help but remind us of La Jetée, Chris Marker's 'photo-roman' on the theme of time travel which went on to inspire Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. Journey to the Moon, however, is far lighter and warmer in tone, wihout ever quite succumbing to the nostalgic celebration of local colour and lost innocence that seems forever to lurk just off screen. Less the dystopian nightmare of Marker's post-apocalyptic fantasy, than the utopian longing for the radical transformation and infinite potential of the Event. If there is a nostalgic element to Ataman's film, it is that of the moment dubbed 'hauntological' by Jacques Derrida: a nostalgia for the future, or rather for that in the past which opened the door to the future and to the promise of impossible things.
Many thanks to Infinite Thought for linking to Fredric Jameson's (1974) article about Zardoz. Jameson's initial "literary" analysis of Zardoz, as a variation on the Enlightenment critique of religious mystification, might be supplemented by the suggestion that, less a "fable" as Jameson would have it, Boorman's film is a critique of religion which nonetheless takes the form of a religious foundation myth (c.f. Freud's Moses and Monotheism). Sean Connery's Zed first receives his awakening from the pages of a book (albeit Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz and not the holy books and religious scriptures of the Abrahamic religions) handed to him by God-the-Father ("I bred you. I led you."), this then leads him to kill this God-the-Father figure, before, ultimately, leading his people ("the chosen ones") to the promised land of the Vortex, a place of Edenic rural serenity, with the final assault of the 'brutals' against the Vortex dwellers a kind of return of the repressed on the part of this particular Utopia's own structural outside.
