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A Bright Darkness: Masao Adachi
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Always
lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in Nature? For my part, I see only forms that are lit up and forms
that are not. There is only light and shadow.
Francisco de Goya |
The Desire to Make a Film
The film
opens with the hypnotic cadence of the oscillation of two bodies, of which we
perceive only parts. A man swings a little girl; we listen to the swing’s
squeak and a child’s voice, whispering. The camera gets closer and closer to
the bodies – we can feel this shaky camera, and the vibration of the body
holding it. Afternoon light gives the image an atmosphere of intimacy, like the
first words of the filmmaker, emerging with the same luminous tone of the bright darkness that embraces the bodies
of the man – Masao Adachi – and the child.
The first
images of Masao Adachi immerse the
spectator in a tactile space. A space that returns us to another video-film
made by Philippe Grandrieux with Thierry Kuntzel in 1981: Cubist Painting. Based on the text of the same name by Jean Paulhan,
its narration is built by alternating video (Kuntzel) with film (Grandrieux)
images. In this work, the protagonist, after observing a room bathed in
blinding light, enters into the darkness and conceives a new sensorial
perception of his everyday space. ‘It would thus seem […] that touching takes
precedence over seeing, tactile space over visual space; as if our gaze was to
become an extension of our body’. (1) This is rather like the transmutation of
filmic space that occurs in the first sequence of Masao Adachi. Watching the images of the encounter between Adachi
and the child, we feel the sense of touch replacing that of sight, tactility
predominating over the visual space. We experience the gaze as an extension of
the body, our retinas reborn as fingertips.
We swim
into a touchable, liquid darkness, an intimate space analogous to Adachi’s
exercise of introspection in the opening scene. In Masao Adachi, the spectator makes a trip into the interiority of a
body, through the streams of consciousness of Adachi’s memories. In ‘The
Painting Before Painting’, a chapter
from Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation, Gilles Deleuze describes the moment prior to what he calls the
‘act of painting’ – that moment when the painter, hypothetically, stands before
the blank canvas.
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1. For an extract in English from Jean Paulhan’s La peinture cubiste (Paris: Denoël, 1970), see here. |
It would be a mistake to think that the painter works on a white and virgin surface. (…) The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. (…) he paints on images that are already there. (2) |
2. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (
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In that
sense, we can read the film’s opening sequence as the mise en scène of all the things that Masao Adachi ‘has in his
head’, as if we were witnessing the ‘filming before filming’ of the Japanese
director.
If Masao Adachi opens with a journey into
its subject’s consciousness and desires, making us think specifically about his
work, we shall soon discover, after seeing the selection of fragments of his
cinema spread throughout, that it also constitutes a powerful document of
Grandrieux’s own work and processes. In fact, the selection of Adachi’s scenes
not only illustrate his words, but also stage some of Grandrieux’s filmic
sources, inspirations and references.
In the film, Adachi remarks:
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The film
must be returned to the world of sensations. Since we filmed with our
sensations, we must finish the film with sensations and not as a prisoner of
our ideas. To go on, a sensation is something that flows, it’s very fluid,
while ideas are fragments of thoughts. This goes back to what I said earlier in
the film. Actually, what are filmed are just fragments of thoughts. The film is
only visible once it is returned to the world of sensations. It's a question I
would like to pursue, and it provokes in me the desire to experiment. That’s
it, Philippe. I think that's the essence of cinema. (…) The world of ideas is
made up of fragments of thought. The world of sensations is linked to that
of ideas, and we just need to return to the world of sensations. I say this
because I think that Philippe does the same.
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Adachi’s
thoughts place his images – and Grandrieux’s, too – in the ‘way of sensation’
that was formulated by Deleuze in his analysis of Bacon’s painting.
In his
analysis of Bacon’s works, Deleuze defines a third way of bodily figuration,
neither figurative nor abstract. ‘There are two ways of going beyond figuration
(that is, beyond both the illustrative and the figurative): either toward
abstract form or toward the Figure. Cézanne gave a simple name to this way of
the Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation’.
(3) Grandrieux, in his text ‘The Insane Horizon of Cinema’, traces the major
characteristics of his cinema. One is the research of the transmission of
sensations through filmic images; this is how cinema becomes a ‘sensorial
experience of the world’.
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3. Ibid., p. 34.
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We are won over and forget ourselves and we forget
what we carry, and what we don’t know, what we can’t know, although it
fascinates us and brings us to life, to a life that is lived, and so it
unfolds. This rhythm, this way of framing, of lighting the body, of
interrupting the take, it comes, it’s there, and cinema closely touches its
essence, a sensorial experience of the world, whose destiny is to transmit
through sensations, the only means which are its own, to convey a fraction of
the passing world, the sensible world, soon dissipated, lost, carried away by
time, a part of time, and that feeling of ‘inevitable solidarity’ may resound
in each one of us. (4)
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4. Translation by Maria
Palacios Cruz at Diagonal
Thoughts. Originally published as ‘L’horizon insensé du cinéma’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 551 (November
2000).
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Following
this line of thought, Grandrieux’s desire in Masao Adachi is not only to build a portrait of this artist’s life
and work but, above all, to continue developing the obsessive issue that
appears in all his cinema: how to film a living body, marked and affected by
time. The same question relates to the Figure,
‘a sensible form related to a sensation’, as expressed by Deleuze. ‘The portrait of a
man, his hands, his face, shaped by the time in which he has lived’: Grandrieux’s words accompany the images of Adachi’s wrinkled hands, filmed so,
so close, abolishing all possible distance between subject and camera. ‘Does the
beauty of the hands, the face, express the truth with which life passes through
us?’
This
is the same question of ‘painting time’ enunciated by Goya in his famous
declaration: ‘Time also paints’. Painting time is a research also embodied in
Francis Bacon’s portraits and their figuration of bodies; in some sense, Goya
is situated in the same ‘way of sensation’ as Bacon, and that Adachi and
Grandrieux express in their cinema. Deleuze on Bacon:
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There is a great force of time in Bacon, time itself is being painted.
The variation of texture and color on a body, a head, or a back (…) is actually
a temporal variation regulated down to the tenth of a second. Hence the
chromatic treatment of the body, which is very different from the treatment of
the fields of color: the chronochromatism of the body is opposed to the monochromatism
of the flat fields. To put time inside the Figure – this is the force of bodies
in Bacon. (5)
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5. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 48.
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We can
find in Grandrieux’s filmed images, in his bodily figurations, the same
‘variation of texture and color on a body (...) putting time inside the Figure’
– especially as Grandrieux is himself the camera operator, ‘imprinting’, in
this sense, his own moments of living, his
bodily traces, in the skin and body of the film, just as a painter does with a
brush in the living surface of the canvas. Grandrieux films Adachi and whispers
about his search for some images in which we can feel the beat of life; while
the camera searches for the traces of a lifetime in its journey across Adachi’s
hands and face. The portrait of the Japanese filmmaker is chiselled or drawn by
the filmmaker over a background of darkness – sending us back to Goya’s black
paintings and, above all, to the figuration of bodies and faces in Grandrieux’s
own filmmaking career.
In his
films we find faces emerging from darkness, in the cabin where the characters
of Un lac (2008) live; faces
discovered as scraps of light in the hotel room where Jean (Marc Barbé) kills
one of his victims in Sombre (1998);
virginal faces like that of Claire (Elina Löwensohn) in Sombre or Hege (Natalie Rehorova) in Un lac that remind us of Renaissance Madonnas; disfigured faces,
transformed into animal visages, with jaws instead of teeth, like Jean or some
other male characters in Grandrieux’s films. And mirror faces, reflecting
Goya’s and Bacon’s desire for painting – or Adachi’s and Grandrieux’s desire
for filming – the beauty of time and of life.
In
one of the Adachi extracts selected by Grandrieux, one guerrilla rebel, after
talking about his hard training conditions, declares: ‘The
landscape was very beautiful. Everything was so lovely. It’s possible that
beauty has strengthened our resolve’. After
his speech, over a shot of the blue sky crossed by the white line traced by a
plane – a shot reminiscent of one in Sombre – the phrase is spoken again, but this time by the French filmmaker, who
adds: ‘I’m reminded of Dostoevsky: beauty will save the world’.
Beauty
will save the world: and so we return to the opening sequence, where Adachi
explored the nature of his desire to make films – ‘No, it’s not a question of
logic. It’s a question of taste’. Something that language can hardly express.
The
sensible world, the beauty of Nature that inspires the guerrilla fighter to
keep fighting – this is a central subject of the film. It comes back at the end
when Adachi, questioned by Grandrieux about the relation between the worlds of
ideas and sensations, answers: ‘The film is only visible once it is returned to
the world of sensations. It's a question I would like to pursue, and it
provokes in me the desire to experiment. That’s it, Philippe. I think that's
the essence of cinema’.
With these words Adachi is, rather than closing the film, reopening it: the spectator returns to the first shots, within a bright darkness that lights up two bodies. A bright darkness where a man swings a little girl, and we listen to the swing’s squeak and a child’s whispering voice. The camera gets closer and closer to the bodies – we can feel this shaky camera, and the vibration of the body holding it. Then, the filmmaker will start to speak his thoughts aloud, trying to explain his desire for filmmaking … And then … |
from Issue 2: Devils |
© Cloe Masotta Lijtmaer and LOLA June 2012 Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |