NYFF 2010: "Mysteries of Lisbon"

When I’m on Twitter—which I have to say I don’t recom­mend, now that I’m in it more or less for keeps I’m almost entirely con­vinced it’s the dev­il, although I haven’t pinned down quite why yet (that is, I abso­lutely know the reas­ons, but am not sure which of them is para­mount), and may report back fur­ther when I do—I some­times like to do this hasht­ag I call dub “cinemaequa­tions” in which I try to describe a film accord­ing to the way it manip­u­lates cer­tain of its ante­cedents. For the new pic­ture by the estim­able and pro­lif­ic Raul Ruiz, a four-and-a-half-hour epic (which has its ori­gins as a tele­vi­sion mini-series) adap­ted from a three-volume 19^th-century Portuguese nov­el by Camilo Castelo Branco, my sum­ma­tion was “The Saragossa Manuscript + Great Expectations x Judex=Mysteries of Lisbon.” As in Dickens, this tale begins with a rather poor orphan (although it’s worth not­ing that while this par­tic­u­lar tale is full of char­ac­ters of low for­tune, or who are about to be deprived of what for­tunes they may have, there is not much in the way of depic­tions of priva­tion here) of obscure ori­gins; like the ever mind-blowing Manuscript, it has a story-within-a-story-and-look!-over-there-another-story struc­ture that cre­ates a some­times ver­ti­gin­ously “real­ity, what does it mean?” effect on the view­er. As for Judex, that’s a little harder to quanti­fy. There’s no real nefarious-crime ele­ment to the nar­rat­ive, but once a black-clad young noble­wo­man played by the estim­ably beau­ti­ful Clotilde Hesme turns up, the intim­a­tions are palp­able. I was reminded of Elie Faure’s descrip­tion of Vigo’s L’Atalante, the mem­or­able phrase “fugit­ive shad­ows of Rembrandt;” fugit­ive shad­ows of Feuillade are cast through­out here. It’s not just the cos­tumes or the moods but aspects of the fram­ing and light­ing (and I do love the way that Ruiz uses actu­al objects—not just the usu­al door frames but the edges of par­ted cur­tains and such—to nar­row the frame and often cre­ate sim­u­lated iris-in views), and the distorted-lens effects, but also the simple eleg­ance of the fre­quent long takes. This styl­iz­a­tion is a huge part of the pic­ture’s often intox­ic­at­ing atmo­sphere. A friend used the word “romantic,” and I agree, but the pic­ture is not overtly con­cerned with sweep­ing emo­tion as such—the vari­ous nar­rat­ives provide it with a near-constant momentum that leaves little room for con­tem­plat­ive rich-in-feeling pauses. Rather it’s the relent­less aggreg­a­tion of situ­ation­al details relat­ing to a romantic mode—legacies, scan­dals, gos­sip, mat­ters of hon­or, swooning—combined with the styl­ist­ic inflec­tions, which of course end up con­sti­tut­ing a kind of cine­mat­ic goth­ic, that sweep you away. Kinda like Gone With The Wind, if you think about it! (Or maybe not.) In any event, a real good one.

I found the below, from an appre­ci­ation Ruiz wrote of Ulmer’s The Black Cat for Positif (reprin­ted in the English-language col­lec­tion Projections 4 1/2) about a dec­ade and a half ago, of some per­tin­ence here. He takes off from describ­ing an anim­ated dis­cus­sion he had with the act­or Martin Landau (who appears in Ruiz’s thor­oughly amaz­ing 1985 Treasure Island) and goes from there:

 “…I drew on the books I had with me, and espe­cially on an art­icle by Jakko Hintikka […] who, on the sub­ject of the­or­ies of lan­guage, or rather of gen­er­al semant­ic con­structs, makes fun of Noam Chomsky (his sworn enemy) by mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between the recurs­ive paradigm which states that ‘lan­guage must be con­sidered as a pro­cess gov­erned by rules’ and the stra­tegic paradigm that ‘lan­guage brings into oper­a­tion stra­tegic rules that gov­ern a pro­cess analag­ous to a game.’

It seemed to me evid­ent that some films—Rossellini, Cassavetes—develop out of cer­tain situ­ations which are con­nec­ted togeth­er accord­ing to the rules cre­ated by the situ­ations them­selves, while oth­er films (the major­ity) present them­selves as a com­pleted game, with vari­ations provided for by the rules that the game makes expli­cit (if they aren’t so already)—films made in Hollywood, both now and in the past.

I’ve always believed that the two paradigms over­lap: in a set of frag­ments of a game, each one poten­tially con­tains a film to be com­pleted by the audi­ence; also the frag­ments behave from game to game in a gen­er­at­ive sequence (accord­ing to the recurs­ive paradigm). 

In gen­er­al, my films try to integ­rate both paradigms. They are made up of frag­ments of incom­plete stor­ies which, in an unpre­dict­able man­ner, engender oth­er stor­ies about daily life, and lead to tem­por­ary con­clu­sions. Each frag­ment wishes on the one hand to find its con­clu­sion far away from the sequence we are watch­ing, and on the oth­er hand to ‘beget’ and link itself with oth­er frag­ments, affil­i­at­ing itself to them like a son is linked to his sires.

I’ve found very few examples of com­mer­cial films that illus­trate my the­ory, apart from The Black Cat, which in its way is the best, the most drastic and irre­fut­able. It was what epi­stem­o­lo­gists call (but here I use the term in a mock­ing sense) a ‘cru­cial experience.’ ”