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Around the corner:Eight |
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A ghostly tennis match translated as unanswered letters by Jeroen Peeters & Jack Hauser.
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Brussels, Nov. 8, 2010
Dear Jack,
The book has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks, waiting for a good occasion to enter this letter. In his novel Man in the Dark, Paul Auster borrows material from several films, which are also discussed by the characters Katya and August, a film student and her grandfather, via the trope of inanimate objects and in relation to loss and grief. Of course I wound up watching all of the four films in the meantime: Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu (1959), and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953).
I don’t feel inclined to repeat the role these films played in the novel, nor Auster’s analysis. More interesting is the way Auster furthers the theme of authorial violence that resides in the arbitrary choices made for a novel’s characters and lives. In Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, all the characters that have been cut off from their own lives reside in an asylum where oblivion reigns, and they confront their author. In Man in the Dark Auster starts by exploring a persona that is at once character and author, pulled back and forth between different realities, eventually trapped in an impossible situation that has both poetical and political overtones. The writer’s fantasy starts like this: “I put him in a hole. That felt like a good start, a promising way to get things going. Put a sleeping man in a hole, and then see what happens when he wakes up and tries to crawl out.” It will take a while for the man to work his way out of the situation.
When I saw a trailer for the film Buried last week, I was immediately reminded of Auster: an American civilian taken hostage and buried alive in a coffin somewhere in Iraq, with only a Zippo and a cell phone. A film adaptation of Auster, revolving around the question how the man in the coffin thinks and feels. And, as I know after having seen the film, also around this other question: who are the authors responsible for his situation?
To warm up, I revisited Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), his single-set film with the most reduced setting: eight people on a lifeboat in the open sea during World War II. How would Hitchcock create an interesting landscape in such a narrow situation? The film unfolds very much like a theatre drama, with a brilliant Tallulah Bankhead performing a star journalist, who appears to be rather well-equipped in the beginning of the film. Curiously, what sets the contract with the viewer, what allows for a whole society to be imagined and organized on that lifeboat, is the first object fished out of the water: a tennis racket! Interestingly, later on even Hitchcock manages to “squeeze” himself into the boat with a cameo in a newspaper ad. Even then, Lifeboat remains in all respects a spacious film and has an open ending.
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Walking around the corner, I was prepared for a more claustrophobic experience. To my surprise, Rodigo Cortés’ Buried was shown in the smallest theatre in Kinepolis – I didn’t even know they had an even smaller theatre than the small ones! I took a seat in the fifth row. Buried is a claustrophobic film indeed, all placed in the coffin, with the world coming in through Paul Conroy’s cell phone only. With the anxiety attacks, the criminal threats, the hold-on messages, the bureaucratic responses from America, the media streams, the political implications, and so on, the space grows actually smaller as Conroy gets more and more entangled in an impossible situation. The film is well-written and keeps up the tension, but the ending is somehow disappointing: as a viewer, one knows the contract in advance, so making up for Conroy’s death with a political punch line – intricate though it might be – kills the imaginary space and makes the film truly “contained”. As soon as I walked out of the theatre, the film was out of my mind – I prefer Hitchcock’s tennis game out in the open.
Oh, the trailer shown before announced more claustrophobic cinema with Devil, about a group of people trapped in an elevator – I think I'll rather let that one pass.
Best,
Jeroen |
To Be Continued |
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