I can't say I enjoyed the experience of watching Tsai Ming-Liang's "The River" (1997). In fact, as a sufferer of chronic neck pain, I found many scenes excruciating. The film's protagonist suffers a motorbike accident in an early scene. His resulting neck trauma becomes more and more debilitating, causing him to seek first modernized medical treatment, then a succession of traditional remedies: chiropracty, massage therapy, acupressure, acupuncture, aromatherapy, etc. Hearing, for instance, the fragile {snaps} of the chiropractic "adjustments" is no fun for any spectator who goes to bed each night hoping not to wake up in pain.
But while I didn't enjoy the film's plot, its cinematic style, on the other hand, was quite beautiful. This is a quiet, mostly immobile, long-take aesthetic in which dialogue plays almost no role. It's a style with a by-now recognizable history, traceable from certain passages in Antonioni, through the films of Chantal Ackerman, all the way up to the work of this director (of which "The River" is the first I'd seen). Its prehistory lies with the Lumiere brothers' actualités and their pre-narrative successors like "Interior New York Subway" (1905). Most shots are their own scenes (i.e., an average scene is composed of only one set-up). The camera does tilt and pan, but never zooms, and tracks or dollies on only one occasion. Often it seems an alien intelligence, some machinic mind, has decided how long to permit a given shot to endure. To cite Deleuze's defining characteristic of the modern cinema, no "sensori-motor schema" dominates "The River." Here "characters" -- I feel the word must be qualified somehow when referring to a film so relentlessly intent on presenting only exteriorities -- are not agents striving toward goals. They are merely bodies enduring what the world (and their bodies) put their bodies through. They withstand terrible physical pain, and they are subject to unbearable drives. The presentation of this pain, these drives, might seem unflinching were it not for the fact that the observer, like the "characters" observed, seems not to possess even that minimal degree of agency necessary for flinching.
The most striking example of any similar aesthetic I've so far seen would have to be Nikolaus Geyrhalter's "Our Daily Bread" (2005). That film puts this style to a use that, at first, seems even more horrible than the human suffering in "The River." As Geyrhalter's sterile camera watches mechanized food production, the viewer encounters gory tableaux: processing of chickens, pigs, and cows, turning organisms into packaged meat. As the film progresses (though it makes no progress as such), the agricultural production (both "natural" and in greenhouses and hydroponic facilities) that's intermixed with these shots of meat finally destroys distinctions between the categories of plant-food and animal-food, leaving the status of the mostly mute human workers deeply unsettled. Both "Our Daily Bread" and "The River" are deeply challenging works. Each constructs for the spectator precisely what only the best cinema can: a space in which to see and think anew about your relations with the world.
3 comments:
Fascinating review! A question: how would you define character? Is the basis for its definition always in the realistic mode and psychological depth?
For a question like that one I turn to Gerald Prince's "Dictionary of Narratology," an invaluable resource. The semic space between two of the definitions Prince provides for "character" points toward the ambivalence I felt in using that word to describe this movie. Prince's definition #2: "An actor; an existent engaged in an action." In this sense, the characters in "The River" qualify as characters, for sure. But, although few today are schooled in Aristotelian philosophy (and I'm certainly not one of them), I think that the word "character" in English today connotes enough of Prince's definition #3 so as to be not quite the most accurate word to describe the human figures Tsai Ming-Liang presents: "In Aristotelian terms, and along with thought (dianoia), one of two qualities that an agent (or pratton) has. Character (ethos) is the element in accordance with which agents can be said to be of a certain type. It is a secondary element, consisting of the type traits added to the agent in order to characterize it. Whereas thought is revealed by the agent's statements as well as by his or her thinking and arguing, character is revealed by the agent's choices, decisions, and actions, and by the way they are performed."
This must be paired with "characterization" definition #2 to give a fuller sense: "In Aristotelian terms, the assignment of type traits to an agent (pratton). Characterization observes four principles: the agent should have a certain moral elevation (chreston); s/he should be endowed with traits appropriately related to the action (harmotton); s/he should have idiosyncracies and be like an individual (homoios); and s/he should be consistent (homalon)." I'd say the "characters" in "The River" are "characterized" in precisely none of these four ways; although I also think that it's only the last two ("homoios" and "homalon") that still matter today. (The presence or absence of the first two Aristotelian principles now should not be taken to determine the presence or absence of character but rather to contribute to the determination of the literary mode of the work—e.g. in Northrop Frye’s breakdown: Mythic, Romantic, High Mimetic, Low Mimetic, or Ironic.)
The key word in the Aristotelian definition Prince provides is actually “revealed.” For a character in this sense there must be something essential that pre-exists actions. In their turn, a character’s actions are important because they express That is to say: precisely: psychological depth, a temporally continuous and unique personality that lies on the interior of the self and can be accessed by the other (here, the viewer/reader) only through its expression as actions (including speaking and emoting). Again, the important part is that this interiority is implied by aesthetic means to exist as such. That is, to be distinct from its expressions, and, in as much as it is distinct from them, ultimately to be more important than they are. This is the foundation of individualism.
I’m reading a book right now that addresses precisely this issue. Stay tuned . . .
Aha! I not only read this review (as I shamefully couldn't remember earlier today), I actually commented upon it (further shame). I hadn't yet read your wonderful reply, though, which is a compelling exploration of the term. I am intrigued by the tension surrounding consistency in our (realist) conception of character - we want our characters to have coherent identities that are expressed through predictable reactions, but "psychological realism" and Aristotelian models of plot construction requires that we see this character develop over the course of the narrative - in other words, demonstrate inconsistency within consistency. Perhaps I should read your other posts on character before I say anything else, but of course at the core of this discussion in the appropriation (an easy one, perhaps, if controversial for recent Aristotle scholars) of Aristotelian theory for Christian moral purposes, which hinges on the dual denotation of character (as identity/role and as moral fiber).
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