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ESSAYS |
The evil within
Some Ferrara films start with trauma, like the hideous rape
in Ms .45. But what isn't traumatic in the worlds conjured by
this abrasive artist? Even walking out your front door-taking
one step too many from the illusory comforts of home and family,
as Harvey Keitel does in Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game-can
register as a daily catastrophe, the beginning of a descent
into hell. Obsession and addiction are the major themes of this
œuvre, the tripwires on which anti-heroes dance: could
there be any plot premise more perfectly Ferraran than that
of The Blackout, in which a reformed booze-drugs-sex addict
comes to the insane (yet somehow workable) conclusion that the
only way to penetrate the dark well of his past actions is to
fall off the wagon and black out all over again? These central
characters are as fractured as the stories and forms that contain
them: they move in a confused psychic labyrinth of furious denials
and compensatory projections. A sense of über-Catholic
'original sin' looms large in Ferrara-a wound mainly endured
by men in dim, instinctual recognition of the wrongs they inflict
on their suffering, seething women.
But what, exactly, is the sin in Ferrara's cinema-and where,
exactly, is its origin? Is it just a personal matter of temptation,
bingeing, deception, moral evasion-most of these men leading
double lives as precarious and agonised as the archetypal
'bad lieutenant'? Ferrara's films offer a form of Brechtian
melodrama beyond Douglas Sirk or even Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Every problem in his films is a social problem, a problem
endemic to the formation and maintenance of a human community.
Violence, exploitation, dissimulation: these are issues of
the State, of corporatisation, technology, politics-inescapably.
Ferrara gives us such 'big picture' problems in a heightened
form, in stories frequently embracing the allegorical modes
of science fiction, fantasy, or horror: our world is populated
with vampires, with vicious phantasms, with invading, marauding
body snatchers. No wonder that a forthcoming book by the French
critic Nicole Brenez is called Abel Ferrara versus the Twentieth
Century: for her, as for Ferrara, the task is precisely to
know, and to portray, what evil is in the modern world, and
how it infects, inhabits, possesses us.
Trash compactor
Most great directors have signatures: Max Ophuls's expansively
tracking camera, Hou Hsiao-hsien's static long-shot long takes,
Jean-Luc Godard's montage-mix of sampled and interrupted sound
sources. But Ferrara? There is no consistent affectation,
no recognisable manner in his prodigious forms. In the prolific
1990s, especially, diversity rules: can it be the same director
who mastered, so swiftly, the hyper-Michael Mann style of
cool nocturnal blue in King of New York; the minimalist 'stations
of the cross' intrigue in Bad Lieutenant; the stark black-and-white
exploitation-horror of The Addiction; the stately, sombre
mise en scène of The Funeral and the hallucinatory,
multi-layered collage of The Blackout? This is one reason,
among many, why it is so important to finally see these films
as they were made to be seen, and as most of them of them
have never been seen before in Australia-in prints projected
onto a big screen through a loud sound system. Like Martin
Scorsese, Leos Carax, or Emir Kusturica, Ferrara makes 'movie-movies'
that revel in the possibilities of cinematic sound and vision.
Yet if Ferrara lacks a signature-and maybe that, in our auteur-commodity
market, slyly and subversively, is his signature-he has honed
an attitude to content and an approach to form that are razor
sharp. Ferrara is in the tradition of John Cassavetes and
Maurice Pialat: he seeks the truth of the moment, the nub
of a contradiction, the telling flashpoint of tension. In
interviews or documentaries, that is all he will talk about:
'getting the shot', nailing something in an image, a performance,
an exchange, a riff. His cinema is a postmodern gestalt, a
fusion in dissonance: bodies, environments, songs, colours,
and edits are so powerfully compacted in his work that we
can hardly separate the elements, as we can with the work
of 'cleaner' directors. It is this sensibility that led him
to invent a mode, from his television work of the 1980s (Miami
Vice, Crime Story) to New Rose Hotel, of what we might call
'canny distraction': that seemingly random wandering of camera
and microphone amidst a crowded mêlée of noises
and events, an ambient, even 'lounge' cinema (after lounge
music), 'dilated and dedramatised' in Ted Colless's description,
where the focus seems always to be just approaching or just
losing the centre of the action-but it's that hazy, perpetually
'becoming' (and dying) totality that is precisely the Ferraran
event, his 'millennium mambo'.
Black holes
Like Stanley Kubrick's stories, Ferrara's narratives do not
'advance' in the normal, conventional way-even when what they
narrate is perfectly linear. Rather, they dwell, fascinated,
on a particular plateau, a 'descriptive' plane on which is
etched an entire way of life, until a sudden turn lifts events
to the next plot plateau. This leaves pockets of story, or
pieces of worlds, cast adrift as islands between large seas
of ellipsis (especially in The Funeral, where-as is often
the case in Ferrara's films-a radical edit takes out at the
final phase of the work's elaboration a lot of connective
tissue). His characters cross these black holes only with
the greatest difficulty, as if tearing themselves on glass
with every fraught step, each mutilation marking a mutation
of their being.
This is an X-ray (and sometimes close to X-rated) cinema.
Plots expose characters to a hellish gauntlet that renders
them transparent-allowing us to see the complex networks of
impulses and influences chaotically informing every little
gesture. Ferrara's images work this way also. They are like
a skin that is progressively exposed, hollowed out, peeled
back. His films often give us stark, cool, diagrammatic images,
theorems of power and resistance (Ms .45, King of New York,
The Addiction). In the latter half of the 1990s, a proliferation
of different image formats or textures continues and deepens
this exploration: television, video, surveillance tapes, split-screens,
digital treatments… leading to an ambiguous cloud-cluster
of image-types in collision in the montage. Watching The Blackout
and New Rose Hotel, we can no longer tell whether we are seeing
flashbacks, mental constructions, objective narration, or
alternative, speculative worlds spinning off from the nominal
fiction. And every time the 'status' of an image becomes ambiguous
in this way, we are back with questions of power and politics,
of the 'hidden hand' behind image-circuits and image-systems,
the hand of Mabuse-like figures such as the director-manipulator
played by Dennis Hopper in The Blackout.
Our Christmas
The Argentine critic Quintín once charmingly proposed
that there are two diametrically opposed kinds of filmmakers
affected by the legacy of Catholicism: 'Easter artists' and
'Christmas artists'. Easter artists are angst-ridden: everything
to them is a question of masochistic crucifixion and desperately
longed-for resurrection; death is their keynote, sin their
crucible, redemption their dream. (Think Scorsese.) Christmas
artists are jollier types: they are more into a celebration
of birth, of hope, of innocence, of new beginnings. (Think
Capra.)
Where does Ferrara sit? All the evidence so far offered seems
to point to the gloomy Easter camp. But let's not forget that
the ghostly splitting of identity, so prevalent in his films,
leads us to at least one literal rebirth of a female hero-after
the cataclysm in The Addiction. And then there is his most
recent film, his personal 'comeback': it's 'R Xmas, our Christmas.
However ironically or perversely, something nonetheless is
stirring, responding to the light of life, in Ferrara's cinema.
From the burnout, the black hole, the infernal confusion and
fire of our age, a new vision is starting to emerge. We can
only await the undoubtedly strange, vigorous, visceral, unpredictable
wonders of Abel Ferrara versus the Twenty-First Century.
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