“This is why you’re photographed . . . “

This weekend I’m in country Victoria to catch the tail end of the Ballarat International Foto Bienalle (about which I’ll write a bit more later). Driving across the border from South Australia means a change in speed limit, the landscape shifting from being a flat brown to a more wooded green, and something I’d not seen before: billboards saying “This is why you’re photographed when you speed”, accompanied with a couple of family snaps of a young woman blowing candles out and looking at the camera. This seemed a little cryptic, though its placement by the highway suggested some kind of road safety message (we photograph/use speed cameras so that you can live to enjoy your twenty-first birthday?).

The mystery was solved a few hours later in the rental apartment though, with the TV on and ads flowing past. One caught my eye. It started with a shot of some family photos on a wall and in other empty rooms. It was quiet and deliberate, with a touch of handheld camera movement, but trying, it seemed, not to be too loud and ad-like. It cut to a succession of ordinary-looking people–a woman in a suburban front yard, a truckie in his cabin, a man in a lounge room–who were looking at or holding a photograph. The subdued music and sombre expressions soon made it clear that the photographs were those of people who were dead. Then the ad cut to closer shots of the people in the photographs, with their names and dates of death. This seemed too specific to be fiction. These must be real people who’ve really lost loved ones (surely whatever agency commissioning the ad would not toy with our emotions so, to actually name someone in full and not have it be true?) Then, the text to close the ad from the roadside billboard. This TV ad is a documentary, I realised.

I can remember a road safety ad years ago which featured a man in a pub having a drink that ended with the final-shot kicker showing him in a wheelchair. It was controversial because it was an actor playing the role. There was nothing telling that audience that it was an actual road accident victim, but people felt cheated that it wasn’t somehow. This current ad depends on this expectation of truthfulness and by giving us the victims’ names it reassures us that our emotional attention to these tragedies is grounded in reality. It also depends on our understanding of photographs as stand-ins for the dead. Photographs aren’t always the only tokens of the departed, but in this case, they serve as an economical way to signal absence and loss. It’s not simply photographs as photographs that do this here–the music and sombre expressions and even tears strongly suggest this, prior to the even stronger confirmations of the names. (I can imagine an ad with a photograph held by a smiling woman, for example, which might indicate a child overseas–when Barthes says photographs hint of death, he’s right, but not always.)

The safety campaign has a website which provides more context, telling us that a handful of families volunteered their stories. These stories, not an abstract set of road safety guidelines, are the main feature of the site. The centrality of the photographs to this campaign is clear: it’s called ‘picturesofyou‘.

Source Code/La Jetée

[Source Code, 2011. via Video Word Made Flesh]

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[La Jetée, 1962. via The Boston Bachelor]

[Update, 29 August 2011: I've decided to take this idea elsewhere. Hello, Cinememory!]

 

 

 

 

 

The Photograph from Marienbad

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a puzzle, an enigma of a film. In an grand opulent hotel, the guests entertain themselves with card games, concerts, target shooting and walks in the garden. One man talks repeatedly to a woman, trying to persuade her that they have met there the previous year. She resists his advances and denies that anything has ever happened between them. But the film is elliptical, and it’s soon clear that the scenes cut between different years, though which sequence is the past, which one the future, and which one merely imagined is never clear. The man persistently narrates his version of how they met and the woman persistently rejects it. Sometimes it seems as though the man is narrating the film itself. He describes how she was standing with her arm half-outstretched on the balustrade, and on screen she complies, standing just so. But this is uncertain too: on another occasion he describes the way she walked around her room towards the closed door. But we see on screen the woman walking to look past an open door. “No, the door was closed!” his voice-over protests, to no avail.

[Image: Screen grab from TheReturnoftheSDQ’s YouTube channel, about 7min 25sec]

A one point he brings out a photograph, taken, he claims, the previous year in the gardens. She barely looks at it but later she seems to using it as a bookmark. He talks about how even this doesn’t convince her. It could have been taken by anyone, in any garden, she says. It proves nothing. We then see her sitting in the gardens, perhaps when the photograph was taken. But we never see a camera or a photographer. Later still she opens a drawer in her room to find it full of copies of the same picture. Perhaps the man has put them there in some grand and vain gesture (as if repeating oneself more and more loudly is a way of getting someone to understand something). Perhaps it’s an indication that the movie is a facade, and the character has stumbled upon the props department storage area. In any case, she lays out the photos in the same pattern as the game that some of the men play — putting objects on the table and removing them until the person left with one object loses. The photograph now is merely a prop in a game that can’t really be understood (at another point, with two men playing, the onlookers shout out a host of possibilities: one has to go first to win, or that it’s a logarithmic series, or some other obscure strategy, none of which apply).

Near the beginning of the film the characters chat in the salon and then pause, as if time has stood still. Perhaps the film hasn’t quite begun, the mechanism hasn’t quite warmed up yet. Perhaps the stagey and artificial-looking stillness is an indication that the photograph to come, the photograph that might anchor the man’s entreaties in something real, is itself fake (something the man has faked a connection to? an object about which the woman fakes ignorance? a fake prop in an elaborate pretense of a movie?) and not really proof that anything has actually happened.

“Light as a feather . . . light”

Words is a brilliant little film from a company called Everynone that’s an object lesson in montage and paying attention. It accompanies a recent show by WNYC Radiolab, those virtuoso purveyors of rich and beautiful radio documentary. Enjoy it with the “all I care about is the wind in my hair” right side of your brain, or the “ah, that’s clever!” analytical side. Or both: like any good montage, combining the two elements creates something greater.

(via John Gruber and Liz Danzico)

(hmmm, there are two versions)

[WORDS, posted with vodpod, Directed by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman, Original Score by Keith Kenniff]

Micmacs

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest movie Micmacs is a condensation of many of the stylistic and thematic concerns apparent from his earlier films: warmly desaturated cinematography, an idiosyncratic and catchy soundtrack, characters who construct their world out of the recycled detritus of the industrial age, a concern with lists and calculations and categories. Micmacs is set in what looks like a contemporary French city, but its real location is some anachronistic present, where the characters negotiate the internet and factory junkyards with equal facility.

The most specific place and time in the film is the wartime North Africa of the 1950s where Bazil’s father gets killed by a landmine. We catch glimpses of the watch that the adult Bazil wears: a military watch, labelled specifically for that conflict. Aside from that, the present. Not really modern, not really 21st-century, but some world where arms dealers and powerful men can still be undone by the patched-together ingenuity of salvagers that Bazil finds company with. One of his friends is loquacious African ethnographer, an interesting character given the nostalgic whiteness that Jeunet’s earlier Amelie was accussed of portraying.

[Micmacs: à tire-larigot, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009]

o

[I’m going to go right to the end of the story here, so if you haven’t seen the film you should probably stop reading now.]

Bazil has a bullet in the brain from a drive-by shooting, and his predicament is that the bullet might shift and kill him instantly at any moment. On a salvage run one day, he finds himself in the industrial neighbourhood of two rival arms factories, one which has made his bullet, and the other the mine that killed his father. Now he has a mission. By the end, the arms dealers have had their precious collections of cars and historical body-parts (sic) trashed, duped into fighting each other, and finally, brought to face the mothers of the children maimed by their products. The CEOs have been kidnapped, shipped to the middle east, and are given a live grenade to hold and a mine to stand on. The mothers hold in front of them photographs of their children.

This too is elaborate theatre of course, and they haven’t in fact even left the city. The veiled mothers are in fact our plucky band of scavengers and the revenge that they exact is not just the momentary terror of explosive death, but the more lingering humiliation of the CEOs’ confessions posted to YouTube. A friend of mine says that this “is the political triumph of the film – not a sermon, but a viral video.”

I wonder if Jeunet used actual pictures of real kids, now limbless from careless ordnance? It sure looks like he did; the pictures seemed pretty convincing to me, flashed on the screen as they were. Let’s say that there were real. If so, they’re doing something clever and extraordinary. The photographs connect the frivolous tale, the merry film, to reality. Inside the fiction film, and inside the fakery within the film, these photos refer to a troubling reality. The arms dealer motivation is no longer just a plot device, no longer a maguffin that motivates the action but that we don’t need to really care for to jump into the story (corrupt ministers, or secret plans, say). No, here, that short moment of reality reminds us the audience of this real and horrible thing. Like the Micmacs movie posters that appear on billboards in various shots, the presence of the photographs reminds us that it is a fiction film. But now, it’s a film that says: ‘We have these plots and shenanigans. Remember, though, that landmines are serious matters’. Even if the photos are fictions, they still point towards a world outside the film in a way that is more weighty than simply having ‘secret plans’ as a motivating factor.

As P reminds me, something similar happens in Waltz with Bashir: the animation cuts to video footage of the aftermath of a massacre. It’s abrupt and shocking. And it doesn’t turn away. But Bashir is a documentary, after all.

For Micmacs, this whimsical fiction (and I don’t mean that as a criticism), it’s a deft move. The photographs disappear from the screen, the moment of solemnity gone. The characters take their revenge, the foes are vanquished, romance is kindled, all are happy. But I’m still thinking about those pictures.