Cinematography as an empty box

All quiet on the western front (Berger, 2023)

By: Daniela García Juárez. Published on Girls at Films on April 6th (www.girlsatfilms.com)

Inside a film, silence is important for everything it holds. Seconds pass in an image that extends and sprouts
seeds that grow perpendicularly, breaking the dimensional limits of the frame. Like ivy, they make their way
through imagination and memory, towards the territory of the sensitive, that which cinema has the power to
communicate in its own code. The moving image is not and never will be a letter, but like letters, it also
punctuates and writes. And it is convenient to remember that its writing role does not fall solely on semiotics. The
shot-countershot is only the beginning,the same as knowing spelling rules or grammar. Why, then, are we content
to call geniuses the heirs of the Soviet school who boast of their precision for visual grammar?

All quiet on the western front (Edward Berger, 2022) won, among other awards, Best Cinematography at the last
Oscar Awards. From the first sequence it is understandable: open shots that record a monumental staging of
World War I. The sunset opens majestically in the background as the horrors unfold. The subjective camera
follows the characters in the midst of the exploit, in long shots that would give the impression of a sequence shot.
Finally, the scene is punctuated by the image of a serene forest, thick with trees so tall they seem to touch the
sky, oblivious to the carnage committed at the foot of their ancient trunks. It is such a precise, stylized and
seemingly grandiloquent combination that it is counter-intuitive to think of it as a smokescreen, an empty box. But
something in the neatness of its image stands out for its lack of truth. Something that begs to manifest itself as
more than just dots and commas. Silence, perhaps. Not only to listen to the time that runs through the shot and
launches the sting, but for the film to listen to itself during the creative process, and to see what emerges from its
corners, as -or more- important than the plot.

Like this scene, the film continues. The constant is the stylization of light, directed straight at the character,
nuancing of his sentimental evocation that varies throughout the plot, contrasted with the darkness of the spaces
around him. Other images strike for their depiction of the prowess of choral direction and their symmetrical
capture on camera, or the natural environment and its magnificent beauty, postcards of idyllic, non-bellicose
times. The images are beautiful, but quick, and in their lack of respite they stray from the sublime. They follow
one after the other, pausing by far for a few seconds, especially those at the high points of the film's drama. What
might open up in the pause of the images is halted by the Soviet-heritage montage that prioritizes narrative and
its immediate meanings over the sensation and imagination that the world in the background would evoke.
The concrete images of the war also respond to this tendency. What we see are battles that are not only bloody
but brutal. Bodies dismembered like a yellowish newsreel. The shot is shocking not because of the richness of
the image, but because each moment is made to be overwhelming, to detonate the fear of death from the
viewer's corporeality, from his natural response to harmful stimuli.

I think of Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), an animated documentary about the Lebanon Conflict of '82. I
think of the horror contained in a dream that flickers in the memory of war. In the fear that does not include the
exploitation of corpses, pools of blood, fallen eyes, deaths conveniently placed at turning points to the next act. A
blunt horror that knows when and how to show itself so that you truly never forget it. I think of a movie that writes.

I also think of the novel underneath the film (referring to All quiet). I imagine the letters, the descriptions. I think of
the terrifying task facing cinema when it comes to translating letters into images, because translating is not the
same as representing. Each language has its own historicity, identity and life. It is not enough to draw lines that
are words in disguise. It is necessary to discover other ways to emerge in feeling and sensation through cinema's
own resources.

Lastly, I am thinking of Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022), a contemporary rival to All quiet on the western front
and also an adaptation of a novel. I think of its images, brimming with simplicity and fierceness. Paused. Careful.
Like someone who wants to discover a new language under the letter, instead of conquering the lands of the
page with his so-called "cinematic art". I think of his renunciation of aestheticized cinema in favor of one that truly
speak, that writes with the resources of cinema, becoming a matrioshka of possibilities in the imagination,
contained in a shot of two hands that intertwine and submerge the viewer under the folds of the fingers.

All quiet on the western front has a vision of this type of thing. A small glimmer of the sublime, something that
begs for attention over and above the gimmicky editing. Between each sequence of war or fundamental
revelation of plot points, nature emerges and imposes itself. Wide shots (though short) of the mountain and the
sunset, of the river flowing after a battle, as if nothing had happened. Of the ants walking beside the corpses.

After one of the protagonist's most crucial confrontations with war, the birds chirp and the sky is tinged with a faint
orange. It is the other world. The one that not only sustains itself while that of men cracks, but also dialogues with
death, showing the face of his life, so unconcerned and unconcerned with war that it reduces it to an irony. It is
almost a joke, to see the river’s water running, while the trenches are filled with red mud and the tubs of women
washing uniforms to be reused and mended are scarlet oceans. It's a joke. War.

"Ants. Small ants run along the trunk. All around the military machinery. Soldiers. Shouts, curses. Oaths. The
buzz of helicopters. And, meanwhile, they run along the trunk."
(Alexievich, 2005, p. 194)

There are other things that are also vision.

The conversation between two soldiers about after the war, for example. They mention the possibilities of their
lives so cautiously that they rather skim over them, without quite touching them, knowing the nightmare that will
really begin and be sustained once they leave the battlefield -if they actually make it. It is essential, in order to
understand the true horror beneath the war, to recognize its inexhaustible character: once it begins it does not
end. It ricochets into the history of an improbable future life. It seeps into all the nuances of human experience,
into the rare thing that love can be. And from that love as a rare thing, children are born who also carry the war
with them. And grandchildren. War spreads and survives from generation to generation, like a parasite or a
wound that does not close but remains, recalcitrant, eating the skin little by little, silently. Giving no truce.
Meanwhile, the government gives medals.

Another vision: the thin breath of life runs between the soldiers while a push on the wrong side tears their bodies
apart. In the blink of an eye, fears and dreams are annihilated. "I am boots with a rifle." And a soldier keeps a
beetle in a matchbox. Whole squads die and the beetle survives. Even in the knowledge of its fragility, life clings
to itself. It tries to recognize itself as something more than a mere sigh, more than a uniform to be washed and
mended.

These are only visions because the film does not listen to itself. It does not address its real concerns and needs.
It seems to leer at the twinges that want to emerge, but does not let them pierce the flesh of the screen choosing
to put the story and its events first. It focuses on the semiotic moment and kills the image. It kills the pain that
grows within the shot, the wound, the punctum. It extinguishes the fire. That's why its Best Cinematography
award tastes so bitter to me, because of its empty box status. What could have been sublime is pamphlet,
entertainment. And war framed as entertainment is dangerous because of its ephemeral quality. If there is
something that the war genre should do in these times is to avoid oblivion. To avoid looking away from the war
that never went away, instead of slapping us for frowning at almost three hours of rivers of blood on the screen. It
would be the least.

The whale or the truth of love

By Daniela García Juárez, published on www.girlsatfilms.com on February the 24th

Sometimes I am haunted by a throbbing concern for cinema. Specifically: I worry about the interaction we have
with it in a present of avoracious audiovisual consumption, potentially overwhelming and suffocating. It is an easy
way out, in the face of the over-supply of moving images, to gobble them up without chewing or even tasting
them, and spit them out in easy-to-describe and process units. Added to the consumer judgments of the digital
communities we inhabit, and the increasingly egomaniacal and rigid expectations, we leave the movie theater
with simple formulas to decompose what we saw, in places located and defined. The balance between these
factors, usually measured by self-complacency, will make us decide whether the film is "worth it or not," whether
it falls into the category of what is desirable by the standards of individual political stance, or whether it reflects
something outside our range of appreciation. Films are at the mercy of our swift need to destroy or love them,
and whatever the outcome, it is unfair if the measure of the verdict is only us.

This tyrannical behavior-the conquest of ego over art-sends the thousands of films produced each year to the
landfill of oblivion. Film is as disposable or replaceable as clothing or food - Mark Mylod already says so in the
recent The Menu (2022). Whether a film is commissioned, commercial or author's hand, after the 120 minutes in
which it is useful to us it becomes one-dimensional and ephemeral. A simple adjective.

After more than a hundred years of history, the only thing we can give back to cinema is a cheap system of
judgment, based on categorical rejection or irreproachable celebration, in turn molded in the collective, and
determined in haste. We cannot say that we watch cinema, if at all we are only watching ourselves reflected in
the particles of light coming out of the projector, not from a place of self-knowledge but of narcissism.

Darren Aronofsky's latest film, The Whale (2022), comes to life in this context.

From the egomaniacal gaze, The Whale, a body horror that follows a morbidly obese man during the last days of
his life, can be summed up in tropes such as obesity as depression and gluttony as self-destruction, as the
protagonist, Charlie (Brendan Fraser) not only does not move from the fatal situation in which he finds himself,
but continues to feed that which keeps him on the edge of death, resigned to the inevitable doom. The
assumption of this unique and explicit metaphor makes the film a target for valid questioning and rejection. In a
society where the media history of fat bodies has been a recalcitrant body horror, associating fatness with
miserableness, cinema has the opportunity to trace a different story, one that neither feeds our personal
prejudices nor reinforces the social cult of thinness. If the fatness in The Whale is just a metaphor for depression,
it would definitely be part of the problem.

But is this really what the film is doing? Beyond immediate conjecture, derived from our visceral, self-absorbed
interaction with it, The Whale demands a less polarizing reading. Unlike his far from subtle previous films,
Aronofsky constructs a film whose rhetorical eccentricity - the fat body as metaphor - is not the meat of a
reactionary discourse, but the façade. With The Whale, Aronofsky draws our attention to a seemingly problematic
film in all its letters -from the title-, adding to a filmography that has been characterized more by its polemic effect
than by its narrative genius, to end up throwing us into a sensitive portrait about love and fear as extensions of
the other, and truth as conciliator between both. A story that far from assuring a discriminatory stance, questions
the essence of what makes us human, how we relate to the world and to ourselves from the complexity and
formal and narrative contradiction.

Charlie's situation is not one of everyday life. His house is not a realistic house, inscribed in the world, but a
metaphorical, absurd house; an ethereal space as would be that of a theatrical staging -it is no coincidence that
the original story is a play-, very similar to what Aronofsky did in Mother! (2017). The stories that are presented to
us a few days after his announced death, are episodes that pay for a philosophical essay rather than a story, and
Charlie's story then, is not one of post-loss depression, nor of a caricatured character who eats his feelings
around a specific moment in his life, but rather, the personal and collective story about the fear of love.

Aronofsky develops this idea from the social and psychological world of the character, a man victim of religious
repression that specifically bruises his sex life. The consequences of this violence lead him to operate from guilt
and fear throughout several crucial moments in his life. He marries a woman to repress and hide his true self,
meets someone who shows him the love spoken of in the Bible (a pure, immense feeling that overwhelms him),
and for fear of losing him, he acts unconsciously, leaving behind his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), the only other
person through whom he has known that feeling. Over the years, guilt grows and fuels Charlie's sense of
unworthiness: her husband dies because of religious coercion, and her daughter has not seen him for years
because of his abandonment. The only thing left for her to do is to keep all her money for herself, even at the cost
of her own deteriorating health, not to make amends, but as a genuine gesture that represents what Charlie
believes about love: something that comes and goes like oxygen, but does not spring from within.

Being stripped of her husband, the love she chose against all odds, means the revelation of an unbearable truth
for Charlie: what remains after loving with an open heart, when the source of our love vanishes, is the most
frightening emptiness. The response to such pain, after a past of violence and rejection, is flight. To throw it under
the carpet even as it grows to adorn all the walls of the house and its façade. Pain turns into fear, a fear of losing
oneself in the absence of the love that was taken away, a fear to which it is easy to succumb when you do not
know the coordinates of what you have lost. Charlie fails to recognize that in love there is also room for
emptiness, that hole immediately after the loss that is death in life, and that emptiness is not the end of love. Love
transmutes, transforms, finds new lives, scenarios and bodies to inhabit. It does not vanish in loss, because it has
no fixed location, but is a reflection of something else.
With The Whale Aronofsky speaks of the price of fear. To fear the void is to resign oneself to live without love, to
reject it at all costs, as Charlie and Ellie have dedicated themselves to doing all their lives, in consequence of
their respective histories of loss and abandonment. Ellie, victim of it, refuses to love the world in its maximum
expression: violence and aggression to anyone who crosses her, emphasizing a disproportionate narcissism,
which enunciates her as the only source worthy of his protection. He, victim of an intolerant and coercive context,
denies of himself to aggressive levels, putting the whole source of his love in his relationship with others,
reflecting, even in the most hostile and unpleasant person, his search for love in the world, even at the cost of his
own life. The fears of both feed off each other, allowing them to survive and corrode the humanity that tries to
resist within each other. Charlie, from his psychological and material disappearance from the world, and Ellie,
from the symbolic death of her relationship with others.

"And I felt sadder when I read the boring chapters of whale descriptions, because I knew the author was only
trying to save us from his own sad story." At the climax of the film, Charlie and his daughter connect to tears over
this phrase, a quote from an essay Ellie wrote as a child, referencing Moby Dick, which Charlie insists on hearing
before she dies. This quote shocks Charlie, a person who often brings to the table his need for sincerity, because
of the contradiction that inhabits his unconscious relationship with the truth: Charlie wants to be saved, not in the
form of divine salvation, as he makes a young missionary who insists on atoning for him see it, but through the
earthly salvation of interpersonal love. But to love one must accept the truth of love, its duality, its emptiness, its
pain, and it is something that neither Charlie nor Ellie, blinded by fear, dare to do. It is what makes them the
same, their life stories.

The Whale is far from being a simplistic demonstration of a physical or mental health condition. Instead, the film
is constructed as a philosophical treatise on love, set in a context of violence and oppression. What are we and
what will we be after a life marked by guilt, behind symbolic and material bars that deny us access to ways of
understanding ourselves and coping with trauma, that rule out escape as the only analgesic? All the characters in
the film seek the location of love in different latitudes outside themselves: in the well-being of others, in the grace
of God, in the presence/companionship of the loved one, in the validation and protection of the loved one. And
their stories introduce the constant question: where is the love that escapes them located?

In the children, even if they are tyrants? In a God they can never feel skin to skin, and in the name of whom
everything they love in life is destroyed? In the ephemeral connection with the other? In the sacrifice to atone for
the sins of others? ... Is love in surrender? Or in selfishness? In truth or in lies? In control or in freedom, even if
this is the way to the end? The latter is especially reinforced by the character of Liz, whose display of love for
Charlie is perhaps the most contradictory, and at the same time the bravest of all.

Aronofsky does not offer precise answers to questions. It is more important to make the exercise of connecting
with the question, and the connection occurs through the tactile quality of his images, sensorial and abrasive,
which stick to the skin, like the chewy wings of the ballerina in Black Swan (2010). The Whale uses the body, not
as a vehicle of morality, but of haptic visuality -understanding by this concept the sensation of contact before the
texture of filmic images; to be able to touch the cinema, to feel it, to be simultaneous bodies (Laura Marks, 1999),
to establish a relationship between the viewer and the philosophical quest it explores, one that impacts the inside
and the outside of who we are in essence. Yes, this is not a film that seeks to approach us to the experience of a
person with obesity from manipulation disguised as empathy, as is the case of The Father (Florian Zeller, 2020)
towards a character with alzheimer's, nor from tonal tenderness, as might be the case with Distancias cortas
(Alejandro Guzmán, 2015), but rather it sows the possibility of a deeper and unsuspected connection in the very
matter of the filmic body and the human body we share.

In What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh (2003) Vivan Sobchack discusses her
sensory relationship in the images:

The film not only "filled" and often "suffocated" me with feelings that resonated and contracted my chest and
stomach, but also "sensitized" the very surfaces of my skin [...] my whole being was intensely concentrated and,
absorbed in what was on the screen, I was also enveloped in a body that, here, was painfully aware of itself as a
sensitive, sensitized, and responsive material capacity.

[....] All bodies in the filmic experience-those on and off the screen (and possibly that of the screen itself)-are
potentially subversive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figuratively and literally. They are
omnipresent and extensional, diffusely situated in the cinematic experience. [...] Even without a thought, my body
feels itself in the cinematic experience."

The Whale, as Sobchack's appreciation describes, awakens our material capacity to connect, to watch and
accompany. Stories of personal violence demand to be seen, even without a single thought in between, but from
a sensitive understanding that only the relationship between bodies can provide, one that prompts us to bond
with more compassion inward and outward. To love one's own and other people's bodies, not from a distanced
tolerance, but from a real and genuine understanding, from the truth.

Review of Ruido (Beristain, 2022)

By: Daniela García Juárez. Published on Girls at Films on December 10th

Among critics and spectators, Mexican director Natalia Beristáin's new feature film Ruido (2022) has been
labeled as a mix between documentary and fiction. The recreation of moments well known to the public eye, such
as the iconoclasm during the feminist marches and the seizure of the CNDH facilities, is so impeccably precise in
visual and sound terms that the viewer might question, at various points in the plot, whether it is perhaps a
guerrilla film, or if it is just a hyper-realistic dramatization of events familiar to the director. It is surprising to realize
that it is the latter.

To achieve this fidelity, Beristáin does not rely on a technical and dramatic naturalism in the style of films like her
contemporaries Manto de gemas (Natalia López Gallardo, 2022) or Sin señas particulares (Fernanda Valadez,
2021), which also address the issue of forced disappearance in Mexico, or even her debut feature No quiero
dormir sola (2012). In Ruido, Dariela Ludlow's photographic style already seen in Los Adioses (2017), which
discovers a present, meticulous and prepared camera, creates a Brechtian distance that brings to the territory of
the conscious the fiction in front of it. Added to the sound stylization, the structure of the hero's journey, and
symbolic performances, loaded with intentionality and projection, make Ruido an atypical case: deep down close
to the characteristics of documentary genre, but touching the more traditional building of fiction, inherited from the
American institution, in its form.

In any case, the style chosen by Beristáin could raise questions about the film's place in the midst of a sea of
realistic or naturalistic cinematic representations of violence in the country. Alejandro G. Iñárritu said at the
inaugural conference of the surrealist Bardo (2022): "I am no longer interested in reality (in reference to the
stylistic distance of Bardo from Amores Perros) [...] I believe that cinema offers us the possibility of imagining life
in other ways". A couple of days later, Ruido is released, a film that not only retakes the value of the
representation of reality in cinema, but also embraces it as a standard and seal of the new step in the career of
its director.

To say that Ruido is a docufiction is a superficial description and a fallacious conclusion based on isolated
elements that could make up this fact. In addition to the realistic compilation of contemporary situations in the
collective imaginary, Beristáin allows herself to create moments of rhetorical verticality, which play with symbols
and isolated metaphors. One of these is the sequence of the searching mothers.

After a cut to blacks, we see the faces of women belonging to real search associations, appearing one after
another in foreground, looking straight at the camera without saying anything. At first glance one might think that
this is a split between fiction and documentary, as Ruizpalacios does in A Cop Movie (2021), and that, from that
point on, we will see an unscripted reportage of real experiences of the searching mothers. It is soon revealed
that the reportage is diegetic and is being done by Abril, a journalist within the plot. Even so, the sequence
maintains the essence of Brechtian rupture that reminds viewers: within this fiction, any resemblance to reality is
not mere coincidence.The second resource I point out is a scene that evokes Marcela Arteaga in El guardián de
la memoria (2019): like the image of the objects of victims that extend decontextualized and infinite over the
desert, so the mother of a missing daughter walks in the middle of the plain, where the emptiness in front of her
appears desolate, like the lack of answers and the hopelessness she keeps. The lost past and the uncertain
future loom and become the limbo of having a loved one missing. With this resource, Beristáin enunciates one of
his most forceful themes without having to name it: the world keeps running, but for the relatives of the victims it
has stopped forever and there is no prompt or reliable salvation. After the disappearance, for many families in
Mexico, only the desert remains.
This image is repeated in the final moment of the film, when Julia and Ger meet in the middle of the plain. Ger is
now wearing a characteristic black bloc outfit, and her mother has just been in a feminist march that turned out in
repression. And although the last we see of the march was the violence received, the realism with which Natalia
captures the strength of sisterhood and the fire of the march leave a deeper impression. When Julia and Ger
meet, there is a dialogue between these scenes, and Natalia delivers the promising reunion that the structure of
her script suggests, but which the reality to which she swears allegiance does not allow: it is unlikely that under
the circumstances of the plot, Ger's character would appear alive; if she did, Ruido would be removed from the
uncomfortable truth she is interested in depicting. Instead, Natalia suggests the symbolic encounter between
individual loss and the legacy of collective struggle. Social movements, in this case represented by the feminist
movement, as an emotional response to the lack of real answers from the authorities. The only thing left in the
face of the irrevocable, is the collective noise.

An ending that tears at the same time that clings, that puts its finger in the wound but does not let it burn. Natalia
Beristáin distances herself from the crudeness ascribed to the naturalism of her contemporaries, and forcefully
defends not only the thesis of the film, but also her predilection for the precise recreation of current events in
combination with styles that seem very foreign to her. It is through a line that plays with journalism, that stands up
to the traditional narrative structure, but breaks both paradigms by including avant-garde elements, that the
director builds an elegant and (above all) compassionate proposal of active reflection towards the situation of
forced disappearance and violence towards women.

Ruido is not a film that awakens through pure and simple pain, which is why even at the rawest dramatic points, it
lacks a dark tone, both in substance and form. Instead, Beristáin brings light to the pain to remind us of what lies
beyond it. The collective noise is both symptom and relief, it is the future that is not mentioned in contemporary
naturalistic tragedies, whose endings lean towards the worst circumstances and whose post-film response is
usually the uncomfortable silence of the spectator, who recognizes himself as a passive actor, sinking into a
nihilism with no way out. What Natalia shows us of the future is resilience, an unjust and undesirable outcome,
but palpable and possible given the circumstances. Ruido is the argumentative reconciliation of a film movement
that has been promised as a form of conscientization, and so far, has remained closer to the condescending and
fetishistic exposition of the pain of others.

Moreover, the vertices between reality and fiction are not only located in what is recognizable within the diegesis.
In the credits of the film, we see the faces and names of missing persons, accompanied by mournful voices that
enunciate them, making visible what the institutions want to be invisible. Also, both on the red carpet and at the
premiere, the founders of the association Voz y Dignidad por los Nuestros were present, who, in the midst of the
questions and answers, chanted the slogan "Why are we looking for them, because we want them!

These moments remind me of an analogy Zizek makes in the documentary-essay The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
(2006), regarding Kieslowski's Bleu: when Julie (Juliette Binoche) is unable to cope with the torment of a terrible
loss, she discovers a nest of newborn rats in her apartment. Something cracks inside her as she looks at the
fragility of life in its nakedness, without curtains or veils. They are there: truth and vulnerability at a point of no
return.

The thin border between reality and fiction that Natalia creates from the aforementioned resources, added to the
physical proximity of the nature of the story -the experiences of real people- before the audience present during
its premiere, are that inescapable reminder of the most absolute and heartbreaking truth. One that will have been
uncomfortable for many of those present and will continue to be uncomfortable during its streaming. One that will
be judged as unnecessarily precise, that will be questioned for going beyond the limits of cinematic purism
(politicized cinema is good as long as it continues to situate itself as an entity isolated from the facts, never in
situ, and always suggestive, poetic, evocative). But, at least for me, the poetry of Ruido resides, in addition to its
intelligent stylistic framework, in its courage to disobey Iñárritu's ideas and the tacit mandate of the dark room:
once the lights go out the viewer will be disconnected from his or her reality. Watching Noise, on the other hand,
is like seeing Kieslowski's newborn mice face to face. More than raw and provocative, simply, true and
unavoidable.

With its ending, Natalia offers a truce. Surrendering to the factual is not so difficult when hope is recognized as a
primary component in the nature of truth.