16
The Experimental Narrative
Experimental narrative should not be confused with the more specifically nonnarrative experimental film or video. The experimental film or video is often entirely taken up with an issue of style. In the extreme (in more than one Norman McLaren film, for example), the film can concern itself with the variations of movements of abstract lines or shapes. In McLaren’s films, line or shape give a visual dimension to an abstract musical piece. The narrative intention is at best remote; more often in such work, it is not even a factor. In the experimental narrative, in contrast, narrative intention does have a role. However, the form or the style of the piece is as important as—in some cases more important than—the narrative.
Today, the most common expression of the experimental narrative is the music video, but its roots are deep, often affiliated with the most important names in film history. Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1928) playfully presents a day in the life of a cameraman, but its style, which explores every conceivable camera angle. Vertov’s playfulness is exemplified by the scene of the cameraman filming a train. The images of the train rushing over us are revealed in the next shot—the cameraman stepping out of a pit he dug to film the train from below. The energy and playfulness of the filmmaking process are at the heart of Vertov’s mischievous sequence of shots of the train. The style is far more memorable than the content. The same is true in Alexander Dovschenko’s Earth (1930) and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien d’Andalou (1928). The latter film, which Buñuel made with the painter Salvador Dalí, illustrates the experimental narrative’s link to the other arts as well as to the intellectual currents of the day. The anarchistic style of the Buñuel-Dalí film attempts to appeal to the unconscious with a series of visual shocks—an eye being slit, two bleeding donkeys being dragged atop a piano and in turn dragging two ensnared priests, insects crawling out from a hole in a human hand, and so on. There is a narrative of sorts, but it is continually subverted by these shock images. The result is a powerful if unclear experience.
Here too there is a clue to the nature of experimental narrative. It follows a nonlinear pattern as opposed to a linear time or character-arc frame. The usual elements that shape a story—a goal-directed main character, a plot— and a traditional genre all tend to be subverted in the experimental narrative. We are left with the powerful stylistic elements of the experience.
Other notable figures who have worked with experimental narrative are Maya Deren (Meshes in the Afternoon, 1943), Chris Marker (La Jetée, 1962), Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror, 1974), Miklos Jansco (The Round-up, 1965), Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), and Krystof Kieslowski (The Double Life of Veronique, 1992). More recently, such filmmakers as Sally Potter (Orlando) in England, Patricia Rozema (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) in Canada, and Jane Campion (Sweetie) in Australia have joined others like Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) and Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim) in the United States to produce what are essentially experimental narratives. Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) in England and Atom Egoyan (Calendar) in Canada are equally interested in the experimental narrative.
General Characteristics
Nonlinearity
The key to experimental narrative is the desire to avoid conventional narrative. Conventional narrative is essentially a character-driven or plot-driven story with a beginning, middle, and end. In conventional narrative, the main character may or may not achieve his or her goal, but the drive to achieve the goal carries us through the story to a resolution. A nonlinear story may eschew a single main character, or a plot, or a resolution, or all of the above. In the experimental narrative, the energy of the story comes from the style the writer-director chooses to use to compensate the audience for the loss of linear direction through the story. Many experimental narratives have no plot; some have no defined character. Consequently, the conventional dramatic tools—conflict, polarities—are less at play. In experimental narrative, form or style is as important as, and often more important than, content. Thus, a nonlinear form is more able to capture the essence of experimental narrative than is the usual set of dramatic tools deployed in more conventional or linear narrative.
A Distinct Style
A style is effective when it helps the narrative it is trying to tell. A style is notable when there is an innovative, as opposed to derivative, feel to the energy it injects into the story. The consequence of the latter point is that experimental narrative works best for those who are innovative with their stories.
Borrowed styles are obvious, and because the narrative content is often modest, the borrowed style fails to capture the audience it seeks. The consequence is that the shelf life of an experimental narrative filmmaker tends to be short. There are exceptions—Bunuel, Tarkovsky—but they are few. When Richard Lester made A Hard Day’s Night in 1965, he was looking for a style that would capture the energy and anarchy of the Beatles. He knew their strength was their music and their individualism, so he sought out a style that would capture those qualities. In essentially the first MTV-style major film, Lester created a series of set pieces in A Hard Day’s Night, unified by the song of the same title. Within that unity he would go anywhere, show anything, shifting tone or point of view. The key was to recreate the energy of the Beatles. He used multiple cameras, a series of running gags, and an absurdist attitude—and the rest is history. The MTV style in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers is a direct descendant of Lester’s film; however, it broadens the stylistic palate to include variances in the style of the set pieces, and the pace, now 30 years later, has picked up considerably.
The style in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) is probing. The story, set principally in a sex bar named Exotica, follows multiple characters. All are wounded; all are sexually confused. Egoyan uses a restless style, probing for understanding, finding primarily the characters’ obsessions, delusions, and smoke screens. It’s as if he is looking for an opening but the characters avoid it. It is only at the end that he (and we) find that opening; until then it is the probing, eroticized style that maintains the energy in the story.
The style may focus on stills, as in Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée; it may focus on long takes, as in Miklos Jansco’s The Round-up; it may focus on haunting images, as in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger; it may be driven by a fascination with a particular piece of music, such as the use of the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express; or it may contain all of the above characteristics. Whatever the mix, the distinct style of the experimental narrative infuses a powerful energy into the experience of the film.
Linkages to the Other Arts
More than any of the other genres in this section, the experimental narrative takes up the other arts, both for inspiration and for affiliation. All of the arts struggle with the issues of form and content. But the experimental narrative, unlike melodrama and the docudrama, does not affiliate itself with realism. Instead, it uses style to probe for psychological meaning, as opposed to a sociological realism. The work of Bunuel and Dali, for example, links directly to Dali’s paintings, his “dream works.” Chris Marker’s La Jetée links to the tension between photojournalism and fiction. Federico Fellini’s Satyricon links Dante’s Divine Comedy with the paintings of Heironymous Bosch. Dovschenko’s Earth and Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky link to the epic poetry of the Far East and the Middle East, respectively. Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade has everything to do with his own ideas and plays about space as it is used in the theater.
The key point here is that the experimental narrative links to other arts to draw inspiration and to use the affiliation to point up the style chosen for the narrative.
The Intellectual Concept
Not only is experimental narrative tied to the other arts, but it is also linked directly to intellectual concepts. A few examples will illustrate the point. Freud’s ideas about sexuality and aggression are influential in the images in Bunuel/Dali’s Un Chien d’Andalou. They are even more central in Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon. Erik Erikson’s stages of development mix with Jung’s archetypal ideas in Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1989). Her self-reflective autobiography and its structure are also influenced by her father’s anthropological background. The structure of the film, made up of chapters, echoes an anthropological diary of growing up, from conception to adulthood.
The Abstraction of Character
Character is often less important in experimental narrative than in any other genre. As in hyperdrama, the character is a vehicle for the ideas of the writer-director. Whereas in hyperdrama the character has a goal, however, in experimental narrative the character has no apparent goal. Consequently, he or she is clearly present in the narrative for the purposes of the writer rather than of the narrative. Identification is not at all likely; we follow characters in Antonioni’s The Passenger without sympathy or apparent reason, except that they are in the narrative. In a film like Exotica, there are multiple characters and the absence of an apparent goal precludes identification. We view them from the outside looking in, rather than from the inside looking out.
Perhaps the most we can say about these characters is to see them as obsessed, to understand their behavior as habitual (they reject themselves a good deal of the time), and consequently, to care about their fate, rather than to see ourselves in them. These observations make us curious as to the reasons for their desire and the consequent self-abnegation. Unlike in hyperdrama, where the character serves a moral purpose or goal, no such purpose is obvious for the characters in experimental narrative. They are abstract figures—often troubled, always mysterious. Only the style directs us to their habits and to their obsessions, often commenting on both.
The Reliance on Pattern
What is required when plot and character are downplayed is a style that invites involvement from the audience, that creates a pattern substituting for the functions of plot and character. In Exotica, we follow each of the five characters through a gradual revelation of their sexual confusion and the sources of their despair. In Sink or Swim, the pattern is literary—chapters unfolding chronologically. In Natural Born Killers, the pattern is the frequent references to television. Pattern is the grid along which we begin to find structure, which in turn will lead to meaning, though obvious meaning in the experimental narrative can be elusive. We may be left with no more than a feeling at the end of the experience of the experimental narrative. Nevertheless, it is the pattern that gives us pleasure, and the motivation to search for meaning.
Ritualized Tone
Just as hyperdrama uses ritualization of the action to create metaphor, experimental narrative uses the organization of the details, aural and visual, to develop a tone that creates metaphor. The tone may be poetic, as in Satyricon; it may be beautifully mysterious and menacing, as in The Passenger; it may be hallucinatory, as in The Double Life of Veronique; it may be epic and inhumane, as in The Round-up. Whichever tone the filmmaker chooses, that tone will tend to have a formal quality that ritualizes the behavior of the characters or creates a metaphor about the sense of place. In Egoyan’s Calendar, Armenia is every homeland. In Chungking Express, Hong Kong is every ultraurban city, throwing people together and yet making each person the loneliest in the world. The characters in Exotica are not simply wounded or confused individuals; they are refugees, running way from 20th-century alienation.
The Voice of the Author
If most forms of drama (like melodrama, for example) are deliberate, purposeful, focusing on an emotional experience for the audience, no such contained experience is the objective of the writer of experimental narrative. The feeling sought might be too diffuse or too intense to be dealt with directly. For this reason, the author seeks out a more indirect or meditative experience for his audience. The writer might feel as much passion as the writer of the docudrama, but that passion is not as directly accessible to the writer of the experimental narrative. Whereas the writer of the docudrama uses form to say, “This is important,” the writer of the experimental narrative uses the form in a more exploratory way. In a sense, the writer is in the position of the poet rather than the popular prose writer—it is in the cadences of the words that a feeling will emerge. Metaphor, image, and feeling substitute for the dramatic tools the docudrama writer uses—character, plot, and structure. There is nevertheless a voice—a definite will to convey a feeling, to share an insight—but what is being shared is not a moral tale, as in hyperdrama, or a political or social polemic, as in docudrama. It may be very simple or complex, but it is very personal and always surprising.
Motifs—Case Studies
In the case of experimental narrative, the presentation of the motifs is considerably different from that of the other genres. The following two case studies will illustrate those differences. We will look at Atom Egoyan’s Calendar (1993) and Clara Law’s Autumn Moon (1992).
Calendar
The Main Character and His Goal
The main character in Calendar is a photographer. He goes to Armenia, ostensibly to photograph churches for a calendar. He travels with his wife and a driver. While in Armenia we see only his point of view, never him. He asks questions, he reacts, but never in a sympathetic manner. His wife acts as the translator for the driver, explaining the history of the sights. The photographer seems rigid, defensive, and eventually jealous of the developing relationship between his wife and the driver. On a deeper level, he seems to be reacting against her acceptance of being both Armenian and Canadian (she speaks the language). He, on the other hand, seems a stranger in Armenia, certainly separated from any sense of identification with the place.
Interspersed with the Armenian sequence is a later sequence, which takes place in Canada. The photographer has dinners with a number of women, all from ethnic minorities; each excuses herself when he pours the last glass of red wine. They ask if they can make a phone call. They each do so. Each speaks (apparently to lovers) in her mother tongue—French, German, Finnish, Arabic. As they do, he ruminates on writing to his wife (in Armenia) or to his foster child (also in Armenia). The scene moves back and forth in time between Armenia and Canada.
The Antagonist
There is no overt antagonist in Calendar. However, to the extent that the main character is torn between his Armenian origins and his Canadian self, he is his own antagonist. The film seeks no resolution, but the issue of identity— the struggle between the identity deriving from the mother country and that deriving from the host country—is the premise in Calendar.
The Catalytic Event
Going to Armenia to photograph churches is the catalytic event.
The Resolution
There is no real resolution in Calendar. Although his wife has stayed in Armenia and he has returned to Canada, we do not know if the marriage is ended or simply in trouble. Nor do we know if the wife has remained with the Armenian driver.
The Dramatic Arc
The story progresses back and forth through time rather than along an arc. The Armenian sequence has two distinct parts—traveling, and photographing. Each is presented differently in terms of visual style, but the proximity of the travel footage contrasts sharply with the more distant images of the photography footage. The photographer’s point of view unites the two, and the wife is prominent in both. These Armenian travel sequences contrast with the stillness and the focus on the photographer in the Canadian sequences. Repetition of images, points of view, and style mark each sequence.
The Narrative Style
The conventional descriptions of plot-driven or character-driven structures do not really apply to Calendar. There is a journey to photograph churches for a calendar, but the character’s struggle is not so much with the pictures as it is with his resistance to being in Armenia. He is there physically, but emotionally he is consistently backing away. Back in Canada we see the actual calendar (the published calendar serves as a transition device between the visit to take the pictures and the present in Canada). In Canada, the character tries to relate to women (as his guests), but each rejects him. The fact that they speak their native language on the phone implies that his bland Canadian presentation does not engage them. Consequently, there is no development in the relationship dimension of the narrative.
The photography seems a professional success. Having taken the pictures he went to take and thus achieving success, he appears to fail on the personal front—with his wife in Armenia and with these various women in Canada. In a sense his limited engagement with the places he has photographed (Armenia) implies a personal unease about who he is (identity).
The Narrative Shape
Physical time is a factor, but in terms of psychological time, the sense of alienation in the main character contrasts with the spiritual well-being of his wife. In this sense, psychological time for the main character stands still.
Tone
The tone of Calendar is formal and emphasizes the spiritual value of continuity (his origins in Armenia) and the alienation of displacement (he now lives in Canada). This is an intellectual premise, to which Egoyan gives roots by using himself and his wife as two of the principal actors. The style reflects the fact that Armenia and Canada are very different—Armenia is exterior, open, while Canada is interior and closed. The Armenian sequence is marked by movement; the Canadian sequences are marked by stasis—no change.
Autumn Moon
The Main Characters and Their Goals
There are two main characters in Autumn Moon. The story takes place in Hong Kong, but in this film the city is pictured as a city of skyscrapers and sea. Each is fascinating and offers the two characters a formal space to occupy.
The female character is a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her grandmother. Her parents and brother have already emigrated to Canada. Whether she is finishing her schooling or waiting for the passing of her grandmother, she is very much in between—being in Hong Kong and being in Canada, being a child and being a woman, being Chinese and being a new generation of internationalists (her favorite food is from McDonald’s), between being happy and being disappointed in life. She has no discernible, specific goal that drives her through the narrative.
The male character is older, possibly 30, Japanese, and a tourist. He too is in between—between being single and committed, between being material and being spiritual, between being cynical and being curious, between being unfeeling and being feeling. He too has no discernible goal that carries him through the narrative. He does not speak Chinese, and she does not speak Japanese. The two of them converse in English.
Autumn Moon carries us through the course of their unorthodox friendship.
The Antagonist
There is no apparent antagonist in the narrative. If anything, they are two products of traditional family-oriented cultures and yet both seem uprooted, floating, without benefit of tradition. They are two modernists, and in this sense they may be their own antagonists. No other characters represent clear antagonists, although there are two important secondary characters, one in each of their lives. The girl’s grandmother, who is utterly traditional, is the only character who proceeds with confidence through the story.
For the man’s part, he meets the older sister of a former lover from Japan. She too is uprooted, divorced—a modern, unhappy person. They become lovers, but lovers of convenience, and neither of them seems to be able to benefit generally from the intimacy.
The Catalytic Event
The two characters meet.
The Resolution
The ending is open-ended. Although the two characters have benefited from each other’s friendship, it is clear that the girl will go to Canada and that he will return to Japan. He has more feeling than he did, but spiritually neither seems more grounded than they were.
The Dramatic Arc
Beyond the course of the relationship, there is no clear dramatic arc. The young girl also explores a relationship with a male classmate. They are attracted to one another and arrange a tryst but are reprimanded by an adult. He may be a policeman, but he seems more like a truant officer. Neither the young girl nor the classmate is in any case capable of moving the relationship away from the link of school work to a future. The Japanese tourist, who calls himself Tokyo, also progresses along the line of a malefemale relationship. But the narrowly sexual band of that relationship seems as frustrating as the asexual band of the young girl’s relationship. The friendship itself between the two seems richer than their individual attempts at relationships. The term “richer,” however, implies satisfaction, and that might be too strong a term for the outcome of their relationship. The young girl makes sure his appetite is satiated—she invites him home for her grandmother’s authentic cooking. But beyond the cursory hanging out together—visiting her grandmother in the hospital and so on—there is no apparent arc to the relationship.
The Narrative Style
The young girl is happy and outgoing; the man is introverted and caustic. Beyond that, we do not get to know either character very well. Consequently, in the character layer of this story, there is no clear developmental quality. Each character seems pleased about the relationship, but neither can go much further. There is no plot.
The Narrative Shape
Just as the characters seem suspended between epochs, time too seems suspended. In any case, without linearity, time is not important in the narrative.
Tone
There is a cool, ironic tone to Autumn Moon. Although there are moments of deep feeling—his confession to the Japanese woman about his inability to feel, his cruel description of the preferable anatomy of her sister—more frequently the film takes the point of view of voyeur, looking from the outside in on these characters. His constant video filming supports this sense.
The stylized sense of the city—flat rather than deep—also abstracts the sense of Hong Kong.
Writing Devices
What Kind of Story Benefits from Experimental Narrative
Unconventional stories are the first source for experimental narrative. Generally, the stories tend to be exploratory—stories of identity, stories of alienation, meditations on a time or place. Vincent Ward’s film The Navigator looks at a medieval period; Clara Law’s Autumn Moon looks at Hong Kong— a place where change and tradition meet and, in the 1990s, conflict. Because experimental narrative sidesteps plot, stories of character dominate. Because the genre favors open-ended or nonlinear stories, the preference is for tone, to make up for the absence of resolution.
The Link to Poetry
Poetry may be nonrhythmic or rhythmic; it may relate to content, or it may emphasize form. There is a freedom in poetry that surprises. It relates to the organization of words—patterns—rather than to single images. It is the same with experimental drama.
If you consider your drama as if it were a visual poem, you will strive for the feeling of a relationship or place, or both, and not unduly re-reference the story back to a conventional mode. The key with experimental drama is that sense of liberation. You are doing something different, and when it works you are a poet, working in the medium of film.
A Simple Idea
Large scale simply works against the experimental drama, so think in very simple, elemental terms. If you limit the parameters of the story and strive for a feeling-tone, you will be on the right road for experimental narrative. Keeping the idea simple—two people, a particular place—will help you limit the narrative in such a way that you do not accidentally lapse into a more traditional narrative. Experimental narrative does not require a lot of story, so simplify.
How to Use Character
Since plot is not a factor in the experimental narrative, the use of character becomes very important.
On one level, the writer must keep a playful attitude toward character. The man in Autumn Moon is depressed, and yet the way the writer-director works with him produces an appealing side to him. It is important that the female character is different from him in the story; the larger the contrast, the better. In Autumn Moon, that character is a girl, 15 years old, as unspoiled as the man is spoiled. The larger the gap, the more play enters the narrative and the more creative the writer can be.
We also should be dealing with the characters in a personal way. We are close to all these characters. They are vulnerable, and yet they remain somewhat inscrutable. They are vulnerable and mysterious. The writer does not want us to know these people any better than they know themselves. As they struggle to understand, so do we. This is an important element of the charm of experimental narrative. The narrative and the style are used to attempt to gain understanding of and insight into the character. Change may or may not happen, but that is less relevant than the exploration itself, the internal struggle.
Finding a Structure
One observable aspect of the experimental narrative is that no two structures are alike. We can say the story tends to be nonlinear, but beyond that, few structures resemble one another.
There are shaping devices: A tourist from Japan comes to Hong Kong. What will he find? Can he relate to the Chinese? He finds a Chinese girl, and they strike up a relationship. That relationship is unpredictable. They must use English to communicate rather than their own language.
In the above example, the relationship itself is the shaping device. In Exotica, a place is the shaping structure. In Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain, an idea—racial hatred kills love—is the shaping idea. Shaping devices become a means to create a structure. The shaping device, however, is not linear—ergo the unpredictability of the experimental narrative.
Tone and Voice
This is a form where your voice can be truly unique. The form, the substance, the people, and the structure all will be interpreted through tone. The tone can be poetic, ironic, or expressive, but it should be specific, to help us understand why you are drawn to the characters or place of your story. The tone is the critical mode in which you will transmit your ideas and feelings, so in a sense, if you choose the experimental narrative, it is your most important decision.
A Case Study in Character: Sleeping Beauties
In Karyn Kusama’s Sleeping Beauties (reprinted in Appendix B), two adolescent sisters prepare for bed. They smoke a cigarette and share a fantasy about a young man on a motorbike who will come and take them away. They go to sleep. They hold hands, thereby acknowledging the love between them. Such a motorcycle rider actually does appear, and the dominant sister decides that the more modest sister should join him. She does so. The one who is left behind feels abandoned. Her sister returns. They climb into the same bed, but the dominant sister is unsettled. Was this a dream or an actual occurrence? Was it the beginning of a rift in the relationship? Is fantasy an antidote to the life they live at home?
The focus is on the two sisters. One is dominant, and the other is pliant— a leader and a follower. But what happens to the relationship when the follower leaves? Will she return? Will the roles be reversed? These are the issues that are explored in Sleeping Beauties. The male is simply “the male,” but the two young women are given characters, if in a very polarized fashion. They are not fleshed out beyond those extremes. The leader initiates—smoking, ordering the pliant sister to join the bike rider—and the pliant sister does as she is told. Will this change? The ending is open-ended, unresolved, leaving us with the puzzle—will she or will she not?
A Case Study in Place: Empire of the Moon
Empire of the Moon, a short film by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson (1991), is about Paris. The point of view is that of the tourist—the tourist coming to Paris, the tourist discovering the mysterious beauty of Paris, its inscrutable quality. In order to capture the mystery of that beauty, the filmmakers use a mixture of documentary images and abstracted images—parts of buildings, the light of the moon moving across tree-lined residential areas, the artificial lights of the tourist boats that peddle the story of Paris as they glide up and down the Seine. Many of the great sites—the Eiffel Tower, the glass pyramid leading into the Louvre, the Louvre itself, the beautiful train stations—all make up the images of Paris. The tourists come from every corner of the world.
In order to shape their notion of Paris, the filmmakers use a variety of shaping devices—five narrators, readings from Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein about Paris, and the nature of the tourist—some happy to be photographed as visitors, others probing, searching for some mystery, a formula that will alter the part of their life they feel needs altering—art, relationships, ideas.
The key to this experimental narrative is that the beautiful mystery of Paris, the Empire of the Moon, is inscrutable but valuable to each of us who needs such a place in our lives.
A Case Study in Structure: River of Things
River of Things, a short film by Katharine and Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, is based on four poems by Pablo Neruda. The filmmakers present four odes based on the poems: an “Ode to Things,” an “Ode to the Spoon,” an “Ode to a Bar of Soap,” and an “Ode to the Table.” The film is formally structured by these four odes. Not all are similar in length or tone. “Ode to Things,” for example, the most naturalistic of the four, is the only one to focus on a relationship—of a married couple. It is also linear in its progression—it follows them from the beginning of their day to its end. The poem itself forms their observational style of dialogue. Their dialogue about things is self-reflexive. This is also the longest of the four odes. The next three odes are focused differently. “Ode to the Spoon” is less natural and focuses on the ironic dialectic between functionality and artfulness. Although each of the episodes is playful, this second ode drifts away from the naturalism of the first episode. Spoons move on their own; they become animate. The pace of the second ode is more rapid.
“Ode to a Bar of Soap” slows down. It remains playful but introduces fantasy and absurdity into the act of the morning bath. Images of chocolate cake and of a bar of soap transformed into an elusive fish in the tub make this sequence the most nonnaturalistic of the four. But as in the first two, the narration is a voice-over. In the last of the odes, “Ode to the Table,” the narration is sung, as a choral piece. The goal is to make the table the hub for every human activity—functional, sexual, artistic. Many people, a chorus of people, participate around the table in order to give it the centrality the ode implies. The tone is serious, sober, important. The playfulness is diminished.
The overall structure of River of Things comes from the Neruda poems. But a secondary structure comes from the tone—a playful attitude toward the narratives of each of the odes. Although the structure is loose, it is nevertheless present, and it shapes the rueful observation of Neruda with a tonal appreciation of those elements in life that we ignore but whose functionality Neruda and the filmmakers laud.
A Case Study in Tone: Eclipse
Jason Ruscio’s Eclipse (1995) is a short film that provides a powerful experience in tone. Set in an unspecified time and place, the only live character is a young boy, age 12 or 13. Through the course of the narrative, there are a series of flashbacks that tell us he is the sole survivor of a massacre. His mother was killed by soldiers. Now, as he surveys the farm where he lived, he sits by the pit where his mother died and finds a dead soldier. Holding the soldier’s gun, he fantasizes about killing the man. Finally he leaves home, following a railroad track until he is found by partisans and taken in.
The tone of Eclipse is elegiac, and is principally about loss. Its nonspecificity with respect to any historical time and place allows us to roam and to believe it is about Bosnia or the Holocaust. In fact, the tone allows us to generalize and speculate about all tragic loss, historical or current. The filmmaker takes a formal approach to his images. The consequence is that it creates two rituals—one for loss, the other for the will to live. Eclipse is a powerful, wordless film that remains with the viewer for a long time. The tone is the central reason for its power.
A Case Study in Voice: All That’s Left: Speculations on a Lost Life
Katharine Hurbis-Cherrier’s All That’s Left: Speculations on a Lost Life gives us an opportunity to focus on the most lingering aspect of the experimental narrative—its exceedingly personal nature. It’s not simply the nature of the subject matter that makes it personal; rather, it is the approach taken.
All That’s Left is a reminiscence of the filmmaker’s aunt. Using a number of photographs of the filmmaker’s aunt, the aunt’s children, the aunt’s husbands, and her own mother, together with images of the leaves on trees and other distinctly rural images, the filmmaker tells the story of her aunt’s life. It is a simple life, a life of responsibility toward children and foster children, toward two men who were not ideal husbands, and toward her sister, for whom she acted as a mother. Four generations of children are nurtured by the aunt, from her own sister to her two children, her grandchildren when the parents no longer were willing to care for them, and for foster children. As the filmmaker repeats more than once, her aunt’s life was a simple life.
The narration, spoken by the filmmaker, searches for meaning. Indeed, the whole film probes for values and meaning. In a poetic, simple way, the filmmaker finds that meaning in the profound sense of giving her aunt exhibited. Using text as well as image, the film is a diary, an investigation, but most of all a processing of loss. The voice of the filmmaker reflects all of these and in a sense internalizes the deep values her aunt represents. Consequently, the film reaches an unusual depth of feeling. The author’s voice elevates this film, but it’s hard to imagine the same material working in the other genres. If another genre were used, the facts of the aunt’s life might take the story toward the tale of another woman—an abused, self-sacrificing woman—and away from the poetry of the life presented as experimental narrative.