Chantal Akerman’s magnificent Jeanne Dielman can be praised for many things, chief among them being a masterpiece of restraint. But not some conservative or judicious brand of restraint, so much as an unbearably intense, suspenseful, violent, and quietly sinister variant. Akerman uses her camera like an architect. The four limits of her frame are walls and Jeanne Dielman is trapped inside them. She is likewise caught in the folds of her prim apartment, a disquieting space of nested surfaces, most of them guarding, underneath their solemn appearance, the garbled code of our protagonist’s muted pain. Every inch of her home is a silent command that she must follow without fail. The dimensions and tools of her kitchen, the organization of her living room, and the decoration of her bedroom, everything contributes to generate a silent and perpetual voice that orders Jeanne Dielman around like a slave. Her apartment is built out of innumerable and inescapable reminders of all the scheduled tasks she has to complete, day in and day out: the cleaning, the cooking, the child rearing, the fucking. She is in a prison of her own making, for her home can only direct her as she has ordained for it to do so. When she completes her chores early one day, she is suddenly forced to do nothing, and so she sits on a sofa-chair and basks in her dead time. She begins to fuss, to tremble with anxiousness. Temporarily outside the loop prescribed by her agenda, she finds her freedom to think absolutely terrifying. Her house of tasks is a fortress that shields her from the dangers of contemplation, lest she realize how harrowingly empty her life is.

Houses are stuffed with meaning. Characters interact with the memories that tremble in every niche. And so do we, heads raised to the screen, gasping at uncanny images of the powerfully familiar. Akerman, like Ozu in Tokyo Story, returns over and over again to the same rooms and doorways, and each return is more profound than the last, more burdened by the weight of past visits and emotions. In order to arouse our recognition and get us to make connections between scenes, Akerman and Ozu will often, not only return to a room, but also film it from the same angle, matching the blueprint of the house to the composition of the frame. We begin to think of the screen in architectural terms, its surface lined with hallways, doorways, and cabinets. We deposit meaning in its corners. The careful balance of household objects and the wary dance of a female body, parallel conflicts in a strict rectangular arena, become geographical drama. We flatten and deepen the image, we fall through the celluloid. A door is closed in Tokyo Story and immediately we recall how that door has been closed previously, under what circumstances, and how the characters moved through the frame in each case, at what speed, and with what gesture. We can compare easily because each shot of the closing door is almost identical. Except for what has changed, which is also what matters most.

II

French director Jean Renoir confessed that, when he made his most canonical film, The Rules of the Game, in 1939, he meant to depict a group of people “dancing on the edge of a volcano”: the volcano was World War II and the dancers where high class socialites and their distracted servants. Preoccupied with petty intrigues and flighty romance in a château, the characters are cordoned off from the world, like inhabitants of a floating island. Their manic games send them careening through a complex system of passages and corridors. Soon, the country house begins to resemble a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors where all the participants, drunk on the sensory spectacle of their nighttime fun, forget the dangers growling around them.

Sharunas Bartas’ The House presents a more deranged and opaque version of this theme. In both films, war rages or will rage around the mansion or château, but the protagonists are always too busy worrying about their comparatively tiny conflicts to notice. Renoir, of course, could not know with certainty that war would arrive to France. Germany was ballooning with power and Europe was tense with anticipation, but the ensuing six years of horror had not officially begun. Nevertheless, The Rules of the Game captures the electric crackling of the months leading up to World War II, the booming guns on a quiet field and the startled death of fleeing animals, massacred during a hunt. Even if we reject this historical interpretation, the oblivious socialites still act like children juggling adult consequences. Their funny dance twirls with playful charm, but the props they use can kill. With its intricate layout, the château spurs on the festivities, the chasing and the mock fighting, until finally everyone is too dizzy to examine either themselves or their situation, let alone foreign policy. Doorways conceal as much as they reveal, slippery floors speed up every movement, hallways push bodies in various directions, and rooms generate private moments separated from the larger story: the château practically directs the action and decides its destination. Like a jealous captor, it would prefer its prisoners continue performing mindless circles and never appreciate the decadence they are surely destined for.

If The Rules of the Game is about a group of fools spinning down towards oblivion, The House is set after the fall has been completed. Its characters are already lost, like specters frozen in the ennui of a bleak afterlife. Time does not flow in this haunted film, and we might imagine we are watching a single instant crystallized into an eternal pause. A mute narrator paces aimlessly around The House, and his shuffling odyssey becomes our own, as we are guided by his curious eyes. Every room is a film onto itself, populated by characters surrendered to self-absorption. Bartas’ eye for portraiture isolates each subject even further. Their solitude, already spiritual and physical, is extended to the frame, which often focuses on a single despairing face before inviting in another. A distraught woman fiddling with colorful puppets, a reclusive chess player going against himself, and a big-eyed girl reading a book while clad in over-sized garbs, each individual occupies his or her own personal area. Even when they all sit down together at a long dinner table, there is no conversation or interaction. The camera, again, quarantines the lonely characters and forces them to suffer by themselves. Like with Akerman, the frame seems to be in league with the architecture, restraining the protagonists to their puny lots.

The House compels its lodgers to stagnancy. An invisible force pulls them all in and interrupts the passing of the hours. Every room is a potential cage: Jeanne Dielman‘s smallish apartment is no less a sprawling and impossible labyrinth than the endless interiors of the Bartas film. The human mind finds the aisles, passages, and crevices it needs to continue perambulating without end in a pointless act of self-preservation. Without a goal or the hope of improvement, the mind finds the need to keep moving, while its human owner, entrenched in endless circles of imaginative flight, concentrates on whatever surrounding surface might lend itself as a getaway destination.

Many fictions use this scenario with the aim of depicting solipsistic, self-absorbed, deluded, and possibly crazy behavior, belonging, for example, to socially irresponsible members of the high class. But the best fictions suggest a more far-reaching phenomenon. Miss Havisham in Great Expectations or Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard – two aging ladies sinking in decadent mansions, wrinkled and elderly, and yet unwilling to notice the passage of time, reluctant to stand firm in the present and acknowledge the years that have settled upon them since the bygone age when they stopped checking the calendar – are simply grotesque exaggerations of common experience. Despite the eccentricities inherent in their characters, we can approach their lives by remembering our simpler, more conventional cases of self-inflicted house arrest: a sticky Sunday afternoon stretched out over a lifetime; three months of summer boredom dragged to despondent old age.

Houses catch anecdotes as if they were fireflies, hide them in a closet or an attic, snare them into a painting or a model boat. Every crack or smudge on the floor, every portrait or hanging vase on the wall, every piece of furniture, every armchair and divan, every dusty organ, every coffee table and flower-patterned china set is the starting point for a hidden narrative, almost none of which, in a movie of sensible running time, can actually be developed. But we can imagine that they might be, or sense that there is a story to follow, even if the camera will never go there. These unsaid anecdotes float on the screen like heavy air, an undeniable presence we cannot locate in a specific time or place, but which permeates each scene.

In our own houses, we are more aware of these hidden narratives. A nostalgic grandpa might have described to us in detail how he came upon a wooden chest, and every time we cross the hallway and glance through the open door of his bedroom, we see the chest and his story flutters through our mind like a sudden gust. We deposit stories everywhere in our houses, and many of these stories enter our daily habit. From the groaning faucet, to the ill fitting electric output, the squeaky front door, the spider-webbed corners of the garage, and the cheesy ceramic sculptures of cherubim. We have a narrative for everything. We see an object and remember where we bought it, or we pass by a lamp table and instinctively leave our wallet there when we come in and pick it up when we walk out. This combination of family history and quotidian habit sediments a house with multiple layers of storytelling. Reposed on our beds, staring at the spotted ceiling crisscrossed by an abstract painting of smudges and discoloration, we might forget ourselves in thought, both daydreaming and dreaming of previous daydreams, our imaginary escapades commingling with the entire encyclopedic breadth of all the daydreams we ever conjured up, most of them written on the dirty surface of the ceiling, the upturned stage of our greatest struggles and wildest leaps of whimsy. A house, then, becomes the repository of our own biography, a library where every niche sends us back to the past, even as we might add new information in the present, so that the house turns into a book we’re always writing and redrawing with self-referential texture.

I haven’t seen enough to counter Oubiña’s historical interpretation. Tiro de Gracia by Ricardo Becher is the only other film I’ve watched from the Group, and outside of capturing a moment in time — the youthful, bohemian atmosphere of late sixties Buenos Aires — it’s dull and out-of-tune, never finding its proper rhythm, drifting across characters and situations through choppy editing that yearns to be jazzy. Although it does not mean to be either, it’s interesting to compare Tiro de Gracia with Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us, other works about twenty-to-forty-something bohemian circles, and discover how the latter pair are far more evocative and profound, how the loose rhythms give way to slower passages, how atmosphere is allowed to flow and settle, how time stalls and starts and runs up against the characters, and how Paris, with its jail of streets, is alive like a watchful gaoler. Buenos Aires, in the Becher film, is distant and anonymous, a background faze that never comes into focus.

The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos, however, is truly great, far more experimental in nature and worthier of our fascination. It is deeply self-referential, at once filmed theater, a film about theater, and a film about film, it chronicles the rivalry between a cast of actors, the Players, who shuffle tragicomically around a film set, and a shadier band of outcasts, the Ángeles Caídos or fallen angels, who stare at the actors with envy and indignation from the shadowy crevices of the sound-stage. This confrontation escalates until it explodes in an all-out brawl near the end, which bares some resemblance to the frequent gang battles in A Clockwork Orange.

Yet this plot is barely felt during the film’s running time. Fischerman, here, is not interested in traditional storytelling clad in unexpected garbs, but is after more destructive and jarring objectives. Many self-referential films, even the great ones, naturalize and include the self-reference into the narrative, erasing the fissures. The film within a film is co-opted by the overall arc — the “story of the artist,” for example — and is therefore no longer unsettling. Fosse’s All That Jazz, Saura’s Tango, and Fellini’s 8½ are all, to different degrees, filmed diaries of how they were made, but they insert this mirror-effect into the storytelling and thus mend the fracture produced by self-consciousness. Split into halves, into the “film in the film” and the “film that contains the film in the film,” the ravine between each is then bridged when the former no longer questions the existence of the latter but merely becomes a fact of it.

In many ways, the same happens with The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos, but Fischerman has his actors criticize the man behind the camera for erasing the fissures and mending the fractures, building a basically coherent story out of the disjointed improvisation unleashed by the performers; as Oubiña would argue, there is a tension between the freedom sought by the actors and the control imposed by the director. When the film closes, the words “Make up your Games” flash gigantically on the screen, a Cortazaresque exhortation in favor of creativity and imagination. But this amounts to a command, and its appearance rings wholly ironic coming after a lengthy monologue by one of the fallen angels, who chastises the director for not providing anything like the freedom he promised.

This tension expands into metaphysical drama. Like in Hugo Santiago’s Invasión, the characters here are trapped inside their fiction. Although they are able to move childishly about the screen, without a care for causality or psychology, interacting for the pure pleasure of interaction, they cannot escape the confines of the film set. Life occurs inside tiny boundaries; the Players cannot move away and the fallen angels yearn to move in. And as the latter sulk in the darkened suburbs of the sound-stage, it would seem as if the lighted perimeter where the Players sing and dance is the only space where characters can be said to exist, while the fallen angels, banished to the outskirts of the spotlight, barely feature as protagonists.

The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos turns into itself like a Moebius strip, every single narrative and conceptual path leads back to the tumultuous center, a bellicose heart where the binary conflicts that drive the film intersect: director vs. actor, players vs. fallen angels, experimentation vs. convention, and so on. Not only is this film about its making, but it also questions its making and its right to exist. The actors often behave irrationally or playfully, in the hopes of breaking through the celluloid and escaping the linearity of the story by introducing tangents that lead nowhere: three actors exchange roles as victim and victimizer in a silly scene out of the Marx Brothers, one actor is painted as a clown for no apparent reason, and another wakes up as it were the proverbial morning, yawning at the start of the film and stretching on the floor for so long, that his habit attains a sort of epic weight, as if it were all humanity waking up to greet the light of the projector.

But even with so much liberty and looseness, the characters are trapped, since their dynamic movements can only happen on a prescribed arena. Even the film itself is trapped: forced to select, place, and arrange its separate pieces into a whole, the film cannot be truly free, since then it would be incomprehensible. Whatever its experimentation, every shot here almost invariably leads to the next, and even when this rule is transgressed, directorial control is only further established, as with the perfectly choreographed jump-cuts, timed for comic effect, and the post-synched singing, edited with precision so that a man sounds like a woman and vice-versa.

Neither the characters nor the film finds the freedom they wanted, but their efforts towards this ideal are captured by the camera. Although it cannot run away from its need to be coherent, the film contains within itself its own attempts at disobedience, so that, regardless of their ultimate success, these attempts are already successful in that they comprise the film. If nothing else, The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos chronicles the path of its disobedience, and this path is a triumph, even if there is no destination, because it is a new path and the film is both its storefront and critic, providing within itself a whole discussion on the nature of rebellion.

But we don’t miss so very much. Our protagonist vacations in the titular city. She travels across it. She meets a guy: the night, the narrow street, and the eerie wind play with their clothes. They exit our gaze. We don’t see where they end up together. In bed? At a doorway for a parting kiss? Later, our protagonist returns to her hometown and she mostly disappears from the camera’s attention. We wonder where she is, for ten minutes, twenty, and then she comes back for an encore when she returns to Marseille. Perhaps the camera only sees her when she feels alive. At her hometown, she is submerged in the everyday, in the quotidian, in boredom, in embarrassing conflicts with her friend. She must flee her hometown in order to reclaim her relevance. She must return to Marseille. And then what? She is mugged.

The film ends with a tearful walk. Marseille has not given our protagonist its promised respite. We don’t know what really happened, but it doesn’t matter. Schanelec concocts an underground flow to link the disjointed pieces. We can intuit what is going on. We simply and merely cannot chart the plot of the film, and if we did, we would end up with dead-ends, lines vanishing on the white of the drawing board. Each beginning dips into a void. She finds a love interest, she loses him. She returns home, she fades into routine and blends with the background hubbub. She comes back to the city that awakened her, she loses her course and wanders adrift out of the movie.

Visitor to a Museum by Konstantin Lopushansky is all ferociousness, a guttural shout. The protagonist wanders out of this movie too, and the plot also meets dead-ends, but these are not provoked by narrative ellipses. The dead-ends in Visitor to a Museum are violent, they’re amputations. Marseille, if there is violence in its severed plot lines, portrays a subdued violence, the protracted pain inflicted by forgetfulness, negligence, and habit. Visitor to a Museum detonates its story. Not narrative ellipses, but demolition.

Our protagonist seeks understanding in a futuristic wasteland. His search for knowledge is interrupted by mutants, and not scary mindless mutants, but inflamed mutants fanned by social exclusion. He wants access to a legendary museum, he travels past barren terrain, but along the way the mutant cause envelops him. At the house he temporarily stations in before completing his voyage, the mutant servants are mistreated as lower lifeforms. Every interaction between the “normal” landowners and their “abnormal” domestics is tense and anxious. We can see the quivering in their respective movements, a back-and-forth of power and submission, as each reacts to the other in predictable patterns that will soon shatter, because each repetition reinforces the pattern, and as the pattern is reinforced it is also wound tighter than it should, and we can feel how it will be necessary to either unwound the pattern or see it shatter in a revolution. Since the myopic “normals” refuse to reconsider the social status of the mutants, only the second option is possible.

Our protagonist thus overlooks his intellectual quest in the immediacy of the revolution that devours him. There is no cultural context outside the museum that can appreciate its lofty offerings. Just like the missing woman in L’Avventura, the museum soon becomes a pretext, an empty location that stands for the highest values harbored by the protagonist, culture, intellect, truth, concepts that have no place in the apocalyptic horror raging around the ancient repository of knowledge. As the protagonist dissolves into the unavoidable chaos, his journey is interrupted forever. Dead-ends in the plot: whether in Marseille or in Visitor to a Museum, they suggest the limits past which the characters are unable or unwilling to move. The vacant intervals of the former, or the deferred museum-bound quest of the latter, outline the borders of the characters’ lives.

Memories too painful to recall, days too tedious to regard, experiences too traumatic to retain: the vacant lots that litter the story of Marseille are like repressed events, together covering a no-man’s-land wherein our vacationing protagonist dares not intrude. When the film forgets her, it might be because she forgets herself. And when the visitor to a museum stops caring about the venerable institution, so does the film. The visitor abruptly alters his stated destination, caught in the shockwaves of harrowing social passions, and the film never reminds him of his former scholarly goals, perhaps because he doesn’t need any reminders: the sorrowful shrieks that close the film are his mad expressions of regret for a dream surrendered.

Director-actor Jacques Tati worked with real space, real bodies, and real physical objects. Even the invented city of his Playtime was real. Tati built it out of tangible materials. His visual jokes had interminable ramifications. Every movement meant a constellation of tiny mannerisms making up the overall gag. Take any funny scene from Playtime, like Monsieur Hulot discovering a noisy seat, or the gradual destruction of a restaurant, or a family grouped around a television seen through a window that doubles as a shopping display for modern banality. These jokes can be fragmented into hundreds of tiny movements, a moment-to-moment comic texture, because real bodies have the gift of spontaneity, inserting creativity into each microsecond.

Animated movement, unless it is motion-captured, cannot replicate this amount of detail. Nor does it want to. Animated movement is always a proclamation, a statement of values. In The Illusionist, a new film by Silvain Chomet based on an unfilmed script by Tati written during the 1950s, a young Scottish ingenue repeatedly and tenderly helps her heel into her shoe with her index finger. This quotidian habit would already be miraculous if simply captured by a camera. For a director to halt his or her film to contemplate such a tiny moment already says something: that life is comprised of meaningless yet profound gestures. But for a director to not just contemplate, but lovingly draw and animate these gestures, that is a call to arms.

To animate is to bring to life, frame by frame, pencil stroke by pencil stroke. Once animated, the everyday detail becomes immense. It is now a carefully reconstructed event. The prosaic is portrayed with a care that imbues it with grandeur. It is not caught by a camera in an accidental episode of curious observation. The movement is not discovered. Animated quotidian details, animated mannerisms: these are planned in advance and executed with exactitude. They are thought out and then drawn, piece by piece, until the entire movement is completed. Moreover, the animated quotidian detail is remembered. It is not a surprise. The artist does not find the detail, as he or she might while filming a live-action feature. Rather, the detail is already in the mind of the artist. It lives first as a recollection, then as animated evidence of that recollection.

To animate the quotidian is to perform remembrance. The artist must dive into his or her memory to extract that which he or she understands as quotidian, in order to then display the results on-screen. Granted, this can happen in a live-action feature as well. Movement is not always or even mostly captured by the camera accidentally. There is usually planning and forethought. Nevertheless, the animated quotidian detail is even less accidental. The artist must meticulously sketch out its itinerary across the frame, must recall and self-consciously rebuild the quotidian detail as such. With most live-action images, something will necessarily escape the creator, something on the frame will be extraneous to the intended image, because reality has too much detail to properly contain in an artist’s imagined preview of his finished work.

Animation, drawing: these activities are not exempt from accidents and discoveries. Artists can follow their guts, flow with their emotions, send their pencils careening through the page without inhibitions. But the sort of animation found in The Illusionist is very precise. This is not the colorful wildness of Norman McClaren’s Begone Dull Care or the scratchy, confusing, bustling, and disturbing beauty of Zdenko Gasparovic’s Satiemania. It is a meticulous, mostly hand-drawn evocation of Edinburgh during the fifties. The characters who pace through its streets are similarly exact — and similarly dated — evocations of Tati-esque physical comedy. The illusionist of the title, the traveling magician Tatischeff, is modeled with eerie accuracy on the late director-actor, from his walk, to his angry and alert poise: arms fastened to his tighs, stretched along the length of his body; hands shut in startled fury. There is no discovery in either location or subject. Instead, we have a period setting housing a necrophilic ode to a dead artist. Everything we see on-screen is reminiscent of things past. Comedy becomes a melancholy reverie. The Illusionist mourns for a time when its jokes were funny.

This is not the film that could have been, because the film that could have been would have simply been, while this one is the remembrance of a film that has been lost to time. It is the faded memory of an unknown cinemagoer, who has retained in his mind, despite the decades, the flickering remain of some secret screening that only he got to watch some fifty years ago. We will never see that lost film. What we have instead is this recalled residue. The Illusionist is a painful and lyrical portrayal of absence: the absence of real bodies; of Tati himself; of the fifties and its clothes, its dresses, and its traveling magicians.

The film dwells on loss and oblivion. Tatischeff is the last of a kind. His magic show is growing irrelevant amidst the shockwaves of rock and roll. His variety act colleagues are transforming into suicidal and depressing parodies of themselves. Meanwhile, the young ingenue who tags along with Tatischeff is soon enamored with and enraptured away by more stimulating company: a handsome young boy, as well as the fresh, consumerist, youthful culture that envelops them both. In the original script penned by Jacques Tati, the ingenue becomes disillusioned with the magician when the young boy reveals him as a phony whose tricks are beguiling deceptions. In the animated adaptation by Chomet, the magician is not exposed in such a way. Instead, he slowly and irreparably grows distant from the ingenue, not because he’s a liar, but because he’s old, outmoded, and boring. Tatischeff does make some mistakes, like neglecting the young girl due to work-related frustrations. Not everything that happens to him is inevitable. But even these frustrations are due to old age and passing time, afflictions outside his control.

Tatischeff is forced to downgrade his act. He leaves the theater stage for the denigrating spectacle of performing behind a shop-window, magically materializing clothing products for the consumption of intrigued pedestrians. Eventually, the ingenue abandons the old magician. He has not agreeably settled into the new era. His shop-window efforts serve as farcical evidence of his obsolescence. He cannot accept his irrelevance, or rather, his final acceptance is steeped in regret. It is a tragic, impotent acceptance.

Chomet does not allow The Illusionist too many animated liberties. Save for a curious dancing troupe, most of the characters move realistically. Tatischeff, as we have seen, is an animated double of the real Jacques Tati. Even the visual gags are mostly contained within the physical limits of a live-action film. Chomet is animating what could have been a film by Tati. But, of course, it could never have been.

In this, there is a hint of Pierre Menard: the Borges short story where a twentieth century French writer crafts a word-for-word remake of Don Quixote. Near the end of the short story, a curious phenomenon is remarked upon by the narrator: even though Menard’s Don Quixote is exactly the same as Cervantes’ original, they’re still radically different novels. “The contrasts in style are also vivid. The archaic style of Menard — a foreigner, after all — falls prey to a certain affectation. Not so with his precursor, who handles with ease the common Spanish of his time.” Despite the identical texts, the different contexts under which they were written produce deep shifts in meaning.

Now, Chomet has not made Playtime over again. He does not intend to wholesale copy Jacques Tati. His aims are closer to homage. And it is not merely the surrounding context of Chomet’s Scotland-based animation studio that alters the meaning of the work. The Illusionist has aesthetic quirks of its own which set it apart from Tati. It is animated, for starters, and Chomet’s eye for rural scenery and nostalgic cityscape is surely his own. Nonetheless, throughout The Illusionist, Chomet strives towards the Tati-esque: from the comic timing, to the sprints and plunges, to the clumsiness. Like a virus, the past infects every scene with quickly spreading sadness. Each gag is actually a comment on itself as a recreation of Tati-esque humor. Chomet does not riff on Tati in order to renovate old material. He is too respectful in his idolatry. The Illusionist treads on sacred ground. It exalts the divine memory of what is no longer with us: times past, cities past, decades past, comedians past, magicians past, the period setting, the animated spectre of Jacques Tati. Chomet establishes an unhurried pace. Each movement, mannerism, and gesture is an attempt to keep up with ghosts. There is no spontaneity, only disciplined mimicry. Characters speak in muffled voices, mumbles that fall into a void, as if every frame had a black hole in it, sucking all nearby spoken sound into its silence. Animated bodies miming underwater: unreal, distant, recalled, dead, stuffed.

Chomet animates Tati with veneration, and not just Tati, but also his time period and the variety act circuit that birthed his artistic rise. It is a sickly homage. It yearns to bring the dead back to life, but it knows its wishes are impossible. The Illusionist feels rehearsed and somber, like a ritualistic dance carried through by performers who no longer believe in its spiritual potential. It is less a whimsical tragicomedy and more a bittersweet tango. With the tango, all tragedy is irreparable. It is fuel for self-conscious lament ruing the futility of it all. Tango is the music of failure. The Illusionist deals with its failure to revive the man who inspired it. In a sense, it deals with its failure to revive itself as the film it could have been, had it been made when its script was written. What it is, finally, is a morose denunciation of just how impossible it would be to actually be that potential film after fifty years, after everything and everyone that moves inside its frames has passed away.

This is a review-discussion I had with Shieldmaden, a poster at The Corrierino forums. I transcribe it here.

Shieldmaiden: I found Jalsaghar interesting, if not always enjoyable. Roy is such a foolish, self-absorbed, petty man that his downfall carries little weight, despite the fact that he represents a way of life that’s eroding as fast as his land. The mood is definitely wistful, though, as we wander through his decaying mansion. I appreciated the focus on manners, on the careful interactions showing levels of respect between generations, servants and master, money lender and nobleman. The servants are a highlight — so much exasperation, disapproval, bafflement on their faces; their reactions perfect when he asks what the neighbor’s house looks like, or when he says, “Use a silver plate.” I spent the musical performances thinking about how foreign (non-Western) the Indian music sounds, and then the British band music makes Roy clutch his ears in pain. Haha.

I was surprised by the way the film changes near the end. It feels looser, more fun, almost campy, as Roy gets more and more drunk and loses his grip on reality. His panic attack is a good moment, with horror-movie music as the flames gutter out. He doesn’t bash anyone’s head in with a bowling pin, but, there is blood. “Blood!”

Guido Pellegrini: We could bring in Pedro Paramo into the discussion, since he’s the eponymous protagonist of my favorite novel, which contains structural and thematic links with Citizen Kane, since we learn about the conceited, rich, and increasingly withdrawn powerful man of the title through the voices of other people, although in Pedro Paramo those people are ghosts and the powerful man’s demise is also the demise of an entire town. Like Kane and Plainview from There Will Be Blood, Pedro Paramo is an ambitious character, someone who is willing to do the most perverse things to succeed, and whose ambition ultimately leads to a moral fallout. It’s interesting to note that Kane and Plainview don’t really have a material fallout. We don’t see their mansions crumble. We see them crumbling as human beings. When Plainview screams that he’s “finished,” he does so in a perfectly resplendent bowling alley, or at least, formerly resplendent, before he bathed it in blood. But that’s the only flaw in an otherwise immaculate mansion. Paramo and Roy from Jalsaghar, on the other hand, see their wealth and their prestige wither before their increasingly inactive bodies. Paramo comes to represent a ghost town. Roy comes to represent a ruin. He’s inside of a ruin and the way of life he represents is just as outdated.

But what distances Roy from Paramo, Kane, and Plainview, is that Roy is not an ambitious man. He doesn’t do anything to deserve his wealth. Awful and conniving as they might be, Paramo, Kane, and Plainview go to great lengths to acquire their capital. They deserve their wealth in the sense that they fought for it, often inhumanely, often unethically, but they fought for it. They don’t deserve to be happy, of course, and they’re not. Yet they are all self-made men to an extent. Even Kane, who is blessed by an early helping hand (although that same helping hand is finally revealed to be more of a long-lasting punishment, emotionally-speaking), does not rest on the laurels of his given riches and creates bundles of his own wealth. Roy, however, begins by over-spending what his legacy has left behind for him, and continues to do the same throughout the running time of the film. He’s a feudal landlord who owns what his family has earned in the past, and as modernity forgets the age of landlords, Roy does nothing to adapt. Instead, he squanders what he has and spends great lapses of time sitting on various chairs, cushions and pillows, watching the hours sift by him while he indulges on his hookah. Paramo, Kane, and Plainview are all given scenes that showcase their dynamism and virility. We see their young enterprising selves. We see them move. They might all ultimately be reduced to hulking, aged giants. But before then, we have already seen the spirited boys they once were. Roy is never spirited. Certainly, he is a bit more energetic during his flashbacks, before the nocturnal tragedy that occurs half-way through the movie. But only a bit more energetic: in essence, he’s still rather inactive. We almost never see him outside of his mansion.

I draw attention to this because I think it’s key to understanding the film’s unique flow. This is not a movie about a rise and fall, because there is no rise. This is probably why his decadence held little weight for you. Roy never has to struggle for his wealth. That role is reserved for his neighbor Mahim Ganguly, who is Roy’s foil: an enterprising money lender who has acquired prominence through his own efforts. This doesn’t make Ganguly a hero. He’s annoying and hypocritical. He pretends to be a great cultivator of music, but doesn’t seem very engaged during the recitals. Yet he still makes his own wealth, buys his own car, and installs his own generator. He is modern. He spends his earnings in modern objects. Roy inherits his wealth and wastes it in traditional classical Indian music. He doesn’t even try to remove himself from the past. He is firmly planted on the ground of what used to be.

Jalsaghar, then, is simply the story of a protracted fall, which Roy cannot prevent because he’s lost in a hookah-enabled daze that melds day and night into a continuous flow charging into oblivion. Satyajit Ray composes Jalsaghar accordingly. There is a soulful voluptuousness to the music sequences, or those scenes where Roy is wasting away, shifting through his mansion. We hear the melancholy strings of the sitar, and the camera flies away and into the characters, as if it too were in a daze. We feel as if the air itself had awful weight, or as if the camera were breaking through this heavy air in a series of miraculous transgressions. During these moments, the story comes to a halt. Nothing purposeful happens in terms of plot. These moments are like held notes. We await their disappearance while the note rebels against our expectations and reverberates without end. In the same way, these scenes seem to be eternal. Since there is no schematic reason for them to either exist or continue for so long, we eventually lose our grasp over them. We cannot contain them inside any preconceived notion of how the film is supposed to play out. So we relax and allow ourselves to just drift with the camera, inhaling the heavy air of these introspective stretches. I am not just referring to the actual recitals. I mean many other moments interspersed throughout the film, with Roy listening to music, a lot of it diegetic, although it often feels like the music that colonizes the frames of Jalsaghar doesn’t need to emanate from an instrument, as if they were the notes of a dying world crying its drowsy swan song.

I think there are two Roys. I think he is always dead, from the first frame onward. He is not present or living in the present. He is submerged in a hookah daze punctuated by sitar wails. He watches the protracted sunset of his life as if inhabiting a dream. Intermittently, he has to surface from the depths of his introspection to attend to practical present-day matters, and even then, he mostly worries about organizing new dreams to be had, new recitals and musical trances. Paramo, Kane, and Plainview also withdraw into themselves as they age. But they aspire to a physical representation of their gains. They build mansions in order to inhabit their wealth. Once they build them, they find them unsatisfying and try to remove themselves from the spiritual failure that their mansions evidence by diverting their eyes inward. Kane is an introspective tank besotted by the Gothic monstrosity of Xanadu. Roy, on the other hand, never aspires to anything physical. He has always already had everything physical he could wish for. At least, most of it was given to him from birth. He never had to fight for it. What he does aspire to is the ethereal, the beautiful music. He is willing to smudge his love for music with foreign interests. He uses music to maintain his prestige. The recitals he stages are for his own enjoyment as much as they are for the consideration and delectation of his society cohorts. But when he is alone in his mansion, with nobody to impress but himself, he still forgets the physical and dives into the intangible universe of the musical, not necessarily as a way to escape the hell of a mansion he has constructed, as with Kane, but simply because it is there, in music, where he is alive: not an escape, but an infiltration. He doesn’t run away from life so much as he breaks into another mansion, one made of pulled strings. I said there were two Roys. One is the Roy of the living. He’s a frigid human being. He barely cares for his family. Or if he does, his love is tempered by an even more powerful love for his wealth, as with Plainview, whose love for his adopted son is always in confrontation with his reclusive desire to make enough money to die alone in an expensive grave. He is jealous of Ganguly, envious of the New Rich. He doesn’t seek or desire a profound connection to anyone else. The other Roy is the Roy of the dead, or rather, the Roy of dreams, of remembrance. I said Roy is always dead. I meant his body is as good as dead. Since the Roy of dreams predominates, Roy’s body is empty during most of Jalsaghar. The Roy of dreams is always flying away from the body — into the past, into music, into elsewhere — and the body we see in-front of the camera is just a vessel that has been left behind by the wandering soul.

I see that I have fallen into a dualism that I don’t necessarily believe in. I think this is because Roy’s behavior inspires me to think in terms of dualism. He creates the dualism, operates along its dividing line. He willfully submerges into the imagined, into the remembered, and forgets where he is in the present. Everything outside the palace of his imagined realm withers while he dreams: the real waning mansion, the flooded lands, the mortgaged jewelry, the lost family. This is why he thinks he can still ride that horse in the end. He has spent so many hours dreaming of the past, that when he finally makes a decision for the present, it is at variance with the reality of that present.

Of course, Roy’s interior world, obsessed as it is with the past, is always being invaded by what is outside in the present, by what he captures with his senses: his introspection is always tied to music, to what he hears; the nocturnal tragedy is presaged by numerous natural harbingers, from flies drowning in drink, to nightmarish lightening showing-off in the horizon; his downfall is underlined by dying candles. Roy’s subjective inner world of imagination and remembrance is jolted by this sensory onslaught that forces him to recognize the present moment. Roy even tries to alter the present moment to better resemble his remembered image, like when he reinvigorates his unkempt music room. Satyajit Ray fills the frame with chiaroscuro patterns, embroidered carpets, and ornamental chandeliers that swing in the darkness, all of these shapes trapping the protagonist and mimicking his decadence. The mansion is like an extension of Roy, a desolate structure standing seemingly alone in what appears to be a barren wasteland, removed from the progress that churns around it, lost in time, a relic of the XIX century. Roy’s tragedy is that he cannot move forward, since the only movement he can do is towards the past and then back to the present, a present that is increasingly distant from the past being recalled. The mansion is his nemesis. The mansion cannot recall its past. The mansion is its present. It is its past degraded by the intervening years. Whereas Roy forgets where he is in order to think about where he was, the mansion perpetually juxtaposes what it was and what it is in a present-day form that cannot but remind Roy of his own expiration. And so it does.

Shieldmaiden: I’m sorry that I haven’t read Pedro Paramo. But I have seen Citizen Kane and There Will Be Blood, so I can agree that Roy’s downfall loses emotional weight by comparison, because it has no build up, no youthful energy or achievement. Roy is a sedentary man to start with, and what energy he has, both mental and physical, he’s put into listening to music. Not a very productive occupation!

But when the film begins, he’s lost even that. It’s this dead feeling you describe so beautifully — the heavy atmosphere, the decayed, empty mansion – that emphasizes Roy’s lethargy (I think it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call it clinical depression) as he sits on his roof staring into space. But, surely the cause of his lethargy isn’t his hookah, or old age, or a decrepit house, or even his impoverishment. Instead, his stupor is caused by the loss of his wife and son. In the scene immediately following the tragedy, he seems stunned, hardly able to understand as his servant explains his financial collapse. Then we’re back on the roof, with Roy in his old age, still staring and confused.

His love for his son is made pretty clear in the flashbacks, but I want to talk about his wife. I forgot to mention her before, and I feel that Ray almost does as well! She is seriously underutilized in this film, and I wonder why. She’s a great character, loved by Roy, but underappreciated, as we see in her tearful scene after the son’s coming-of-age ceremony. (“We’re losing all of our land to erosion!” “Nonsense!”) She’s underappreciated in death, too; not even mentioned after the accident! When she is on screen, though, she brings out the best in Roy. Look at the scene where she and their son are leaving on their trip. Her flirtatious scolding and his good-natured comebacks give us the most favorable impression of Roy that we’re going to get. But we barely see her before she’s gone.

I don’t have much respect for Roy, but to do him justice, I feel sure that his emotional and physical shutdown is more a result of the loss of his family than his financial disgrace. The loss of his family is the elephant in the room, the unspoken terror behind his final breakdown. As he drags his servant from portrait to portrait, reveling in his family’s prestige and nobility, he can’t escape the devastating fact that his is the last portrait. He is the end of his line.

Guido Pellegrini: Those are interesting thoughts. I suppose I always found his affection inadequate. It’s similar to There Will Be Blood. Every viewer will gauge the father-son relationship differently. Some will say the love is genuine. Others will say it’s part of Plainview’s showmanship. I say it’s a combination of both, the precise ratio shifting from scene to scene. We could say the same thing about Roy. He definitely loves his family. But that distant, lethargic Roy that emerges post-tragedy is still discernible in the younger Roy. He’s never exactly buoyant. He is always haughty and removed. He just becomes more so after the tragedy. Even the tender scenes with his wife: there is always a distance. His playfulness in the little moment you describe is cute, but she’s the one displaying most of the affection. There are, of course, cultural and contextual undercurrents. She’s supposed to show affection and veneration. He’s supposed to exude superiority. That’s what their social roles have ordained. And those roles decide how the little moment plays out. I think there is love squeaking through the cracks of these narrow roles, but it is certainly a suffering love gasping for air amidst so much structure, formality, and restrained tenderness. Assuming Roy is restraining it, which would mean it is there in the first place.

What I meant to conclude in my previous answer was that, even though Roy seems trapped in his inner world of memory and imagination, there is a dialogue between what Roy feels and what his outside environment evokes. The environment provides clues to what is happening to Roy. But this is only possible because Roy is likewise part of the conversation. The environment can evoke what happens to Roy because what Roy feels is reflected in the environment, and the environment in turn affects what Roy feels. His listlessness leads the house towards oblivion. Forgotten first by Roy, the house begins to be forgotten by time. Soon, it is already a relic. And this relic reminds Roy that he has also become irrelevant and outdated. Those portraits, those dwindling lights, are charged symbols of deterioration. But they’re more important as the ghosts of Roy’s nightmare. We don’t need the symbols to provide us with information. We know we are watching a downfall. What these symbols do is force Roy to consider his dire reality, as if the house were trying to talk to Roy about their mutual ruin. An unsuccessful chat, it would seem. Roy listens, but only to go mad and obviate whatever lessons he could have learned.

Shieldmaiden: Ah, now I see where you were going with that, and I really like the idea of the conversation between Roy and his decayed mansion. It makes sense of that horror-music and candles scene for me. What I saw as a strange overreaction makes much more sense as the house forcefully shakes him out of his lethargy. There’s a beautiful logic to the house as the evocation of what he’s become, since he caused its ruin along with his own; and it enriches the whole movie to look at it that way! Thanks for the perspective. This was definitely a movie I needed to discuss to fully appreciate.

This is my first Manoel de Oliveira. An odd film. Girl dies. Her family requests a photographer. Ergo, a young man travels to the family’s mansion to photograph the dead girl during her wake. While accomplishing this, he falls in love with her beauty, or seems to, although what really happens is that he beholds her angelic smiling face, watches in terror as her eyes open, and upon realizing that he’s the only one at the wake who witnessed this secret miracle, he flees from the mansion in terror. Several nights of ghostly dreams and several days of idyllic farm-work await. These latter occasions are a pet obsession of our photographer protagonist: he likes to snap pictures of the toiling men scraping the earth with their hoes. There are scenes of platonic love as the main character hallucinates with the dead girl or screams at her tomb. There are scenes of ostensible drama as the somber participants of the wake shuffle in the shadows or as the mansion’s maid unveils her bitterness towards the meek photographer. The film ends on a tragic note. By the time we get to the credits, we are supposed to have seen a bittersweet love story.

But the tragedy or the drama barely registers as such. Oliveira’s camera spies events from a ghost’s perspective. Every image is detached from life, distant in a truly unreal way. None of the typical dramatic scenes have any weight to them. Characters mourn on-screen, but they are really going through the motions of mourning, going through the motions of platonic love. Everything is staged like a satire. We think we are watching drama. We are really watching a comedy. As if the play on life’s stage were trivial. Our ghost of a camera gazes at the spectacle of human performance before it as if it were amused by the endeavor. It cares for the characters, but it apparently finds their attempts to grasp the truth of things — of love, of death, of life — inadequate, though endearing and even honorable in their inadequacy. Maybe that’s stretching it a bit. I am trying to figure out what this movie is doing. On the one hand, it is entirely superficial. None of the scenes that call for emotional power actually wield it. In its self-consciously old-fashioned manner, The Strange Case of Angelica is entirely superficial. We don’t get drama, but a play on drama.

Yet the film still brushes against the transcendental. As if it were in touch with some truth beyond the human performance of love and mourning, beyond the story. Or rather, a truth around the performance, because in real life that performance can certainly have a lot of truth to it. Our attempts to convey or grasp the truth of terrible or beautiful moments are most certainly inadequate, but that unavoidable failure is always part of the point. Not in this film, however. Absolutely no one during the wake comes across as a human being. They are more like automatons pacing inside a lugubrious house while pretending to mourn. This is okay. In the world of The Strange Case of Angelica, the comings and goings of people are increasingly mechanic, kitschy, self-evidently rehearsed, and stilted. What emerges as truthful, however, is some sort of cosmic wholeness: landscapes, moods, atmosphere; photographs swaying in unison while clothespined to a string; farmers hoeing while the photographer’s camera snaps under the afternoon sun; the photographer peering from his balcony as the sunlight flattens the composition into a two-dimensional fresco; interior scenes transforming into extreme long-shots of the city landscape; smoke contorting itself in its flight towards the clothespined photographs; a room revolutionized by a replaced light-bulb; a mourning husband crying for the dead girl with the city skyline behind him; the rows of filled seats during a church burial service creating perspective arrows pointing towards the protagonist, or rather crushing him, not like arrows now, but like the two hands of a pair of tweezers, squeezing the already weakened photographer into submission. Things of this sort. Despite all its kitschy superficiality, or because of it, Angelica has much of the spiritual and the ethereal to it. Human movements are inadequate performances displaying their lifelong failure atop a stage of beautiful mysteries and enigmatic sights. At least in this film.

No es una película difícil de entender. Parece serla porque no sigue las pautas del cine convencional y no cuenta con personajes protagónicos, o mejor dicho, no hay ningún protagonista que extienda su vigencia durante todo el transcurso de la cinta. Podríamos decir que Los rojos y los blancos cuenta con una seguidilla de protagonistas que se van intercalando a medida que cada uno de ellos va muriendo. Es como si la cámara estuviera permanentemente buscando alguien a quien seguir, pero la violencia imperante fuera cercenando sus posibilidades afectivas.

Rusia está embrollada en una guerra civil entre el Ejercito Rojo del gobierno bolchevique, establecido en el poder desde Octubre de 1917, y el Movimiento Blanco de los sectores pro-zaristas. Hacia 1919, muchos húngaros se enlistan en las filas de los rojos, porque ellos también quieren conseguir, y terminaron consiguiendo, su propia revolución, y así se fundó la República Soviética Húngara, que duró solamente cinco meses, porque en agosto de 1919 invadió Rumania y se acabó la aventura del Partido Comunista de Hungría. No está claro en qué momento de 1919 está situada Los rojos y los blancos — si antes de que se llevara a cabo la República Soviética Húngara, o después de su caída, o durante su existencia, aunque parece probable que se trate de la primera opción — pero lo importante es que los personajes húngaros en Los rojos y los blancos pelean junto a los bolcheviques por ideología y por conveniencia, porque una victoria bolchevique puede llegar a ser una victoria para la Hungría comunista.

Casi nada de esto es explicitado dentro de la película. Los rojos y los blancos no es un curso histórico filmado. Ni siquiera pretende que la audiencia sepa mucha historia a priori. Obviamente, cuanto más sepa el espectador, más podrá apreciar lo que está ocurriendo, pero se trata de un saber casi superfluo. Lo único que realmente importa es lo más básico: hay un grupo de uniformes oscuros, quienes a pesar de su vestimenta son los blancos del título; y después hay otro grupo de uniformes más claros, que son los rojos, y dentro de este grupo hay algunos húngaros, como era de esperar, ya que el director y la película provienen de Hungría. Así nomás, como si se tratara de un partido de fútbol, rojos y blancos, porque eso es justamente lo que Jancsó quiere mostrar: una batalla que, fuera de su contexto, fuera del trasfondo político y social que la fundamenta, en lo esencial, es un sangriento juego abstracto de uniformes que van de un lado para otro.

Tema trillado: la trivialidad trágica de la guerra. Pero a través de su estética, Jancsó nos da algo único, algo que va mas allá del virtuosismo, si bien virtuosismo hay por demasía: tomas largas, larguísimas, de varios minutos, una cámara voladora que mira, observa, se mueve, baila (y baila aún mas en Salmo rojo, cinta posterior de Jancsó), viaja, descubre, una cámara con personalidad propia. Béla Tarr, compatriota de Jancsó, cita a este último como influencia, pero las tomas interminables de Tarr son tomas lúgubres, apesadumbradas, agotadas. Jancsó despliega un dinamismo y una vitalidad incesantes. La cámara y los personajes parecen moverse como si formaran parte de una coreografía infernal. Otros maestros de la toma larga — digamos, Hsiao-hsien Hou — construyen mundos que parecen existir sin conciencia de la cámara, como si la cámara fuese un hombre invisible que examina las vidas de los seres humanos, o un Frankestein escondido que se deleita contemplando la vida de una familia que no sabe que está siendo contemplada, un observador que no influye sobre lo que observa, salvo por el hecho de que está observando y por ende se preocupa por los infortunios que atraviesan los sujetos observados. Jancsó no logra, ni tampoco intenta lograr, lo que sucede en una película de Hou, porque las tomas largas de Jancsó, de tan coreografiadas, son siempre evidentemente eso, coreografía, cuerpos que se mueven para ser vistos en movimiento.

El juego fatal de los rojos y los blancos es también un baile predeterminado, coreografiado, cada bailarín recorre el terreno como ha sido pactado de antemano, y el baile siempre termina igual, como cualquier coreografía: la obra de los rojos y los blancos concluye inevitablemente en la muerte. Así, los movimientos casi mecánicos de los soldados — llenos de vitalidad, sí, pero carentes de naturalidad — adquieren un matiz siniestro. Cada minuto es un paso más a la hecatombe. En esto, hay algo de Invasión de Hugo Santiago, donde los soldados, también diferenciados más por sus uniformes que por su ideología — no porque piensen igual, necesariamente, sino porque la ideología, el contexto que desembocó en la guerra, esta ya tan lejos de la sangre derramada, que el origen de la guerra se pierde en lo inalcanzable del pasado — continúan eternamente jugando a la guerra, una guerra que saben interminable, pero que desganadamente se prolonga, y aquellos que entienden lo fútil de la guerra solo logran mirar hacia la cámara con desilusión, como lo hace Olga Zubarry en la última imagen de la cinta.

Por otro lado, como dice Gordon Thomas en un artículo para Bright Lights Film Journal, la “estética controlada (de Los rojos y los blancos) actúa como una disonancia que vibra expresivamente junto a escenas de violencia, de tortura y de humillación”. La coreografía mecánica de los cuerpos incluye también a los desplazamientos indiferentes de la cámara, que se traslada con proeza, pero que se mantiene imperturbada por lo que observa. Un personaje que pensábamos principal puede fallecer sin anuncio ni despedida. Ni siquiera se conmueve la banda sonora con algún estallido instrumental. Los hechos ocurren en la pantalla sin jerarquización. No es más importante la muerte de un personaje principal que la de un personaje secundario, o si lo es, la atención que le presta la cámara al protagonista caído es de corta duración, ya que, como dije anteriormente, todo protagonismo en Los rojos y los blancos es precario. Sin descanso, la cámara y la película se olvidan rápidamente del protagonista caído, porque los nuevos protagonistas y sus nuevas muertes no dan espacio para la reflexión.

Aunque a muchos la película les puede resultar fría y distante, a mi entender, no se trata de una película sin emociones, sino de un entorno donde las emociones siempre están opacadas por la guerra. Hay ciertas tomas, miradas, caras y personajes que prometen un caudal de emoción y hasta de expresividad, pero este caudal está permanentemente circunscripto a lo potencial, a lo subterráneo, un caudal que podría haber fluido en tiempos menos violentos, o quizás un amor que podría haber florecerido en otro lugar y en otra época. De vez en cuando, podemos entrever una llamarada de emoción en un gesto, en una discusión entre personajes, en una alocada marcha hacia el exterminio, pero siempre la desgracia por delante y la cámara impasible dando vueltas alrededor de los cuerpos que no tienen horas para sentir, solo días para moverse en la danza atroz de los rojos y los blancos.

There is a majesty about the Ohmu. They are hulking, clumsy beasts. We see them first as a dead remnant, an empty exoskeleton resting underground. We are aware of their strange beauty before we realize the danger they pose, although the sight of the dead remnant has an eerie tone to it: we find both idyllic paradise and oneiric wasteland during the film’s opening minutes. Our protagonist quickly verbalizes this contrast, because this is a film where everything is verbalized, which is its biggest drawback.

Fortunately, the images are so overpowering that the banality of the script turns into some kind of rhythmic chant that pushes the images onward. Which is obviously being lenient on the script. The truth is that Nausicaä plays like a diluted, simplified Princess Mononoke. Which is probably because Princess Mononoke is a complicated, more ambiguous Nausicaä, made a decade later under the influence of Miyazaki’s artistic maturation. But Nausicaä doesn’t really falter in comparison to Mononoke. It does at the level of script and theme. But it doesn’t really falter. Why is this? The images in the earlier film provoke a more acute emotional blow than those found in its seemingly improved successor. Perhaps because it’s not really an improved successor. Not at the level of aesthetic or visual language.

Nausicaä is a continuous barrage of stunning compositions and mounting spectacle. Miyazaki likes to play with large groups — of people, of animals — moving them from one portion of the narrative landscape to another and then getting all of them to clash in a massive climax. It’s an obvious method to build drama and tension, but Miyazaki does it well. He hinges the dramatic swing of his story on the constant traveling undergone by his chosen groups. He puts them on a collision course, jumps from the tale of one to the tale of another, and follows a protagonist that serves as a bridge across all of them. That is the structure of Mononoke and Nausicaä. What the former adds to the latter is a bit nuance. Both present a confrontation between nature and a technocratic warring people. Stuck in the middle are peasants in harmony with the flora and fauna around them. And the protagonist is one of these peasants, the most important one of them all, the individual who will appease the waters of strife, showing both sides how to coexist through his or her own example.

Also in both films, the representatives and leaders of the two opposed human groups are women. Mononoke adds a male mediator between nature girl and technocratic girl, but he’s boring in comparison to them. Nausicaä has no male mediator, although there is a weak male love interest who falls into oblivion after the film is over. What Miyazaki introduced ten years later are blurred borders and confused definitions. Nausicaä pits wholesome nature girl against evil technocratic girl. By the time he made Mononoke, Miyazaki had reworked his archetypes: nature girl is not so wholesome and technocratic girl is not so evil. We are afraid of the former: she’s feral, impulsive, dangerous. We respect the latter: she’s strong, resourceful, gutsy; she manages to spur enthusiasm and loyalty from her fellow women; and the men don’t feel compelled to question her authority. Which is true of the technocratic woman in Nausicaä as well, except she does not command our respect. She’s distant and cold. Only near the end do we sense a conflict in her character. Her counterpart in Mononoke understands her responsibilities. She carries them. She essentially lives for others or at least knows that during her tenure she will have to decide the fate of others. You can view her body, her poise, as a balancing act where the conflict stands on her head, and her incessant concentration seeks to prevent its falling. We don’t get that from her earlier sibling in Nausicaä, who is little more than a caricature.

But nature girl in Nausicaä does not fare as badly. Like the Mononoke technocrat, she balances the conflict on her head. Were it not for this balancing act, she would be dreadfully dull, since she’s a lovely, wholesome, caring, and socially-conscious girl with a taste for revealing skirts and a suspicious lack of undergarments. That last part is not as dull as the rest, but basically, she’s perfect. Except, of course, for her distraught and desperate demeanor. She is willing to die for her cause and essentially kills herself several times. That she survives or only suffers a few wounds does not erase the fact that she is willing to jump from her little glider to another aircraft while being shot at from the aircraft she’s planning to board. The aircraft in question is carrying a little Ohmu. If the little Ohmu is carried to where the aircraft is carrying it, thousands of innocent people will be trampled under the fury of countless adult Ohmus. So she jumps. And it’s not her first act of recklessness. We are used to our movie heroes and heroines being typically heroic. But here we are aware of the heroine’s fragility and so is she of her own mortality. There is no shortage of tears and worried expressions on her part, so she’s not falling back on some stoic routine either: she is simply willing to die to accomplish what she needs to accomplish. This obsessiveness grounds her character. She’s not merely a pure entity walking around the screen in all her pure purity. At least, she’s not just that. She’s earnestly struggling, gnashing her teeth and not giving in. Considering the film grants her a cliché ‘chosen one’ backstory, she makes a surprisingly and visibly pained effort to make good on her prophesied promise.

But we need to go back to the Ohmu, we need to go back to their ugly majesty. Miyazaki movies succeed because, despite all his grating dialogue (and most of it is grating in Nausicaä) and despite his occasionally simple themes (some might disagree with the word “occasionally”) his viewers can and often have a profound reaction to his images. The contrasts are easy enough: the beast is beautiful, hypnotic, monumental, and it is also haggard and unseemly. We have a disgusting insect blown out of proportion so that it turns into a deity. They might not actually be deities, but this is how we perceive them. They are beyond us, beyond human life, like beings from an astral plane. Japanese video games have given me similar imagery to savor: Sin in Final Fantasy X or the giants in Shadow of the Colossus. The Ohmu are noble and good. They attack those who attack them and their counterattack is ruthless hell. Again: the themes and contrasts are simple. Why is my reaction to them so layered? Why is my reaction to everything in Nausicaä so layered?

A gorgeous post-apocalyptic nightmare. That is the world of this film. A small spot provides an idyllic rural scene, full of wind and grass and windmills and other things that flap with the wind and trickling water and little waterfalls. But it is always an imperiled rural scene, imperiled by its outskirts. It’s a familiar tactic, used more obviously in Mononoke: that is, show an idyllic rural scene, then invade it with a foreign body or a foreign conflict that disrupts the peace. The effect is like opening one’s view of a painting from up close. At first, we can only see an isolated portion of the larger canvas. A few people talking, some dogs chasing tails. Then we begin to take a few steps backward. And so on and so forth, until finally, from our new removed vantage point, where we can see the whole painting, the talking people and the chasing dogs are re-contextualized as poor beings trapped inside an epic battle. Our immersion is aided tremendously. Before we know the larger story, the film or the painting has managed to insert us into a tiny niche within the larger story. So when we finally meet up with the larger story, we encounter it from within: we walk out of the tiny niche and into the larger story that now surrounds us.

Our minds can make a world out of anything. Give me a room and two people in it, and that will be my world during the length of the film. Open a window or a door, kick the two people out of the room and into the outlying landscape, and now the world I had built up has been expanded to such a point that I can barely make out its limits, if there are any. A narrative world appears to us as massive if we can imagine every room inside this larger world as a microcosmic world unto itself. That’s when we buckle (but joyously, a cathartic release) under the weight of a movie that presents a constellation of small worlds enjoined in endless combinations. Beginning a story with a small town and then zooming out to expand the geographic reach of the narrative is one of the most common ways to do this. Mononoke does it with no frills. Nausicaä more or less follows suit, except we don’t quite begin in a small town.

We begin, in fact, outside of it, in the gorgeous wasteland that has already been lost to humanity. The idyllic town is only biding its time until the lethal flora reaches its confines. Pollution has made plants and trees into receptacles of death. And it’s these deadly plants and trees — and the horrible insects that live besides them — that the film starts with. When we travel to the idyllic town that has thus far been spared the apocalypse, we are already ever-so-slightly shaded from our initial experience with the dangerous beauty of nature. In these sorts of films, where we know that a great tragedy will befall sooner or later, any idyllic picture is bound to arouse bad vibes. We know the inverse is what the story is really about. So no idyllic picture is really idyllic because its presentation is a portent of its upcoming opposite. Happiness appears twice: at the beginning and at the end. We might have confidence regarding the latter: a happily-ever-after we cannot verify since the credits have begun to roll. But we’re leaving the movie’s grasp at that point. This final happiness has no real staying power. It is the first, initial happiness that is most troubling: the happiness that is the clarion call of tragedy.

Nausicaä mimics this pattern, with an appropriately idyllic opening in a small town being disrupted by outside invaders (a gentle whiff of xenophobia flows in the air, but the suggestion at the end of the conflict is that the simplicity of the small town has been enriched through contact with the outside world, although it is an embattled improvement, a connection to the rest of the world that has been gained in blood). What undermines this pattern is that the memorable prologue which begins the movie is spent amidst ruins and death and killer spores and humongous monsters. These horrible details are part of the idyllic opening. The protagonist enjoys herself in such a scenery. She later reveals to be making scientific attempts to eradicate this same scenery, but we never forget the sight of her relaxing underneath a pile of killer spores. She might want to end the post-apocalypse, but this desire does not prevent her from finding elated solace in the toxic forest.

We get plenty of conventional scenes of rural serenity. But first, we get this: serenity in a wasteland, fascinating ugliness. And the monsters abide by this contrast. Ohmus are admirable because they’re hideous and violent. They can live in a healthy environment. But we mostly see them in sick places with sick fauna, and the same is true of most of the other animals and insects. We should almost wish that improvement never comes for the world of Nausicaä. It is more interesting as a vanishing and ailing place. All of these visions of fascinating ugliness beat at the viewer like consecutive waves. Those red spots in the dark: the Ohmus advancing at nighttime, their angry eyes announcing their presence to the increasingly worried human spectators who will soon be their victims. The melting Giant Warrior: already a wounded deity at birth, because it was not ready to be born yet, dying as it takes its baby steps, killing as it was grown to kill. And yet such utilitarian purposes seem unsuited to its spectacular frame and its lofty reputation as the destroyer of civilization. There is much that is pathetic about the Giant Warrior’s brief entrance. Like a great king forced to do menial work. So much grandeur at the service of the misguided technocrat girl who orders it around. And so it melts: beautiful, disgusting, big splotches of self spilled on the hillside, and a skull slowly arising from the falling skin.

In eradicating the scenery and the post-apocalypse, the protagonist does not mean to drive the animals and the plants towards extinction, because they’re merely sick versions of their healthy counterparts. She only wants to revert things to their original state. You can say that her elated solace in the gorgeous wasteland is her admiration for the hidden, twisted beauty that still peeks through the ruins, the glimmer of the landscape that once was, now deteriorated into a hint of what it used to be, but that hint is wonderful in and of itself, a tremulous beauty besieged by its polluted present, a beauty that might fizzle out without warning and take a human life along with it. Which means we’re back to the contrasts I already mentioned, but ultimately, the reason my reaction to the film is so layered is that the contrasts don’t function as contrasts. This world is not a collection of contrasting features. It simply is: a world of uncanny wonder, a world that is remembering itself. Like old buildings, the flora in Nausicaä evokes the past. Time has ensconced itself into every pore and leaf and creek and cave. You cannot look in any direction without feeling the weight of time. It is always there in this wrinkled aging world. And the huge creatures seem to be from another age, as if they should be extinct. But they’re not, and in their anachronistic perseverance we sense that, if anything remembers the decadence and ancient glory of this world, really remembers, not just through tales and myths, but actually recalls how the descent played out, if anything remembers, it is the Ohmu. Which is why they are so majestic. They seem to carry time and memory along with them, atop their regal monumentality. They can heal, return a recently dead person to life. They communicate through some unheard language. They can determine the fate of human civilization and can stamp it out entirely if they so wish. Now, they might not actually be either deities or memory-bearers. But what matters is how we feel about them. They seem beyond understanding, either animalistic or wise depending on the situation. When we first see an Ohmu, during the aforementioned prologue, we find a left-over shell, a remain: we are introduced to them as creatures from a bygone era. We immediately discover otherwise, but their immensity gives them an aura of timelessness. They have already beaten time, they are outside of time, eternal. And they calmly observe a withering land that does not renew itself but only accumulates the passing years, one on top of the other, painting its demeanor with coats of time.