Vive L'amour!

Above all else there is clarity in Sembene's films.  it is the clarity of positions, of speech, of objects, and of intentions.  One always knows where to look, where Sembene is leading you towards next with his camera eye.  In one scene a jar of water is poured into a container and within the background a link is made between the women that appear.  When Bazin stresses a total picture of reality, an emphasis of reality, he had it wrong...what one looks for within a cinema like Sembene's is the potential of ideas to burst forth from something else in the most contaminated and concealed manner as possible.  Like when the birds incessantly chirp upon the soundtrack in Sembene's films, it is a matter of something being made so obvious, so obtrusive upon the world that it should be made noticeable.  Art, especially within the aspect of negative spaces creates these abysses of sound and picture not to be forgotten, but to be bothered by this largeness of something that is there.

One director who comes to mind when I think of Sembene is Kurosawa, and of course when I say Kurosawa, I might as well reference the Grecian chorus, a unison of person that clamors through the voice and identity of the middle.  That's the beauty of Sembene/Kurosawa...to squat in the middle, to lead and rally by the emphatic presence of everyone standing around, a group whose ears become our listening.  And space is placed next to man in his films...it is man that inflates the presence of things, an anthill, a rope that guards a doorway, a pile of refused radios ditched in the middle of a village.  It is all these things that exist through the participation of the lines that people draw within society, of all the moratoriums, the power struggles, the insults, and the intimacy that they try to keep close to themselves.  These are elements of space that become invested with culture.  Like the native american who takes pictures of pampas grass that reveals nothing, and when asked why he had taken that picture, he says it is because there used to be a beautiful, black snake that lived there.

But Sembene is no ghost. He understand the political value of the world he lives in--the intimacy of his pictures is precisely the journalism, the playwright politician who wants pictures to negotiate with a reality.  When people say Brecht in terms of Sembene, it is at this point of theater shaking the mirror of identification at reality, and commanding, convincing, and generating an empathy towards a sense of change.  Something tells me that this art will do very little, though.  The real theater that convinces us of Brecht is the real violence that occurs immediately and dangerously, it is the image of injustice that makes us squirm.  It was never in the cheery satire of his political theater, but perhaps in the more private poetry of Brecht, where his words become the readers at the instant and fill in the lack of need.  Film as political art seems doomed to me, but does one really want those silly treatises of Argentinean encyclopedias of third world from Solanas?

The best attitude to take is mad laughter, the laughter of Alan Moore's Comedian, the absurd stance of Kafka, or Oe.  And when I say laughter, one should take this as violence.  True violence always strikes wildly.

Marker will not succeed at anything without the photo.  I suspect that even when he was a professional writer or a novelist, he was thinking through photos instead of words.  Let's put aside all those arguments against the quality of the photo these days, and jump right into the reality of it.  History, and more history.  When you watch this film, the avant-garde loosens itself and becomes an education.  Have you thought of Ken Burns?  A photo animated by the most dull movements of camera tracks.  Yes, but rather than experience what it is that is so plainly a history about a history, Chris Marker ventures out into the netherworld of the picaresque essay, an idea that bounds about, that squirms and returns to find its real chore when ready. I've mentioned this before,  but this is something that is very important when you are making a film...there is only one rule to the best kind of filmmaking: what you think you see and hear is not really the thing you see and hear.  It's most clearly that image from the magic trick--the magician says, hey, I will make this disappear, it disappears, and then I will make it return, and then it returns.  This trick never fails to wow someone who is watching a film. But it is ambitious of Marker to do this every time...he is a fantastic editor of ideas...like the shots of the dying Giraffe that pop up well before it arrives at that topic, a subliminal inkling of what Marker achieves....

As a side note, have I written about the Watchmen at all? How Alan Moore's design and writing is something very close to Griffith, and something very close to Marker.  He says that it emerges from the modernist experimentation of Burroughs, and this is most likely true, but towards the end of the novel there is the scene where Ozymandias is watching all those televisions in his room, and comes up with a hypothesis of the future.  That against the panoply of vision, this barrage of watching he will be able to extract something not there, something that is concealed with futurity.  And Moore thinks, isn't this much like when one cuts open the entrails of an animal to read one's future, that within all this violence, this smashing of images that do not occur end to end but side by side one will discover different images within so many at once.  Did you know that this is what Marker does as well? A loner, in his apartment with so many televisions running, of course he is allowed to come up with these different amazing juxtapositions...it is television, it is the remote control, it it the multiple screened spectacle of television that allows him to bound back and forth from here and there, and now and then, and everywhere.  Eisenstein again.  Not two molecules colliding though...millions upon millions, again and again.