CINEMA'S OUTWARDS AND INWARDS FILMMAKERS:

Life. Myth. People. Soul. The Real. The True.

From Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Cinematographer Robert Burks. Kim Novak as Judy sees a figure rise from the darkness.

Mike Leigh says films should be about ‘real people’. Presumably, he’s arguing against the confections of the mainstream, the heroes and villains of the Manichaean escapism pervading much of it.

It’s the ‘real people’ he cites, with their vulnerabilities, shortcomings, illusions, needs, and everyday humanity who provide him with the grounded catalyst for his work. He looks around, so he suggests, he observes, takes in, then brings that perceived reality to the screen.

Since his films attain such heights we would do well to listen to his strictures. Just watch his Another Year — to take only one example of his work — the rewards of such cinema are immeasurable.

And Mike Leigh is far from alone. Watch Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake or consider the writings and cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. Whether informed by observation of people, specific or general, or by ‘real life’ stories they have come across, these filmmakers give us films without which our sense of cinema and the human condition it reveals, would be rendered much the less…

While such dramas may be those of the everyday world, contained within the registers of our familiar experience, they may also draw on more extreme scenarios. Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Romain Gavras’ Athena show the communal anger and violent precarity of Paris’ banlieues with unflinching mastery.

The stakes in this canvas are, unmistakably, life and death, and literally so.This is cinema at most heady. All too recognizably human, yet narratively wrenching, formally kinetic, visceral.

What more, within a spectrum that ranges from the everyday circumstances of the oeuvre of Ozu to those explosive events portrayed by insistent social commentators such as Ly and Gavras Jr, is there to be said? Isn’t it this ‘reality’ alone that affords a movie its authenticity?

Let’s step back. With a genesis coinciding with the influx of immigrants through Ellis Island, germinal American cinema needed to find stories and characters to engage newcomers from across Europe, many of whom could barely, if at all, speak English. A mass of different nationalities, religions, cultures, and perspectives.

So the task befell to filmmakers in a time of rapid nation-building of creating instant, universal myth, with its gods and goddesses, its devils, its fabulation, its heightened realities, its revelations of the human soul.

Mythopoeia thus became the business of those early filmmakers — in contrast to contemporaries in older cultures with mythologies long since formed.

Once this nascent cinema had connected with a diversity of ethnicities and cultures, as it succeeded in doing, so it began to appeal to other audiences across the world.

Yes — Black America was ignored, denigrated, native America was reduced to enemy-hood, women were permitted minimal agency in filmmaking and as characters on screen, while, apart from caricature, Asian Americans were largely omitted.

Something in these movies though, a brashness, a primal drive, a resonance, came to burrow beneath the defenses of the older, settled, more sophisticated cultures of the immigrants, and of the countries they had left behind, breaking through even there.

The characters of that cinema were nothing like Leigh’s ‘real people’ — instead they were constructs of humanity incorporating a commonality to touch us all.

Our needs, fears, hopes, vanities, the universal stuff of our lives — the human soul in all its paradoxes and mysteries — came to the silent screen, continuing into ‘the talkies’, their larger than life characters honed and fortified as genres developed.

Westerns, Screwball Comedies, Gangster movies, Noir, Horror, War Movies, Romances — each were built on the artifice of worlds removed from the humdrum dailiness of their audiences’ ‘real life’. At their worst they presented, and still do, confections of minimal substance. At their best, they offered, and may do still, myths to nourish our collective psyche.

Where indeed, are the ‘real people’ in much of the world’s greatest cinema?In what sense, for example, are any of the characters in Vertigo — widely regarded as one of film’s most profound treasures — anything like ‘real people’?

Hitchcock, a petit-bourgeois, Jesuit-educated Londoner with a fear of women and a dread of intimacy used his consummate sense of cinematic language to render the turbulence of his psyche visible. The only way to get rid of my fears is to bring them to the screen, he said. (Did he succeed in getting rid of them? We will never know although I doubt it.)

Yet, out of this very specific, damaged Englishman came a cinema universal in its language and imagery, in its revelations of raw humanity. One, even if exclusively male-based, that has stood the test of the decades.

Hitchcock wasn’t looking outwards at the people in the street, in the community, going about their lives as best they could, for his authenticity. He was looking inwards. Into his terrors, inadequacies, confusions, desires, guilt. Yet somehow, this distinctly peculiar man found in the petrifying currents of his pathology the richness that rendered his canon universal.

Go to Kubrick! Alex the Droog, Redmond Barry, Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove — any real people among them? Go to the epic Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawkes. To Rueben Östland’s recent Hogarthian Triangle of Sadness even. Truth, not mere ‘reality’ is what informs the vibrant, compelling characters of such cinema.

Homer, Borges once wrote, wasn’t at the siege of Troy. Homer was a poet of myth, not a war reporter, not the estimable Pontecorvo making the magnificent Battle of Algiers but the conjurer of a timeless universe of battling mortals, gods and goddesses who have enthralled, haunted, and graced the ages.

It was through those heroes and villains, those gods and goddesses that through the barriers of time, geography, and contrasting cultures we have sensed the truths of the human condition.

Note well then the advice of Mike Leigh, Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, and others but be aware also that there is more to cinematic and fictional characters than the reproductions of ‘real people’ — as these masters themselves well know or did know. (Farhadi’s antagonistic official in A Hero, for example, is a construct of the hostility the protagonist must face — not a ‘real person’, or anything like one, but a functional component of the filmmaker’s deftly composed dramatic narrative.)

Mere re-creation may bring us to a recognition of some specific reality. To the contrary, the artifice of a character, especially when drawing on the inner roiling of our souls, can bring us to the recognition of universal human truth…

Peter Markham December 2022