The Darkness Doubled

In 2004, Mark Lapore and Phil Solomon collaborate on a film for their friend and fellow filmmaker David Gatten who has recently been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. The film has an ambiguous function; ostensibly a eulogy, and yet a symbol of solidarity, of comfort, “do not go gently into that dark night.”

It’s an idea Lapore has been pestering Solomon with for some time: a film composed of captured scenes from Grand Theft Auto, not of the gun-slinging bitch-slapping variety, but showcasing the game’s protagonist at his most vulnerable. At a country house (presumably a hideout of some sort), taking shelter from the rain on the patio, a hanging pot of flowers being tossed around by the wind. As a collaboration it exhibits Lapore’s irreverence and Solomon’s solemnity. A technique many would see as flaky converted into a touching tribute to a kindred soul. “Experimental” and “perilous” share the same latin root.

And yet, a year later, it is Mark Lapore who has died, Gatten having miraculously recovered. Untitled (for David Gatten) is now Lapore’s self-created eulogy.

The video game metaphor makes the film all the more eerie. The character is hiding, but from what? One imagines the anxiety; perhaps from the police, perhaps from a rival gang that has targeted him for taking one of their own, perhaps from his own comrades who have been ordered to hunt him down for having compromised his superiors. Death as something lingering the darkness, ready to pounce on its unexpecting victim. Lapore knew that he smoked too much, he had adapted the silent film entitled The Nicotine Princess about the dangers of smoking, albeit with characteristic irony.

Was there something in him, while he and Phil struggled to figure out the controls to a game neither of them knew much about, that knew what was in store for him? A doctor’s diagnosis: “you will die in a matter of months” vs. a life lived in fear, of constantly looking over one’s shoulder.

And the way that this knowledge colours our interpretation of all his films; his earlier anthropological studies, his attentive care to the mundane, his loving portraits of his daughter. They seem all the more…personal.

Verlaine was a huge influence on Lapre. No, not the French poet.

I remember how the darkness doubled
I recall how lightning struck itself.
I was listening to the rain
I was hearing something else.
--Television, “Marquee Moon”

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I left the Ontario Cinematheque a little disappointed. Compared to the earlier screenings of El Sur and Sol de Membrillo, Erice’s most recent effort failed to fully satisfy. La Morte Rouge has Erice reminiscing on the first film he recalls ever having seen: the 1944 Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes film The Scarlet Claw. Erice’s is a touching film, rife with profound ruminations on the development of an artists’ vision, pre-work, pre-career. It reminded me of something Scorsese said about the first time he discovered what a “director” was, that there had to be someone steering the movie in a certain direction, and deciding instantly that that was what he wanted to do. Except, Erice’s realization is more metaphysical. He speaks of his fear of the man with the claw creeping into his bedroom, and not being able to later identify him. When an actor plays an actor (master of disguise) we often lose sight of his being…an actor, and why couldn’t the mailman in a coastal Spanish village be, in secret, equally villainous?

But is film the right medium for such vulnerability? All of Erice’s film have an “other” that simultaneously distances and familiarizes the subject: Frankenstein in Beehive, the movie star Irene Rios in El Sur, the quinces in Sol de Membrillo whose physicality are obsessed over by the painter and yet negated by the filmmaker, and, perhaps most abstractly, the scribbled watch in Lifeline that actually works. And yet when this “other” itself becomes the subject something feels too deliberate. Voiceovers almost always feel too deliberate, or at least too superfluous. Bresson revels in their superfluity, Godard adopts them as a cinematic form that he can push to a Derridean type of archi-writing, (often bordering on inaudibility, but never more than two tracks.) Erice simply reads, narrates that which the images aren’t quite showing.

Now it is, of course, meant to be a letter, to Kiarostami. But a cinematic letter surely ought to be more than dialogue accompanied by visual aides. Even Godard’s’ Lettre a Freddy struck me in a similar way. And even Godard says at some point in the Histoire(s), (I forget the exact phrasing) that the cinema is the art of alterity.

...

What then makes a personal cinema? Lapore and Brakhage film their family members, but aren’t they temporarily transported into a different realm once the camera goes on? Or perhaps the formal controls, to shoot, develop, and edit every stage of the film. Some might argue.

Cf. Ian Mckellan



Or Nick Ray, the auteur par excellence. Right, JLG, he IS cinema. Ok. But the credits for We Can’t Go Home Again, after Nick’s prologue (voiceover) states “A FILM BY US.” And even more explicitly in the end, as he wraps the noose around his (the director’s) neck, the students lazily protest, “I have been interrupted.” Nick’s film.

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I probably don’t say this enough but God bless youtube! I send the user a message, where on earth did you find this film? The title is in Italian, from television perhaps? I’ve heard that Peleshyan doesn’t want these films shown, his first two, this being the second. It’s a very youthful film, playful like Lipsett, the other Arthur.

I remember having a similar Scorsese moment early on in my encounter with Peleshyan. Specifically, reading the crew information. His films have a personal feel, like he just set out one day with a camera and just left it running. But those of us who have tried that know that that’s not the best way to document reality. It does, in fact, require direction. One can feign impartiality like the recent crop of leftist essays, but it will be an supercilious de-sedimentation at best. Requiring a Hegelian absolute consciousness to direct it, to personalize it.

And there’s something authentic and yet lucky about it, I hesitate to call it transcendental. But, say, like the Roman artist who, frustrated at his inability to paint a horse foaming at the mouth, throws a moist sponge at the canvas in a fit of fury, only to discover it perfectly attained the desired result. “no accidentology, but chance discovery” said Virilio (via Aristotle)

Double yourself and receive me darkness
--Whitman, “The Sleepers”

I don’t know how much “distance montage” is Peleshyan’s own term, or something that critics have adopted an easy label. But in reading Eisenstein I get the impression that editing is the only place where the filmmaker can exert total control. And thus, the more distant the conjoined images, the more personalized it becomes. When it becomes a matter of intuition. Like Ray, Godard had only superlatives so say about Peleshyan. The last invited into the hotel of Russian directors in Les Enfants Jouent au Russe



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Russian.