One Shot in Carlos Reygadas’s Cinema
I'll begin with setting up the image, which is one unbroken shot. I won't link it or post a picture because seeing what I'm writing about will defeat the purpose of the writing — see what I see through words. In Carlos Reygadas’s Japón, a middle-aged man goes to a remote village in the mountains, expressly to kill himself. He ends up staying in a barn on land where a very old woman lives alone. He masturbates in the barn one night. The camera shows the rafters his closed eyes would be pointed to if open and then the screen fades to black. The sound goes out. The shot begins: there is a young woman on a beach with her back to the camera. Late afternoon sun. She walks knee-deep into water and picks out some flotsam. She turns and walks toward the camera position (on the beach), about twenty paces away, and then stops to look into it, the top of her forehead to her shoulders the size of the frame. She stares into it (us), her facial expressions changing.
We’ve seen this shot before — there are countless ones like this in the last twenty-five years of cinema, with their strain of the sentimental in our fin de siècle and end times–enhanced lives. Many are captured by the ubiquitous steadicam, but it really stretches back to painting, portraiture, a rendering in the olden sense, though cinema’s temporality and its language (Cinema, Deleuze says, is blocks of movement-time that tell stories) ingrain it with rougher notions and psychological implications, appendages of our Freudian-skewed awarenesses. This type of shot means less when we see it now, mainly because the camera is often not still, but steadicaming over and around the woman (or man) like a whirligig, selling the audience on the idea of rapture or lost love or innocence. But this type of “image is all” coverage has little purchase on something that can never be forced and is missing in so many — the ambiguity of feelings, the shadings of amour. In Reygadas, there is no sentimentality, primarily because there is no sound — no mood music to rob the perceiver and possible preserver of the art from making their own experience out of it. Seemingly, the woman is from the main character’s past. She slowly walks into close-up with a curious look at him — a recognition of all their time together and all time, even the time after the time of her youth — a sort of Mona Lisa– type time lapse of how she looked then, before a souring and a turning away, all in six seconds. It’s the look, the regarding, a gaze filled with shards of ruination that summons me — she goes on to kiss the very old woman, who is suddenly in the frame, but this gives the dream or fantasia a logic, for the man will soon ask that older woman to have sex with him. But that is in another season of the work.
For me, her fractaled gaze is the film, the entire object (it’s what escapes me, so I take it with me) — a look impossible to conjure and more impossible to duplicate for a second take and be recorded to be seen by a figure probably in the low millions, if that. It is that isolation in time of eyes on eyes that haunts and blends with the present. Even if she was not the woman or the wife he is seemingly running away from, she was important enough to fill his mind — to be one of the moments remembered when close to death: never the orgasm, a dime a dozen, but the shifting and stiffening of a gaze from blue to gray.
Still from Carlos Reygadas’s Japón (2002).
The film will eventually come to a tragic end, but not the one that is expected — and there are elements of the climax that are willed, concurring with Reygadas’s “that horrible and very American idea from Hollywood that a good story makes a good film” (rather than “What’s important is the vision and how one feels things”) more a Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier) stratagem, a film that I once thought profound, but whose stratagems now leave me cold. I refuse to go extra-cinematic and look to see if the woman was Reygadas’s girlfriend or maybe his future wife, this will only drain the mystery of something vital and synthesized — that is, I must color it with my history, blend it with certain essences no one else contains, as this will garner my soul much more uncanny reverberations.
Other people’s art haunts our hours. Advice from our best friend can be quickly disregarded, but a well-hewn parable, a parabolic image can disorient and chip away at something we’ve been meaning to do, as well as something that might never have occurred to us. The woman’s gaze — concrete, but also caddy — a troglodytic benediction saying, Once, I knew you… and now I leave you — has tracings of others I have received over the years, only from women I have known in the carnal sense, and a few of the women delivered such a look unto me in just such pristine, natural settings, as when the blue above sea saintly blooms around one’s head, which is to say, on trips.
Also, underwriting the gaze is Walter Pater on the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda): “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her…” When I place these words over that cinematic image in a transparency, along with others, by Proust, Wallace Stevens, and Louise Glück, the tenor gets changed, light creeping in and out of cloud. Their words bring out different colorations in the woman’s look — Stevens: “But a woman in threadless gold / Burns us with brushings of her dress / And a dissociated abundance of being, / More definite for what she is —” Glück: “…I think / you are a small irritating purple thing / and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth / because you are all that’s wrong with my life / and I need you and I claim you.” I’m seeing the film in triplicate—in three triplicates. The words purl, some with voice and some not, and I transfer to moments when I read these works and the swirling emotions they conjured: a golden world, a lost friend, fear, being stuck in a small town, wanting to get into the artistic world that lived in our world (though I didn’t know that), until a stopgap rises and they pile up like flotsam fence-caught.
I break free from these words only to find the woman on Reygadas’s beach is not only censuring me in my past, but my present. She gives the gaze that an unhappy spouse often hides, because the parties aren’t looking much at one another anymore — it’s the look one will see on the day when the other finally walks away. So, when broken down, the entire shot, all fifty-nine seconds of it, is the entire length of a life, a relationship: a viewpoint, gaze, distance, closing-in, electricity, gaze, her looming cresting into scorn, memory of hurt, anger, leaving, moving on — from its inception to when the older woman makes her appearance in the frame.
Ten years ago, smoldering in the debauched NYC dating scene, I wouldn’t have a kernel of these assemblies of thought in relation to the gazing, not even five years ago, before a child. “She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand; / She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin” — it’s easy to fetch those Theodore Roethke words out of my portable glade. I’ve been playing them into my life situation, whatever it may be, for years, though ill-understanding their import. So I wanted to find a teacher to share more languorous hours with me. And I did. And I read Roethke’s poem to her, my voice filling her eyes on some random weekday afternoon — Octobral light, rust-colored leaves, acorns hitting the ground — when I would normally have been in something approximating college, fuming on the quad. And she was older, her eyes felicitous but spotted with lusters and gradations the young cannot fathom — heartbreak, remorse, all her greens graying. She knew the poem regardless of years. And she might have known right then we would come to nothing.
Before Japón, I hadn’t thought of that day in many years. Those moments, that sharing, the poem, it’s all probably still less important than I think and these images drift in and away while the current blaze of autumn is dulled and dampened by the time of collapse. Reygadas’s woman on the beach might not even stand for the memory of the man, but a translucency of what cannot be regained. Hans Blumenberg called out “the essential ambiguity of the aesthetic object,” wherein works are not invented, but found, and how “they are just as foreign or familiar to the subject of the reader as to that of the author.” I found my history in Japón, in all its eddies and distortions, its freeze-frames and fast-forwarding. The encounter has estranged me from who I thought I was — my heart has leapt onto a different cloud. And now I’ve written down my account of it, how it tattered and sustained me for days, as all great art does.
Still from Carlos Reygadas’s Japón (2002).
