To Let Us Both Get To Our Business [No. 2]
by Matt Paley
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
The film that taught me to cultivate silence — or, at least, made me aware of the flesh of the film itself — was Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Perhaps Wong Kar Wai doesn’t compare to Vigo or Epstein — his films certainly fall into the category of “sentimental loves stories in celluloid” — but I remember realizing, for the first time, that In the Mood for Love loses nothing from a subtitle-less viewing. I saw, in that, the hope of a fuller, richer, fleshier cinema.
Should cinema attempt to do all of its work visually? The question presupposes something essential to cinema about the moving image–that every art can be reduced to a single heart; painting to color, poetry to words (or, perhaps, their absence), drawing to the line, etc–and that the heart of cinema is not the dream of a complete representation of the world (as Bazin might argue).
Or, on the other hand, is cinema is in the unique position to utilize all of these languages? Should the film-maker, then, search every subject / idea / emotion /
To Let Us Both Get To Our Business
by Matt Paley
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
Many film theorists subscribe to some belief of primacy—the primacy of the image over sound, of image over language, of sound over image, of language over image. My feeling, swayed ever so slightly by a few of these arguments, is that there is some work that each of these languages has more trouble expressing than the others. Some content is best left to the visual (and iconic), some to language (the purely symbolic), and some to sound only (indexical, leaving the audience some work of imagining). Obviously, this neat semiotic differentiation is a gross oversimplification; yet they do all three have different properties and effects.
Too often, in the imitation of ‘real life’, the modern filmmaker uses all three where one will do. It is sensory overload—we comprehend the moment thus created only dimly, and feel our emotions manipulated artlessly. The great filmmaker, utilizing all three languages simultaneously, captures something we already know, and have felt, and allows us to experience it as if for the first time. He searches not for new stories—the greater the filmmaker, in fact, the older the story he tackles—for he knows that he makes every story new and interesting by using these languages in new and unexpected ways.
Let me say now that I too have a theory of primacy: that of feeling over thought. My art is not philosophy; it strains against the intellectual weight of Brakhage and Bresson, and shies away from innovation for its own sake. I stumble in the dark for moments of feeling, for connection and coincidence, and the less thinking I do is most often the better. I idolize Truffaut, and merely tolerate (all but the earliest) Godard. I hold Cassavetes somewhere deep, a fire in my gut. My art will never be about language, or the limitations of language. But I have stories to tell, and the great storytellers do not waste their tools.
It is commonly said that the photographic image cannot convey religious experience. Wasn’t it Maya Deren, after all, who, after be granted access to film the most intimate ceremonies of the voodoo practitioners of Haiti, went back to the United States with hours of footage and wrote an ethnography instead?
And so we discuss with the poet the limitations of poetry, with the musician the limitations of music, with the photographer the limitations of the photographic image.
I think of Cassavetes as embodying all, all that is wrong with film. Brakhage was not an intellectual — his IQ –he proudly boasted– was 84. He was an artist of the senses, specifically sight/vision, and the greatest of those who worked in moving sight in our time. He was not a bougeois pseudo-intellectual (Cassavetes, Truffaut…) trying to tell sentimental love stories in celluloid. Cassavetes is Capra without the happy ending — the film stuff, the actual flesh of film, is equally dull.
If you’re a storyteller, and love film, look at Renoir’s Toni, or Tati’s anything, or Pasolini — the film tells the stories, is not just some not pretty pictures to accompany a script.