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Just seen three rather different films that deal with history in a potentially interesting way, and got me thinking about cinematic techniques for dealing with non-contemporary periods, and trying to balance attempts at historical realism or authenticity with representations of the difference or distance from the present, so: a thread.
First up, Perfume, based on Patrick Suskind’s “unfilmable” novel of the same name, and like it focusing on the life of a serial killer in eighteenth century France with an extraordinary gift of smell. Both the book and the film are upfront about the difficulty of representation here, both of the unique stench of the past (that we moderns are presumably largely removed from) and the particular abilities and obsessions of the main character, his fame largely erased from history: “because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.”. But the film starts ambitiously enough, attempting to create a map of Paris through the odours that one might have been exposed to, rather than a moving visual perspective through the streets of the character’s birth: the viewer jumps between the wares of Parisian markets, the piles of refuse, the stench of its poor, the perfumes of its upper classes. Sadly, this sort of immediate and original way such a character might have perceived his world isn’t really sustained throughout the film, and though there’s a slightly less realistic attempt to portray the extension of his nasal sense through space once the character is slightly older, by the end of the film it’s become almost a generic special power type effect, and consequently a much more conventional view of history. What really struck me is that, the technique they originally adopted, hard as it is to fully signify visually what was on the written page, complemented the fairly standard realistic approach to the setting really well, and once it was dispensed with the overall effect was much less convincing.
Then there was The Libertine, based on Stephen Jeffreys' play on the life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, with Johnny Depp in the lead role. I really liked The Libertine. And I really liked the way it presented the past (Restoration England), even though, from what I understand of it, most of the movie’s critics thought it was just dull and poorly lit. And there is a very prominent and very artifical seeming attempt to light the film in a different way to the norm, indoor scenes appear to be insufficiently lit by candlelight, concentrating all of the flickering illumination in the centre of the screen, and in the outdoor scenes characters are almost lost in the fog that surrounds them. There’s a limited palette and grainy, muted and unstable quality to much of the film which I, and I could understand why some people would find it really annoying, really loved. The common folk of the film were sufficiently grubby and tumorous enough to escape the familiar stereotype of rosy-cheeked extras with a bit of makeup and a ragged jumper thrown on, but what I liked was that in some ways it was a film that wasn’t interested in dwelling on pseudo-realistic portraits of what life was like back then for the lower classes – whether Rochester was striding shoulder to shoulder with the common people of the city with his well-heeled companions or whirling through them in his venereal persona of Doctor Bendo, the camera is as dismissive of their presence as he is. The overall effect was one of difficulty in seeing through the murk of the past into the lives of the individuals who lived there, even when in some ways the message of the film was that some of those individuals and their motives would be very recognisable or sympathetic to us today.
Then there was Pandaemonium, which again featured characters from history, this time Coleridge, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth, give or take a bit of artistic licence. Now what was really interesting about this film was in the way that it portrayed Coleridge as basically adrift within the chronology of his own life (his mental instability seeming to cause him to experience his own life in a fractured rather than progressive fashion, jumping back and forth between the events of his youth and later years), and also dislocated from his own period, able to see, in fact forced to see glimpses of the future in his present day surroundings. It’s not the only thing the film’s doing, at other points a deep in the grip of opiate addiction Coleridge seems to experience time moving at a different pace, and in another scene the literary chums seem to overturn the physical laws of the world themselves with their antics. So on the one hand you have quite a conventional attempt to portray their lives as those of the notorious, drug-taking celebrities of their day, to see their lives under today’s terms, and on the other you have, I think, a more ambitious attempt at a literal demonstration of the clichéd ideas that great works of art can live beyond the lives of their creators as well as prefiguring the future they might exist in. I don’t know how easy this is to explain to those who haven’t seen it but suffice to say it’s a rather odd film that doesn't spend much time explaining itself, which attempts to say something about the nature of art and timelessness, and even if it isn’t entirely successful captures something of both the positive and negative aspects of that quality.
So what do you think? What are the films you've seen that best represent the strangeness of the past either through fidelity to history or an original conceit?
Also, calling something (prose say) cinematic has sometimes become a bit of a shorthand for describing it as existing in a fast-moving, spectacular modern way. So conversely, can anyone think of successful representations of the present, and the way present technology shapes our understanding of the world? The only thing that’s springing to mind right now is the dire attempt to incorporate the world of anytime anywhere news coverage into the fantastic contemporary setting of Spiderman 3, but surely there are better examples out there? |
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