Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

  The older avant-garde film-makers in America (Maya Deren, James Broughton, Kenneth Anger) turned out short films which were technically quite studied. Given their very low budgets, the color, camera work, acting, and synchronization of image and sound were as professional as possible. The hallmark of one of the two new avant-garde styles in American cinema (Jack Smith, Ron Rice, et al., but not Gregory Markopolous or Stan Brakhage) is its willful technical crudity. The newer films—both the good ones and the poor, uninspired work—show a maddening indifference to every element of technique, a studied primitiveness. This is a very contemporary style, and very American. Nowhere in the world has the old cliché of European romanticism—the assassin mind versus the spontaneous heart—had such a long career as in America. Here, more than anywhere else, the belief lives on that neatness and carefulness of technique interfere with spontaneity, with truth, with immediacy. Most of the prevailing techniques (for even to be against technique demands a technique) of avant-garde art express this conviction. In music, there is aleatory performance now as well as composition, and new sources of sound and new ways of mutilating the old instruments; in painting and sculpture, there is the favoring of impermanent or found materials, and the transformation of objects into perishable (use-once-and-throw-away) environments or “happenings.” In its own way Flaming Creatures illustrates this snobbery about the coherence and technical finish of the work of art. There is, of course, no story in Flaming Creatures, no development, no necessary order of the seven (as I count them) clearly separable sequences of the film. One can easily doubt that a certain piece of footage was indeed intended to be overexposed. Of no sequence is one convinced that it had to last this long, and not longer or shorter. Shots aren’t framed in the traditional way; heads are cut off; extraneous figures sometimes appear on the margin of the scene. The camera is hand-held most of the time, and the image often quivers (where this is wholly effective, and no doubt deliberate, is in the orgy sequence).

  But in Flaming Creatures, amateurishness of technique is not frustrating, as it is in so many other recent “underground” films. For Smith is visually very generous; at practically every moment there is simply a tremendous amount to see on the screen. And then, there is an extraordinary charge and beauty to his images, even when the effect of the strong ones is weakened by the ineffective ones, the ones that might have been better through planning. Today indifference to technique is often accompanied by bareness; the modern revolt against calculation in art often takes the form of aesthetic asceticism. (Much of Abstract Expressionist painting has this ascetic quality.) Flaming Creatures, though, issues from a different aesthetic: it is crowded with visual material. There are no ideas, no symbols, no commentary on or critique of anything in Flaming Creatures. Smith’s film is strictly a treat for the senses. In this it is the very opposite of a “literary” film (which is what so many French avant-garde films were). It is not in the knowing about, or being able to interpret, what one sees, that the pleasure of Flaming Creatures lies; but in the directness, the power, and the lavish quantity of the images themselves. Unlike most serious modern art, this work is not about the frustrations of consciousness, the dead ends of the self. Thus Smith’s crude technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility embodied in Flaming Creatures—a sensibility which disclaims ideas, which situates itself beyond negation.

  Flaming Creatures is that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence. To be sure, this joyousness, this innocence is composed out of themes which are—by ordinary standards—perverse, decadent, at the least highly theatrical and artificial. But this, I think, is precisely how the film comes by its beauty and modernity. Flaming Creatures is a lovely specimen of what currently, in one genre, goes by the flippant name of “pop art.” Smith’s film has the sloppiness, the arbitrariness, the looseness of pop art. It also has pop art’s gaiety, its ingenuousness, its exhilarating freedom from moralism. One great virtue of the pop-art movement is the way it blasts through the old imperative about taking a position toward one’s subject matter. (Needless to say, I’m not denying that there are certain events about which it is necessary to take a position. An extreme instance of a work of art dealing with such events is The Deputy. All I’m saying is that there are some elements of life—above all, sexual pleasure—about which it isn’t necessary to have a position.) The best works among those that are called pop art intend, precisely, that we abandon the old task of always either approving or disapproving of what is depicted in art—or, by extension, experienced in life. (This is why those who dismiss pop art as a symptom of a new conformism, a cult of acceptance of the artifacts of mass civilization, are being obtuse.) Pop art lets in wonderful and new mixtures of attitude, which would before have seemed contradictions. Thus Flaming Creatures is a brilliant spoof on sex and at the same time full of the lyricism of erotic impulse. Simply in a visual sense, too, it is full of contradictions. Very studied visual effects (lacy textures, falling flowers, tableaux) are introduced into disorganized, clearly improvised scenes in which bodies, some shapely and convincingly feminine and others scrawny and hairy, tumble, dance, make love.

  * * *

  One can regard Smith’s film as having, for its subject, the poetry of transvestitism. Film Culture, in awarding Flaming Creatures its Fifth Independent Film Award, said of Smith: “He has struck us with not the mere pity or curiosity of the perverse, but the glory, the pageantry of Transylvestia and the magic of Fairyland. He has lit up a part of life, although it is a part which most men scorn.” The truth is that Flaming Creatures is much more about intersexuality than about homosexuality. Smith’s vision is akin to the vision in Bosch’s paintings of a paradise and a hell of writhing, shameless, ingenious bodies. Unlike those serious and stirring films about the beauties and terrors of homoerotic love, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and Genet’s Chant d’Amour, the important fact about the figures in Smith’s film is that one cannot easily tell which are men and which are women. These are “creatures,” flaming out in intersexual, polymorphous joy. The film is built out of a complex web of ambiguities and ambivalences, whose primary image is the confusion of male and female flesh. The shaken breast and the shaken penis become interchangeable with each other.

  Bosch constructed a strange, aborted, ideal nature against which he situated his nude figures, his androgynous visions of pain and pleasure. Smith has no literal background (it’s hard to tell in the film whether one is indoors or outdoors), but instead the thoroughly artificial and invented landscape of costume, gesture, and music. The myth of intersexuality is played out against a background of banal songs, ads, clothes, dances, and above all, the repertory of fantasy drawn from corny movies. The texture of Flaming Creatures is made up of a rich collage of “camp” lore: a woman in white (a transvestite) with drooping head holding a stalk of lilies; a gaunt woman seen emerging from a coffin, who turns out to be a vampire and, eventually, male; a marvelous Spanish dancer (also a transvestite) with huge dark eyes, black lace mantilla and fan; a tableau from the Sheik of Araby, with reclining men in burnooses and an Arab temptress stolidly exposing one breast; a scene between two women, reclining on flowers and rags, which recalls the dense, crowded texture of the movies in which Sternberg directed Dietrich in the early thirties. The vocabulary of images and textures on which Smith draws includes pre-Raphaelite languidness; Art Nouveau; the great exotica styles of the twenties, the Spanish and the Arab; and the modern “camp” way of relishing mass culture.

  Flaming Creatures is a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world—and such a vision is perhaps always, at its core, epicene. But this type of art has yet to be understood in this country. The space in which Flaming Creatures moves is not the space of moral ideas, which is where American critics have traditionally located art. What I am urging is that there is not only moral space, by whose laws Flaming Creatures would indeed come off badly; there is also aesthetic space, the space of pleasure. Here Smith’s film moves and has its being.

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  Resnais’ Muriel

  Muriel is the most difficult, by far, of Resnais’ three feature films, but it is clearly drawn from the same repertoire of themes as the first two. Despite the special mannerisms of the very independent scriptwriters he has employed—Marguerite Duras in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Alain Robbe-Grillet in L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, and Jean Cayrol in Muriel—all three films share a common subject: the search for the inexpressible past. Resnais’ new film even has a co-title to this effect, like an old-fashioned novel. It is called Muriel, ou Le Temps d’un Retour.

  In Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the subject is the collation of two disjunct and clashing pasts. The story of the film is the unsuccessful attempt of the two principals, a Japanese architect and a French actress, to extract from their pasts the substance of feeling (and concordance of memory) that could sustain a love in the present. At the beginning of the film, they are in bed. They spend the rest of the film literally reciting themselves to each other. But they fail to transcend their “statements,” their guilt and separateness.

  L’Année Dernière à Marienbad is another version of the same theme. But here the theme is put in a deliberately theatrical, static setting, at a tangent to both the brash modern ugliness of the new Hiroshima and the solid provincial authenticity of Nevers. This story entombs itself in an outlandish, beautiful, barren place and plays out the theme of le temps retrouvé with abstract personages, who are denied a solid consciousness or memory or past. Marienbad is a formal inversion of the idea of Hiroshima, with more than one note of melancholic parody of its own theme. As the idea of Hiroshima is the weight of the inescapably remembered past, so the idea of Marienbad is the openness, the abstractness of memory. The claim of the past upon the present is reduced to a cipher, a ballet, or—in the controlling image of the film—a game, whose results are entirely determined by the first move (if he who makes the first move knows what he is doing). The past is a fantasy of the present, according to both Hiroshima and Marienbad. Marienbad develops the meditation on the form of memory implicit in Hiroshima, cutting away the ideological clothing of the first film.

  The reason Muriel is difficult is that it attempts to do both what Hiroshima and what Marienbad did. It attempts to deal with substantive issues—the Algerian War, the OAS, the racism of the colons—even as Hiroshima dealt with the bomb, pacifism, and collaboration. But it also, like Marienbad, attempts to project a purely abstract drama. The burden of this double intention—to be both concrete and abstract—doubles the technical virtuosity and complexity of the film.

  Again, the story concerns a group of people haunted by their memories. Hélène Aughain, a fortyish widow living in the provincial city of Boulogne, impulsively summons a former lover whom she has not seen for twenty years to visit her. Her motive is never named; in the film, it has the character of a gratuitous act. Hélène runs a touch-and-go antique furniture business from her apartment, gambles compulsively, and is badly in debt. Living with her in a painful loving stalemate is her uncommunicative stepson, Bernard Aughain, another memory addict, who has recently returned from serving in the army in Algeria. Bernard is unable to forget his share in a crime: the torturing of an Algerian political prisoner, a girl named Muriel. He is not merely too distraught to work; he is in an agony of restlessness. On the pretext of visiting a nonexistent fiancée in the town (whom he has named Muriel), he often flees his stepmother’s modern apartment, where every item of furniture is beautiful and for sale, to a room he maintains in the ruins of the old family apartment, which was bombed during World War II.… The film opens with the arrival from Paris of Hélène’s old lover, Alphonse. He is accompanied by his mistress, Françoise, whom he passes off as his niece. It ends, several months later, the unsuccessful reunion of Hélène and Alphonse having run its course. Alphonse and Françoise, their relationship permanently embittered, leave for Paris. Bernard—after shooting the boyhood friend who, as a soldier, led the torture of Muriel and who is now a civilian member of the OAS underground in France—says goodbye to his stepmother. In a coda, we are shown the arrival in Hélène’s empty apartment of the wife of Alphonse, Simone, who has come to reclaim her husband.

  Unlike Hiroshima and Marienbad, Muriel directly suggests an elaborate plot and complex interrelationships. (In the sketch above I have omitted important minor characters, including friends of Hélène, who figure in the film.) Yet, for all this complexity, Resnais conscientiously avoids direct narration. He gives us a chain of short scenes, horizontal in emotional tone, which focus on selected undramatic moments in the lives of the four main characters: Hélène and her stepson and Alphonse and Françoise eating together; Hélène going up, or coming down, the steps of the gambling casino; Bernard riding his bicycle in the town; Bernard going horseback riding on the cliffs outside the town; Bernard and Françoise walking and talking; and so forth. The film is not really hard to follow. I have seen it twice, and expected after I saw it once that I would see more in it the second time. I didn’t. Muriel, like Marienbad, should not puzzle, because there is nothing “behind” the lean, staccato statements that one sees. They can’t be deciphered, because they don’t say more than they say. It is rather as if Resnais had taken a story, which could be told quite straightforwardly, and cut it against the grain. This “against the grain” feeling—the sense of being shown the action at an angle—is the peculiar mark of Muriel. It is Resnais’ way of making a realistic story over into an examination of the form of emotions.

  Thus, although the story is not difficult to follow, Resnais’ techniques for telling it deliberately estrange the viewer from the story. Most conspicuous of these techniques is his elliptical, off-center conception of a scene. The film opens with the strained good-byes of Hélène and a demanding client at the threshold of Hélène’s apartment; then there is a brief exchange between the harried Hélène and the disgruntled Bernard. Throughout both sequences, Resnais denies the viewer a chance to orient himself visually in traditional story terms. We are shown a hand on the doorknob, the vacant insincere smile of the client, a coffee pot boiling. The way the scenes are photographed and edited decomposes, rather than explains, the story. Then Hélène hurries off to the station to meet Alphonse, whom she finds accompanied by Françoise, and leads them from the station back to her apartment on foot. On this walk from the station—it is night—Hélène is nervously chattering about Boulogne, which was mostly destroyed during the war and has been rebuilt in a bright functional modern style; and shots of the city in the daytime are interspersed with shots of the three walking through the city at night. Hélène’s voice bridges this high-speed visual alternation. In Resnais’ films, all speech, including dialogue, tends to become narration—to hover over the visible action, rather than to issue directly from it.

  The extremely rapid cutting of Muriel is unlike the jumpy, jazzy cutting of Godard in Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie. Godard’s abrupt cutting pulls the viewer into the story, makes him restless and heightens his appetite for action, creating a kind of visual suspense. When Resnais cuts abruptly, he pulls the viewer away from the story. His cutting acts as a brake on the narrative, a kind of aesthetic undertow, a sort of filmic alienation effect.

  Resnais’ use of speech has a similar “alienating” effect on the viewer’s feelings. Because his main characters have something not only benumbed but positively hopeless about them, their words are never emotionally moving. Speaking in a Resnais film is typically an occasion of frustration—whether it is the trance-like recitation of the uncommunicable distress of an event in the past; or the truncated, distracted words his characters address to each other in the present. (Because of the frustrations of speech, eyes have great authority in Resnais’ films. A standard dramatic moment, insofar as he allows such a thing, is a few banal words followed by silence and a look.) Happily, there is nothing in Muriel of the insufferable incantatory style of the dialogue of Hiroshima and the narration of Marienbad. Apart from a few stark, unanswered questions, the characters in
Muriel mostly speak in dull, evasive phrases, especially when they are very unhappy. But the firm prosiness of the dialogue in Muriel is not intended to mean anything different from the awful poetizing of the earlier two long films. Resnais proposes the same subject in all his films. All his films are about the inexpressible. (The main topics which are inexpressible are two: guilt and erotic longing.) And the twin notion to inexpressibility is banality. In high art, banality is the modesty of the inexpressible. “Ours is really une histoire banale,” the anguished Hélène says ruefully at one moment to the suave, furtive Alphonse. “The story of Muriel can’t be told,” says Bernard to a stranger in whom he has confided his excruciating memory. The two declarations really amount to the same thing.

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  Resnais’ techniques, despite the visual brilliance of his films, seem to me to owe more to literature than to the tradition of the cinema as such. (Bernard, in Muriel, is a film-maker—he is collecting “evidence,” as he calls it, about the case of Muriel—for the same reason that the central consciousness in so many modern novels is that of a character who is a writer.) Most literary of all is Resnais’ formalism. Formalism itself is not literary. But to appropriate a complex and specific narrative in order deliberately to obscure it—to write an abstract text on top of it, as it were—is a very literary procedure. There is a story in Muriel, the story of a troubled middle-aged woman attempting to reinstate the love of twenty years ago and a young ex-soldier wracked by guilt over his complicity in a barbarous war. But Muriel is designed so that, at any given moment of it, it’s not about anything at all. At any given moment it is a formal composition; and it is to this end that individual scenes are shaped so obliquely, the time sequence scrambled, and dialogue kept to a minimum of informativeness.