Image and event in recent Hungarian film (The Man from London, Delta, Milky Way)

Izabella Fzi (1976) is Associate Professor of Film and Literary Theory at the University of Szeged (Hungary). She is chief editor of the online film studies journal Apertra (www.apertura.hu). She has previously written on narrative theories in film, mediality, and spectatorship and she is co-author, with Ervin Trk, of Introduction to the Analysis of Epic Fiction and Narrative Film (2006).

1. Spectacle and narrative1 As a medium able to create the illusion of movement, film is often epitomized as a narrative medium in which narrativity is a constraint rather than a possibility. In his essay comparing the medium specific features of epic fiction and narrative film, Seymour Chatman points out that despite the plenitude of visual details characterizing visual representation, in film there is a pressure from the narrative component [] events move too fast [] narrative pressure is so great that the interpretation of even non-narrative films is sometimes affected by it (Chatman 1999, 438-439). Visual details then are subordinated or reduced to the logic of narrative, descriptions are interpreted as withholding or delaying information. Besides this reasoning stated in terms of mediality, there are two interrelated arguments about the relation of visual and narrative, which occur again and again in film studies: (1) the visual and narrative layer (sometimes labeled as spectacle and narrative) are opposing forces, in film they imply different spectatorial attitudes, and a different temporality and (2) in classical (Hollywood) cinema the two principles have merged into one to form one paradigm. The first claim is formulated by Tom Gunning (1993) in relation to early cinema. The first projections of moving images were contextualized by the visual illusions performed in the tradition of the vaudeville, magic theatre, and tricks. Early film, according to Gunning, implies a totally different spectatorial attitude: while narrative demands a voyeuristic involvement in the unfolding of the events (most often the resolution of an enigma), which happen without the acknowledgment of the spectator, early cinema (labeled as cinema of attractions) is an explicit display of exhibitionism. It addresses directly the viewer and seeks to arouse and satisfy a visual curiosity. Instead of narrative structuring, such as montage or multiplicity of points of view the meaning generating procedures are established by the act of framing and the temporal irruptions of presence and absence. The second claim, the complicitness of the two layers in classical narrative cinema, can be illustrated by the critical analysis carried out by the feminist approach. According to Laura Mulveys (1975) famous essay the split between spectacle and narrative between the visual presence of the woman who is the object of erotic contemplation and the male hero whos activity is forwarding the story is resolved from the part of the spectator as scopophilic or voyeuristic objectification of the woman and identification with the active male hero. The critique of classical Hollywood cinema as a means of subordinating spectacle to a causal, character driven narrative is somewhat superseded by contemporary Hollywood cinema (especially action genre) which as stated privileges moments of spectacle, the illusion of a more direct emotional and experiential impact (King 2000, 36). However, as many have pointed out, the special effects and stunts of contemporary cinema cannot be accounted for as visual counterpoints, since they are not diegetic ruptures 2, only tamed attractions (Gunning 1986, 70).

1 2

During the writing of this article I was a scholarship-holder of the Etvs Hungarian State Fellowship. the effect accompanies our highest point of engagement with the story, as the hero extricates himself from an impossible predicament (Higgins 2008, 76).

Beside these different, sometimes contradictory, valuations of narrative and spectacle, which also function as critical terms,3 another approach less in historical terms is described by Kristin Thompson (1981), who introduces the notion of cinematic excess, denoting all the features of a film lacking motivation and acting counter to narrative and unity. What Thompson points out is the arbitrariness inherent in visual narration appearing in the choosing of devices (props, camera placements, actors, etc.) or duration while something is shown on the screen. While these elements can be indicated (even if they are highly dependent on the viewers subjectivity), nevertheless their systematic analysis is impossible (496): every attempt to attribute them a function will constitute a new narrative, consequently they will loose their excessive character. Excess is exemplified mainly in terms of style (the latter based on the notion of defamiliarization coined by the Russian Formalists). The relation between excess and style is, however, vague in Thompsons account: Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific patterns which we could say are characteristic of the work. But the formal organization provided by style does not exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectators attention to style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well (489). In other terms, excess signifies elements which cannot be accounted for in interpretation or organized in patterns of style, connotation or narrative. In this respect excess could be a figure of the resistance exerted by the film text to totalizing interpretations, signaling the gap experienced through the movement from detail to meaning4. Thompsons study has as its starting point Roland Barthes article entitled The Third Meaning (1970/1977). Here Barthes points out traits and marks of images encountered in Eisensteins Ivan the Terrible and Potemkin: the stupid nose of the courtier, the beard of Ivan at once artificial and referential, the low headscarf of the old grieving woman. These traits appear on another level of meaning (a third one beside the level of communication and signification) or constitute another type of meaning (obtuse contrary to obvious), since they cannot be attributed to an intention (the level of communication), nor are they symbols emphasizing an obvious meaning. Since they blur the limit between sign and non-sign, leaving interpretation uncertain and undecided, it would be more fortunate to call them signifiers (instead of meanings): signifying accidents, according to Barthes, signifiers without a signified, both empty and overdetermined. Subverting accepted meaning practices, these incomplete signs instantiate a new articulation, a new structuration based on what is purely image (that which is undescribable by language) or the specific filmic 5 (the representation which cannot be represented, 64). Narrative becomes just one configuration among others, and movement considered the essence of film a framework of a permutational unfolding (1977, 67). Barthess examples from the Ivan and Potemkin present similarities with the descriptions of the punctum from his book on photography, Camera Lucida. Punctum is something in the photograph which pierces through the actual message, style or composition of the image. However, the filmic does not refer to this photographic quality of the film stills6 (a comic-strip
3

See for example Dana Polans critique of spectacle: the very fact of showing (regardless of what IS shown) becomes a spectacle (and specularly seductive) in the ways it blocks, ignores, shuts out, other forms of cognition. [] Spectacle offers an imagistic surface of the world as a strategy of containment against any depth of involvement with that world. (1986, 63) 4 See Bignell 2005. 5 Everything that can be said about Ivan or Potemkin can be said of a written text [] except this, the obtuse meaning (1977, 64-65). 6 Yet, the film still is delimited by Barthes as a privileged locus for the third meaning, the filmic. The film still is unaccountable by the viewing perception, an artificial unit which in itself does not prescribe or contain its

or a photo-novel would be better examples of that), since its subversive character derives from being doubled by another text, the film (66). The film, the forward movement of the film, or the narrative constraint are just one version or one realization of traits unappropriable by them. The story then becomes spatialized, a vehicle for other meanings, constituting a diegetic horizon for meanings unaccountable by itself. Thopmsons concept of excess and Barthess third meaning indicates a level in the film text which cannot be described by the relation between spectacle and narrative, visual and logical. Spectacle in the form of contemplation or objectification (Mulvey) or in the form of tamed attractions (Gunning), stunts and special effects denotes the moment in which the forwarding movement of the story is halted. I would like to put forward an approach in which the visual layer of the film and the event, the occurrence are not opposed to each other, but event-ness derives exactly from the visual component. For this we must change the level of investigation: from the relation between narrative and spectacle to the relation between image and event. 2. The image-event Introducing the concept of the image-event aims to bring to notice the event character of the image, of the visual dimension of the film. From a film historical point of view this foregrounding of the visual bringing forward an event is often accompanied by the reevaluation and weakening of the story-line. My examples are from recent Hungarian films, the present investigation does not aim at a historical account, only at elaborating the main theoretical frameworks of this aspect. The image-event is not an event of the story, it appears detached from the narrative structures. I will outline briefly the differences between the story-event and the image-event. In his analysis of the Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948) Andr Bazin emphasizes that the central event of the story, the stealing of the bicycle is not an event in itself, in itself the event contains no proper dramatic valence. Only inscribing into a context acquires the value of an event which in the case of Bicycle Thieves concerns the social context of happenings. Inserted in a number of systems of dramatic coordinate, the event will be conferred with an irrefutable and undeniable meaning: the thesis emerges fully armed and all the more irrefutable because it is presented to us as something thrown in into the bargain. Paradoxically, the thesis (i.e. in this world the poor must steal from each other in order to survive) is shaped by the viewer, and not by the film which conducts to a model of communication free from any risk: De Sica wins every play on the board without ever having made a bet. The stealing of the bicycle becomes the event of the story by being inscribed into a time-space and causal structure7 and by acquiring a symbolic meaning, a message (a thesis). The occurrence gains the value of an event from the narrative structure, the crucial point of which is the ending, the closure, establishing or determining the place and value of all the events in the story. On the contrary, the image-event is an event which cannot be inferred from the narrative structures; it is an occurrence, an appearance which, however, needs a story as a diegetic horizon or background in front of which it can unfold itself. My samples are drawn from three Hungarian films, all of them distributed in 2008: The Man from London, Delta and The Milky Way. These films are not without antecedents, they are all works by well-known
integration into a narrative. 7 Even if this structure in the case of the Bicycle Thieves in particular, and neo-realism in general, maintains the appearance of spontaneity, of lacking any exterior intervention or commentary from the part of the narrator.

directors and have their places in these oeuvres: The Man from London is the latest film of Bla Tarr, the other two are films by younger directors, Kornl Mundrucz and Benedek Fliegauf. All of them represent a tendency that foregrounds apparently very simple, visual patterns which are ambivalent interpretations of the story told rather than simple means of storytelling. The Man from London is an adaptation of Georges Simenons crime story, which extracts the motivational and causal relations from the story. Nevertheless these terms can be deduced rather easily. Delta recounts a story which is imbued with elements of myth with characters and plotting patterns known from different genres. The multiple patterns cited make it impossible to decide on the relation between the events, and hinder a reading which focuses exclusively on the story. Suspending the continuity of space and time and of characters, The Milky Way goes further in minimizing the story-line, it consists of ten distinct episodes, each of which could function as a point of departure for a different story. The most obvious common feature of the films is an extreme slowness which requires from the spectator a lingering over the image, first of all contemplation rather than excitement or suspense. Slow movement comes near to stillness: the camera moving millimeters by millimeters in The Man from London, the apparently uneventful, isolated world of Delta, and the absolute fixed frames of The Milky Way relate slowness with stillness. Movement in film is closely linked with the perception of time by the viewer, but movement appears on several levels. Besides the movement of characters, objects and that of the camera which are spectacular and easily perceived, there is another kind of movement: the movement generated by the projection of the frames. This kind of movement is an empty one, a blind force, the emptying of the movement, since it is possible to project one and the same frame for hours or to project subliminal frames each presenting a different view. In this respect there is no difference between the film-types represented by the Lumiere-brothers (reproduction, documentarism) or Mlies (illusion, tricks, spectacle), since both types are constructing movement out of still frames with the difference that one of them bears a stronger resemblance to our experiences in the phenomenal world. Movement in film derives from stillness, continuity from discontinuity.8 Laura Mulvey argues that Cinemas forward movement, the successive order of film, merges easily into the order of narrative. Linearity, causality and the linking figure of metonymy, all crucial elements in story-telling, find a correspondence in the unfolding, forward-moving direction of film (2006, 69). That is, the time of projection is transformed automatically into the time of the story. The photographic indexicality of frames manifests itself only through the concealment effectuated by the symbolic and iconic relations between the segments of the film: the instantaneity of the moment, its eventuality or chance-character is melted in movement and turned into motivation and causality. The unconscious of the medium, stillness and death, appearing in the frames becomes obscured by the categories of animation, movement and life. The Man from London and The Milky Way could be regarded as a reflection upon movement and time, not mainly through the events and movements of the story, but through image-events in which the image often takes place by evoking the sill image and frame. As the other well-known films by Bla Tarr, The Man from London imposes a different pace, a different rhythm to which we are generally used to, not just in terms of the unfolding of the events, but from the point of view of visual perception too. Still, The Man from London excels by perfecting choreografied slowness which, at times, is hardly motivated by the plotsequence. The exposition of the film is a twelve-minute length shot in which we see people
8

There is a new preoccupation with the study of films photographical basis which points out that the medium of the film presents us with the simulacra of time and movement. C.f. Mary Ann Doane 2002, Laura Mulvey 2006, Garrett Stewart 1999, Victor Burgin 2004.

disembark from a ship two of them plotting to get ashore a case with money without notice. There ensues a fight between them in the course of which one of them is murdered and the case lost in the water. The whole scene is watched by a dockworker (Maloin Miroslav Krobot) who is installed high above in a watch tower and ultimately gets hold of the case. From this point on we see the consequences of this action: he goes to his daughters workplace and forces her to leave with him, buys her an expensive fur from the saved money of the family. When he finds out the hiding place of the man (Brown Jnos Derzsi) who originally stole the money and continuously spied on him in the meantime, kills him and confesses the deed to the inspector, after having denied any relation to the case beforehand. There is no motivation for the murder or the confession, characters are very restrained in their manifestations: the only violent outburst is from the part of the wife (Tilda Swinton) seeing her daughter losing her job and all their saved money spent on a piece of shit. It is as if all the pressures and frustrations accumulated are blazing out in her overacting. The lack of motivation and causality results in a series of events rather than in a story. My hypothesis is that these functions, namely motivation and causality are entrusted to the visual composition of images, yet this layer of the film in turn also contributes to the undoing of the story. In the first shot of the film we have a gradually emerging image of the harbor, beginning with a prow of a ship, the view of which is sometimes obstructed by dark spots later revealed as the wooden frames of the window through which the camera gazes. Blurred spots occur from the darkness, we are either too near or too far, or the image is too dark to identify the object on the screen. [Fig. 1.] An image which bears the memory of its formation emerges from meaningless details. The act of framing is continuously inscribed in the image: we do not arrive at a final image, the camera is in a constant movement of reframing. (The camera does stop for a moment when characters set in motion they dance in the inn for example, or when we experience an emotional plenitude of the image, the weeping wife at the end of the film.) Otherwise the context of the image always changes visually, requiring a continuous redefinition. Obstacles of vision as windows, bars are often composed into the image in Tarrs films; in classical cinema they are signs of subjectivity, marking a characters place in a subjective shot (Dark Passage, Lady in the Lake). At the middle of the first shot we find out that the scene we are looking at is also watched by the main character.9 The shot, however, does not become a subjective one: the scrutinizing, scanning camera movement is hardly the reproduction of a human gaze: nothing, none of the characters escapes this detached and impassive observation. Moving millimeters by millimeters, the camera acts as the long focus lens in Rear Window, watching its object as if it were a bug under the glass. This mechanical character is reinforced by the quasi-movement of the windowpanes10: the passing window beams which constitute an arbitrary sectioning of the view, remind one of the succession of film frames (as the illuminated windows of the departing train). [Fig. 2.] The stills of the film, 24 frames projected per second, are never perceived as such by the spectator. Nevertheless the seriality of frames is suggested in this shot by a kind of spatialization, the barred images appearing next to each other, or by the camera movement which effects minimal changes in image reminders of the minimal differences between frames next to each other. Graphic rhythm, the repetitive non-diegetic music or the ticking of a clock all
9

A trade mark of Tarr: a sequence which begins as an objective shot is relegated to a characters point of view by the camera movement. 10 Such relative movements occur in film elsewhere too: when Brown rows in a boat to find the case with the money, the movement of the boat seems as moving in one place, then he stops to scan the water, clouds of fog surround him and move so fast that the boat appears as moving on the water.

these with their different paces and rhythms establish a temporal sectioning, a serial construction different from the time of the story. Camera movement detaches from the movement of the characters, acquires an autonomy which ultimately contributes to the derealization of the shots real time, inscribing the time of the apparatus into images. Movement in The Man from London is a blind succession, never brings totalization, the time of the story becomes the horizon for another kind of temporality. In contrast, in Delta there is more physical action, although characters act on instinct more, they are eating and drinking, moving about, building a house, but almost never re-acting. None of the actions has a narrative significance, however, in a sense that it would lead to a goal or purpose. The synopsis included on the webpage of Festival de Cannes outlines the story events in the following way: A quiet young man returns to the wild, isolated landscape of the Delta. It is a labyrinth of waterways, small islands and over-grown vegetation, where the villagers are cut off from the outside world. The young man, who has been away since early childhood, is introduced to a sister he never knew he had. [This information we are never shared in the film.] She is frail and timid, but resolute when she decides to join him in his run-down hut on the shore. Together they build a house on stilts in the middle of the river, far away from everyone else. One day, they invite the villagers over to share a meal together, but it becomes apparent that the coarse locals do not accept their unnatural relationship. The end of the story is, of course, the slaughtering of the two11 as the finale of an exuberant carnivalesque revel. Nothing in the story is motivated. There are redundant dialogues and actions, but no prehistory, only hints to the antecedents of the events. Characters have no depth, they incarnate abstract, perhaps mythical figures whose action or speech never fully exhausts their real nature. We have no sense of the passing time (although there is a continuity of days and nights) all these account for a mythological theme, perhaps the myth of the beginning, a civilizatory act which is symbolized by the building of a house on the water. The film abounds in potentially symbolic motifs (the fish, the carpenter, hospitality, the sacrifice), at the same time it has a certain roughness things are what they are coupled with a naturalistic representation of the events (especially the scene of the murder with an entirely different kind of acting). I will concentrate on one visual aspect of the film, the most powerful, in my opinion: the setting. Delta does not function (only) as a beautiful background to events and characters, rather events become an enactment or display of the powers of the place. There is a sequence which can be regarded as a visual event relating man and nature in an impossible movement. The camera starts from the main character seen from the back, evoking the dark atmosphere of Romantic landscape painting (Caspar David Friedrichs Rckenfigurs are bestknown examples), the motionless contemplation of natures sublime spectacle. The camera seems panning the view, the object of contemplation, in a circular movement, but at the end we arrive at facing the character, which is a violation of the composition with a back figure. The face must not be shown, this is the key of the enigma: an empty place, a floating signifier. The camera movement which started as a scanning of the view ends in turning back the gaze on itself. [Fig. 3. 4.] All the sublime moments in the film are attributed to nature, associated sometimes with death (I am thinking of the rowing of the death-boats to a funeral along the river which is captured
11

We can infer the murder of the male protagonist, we cannot be sure of the death of the girl.

from above, and accompanied by Lajks music), even if the nature of nature is never stated in clear terms. It is what it is, but equally a blind force without an origin or motivation. As nature in the film, characters and events are without history and goals. They just occur as natural phenomena. It is misleading or superficial, I believe, to propose an interpretation setting the main conflict between the community and the two brothers who are transgressing social and cultural taboos by their unnatural relationship. It is rather the conflict between nature and culture inside the human being which ultimately finds a resolution in a violent act without meaning or reason. Another, more radical step in detaching from the structures of narrative by foregrounding visuality is represented by The Milky Way. The discrete episodes of the film are shot from a fixed point of view, without camera movement or editing. The film, which is also displayed as a video-installation in museums, has been labeled as a minimalist ambient-film or zen buddhist statement on passing time, the ephemeral. Another approach is to consider each of the episodes a visual riddle or conundrum. The source of the mystery can be localized in a visual constraint adopted by the film concerning the act of framing: a transgression of the framing codes of the still image and moving image. According to Andr Bazin there is a radical difference between the framing of a painting, for example, and the framing of the filmic image, between frame and screen: The outer edges of the screen are notthe frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal (166). In cinema there is a constant reframing of different types (by camera movement, the shot-reverse shot system, eye-line matching, etc.), we could say that film is a continuous struggle to include the off-screen space within the frame. In The Milky Way what is outside the frame is at once an off-screen space (hors cadre) and an out-of-field (hors-champ).12 [Fig. 5.] The fixed point of view in The Milky Way can be interpreted as an allusion to the proto-film. While in the classical narrative film the multiplicity of viewing angles and distances reinforces the continuity of a unified space and time, the early film, the cinema of attractions, according to Tom Gunning (1993), maintains the unity of viewpoint and of framing. Continuity and unity is achieved by the act of display and showing, instead of narrative structures extending over the multiplicity of shots, viewpoints, framings. The unity of framing results in a frame composed from different heterogeneous parts, a surface which is manipulated through collage, splicing, or stop motion technique. All these account for another type of thinking through film and image, which has as its primary act the showing and its temporality given by absence and presence, appearances and disappearances. [Fig. 6.] The fixed point of view in The Milky Way (within one episode) creates a cosmic non-human gaze which through tearing out a part of the space framed in an absolute way (there is no outside of the frame which could be shown) effectuates an act with the force of an event. The framing of the field of the image brings into play parts of various qualities. Splices, edges, borders within the frame become imbued with different meanings, as ambiguous loci of the image. Yet, the motionless gaze of the camera delimits not only a part of the space, but articulates and grasps also a temporal sequence. The occurrence, the event unfolds very slowly, but if we are patient enough, it will occur. This stillness of the viewpoint brings uneasiness into the image, because the space of the fiction negates the fixed frame and longs for the extension of the diegetic field. The movement of the characters, though, breaks the
12

See Vernet 1988, 29-51.

absolute closure of the space, they enter and exit the frame sometimes from left and right as in theatre, other times from the depth or the space of the camera (len deca)13. Within one sequence our narrative knowledge is restrained in a way that our inability to infer the story refers us back to the image. But when we are giving ourselves to the contemplation of the image as a surface without depth, we are shocked by the piercing of this surface. This continuous see-saw motion between surface and depth, series and cause-effect, narrative and spectacle creates the image event, the images as a process, as an endless becoming. In this paper my aim was to point out different aspects of visuality which create meanings on different levels (the mechanistic autonomy of the camera, and seriality of the frames, the visual analysis of the relation between the setting and characters, and dynamics of what is outside and inside the frame) outside, in opposition to, or alongside the narrative dimension of the film.14 References Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text, ed. by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Bazin, Andr. 1971. Bicycle Thief. In What Is Cinema? sel. and trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bazin, Andr. 2002. Painting and cinema. In Qu'est-ce que le cinma? Paris: Les Editions du Cerf; first published 1958. Bignell, Jonathan. 2005. From detail to meaning: Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973) and cinematic articulation. In Gibbs, J. and Pye, D. (Eds.), Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, 42-52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Burgin, Victor. 2004. The Remembered Film. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1999. What Novels Can Do That Films Cant (and vice versa). In Film Theory and Criticism. Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 435451. New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edition Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Gunning, Tom. 1986. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde. Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4. Gunning, Tom. 1993. Now you see it, now you don't. The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions. Velvet Light Trap, 32.3: 3-12. Higgins, Scott. 2008. Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative and the Contemporary Action Film. Cinema Journal 47, No. 2 (Winter): 74-96. King, Geoff. 2000. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster London: I. B. Traubis & Co. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16.3 (Autumn): 6-18. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.

13 14

See Vernet 1988, 29-58. I owe thanks to my colleagues, Attila Kiss, Gbor Gelencsr, and Lrnt Sthr for giving me insightful ideas and useful comments. gnes Matuska proofred the many versions of this article.

Polan, Dana. 1986. Above All Else to Make You See: Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle. In Postmodernism and Politics, edited by Jonathan Arac. 55-69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stewart, Garrett. 1999. Between Film and Screen. Modernisms Photo Synthesis. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Vernet, Marc. 1988. Figures de labsence. De linvisible au cinma. Paris: ditions de letoile.