The Cinema of Vulnerability

A screen of power or a screen of the soul?

From The Teacher’s Lounge. Writer-Director Ilker Çatak. Cinematography Judith Kaufmann. (Image Sony Pictures Classics)

The cinema of vulnerability? What do I mean? Don’t there have to be stakes in any dramatic narrative? Threats, peril, casualties — whether physical or emotional, mortal or psychological? Isn’t all of cinema an arena for vulnerability in one way or another?

I think it was Ari Aster who I heard in an interview say that if he’s to engage fully with a movie, he needs a sense of the filmmaker’s vulnerability. This was a revelation. Not because it was unfamiliar—I realized it’s the case for me too. I’d just never accepted I had the same requirement. Why? Because it made me feel vulnerable? Unable to tough out the action movies, the cold noirs, the macho thrillers?

Or perhaps it’s more that I’m not so interested in watching a movie when I might as well be staring at insects fighting it out in a jar. Being a voyeur gazing at conflict for adrenalin kicks, for ‘the ride’ is not only something that to me seems vacuous, it tends to leave me somewhat nauseous. I can’t help but feel the pain inflicted on characters, whatever their position in any spectrum of good to bad.

Instead, I generally need the filmmaker to bring me into the emotions, visceral and neural sensations, and the cognitive activity of at least one character. If that character isn’t vulnerable in some way, what’s more, I’m unlikely to be able to empathize, not merely sympathize, and certainly not identify with them. (Note: empathy = in the feeling; sympathy = with the feeling; identification = being the character.)

Even Tom Ripley, at least in his novel and movie manifestations — Purple Noon, Ripley’s Game, Talented Mr Ripley has his moments of paranoia verging on panic. Even a Joker, in Joaquin Phoenix’s versatile hands at least, has his complex PTSD, poor murderous guy, and so I go with him.

So that’s one way a filmmaker’s vulnerability might come across — not only in the nature of their characters but in the ways they have the viewer connect with them. (With Whiplash the audience around me in the movie theater were howling with laughter at the suffering of the victims of bullying — something the filmmaker himself, apparently incapable of modulating his film’s tone, seemed to me to be encouraging. No vulnerability there.)

How else might vulnerability in a filmmaker be manifested?

In a sense of fragility perhaps. In the characters, as discussed, but also in their world, their customs and culture. In Ilker Çatak’s 2023 The Teacher’s Lounge the faculty world of protagonist Carla Nowak is stricken with conflicting obligations, loyalties, and resentments. At the same time the teacher-pupil relationship at the center of the story reverberates with an ambiguity of power dynamic familiar to those of us who have worked in such an environment. The authority of the educator vs. the tyranny of the student. The delinquent student as victim, the teacher as bully — although who might be the true bully?

Guilt meanwhile, is transferred so seismically from one to the other that even Hitchcock at his best might feel left behind. The Wrong Man, I Confess, and North By Northwest by the master of vulnerability barely match the interchangeable culpability of perpetrator and perpetrated upon in Teacher’s Lounge. In such a morally shifting cosmos, the tissue of meaning appears fragile. There’s no center that holds and Carla’s world, and our sense of it, falls apart — triumph, defeat, hurt, defiance are rendered the contradictory vibes of the movie’s scintillating, perplexing, paradoxical ending.

Which brings me to uncertainty, as companion of fragility a similarly fertile domain for vulnerability. Moral uncertainty. Cognitive uncertainty. Narrative uncertainty. Uncertain uncertainty.

When we don’t know where we are with a movie, where we’re going with it, whether a character might choose the right path or the wrong, the safe or the perilous, when we are unsure of what our protagonist knows and what they don’t, when a story seems to be going in one direction but we find it going in the opposite or suspect it might, or when we sense traces of a hidden story that might rise up to eclipse the ostensible one, we become uncertain of the film we are watching and how of how we are to relate to it — and with that uncertainty comes a sense of vulnerability, both in the film and in ourselves.

Another approach to understanding this cinema of vulnerability might be to look at its opposite: the cinema of power.

There’s precious little vulnerability in what might be thought of as cinemachismo. In this category we might include the predilection for torture in the movies of Villeneuve from Incendie to Prisoners and on, or the beloved festive screen mayhem of Miller, or a Bond industrial slaughter, or Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty in which the filmmaker invites the viewer to smile with the torturer — or in the filmically consummate soullessness of a Fincher.

This is far from suggesting though that violent movies and thrillers necessarily fit into the cinema of power. If Wenders’ Perfect Days, Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, the new Cottontail by writer-director Patrick Dickinson, eschewing screen ‘action’ as they do, are quintessential exemplars of vulnerability, then so are Haneke’s brutal films — Funny Gamesamong them — critiques as they are of our love of festive cruelty, of what the filmmaker refers to as America’s ‘barrel-down cinema’ — an alternative term for the cinema of power perhaps? Scorsese’s canon overflows with vulnerability, from the final lonely damnation of Goodfellas’ Henry Hill to the epochal precarity of Kundun’s Dalai Lama. Kubrick’s characters are forever at the mercy of the contradictions and confusions of the human and the mechanical. The criminally underrated master Agnieszka Holland’s most recent film Green Border is awash with brutality melted out to migrants but like much of her body of work aches with vulnerability. The shocking Titanefrom Julie Ducornau descends into terrifying visceral violence yet at its end to sings from the heart in what is surely one of the strangest, most unlikely yet fiercely emotional denouements the screen has ever offered.

These movies, however savage, don’t desensitize us. We aren’t invited to embrace their violence. To the contrary — they tear us apart. Indeed, it isn’t violence or its absence that gets in the way of or gives us a film of vulnerability. It’s where the filmmaker places us in relation to the characters and their story. Yes, violence, cruelty, combat are the stuff of myth, of drama, of story, of spectacle — all potent elements in great cinema. How we engage with all of this is however what determines how this fiction comes to life in us. Does it hurt or does it titillate? Reveal human truth or divert us from it? Do we feel the pain of others or enjoy witnessing it?

Of course, I’m dismissing some highly accomplished directors here while I can so often get things badly wrong. For example, I used to think Steve McQueen couldn’t convey empathy. A brilliant filmmaker but Hunger I found icy, while in Twelve Years a Slave his racking of focus at one point from emotional to physical pain struck me as revealing an instinct for sadism rather than empathy. But when I saw his Small Axe series of films, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. These movies could be compared with Kieslowski’s Decalogue for their luminous humanity. Then there came this versatile filmmaker’s documentary Occupied City! Four-and-a-half-hours of emotion obliquely but painfully conveyed, the soul that seemed almost comprehensively extinguished somehow surviving the hell it has been put through…

It’s the concept though, a cinema of vulnerability that to me resonates. If I’ve left it nebulous at times, I’d argue that the screen of the soul and the movie-audience connection it prompts could never be reduced to easy conclusions…

Peter Markham
June 2024