2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

 

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle is one of Jean-Luc Godard’s unquenchable glories, a film of electrically vivid presences, suffused with a sense of absence and longing. Filmed in 1966, it finds the world bewildering, all but submerged in consumerism and its attendant messages and forced choices; between the surfeit of surrounding signs and meanings and a hellish global outlook (most prominently represented by Vietnam, frequently referenced here), it’s barely possible just to live in and experience the world, as one compulsively questions the most basic elements of identity, language and experience. And yet, compared to our own mostly drab world of blacks and greys, the environment is gloriously colourful and stimulating; even a mundane shot of a gas station ravishes the eye with the perfection of the composition, the reinforcing blocks and splashes of red linking the flowers in the foreground to a car standing at a pump to the trims on the fixtures. Similarly, as Godard’s voice over muses over the acceleration of science and progress, commenting how the future may now be more present than the present, the vivid observance of something as mundane as coffee swirling in a cup tells us otherwise, that the present for all its travails remains inexhaustibly fascinating and seductive. The film’s most identifiable plotline has its housewife protagonist (Marina Vlady) working as a prostitute, another expression of economic pressure, but on this occasion played mostly for absurdity, including an episode in which an American war correspondent (for the Arkansas Daily!), taking a Parisian break from Vietnam, has Vlady’s character and a colleague parade around with airline bags over their heads, the image both gleefully absurd and yet rather poignantly sad (not least because both the airlines in question, Pan Am and TWA, are now long gone, like much else of the film’s vivid consumerist reference points).

The Possession of Joel Delaney (Waris Hussein, 1972)

 

The basic premise of Waris Hussein’s The Possession of Joel Delaney – a sadistic killer’s spirit occupying another man’s body – seems pretty old-hat now, but the film is unexpectedly distinctive in a variety of ways. Well-to-do Manhattan divorcee Norah Benson (Shirley MacLaine in an intriguingly uncharacteristic role) struggles to deal with her younger brother Joel Delaney’s erratic behaviour, from randomly attacking a man in his building and subsequently remembering nothing of it, to weird outbursts of childlike exuberance; she discovers that Joel’s now-dead closest friend was a serial killer, the dead man’s mother claiming that her son's malign spirit now occupies Joel’s body (the theme of unstable psychic boundaries extends to initially teasing us to read Norah and Joel as lovers rather than siblings, with several subsequent intimations of excessive closeness). The film’s depiction of an attempted exorcism is quite unnerving in its sheer assault on the senses, although that’s in part at the questionable cost of depicting New York’s Puerto Rican community as entirely and scarily other, an impression bolstered by subsequent scenes in which Norah finds the unfamiliar streets of Spanish Harlem too much to bear, all but throwing money at an off-duty cab driver to get her out of there. On the other hand, the initial portrayal of her entitled life (for example, lounging in bed as she deluges her put-upon housekeeper with instructions and demands) suggests an under-examined decadence complacently making itself vulnerable to malign infiltration. The film’s ending – while showing some signs of truncation, with Michael Hordern’s prominently billed analyst character amounting to nothing, and a few key events taking place off-screen – is again more raw and transgressive and palpably threatening than one might have anticipated; the final twist isn’t so shocking in genre terms, but certainly gains something from, well, from being built around Shirley MacLaine.

L'amour a mort (Alain Resnais, 1984)

 

Alain Resnais’ L’amour a mort is a uniquely unsettling film, stark and stripped down and unerringly focused, seeming by its nature to demand a deeply personal response but forging a rigorous cinematic space that precludes any easy identification or sentimentality. The film starts in the midst of trauma as Simon (Pierre Arditi) suffers an attack and is pronounced dead by the doctor; he comes back to life though, the whole event initially seeming like an amusing embarrassment, and one sparking a sense of liberation as Simon feels free to cut ties with people he doesn’t like and to plan trips around the world. But he becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea that he did actually die, studying the Bible and talking about how he glimpsed the afterlife, and then he’s gone, with his partner Elisabeth (Sabine Azema) immediately becoming obsessed by thoughts of joining him. The couple’s best friends are married clerics, allowing a certain amount of theological debate, and the film’s closing words assert a belief in resurrection, but the prevailing sense is of a love and accompanying rationalization that lacks any ready explanation or reference points. Resnais closes off all easy points of explication: Simon and Elisabeth have been together for only a few weeks, undercutting any sense of a long-established love; one of the married friends reveals to Elisabeth that she and Simon had an affair years earlier and even entered into an unsuccessful suicide pact (the film daringly suggests that suicide might not be antithetical to religious belief, but rather central to it); despite the film’s preoccupation with endings, Elisabeth works as a biologist developing new plant species and Simon is an archaeologist, both in their different way focusing on origins (which, however, are also inherently forms of closure). Resnais punctuates the film’s mysteries with shots of swirling snow against a black background, or similar evocations of an unknown elsewhere, as if the film itself were aspiring to transcend conventional form and existence, to merge with the unknown.

The Passion of Remembrance (Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986)

 

Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance is a film of sharp contrasts: between documentary and fiction, celebration and criticism, hope and despair, traditionalism and progressivism, heteronormativity and queerness, between submitting to chance and fatalism and aspiring to control, all fascinatingly, often thrillingly interwoven.  The film’s title speaks to the commemoration of the struggle for social and racial justice, and it’s particularly concerned with how the telling of that history, however passionate, has been a predominantly male function, dominated by easily assimilated “iconic” images such as the American athletes giving the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics (a clip included here). It’s particularly biting on under-examined male attitudes toward homosexuality, with the mother and sister defending a gay friend against complacent barbs, and (in one of its most straightforward dramatizations) depicting a couple of policemen going easy on a group of violence-minded youths. At the same time, the film takes time to assert the joyfulness of family and friendship, even in such minor rituals as collectively watching and squabbling over a TV gameshow; it has extended sequences of stirring music and uninhibited dancing (there’s an occasional music-video-like playfulness in its approach to the documentary montages also). And further, Blackwood and Julien’s framing device, with a man and woman conversing and arguing in a desolate landscape (seemingly a representation of a parched history which undervalues the contributions of women to activism and discourse), has the quality of myth, of post-apocalyptic science fiction in which, after all else has been stripped away, the core issues of social and gender equity may be all that remain. The film can feel somewhat stilted and overly formal at times, but the lack of polish feeds the broader sense of direct engagement and authenticity, of a film urgently concerned with immediate needs and crises.