Avant-garde is a movement that seeks to break the tradition and politicise the issues. The theoretical approach to cinema addressed the issues like realist versus naturalist films, spectator-screen relationship, editing styles, subjectivity, and psychoanalytical potential of a film, auteur cinema and the semiotics of the film. With this, filmmakers turned to making film with experimentation as its central part. This report discusses how the avant-garde is exemplified in Rubber and La Jetee films.
Chris Marker composed La Jetee in1962 which is almost entirely of still shots. The film has the theme of time, memory, and perception, and it tells an elaborate science fiction story, which ultimately deals with the perceived illusion of cinematic movement. “The human brain forgets the cuts,” Michel Gondry said about film. And just like Michael Haneke calls the 24 frames in each cinema second “24 lies,” Chris Marker emphasises the false perception of film movement by simply slowing down the pace of the still images.
La Jetee is an experimental time travel film, but temporality and movement are opposed visually with the still images. The film emphasises the illusion of time lapse and movement perceived both by the characters within the film and the audience of the film. It achieves the feeling of movement and time lapse mainly through its editing. It uses dissolves, fade-ins, and fade-outs to provoke the feeling of time lapse. As more obvious and gradual transitions than a cut, dissolves, fade-ins, and fade-outs suggest longer time lapse.
The dissolve is synchronised with the sound. As the story moves from the past to the present, La Jetee creates mental continuity and rhythm through its visual and sound editing. The soundtrack serves as an editing framework which shapes the mental transitions between the sequences of the story. For example, in one of the sequences when the main character is in the past, music is running along the voice-over. As the character “falls back exhausted,” a shot of the woman’s face dissolves to the character’s face back in the laboratory. Music stops at the moment of the dissolve, but begins again when the scientists “probably give him another shot” and the character returns back in the past.
The German voices are the only direct speech in the film, and they are intentionally vague, inaudible, and incomprehensible. The fact that neither the main character, nor the woman say anything in direct speech makes the audience feel them lifeless and detached from present. None of the characters in La Jetee have a name either. They seem voiceless and lifeless figures frozen in time. Their black-and-white photographs enhance the feeling of lifelessness.
The live-action sequence consists of the woman blinking—a subtle movement which can be easily overlooked. Right before the blinking, a long series of slow dissolves show the woman sleeping in bed. The dissolves are so numerous that at times it appears as if the woman is alive and moving. Just like the main character cannot tell if he moves or has simply made it up, the audience cannot distinguish between the woman is still or moving.
La Jetee tells the story of a man who sees his own death as a child without realising it. He lives his life (presumably), only to find out the moment that has marked his entire life is the memory of his own death. From a philosophical point of view, La Jetee is an existentialist tale of doomed existence, inevitability, and predetermined death. And the best way to express this idea is by using lifeless photographs to tell the story of a life that is only perceived as such.
The cinematographic, representational economy conveys a bourgeois, anti-materialist consciousness, which the avant-garde film alone is able to purpass, or at least to portray in critical self-reflection. As a consequence, in La Jetee, the incestuous desire of a protagonist watching his own movie and which is under penalty of death, is the illusion-breaking self-reflective element. This ennobles La Jetee alongside its ingenious photographic composition into a unique and in itself an unrepeatable avant-garde film.
If La Jetee applies the violence of the Oedipal drama to itself, then the death of its protagonist more than anything guarantees the separation between a passive spectator and the screen and prevents a potential participative involvement in the event from taking place. If the scene of the runway reflects spectators’ Oedipal viewing position, then the incestaboo ensures that the spectator doesn’t commit illicit auto-erotic, masturbatory, or incestuous acts with either his other self or with his parents, and that he remains restricted to a viewing position separated from events, in order to acquire neutral and objective knowledge of future technologies or of the cinema, as does the Apparatus Theory itself. Le Jette and its theorising encounter the Oedipal cinema, and the ideology of a neutral and transcendental standpoint built into it, as a given fact, which every film is condemned to reproduce and which the avant-garde film can only expose.
The other example of avant-garde film is Rubber. It is a road movie in the most literal sense. It’s also a horror film, a critique of cinema past and present, an absurdist satire of traditional film tropes, an homage to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, a comeback for Eighties icon Hauser, and a feature-length avant garde film unlike any other.
“All great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason,” explains Spinella’s deadpan desert cop Lt. Chad in the film’s intriguing, fourth-wall-shattering prologue. Rubber is a randomly vicious antagonist, a sentient tire that rolls up out of the California desert and goes on an inexplicable rampage that’s viewed from afar by a binocular-wielding “audience.”
Rubber is a deliberately out-there provocation and such works are geared to be despised. Homicidal, telekinetic, and jealous of the less vulcanised life-forms it encounters, this steel-belted psychopath is, in its own wild way, genuinely of and on Kerouac’s Road: It is a mad one, mad to live, mad to talk or, at least, communicate, mad to be saved, and “desirous of everything at the same time.” And therein lies Rubber’s Achilles tread: At nearly an hour and a half, it’s a mighty long stretch of two-lane blacktop for a Dada-esque prank that could’ve been considerably more substantive – not to mention subversive – had it been worn into an explosive 20-minute short.
The film is a demonstration of the concept of “no reason,” it opens in the California desert with a cop (Stephen Spinella) stepping out of his police cruiser and addressing the camera directly. As for the sentient tire, it comes to life in the desert, discovers it has the power to kill scorpions and bunnies through telekinesis, and then proceeds to stalk human prey.
The avant-garde film Rubber is rife with Brechtian allusions that call attention to the movie-making apparatus, filled with broad philosophical musings about scopophilia and other stalwarts of film theory, it sometimes feels like the narrative version of a long-winded film studies class tinged with a love of grandiose conceptual absurdity.
Still, the movie offers plenty for the 99.999 percent of the audience that don’t spend their free time debating the relative merits of feminist film theory or devouring Christian Metz. The picture thrills in large part because the filmmaker so gleefully indulges in the craziness of the conceit, mirroring the tire’s deadly advance across a barren American desert with the plight of onscreen spectators perched on lawn chairs, binoculars in hand, devouring the spectacle and debating what it all means.
The experience inspires feelings of incredulousness, the stark disbelief only provoked by works of art that dare to step boldly outside the mainstream. The sort of self-reflexive dialogue that comprises much of the production could easily register as smarmy, too cute self-absorptive schlock, but Dupieux and the actors ably tread the tenuous line between the fresh and the pretentious. Their philosophical musings about the nature of storytelling have a spontaneity to them that spurs charmed recognition rather than grating eye-rolls.
At the same time, Dupieux uses carefully-timed takes and some tire-level camera placement to transform Robert into a scary, sinister figure. There’s real tension in his rage-filled vibrations, which are spurred at the slightest provocation and which through some sort of psychic energy cause the spontaneous combustion of his antagonists. He’s a tire with a personality, obsessed by a French tourist lodging at a seedy motel.
This is a smart and incisive cinematic experiment. Whether people ultimately love it or hate it, or can’t imagine seeing a movie about a tire, it’s unique enough to deserve their consideration.
Bibliography:
- (2014). Avant-Garde. Available: https://www.filmtheory.org/avant-garde/. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- Lamos Ignoramous. Chris Marker’s La Jetee Analysis: Mortality and the Illusion of Time. Available: http://filmslie.com/chris-marker-la-jetee-analysis-temporality/. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- Scott Tobias. (2011). Rubber. Available: https://film.avclub.com/rubber-1798167773. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- MARC SAVLOV. (2011). Rubber. Available: https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2011-04-01/rubber/. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- Robert Levin. (2011). Review: ‘Rubber’ Aims its WTF For The Head But Not the Heart. Available: https://filmschoolrejects.com/review-rubber-aims-its-wtf-for-the-head-but-not-the-heart-5662428b7d17/. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- (2006). La Jetee (1962). In: Todd Fraley, Anandam P. Kavoori Media, Terrorism, and Theory: A Reader. Google Books: Rowman & Littlefield. 56-66.
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