Melodrama & minimalism: Au Hasard Balthazar & Pyaasa (video essay for Fandor Keyframe)

I've been pretty busy lately (just not online), and didn't realize that my most recent Fandor video essay had actually gone up back in June. I submitted it a few months ago, inspired partly by having recently rewatched two of my favorite movies, and partly by a minor controversy surrounding Kevin B. Lee's video "Inside the Rooms of NO HOME MOVIE" which altered the soundtrack of clips from a Chantal Akerman film. What difference does sound make in our emotional perception of a scene? What is the common ground between melodramatic and minimalist uses of sound?

I addressed these questions in the above video, as well as in the accompanying text (which you can read in full on Fandor Keyframe (the Fandor video and page no longer exist although this is available on my own channel). Here is the intro to that text:

The Favorites - Au Hasard Balthazar (#65)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966/France/dir. Robert Bresson) appeared at #65 on my original list.

What it is • One of the most famous statements about Au Hasard Balthazar is attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, who went on to marry its leading lady (Anne Wiazemsky, at the time of Balthazar a completely inexperienced 18-year-old nonprofessional). Godard describes this deceptively simple, minimal, quiet film as "the world in an hour and a half." Virtually - maybe even actually - the entire film takes place in a village so provincial that the occasional car or transistor radio seems vaguely anachronistic. Yet this isolated hamlet truly does feel like a microcosm of the wider world, with characters who are starkly defined and delineated. They exist not only in isolated corners of the narrative but are also forced to interact with one another, creating clashes or attachments that illuminate both parties. The tapestry woven by this novelistic ensemble includes the intense, fiery cruelty of Gerard (Francois Lafarge), the miserly, lustful cynicism of the merchant (Pierre Klosowski), the belligerent but oddly impotent alcoholic rage of Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert), the infuriating, self-defeating pride of the schoolteacher turned farmer (Philippe Asalin), and especially the demure, despoiled innocence and growing self-awareness of the farmer's daughter Marie (Wiazemsky). The needle that weaves these threads together is the title character, Balthazar, a donkey suffering above and beyond the usual misery of a beast of burden. Over the course of the film he passes between a series of masters, frequently returning to and departing from the home of Marie, where he was baptized in the film's early minutes (some viewers perceive this act as giving him a soul, which heightens his awareness and "humanity" throughout the rest of the movie). We meet him before the film even begins, braying abrasively under the opening credits, and he is at the center of the first and final shots. The story is seen through his eyes even though there are many sequences in which he's not onscreen, in which characters discuss things that have nothing to do with him. This explains why the above description comes as something of a surprise to me even as I write it. The bustling, picaresque nature of that narrative is a far cry from the film's muted, spare storytelling. Even having seen the film numerous times, it's never really registered as a plot. There is character psychology at work; for example, Marie's complete submission to Gerard seems to be at least partly a response to (and perverse reflection of) her own father's harmful stubbornness. And there is a larger story unfolding, of a community that preys upon and breaks down its weakest members, of a child's fatal illness and an offscreen murder and a legal battle dividing longtime friends and a criminal conspiracy led by a choir boy gone astray. But the incidents occur mostly offscreen, and the relationships are implied rather than stated or even observed. The film's body is made up of acts, glances, and gestures of cruelty and occasional kindness that appear random to us, however deeply rooted they may be. Does the donkey's perspective strip this story of any relatable human context? Or does it reveal its emotional substance, free of distracting narration?

Why I like it •

The Eyes Have It

A visual tribute to my favorite scene in Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966, dir. Robert Bresson), in 8 shots

That Total Film 1964 - 1966 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 16

The sixteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 16: That Total Film"

That Total Film

The films in today's chapter form an entity thrilling, melancholy, beautiful, and tragic - the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end. When asked to write about Fists in the Pocket forty years later, Jean-Pierre Gorin noted ruefully, "every scene ... with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in." Oh, you can see that all over the place today, in a chapter that - not accidentally - finds itself exactly halfway through the series, to the point where the closing clip is even divided in two, to be concluded tomorrow.

The Great Movies

Penned by William Bayer, an independent filmmaker and writer on cinema, this lavishly-illustrated, thought-provoking coffee table book, composed of sixty films divided into twelve categories, is by all accounts currently out of print, and long ago forgotten. Or rather, long ago forgotten by most people (if they ever even made its acquaintance), but not by me. Somehow this book, published ten years before my birth, came into my possession in early childhood (I believe my father purchased it before I, along with my cinephilia, came onto the scene). It has had an inordinate influence on how I look at movies to this day. I still own it and have reproduced many of its pages in this post, as a tribute to all those glorious but long-neglected celebrations of the movies - the books which served to engage our curiosity, to focus our eye, to sharpen our intellect, and most of all to fire our imagination so that sights unseen became holy grails. A follow-up post will examine the many books that served this purpose for me, and then I will pass the baton on to my readers, but for now...The Great Movies.