The Urgent Cinema of Autobiography

7/30/2019 The Urgent Cinema of Autobiography

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Robbie Bruens

March 15, 2011

Film 151 / Brizuela

Option 2

The Urgent Cinema of Autobiography

Glauber Rocha and Nicholas Ray each made a movie that one could describe as

being part of the urgent cinema of autobiography. For Glauber, the urgency was political

that on reflection looks personal. For Ray, the urgency was personal that on reflection

seems surprisingly political. Neither movie resembles the autobiography as it exists as a

literary genre. Land in Anguish and Lightning Over Waterare not memoirs, though they

both incorporate memory into their stylistic vocabularies. Of course, it should come as

no surprise that Glauber would not rely on an old literary form for his self-consciously

revolutionary cinema of the future. Nor would Godard, who could not even imagine

Ray doing anything but make films, find it shocking that Ray would eschew a familiar

literary genre in telling his own story as a motion picture. More interestingly, both

utilize what Pasolini called the free indirect subjective in their respective narratological

approaches to telling the stories of their own lives, loosely fictionalized. By conflating

subjective and objective points-of-view between each movies authors and characters,

Ray and Glauber establish a continual narrative instability that supports the urgency of

their self-reflective explorations.

Land in Anguish and Lightning Over Wateruse a cinematic technique I will call the

interchange. The interchange is a moment in a movie where perspective is suddenly

blurred to allow for a move from one point-of-view to another. These moments of


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interchange will illuminate how each director uses the free indirect subjective to

complicate the narratives of the urgent cinema of autobiography.

Land in Anguish derives its urgency from the significance of the historical

moment in which it was produced. It was made in response to the military coup in Brazil

during the mid-1960s. The protagonist of the movie, Paulo, is a poet, journalist and

politico. As a politicized artist in the midst of military coup, Paulo is in a similar position

to that of Glauber during the coup. Thus he functions as a kind of stand-in for Glauber. In

this way the movie operates as a fictionalized memoir as well as a allegorical

commentary on the politics of the time.

Land in Anguish interchanges the perspectives of Paulo with two politicians:

Viera the populist and Porfirio Diaz the reactionary. Each interchange suggests the split

conscience of Paulo. He is unsure of his loyalties, of who to trust, of the ability of anyone

in the political world to be free of both corruption and the stink of failure. By examining

how Glauber interchanges the perspective of Paulo and Diaz, one can see a way that

Glauber subverts the traditional expectations of the protagonist/antagonist relationship.

Note that Paulo actually resembles a younger Porfirio Diaz in the movie. In an

early scene, Glauber shoots Paulo enviously looking over at Diaz dancing with the

beautiful Silvia as Paulo describes his memory of the time in voiceover. Paulo calls the

election of Diaz a happy day but also refers to the time as empty, useless days. Thus

his memory is divided in sympathy. Glauber cuts between long shots of Diaz taken from

the balcony and tighter shots taken from the floor where Diaz is actually dancing in

order to visualize these shifts in distance between the points-of-view of Paulo and Diaz.


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Thus we see Paulo remember the day as if he were Diaz himself but also remember the

day as a Diaz detractor.

The perspectives of Paulo and Diaz are blurred once again in a scene much later

in the movie. After Paulos theatrical beating of Diaz set to sounds of gunfire and

operatic war music, we see a shot of Diaz hunched over and crying followed by a match

cut to a shot of Paulo also hunched over and crying before proclaiming Viera as the

candidate of the people. Paulo has spurned the reactionary and rained blows down upon

the same but alas ! he only recapitulates his loyalties for the populist demagogue Viera.

Glauber captures the futile tragedy of this act of misplaced faith by interchanging the

broken, defeated perspective of Diaz for that of Paulo who in his prideful exclamation of

Viera is equally broken and defeated. Glaubers memoir fractures along contours of

disillusionment, disappointment, entranced anguish for these are the emotional

realities of Latin American politics in Glaubers view.

Fractured emotional realities abound in Lightning Over Water, a staggeringly self-

reflexive documentary made by Wim Wonders and Nicholas Ray about the relationship

between Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray and how it was strained by making a

staggeringly self-reflexive documentary about how Nicholas Ray was slowly losing his

battle with lung cancer. Rays autobiographical impulse becomes increasingly urgent as

his condition worsens and it becomes clear he will die before the movie is complete.

Lightning Over Wateris more naked than Land in Anguish in how it toys with

perspective by explicitly including cameras and other filmmaking equipment as both the

props and tools of perspective shifting. The free indirect subjective in this case dispenses

with any notion of objectivity altogether. The audience either sees the world through the


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crisp precision of Wenders and his passionate crew or through the grainy experiments

of the wily one-eyed outsiders of Ray and his friend Tom Farrell. Both teams that

provide the entry point for the audience to see the documentary are also subjects of the

documentary itself. Therefore, subjectivity is total.

The movie is a kind of deconstruction of the artifice of filmmaking itself.

Interchanges often hinge as much around the cameras themselves as the shots the

cameras actually take. Early on in the movie, as Ray rides in a limo to make a speech at

Vasser, there are a series of interchanges between Wenders camera and Farrells.

Wenders provides the wider shots thatinclude both Ray and his wife as well as Tom

Farrell shooting his own footage of the two of them on Super 8. These shots seem to

show Ray and his wife as performers for Farrell. Farrells own shots are a more intimate

close up on Ray, and they feel less staged. Ray actually asks Farrell to stop shooting. This

scene exemplifies how the free indirect subjective is most prominently used in Lightning

Over Water.

The prominence ofRays experimental movie We Cant Go Home Again in the

movie adds a layer of self-reflexivity because Ray and Wenders essentially embedded an

autobiographical film inside another autobiographical film. In the scene where Ray,

Wenders and their friends and collaborators screen We Cant Go Home Again, there is a

sense of interchange even without the gimmick of cameras filming other cameras. What

we are watching is a group of people watching a highly experimental work in progress

feature that deals with Nicholas Rays life and experiences and this same group of people

as they watch are engaged in creating a completely different experimental work in

progress feature that deals with Nicholas Rays life and experiences. The images of We


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Cant Go Home Again are framed by the screen it is projected upon which is framed by

Rays own home which is framed by the shot used in the film we are actually watching.

This interchange is endlessly fractured, almost recursively, as in a mirror reflected in a

mirror.

As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Ray has taken on for himself the

male lead role he so often made movies about: a man with a fatal flaw who needs

someone with greater moral strength to try to save him. Instead of a romantic female

lead for this savior role, we get Wim Wenders. Wenders explains that he wants to stop

making the movie in order to comfort Ray in his final months alive, but he realizes that

to stop making the movie would truly break Rays heart. Wenders curious position is

most clear near the end of the movie. There is an interchange from a relatively objective

shot of some combination of performance and genuine intimacy between Ray and his

daughter to a close up of Wenders watching the scene play out. At first, it seems the

perspective simply shifted to Wenders but then Wenders opens his mouth slightly just

as Rays daughter responds to something Ray said. And so it is as if Wenders speaks with

the voice of girl at the end of the tragic romance when the male lead is doomed to die

before his time.

Glauber Rocha and Nicholas Ray both constructed the urgent cinema of

autobiography in a fashion that is at once intimate and distant. The disjointed

oscillations between warmth and alienation can have a discomfiting and befuddling

effect on the viewer, but this is necessary in order to truly express the loss of illusions

that both Glauber and Ray seemed to experience, the former at the end of a political

epoch and the latter at the end of his own life.

Documents

The Urgent Cinema of Autobiography