Michael Pattison

[svsg]

Memories and Desires

People unfamiliar with capo's writings and thoughts would definitely find this cryptic. This is clearly autobiographical and the film does little in terms of preparing the viewer with the background. But this is a short film and there is no time to waste. So...

The film ends with a summary of what is referred to as "diagnosis" by the narrator. And one would gather that the "system" being referred to is an all encompassing entity, comprising of institutions and beliefs. The vast amounts of voice overs take a second viewing to grasp fully, and the film would have benefited by having less voice over. It seems as though the narrator wanted to fit a half-hour of text in a little over 10 minutes. An instance where the voice over is really reinforcing the images is when the light bulbs are shown, some flickering and some dead.

The strong point of the film is its images. Often static, it creates a lingering effect in the viewers mind. I especially liked the empty class rooms and corridors, as though commenting on the intellectual bankruptcy of the school as an institution. And also the menacing gargoyles on the church exterior, as though reminding of the tyranny of religion.

The excursions into the memory of a girl and the relationship, seem somewhat tangential to the main theme, although it serves as an accessory for the commentary on religion.

I look forward to what capo will make in the future, hopefully it is a feature film

[Capo]

Thanks for viewing and reviewing.

I think this might be my best film, but it's very flawed, even outdated from a personal point of view. Clearly made at a time of political transition more than conviction. The very final segment was actually written a long time before the film was thought of, as a personal manifesto by which I could remind myself how to 'survive' in an institution to which I'm really quite opposed; and it was written at a time when I was reading Wittgenstein and loving him, without quite knowing fully what the fuck he was saying. Then in the film itself I tried to balance a more objective 'video-essay' (the "diagnosis" itself) and the personal journey by which I've arrived at such diagnostic intellectualism (the 'love affair gone wrong').

As a result it's very hit and miss, and the failed link between the two is its fatal flaw. The richest is the empty corridors bit, the whole text for which I lifted from my own short story (the one that got me into trouble).

I love this style of film-making, to watch and to make. It's something I'm definitely going to explore further, because it's something I feel I have a talent for (though obviously an extraordinary ocean in which to develop), and enjoy doing.

Here's my written evaluation of the film, which comprised 15% of the final mark:

An Evaluation and Textual Analysis
of Memories and Desires

Memories and Desires is a film-essay that can be divided roughly into eight parts, all of which comprise an accumulative attack on the hypocrisies and corruption of two institutions. The process and method of the production has been investigative; the result is diagnostic. The film’s subtitle is Letters from Garek Babquis Concerning “The Diagnosis”, Garek Babquis being an alter ego[1] of sorts, or a fictional voice for my own personal reflections, and the Diagnosis being a conclusive condemning of “The System”.

In light of this essay form, I will analyse the film as a linear accumulation of information and argument. Here, also, considering the many elements comprising the thematic fabric, I will concentrate more on the aesthetic approach of the film, how the visuals and sounds impact upon the meaning of the script, than on the script itself.[2] For the purpose of discussing the project as a linear essay of eight episodes, it is beneficial to name them thus: 1: factory (opening); 2: campus (exposition); 3: laundrette (anecdote); 4: Sarah (detour); 5: images (elaboration); 6: church (justification); 7: complex (argument); 8: sunset (conclusion).

The first part – or episode – acts as an introduction, like the opening paragraph of a written essay. We fade in to reveal a chimneystack, from which billows smoke. Thereafter is a succession of dissolves, each of which are slow enough to allow not only the images themselves to capture the viewer, but to draw attention to the transitions themselves: not only is this a film-essay about the failings and hypocrisies of institutions, but also about making a film-essay about such things. This reflects my long-standing interest in self-reflexive and self-explorative texts. Essentially, the film itself is its own commentary.

As the script reveals, these images of a factory are a dream that haunts Garek Babquis from his youth. In this respect, what we are seeing is not a memory per se, but a memory of a memory. It is essentially the catalyst that propels Garek Babquis to investigate its meaning, and from which the resulting Diagnosis unfolds. To achieve the post-industrial dreaminess of the images, I filmed from afar and without a polarising filter – to set it apart from the rest of the film. The sound in the scene is actually diegetic, of a motorway directly behind the camera. Because there is no visual indication of this off-frame space, the sound becomes detached and detaching: in a word, dream-like.

This opening sequence began with a slow fade in, but it ends abruptly with a cut-to-black, for the short, explanatory title sequence. The cut itself destroys the harmony of the previous dissolves, and the essay becomes the product of a self-conscious author punctuating his own mark onto his work.

And so begins the second episode, which acts as an exposition of the film-essay’s aims. “I wish for my work to be prescribed, probed,” says the narrator, “the same way I have been prescribed and have probed the work of others. I want to be at the centre of all their exegeses.” This is indicative of my intentions with the piece; if the subject matter and voice-over appear at first to be dense and incoherent, the layers of meaning are not impenetrable. As with any other philosophical musing, a bit of work may reap its rewards, and in this episode I am, among other things, asking to be taken seriously.

I had originally scripted wide exteriors for this early sequence of campus buildings, but on the location scout realised that medium shots made the buildings more anonymous and menacing in their facelessness. When storyboarding, I also noticed how the closer proximity accentuated the fact that the camera was on the ground, looking up at – and overwhelmed by – these daunting structures. This appealed to me immediately – the sense of an institution’s intimidating physicality – and later in the film-essay, it is taken even further with the church sequence.

The transitions between shots at this point are sharp cuts, in contrast to the dreamy dissolves of the opening factory shots. Rhythmically, the cuts compliment and highlight the rigidity of the images themselves: the striking verticality of window pane after window pane, on the one hand, draws our attention to the verticality and physical limitations of the film frame itself, and on the other it suggests the educational institution is a kind of prison. Furthermore, I used a polarising filter to adjust the reflective windows in order to create a consistently rich visual throughout the episode – in contrast to the soft ecru texture of the factory.

I end this sequence with a fade out, but the next episode begins with an abrupt cut to a new image. The latter disrupts and dislodges the harmony of the former. Again, it is a simple case of the author announcing his authority: drawing the viewer’s attention to the fact that they are watching a film-essay. It is knowingly artificial.
The third episode, in the laundrette, continues the style of the second episode but introduces a new element: non-diegetic sound.

On the one hand, the symmetry and order of the washing machines present an anonymous and hardened world, but on the other, the crescendo of artificial music adds a warmth and subtle humanity. Meanwhile, the voice-over carries on as it has, but now with an altered tone. My intention here was to create a sense of invaded privacy, despite the images being devoid of human activity. As the narrator says, “They exchanged glances in this most intimate of places”; the accompanying image is of two washing machines side-by-side. In the absence of human movement, these machines gain a humanity, a personality. And in the lack of literal humanity, as if these present images tell a different story to the ones in Babquis’s letters, the tone is at once nostalgic and mournful.

‘Sarah’, the fourth episode, begins as a revelation, almost as an inevitable conclusion to the laundrette scenes, with Sarah herself blinking and addressing the camera.[3] This is the first point at which an actor has literally been seen, and I intended another shift in tone by placing Aroon, the actor playing Sarah, at various positions within the frame, but keeping the camera absolutely static. The framing becomes objective, but the voice-over becomes hyperbolic; meanwhile, the image itself becomes animated. These aesthetic qualities seem to contradict one another and create a complex dichotomy of objectified subjectivity – or subjective objectivity – the nature of exploring one’s memories.

In my notes on Aroon as my choice for Sarah, I acknowledge her natural apprehension of performing as a necessary part of the character. To accentuate her simultaneous daring and nervousness, I employed jump cuts to upset the rhythm of her getting unclothed. Furthermore, if Sarah is undressing willingly before the camera, it is the abrupt, intrusive cuts that help her do so; in this respect, style becomes even more significant as both camera and cutting become interrogative.[4]

The intention here was to create a loss of innocence; it’s cute, it’s endearing, but it’s also irreversible. The background wallpaper differs in its repetition and order from the previous episodes; it adds an aloof quality, an abstraction, like the scene in Little Children (2006) in which Brad compares Sarah to Kathy by imagining the latter suspended against a block white background.

Sequence five – ‘images’ – is perhaps the one that seems most disruptive to the intentions and style of the film-essay as a whole. This is true: firstly, it is black-and-white; secondly, the camera is mostly handheld. But the meaning behind this sequence is given clarity only in the context of how its implications affect the rest of the narrative: without this intimate, affectionate mini-hymn to Sarah, or to the idea of Sarah, the subsequent arguments against the Church and its corruption seem unjustified, seem to lack a personal conviction or validity.

A few things to note. Firstly, the decision to go black-and-white: to de-eroticise the flesh tones – the voice-over is affectionate, but it is also clinical – but also to set it apart. This second point is worth noting in considering that this sequence is actually an idea for a would-be film; Garek Babquis’s voice-over – introduced for the first time – becomes in this sense an interior monologue, and the episode itself becomes a what-if scenario. The music is a repeat of that in the laundrette sequence: it establishes a link to Sarah – it becomes her motif.

When the explosion destroys the image of Sarah smiling to camera, it also destroys the idea of a film-within-a-film. Garek Babquis’s idea for a film never materialises. The cut to the silent image of the lone magpie flying off is very Malick-like: there is a moment late on in The New World (2005) in which a Native American leaps from a chair and flees the room – the movement alone suggests a liberation of sorts. Here, the editing suggests that the magpie is reacting to the actual explosion, but also that it symbolises Sarah’s a) loss of innocence (as seen in her previous undressing) and b) elusiveness.

The shot immediately succeeding the magpie brings us back to reality, from the handheld black-and-white to the loud and rigid: the zoom punctuates style and reminds us we are watching a film. Sarah shuns us; and as the voice-over explains, she has fled for the Church. The French line, ‘Le temps détruit tout,’ is a quote from Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), and translates to ‘Time destroys all’. This is a major theme in the film-essay, as Garek Babquis attempts to transcend the transience of human emotion with the endurance of intellect.

The sixth episode, then, is justified in attacking the Church. In the second paragraph of this evaluation, I labelled this segment’s intentions as ‘justification’. What I mean by that is how it retroactively justifies the preceding anecdotal detour, and also justifies the wider argument being made: in attacking Christianity as an institution, the film-essay invokes parallels between this and education. Indeed: if education is failing us, then the Church is the opportunist that leeches onto this misfortune for its own means. Together, the two become an intimidating and outdated gargoyle, as seen in the images here.

The visuals of the churches recall the low-angles used in the second episode, but here the camera moves elsewhere, to look closer: it zooms in and lingers on the devils engraved into the architecture. Filming these shots late in the afternoon, on a clear day, meant that there was a stark contrast between the blue sky and the yellow architecture. It’s almost painterly, I suppose; surreal, too.

The accompanying soundtrack begins as diegetic – the traffic noises were recorded alongside the images – but soon blends into the artificial music I composed. The ‘needle on vinyl’ sample suggests cyclicality and decay, and also something which has reached its end. The choral drone was originally louder, but was too overwhelming; reducing its volume gave a sense of anticipation, of something that never quite comes fully to fruition.[5] The intention was to haunt, to compliment the unsettling images.

‘Complex’, the penultimate episode, brings us back to the main strand of the essay: the educational complex that falls under Garek Babquis’s Diagnosis. It begins with an almost black shot, of a mysterious room in darkness, in the corner of which flickers a computer light. Immediately, too, is a low-frequency bass riff that punctuates the start of this episode, the end of the last, and will become the binding motif for the rest of the sequence.

The voice-over for this episode was the starting point for the entire project; I adopted it from a previous short story I had written, which was in turn inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (2006). The intention was to create a brooding atmosphere, of emptiness and decay, as if this entire vicinity has been forgotten and neglected: note the recurring visuals of repetition, as with chairs, computers, corridors, lights. A collective all in vain. I wished here to evoke an emptiness on the inside only to conclude with the absurd and telling notion of it all looking alive from an outside perspective. As the narrator says after this sequence: “Nothing was more obscene to me than the lengths to which my educational institution went in order to protect and project its own image.” The sequence depicting a lonely complex is the allegorical summation of these sentiments.

I arranged and ordered the images to the pace and rhythm of the script. The problem here was that the voice-over was recorded in one take, and so there were very few pauses; as a result, the sequence felt rushed. I wanted the images to linger, in order to strengthen a sense of emptiness. In adding the bass to the soundtrack, the images seemed especially speedy. A lot of tweaking was needed, as a result; lengthening and shortening the images and forcing breaks in the voice-over. The final product allows the viewer to dwell on the images longer.6

The final sequence begins with a static, lengthy shot of a lakeside at dusk. The composition is once again very Malick-like, with a calming sense of the natural world. It is in stark contrast to the obstinate compositions of earlier scenes, and provides a compliment to the voice-over, which tells us of Garek Babquis’s thoughts immediately prior to attempting another film. In this sense, the natural world becomes a sanctuary, where one’s creativity may flourish – outside the hierarchy and anti-individualism of university life.
As the narrator says, “…the sun was forever setting on it,” we dissolve to the film’s final scene (and shot), in which the sun sets on campus. Filming this in one take over the course of forty minutes, I originally planned on having a time-lapse sequence, to capture the sunset in full. But this would have been a drastic and noticeable departure from the more disciplined, systematic structure of the previous narrative; not to mention quite clichéd.

The resulting dissolves allow the image to unfold at their normal pace, but are lengthy enough to make the transitions invisible and subtle. Furthermore, the dissolves recall those of the opening shots of the factory; these are the only two episodes in which the transitions are not the blunt cuts that develop the rest of the narrative. Stylistically, then, prologue and epilogue are bound: if the film begins with a dream, or a memory, it ends with a desire.

The accompanying music is a lengthy crescendo, a simple motif repeated with various effects, increasing its feedback and distortion as it goes on. As Garek Babquis declares the “System is an illusion”, the sound overwhelms him and takes us into the “ever-darkening night” on an uplifting, positive, pro-Individualist note. And so the film-essay is a collection of its author’s personal reflections and concerns; the script deals with themes of memory, desire, innocence, institutional inadequacy, hierarchical corruption, truth, objectivity, the banal truisms of subjectivity, intellectual and academic fraudulence. The tone is very scathing, and the film becomes a form of catharsis.

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Notes

[1] Much like Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper.
[2] Ideally, one would view the film alongside a printed version of the script, to read as an essay outside the viewing experience.
[3] It is also a nod to the revelatory moving image in Marker’s La Jetée (1962).
[4] The jump cut once again reminds us of the formalism, of the film as an artificial structure.
[5] Very much influenced by the opening sequence of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007).
[6] In turn, this had an effect on the narrative as a whole. After adjusting this segment, the others now seemed rushed. If I was to make the rhythm consistent, I would need to adjust all of the episodes. The final product is, as a result, more methodic and structured than it was initially.

[Capo]

And, in response to the final project as a whole, my tutor's comments:

I think “Memories & Desires” is stunning. Its apparent simplicity belies the considerable control over the material, and its pace & style of delivery. I was impressed by the carefully constructed images and their consistency of style for each sequence.
The use of framing, often exploiting perspective, gave a sense of bulk to the exterior architectural shots of the University without identifying anywhere specific, or becoming establishing shots that locate the narrative in a traditional way. The institution becomes an organism. The deserted interiors later in the film reprise this, their emptiness only being reinforced by the animation of abandoned or malfunctioning elements within the images, such as the flicker of computer screens or the flickering fluorescent light. (These reminded me of the photographs of Naglaa Walker – particularly in the collection “On Physics” – in which she seems to capture simultaneously both the inertia and potential of empty science laboratories).

The text is dense, and even after several viewings I cannot pretend that I pick up all of your ambition for the piece. However, the tone of wit & cynicism that is the spine of the commentary comes across strongly, and I think that the writing is strong. Your decision to use different voices here was important as, in addition to changing the form of address, the different deliveries shape the film considerably (compared, for example, with a single voiced commentary).

The pace & delivery of what is essentially a series of still images is very well controlled. With stills there is often the temptation to cut more quickly but I think that the pace of the film has actually slowed down & spread a little in editing, which is a sign of confidence in the ways in which images & sound are working. Holding the still frame asks the viewer to enter it, to observe the tiny little movements which give each shot its dynamic – the little movement of a cloud or the change of a reflection of glass.

I was impressed by the ability shown to find &/or identify simple solutions to achieve desired results. For example, the use of
polarising filter to saturate colour, or the use of the series of long dissolves at beginning & end. These are so much more effective for the film than using digital effects or relying upon a ‘”fix it in post-production” attitude, and are a result of the extensive pre-production work indicated in the portfolio.

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And a second marker's comments:

This film really is visually outstanding – the slow pace and use of still images is very effective despite the fact that it is tough
to pull off (Marker is cited as a reference point and that makes perfect sense in aesthetic terms at least). The use of strong,
angular compositions and the inclusion of movement within static images (flickering lights, the washing in one of the
machines) as well as contrasts between images all produce a slow paced but visually dynamic effect. The contrastive use
made here of empty institutional spaces and of the body is evocative, as are the interweaving of commentaries on education,
intimacy and desire. As Roger notes, varying the voiceover works well although the implicit mapping of a mind/body split
onto the institution and the body felt a bit hackneyed to me (if anything, getting the female voiceover to speak of/dwell on an
other’s subject position compounds the problem). The opening and closing sequences are nicely matched and thoughtfully
put together.

[svsg]

Oct 17, 2009 17:12:33 GMT Capo said:

I love this style of film-making, to watch and to make.

I think you'll like watching Antonioni's films. I know you've already watched a few, but try watching his other famous works too