“I was messed up in the head at the time. I thought I was going to make the great American comedy, that I was going to reinvent comedy, and I wanted to pick up from where I saw Buster Keaton or WC Fields. I wanted to isolate this idea of violence and the repetition of violence and how it would become humorous. Y’know, a guy slips on a banana peel and hits his head, or falls down some stairs, or hangs off of a clock tower, and there was something humorous in this. I was trying to figure it out.
“So I thought the purest, truest humour would be to just have a series of brutal fights, where I would just lose the fight. But I would fight every single demographic. So, like on wednesday I’d fight a lesbian, on tuesday I’d fight a Greek guy… you know what I’m saying? To just go through the entire demographic of people that constituted New York City at the time.
“But after maybe five fights I realised that I wasn’t gonna be able to hang on.”
But with Chaplin and Keaton, part of what makes it funny is that you know they’ll be alright…
“Right, but like I said, I felt like it was the next [level]. I felt like it was the evolution. Where you actually knew that the person was not gonna be alright.
“I don’t know how funny it is, but at the time it seemed like that was the most obvious place to go.”
What did your friends and family say about this project?
The eerie, unsettling potential of the harmonica had, by 1978, already been well established. It's slurred wail and reedy chords, its uncanny sound – so close in many respects to the human voice, but a human voice transfigured, become-cyborg – haunted the soundtracks of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and Luchino Visconti's Ossessione like a refrain of the damned. It is this mechanic squeal, drifting in and out like scant punctuation amidst the endless deafening silences, that adds so much to the palpable sense of terror built up in the long, slow build up to Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave.
From beginning to end, the story is untroubled by non-diegetic music, still something of a rarity in late 70s American films. Zarchi claims whatever music he tried to “impose” on the images he'd shot just made him want to “puke”. As a result, harmonica aside, the film contains only two short snatches of (diegetic) music: a soft church organ as the protagonist, Jennifer Hills, goes to ask for forgiveness before embarking on her vengeance; and, a little later, an aria from Puccini's opera Manon Lescault.
It is therefore tempting to impose upon these three very different musics a classical Freudian psychodrama, with the rapist's harmonica playing the part of the film's sonic id, the voice of inhuman machinic desire; the church organ, its superego – or perhaps more properly ego-ideal, the father to whom one must beg forgiveness; leaving the operatic aria to play the role of the film's ego.
Meir Zarchi is somewhat flip about his choice of music for the scene in question. He even admitted when interviewed that right up to the last minute he was undecided between it and some rather jolly uptempo honky tonk piano music. Having amputated the gang leader's manhood and left him bleeding to death in her bathroom, Jennifer (played by Camille Keaton), walks downstairs and puts on a record to block out the screams. She then sits impassively, waiting in an armchair, her gaunt features as deadpan as the father (Buster) she inherited them from.
Though Zarchi wouldn't give his reasons for the choice, the libretto to this particular aria, which comes from the fourth and final act of Puccini's opera, seems peculiarly appropriate:
Sola, perduta, abbandonata in landa desolata! Orror! Intorno a me s'oscura il ciel. Ahime, son sola! E nel profondo deserto io cado, strazio crudel, ah, sola, abbandonata, io la deserta donna! Ah, non voglio morir! Tutto e dunque finito. Terra di pace mi sembrava questa Ah, mia bella funesta ire novelle accende strappar da lui mi si volea; or tutto il mio passato orribile risorge, e vivo innanzi al guardo mio si posa. Ah, di sangue s'e macchiato! Ah, tutto e finito; asil di pace ora la tomba invoco No, non voglio morir. Amore, aita!
Clearly the cries of horror! ('orror!') I don't want to die! ('non voglio morir') the terror of being alone, lost and abandoned ('sola, perduta, abbandonata') in a desolate place ('landa desolata') thought to be a peaceful haven ('terra di pace'), are almost uncannily appropriate to the specific situation Jennifer Hills finds herself in at this moment in the plot.
What should be more unsettling to any hope of a feminist appropriation of I Spit On Your Grave is the implication in the latter half of the poem that all this may have been brought about by her own "fatal beauty" ('bella funesta'). It is, to say the least, disturbing to discover that, at the very moral, sympathetic core of the film's sonic subjectivity, such lyrics would seem to echo the plaint of the gang leader that Hills had brought the rape upon herself by the way she dressed.
Speaking of Le Camelot, the character in L'Atalante played by Gilles Margaritis, during an interview on the DVD of The Complete Jean Vigo, Georgian director Otar Iosseliani says,
The other charmer [seducteur] is someone extremely touching. He hides. That's typically French. He hides everything under a form of clowning. He's impenetrable and neutral. He's cold and mechanical. But you feel that, despite all the misfortunes the director inflicts upon him, he always comes through - because someone is watching him.
On a superficial psychological level, he is just talking about the character's exhibitionist sense of security before an audience. But doesn't this description, and particularly this "he always comes through - because someone is watching him," seem to apply equally well to Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or, perhaps especially, Buster Keaton? In a more profound sense, Iosseliani is talking about the position of the slapstick film hero - his safety is always guaranteed by the camera, and by extension, the audience.
It is oddly fitting in a way that Michael Haneke's (1997) Funny Games came out almost at the same time as a film with almost the same name that sought to revive somewhat the tradition of the cinematic clown, Peter Chelsom's (1995) Funny Bones. For Funny Games is, in a way, the direct opposite of the old slapstick comedies, or rather it is the proof that such films are no longer possible. When Paul (Arno Frisch) winks at us and invites us into his confidence, we know, not only that no-one is safe, but that we will be ourselves responsible for what happens.
A new exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française, in Paris, celebrates Jacques Tati as modernist and deconstructionist. The curators have taken a still from the pharmacy scene in Playtime, wherein the green light of the shop's sign gives its wares and its customers a sickly pallor, and captioned it with a reference to Derrida's famous analysis, in Dissemination, of the crucial ambiguity of the word, 'pharmakon' in Greek, and the role it plays in Plato's Phaedrus. In Socrates speech in the Phaedrus, writing is offered to the king by the god Thoth as a "remedy" (Pharmakon) for his ailing memory, but the word pharmakon is inherently slippery, meaning as much poison as cure. “If the pharmakon is ‘ambivalent,’ it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed," says Derrida, "the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/ body, good/ evil, inside/ outside, memory/ forgetfulness, speech/ writing, etc.).…The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference."
Like middle period Chaplin, Tati's Monsieur Hulot is an (almost) silent man in a world full of noises. Just as the little tramp in Modern Times, Hulot in Mon Oncle may sing and whisper in people's ears but almost never speaks out loud. In a scene early on in Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot we discover why. Arriving in the hotel, laden with luggage, Hulot is unable to introduce himself until having the pipe pulled out of his mouth by the receptionist, like a baby's dummy. It is the pipe that has stolen his voice, one partial object effaced by what is, in a sense, another. Hulot's pipe, though not quite permanently between his lips, is none the less somehow in him more than himself, like Lacan's objet petit a, it is more a part of Hulot than his own body. Look at the famous silhouette on the poster for Mon Oncle, it is by the pipe that we recognise him, and by which he becomes a kind of phatic image. As his frame juts forward when he walks, once gets the sense it is the pipe leading the way, calling the shots. John Towsen equates the removal of Tati's pipe for the exhibitions poster on the Paris metro (!) to the removal of Chaplin's cane.
Not that noise is threatening or disturbing to this quiet man, as they sometimes are to Chaplin, rather it is a source of endless wonder and amusement. In Mon Oncle he spends considerable time positioning his window just so to reflect a pool of light where a little bird is perched, encouraging it to sing. One thinks, also, of his seemingly endless fascination with the noises made by chairs in Playtime. Bazin speaks of Hulot's world as one of a "sonorous inanity" that is nonetheless "undeniably human," claiming it is the sound of Tati's films that give them their "weight" and "moral dimension." As such, it is through sound effects that Tati brings everyday objects to life, and by reducing speech to a meaningless chatter, makes objects of his cast. We find ourselves in the magical world of Disney's Fantasia, where each little individual noise that has been bestowed upon each individual object becomes its spirit. Tati's moral philosophy, then, as revealed by his sound world, is object-orientated.
Of course, if there was one country for whom the controversial personal life of Charles Chaplin could never besmirch the heroic status of his tramp, it was France, and Hulot is very close to Charlot. But it was Buster Keaton who named Tati as his heir. Like Keaton, Tati can be seen as a theorist of technology, somewhat in the mode of Paul Virilio. For Virilio, "The invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident.” Seen this way, the shipwreck is indeed the “futuristic” invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station." In this sense, Hulot, in all his calamitousness, is revealing the truth of the objects he encounters. "You must learn to get along with modern technology," says his sister, Madame Arpel, "become more modern." But in his subtle détournement of the Arpel's lime green sofa, Hulot shows himself the true modernist by transforming it into the close cousin of a Le Corbusier chaise longue.
Unlike Keaton's hardworking young man, however, Tati seems to be permanently on vacation. In his use of the camera and in the editing suite, Tati is a very different director to both Keaton and Chaplin. In his long, still takes, and wide-angle framing, Tati is very much a post-Rosselini comedian, with the austerity of Robert Bresson. There is a stillness and calm to his frame, even as chaos reigns amidst its subjects. The impassive features of Monsieur Hulot are somehow reflected in his international style image of Paris. "The biggest star of all is the set," Tati once said, and his characters, especially the Arpels in Mon Oncle, frequently resemble nothing so much as cuckoo clocks announcing the time. Michel Chion credits Tati's films with a certain "awareness of the cosmos," citing a childhood memory of watching Mon Oncle, "what I really liked about it was that night fell, and you had the feeling you were breathing night air." This sense of space, of air, is complemented by the soundtrack - the ever-present tweeting of bird song in Les vacances, and the ebb and flow of traffic, coming almost to resemble the babbling of a stream, in Playtime. "But what would Mr. Hulot be without vacation?" Asks Bazin. "We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were — a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides."
