Dear Jack,
Since the word caused a small editorial stutter the other day, maybe I should come back for a moment to this term “tropological wandering”, which I dropped before in an attempt to describe my own practice as much as the cinema of Claire Denis. Since I’m interested in the pathways afforded by conceptual landscapes, tropes allow for the exploration of embodied and embedded meaning, yet as materials or objects they remain somewhat opaque and resistant towards explanation. And at the same time they are somehow efficient in harbouring large, scattered realities, containers of meaning and noise at once.
To me, a master of the tropological wandering in cinema is Alfred Hitchcock, who developed the notion “McGuffin” for that which drives the plot of a film. In an interview with Truffaut in 1966 he said: “It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’, and the other answers ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin’. The first one asks ‘What’s a McGuffin?’. ‘Well’, the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands’. The first man says ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands’, and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no McGuffin!’. So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.”
Hitchcock’s work is indeed not exactly plot-driven, it navigates its way through objects and images and a good deal of nothingness. His first movie that explores the McGuffin principle in extenso is said to be The 39 Steps (1935), one of his truly great early films. With a few examples it can be made clear how Hitchcock not so much constructs a plot but a mental landscape. In the opening sequence we follow the male protagonist walking into a theatre, only by shots of his legs and his back – which is nothing else than an invitation for us to walk into the film. Hitchcock often has interesting leg choreography; his Strangers on a train (1951) opens in a similar way – though adding tennis rackets to the legs! Now that we’re walking, in The 39 Steps Hitchcock makes us also travel by train to the Scottish countryside and take a walk there, populating the landscape with a flock of sheep and other animals. Back in London, the landscape also pervades the urban jungle. When our man escapes Scotland Yard at some point, ends up on the stage of a political meeting and has to improvise his way through a speech, he looks down at his paper, which is turned upside down, wondering which politician he is actually introducing, enthusiastically calls out his name but then has to apologize for nicknaming him after realizing he hadn’t quite made out the man’s proper name from the paper that actually reads “Mr. McCorquodale”.
Last Sunday I went around the corner to see Anton Corbijn’s The American, produced by George Clooney, who plays a middle-aged contract killer that wants to get out of the job and catch up with his life again. Last time I saw Clooney was either in an ad for Martini or Nespresso, or perhaps as the sex maniac in the Coen brothers film Burn After Reading (2008). But he easily sheds history and it was great to watch Clooney for once not in a clowny role or ironic way of acting. His character Jack/Edward also sheds history easily – or not quite: “And remember, Jack, don’t make any friends. You used to know that!” He is an American that pretends to be a photographer with an interest in the here and now only. The film is quite minimalist, though very rich in texture, depth and intertextuality – too much to discuss.
The most developed trope is the fascinatingly ambiguous object of the gun Jack/Edward builds as his last job. The endless constructing and fine-tuning of the rifle in order to make it work smoothly and with deadly precision, the mechanics of the object and the activity are what make Jack/Edward a craftsman rather than an artist, like the priest remarks. The point is not that he is a killer not a photographer, but that he doesn’t know how to place his secret in the world. The mechanical seems to be his liberty, his way of diverting the attention from his life and his secret – he lives from contract to contract, which provides him something to hold onto. Yet it also ensnarls him, as the mechanical extends into the criminal network he cannot leave. Or take his relation with the prostitute Clara (Violante Placido): the theatrical orgasm of the prostitute is of course a well-known cinematic trope, but whether it was fake or real, in either case it confounds Edward since it disturbs the contractual relationship he has with her. When she lures him into a dinner meeting outside the brothel he is really lost, because there is no contract anymore and he has to improvise. Again the mechanical relieves him from any true decision: Clara takes the lead and orders the food, while he buys a rose from a Pakistani in an inadvertent attempt to construct yet another contract.
One scene at the end of the film confused me, and I still don’t really know why, but it relates to the “legwork” in Hitchcock. In The American, many scenes played by Clooney or his boss Pavel (Johan Leysen) are limited to the voice or to facial expression, often in telephone dialogues. It is only at the end, when Pavel is chasing Jack in the alleys of Castel del Monte, that we see Johan Leysen run in a somewhat awkward way, with the camera focusing on his legs. Why did that moment appear awkward to me? Is it because Leysen is older (Clooney is a fit and sporty type in the film, regularly exercising his body)? Because his trousers are too short or his rubber soles lack elegance (Clooney is shown taking off his clacking leather shoes in another chase earlier in the film)? Because he is mainly a theatre actor and hasn’t developed so much a full-bodied expressivity? Playing the film back in my mind it is clear that the legs of the female contract killer Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) get a lot of explicit attention, sexualized attention from a male gaze. But what about the legs of men in film?
In an interview director Corbijn says that one can’t make a Western anymore, that the genre is outdated. He does toy with elements of the genre though, such as the setting of a duel. And he makes the anachronism and dislocated aspect explicit by showing an excerpt of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) on a poor quality flat screen TV in a bar, with Italian men explaining to the American Edward how Italian this film is. Revisiting its famous opening scene, most of the expression stems from faces in close-up, but then we also have a fly directing the gaze and a train opening up the landscape, then the firmly grounded standing, and eventually walking, running and horse-riding. In Westerns men do have legs. In The American we start in the Swedish snow fields and then travel down south by train, but I realized that Corbijn is very much a photographer, that the landscape is a series of views to him, with a history on the screen perhaps, but not quite a space that grounds the characters.
Since a year or so I don’t go around the corner by bike anymore, but always walk – now I wonder what it does to my thinking.
Best,
Jeroen |
