Regret: Bertrand Tavernier's "A Sunday in the Country"

 

On a lovely Sunday morning in 1912, the elderly artist Monsieur Ladmiral prepares for a visit from his son and family. We see that M. Ladmiral must be a successful painter: his house in a country setting near Paris is large and beautiful, his studio situated in the garden is spacious and elegant. It is evident from the paintings hanging in the house and studio that he is a very traditional painter, conservative in style; the upheavals in art of the late 19th century passed him by. 

The sense of life not being fully lived pervades this poignant film. Ladmiral's reserved middle-aged son Gonzague visits regularly, bringing his straight-laced wife and three children. At one point Gonzague wonders if he should have pursued painting when he was young; but perhaps he wouldn't be as good as his father, or, he would compete with him. Ladmiral also seems a bit disappointed in his son, a feeling that is thrown into vivid contrast with the unexpected arrival, via motor car, of his beloved daughter Irene. We can see that he adores her brilliant free spirit, her unconventionality, her need to liven things up. She is the only one whose opinion about his work he seeks, and fears. In the studio, she disparages a painting in process on the easel as yet another "corner of the studio" painting; how dull, how ordinary.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876

Then she whisks her beloved father away in the motor, to a café near a river, where there is dancing. For me this scene is the heart of the film, where Tavernier calls up the spirit of Renoir. And here is where father and daughter have a candid talk about his work. Irene says to him, pointing to the dancers, "That's what you should have painted". His response is beautifully thoughtful, and relevant, I believe, to choices all artists make: 

I painted the way I was taught. I believed my teachers: to respect the traditional rules, maybe a bit too much. I saw originality in others' work. Cézanne's major exhibition in '96 or '97 was interesting, but I thought "Where can that lead me", like van Gogh's work. I'd singled him out. I spent a summer painting in Arles. Perhaps I lacked courage. Some years ago, I considered changing my style. I thought about it seriously, but it hurt your mother that I was still groping at that age. I'd just been decorated; our future was assured. If I'd imitated what was original in other painters––Monet, Caillebotte, Renoir––I'd have been even less original. I'd have lost my own special melody; at least it was mine. I painted as I felt, with honesty. If I didn't achieve more, I at least glimpsed what I could have done. 

Then he recounts his dream about Moses, who saw the Promised Land, so could die without regret. Irene listens to his passionate, yet hesitant words with attentive love. 

When all his guests have gone, M. Ladmiral sits alone in the studio. Although his talk with Irene made it sound as though he had no regrets, the expression on his face––he is sensitively portrayed by Louis Ducreux––reveals uncertainty. He removes the unfinished painting of the studio corner from the easel and turns it against the wall. He places a smaller blank canvas on the easel, which he turns so he can look at it from the studio couch. The camera lingers on his hands, moving as though seeking answers. This scene was so touching, even heartbreaking. Although he spoke of having no regrets, he seems full of self-doubt.

I loved this about A Sunday in the Country: it wasn't only sensitive to family relations, but also astute in its portrayal of an artist's questioning of their work. I wonder if artists reading this have felt that. I certainly have: that sudden crushing sense of bewilderment, the "what am I doing?", the ground sliding out from under my feet. We go on, as best as we know how. 

Ozu's Eye: The Transcendence of the Ordinary

The camera lingers, still and quiet, for many seconds, on a simple hanging lamp. A gong sounds.....

....and the view swings outward to women walking down a street. These are the opening scenes of Yasujiro Ozu's 1936 film The Only Son. They tell us that this will be a tale of ordinary people that has large and tragic dimensions:

"Life's tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child."
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, quoted as the epigraph for The Only Son. 

I haven't watched an Ozu film in a while, so I was again struck by his remarkable sensibility, one that sees the common objects of the world in a way as to make them characters in the drama; they expand our understanding. Ozu demands that we pay close attention to the world he shows us. Several years ago I wrote a post about a beautiful later color film of his, Floating Weeds, which you can read here. The Only Son begins in a provincial town, whose main product is silk; the mother of the story works at spinning silk. These wheels are protagonists, as we see them change over the years into more industrialized machinery.

Ozu uses a very low camera angle, so the figures in the film achieve a monumentality within their everyday lives and stories. We are almost always aware of them as part of an environment, composed in such a way as to emphasize their feelings. The widow O-Tsune has just told her young son, Ryosuke, that she will sacrifice so that he can continue his schooling and become a "great man". His stance, facing away from us, leaning against the wall, shows a deep ambivalence and sadness in leaving his mother.

Years later O-Tsune goes to visit her son in Tokyo, who is living very modestly with a wife and newborn son. She sits in his house, framed by everyday objects and a glamorous image of Marlene Dietrich (?....she and her son go to see a German film within this film). The bowed sadness of O-Tsune is heightened by these surroundings.

 Sometimes with scene changes, Ozu first focuses on industrial objects in the landscape....

....or shows us a mixed scene of industry alongside a house, with plants, and laundry hanging. His fixed camera shows us this shirt blowing in the wind, the pipes and tanks behind it, and soon two figures––those of O-Tsune and Ryosuke––move across the still image, an image of jarring contrasts.

Ozu loves laundry: he returns to this scene several times, and lets the camera linger. What is it about household items hanging outdoors that is so poignant? a metaphor for the tenuous and fleeting nature of life?

Back at home, O-Tsune is a small, elderly worker amid baskets that are like human sentinels, all dwarfed by mute buildings.....

.....and lastly we see, as a symbol of her life, a courtyard leading to a closed gate. Ozu touches deep feelings with reticence, making them all the more touching.

"There has to be a mystery...."

"The sun has changed position. 

No going back.

But the canvas remains warm."

A man wanders, as in a dream, through landscapes, towns, cities; he meets a monk, and a man in a roadside diner who needs to speak of his philosophy of life. Finally, he arrives at a building full of paintings, paintings that he describes as though they are real life: of a landscape he says: "If I just enter here, I will never come back". The Russian director Alexander Sokurov's Elegy of a Voyage, 2001, which you can watch online here, is a reverie, as this unknown man, mainly hidden from view, tries to find his place in the world. He finally discovers it within paintings, remembering himself to be at the site of the Pieter Saenredam painting shown above, there when it was painted, where he knew the people, the window, the light. Sokurov, who was the director of the brilliant Russian Ark, has a remarkable approach to paintings; I've never seen any depiction of them which brings them so close to actual life. For him, a painting is the same as a film; they are as real as each other, and as much of an illusion.

In an interview on the dvd containing two short films, Elegy of a Voyage, and Hubert Robert, A Fortunate Life (1996), Sokurov discusses the connection between painting and cinema: they are both flat:

....therefore all the talk of the third dimension in film is a game and a mistake. I think that one must do his utmost to achieve the same results artists manage to obtain while creating a painting.  

A flat image has something. Something that we hold back from the viewer. A reticence. And art is only where this reticence exists. A limitation of what we can actually see and feel.

There has to be a mystery, and the flat image provides this mystery.

I find this analysis of the heart of painting's magical nature fascinating. I've long felt that one of the things that is most compelling to me about doing my own paintings is creating an illusion of tangible reality; that the painting is actually flat makes this an uncanny process. Sokurov very emphatically state that he has no interest at all in 20th century art; for him, the greatest art was made during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. But I think that the idea of reticence also applies to 20th century abstraction, to all painting really. It all holds something back; it all asks us to think, to imagine, to feel. And what about realist sculpture? I wonder what Sokurov would say about that. Does providing a lot of information in a three dimensional work negate reticence, and therefore mystery? I would think it's a different kind of mystery: one that wonders how wood, clay, stone, can be transformed into an object that pulses with life, such as this ancient Egyptian portrait head of Senwosret III:

Is art "only where this reticence exists"? In the sense that artists are not gods, are not creating "reality"––though reality itself is something to argue about––yes. Yes, something is held back, and in that is art's mystery.

Jean Painlevé's Magical Worlds Under the Sea

From Sea Urchins, 1954

There is so much life on this earth that we humans are hardly aware of; it is too small, or out of sight on high mountains or under the sea, or simply unnoticed. I have a favorite Henry David Thoreau quote:

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.

Happily, there are people of great curiosity and vision who help us expand our known worlds through their large intellectual ray, such as the scientist filmmaker Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Over a period of decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s, he made more than 200 scientific films, and is best known for his short films on sea life. I have to thank the artist Michael Brennan for alerting me to this artist, for I have to call him an artist along with a scientist: it is very clear that the aesthetic quality of his work was supremely important to him. It is the aesthetic quality of his films, the visual inventiveness, the sheer beauty, the marvelous scores, from classical to jazz to modern, that makes them special to me.

Sea Urchins

I remember sitting in an elementary school classroom watching film strips or short educational films, but I'm sure we never saw anything as gorgeous as those of Painlevé. Even when he is the scientist––his films are full of complex and detailed information. I should also warn potential viewers that some of them show dissections––and shows us the insides of a sea urchin, it is a beautiful object, mysteriously dangling in a dark space.

From Hyas and Stenorhynchus: marine crustaceans, 1927

A selection of Painlevé's films, some made with his partner Genevieve Hamon, are available from Netflix, published by The Criterion Collection in a set called "Science is Fiction" (you can see a clip from The Love Life of the Octopus at the link). In the film above, tiny crustaceans, only an inch and a half long and decorated with algae, dance to the music of Chopin.

From How Some Jellyfish are Born, 1950

To film these tiny creatures, only 1-2 mm long (that's less than a tenth of an inch!) some seaweed was placed in a very small aquarium, with the camera magnifying them.

How Some Jellyfish are Born

We see so much more than with the eye....and who discovered these animals, and how?...We can see those bulbous extremities, which turn out to have hundreds of poisonous cells to paralyze their even tinier victims/food source. As the tentacles wave about in the film, all I can see is loveliness, but life is not so simple.

Two stills from Sea Ballerinas (Brittle Stars and Feather Stars), 1956

 In this lovely 13 minute film, with a score by Pierre Conté, starfish are seen moving like elegant ballerinas. We are also shown the brilliantly patterned undersides of some brittle stars, which the narration describes as like oriental rugs.

Sea Ballerinas (Brittle Stars and Feather Stars)

The feathered tiny stalks on the arms of the Feather stars are for breathing and for gathering microscopic food particles. We are told that "They look like strange incantations in motion". There are many moments of visual and verbal poetry in these films.

Sea Ballerinas (Brittle Stars and Feather Stars)

There's also a lot of humor. Painlevé presents us with the conductor Galathea, a species of squat lobster, who sure looks like he's conducting this floating feather of a star fish.

From The Sea Horse, 1933

One of the most wondrous creatures to inhabit our planet is this fish....yes, it's a fish....whose upper body is the shape of a horse. I wonder how this evolutionary quirk happened.

The Sea Horse

It turns out that the most fascinating fact about this fish is not its shape, but its reproductive strategy. It is the male of the species, seen above, that gestates the young in a pouch in his body; the female deposits her eggs there, he fertilizes them and carries them until birth. In the screen shot above, he is in labor, and you can see the tiny seahorses that have emerged from his pouch. This little animal shows us that gender roles don't have to be fixed as we humans know them.

From The Vampire, 1945

This brief 9 minute film shocked me; it was so different in tone from all the others I'd watched: it began with "strange and terrifying" creatures, diseases spread by insects, and some scenes from Murnau's film Nosferatu; the inspiration for the vampire coming from animals in nature. Creepy creepy creepy. Then we're introduced to the South American vampire bat. Horrifying. It wasn't until I read the interesting essay by Scott McDonald on the Criterion site that I learned the film, made just after the war, was a political statement, expressing a hatred of the Nazis; Painlevé had to spend years in hiding during the occupation of France.

From Acera, Or The Witches' Dance, 1972

These short films are mostly about wonder, and beauty, and for me the most lusciously gorgeous of all was Acera, about a small sea mollusk. These rounded creatures are dramatically organic forms in a dark universe.

Acera, Or The Witches' Dance 

The become monumental.

Acera, Or The Witches' Dance

They are also the most elegantly lovely dancers as they float; a "fold of skin forms a cloak around its body, allowing it to move and swim". Delightful lilting music accompanies the buoyant dancers, who bound up and float down to attract a mate. You can't imagine from a still image how wonderful these mollusks are, how beautifully they are filmed; it is a project of sheer joy. And a project to show that sexuality isn't fixed, since these creatures can be male or female, or both at the same time. Life is a wonder, and much richer and more varied than we imagine.

"You the Living": A Black Human Comedy

Five cooks stand staring out a window; they are partially hidden and separated from the gray world.

They are replaced at the window by one man, and slowly moving past outside is an old man with a walker. He walks with difficulty, bent over, and pulling something behind him.

When I saw what he was dragging––a small dog wrapped up in his leash––I burst out laughing, and kept on laughing with great hilarity. I wanted to kick myself to stop: stop it! the poor dog! but it was so darned funny: aren't we just like that, dragging a life burden that needn't be one; we make our inattentive selves miserable. This was just one small scene among many, a favorite one, in the film You the Living by the Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. As I was thinking about how to approach writing about Andersson's unique sensibility––mordant, sensitive, critical, loving––and his demanding aesthetics––all the sets in the 50 short segments except for one were constructed on a large sound stage––I thought of Balzac and his Comédie Humaine. Both artists attempt to show life in all its complexity and misery, its desires and disappointments, though Andersson is a lot funnier. He is famous in Sweden as a maker of commercials and you can get a sense of his way of seeing by watching a few of them at this link. I'm sure that his use of short pieces in a feature film was influenced by this work.

You the Living begins with a quote from Goethe, and we later see a bus with Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Hades, as its destination:

Be pleased then, you the living one, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.

We are so often not pleased: we whine, we yearn, we complain; we are sad, feel unloved, unappreciated. A recurring character in the film is a big woman who keeps telling her boyfriend to leave, that no one likes her, no one understands her....go go away. He tries and tries to cheer her up, but it's only when he tells her he has to go home because the oven is on, and that there's a veal roast cooking, does she say that she'll come by later. In the commentary, Andersson explains why he only shows the lives of ordinary people:

I believe that art is universal, both in a geographical and social sense. Art defends man regardless of standing because deep down we are all so very alike.....we all need respect, attention, and love.

There is a great deal of wonderful music in this film, including Dixieland, and offbeat instruments like this sousaphone, not much appreciated by spouses. All these sets were constructed, a work of several years, so the view through a doorway––a place for a figure to stand––with a slight glimpse of another room, is planned. The colors are all grays. The camera does not move. The picture on the wall at left falls into the fish tank from the noise.

Andersson spoke a lot about politics in his commentary, and here is a segment on class: the window washer, wearing workman's blue, is standing outside the posh gallery while the man inside points to spots that he sees; the window washer obediently takes a rag to each spot pointed out. The gallery person is ridiculous and the workman dignified. But I tend to see a larger, more metaphoric meaning in many of these sketches: we can think about how we too often look towards tiny imperfections and let them ruin something beautifully done.

This is an important scene, another setting in a room looking out into a hallway and more doors (and notice the Blossfeldt print hanging on the wall); it reminds me of the Dutch painter de Hooch who often painted rooms opening onto doorways. The doctor is a psychiatrist, worn out and very unhappy, funny in his gray affectlessness; he complains about his patients

...who want me to help them have fun. They demand to be happy at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish, and ungenerous. 

He has given up on trying to make mean people happy; instead he prescribes pills, lots of pills. Why this bleak assessment of humanity can also be humorous is one of the mysteries of this film. We are forced to look at ourselves and realize, yeah, we're pitiful creatures, aren't we? and have a rueful laugh over it.

In a small church, a wry twist on a familiar scene of a woman kneeling and praying "Forgive those....", but her list of people to be forgiven keeps going and going and is not the usual sinners, and she goes on and on and on while the person patting her back wants her to get up so they can leave. Her list includes:

those who are greedy and cheap
who grow rich by paying miserable wages
who withhold the truth from the people
who are heartless, merciless, and quick to pass judgment
newspapers and TV channels that mislead, that distract attention from that which is important
  

Two people recounted dreams in the film: first a terrible dream of a cement worker who found himself in the home of a rich family, with a dinner table set with 200 year old family china. He prepares to do the tablecloth trick, but instead of all the dinnerware staying on the table, it comes tumbling down and breaking, revealing Nazi swastikas hidden under the cloth. He is put on trial for destroying the china and is sentenced to death by beer-drinking judges. It is the justice system run amok. When the electric chair technician has to check an instruction manual, the humor turns very black.

There was another dream, one of sheer beauty and kindness and love: a young woman meets a rock musician in a bar and falls yearningly in love with him. Her dream shows their little home after the wedding, and their blissful union. He plays a beautifully on the guitar while they look at each other sweetly. Soon I noticed that the scene out the window was changing, as though this very ordinary apartment was a moving train.

Their little home pulls into a station, where a large crowd of well wishers greets them with shouts of congratulations; it is an extraordinary moment. Ah, if only the world could be this generous, this perfect. But the young woman does not have her dream fulfilled.

And...we are all doomed: the bombers will come and life will end. Andersson spoke of the tragedies of the bombing of innocent people, all those leading ordinary lives. I see this final scene less as a political statement than as a metaphor for the death that will come to us all; so, as Goethe wrote, we living ones should be pleased with the life given us before then.

"Chasing Ice": The Tragic Sublime

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Alaska, June 20, 2008 (detail)

All photographs are by James Balog and are from the following three sites:

Chasing Ice; James Balog Photography, Extreme Ice Survey & Ice; Extreme Ice Survey

The word "sublime" has become a commonplace––"oh, that pie is sublime!"––but to philosophers of aesthetics and to 19th century landscape painters the concept included horror. To Kant (I quote from the Wikipedia link on the sublime) it included "the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying". For Schopenhauer beauty was pleasure in seeing a benign object, while the sublime was seeing "an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer." It seems to me that nothing could express this idea of the sublime better than the icy regions of the globe, terrifying in their grandeur. These regions of glaciers and frost are now also frightening to contemplate, in that they are giving us disastrous news about the state of our planet.

Lindblad Cove, Antartica, January 11, 2011

James Balog, a photographer concerned with environmental issues, went to the Arctic to photograph glaciers on assignment for National Geographic. He was so struck by the evidence of climate change there that he made it his mission to document the changes happening, much too rapidly, to the world's glaciers. From this idea came the Extreme Ice Survey, and Chasing Ice, a stunning documentary about this important project; you can see the film on Netflix. Thanks to my friend, the artist and very concerned citizen, Ravenna Taylor, for alerting me to this beautiful and horrifying film. The beauty of these places is astounding, surprising; Balog's eye for pictorial drama makes the story so much more compelling.

Jokulsarlon, Iceland, "Icebergs that originated in the vast expanse of the Vatnajokull decay and melt in a tidal lagoon." March 4, 2005

Balog began the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007 to document the changes in glaciers over several years. There were many technical challenges in setting up cameras in severe climates that would automatically photograph the views in front of them over months. You can see some of the videos made by time-lapse techniques at the Extreme Ice Survey link above. They clearly show glaciers in retreat.

Ilulissat Glacier, Greenland. "A helicopter flying past a half-mile wide section of the Ilulissat Glacier calving face gives perspective on the staggering immensity of this ice wall (in some places it may be 70 stories tall)."

The enormous size of the glaciers seems boundless, immutable. But in fact, although glaciers always retreated a bit during summer and reformed during winter, now they are simply in retreat.

Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland, August 24, 2007

Icebergs are pieces of a glacier that have broken off and floated out to sea.

Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland. "Icebergs that have rolled over and been scalloped by waves metamorphose into fantastic shapes." August 24, 2007.

This has always happened, but the rate at which it is now occurring is much faster than in the past. In the film Chasing Ice, we see an entire wall of a glacier collapse, an astounding sight.

Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland; Iceberg, July 17, 2007.

The fabulous forms of ice are wondrous and like nothing else. I can understand why artists such as Frederic Church in the 19th century went to the Arctic to paint icebergs:

Frederic Church, The Icebergs, 1861; oil on canvas, 64.5 x 112.5 in.

Svinafellsjokull Glacier, Iceland. "...a massive landscape of crevasses". February 12, 2008. (detail)

The intense blue of some of the ice is a marvel....

Greenland Ice Sheet, "Adam LeWinter surveys Birthday Canyon". June 28, 2009.

....as is the tremendous size and dwarfing scale of glaciers and ice sheets. They are among the great wonders of the earth, and they are surely disappearing due to our actions, and to our inaction about climate change.

Greenland Ice Sheet, "Bubbles of ancient air, possibly 15,000 years old, are released as the ice sheet melts." July 14, 2008.

The Greenland ice sheet is littered with dark holes in its surface, holes that attract more and more heat, and that release eons-old air from its depths. It is melting at a rate of 47 cubic miles per year. If the entire sheet of ice melted, sea levels would rise 24 feet, but that would likely take hundreds of years, though there is disagreement about it among scientists (see the link). It is clear, though, that even moderate melting would not be a good thing. James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey are performing a great public service in making us aware, by luring us with beauty, of the danger that comes with it.