Dubious Truths: Cinematic Pliability

An assignment for a film studies class on pre- and post-war Japanese cinema at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Russell Thomsen, 2016

In watching a film, the audience typically enters a kind of contract with the multiple cinematic aspects they see cast before them. Whether in terms visual or narrative, the film often purports a depiction of a story into which the viewer invests a particular truth. One trusts that the images and happenings they are shown onscreen represent a certain verity. The cinematic image contains a presumption to its reciprocity with reality. As an effect of this condition, the audience remains largely unchallenged in its comfortably passive relationship with the screen. It is this very transaction between viewing and content that underscores the consumptive quality of cinema, and thus a particularly interesting interaction occurs in those films which subtly set this sequence askew. Insodoing, such films deeply interrogate the complacent relationships between onlooker and content, enticing an annulment of the methodical practice of consumptive viewing that goes as far as to disrupt the mechanisms by which the audience begins to self-identify vis-à-vis its usual role as actionless bystanders to a purported event. Where Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky writes that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known”, one encounters a similar prerogative in those films which question the engagement of the audience. This annotates the specific belief that any artwork ought “to make objects ‘unfamiliar’” so that one might recover a knowledge of such things beyond their immediate habitual connotations (Shklovsky 2). Still, the mere identification of this possibility does little to settle the particularities of how a film might go about unsettling this relationship.

Precisely here, the dialogue around a film’s ability to interrupt its passive consumption conjoins with a discussion around the qualities of content and technique in any piece of cultural production, as these function in regards both to construct the normative condition of the cinema and its reception with the audience. The alignment of these terms thus occurs to encompass an understanding of the levels on which the film functions to present itself to a viewership. Such terms resonate not so much for their mutual involvement in cinematography as in their dual abilities to warp the process of consumption. Content and technique therefore form a foundational dichotomy for our comprehension of culture and prove to be effective means for gauging the respective values in a particular work. The observation by critical theorist Jacques Rancière that “representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent” thus making “the image not the duplicate of a thing… [but rather] a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible” carves for this dichotomy a comparable space around truth as a medium for the juxtaposition of the two approaches. Each holds in the alteration of its typical delivery the distinct opportunity to estrange the passivity of a film into a reflection on film itself that might instead invest a degree of agency in the audience to determine their prospective interpretations of what they have seen.

To interrogate this space between film and consumer as mediated by the latter’s belief in a supposed truth content played out before them, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) become keen studies on the veracity of the visual image. Both films essentially deal with the same scenario: the perception of an event, as narrated by a character, coming to trial against the visual recollection of that same event. In both, a dubiously witnessed crime is told in such a manner that the we, as viewers, become destabilized as such, losing our ability to trust that which is shown before us. Thus emerges the possibility for an analysis around each film’s specific bias towards one end of this spectrum. In both, the presumed adjacencies between image, text and truth unfurl to an extent that one no longer invests faith in any of them. If this is the binding factor that thematically links the two masterpieces, where each differs allows the most productive assessment of the content-technique juxtaposition in specific relation to their abilities to eschew the habitual passivity of the audience. Here, the argument must bifurcate in order to demonstrate the specific engagements of truth in imagery that each film approaches. In the case of Last Year at Marienbad, a repertoire of formal elements shifts the standard registers of plotline and visual reference to the extent that the audience finds itself completely defamiliarized any form of objective truth in what the film itself depicts. Perhaps more subtly, Kurosawa’s masterpiece relies on a permutation of a more traditional element of film. Rather than obscuring formally the boundary between the film’s trustworthiness, Rashomon delivers a set of elements which, taken each by their own, do little to obfuscate their respective values of truthfulness. Interrogating four witnesses of a murder, the film sets each’s account against one another, resulting in a withheld clarity that renders the audience unable to process the (perhaps) imagined imagery played out onscreen against the conflicting narrative of the accounts.

This disjunction manifests itself in the starkness of difference between the accounts of those involved. Speaking from beyond the grave through a medium, Kurosawa’s samurai weaves a tale in which he killed himself in a bout of destitute heartbreak after being freed from the captivity of the bandit who stole his possessions and raped his wife. To the contrary, the account of a woodcutter who supposedly witnessed the event purports a pettier sequence of events, ending in the bandit haphazardly winning a fight with the samurai by stabbing him. These gentle discrepancies imbue Rashomon with the ability to force the audience back on itself. Presented with four varying accounts of one event, the film cannibalizes its own ability to convey a truth insofar as it defies the very singularity of the concept by equally proposing four alternatives. The central mechanisms of content delivery for the film nevertheless remain predominantly intact. The plot is delivered through dialogue that aligns with immediacy to the images alongside which it is placed. Although the four tales – those of the bandit, the wife, the samurai and the woodcutter – find disjunction in their contradictions to one another, theirs position is one of a formal alignment in which one might recast the film as one of a brief introduction, a middle compiled from four distinct tales and a problematic conclusion, itself to be touched upon shortly.

Shklovsky’s rhetoric again becomes poignant when he reminds that those in the church “considered it blasphemy to present as strange and monstrous what they accepted as sacred” in reaction to the heresy of Tolstoy’s abject descriptions of religious practices (Shklovsky 4). One might conject that Rashomon causes little blasphemy to the core tenants of what many traditionally consider to be film. Although the piece goes a long distance to decouple to presumed truth in a narrative, its formal interventions remain few in their possible denigration of the viewer’s complacency. By comparison, Resnais’ work undermines a number of conventions in order to establish clear and fertile ground on which the viewer is presented with their own subjectivity. The film no longer hails as anecdotal through its refusal to divulge a conclusory reading, which is to a great degree similar to Kurosawa’s achievements. Where each primarily begins to differ in those regards which are overtly productive to the dissection of a film as a collection of plot, narrative and technical aspects is in the clear intentionality of Resnais’ formal suppositions onto the main structure of his work.

Revolving around a prolonged conversation among three anonymous characters over the exact chain of events which occurred the previous summer while on holiday at a reclusive palace, the viewer gradually gains reason to doubt the account of the triad’s mysterious and somewhat maleficent male lead. Here emerges another crux between Marienbad and Rashomon which only furthers their productive comparison. That both narratives gather in the uncertain space between spoken tale and narrative posits each as a clear intervention into the function of a film as a narrative device to convey a message or story. In the particular case of Last Year at Marienbad, the film presents the narrative itself, as text, as if to be presume its fidelity. The degradation of the tale’s believability subsequently occurs in the film’s imagery. Resnais’ excruciating depth of formal mutations imbues a thick yet subtle gloss of surreality across the film. Many shots occur through the vision of mirrors, storylines repeat themselves through a series of gentle plot changes and, perhaps most famously, shots glance across screen in which incongruous elements, such as shadows, create a visual impossibility (see below in Resnais’ misregistration of shadows between the characters and their scene).

Perhaps more blatantly operational in the overarching structure of Last Year at Marienbad are the great lengths to which nonlinearity and visual pacing are employed to question the image-as-truth parabale. Where one scene begins in one room, the film’s strict emphasis on its script as a driving force of the cinematic progression lulls the viewer into an unaware complacency. By the end of each narrated act, the viewer becomes self-aware in as much as they come to terms with their own perception of the discontinuity between spoken text and depicted image. In a particular sequence, one character’s narration of the events of the past summer begin as a kind of reminiscent tale, only to end as the character in the present reassumes the role he once played. His narration jumps from being a third person perspective onto the past into a disjointed engagement with the present as he both annotates and engages in conversation with his female companion once thought to be exclusively shown in retrospective montage (see next page for images). Resnais conflates montage and general plot advancement for the mutual disintegration of their temporal values. With those once presumed truths abandoned, the larger framework of a film and its reliance on depictive elements collapses within the viewer’s self-understanding. In this instance, the operation enforces a formal interrogation of the film’s dialogue, here in the shape of a conversation, by placing it at ends with the depicted image, itself depicting a clear changing of both set location and narrative time. The confusion of the cinematic elements into which one typically invests faith as an audience makes at odds the normative relationship, more generally assembled around consumption, that mediates one’s experience with the medium of film. Here, Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and Kurosawa’s Roshomon align in their endgames to displace the unquestioned viewership of the audience from its often presumably innocent content. Only in the former does this process demand that the viewer account for their beliefs insofar as their reliance on normative devices of cinema are no longer provided as an underlining truth content, while the latter leaves untouched the foundational apparatuses of cinema.

Less so than performing to convey a singular anecdote, this subtle shifting of the parameters around which a film manifests itself serves the greater intention of endowing a new agency within the viewer. To borrow an interpretation from a theory of photography, one might find great resonance in Susan Sontag’s observation that, “…Despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.” (Sontag 6). To such extents, Resnais’ and Kurosawa’s works pivot the truthfulness of the piece back into the jurisdiction of the viewer in the hopes that they become no longer the passive consumer so decried by Schklovsky. Rather than positing the intended message of the film, this ‘theory of rumination’, if we might title it that, is indeed sculpted to confuse the viewer. Beyond the very evacuation of a central theme or lesson from the plot, this functions beyond a level of mere confusion to demand an intentional agency of the audience. It does not simply question those who view it as to their capabilities to condense from it a point so much as it demands they think as capable, individual beings lest the entire experience emerge senseless and meaningless without having been authoritatively delivered a message by the filmmaker.

To these ends, the finale of Roshomon becomes particularly frustrating in its inability to leave unsettled the problem of central meaning. In an exchange between the priest and the woodcutter, the latter’s willingness to take in an orphan restores the holy man’s faith in humanity, previously shaken to unstable extents by the depictions of the crime around which the film centers. Kurosawa’s deep intention to imbue the film with a certain lightness, to avoid the dichotomy of truth and falsehood, seems to be here most precariously adjacent to the content of a fable or tale, each of which function impart on the audience a particular lesson. One might here posit that this moment represents the transformation from viewer to consumer in the most basic sense, because it annotates the exact aspect around which one hopes directly for a predetermined outcome from a work of culture, as if the transaction of the culture’s consumption is a somewhat irrelevant middle ground between the presupposed ignorance of the viewer before and the enlightenment of the mind after having been witness to a film. It is this very expectation that enframes much of one’s interaction with culture, and thus it emerges as rather unfortunate that Roshomon defaults to its parable in such a predictable manner in its final sequence in order for those who view it to leave with a distinct comfort, rather than the profound distancing around which Last Year at Marienbad at once encapsulates its cinematic value and betrays its value as pure (meaningless) entertainment.

Regardless of these nuances, each film gauges the nature of truth capable through the cinematographic lens by examining the relationship of the viewer to the images depicted onscreen. Ultimately, a comparison of Rashomon and Last Year at Marienbad reveals the manifold properties of cinema to expunge the visual of its monopoly on truth through the manipulation of both content and technique. In so doing, it distances us, the audience, from the notion that our vision imbues us with the power to witness. The distinction in approach (either through content or form) becomes less important as the films respectively deconstruct their own worlds. This unique alienation of the viewer assumes the ultimate goal more of producing a distancing from any inherent truthfulness in the image itself than of foraging the dichotomy of technique versus content. This is to say, both approaches are clearly profitable in their own regards, though their accessibility varies due to their respective levels of reduction from the recognizable forms of a film, leaving Resnais’ magnum opus as a rather difficult piece of cinema to politely swallow. More importantly than the differentiated positions in which an audience finds itself after seeing each is the central value of their estrangement from the normative processes of passivity and consumption that have become rampant in cinema. Both unsettle the viewer to the very lie they see portrayed before them, effectively invalidating their position as a neutral party to the inherently messy business of cultural production in hopes that they might become aware to the slipperiness of this transaction that occurs around them with near incessant rhythm in the contemporary sphere of culture. Each film thus bears witness to the creation of an active agency for the onlooker, a reimagined space between the screen and the eye that forgoes the traditional linearity of viewing for a more delicate exchange of understanding around an unsettled, cinematic ambiguity.