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| From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert1.png |
Dir. Stephen Dwoskin
West Germany – United Kingdom
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| From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert4.png |
If there is an inherent
abstraction in film and motion footage as a form, it’s that it cannot stimulate
all five senses a human being has in reality. Baring failed attempts at one of
them, taste, smell and touch have yet to be fully implemented into cinema. Some
of behaviour people partake in when watching films, as simple as eating food
like popcorn, could be seen as their attempt to compensate for this fact and to
avoid having to only see and hear for two hours or so. Film is about sight and
sound. The only point further from this is pure ‘visual’ cinema which has no
sort of soundtrack whatsoever as practiced by the late Stan Brakhage in his short films; beyond this you are projecting
light on a screen and sticking objects directly onto celluloid, the later actually
practiced by Brakhage as well, or you’re
going to just conjure up images in your mind like literature does when you read
it or when you have flights of fancy. Sight and sound, fitting choices of words
for the well regarded film magazine from Britain to choose as it title, are the
prime aspects of cinema and how it is made, how they are used and juxtaposed
with, experimental cinema usually playing with this for effect.
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| From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert6.png |
Behindert is an abstraction of a relationship drama. After a
prolonged scene at a friend’s home for dinner, a woman (Carola Regnier) meets a disabled man (the director Stephen Dwoskin himself) and embark on a
relationship together that is soured by their waning passions and, using the
director’s own disability after childhood polio ceased his ability to use his
legs, her frustrations of how he has to function differently without the same
functions physically another person would have. Musically the score, when not
allowing us to hear the characters speak, is that of atonal noises and an occasional
piano. Visually the film starts a technical style of prolonged close-ups that
would be continued in Tod und Teufel
(1974) from the same year. Mostly made of close-ups, extreme close-ups and
abstracted images, we are forced to scrutinise the characters, especially the
woman in prolonged minutes. We see the lines and pores on her cheeks and
eyelids, flawed but beautiful face with combed back red-brown hair, the
contours and dimples of her wide mouthed smiles and frowns of sadness, and with
Regnier’s deep, fathomless brown eyes,
her emotions in lingering detail not followed though with in more conventional
cinema. It’s voyeuristic at first, but feels more like you, the viewer, having
to actually look at the people you
see, their expressions and what they are thinking, their bodies in abstract
positions in the microscopic lense of the film camera, and what they are
thinking as you have to look at the images and them, set to noise, longer than
another film. If there is a major critical flaw in the late Stephen Dwoskin’sf film, it’s that in
vast contrast to Tod und Teufel,
which took the same style to two scenes out of a Ingmar Bergman drama and stretched them out to a whole feature
length, forcing you to look at the same actress’s eyes in raw, agonising
emotion, it’s that, while his obsession with the image is fascinating, as
looking at anything for myself and absorbing it in is inherently going to have
an effect, he pushes it too far into what I would call “arch” experimental
cinema. This is what I am calling, in vast contrast to experimental work that I
find powerful and potent, films that purposely push themselves teasingly as
experimental and end up being vague even in the point of the experimentation, or
as this film does, ignores how its conception inherently conveys the concepts and
covers them up in unnecessary excess. We don’t need the other prolonged moments
looking at someone which are not connected to the others. We certainly do not
need the proto-shaky camera of still moments and faces that felt deliberate
rather than by accident. It lacks the power of the other film because it forces
itself to push its central idea far too hardly when the inherent concept of a prolonged
view of a woman’s face, staring straight at the camera – Dwoskin the character,
Dwoskin the director or us? – is enough
to challenge and affect a viewer.
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| From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert9.png |
Sadly Dwoskin’s films are difficult to find. I am only lucky to have seen
quite a few now because I still have contact with my old university and can
still borrow materials from their library. This makes this review instantly
abstract as, unless you can find the French box set like I found in that
library or a bit torrent link, you can only conjure up the film in your minds. My
lack of knowledge of harvesting images from the film to have screenshots does
not help either, but thankfully they were available online and replicated here.
If you can find it, see it baring in mind the patience needed for it. Hopefully
the review will suggest however that to have to stare at another person’s face,
even if it’s a replication in a movie, for a period longer than we usually do
in reality has an immense effect on your thoughts. Its considered impolite or discomforting,
understandably, at times in real life but considering the lack of connection
between human beings at points, something like this, despite not succeeding well,
suggests that one having far more eye contact with your fellow man or woman
could ease a lot of closed up feelings. Sight, as well as sound, can have such
an effect on a moment depending on how long it is.
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| From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert2.png |
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