The Green Ray (1986): Conversations, Alienation and Love

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Adrian here:

What do I think about conversations? Well, perhaps, from my own experience, they comprise a social act driven by two or more people who are willing to share themselves to each other, an act of engagement. Eric Rohmer's films are full of conversations. They comprise a large section of the narrative, often they contain the most important facts about the characters. Most often, these conversations propel the narrative of the films.

The Green Ray (1986), my second Rohmer film, has many conversations. If there is one thing to describe these conversations: awkward and often isolating. Compared with conversations at My Nights at Maud's (1969) which are engaging and percussive between the people, conversations in The Green Ray have a tendency to distance the main character, Delphine, from the rest of the group. Rohmer has achieved this subtly by placing Delphine in slightly awkward positions.

Isolation through Frames

Rohmer uses cinematic techniques and staging techniques to isolate the character Delphine. From my observation of the film, he uses two techniques: awkward positioning of the character, and cut-through technique juxtaposing Delphine with other characters for comparative purposes.

Conversations, like the one above, always put Delphine in an awkward position, often between two people who challenge her ideals. These conversations singled out Delphine as the only vegetarian in the group. She was place intuitively centered in the two frames, emphasizing her obscurity and difference among the others.

Another 'isolation technique' that Rohmer used was by placing Delphine detached from the rest of the group. As you can see above, the first two stills shows the connectedness of the characters, while in the last frame, Delphine character seems to be alienated even if she was with a child. She seemed to be detached from the group, which leaves us to Delphine running away from these set of friends at Cherbourg.

Dualism of Nature

The film also establishes a unique connection with nature and the phenomenon surrounding it like superstitions, the Zodiac, and other. It either compliments our main character's temper or alienates her.

Delphine admires the natural beauty of her surroundings, as implied in the frame above. It strikes me to think that Rohmer is sensitive enough to place Delphine where she is most at home to: among the currant bushes, being a vegetarian herself. On the other hand, Rohmer uses the same element to identify with Delphine's loneliness. This duality reverberates throughout the film. Even the happiest of places, Delphine cannot find her mind at peace.

In Delphine's journey alone in her two vacation destinations, she encounters a deep disconnection with herself. As implied in these two occasions, she seemed to find these places distant from herself. She despise being in Paris for a vacation, so she ended up on a beach at Biarritz where she met a Swedish girl who is exactly her, a single traveler. She strikes up a good conversation, but it turns out that the Swedish girl hates commitment as oppose to Delphine who treasures a deep connection with her loved one. They ended up at opposite boats, and when they met two guys who apparently into foursomes, Delphine withdraws. This withdrawal brought her to the man that will fulfill her thirst for a romance and belongingness.

With nature also functioning as chance, we are brought to elements of superstitions, being it as the penultimate central dogma of the whole theme. Rohmer harbors the great central order of things by introducing found objects and 'found stories' (as with The Green Ray story of the ladies by the bridge) and connecting them within the internal story world of Delphine.

Such elements are normally 'off' to conventional cinema. They are even 'unnecessary' to some films with a similar plot as this one. But these 'found' elements are what binds the film. As with the first card, a Queen of Spade, it foreshadows Delphine's unsatisfactory vacation trips, while the second card, a Jack of Hearts, predicts the arrival of a man in her life.
As with the green ray, the foreshadowing happens when Delphine eavesdrop on the conversations of a group of old women by the bridge. Delphine was transfixed by the magical element of the story implied by her smile. She admits that she do not believe in the Zodiac but believes in her own superstitions.

The green ray is believed to act as a lens of emotions for two people who has seen it. When two people saw it together, they will, in turn, see each other's feelings.

Collecting Everything


Rohmer has made this film for his audience especially for those who have lost their hope for love. Rohmer is aware of these moments. He used cinematic techniques to illustrate the feelings of his characters by placing them in environments that would highlight these emotional tonalities. It is as if with the subjective framing of the green ray in the last scene Rohmer alludes to the alienation of the modern times. For everyone who has lost it, Rohmer conjures a green ray to let those people experience it at first hand in cinema. But it only remains there as an illusion of hope. And upon exiting the cinema, one asks: when can I see a green ray myself?

Ciao!
****

TOP 100 FILMS - 51 - 55

(Sorry! Its been awhile. The long delay is mostly because I'm finishing my undergraduate studies and also because I'm busy catching up with so many films for the past few weeks.)

The Man from Earth (2007) is not your ordinary science-fiction film, and maybe one of the most underrated sci-fi of all time. What is so strange about this sci-fi film is that it is only set in a living room with six to seven people talking. And for one and a half hour, the whole of man's history is revealed. Unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which tracked the evolution of men with the full usage of the film language, in The Man from Earth , the evolution and the history of men was told in words from the main character. This gave the film a post-modern bent, not much explored in many sci-fi films of the past decade. It follows a professor named John Oldman, played by David Lee Smith, who was about to leave. He doesn't tell anyone even his closest friends why he was leaving and where will he go. A day before he leaves to nowhere, his friends went by his house. Pressured by his friends to tell the reason of why he was leaving, he was forced to tell them that he was a prehistoric man who have lived 30,000 years. He never gets old and he claims to have been involve in creating much of what we know about history: Da Vinci, Siddhartha Gautama, Christopher Columbus, Van Gogh. His friends were fascinated: all academicians themselves and part of the university where Oldman teaches each of them challenged Oldman and his claims. Based on the last script written by award-winning sci-fi screenwriter Jerome Bixby before he died, the film is filled with so many philosophical, spiritual and political questions that stretches from reconciliation of biological make-up and spiritual make-up to immortality to human strife to human existence. The film has delivered verbal entertainment on such a small budget of $200, 000. It was distributed via BitTorrent sites. It has the qualities of a cult film, that someday, a few years from now it will be considered as one of the most of enthralling, most philosophically sophisticated sci-fi film of all time.

My Night at Maud's (1969) is perhaps my most memorable ordeal with Eric Rohmer who died earlier of 2010. Rohmer, whose literary origins gently melts within his films, gave this film so much life that I want to stay within the film forever. The narrative of the film is about a mathematics teacher named Jean-Louis played by Jean-Louis Tritignant, visits Clermont-Ferrand for a conference and one night he met with his long lost Marxist friend, Vidal played by Antoine Vitez. Vidal later brought Jean-Louis at Maud's, his friend. Maud is strong-willed woman, divorced, rich, playful and seductive while Jean-Louis is reserved, emotional, religious and single. Vidal flirts with Maud, but Maud is uninterested. On one night they conversed about politics, as it is being fueled by Vidal's Marxist commentaries, and philosophy, triggered by Maud's insistence to know the private life of Jean-Louis as they discuss about how to reconcile Jean-Louis' previously implied promiscuity and his devotion to the Catholic religion. The film has simple, its core is a series of talks shaping each character perfectly. When Jean-Louis fall in love with a beautiful girl he met on the streets of Clermont-Ferrand, it was apparent that this people are not hero and heroines nor the story is a melodrama. But they are, in they're own way, simple people with simple personalities. Rohmer magnifies this simplicity by presenting to us the most banal way to love a person, and that is to say I love you as plain as it is. This directness and simplicity is quite rare in cinema, one thinks of many ways to compare this instances to Bresson, the way it can be viewed as paratactic. But the uniqueness of Rohmer is his capacity to draw out complex emotional and psychological depth of his characters through this technique, a thing most directors find it hard to do.

Eureka (2000) is a film by Shinji Aoyama. Shot in sepia tone, the film returns to monotonic frame compositions that we rarely see today. Rare is a film that takes you within the heart of violence while exposing the humanity of his characters. A film exquisitely paced, it begins with a bus hostage wherein three of the four main characters met to face their immediate death from the hostage taker: the bus driver and a sibling, a young girl and a young boy on their way to school. The scene rather sparse in filmic information. The absence of the beginning of the hostage taking process was cut, and what is shown is a bus in an empty parking lot surrounded by the police under surveillance. The sparse aesthetics delivers contemplation beyond the form. The balance between minimalist staging and slow pace editing demands new perceptual challenges for non-contemplative audiences. The film commands new concepts of time and space, that, at one point in the film, the violence is a preempt and hinted by a series of images when one of kids is cutting the trees. It takes space integral to the character's mind, subtle expressionistic imagery almost art. Its epic three hour running time consumes one from within: melancholia steaming deeply from its unabashed roots. Eureka is one of the most underrated art films of the decade.

Querelle (1982) is one of the most revolutionary works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. When one digs into Queer theory in film, writers and authors devote time and space to discuss its significance in the history of queer film. What Fassbinder have done was to take Genet's work, Querelle de Brest, and transform into a phantasmagorical and homoerotic work that would echo Jean Genet's classic Un Chant d'Amour (1950). It's main character, Querelle, embodies one of most atypical non-straight masculine gay roles in anticipation of its full exploration in the Queer New Wave of the 1990s. Querelle's experimental air can be traced from underground cult film Pink Narcissus (1971) by James Bidgood. The mix of heightened sensory overload and melancholy plus its refutation for being the posthumous work of who was once a gay director, Fassbinder, demands strenuous allegory to what Fassbinder was up to in making this film. The film stands on its own for being stylistically unique and adventurous. Its sexual content will still be of a question. It can be considered as a liberation of Fassbinder in film. Its transcendent quality makes it his most personal film, his masterpiece. His authorial presence is so strong, it echoes a revolution.
Winter's Bone (2010) has an emotional core so deep it creates waves of bursting tour-de-force acting by Jennifer Lawrence. Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman's acting are galaxies apart. Yes, Natalie Portman do have her own of way of wearing a ballet shoes, but Jennifer Lawrence's acting is nuanced and very raw. She do know how to put up a brave face and speak the language of the locals. What i like about the film is its unforgiving air, stuffy and full of territorial issues. Territorial boundaries have structured the whole film, and we course with Ree Dolly in her journey to break some of these unseen boundaries. The cinema verite style Debra Granik infused with the dark and bleak mise-en-scene heightens the intensity of the film. It delivers a point of fact reality of people living at the harshest conditions. A document of the cultural and political battle in America in its quest to regain their identity and stability.

46-50<...>55 - 60

Ciao!
****

My Night at Maud's (1969)

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I haven't seen you but it seems that you're the best Christmas gift ever. [^_^]

Ciao!
****

ERIC ROHMER (1920 - 2010) at The Auteurs Daily | Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

...click the link here...
here and here...

Rohmer (1920 - 2010)

The medium for him is a continuous flow of images, of thoughts bathe in light, the whole of it from the grandeur of literature.


****

Melville's Dick


Eventually, after furnishing my old room at the province, I faced a number of books that have died literally in my closet. Of course, there were Saul Bellows who just laid on my closet untouched and some other Hemingways hanged from the roof of our house, and the infinite list of Dickens and his insurmountable books from the Victorian London whose bookface i could not recognized. I hate to admit that most of my Austens have just died in neglect of those full nine years that i have left it lodged somewhere under my bed. My room is, itself, a loom of destruction for literature. Rainy days brought not only water but flood. I'm sorry books... I'm very sorry...

But Melville's Dick is all that I have left.

Ciao!
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