Words of Wisdom

"Some people will not act without knowing where they were going, or what they can expect. They are conditioned to the result, thinking they know what it will be. They project results as already experienced into each action they are faced with, and in this way think they know where they are going. Risk, failure or confusion area apparently eliminated. Yet their results merely echo the past. They have a preconception that a particular object should be represented by a particular image. This too becomes a projection of a received or taught symbol, not necessarily a symbol acquired by experience. It is undoubtedly easier to exist in this way, since it avoid change and readjustment, confusion and effort. It also permits control, restraint; you know where you are and you know who you are - at least you think you do, probably because you are static enough to see your whole frozen frame."

"Appreciation in the broadest of sense as far as film is concerned is very important today. The viewer, having been conditioned to accept the story as the main conscious experience, has difficulty appreciating film on the intuitive and unconscious level. With the advent of sound film the verbal story has become more dominant than the visual narrative. We experience a 'minimal' sensation in that long, long shot of the empty street in the basic cowboy film - just before the gunfight - we accept this tension because it is resolved by the eventual gunfight. Our sensation is resolved for us but my view is that the tension can be and very often is a valid statement in itself and this tension is a thing we have to live with and resolve for ourselves. The sensation without the familiar narrative resolution can provide an active situation for the viewer where he is part of the whole, and is very much alive in it; no longer escaping but growing...and I begin to wonder how we have lost in the way of seeing and feeling because the need for  profit and quick political propaganda has weaned generations on the simple escapist films ('let the workers rest - they will work better tomorrow'). As a result, most cinema goers hear the patter of pipe dreams and register sensation solely by dictionary description."

- Film Is (1975) by Stephen Dwoskin, pages 62 and 126 respectively. -

Sight and Sound of Atonal Textures (Behindert (1974))

From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert1.png

Dir. Stephen Dwoskin

West Germany – United Kingdom

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.

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.

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.

From http://www.cinemaontheroad.com/screenshots/Behindert2.png

The Candid Eye [Central Bazaar (1976)]

From http://img.filmous.com/static/photos/85223/poster.jpg

Dir. Stephen Dwoskin

United Kingdom

Film #27, for Saturday 27^th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

From http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/7135/vlcsnap8502.jpg

[NOTE: This review has screenshots with near and full frontal nudity and are NOT SAFE FOR WORK. I hate the idea of having to put this warning just because of the final image mainly, but I have to take into consideration it may not best in every local to view these pictures there. I intended to screen-cap them myself from the DVD but the technology failed me miserably, so I have had to use ones of varying sizes from other locations like my other reviews, especially since I did not want to make it seem like it was a film just of women in various states of undress for titillation and involves men as well. If you are fascinated by what you see, the DVD is still available in the United Kingdom from our retailers.]

From http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/5485/vlcsnap11352.jpg

The following film that I am writing about wasn’t intended to be part of this season at all. It is the sort of obscure and unconventional cinema I like to dig myself into when I’m watching films in my everyday life, especially as a British Film Institute release from an organisation known for releasing obscurities like it. An experimental film, in which the late director Stephen Dwoskin filmed a group of volunteers in his house for over a week like a proto-Big Brother, it has nothing to do with the horror genre, but within its two and a half hour running time Central Bazaar became a far more fitting choice for the season than what I was originally going to review. Allowing the individuals, male and female, to channel out their emotions and passions fully, Dwoskin affectively filmed a psychological session that lasted a whole week or so, all filmed in a red covered room with no open windows, preventing the individuals from knowing when it was night or day, and affectively creating a ritualistic tone close to Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) (Review Here). There is a danger in putting this in the season that I could seem subconsciously puritanical on a surface level, full of full frontal male and female nudity, or even homophobic or phobic of transgenderality, with scenes of sexual interaction between men and cross-dressing. This sexual nature, nearly about to become pornographic in a group massage scene later on if penetrative sex was to have taken place, is actually beautiful once I got passed the disorientating tone of the film within the first half, a continuation of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) in bright colour and fantastical costumes that shows a shedding of shame and a liberated nature to the volunteers’ interactions with each other. However, a sense of unease for very different reasons stays continually with the viewer throughout the whole film.

Central Bazaar is as truly experimental as that word implies an attempt to create a film different from conventions whether it works or not. This is an exceptionally difficult film, consisting entirely of prolonged images and sequences of the individuals interacting in front of Dwoskin’s juttering camera as it collects together fragments of them, their interactions and the objects around them. My head did hurt throughout the film, trying to grasp, not the meaning behind the images, but what lead to them being put on screen. It is a difficult film in the truest sense, compounded by a score that, while brilliant, is utterly unnerving for most of the film’s length. It is this score that contributed the most to this film being added to the season, a sonic noise that moves betweens electronic sounds to unsettled gramophone music for children.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/central-bazaar/w448/central-bazaar.jpg?1289467444

The film can be seen as a mirror to our repressed desires, literally shown by real people within the circumstances, but interconnected to it is a disturbing yet necessary relinquish of emotions less than desired by the viewer. Unlike Flaming Creatures, an American experimental film which realised perverse joy through a low budget glamour of Hollywood cinema, Central Bazaar for its moments of pleasure is undercut by a downward drop in most of the scenes. The painted white faces, naked bodies covered in glitter and masks can become grotesque or battered down by the anxiety of those behind them. Then the facades start to crack, with individuals starting to weep and needing to be comforted by someone with them, or in the worse cases, violence starting to take place even if its implied, from wrestling between a woman and a man, to a squabble between four of the men with one in blackface punching the one who has him in a headlock on the floor in the chest repeatedly. The sense of madness is permeable, effecting me as the film went on, its two and a half hours going through a delirium, and sensuality between it, before spending the whole of its final quarter, in full detail, creating a sense of exhaustion in the viewer as the volunteers onscreen start to remove the makeup and feel the effects of the days, the red curtain behind the camera evoking David Lynch and the insanity he portrayed in his films later on.

Halloween as a season seems to evoke the liberation of desires both pleasant and unsettling to people. Horror films do this as well, purging one through the gruesome while allowing you to have pleasure at the same time. The origins of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome from a Halloween party where patrons went as ‘their madness’ is brought to mind for me in the case of Central Bazaar, a trance-like mood throughout it that sucks you in as the individuals involved act out their nightmares as well as their desires, the horror of seeing people in this presentation at first altered into a sympathy for them tinged with the horror of seeing their joy grounded by the stress they exhibit on their faces. Is it exploitative on the director’s part to have made this film? It is from the perspective of a voyeur, but unlike reality TV we are with the participants rather than gloating at them, showing for me the horror of the outside world and its restrictions as well against what is shown onscreen. Three occasions the individuals talk or sing to the camera, and at one point one man pretends to be a living puppet whose ‘strings’ are pulled by the other participants, the theatrical self-recognition of their situation in these moments obvious after viewing the film. The cathartic material, that will be pretentious and unbearable for most to sit through but fascinating to others, is fitting for this month as it is a season, beyond the horror films and candy, of releasing deep emotions, dressing up in costumes and letting one’s  desires come out behind them. Again, Central Bazaar is not for everyone, but it pulled me into its madness and I have to praise it as a brave experiment which has a power to it. It left my mind battered but rather than being vague and arch, its devotion to raw emotions made it potent rather than cold experimentation. And unexpectedly, shot in the United Kingdom by the American Dwoskin, I have a great British entry finally in this season that is not in the horror genre at all, showing that our history of neglected experimental cinema in the British Isles may have far more bite over most other films made here.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAy1cOQKRyU2DQD_lNJU0Ax0uBtiDcdudq4HWXWMQGk4IEFC4NRml4j_cmoZKS_f1LEg1scVirjTTigmMsPUK1ArSHucKtaI4kSK7ctbdHDzKRIaR1JyWwfsDF-2HMSV45uP_ethiCIw/