 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
India Song
|
 |
|
Durassic Park
For
about 60 years – the first 60 years of cinema – the relation of a narration
(whether in written inter-titles for silent films, or spoken voice-over for
sound films) to a narrative was relatively simple and clear. We watched an
event unfold on screen; and, laid on top of it, a commentary that did not pre-empt the visual event, but tactfully prepared it, set up its context (“So
I came to the river, unaware of what would happen that day …”) – and then, just
as tactfully, vanished from the film until its next brief, necessary,
functional appearance at the start or end of another scene. Many fine classical
films – from How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1940) to Carlito’s Way (Brian De Palma, 1993) – have streamlined and perfected, for artistically expressive
as well as functional storytelling purposes, this technique.
Only
a few special, exceptional works throughout the greater part of cinema history
contradict this convention. In the Chinese film Spring in a Small City (Fei Mu, 1948) – the daring original version, not its
comfortable and slick 2002 remake – the voiceover of the wife in this tangled
but understated marital melodrama poetically reiterates what is plainly visible
on screen, covers incidents she has in fact not witnessed, and puts sad,
unspoken realities into brutal words. In the Japanese production of a supremely
eccentric Austrian-American, Josef von Sternberg’s The Saga of Anatahan (1953), the almost constant narration, spoken
by the auteur himself, regularly destabilises its own presumed omniscience over
the story. And in Marcel Hanoun’s remarkable Une simple histoire (1959), the idea of spelling out or doubling
the patiently descriptive image-track (devoted to a single mother’s everyday
actions) with an equally pedantic voice-over account (belonging, this time, to
the central character) reaches a rigorously systematic yet subtly varied point
of extremity.
In
his classic essay on Sternberg (originally titled “Aquarium”), the modernist
French novelist Claude Ollier (1922-2014) suggested
of the voice-over in The Saga of Anatahan:
The text which he reads is in fact
more than just an element linking one scene to another, and more than just a
commentary. It is a musical and signifying part of a poetic fresco for a screen
in black and white. […] The voice seems to summon a scene into being as often
as to hold forth on its execution, seeming to solicit the mise en scène more than to criticise it. (1)
The
various New Waves of the 1960s – French, Brazilian, Czech, Japanese, Polish,
Italian, Indian – scrambled the customary functions of voice-over in many,
freewheeling ways: fragments of spoken text inserted as quotation, lyrical
interlude, reflection, jazzy punctuation, complication or punctuation of
narrative point-of-view … the sorts of modern voice-over techniques mined, ever
since, by Martin Scorsese or Leos Carax. Yet, in an odd phenomenon of global
synchronicity, it was during the 1970s – and essentially there alone – that the
intermittent pre-‘60s radicalism of experimental narration asserted itself in
force across a number of extraordinary, singular works, including Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973), Fontane Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974), Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978), Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) and,
last but far from least, India Song.
Which is a curious bunch of titles indeed, crossing serial television
production, genre cinema, classic literary adaptations and the avant-garde.
In
these films, the conventional relation of visual event to verbal narration is
thoroughly, utterly inverted. The images may show or propose little – a couple
driving, a character sitting at a table, a tableau
vivant of an awkwardly static grouping of characters – but the narration
gives us an enormous amount of information about and reflection upon this
visual event: what’s happening before, during and after it; its context and
significance; and sometimes a poetic weaving of different voices around it and
spreading outward from it.
There
is always a significant shift (in relation to convention) involved in the way
these texts are delivered, the imagined place from where they are spoken:
Fassbinder, like Sternberg, reads the voice-over himself; Sissy Spacek’s Holly
in Badlands swings wildly from
impossible omniscience to unacknowledged avoidance and repression; the novels
used by Kubrick and de Oliveira (a constant in the latter’s career, as Abraham Valley [1993] shows) are
retained in huge, verbatim chunks.
These
spoken texts can seem “novelistic” – even when they are not actually adapted
from prior novels – in their density and detail, their highly written
structures of literary artifice. And the resulting films may seem minimalistic
– even as they are, to those open and sensitive to their charge, textually
dense and deeply affecting. Both novelistic and minimalistic won’t get us
terribly far, as terms or tool, into these films.
Duras’ India Song is a key movie in the
small tradition of works that are simultaneously minimalist and rich. But it is
– and always has been, since its premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival
in 1975 (2) – divisive. There are
viewers for whom Duras’ filmic minimalism will always be too much: desiccated,
overly formal (if not formalist) and abstract, literally posturing, flat, too
heavily leaning upon the sombre effect of the literary word. Many poor
imitations subsequent decades (in short and feature films, as well as
art-videos and gallery installation pieces) have done nothing to improve this
bad reputation for those ill disposed towards Duras as an artist-celebrity.
Emilie
Bickerton, for instance, concludes that the “distillation” of Duras’ oeuvre
could run thus: “A detached, half-conscious protagonist looks out on a world
that she is ultimately powerless to affect … a world dominated by ennui”. (3) But to those who love the film – beginning with the testimony of the never-very-modest
auteur herself in the informative making-of documentary La Couleur des Mots (1984) (4) – its substance is wholly and instantly
emotional. I will come back to the question of the kinds of spectator emotion it
releases or puts into play.
Duras
frequently presented India Song –
like much of her cinematic, theatrical and literary work – as autobiographical.
Not issuing directly from her own experience – as is her most celebrated novel, The Lover (1984, poorly adapted to
film in 1992) – but based on her observation of people around her when she was
young. Duras grew up in French Indo-China (known today as South Vietnam); in
working up India Song (firstly, as a
theatrical piece commissioned for the British stage), she decided to “widen the
frame” by altering the geography, and hence what she called (in La Couleur des Mots) the “destinies” of
her characters: “I moved everything to Calcutta”.
In
so doing, she abstracted two different situations of colonialism, in order to
equalise them as material for her modernist/minimalist melodrama of the
passions. Even specific socio– or geo-political associations translate into an allegory
of passion for Duras: “She is Calcutta” and “He alone is Lahore”, she remarks
of the main characters in her “Notes on India
Song”, (5) irresistibly replaying the memory of gender and national
division structuring Hiroshima mon amour (1959), which she wrote for Alain Resnais. I am interested, in this piece, less
in a political critique of Duras’ decision (rarely undertaken by her
champions), than in taking aesthetic measure of the displacement it involves.
(6)
For
the displacement does not stop there. The author’s experience of a childhood in
Indochina is made over into an imagining of a decadent, white colonial culture
in decline in India; and that imaginary is filmed, very obviously, in
contemporary France – specifically locations including the decaying Palais
Rothschild – without any attempt to disguise the raw artifice of this fact.
Another displacement, minor but glaring, that is surprisingly easy to overlook
or forget: that this extremely French film has an insistently English title,
and that – in a way that evokes, in a surreal détournement, the unfussy logic of Hollywood’s historic
spectaculars set in non-American lands – its presumably British characters
speak almost solely in the author’s native tongue. From Indo-China to India to
France: this dizzying succession of moves, both geographically and temporally,
leads us finally to an unusual space-time that seems to belong to cinema – or more
exactly to the unfolding of this one film – alone.
As
savvy spectators of today, we need to remind ourselves of the strangeness of India Song in this regard – and how
radical a gesture it must have been in 1975. This is a film in which the act of representing the past – recreating
it, evoking and conjuring it, building it on screen – undergoes a massive
process of dematerialisation. There are costumes and sets that more or less
evoke that past, and music participating in the historical mood … but very
little else.
Is
the costume-drama flimsiness of India
Song a matter of economy, production expedience? On the contrary, it was,
from the outset, a fundamental aesthetic decision. The past is gone, cannot be
represented, is lost in the mists of its re-mediation and narrativisation;
personal experience can only be reconstructed accordingly, at the risk of what
Bickerton calls an extreme (and, for her, crippling) “sense of otherness from
the world”. (7) This is the type of writing or art-making, from the cliff-edge
of oblivion, deliberately riddled with absences and impossibilities, that is
familiar from the work of Duras’ literary comrade, Maurice Blanchot. (8)
Little
wonder that so many reviews and commentaries on India Song refer to it, casually, not as a historical re-creation
at all, but as the prime example of another, amorphous kind of cinematic genre:
the memory film (closely linked, as
it happens, to the equally amorphous brand-label of the dream film). Critics including David Bordwell rank India Song, in this regard, alongside Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964) or Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
as particularly haunting examples of this type; (9) the collected works of
Terence Davies (such as Distant Voices,
Still Lives, 1988) and Bird (Clint Eastwood, 1988) have also been nominated as prime memory films,
alongside the entire “haunted cinema” of Víctor Erice (see this audiovisual essay).
What
is this special category of the memory film? Decidedly not a film with
elaborate and lengthy flashbacks, a guiding voice-over (“I recall when it all
began …”), and a plot construction founded on the fictional act of remembrance
– such as (to take a magisterial example) Once
Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) or, in a more fractured,
modernist, multi-layered vein, The
Ceremony (aka Ceremonies, Nagisa
Oshima, 1971) and Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999). (10) Rather, it is a film
that, in totality, presents itself as filtered through memory, the end-result of a process of memory, or a mosaic of memories,
unflagged as such except through clues offered by style and mood (usually
melancholic or elegiac).
However,
designating India Song as a memory
film runs the risk of cohering it, papering over its abundant cracks, in a way
that the work itself militantly resists. In this regard, one does well to make
the effort of trying to re-experience the film in its time, that initial moment
of the “India Song event” (as Joël
Farges and François Barat dubbed it). (11) For, just as it witnesses the
intriguing flowering of extreme and unconventional voice-over narrations in
1970s cinema, India Song sums up a
brief, bold era in art and thought when gaps, fissures, ruptures and
contradictions were prized almost above all else.
A
profoundly anti-classical moment: whereas normal films are daily praised for
appearing seamless, India Song is a
film full of gaping seams – indeed, it is built on them. My own memory of
seeing the film as a young cinephile in the ‘70s (12) corroborates this: what was striking
then (to adapt a phrase of Duras’ own explication) was the fact that the image
and sound proceeded on two separate paths, merely “touching” each other now and
again, creating a frisson of
narrative (and of the narrative’s world), but never fully constituting it
(Duras described the film as “the bringing to ruin of any kind of reconstitution”)
(13); that certain notable images – such as, immortally, the vision of Delphine
Seyrig’s exposed breast, standing up in the frame like a mountain – seemed to
emanate from no discernible point-of-view belonging to any visible fictional
character; that Carlos D’Alessio’s extraordinary old-style, dance-band score,
as a recording, is simply engineered but not produced, hence retaining the
rough charm of an unmixed, untouched live performance (bum notes and all). (14)
What
is the upshot of all this? The story – this sad story of Anne-Marie Stretter,
relayed in novelistic form in The
Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964) and The
Vice-Consul (1965) – is told neither in the images nor the sounds; rather
it is alluded to, echoed, replayed in
various fragmentary ways. The specific time and place of the story, the time
and place of its unfolding, is thus neither seen nor heard. This is another
constitutive aspect of the film’s strangeness: from where, exactly, do these
images and sounds (separately) issue? From what point in space and time? Cinema
– even the most conventional, mainstream cinema – has accustomed us to routine
ambiguity, a strategic vagueness, in the placement of voice-over narration: it
usually comes from somewhere further ahead in time, when the
narrating-perceiving-remembering subject is older and wiser, having reached the
point of being able to tell his or her tale. But to take the assumed present
tense of the image and subject it to the same wandering vagueness or ambiguity
is a truly radical move, and Duras’ gesture – her conjuring of a filmic fiction
as “this place where doubt is cast” (15) – resonates through many of the most
decisive experiments to follow in cinema history.
Many
in-depth discussions of India Song dwell on aspects of its highly original visual style – its lighting scheme,
wall-to-floor mirrors reminiscent of certain Russian silent films, rhythms of
camera and bodily movement – and, in broad terms, the system of its image-sound
relation (taken even further by Duras in the film’s avant-garde sequel of sorts, Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert [1976], which recycles exactly the same soundtrack, but over completely
depopulated shots seemingly taken in and around the same locations). (16) But
what of the film’s emotional impact, so determining for those who adore it, so
lacking for those who do not? The peculiar emotional register of India Song is caught in Ollier’s
discussion of The Saga of Anatahan in “Aquarium”, written four years before
Duras’ shoot in 1974:
Emotion no longer arises from the
events themselves, but from the alternation of drawing near and moving back at
the suggestion of the “voice off”, a coming and going based on the alternation
of the struggle between violence (shown and lived) and calm (recited, earned by
age and reflection), between madness and wisdom, between self-destruction and
renewal and recovery. In its strict and distant course, this voice communicates
over and over again the impression of a destined and inevitable development.
(17)
This
description corresponds to the passion, intermingled with contemplative
distance, that Duras herself frequently evoked: “To speak about the reception
in India Song is to inhibit the
rapture I feel when I speak about it”. (18) But there is another, quite different
but no less intense emotion I have often observed (and even participated in) at
several public screenings of the film: a kind of delirious, hysterical, mad
laughter. And this is not necessarily a sign of disrespect, nor entirely
explicable as a nervous, defensive reaction – for quite a number of the film’s
fans have testified to this very same experience, in many different periods and
countries since 1975.
Why
does India Song – and particularly,
in my own viewing history, the prolongation of Michael Lonsdale’s wild
screaming as the Vice-Consul on the soundtrack – provoke such an emotional
reaction? The answer, I believe, lies in a condition of the cinematic apparatus
that Thomas Elsaesser described well in 1969: the viewing situation generates
what he calls a psychic matrix from
the agitational effect of the motion-picture upon the immobile spectator. (19) Managing this essentially negative condition – one that easily gives rises to
violent emotional reactions – and turning it into a positive experience is no
small part of the everyday art and craft of narrative movies. But when the
immobility of audience members is met by the immobility of events and bodies in
the image-track of a film such as India
Song, something goes fascinatingly askew, and other kinds of sensation –
like the kind of jouissance which
Roland Barthes once promised exists on the nether side of boredom (20) – come
into play, exactly the kinds of sensation elaborated by a century of
avant-garde cinema. What usually counts as psychic compensation for the
spectator during (brief) moments of immobility in funky mainstream cinema
(think of the tableau or vignette effects in Wes Anderson’s films) is the
soundtrack – usually a beloved or cultish pop song that freezes the action more
definitively than the numbers in a traditional musical comedy do.
But
the veritable shuttle-parade of displacements on all levels in India Song takes us way beyond the
facile pleasure of such compensations, and into a hitherto unknown terrain of
cinematic thought and sensation – a terrain that we are still exploring
(whether in practice or critical theory) today, long after the death in 1996 of
Marguerite Duras.
1.
Claude Ollier, “Josef von Sternberg”, in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1980), pp. 958-959. The original French text, “Aquarium”, now
appears in Ollier, Ce soir à Marienbad (Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2020); the English
translation for Roud by Michael Graham is superb and
exact. back
2.
See Marguerite Duras, Duras by Duras (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), for many passionate testimonies
dating from the first year of the film’s public life.
3.
Emilie Bickerton, “The Timeless Marguerite Duras”, The Times Literary Supplement (25 July
2007).
4. La Couleur des Mots (The Colour of Words), directed by Jérôme
Beaujour and Jean Mascolo, with interviews conducted by Dominique Noguez, is
available as a Postface on the India Song DVD (Benoît Jacob Video, France).
5. Duras by Duras, pp. 14-15.
6.
It can be argued that the task of politicising Duras falls precisely to other,
later filmmakers who admire and have been influenced by her: in this sense, if H-Story (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2000) fills in
the geo-political outline of Hiroshima
mon amour, then A Song of Ceylon (1985) by the Australian-Sri Lankan experimental filmmaker Laleen Jayamanne
offers a pointed rewriting or rewiring (along another geo-cultural
displacement) of India Song.
7.
Bickerton, “The Timeless Marguerite Duras”.
8.
See, for an example of Blanchot’s commentary on Duras, The Unavowable Community (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988). back
9.
See David Bordwell, The Films of
Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The
notion of the “haunted memory” film is also explored in my book Mysteries of Cinema (Perth: University
of Western Australia Publishing, 2020). back
10.
For a discussion of this temporal narrative structure, see Adrian Martin, Once Upon a Time in America (London:
British Film Institute, 1998).
11. Duras by Duras, p. 1.
12.
See Adrian Martin, “Scenes” (1982), reprinted in Mysteries of Cinema.
13. Duras by Duras, p. 16.
14.
The music – in exactly the recorded form that the film uses it – appears on the
invaluable CD (credited to D’Alessio and Duras), India Song et autres musiques de films (Le Chante du monde, 1991, LDX 274818). D’Alessio, born in Argentina 1935,
worked extensively with Duras on film and theatre projects; he became best
known, near the end of his life in 1992, for his collaboration with the
directorial team of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (Delicatessen, 1991). He can be glimpsed performing the central India Song theme on piano in La Couleur des Mots.
15. Duras by Duras, p. 13.
16.
See, for examples, Elizabeth Lyon, “The Cinema of Lol V. Stein”, in Constance
Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory (London: British Film Institute & Routledge, 1988), pp. 244-271; Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Da
Capo, 1998). back
17.
Ollier, “Josef von Sternberg”, p. 959.
18. Duras by Duras, p. 12.
19.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Narrative Cinema and Audience-Oriented Aesthetics”, in Tony
Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer & Janet Wollacott (eds.), Popular Television and Film (London:
British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 270-282. A subsequent 1974 revision of this
late 1960s text, again retouched in 2001 and retitled “Narrative Cinema and
Audience Aesthetics: The Mise en Scène of the Spectator”, appears in Elsaesser, The
Persistence of Hollywood (London: Routledge,
2012), pp. 95-104. back
20.
See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the
Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
© Adrian Martin June 2008 |
