Four Views of Cinema - Part One by Charles Rees

Abstract

In this article Charles Rees offers his personal insights about how image and sound can be re-‘read’ in such a way as to transcend current narrative constraints. He offers examples of films which have influenced and impressed him, and extrapolates on ways in which cinema might develop in the future.

My four views stretch over a long period.

Each individual sees differently.

The Camera Image sees differently from humans.

First View: The Eclipse

The first view was only a glimpse. Following an early enthusiasm for spectacular films - Ben-Hur (Wyler 1959), El Cid (Mann 1961) – on vast screens that envelop you to put you in another world, I saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse/The Eclipse (1962) when I was sixteen. This film put me in another world in a different way. Rather than being swallowed by a film, I swallowed. I think I discovered my own way of seeing films. I was bewitched – at least I seemed to have some kind of affinity with this film. It stunned me into a way of seeing films that I had not imagined before. I never forgot this revelation of a way of seeing films, although I subsequently used other ways. It was always there, a way of having a handle on a film and of keeping one’s autonomy in relation to it.

Makhmalbafs's “A Moment of Innocence” by Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad

Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad has kindly allowed us to post the text of his introduction to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 'A Moment of Innocence", which A Nos Amours presented at the ICA in March 2013.

Rumi, a Persian mystic poet says in a poem, 

“Truth is a mirror which fell on Earth from God’s hand and broke.  Everyone picked up a piece and saw their own image in it and thought they had the truth.  But truth was divided among them all"

History, multiple truths, documentary, fiction and poetry mix in “A Moment of Innocence” a deceptively simple film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf who is one of Iran’s best known film-makers. He is not just remarkable for his accomplishment in filmmaking but also for taking a metaphoric personal journey that spans from being a religious guerrilla to becoming a secular world-renowned director.  He had not seen any films until the age of 21 due to a strict religious upbringing. He recalls his grandmother saying that whoever went to the movies would go to hell in the afterlife. After the 1979 revolution, he began his career as a self-taught ideological filmmaker, fully at the service of Islamic Republic.  He refers to this period as his first phase of filmmaking. Understandably his films of the period are unremarkable.

A Moment of Innocence?: The Political Potentials of Pop-up Film, by Ella Harris

Not so long ago A Nos Amours screened Moshen Maklmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996) at the ICA. The presentation of this Iranian film by A Nos Amours, a pop-up cinema collective, raised questions about the political potentials of pop-up as a new mode of cinema spectatorship.

Maklmalbaf’s quasi-autobiographical film, set in his home country, is an exploration of what it means to recreate a moment in history, and what such a re-exploration can hope to achieve. The film follows Moshen (playing himself) who is making a movie about an incident which was pivotal for his 17 year old self; the stabbing of a policeman during a political demonstration. Unexpectedly, the policeman himself returns, eager to take part in the film too, albeit with his own emotional agenda. Both men chose a ‘young me’ to act in the reconstruction and set about training the boys to embody their past-selves.

Reading pop-up Cinema by Ella Harris

Carnival of Souls: Are we ghosts in the city?

Introducing Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) at A Nos Amour’s pop-up screening this Thursday, Rodger Clarke began by contextualising early cinema within other historical technologies of entertainment. He outlined the early competition between X-ray and Cinema as forms of amusement and explained that, at the turn of the 20^th century, both were features of pop-up urban spaces, found mainly at travelling fairs. Alongside ghost shows and mechanised rides, cinema and X-ray evoked awe and astonishment, poised half way between feats of science and enigmatic apparitions. That early film was emerging in these transient spaces, alongside X-ray and ghostly spectacles, goes some way to explaining film’s long fascination with the ghoulish; an obsession which is at the heart of Carnival of Souls. It was therefore an apt choice for a pop-up film showing; the ghosts on screen, as illusionary as the shadows of cinema, were in turn as fleeting as the happening itself.