I have started watching decent films and looking for innovative filmmakers after a break of actively doing so – recall, I began L3 watching as much sci-fi as possible. However, I have now reached a point where I’ve got something that could act as a kind of loose script to begin making related work to live online in the form of moving images, perhaps gifs or short films. I am not sure yet what they will be or look like – but as I said in the Assignment, I feel quite strongly the work needs that – at the moment, perhaps it is like a plan/script/blueprint. I don’t think it should be a sub-element. I do think it should be a partner to act in tandem. Whether I use SYP or BOW A5 to work on it (perhaps both) is something to be seen.
I watched Claire Denis’ High Life (2018) on Friday and have spent the rest of the weekend watching and reading all I can about her.
High Life is visually incredible and all the way through I kept being reminded of contemporary photography I have seen recently – especially Valentine Bo, Your next step would be to do the transmission. (Interestingly, this work has stayed with me although I was not sure of it when I saw it at Foam’s Talent Exhibition in Vauxhall last year). Denis’s work is darker, less deliberately kitsch, and for me – perhaps unfairly, in a different realm by far. I wondered who had done the set design as its very distinctive. Somewhere on the internet, it claimed that Olafur Eliasson had designed the space-ship, but Denis says in an interview his contribution is only the yellow light (unsurprisingly) at the end. Of course, there is a team of art, set, and production designers, and together, with Denis, they create a tangible, distinctive and stunning although grotesque landscape perhaps as Peter Greenaway or Andrei Tarkovsky can. I plan to watch the film again as there is so much to see.
But I am most interested in the way Denis eschews Hollywood conventions and narrative structures. I had recently also watched Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) which ends with typical Hollywood heroism. Denis’s films never end that way. Both films are about an abandoned human far from earth (home) but Denis’s is profound in ways that the Hollywood film (very exciting and well-executed) could never be.
In Beau Travail (1999) I was reminded of Richard Wrangham’s Goodness Paradox where we are told how humans are the only mammals that plan their violence. There is something so psychopathic about the way the Foreign Legion soldiers are required to iron and make their beds to absolute perfection. The violence is made more terrifying as the film is at times like a ballet or an opera exploring ritual and distancing – which we use to remove ourselves from the destruction and violence we commit.
Like Denis, I grew up in a colonial country and knowing something of the inherent violence and ongoing trauma for people and land meant White Material (2010) would always be a profound watch for me.
Denis never glamourises violence. She often doesn’t show it directly. We more usually see the outcome or obstructed views. She also directs the camera unusually at times, we see nothing but the back of someone’s head for far longer than in other films. In High Life, she mixes ultra HD and special effects of the present which is really the future with Super 16 for the past. The colours are beautiful and alluring in both cases.
There are no linear narratives. She is very sparing with dialogue and uses layers of sounds, music, abstract visuals. She is an incredible filmmaker. I really like that she has always been determined to do things her way, that she refuses to give in to normal conventions of film. She says in an interview, yes, perhaps she is like that because although European, she did not grow up in Europe. I often wonder the same thing about myself – this sense of being an outsider informs a great deal across all aspects of my life. I wish I had the same presence and certainty about that difference throughout my own life. Instead – I realised just a few years ago. I will watch her first film Chocolat (1988) and then watch High Life again for inspiration – paying careful attention to the editing choices she makes. I also read, she shoots quickly but makes the film in the editing suite – which is clear. Each element is given value. Nothing is tagged on.
Denis’s sets up her shots like photographs too. And the camera stays, settles, waits before moving on or a cut is made so we can take what is being seen in. The end of Beau Trevail is truly great.
I like this from Slant Magazine, “Denis isn’t interested in Hollywood-style verisimilitude, as High Life is only interested in using the space-outlaw template to talk about Earth. The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Ridley Scott’s The Martian.” (MacFarlane, 2018). It reminds me of Wrangham’s arguments about our complex nature.
https://slate.com/culture/2019/04/high-life-claire-denis-director-interview-sex-space.html
https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/high-life
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