The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: A Filmmaking of Philosophy 9781501316111, 9781501316142, 9781501316135

Citation preview

The Films of Lenny Abrahamson

The Films of Lenny Abrahamson A Filmmaking of Philosophy Barry Monahan

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway , New York , NY 10018 , USA 50 Bedford Square , London , WC1B 3DP , UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Barry Monahan, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image : Film, Room (2016) © Element Pictures, Collection Christophel / ArenaPal All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Monahan, Barry, author. Title: The films of Lenny Abrahamson : a filmmaking of philosophy / Barry Monahan. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and filmography. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030783| ISBN 9781501316111 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501316135 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501316128 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Abrahamson, Lenny--Criticism and interpretation. | Motion picture producers and directors--Ireland. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.A263 M66 2018 | DDC 791.4302/33092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030783 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1611-1 PB: 978-1-5013-6223-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1613-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-1612-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Ciara and Clara: from whom I learn so much every day.

CONTENTS

List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 Five contextual categories: Classifying cinema in Ireland 4 Four cinematic categories: The national and beyond 9

1 3 Joes

15

The young filmmaker and the first short: Mendel 15 A new context for Irish film production and 3 Joes 17 Inner speech and cinema: What 3 Joes does not say 28

2 Adam & Paul

41

Celtic Tiger cinema: From short films to features 41 Structuring absences: Aesthetic sculpting 47 Dual protagonists and the cyclical narrative 53 A dystopian urban fairy tale 62

3 Garage

75

A second collaboration with Mark O’Halloran 75 Aesthetic minimalism of action and dialogue 78 A phenomenological consideration of the film 90 Self-enlightenment and Josie’s epiphany 101

4 What Richard Did

109

Characters in context 109 Richard, narrative and Sartre’s ‘bad faith’ 115 Withholding expressionism: Richard separated from narrative space 128

viii

CONTENTS

5 Frank

139

Inside the head of the character in early cinema 139 The Frank behind the head inside the head 142 The ideas behind the face inside the face 147 Idealism and materialism in Frank 151 Phenomenology and photogénie: Frank’s head as seeing and seen 156 Barthes and Deleuze: The framed face as approach to cinema 159 Concrete becoming abstract: Comedy and music in Frank 164

6 Room

173

Contexts for the novel and its adaptation 173 Room’s innocent first-person narrator 180 Levels of reality in Room: Aristotle’s cave and Baudrillard’s Simulacra 183 Jack’s language as mediating and constituting reality 189

7 Interview with Lenny Abrahamson (Dublin, 1 June 2014) Bibliography 210 Audio-Visual and Internet Sources 222 Filmography 223 Index 226

197

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1

Power dynamics played out at the breakfast table in 3 Joes. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Lenny Abrahamson 36

1.2

Reconciliation in the suburban garden in 3 Joes. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Lenny Abrahamson 40

2.1

Rack focus from the chimneys to the characters establishes fatalistic narrative line. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 57

2.2

Adam and Paul’s cartoon counterparts on Janine’s television. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 68

2.3

The destructive cycle and a new generation. The boys encountered outside the flats at the beginning of Adam & Paul reappear later in the film. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 71

2.4

The narrative cycle and place. Images copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 72

2.5

The narrative cycle and place. Images copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 72

2.6

Paul realizes that Adam is dead. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 73

2.7

Paul immobile and behind the narrative. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 73

3.1

Finding Josie positioned in the natural landscape. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 89

x

LIST OF FIGURES

3.2

Comedy through useless action. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 92

3.3

Mirroring action, we and the camera are always ahead of Josie. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 100

3.4

Mirroring action, we and the camera are always ahead of Josie. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 100

3.5

Another example of futile action for comedic purposes. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 101

3.6

The framing of Josie’s motionless hands. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 104

4.1

Following Richard as protagonist leading the narrative. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 119

4.2

Richard’s two point of view shots of Lara. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 122

4.3

Richard’s two point of view shots of Lara. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 122

4.4

The bench scene from Adam & Paul. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 123

4.5

The bench scene from Garage. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 123

4.6

The bench scene from What Richard Did. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 124

4.7

Contrasting demeanour during the first and later driving scenes. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 134

LIST OF FIGURES

xi

4.8

Contrasting demeanour during the first and later driving scenes. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 134

4.9

Richard’s horrible screaming. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 137

4.10

Simultaneous closure and withholding resolution. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 137

5.1

Jon’s first contact with Frank; notably on stage marking the performative nature of their relationship. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 142

5.2

Jon arrives at Frank’s parents’ home. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 143

5.3

Frank’s final improvised performance, now unmasked. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 145

5.4

On-screen messages as surface and superficial communication. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 155

5.5

On-screen messages as surface and superficial communication. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 155

5.6

Frank is simultaneously revealed and disappears. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 162

6.1

Compressed domestic space in Room. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 179

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

6.2

Jack’s point of view maintained tonally. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 181

6.3

Jack’s shadow games. Image © Element Pictures/Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 184

6.4

The television as mediating apparatus. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 186

6.5

A similarly shattered television in Adam & Paul. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film 187

6.6

Ma mediated by television monitor. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 191

6.7

Ma and Jack suspended above the real world as they come to terms with their freedom. Image © Element Pictures/Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures 195

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In 2008, long before this project began, I had the opportunity of meeting Lenny Abrahamson to discuss his first two feature films: Adam & Paul and Garage. I was instantly taken by the passionate way in which he spoke about his philosophy of film and his ideas about cinema. Since then, I have met him several times, and my wonder at his love of ideas and their rendering through the art form to which he is so committed has never waned. For his generosity with his time and thoughts, and constant openness to dialogue about his work, I thank him sincerely. His wife Monika (with supporting cast Max and Nell) has also been inspiring as another dedicated cinephile. For sharing her ideas on film art, I thank her too. I am surrounded by a wonderful group of friends and colleagues at University College Cork (UCC) who have openly shared ideas on Lenny’s films, and on cinema more generally. Some are based in the School of English and some work in Film and Screen Media. Of these, I want to acknowledge Graham Allen, Tom Birkett, Claire Connolly, Val Coogan, Miranda Corcoran, Jennifer Crowley, Alex Davis, Anne Etienne, Anne Fitzgerald, Alan Gibbs, Adam Hanna, Elaine Hurley, Lee Jenkins, Abigail Keating, Heather Laird, Mary Morrissy, James Mulvey, Linda Murphy, Dan O’Connell, Maureen O’Connor, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Christine O’Regan, Aidan Power, Laura Rascaroli, Barry Reilly, Jo Robinson, Ken Rooney, Edel Semple, Eibhear Walshe and Gwenda Young. All have supported me in different ways: recommending useful reading and viewing, and giving technological advice, moral support and encouragement. To all of them, a warm thank you. Beyond UCC, friends in the field of film studies have also been very generous in sharing their ideas. Specifically, I want to mention Ruth Barton, Cormac Deane, Conn Holohan, Martin McLoone, Malachy O’Higgins, Susanna Pellis, Maria Pramaggiore, Rod Stoneman and Tony Tracy. My PhD students have also shared their ideas and passion for learning in many formal and informal discussions: Nicholas O’Riordan, Loretta Goff, Orla Donnelly and Davide Abbatescianni are the future of what promises to be exciting new intellectual and creative interventions into our field. Thanks to them all for insightful and inspiring moments of conversation. Closely connected to Lenny’s work have been his collaborators Stephen Rennicks and Mark O’Halloran, with whom I have had some wonderful

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

discussions about his films. I want to thank them, and Gerry Stembridge, Carmel Winters and all the crew at the Schull Film Festival – big fans of the Abrahamson canon – for all of the ideas that they shared along the way. Thanks are also due to Emer O’Shea and Paula Heffernan at Element Pictures, and to Jonny Speers who facilitated use of stills from the films discussed here. At Bloomsbury Katie Gallof, Susan Krogulsky and Lauren Crisp were incredibly efficient, enthusiastic and supportive guiding lights on the journey: thanks go to them and their wider teams for the constant encouragement in, and management of, my work. My family and close friends have been constantly supportive of, and enthusiastic about, this project at every stage. I want to mention Brian, Sarina, Thomas, Liz and Christophe in this regard. Wonderful and inspiring times were also provided by Kevin, Dolores, Stephen and Suzy, and by my parents Christy and Etta, and my siblings Evelyn and Peter. A big thank you all for your role in getting me through! Finally, and so importantly, I want to thank Ciara and Clara who have been the best inspiration and loving team that I could ever imagine. This modest work is dedicated to them for making me happy and keeping me thinking (not always mutually inclusive dispositions!).

Introduction

We need only take a cursory glance at Lenny Abrahamson’s canon to appreciate how he might be considered one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary filmmakers in Ireland. Although he has directed five feature films to date – perhaps a relatively modest portfolio – the stylistic variety of his work and the range of thematic questions that he has explored have been striking. The number of awards and accolades that his films have attracted across his career has grown exponentially and, to give one recent example of such success, the Internet Movie Database currently lists 103 wins out of 133 nominations for Room (2015). Abrahamson has skilfully shifted gear from independent low-budget productions (Adam & Paul cost less than €500,000 in 2004) to mainstream work (Room cost approximately $13 million), adeptly negotiating different networks of production and distribution on national and international platforms. He has also displayed versatility by working in television: collaborating with Mark O’Halloran to produce the four-part series Prosperity for Element Films in 2007, and directing two episodes of the Fox 21/Groundswell Productions programme Chance in 2016. In 2008, he also created and produced Dublin 26.06.08: A Movie in 4 Days, a feature-length montage of short films based in and set around the city, directed by a number of contributing filmmakers. These facts go some way in indicating the expertise with which Lenny Abrahamson has managed his creative work and offer ample evidence for the kind of multitasking and balancing of artistic and business acumen that are required to succeed in the film industry. His films have inspired this book because of their relentless interrogation of the human condition, and because of the profound and diverse ways in which Abrahamson asks fundamental questions about being human. However, the inspiration for this project did not just come from Abrahamson’s films but also from another aspect of his cinematic contribution that has been informative of how I have approached this work.

2

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

From the earliest stage of his filmmaking, Lenny Abrahamson has been incredibly generous in sharing ideas about his work. This has seen him taking part in dozens of public discussions, interviews and conversations, as well as giving countless hours of his time to broadcast and print journalists. He accepts invitations to appear at film festivals, universities and secondary schools with magnanimous eagerness and answers questions by participants with enthusiasm and a passionate desire to communicate the importance of his medium in contemporary culture. The appearances and contributions that I have seen have encouraged my consideration of his films in three main ways, which I hope to have applied in the formation of this book. First, Abrahamson’s passion for cinema is immediately evident in every part of his discussions. He talks about the medium, and all of his contributions, as a great universal form of expression, informed and enrichened by its history, and by the greatest of the practitioners who have preceded him. He avoids limiting himself to parochial or national identity or political definitions and subject matter, and believes in a capacity for film to transcend its immediate circumstances of production and invite important questions about the human condition. Echoing this line of thinking, I hope to consider his films as creative forces that have not only something to say about our ontological position in the world, but also as they might be used to reflect upon some of the major philosophical questions that theorists have considered since the beginning of analytical writing on film. Rather than force theoretical questions onto the films, as often better suits the analyst than the artist, I am attempting to allow the films’ aesthetics and themes tease ideas from some of the best-established conceptual frameworks, and in some cases to problematize and to give nuance to them. Abrahamson’s work does not offer an explicit philosophy of filmmaking, but as it comes from the mind of a profound and engaging thinker, it may have something to say about reality and the film–reality relationship. Secondly, I have been constantly energized by the skill with which Abrahamson has talked about how his films are working. Typically, he begins with very concrete examples from the works, explaining decisions and aesthetic and narrative choices that he has made. He elaborates these by taking the listeners gradually towards more complex, abstract notions, and does so with a clarity of which any university lecturer would be proud. He speaks lucidly and in a probing way about even very complex philosophical concepts and does not lose his audience in the process. In the pages that follow, I try to accomplish the same achievement. Even when I am introducing some of the more amorphous theoretical notions, I hope to do so by starting from basic points of analysis and then develop these to deeper levels. In this, I hope that those readers who are exploring certain aspects of film theory and analysis for the first time will find my references to the films a useful set of illustrations in elucidating the nebulous conceptual frameworks

INTRODUCTION

3

that I believe are best invoked by the different films. Thirdly, in line with Abrahamson’s ubiquitous citing of key European and independent directors who have inspired him, I will imbricate my consideration of his films with examples from those of the masters whom he has mentioned in so many interviews. The task of locating and referencing all of these instances from his public appearances and discussions would have been an enormous challenge were it not for the serendipitous appearance of an article by Eoin Butler in the Sunday Independent on 11 May 2014. In that piece, titled ‘Frank Talk’, Butler asked the director about, and then listed, Abrahamson’s favourite films. These are given ‘in no particular order’ of preference, but chronologically offered as follows: A Man Escaped (Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé) by Robert Bresson, 1956 The Silence by Ingmar Bergman, 1963 My Childhood by Bill Douglas, 1972 The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser by Werner Herzog, 1974 Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick, 1975 Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by John Cassavetes, 1976 The Match Factory Girl by Aki Kaurismäki, 1990 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu by Cristi Puiu, 2005 I reference these films throughout the book, in a close reading of Abrahamson’s own, and I hope to justify their usefulness in this regard and the practicality of the comparisons for understanding his canon. As a general list, these films and their creators are connected inasmuch as they are productions set outside of the mainstream, Hollywood circuit of production and distribution. They have also received extensive, favourable critical and analytical attention, in line with the aesthetic and formal innovation shown by their directors, both in these films and across some of the most important canons in the history of cinema. That directors and works of such a calibre have inspired a sensitive cinephile like Lenny Abrahamson is no surprise: what I am interested in exploring here are the ways that comparative considerations of these older films with the contemporary works of Abrahamson might shed light on the deeper creative expression of the latter, and usefully open up more theoretical conversations and commentaries in related areas of film studies. Like Abrahamson’s films, those listed above as some of his favourites eschew straightforward generic or stylistic grouping. Rather than letting this become a restricting factor, I hope to turn certain aspects of those films’ aesthetics, thematic interests, characterization and narrative styles towards an understanding of how such categorization actually works. I am also attempting to use this quality to examine Abrahamson’s approach to, and practice in, the cinema art.

4

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The section that follows provides a general framework for developments in Irish cinema that were contemporaneous with the beginnings of Abrahamson’s early career. I propose that these might be useful for readers not familiar with that background. Following this, I set out five categories in which many non-mainstream films have been placed. By offering these two conceptual perimeters, I hope to show how Abrahamson’s films avoid simple classification and may be better understood against and across, rather than merely within, these somewhat limiting geographical and analytical sets.

Five contextual categories: Classifying cinema in Ireland To contextualize the characteristics of Abrahamson’s productions, it is necessary to outline the developments across related filmmaking in Ireland within which his career as director evolved. Where the national film industry and its cinematic themes were often polarized across set questions – representations of national history and contemporary local situations, attempts to facilitate an indigenous aesthetic while mirroring the best of international practices, and addressing Irish audiences with relevant commentary – Abrahamson’s strength lay in his avoidance of simple categorization in relation to local concerns. This approach became a part of his industrial practice in finance and production, and his intellectual creativity. In this way, his work was managed with a keen business acumen that dealt with universal questions which he explored against recognizable indigenous settings and events, rather than by simply examining native questions pertinent only to local situations. Obvious in his early short films Mendel (1987) and 3 Joes (1991), these qualities became formative in the development of thematic concerns, his aesthetic interests and the general management of his later feature film productions from financial and creative perspectives. In many respects, Ireland in the 1980s was the best of decades and the worst of decades for any burgeoning Irish filmmaker, and even a quick look at the period reveals as many paradoxically advantages as it exposes unfavourable developments. After years of campaigning for state support for indigenous filmmaking, activists could finally celebrate the political endorsement of Bord Scannán na hÉireann (the Irish Film Board) in 1980 as some recognition by the political authorities of the cultural importance of native filmmaking. But the notion of a state recognized, valued and supported cinematic culture was in practice riven with paradoxes. In spite of growing affirmation and ultimately statutory support, burgeoning optimism among the filmmaking community was beset with hesitations, uncertainties and numerous circumstantial complications that led to

INTRODUCTION

5

its decline later in the decade. In order to assess the latent ambiguities of governmental attitudes in relation to the purported benefit to the indigenous cinematic culture, there are five key elements that should be considered. For the most part, and in spite of evident problems, these features can be found in the country by the time the Irish Film Board came into functioning existence in 1981. The first of these requirements is the existence of a body of activists, with a coherent political agenda and a corresponding commitment to the development of a film culture. In other historical cases, equivalent cultural groups were often motivated by national political concerns, or by a conscious drive to address a deficit in self-representation on screen. One of the problems faced by any group of Irish filmmakers was that, notwithstanding the relative geographical homogeneity of the Irish state, its small population meant that even with maximum box office turnout for an Irish film, the returns could never provide enough profit to cover costs. The borders of the republic were as clearly established as might ever be contended, and inasmuch as this homogeneity existed, its political independence and jurisdiction ensured the stability of a platform uniformly covered by state policy. This aspect was an essential quality for activists, and its importance has been advanced by Paul Willemen in relation to burgeoning film industries: For the purposes of film culture, specificity is a territorial-institutional matter and coincides with the boundaries of the nation-state: the terrain governed by the writ of a particular government. (1995, 25) As Luisa Rivi has argued in another context, its benefit was qualitative and perceived rather than significant numerically. In the case of Italy, Rivi has noted: ‘The film Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946) attempted to forge an identity for postwar Italy, by coalescing a nation, an “imagined community” around recent constitutive elements – that is, around new myths’ (2007, 4). Rivi is thus optimistic in her affirmation, and she offers supporting evidence that is also significant in the Irish context when she states that it was not important ‘that only about 10 percent of the films produced in Italy at the time were neorealist and they were not very popular; those “happy few” manage to establish the image of a new Italy abroad’ (4). Closer to home, and more recently, the struggles beset by the Irish cinema activists in the 1970s were echoed across the Irish sea where James Park noted that, in spite of creative developments in British cinema in the 1970s, there was little formal support for many filmmakers. Park concentrates on the careers of specific directors noting: Smith and Leigh moved into television drama, Brownlow directed his attention to film history and the restoration of classic silent films, and Douglas eked out a living from unemployment benefit and occasional

6

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

odd jobs. There was a desperate need for new initiatives to create an area of medium-budget production for these directors to move into. (1990, 132) On what Sarah Street has called ‘phase three’ of British cinema from 1966 to 1980, she affirms that there ‘appears to have been a fusion of most previous strands of experimental activity, producing some of the most exciting British cinema by Sally Porter, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Terence Davies, Bill Douglas and Lynne Ramsay’ (2009, 188). The second requirement is the need for official statutory and policybased financial support for indigenous production. After decades of struggling for state-endorsed recognition and the fight for the establishment of such a mechanism, in 1980 the government passed the Irish Film Board Bill. Although it was some time before the board was fully constituted, at least in its first phase three of its required seven members were appointed. However, in spite of a wave of enthusiasm and celebration by campaigning filmmakers, the operations of the Film Board were hindered by internal conflict and division, the most publicly demonstrative of which was the protest reaction by Irish filmmakers to the Board’s having funded Neil Jordan’s first feature Angel (1982) in spite of the fact that he had only filmed a short documentary prior to that and because the amount granted exceeded the maximum allocation allowed by the Board’s policies (see Rockett and Rockett 2003 for a detailed description of this episode). This argument was fed by charges of nepotism against the first Chair of the Board – John Boorman – on whose feature, Excalibur (1981), Jordan’s documentary had been based. Notwithstanding this, later policy developments by the political centre seemed to demonstrate ongoing support for the filmmaking community and, in another demonstrably progressive move, by 1986 the responsibility for the Film Board was transferred from the Department of Industry and Commerce to Taoiseach’s Junior Minister in the Department of Arts and Culture. In the same year, the National Film Institute became the Irish Film Institute and received money from the National Lottery – not directly from state coffers – to establish the Irish Film Centre. By January of 1987, a White Paper document titled ‘Access and Opportunity’ identified two institutions as deserving funding: the Irish Film Board and (through looser taxation) support for the Irish Film Institute’s cultural project, the Irish Film Centre. Disastrously, however, with the national debt spiralling towards £260 billion, in June of 1987, Charles Haughey suspended operations of the Irish Film Board claiming that new tax incentives would facilitate film and that the Board didn’t justify its annual £500,000 cost (Rockett et al., 1988). Even with this setback, however, some writers have found reasons to withhold pessimism. Kevin Rockett pointed to evidence for hope with the introduction of tax incentives for investment on Irish film coming on the back

INTRODUCTION

7

of the government’s suspension of the Film Board in 1987 (1994, 129–130), although the ultimate effects of the move might have been questionable. Martin McLoone was cautious in his later assessment: These incentives did have an impact and the level of international interest in Ireland increased over the next five years. However, as a package, it ditched the indigenous aspect in favour of the commercial, and the independent sector had to wait until the changes of 1993 to see the implementation of a full package of support for both kinds of film activity. (2000, 114) The third element required for the healthy sustained development of an indigenous film culture is technological feasibility. This includes the need for training centres and institutions for the education of young filmmaking enthusiasts and the availability and accessibility of hardware for them. Throughout the 1980s, even as third-level programmes in Drama and Theatre Studies were established in universities, the possibility of studying filmmaking was limited to the Rathmines Institute of Technology and the Dun Laoghaire School of Arts. Philip French foregrounds this requirement in his consideration of national film industries, noting in the broadest sense: ‘A film industry is the totality of resources for the production of theatrical movies – the studios, laboratories and other services, the craft talents from electricians and carpenters to special effects people, editors, cinematographers, sound recordists and so on’ (1994, 35). Even as some celebration of the government’s role in the support and development of an Irish film base was voiced at the beginning of the decade, on 3 April 1982 the already limited available technology and film centres took a hit when it announced the closure of the National Film Studios. In tandem with these elements, a healthy industry also needs a body of engaged, intellectual commentators and critics based in media outlets with backgrounds in journalism and academic research, and observers and analysts on the creative activities of filmmakers. These critics provide an important contribution to the dialectical development of a cinematic culture within which producers and commentators can engage in critical public dialogue, challenging expectations and holding each other accountable to the highest aesthetic, thematic and production standards. In Ireland, these areas of public commentary and criticism were already in place. The specialist magazines Film Base and Film West were well distributed publications by the mid-1980s. They established a forum along with academic commentaries, begun with research by Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, Martin McLoone and John Hill, which culminated with the publication of Cinema and Ireland, in 1987. McLoone would later emphasize the importance of such critical outputs and fora:

8

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The spirit of critical self-reflectiveness is the constant element in all great film movements and national cinemas over the years [and policies] should aim therefore to nourish and promote this spirit, and ensure that specific, critically engaged film cultures continue to flourish parallel to Hollywood. (1994, 171) The paradox inherent in such commentary and accompanying filmed themes is that, in order to establish new discursive frameworks that evade and overcome the limited modes of more conservative and traditional nationalisms, they may often get bound up with the very debates that they seek to transcend. This can mean that ‘cultural self-reflexiveness’ may be as limited or restricted as the earlier cultural nationalism that new commentators and filmmakers seek to deconstruct. This point is made in Ernest Gellner’s definition of the nation and the discursive mechanisms required for its evolution, as he warns that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, although that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures’ (1983, 48). Emphasizing the centrality of critical dialectics in this regard, Philip French notes that a healthy cinema ‘re-creates and examines the past of a culture, reflects the present, argues about the future – it is an art form, a means of expression, a mirror, a source of shared experience’ (1994, 35). The question remained for all of the protagonists in Irish cinema  – both makers and commentators – as to how to walk the line between identifying and representing themes currently relevant to the nation and its citizens in the light of the overwhelming cultural market hegemony of the Hollywood centre and its new-found post-1970s international box office success and dominance, and yet to avoid falling backwards into regressive and limiting thematic questions around definitions of Irishness and Ireland. The fifth piece in the machinery of a native film culture is an indigenous cinema-going audience ready to engage with, and be stimulated, challenged and entertained by ‘local’ productions. Meaghan Morris straddles both when she offers an appraisal of Paul Willemen’s writing on the boundaries between the national and the international, foregrounding how Willemen reminds us that the fiscal, legal, and educational systems put in place by national governments have consequences both for social power relations and the kind of cinema they enable. (1994, 18) Kevin Rockett optimistically finds a way to deconstruct restrictive binaries when he proposes that audiences can be found for even the more political and art house film, and uses box office evidence to support his claim that the notion of

INTRODUCTION

9

the false opposition, ‘commercial’/‘non-commercial’, needs to be challenged also. As was demonstrated by the five-week Dublin run of the supposedly ‘difficult’ and ‘non-commercial’ Anne Devlin in 1984, there is an audience for films which are designated ‘demanding’ or simply ‘different’. (1988, 143) So, in spite of its population size, Rockett is hopeful about the possibility of enough interest for the support of an indigenous Irish cinema and disavows any need, by necessity, to compete directly with the Hollywood product, or in any way use it alone as a barometer of success. And so it happened that all of these elements came into operational existence at one time or another in the 1980s. Notwithstanding the presence of all five – the campaigning practitioners as activists, an apparatus for statesupported funding, training facilities and production hardware, a body of critical commentary, and evidence of a receptive indigenous audience – all were beset by certain tentative paradoxes of an emerging national cinema. The momentum behind the reaction to the first wave of films gathered followers and fostered creative developments in the seven years during the suspension of the Film Board. The work of the next generation of directors would come to fruition post 1993.

Four cinematic categories: The national and beyond Commentary on the critical definition of the works of practitioners within national borders has tended to fall into one of four categories that have political and aesthetic implications for how that cinema is subsequently discussed. These can be identified historically within a broader European context, and for the most part against what has been described as the mainstream Hollywood product. Thomas Elsaesser hints at some of these when he notes that three dominant discourses that have until recently defined European cinema in the academic realm: ‘national cinema’, ‘auteur cinema’, ‘art cinema’. One could call these the paradigms of autonomy: National cinema. (2005, 22–23) In a practical sense, for most peripheral minor national cinemas, these definitions are seen as cultural shields against the threatening dominance of the mainstream product, and their transgressive and liminal qualities are often empowering. Sometimes the vagueness of national definition can align well with such characteristics, as Lance Pettitt has hinted in the Irish

10

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

context when he notes that ‘Ireland’s historical development has provided the country with an indeterminate, in-between character. Its modern and contemporary history is characterised by an uneven process of emergence and self-definition, economically and politically, socially and culturally’ (2000, 2). Brian McIlroy offers a continuation of this line of thinking with a look that considers the recent Irish economic boom: Just as economic historian Marc Levinson (2006) describes the rise of the container concept and its ensuing traffic to pinpoint the beginning of globalization, one can point to cultural transnational flows and genrification in particular, as inclusive structuring processes and knowledge producing systems that reach their potential in the filmic sphere. (2007, 4) It will be useful to consider each of the categories in turn, to appreciate how Abrahamson’s canon fits into and across each in a way that demonstrates the global reach of his nationally situated, but internationally relevant, themes, and the skill with which he came to negotiate market operations and aesthetic possibilities. The first of the group of four are manifesto movements, and they are usually regionally identifiable. Manifesto movements are, for the most part, politically or ideologically (culturally) motivated, and inasmuch as adherents seek to address perceived deficiencies in their contemporary filmmaking contexts, by setting down rules these movements are definitively and actively prescriptive. Some examples include the Surrealist Manifesto, the nouvelle vague, the Oberhausen Manifesto and, more recently, the Dogme95 movement. Similar historical trends, not as obviously expressed as ‘movements’, might include trends in Russian Formalism or Futurism in the 1920s. Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out that in many cases these declarative movements have become associated with later definitions of national cinemas. He gives some historical examples: Most national cinemas are (re-)defined as a consequence of self-declared movements or schools (the ‘new waves’, which in Europe started in Italy with neo-realism of the late 1940s, includes Britain’s kitchen sink films of the 1950s’, the French nouvelle vague and other ‘new’ cinemas throughout the 1960s and early 70s in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic). (2005, 23) In the Irish context, nothing as clearly iterated as an agenda-motivated aesthetic programme or thematic political strategy for the establishment of a manifesto ever transpired, although the group of activists who came to be known as the ‘First Wave’ directors was at the forefront of the move towards Irish cinema in the 1980s.

INTRODUCTION

11

Perhaps what occurred among this hub of activists could be identified as more of a prescriptive cultural activism than a manifesto movement, but the filmmakers’ work had some stylistic qualities that might link it better with the second set. This category is the cultural aesthetic movement. Films in this group are recognized descriptively as they emerge, born from a social and political Zeitgeist, but are always identified by common aesthetic and formal tendencies. These include German Expressionism as it developed between the wars; British ‘kitchen sink’ Neorealism; the cinéma du papa literary cinema as identified in France by 1950s’ critics there; and post-War Italian neorealism. The list might even include other diachronic non-generic sets like the ‘Carry On’ and ‘James Bond’ series in Britain. The early Irish filmmakers created a body of formally innovative and aesthetically influential work and offered a common political and social focus that has been identified by Ruth Barton. In summarizing a consistent thread of tendencies across the works of the first-wave directors, with a focus on thematic commonalities, she has noted: Variously, the works of directors such as Cathal Black, Joe Comerford, Pat Murphy, Thaddeus O’Sullivan and Bob Quinn addressed questions of social exclusion, emigration, religion, nationalism and feminism. Collectively, they sought to establish a new Irish cinematic idiom, to break with the dominant and exogenous tradition of romanticism and to look at Ireland from the inside out, rather than vice versa. (2004, 85) In her close reading, Barton shrewdly identifies an inherent, and perhaps latent, problem of self-identification. That the filmmakers’ intentions have a clear local thematic focus and that academic writing has thus been drawn into some nationally interested debates have been noted by Paul Willemen: Such practices are an acute problem in film studies […] for film theoretical malpractice can be found in the assumed universality of film language. This illusion is promoted to ignore the specific knowledges that may be at work in the text: for instance, shorthand references to the particular, historically accrued modes of making sense (often referred to as ‘cultural traditions’). (1995, 26–27) Mark Betz softens this approach by offering ways of avoiding the reductive categorizations of the ‘national’. Even as he criticizes the economic imperatives behind many (the so-called ‘independent’) festival circuits, he does not deny their potential for transcending national boundaries. He suggests that ‘the ways in which this cinema has been considered in film scholarship tend to mark […] as something different: a particular kind of world cinema tied ineluctably, and often to its critical detriment, to a film festival culture’ (2010, 31–32).

12

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The third category places the film director at the centre of the creative process. It celebrates the director as the author – auteur – and the source of a body of films’ stylistic and thematic coherence. Elsaesser implies the extent to which the ‘auteur’ categorization played an instrumental bridging role in connecting production apparatuses and aesthetic framing of a national cinema with international structures. The analogies in the cultural politics of the cinéma d’auteur between (national) literature and (national) cinema, and the counter-movement of reclaiming for the ‘nation’ the commercial cinema with popular appeal, hopefully help to put in context what was at stake in making auteurism such a persistent criterion for defining European cinema. (2005, 489) In assessing the growth of the auteur’s privilege from its base in Cahiers du Cinéma, James Wierzbicki has suggested the extent to which the movement had political motivation that would connect practice with discourses around both art cinema and minor national cinemas (2012). Elsaesser articulates the same idea in his writing by triangulating the categories of auteur, art house and national cinemas (as an example, see Elsaesser 2005, 23). The fourth and final category here is that of art house cinema. It differs radically from the other types because it is postscriptive and is founded upon distribution expectations and management, and grounded in premiere and then box office results. The ‘art house’ designation (which may have certain commercial viability) refers to the non-mainstream product, and often cashes in on this notion, in an a posteriori way. It can be managed with financial justification, usually arbitrarily as it is connected to notions such as cultural quality, intellectual currency and validity, as well as aesthetic innovation. This mode of marketing determines art house cinema as important and highbrow in what are often perceived as esoteric or inaccessible ways. These films are often less easily accessed, and their currency is linked to this aspect. David Andrews exposes this mode of management of the product with candid scepticism: ‘Art cinema does not, then, rely on the art house per se. Neither does it depend on a particular subgenre or a specific audience. It relies instead on a definite ideological dynamic steeped in omissions and distortions’ (2010, 63). While certain readings of the ‘art house’ label have provoked scepticism, Terry Byrne invites a more broadly encompassing and affirmative take in the context of Irish film, by attempting to relegate the role of budget. Arguing that ‘art cinema is left on the fringes of the financial exchange, whatever the source of funding’, he goes on to note the struggle apparent in Ireland: ‘This is the dilemma faced by those Irish filmmakers who have aspired to a career in the industry (meaning the multinational industry, wherever one may think it is located)’ (1997, 112). Like directors working from beyond any mainstream centre of funding, therefore, it is the Irish filmmakers who

INTRODUCTION

13

successfully negotiate both the financial industrial mechanisms and who produce critically accomplished films, who have found their work placed definitively into one or more of these categories. Unfortunately, it was not within the scope of this project to give consideration to Abrahamson’s television work, but I am hoping that this might be considered with analytical attention elsewhere. This book sets out to argue that Lenny Abrahamson is one of the most interesting contemporary filmmakers to have succeeded in such a negotiation, but whose films cannot be easily defined. With work that defies simple generic or market categorization, that shows a wealth of creative versatility and thematic breadth and that bears a quality consistently celebrated by critics and audiences, Abrahamson has made a huge impact on the landscape of Irish film and raised the bar to all of those creative cinephiles who will follow him.

1 3 Joes

The young filmmaker and the first short: Mendel The circumstances of Lenny Abrahamson’s birth in Dublin on 26 January 1966 to Max and Edna (née Walzman) might not have been striking for a boy who only twenty-five years later would have begun to establish his credentials as one of Ireland’s most interesting internationally recognized filmmakers. With his two older sisters Lynn and Gail, and his younger sibling Emily, from his early years what he saw of cinema was mostly on television, which he remembers watching keenly (‘DP/30 @ TIFF: Room, Lenny Abrahamson, Emma Donoghue’, 2015). Indeed, with both maternal and paternal grandfathers having immigrated to Ireland from Eastern Europe, he was as likely to have been born in Poland or East Poland/West Ukraine and to have been a prominent contributor to the canons of either of those countries. However, by his late teenage years, his attention was drawn towards alternative cinema – first, through a season of art house films shown by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC2) and then by virtue of constant conversations about non-mainstream films with a group of close friends who were dedicated cinephiles. Two of these – Stephen Rennicks and Ed Guiney – would be collaborators with whom Abrahamson would work for over three decades. Abrahamson finished his secondary-level schooling in 1983 and started his third-level studies in October of that year at Trinity College Dublin. Although he began an undergraduate programme in Theoretical Physics, after two years in the area, he took sabbatical leave and then returned to study Mental and Moral Science in the Department of Philosophy, where he remained until 1990. His considerable academic accomplishment there won him a TCD Scholarship, and later led him to complete an MA in Mental and Moral Science; a qualification that earned him a PhD bursary at Stanford University, California. All the while he was drawn towards creative film work during his student years. Unlike the two main third-level film colleges

16

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

in Dublin in the 1980s – the Institute of Technology Rathmines and the Dun Laoghaire School of Arts – there was no practical film studies programme at Trinity at the time. Not fazed by this lack of facilities, he co-founded the Trinity Video Society (also known as the ‘Trinity Video Club’) with Ed Guiney, and with his friend Stephen Rennicks they shot a short film with his maternal grandfather as the subject. Under their surname acronym GRA Productions, this 1987 short film was titled Mendel. Shot on reversal stock which they had acquired as reject film from the national television broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann, the piece was an interview montage of biographical reminiscences by Mendel Walzman. Although Abrahamson was later to comment unfavourably on the quality of the celluloid – noting that one half of the film was tinted with a blue hue and the other too orange – the film was technically competent and innovative in subtle ways. On the most basic level, the twelve-minute film is a talking-head style recording of a series of recollections by Walzman on his time growing up in Poland, his recruitment into the Polish army during the First World War, and then his emigrations to Belgium in the 1920s and ultimately to Ireland where he would settle in a move to evade the rising Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s. In terms of the film’s inventiveness and in some traits that can be seen to resurface in his later features, Mendel shows remarkable maturity for the first-time directors Abrahamson and Rennicks. Its visual restraint displays a confidence and faith in the medium to carry the most moving aspects of the central character’s personal story. It opens with a montage of shots framing its protagonist from different angles, and at varying distances from the camera, so that his face becomes the immediate and clear focus of the piece in a direct way. Not dissimilar from the framing of Anna Karina’s face in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), the opening shots alter successive angles on Mendel’s face as he recounts his personal experience in Poland between the wars. The position that he occupies within the framed space alters less rapidly as the film unfolds, but always does so in respectful observation of the biographical tales that he offers. The film closes with a trucking back from the interview chair on which he sat – finally empty – slowly fading with the seat in a long shot set within a door frame; a stylistic decision that leaves the viewer contemplative of the enormity of the narrated story and allows a gentle winding down of the film marking Walzman’s position liminally as both outsider and insider in the filmed space and, by implication, within and beyond his contemporary Irish society. In a variety of ways, Lenny Abrahamson’s later feature films present similarly marginalized characters. Positioning them on the fringes of mainstream society facilitates his exploration of not only contemporary social and political situations but also more existential questions that transcend their immediate contextual circumstances. Abrahamson’s work thus stands in various ways both inside and beyond the political realities of Ireland and

3 JOES

17

the indigenous cultural and industrial cinematic developments at the time of each film’s production. In terms of personnel, he would continue to work with Guiney and Rennicks on every project, right up to the Academy Awardnominated Room (2015). His first short film gave him important experience – even still as an undergraduate student – in institutional negotiation, which began with discussions with the management of RTÉ in the acquisition of film stock, and would be honed with several years’ work in advertising from the early 1990s. In rendering a personal narrative cinematically, Mendel was a frank outsider story that invited its audience to consider a character with a fascinating background, told in an accessible and subjective way. From an aesthetic perspective, it bore a few elements that would become characteristic of Abrahamson’s feature-length films. He and Rennicks employed a simple, pared back way of shooting that allowed the story to emerge through character, without directing the spectators with cinematic point of view shots. In the film, they allow an unforced connection between the content and its execution; without heavy-handed formalism or gratuitous stylistic decorations, Mendel, like Abrahamson’s later productions, was cinematically candid and unadorned, and showed confidence in the medium to facilitate for the spectators an absolute ‘being with’ the character. In the Irish cinematic context of the 1980s and 1990s, Lenny Abrahamson stood as both insider and outsider, who was simultaneously involved in the burgeoning industry yet all the while critically removed, equally benefiting from contemporary developments but not caught up in activist policy debates.

A new context for Irish film production and 3 Joes The greater part of Abrahamson’s success was due to how it refuted simple categorization along lines of national or international cinema. His work accomplished an address to locally recognizable settings, but within a framework of stylistic inheritance of global cinema with transnational financing, positive critical reception and recognition, and distribution. In the first wave of Irish productions, marginalized, disenfranchised and disadvantaged social outcasts were identified as groups somehow relegated socially because of their position within an inflexible nationalist cultural and political hegemony, and rigorously confined by its social consequences (economic, welfare, educational and the ideological stronghold of the country’s religious institutions). The focus of the first-wave filmmakers in this regard was manifest in their narratives of exclusion, and the formal configurations of their films. Especially true to this were films such as Reefer and the Model (Comerford, 1987), Exposure (Hickey, 1978), Criminal Conversation (Hickey, 1980), Our Boys (Black, 1981), Pigs (Black, 1984),

18

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Down the Corner (Comerford, 1977), Traveller (Comerford, 1981) and Eat the Peach (Ormrod, 1986). Also contemporaneous with these formally innovative films were others that set protagonists in conflict with the constraints of the narrative – as objective correlative of their social circumstances – and allowed tensions to be presented through the more complex formal and aesthetic arrangements of the films. Examples of this type are Pat Murphy’s Anne Devlin (1984) and Maeve (1983), and Bob Quinn’s Lament for Art O’Leary (1975) and Budawanny (1987). All of these films were concerned with national narratives or an address to earlier depictions of Ireland by US and UK filmmakers. While Abrahamson is consistently interested in representing similarly socially marginalized characters, he is not motivated first and foremost by local questions, and works at one remove from parochial situations in favour of presenting universal themes. Unlike many of the Irish filmmakers who made their feature débuts in the mid-1990s, Abrahamson was not educated by any of the first-wave directors and had no formal institutional training in filmmaking. He was not bound by the same discourses that concerned these earlier directors, nor by the need for inspirational revolt – formally and aesthetically – which motivated many of their students in the 1990s. His focus was both national and international, being neither bound nor oppressed by the discourses of a limited national/international binary that many either endorsed or rejected. He denied any arbitrary separation of commercial success and aesthetic and philosophical rigour in his films. This germinal notion is of critical importance in our consideration of even his first short film. Any grounding of his films within a limited Irish context or reading of his themes and characterization as foremost ‘Irish’ is something to which Abrahamson does not relate. In a 2008 interview with Conn Holohan, Abrahamson rejected the possibility of ambiguity about any national focus in his work by stating: ‘Irish in a broader sense, in terms of some programmatic idea or thematic idea of a national cinema, I don’t understand that’ (2008, 164). The serendipitous coincidence of the release of Educating Rita in Irish cinemas on Friday 7 October 1983, shortly after Abrahamson had enrolled at Trinity College Dublin, played an unexpected role in the first steps of his career. The film was an adaptation of Willie Russell’s play by British director Lewis Gilbert, and because some of the film was shot on location on the campus and in the buildings of Trinity College, the university was offered remuneration that was used to set up the Trinity Visual Arts Fund, also known as the ‘Fund for the Visual and Performing Arts’. The new resource made money available to students who were interested in developing film projects while attending the university. In the final year of their study, Abrahamson, Rennicks and Guiney applied to the fund committee for financial support to make their first semi-professional short film. Their application was successful

3 JOES

19

and the trio received £2,000, which they augmented by fund-raising and borrowing. 3 Joes was completed with technical help from friends who had been studying film at Rathmines. A number of these crew members would continue to work in the film industry and related areas. John Moore, who was its sound editor, went on to direct the Hollywood blockbusters Behind Enemy Lines (2001), The Omen (2006) and A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). Assistant Camera Operator, P. J. Dillon, subsequently had a successful career as director of photography on Kings and 32A (both 2007), Zulu 9 (2001), as well as the television series Vikings (2013–present) and Game of Thrones (2011–present). Hugh Linehan, who was the film’s First Assistant Director, later became the culture editor of the Irish Times. The film also starred Gary Cooke, Mikel Murfi and Dominic West, all of whom followed the venture with hugely successful careers in theatre, television and film. By the time Abrahamson had begun doctoral research at Stanford University, the short film was already running the festival circuit to great acclaim. While in California, Abrahamson received news from back home that 3 Joes had won the Best European Short Film at the Cork Film Festival (1991), and the Galway Film Fleadh Audience Selection Award in the same year. It would go on to win the Organisers’ Award at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (1992). Abrahamson would later discuss how with the film he had hoped to disregard the typical concerns of films made in Ireland at the time. He expressed this in interview: ‘I couldn’t wait for Irish people to see it because it was such a finger up to what was going on in Irish cinema, which was this really earnest, meant, terrible socially aware cinema’ (Holohan 2008, 164). There is a notable difference between this approach and sentiment, in breaking away from his precursors’ cinema, and their philosophy which, by trying to deconstruct the shibboleths of cultural nationalism, frequently remained all the more shackled to them. The respect for a new cinematic simplicity, with a verbal and visual silence moving from dense and complicated classical cinematic language, was also very much a part of the desires of young French filmmakers in the 1950s’, when the nouvelle vague broke with the traditional cinéma du papa. Dudley Andrew summarized François Truffaut’s aesthetic in that auteur’s rejection of the earlier, more decorated style. He quotes Truffaut’s critique of contemporaries using ‘“scholarly framing, complicated lighting effects, polished photography,” and countless other correct formulas which make the sets and costumes “just so,” and allow Frenchmen to feel both comfortable with, and proud of, their literary classics’ (2011, 202). Exactly the same rejection of an earlier Italian generation’s cinematic and literary output was evident in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose realist and pared back approach bares many similarities to that of Abrahamson. Maurizio Viano summed up Pasolini’s revolt in this way:

20

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

First, Pasolini’s decision to make films originally antagonized the Italian literary establishment and, in a sense, Italian culture tout court. Second, he was part of the cinema d’autore movement, which meant that his cinema, by definition, followed in neorealist, antispectacular steps. And third, the cultural industry looked at him with political expectations. Once inside the film industry as a director, Pasolini occupied a position of his own which in a way reflected these three factors. (1993, 52) All of these qualities – avoidance of verbal intricacy in dialogue, an antispectacular aesthetic and stylistic influences from international directors – can be found in Abrahamson’s early short film. 3 Joes was written with Michael West, who would later collaborate on a majority of Annie Ryan’s Corn Exchange Theatre Company productions. Established in 1995, the Corn Exchange group devised ensemble pieces characterized by a Commedia dell’arte style often infused with Beckettian themes of absurdity, the banality of daily existence and exaggerated expressionistic movement and choreography. Even though 3 Joes is not as stylistically decorative as the kind of productions that West would subsequently produce on stage, it does bear similarities to them in some of its Beckettian simplicity, its situations, events and backdrops, and in a slightly cartoonish, wry humour of performance and characters’ behaviour. The film presents an average morning in the life of three male characters who cohabit a suburban house in an unspecified Irish city. As their morning unfolds, the characters emerge from the uniformity of their eponymous positions – all identified as ‘Joe’, but never diegetically named – and in line with the actions and activities that they perform and through which they interact: credited with the designations ‘Smoker’, ‘Washer’ and ‘Sleeper’. At first, they are even stripped of clothing and of props that might otherwise provide shorthand information that might guide the spectator in interpreting them. We discover the three characters raw and without backstories and experience them as they are presented in their white-walled space. Their personalities and relationships unfold not because of what they say, think or believe on some existential level, but by what they do and how they interact; a set of connections for the most part presented in silence. It is hard not to find Beckettian undertones in the banality of the action, the repetitive diurnal activities of waking, working at menial tasks, and the lazy meandering through domestic routines, which the three Joe characters undertake. Around the time of the film’s production, Abrahamson had seen Jim Jarmusch’s feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and had been taken with its austere aesthetic, beautifully paced editing and slow burning characterization and narration. Several of Jarmusch’s stylistic influences are evident in 3 Joes, employed by the Irish director both in homage to the American’s film and also out of a fascination with how the medium could work when trusted with an enriching simplicity of capturing the world with

3 JOES

21

observational stillness. Foremost in Abrahamson’s endeavour was his desire to place characters in uncomplicated circumstances, resisting dialogue and revealed in their situation as if accidentally discovered. He noted his penchant for such cinematic silence when he invoked his reaction to the Jarmusch film: ‘I’d watched Stranger than Paradise and I thought, I love these black and white scenes where three people sit at a table for 10 minutes and don’t say anything’ (Holohan 2008, 164). This narrative simplicity is a useful component of the medium that was identified by Andrew Klevan in his book Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. There he noted: Films allow extraordinarily refined methods of narration, ironically often overlooked precisely because of the roots of that refinement: the medium’s direct and immediate manner of communication. It is a fascinating paradox that the possibility of subtlety in film’s authorial narration depends on embracing the medium’s blatancy. (2000, 60) This quality was achieved by careful and meticulous planning through improvisation techniques that paradoxically had as their ultimate objective, their own effacement. By rehearsing characters’ interactions in the minutest details, performers could sustain narrative action and achieve the desired effects through spontaneous, innovative acting. The method was constantly used by another of Abrahamson’s favourite independent directors, John Cassavetes, about whose modus operandi Robert Kolker explained: He takes a direction away from the tidily plotted narrative of heroic endeavor and melodramatic longings, so much the core of American film, toward a more loosely observed structure in which the director, his players, and his mise-en-scène create a process where the telling of a story becomes subordinate to the moment-to-moment insights into character and situation. (2000, 19) This approach, which Abrahamson used in the planning of action and interaction in 3 Joes, resulted in a style of performance that would continue in all of his feature-length productions. Like Cassavetes, he sacrificed ‘consistent and planned narrative development to microscopic observation of his characters’ attempts to articulate their despair’ (Kolker 2000, 19). Geoffrey Nowell-Smith connects this method of direction with a broader cinéma-vérité approach that also informs Abrahamson’s style, finding in similar directors that certain ‘[s]pontaneity and improvisation were the keynote, with frequent recourse to cinéma-vérité techniques’ (1997, 541). On the precise detail of its execution, Kolker has outlined in some detailed how improvisation ‘offers an effect of immediacy and spontaneity but is in fact created with craft and planning; the demands of shooting are too precise to allow for many changes and surprises when the camera is running’ (2000, 192).

22

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The enactment of spontaneity that ensues in 3 Joes provides the comedy in a number of instances. As is often the case in Buster Keaton’s films, it is the fact that actions are too perfectly timed and mechanically managed in their cause and effect that creates the comical results. What is important about this meticulously rehearsed improvisation is that once details are presented visually, their intricacies can only be ineffectually described in language. This works here in a general way when scenes are presented in a three shot of the Joes at the breakfast table, silently going about their morning ritual. None of these is deliberately or visibly ‘ostentatious’, but are all comprehensible because of the obvious meaning contained in every glance, gesture and side smirk. An instrumental aspect of Abrahamson’s study of human interactions is the way in which he separates them from their environment in an effort to purify them of social concerns and real-world politics. This allows us to observe them uniquely through all of their basic human endeavours, desires and needs. The Joes’s space is established visually apart from the external world by tracking shots that seamlessly penetrate the borders of the neighbouring gardens and find them in their own secluded and distinct location. As with Stephen Rennicks’s music for Abrahamson’s later feature films, the soundtrack of 3 Joes eschews identifiable national rhythms and tonal qualities, but is underscored with an African or Caribbean percussion. This contributes to the physical and geographical separation of the characters who are allowed to negotiate their own private space unencumbered by the political and social realities of the immediate world beyond the four walls of their house and garden. Abrahamson finds cinematic potential in designs and structures that are non-mainstream. In accordance with Aristotle’s guidelines for the ideal tragic drama as detailed in his Poetics, mainstream cinema frequently places the narrative determination on plot, during which action informs and motivates the story, and characters become defined in relation to this; by virtue of what they do or fail to do, reacting with and against the series of events. Having defined ‘plot’ in terms of dramatic action as ‘the construction of the incidents’, Aristotle goes on to clarify that ‘people are of a certain sort according to their characters, but happy or the opposite according to their actions’ (2001, 95). He concludes his point by subordinating speech and dialogue to action, which is all the more profound as exposing true character: [If a poet] puts in sequence speeches full of character, well-composed in diction and reasoning, he will not achieve what was [agreed to be] the function of tragedy; a tragedy that employs these less adequately, but has a plot (i.e. structure of incidents), will achieve it much more. (2001, 96) Andrew Klevan summarizes how David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson find Aristotelian functions in operation in the classical mainstream film when they ‘characterise the classical Hollywood cinema as

3 JOES

23

a style where film technique is subordinate to the construction of the plot’ (2000, 57). For Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, the character occupies a central position and this is facilitated by recourse to plot cause and effect logic: Here in brief is the premise of Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered – i.e., personal or psychological – causality is the armature of the classical story. (1985, 13) Klevan also emphasizes that the aesthetic qualities are ranked in a hierarchical structure by the earlier analysts, but always as subsidiary to the primary drive of establishing characters’ motivations and goals, and their raison d’être: ‘style is something that can be separated from film narrative so that spatial and temporal structures are taken as subordinate to it’ (2000, 57). With a critical approach that is applicable to the characterization and narrative progression in 3 Joes, Stephen Heath proposes that a mere separation, and hierarchical interpretation of the various components of the whole narrative and its effects, is limiting. Stylistic designation of character and narrative should be considered in a more imbricated way because, he claims, ‘what is crucial is that it be given as visible for the narrated and that the spectator be caught up in the play of that process, that the address of the film be clear’ (1993, 82). Contrary to the mainstream predisposition of cinematic narration, much non-mainstream cinema is character-driven. Individuals are defined by virtue of states of mind, belief systems and through discussions that reveal their depth, and from these qualities, narrative situations and plot developments are set to unfold. As is often the case with Abrahamson’s cinematic work, 3 Joes bridges both designations so that characters take action by finding themselves in situations and are defined by reactions to these. Martin McLoone points to how Eoghan Harris has identified what he humorously calls the ‘je pense, je mange’ kind of narration in many of the films of the first-wave generation Irish directors, who favoured character study over plot development (2000, 200). McLoone more favourably offers a number of 1990s Irish films that, like Abrahamson’s work, manage to merge both the plot- and character-driven approaches. He singles out a few and identifies intertextual referencing: ‘Breathnach’s I Went Down shares similarities with the independent American cinema (especially the Coen brothers) and even the so-called Euro-pudding The Disappearance of Finbar is impressive in parts for the way it replays both Jarmusch and Kaurismäki’ (200). Inasmuch as 3 Joes neither fully embraces nor rejects the more rigid Aristotelian principles of dramatic narration whereby plot and event motivate and propel the action, it also eschews this simplistic and reductive binary separation. Abrahamson’s preference to lead off from the

24

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

blank canvas of character, allowing characterization to occur in real time without ostensible plot point intervention, is also evident in the titles of his films, which usually draw attention to the direct focus on individuals or the characters’ situations by naming places – Garage and Room – or the characters themselves – the Joes, Adam, Paul, Frank and Richard, as well as with the four episodes of the television series Prosperity. As an example of this, the characters in 3 Joes do not arrive with stereotypically psychological ‘depth’, but emerge entirely through how they act and react to situations created by one another. The framework of the Joes’s situation is designed both by a comedic tonal quality and by the welltimed gags. In this way, much of the comedy of the piece operates with a recognition of how one possible micro-structure of the narrative – here, the ‘gag’ – works by using a basic set-up/pay off device. In this case, the balance of the set-up is offset, or entirely postponed, so that rather than provoke laughter, it exposes itself in its construction. I have proposed elsewhere that the ‘comical alteration of the cause and effect relationship disturbs linear narrative expectations, but it works by providing clearly defined narrative beats: cueing moments that lead the spectator through the story’ (Monahan 2013, 51). In the film, the snowball effect, a core part of much visual cinematic narrative comedic routines, occurs along the lines prescribed by Henri Bergson in his 1900 publication, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Using as examples of the snowball effect ‘the successively falling line of soldiers, and the house of meticulously built cards’, he explains that they ‘are all different, but they suggest the same abstract vision, that of an effect which grows by arithmetical progression, so that the cause, insignificant at the outset, culminates by a necessary evolution in a result as important as it is unexpected’ (Bergson 1914, Chapter 2, 1.3). In Abrahamson’s short film, one of the earliest examples of comedic distortion occurs in John Moore’s use of sound in an instance that marks the ridiculousness of the distorted logic of the film when Joe Sleeper stands before a mirror regarding his sleepy expression. With a shot that offers what in an Ingmar Bergman film would be a moment of contemplative self-reflection, and thus have the potential to become a seriously introspective beat, the philosophical potential is shattered with the sound of him urinating. The combination of the higher order of intellectual self-awareness and the lower order bodily function is comedic in the way that it sets up an incongruity across expectation. Later, in a two-shot sequence when the Joes sit at the breakfast table, Sleeper reaches to take the teapot, but Washer takes it first and fills his own cup. He then pours tea into Sleeper’s mug provocatively and slowly from a height so that the filling noise is drawn out, ridiculously. He underscores the ludicrousness of the action by playing with the final few dribbles, the last few of which are heard over a single close-up on Sleeper who watches unamused. Sound is important here as it underscores the framing of a character who often looks away from the action, implying a space beyond

3 JOES

25

the claustrophobic one presented. This case of sound design mobilized for comedic effect is reproduced throughout the film at moments that imply consequences of actions that are heard but not shown. For example, early on, the camera frames two of the Joes: Worker doing the laundry, and Smoker sauntering lazily across the garden. The latter kicks what sounds like an unseen jettisoned tin can. The sound of the vessel denotes its emptiness, perhaps echoing the characters’ uneventful morning and the shell of the film’s time that will gradually be filled with nothing. The hollow sound of the can, in a state post-consumption of its contents, is Tati-esque in its incongruous punctuation of the characters’ lethargic inaction. This occurs again later when, in silent attempts to mark political swipes at Joe Sleeper, Joe Smoker ostentatiously, knowingly and provocatively, stirs his cup of tea and crushes spilled sugar onto the table with the base of his cup. Similar to Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, 3 Joes uses a self-conscious telling of bad jokes – again minor narratives within the narrative – that foreground the very construction of plot and the way in which humour is created throughout. As Joe Washer goes along the clothesline hanging sheets, he tells himself two trite jokes, pointing to the passing time banalities with which the film is decorated, and marking the telling of the bad joke as a gag in itself. The role of bad jokes has a direct relation to how the rest of the narrative is working. The Beckettian undertones that can be found in Abrahamson’s absurdity and the existential trivialities that come to the fore in his later feature collaborations with Mark O’Halloran are essential functioning narrative devices in 3 Joes. Like Krapp in Beckett’s play, who casually discards a banana skin, Joe Sleeper and Joe Smoker are unaware of the jokes in which they have been drawn to participate, and the consequential stepping upon and slipping on the empty skin for Krapp has several parallels in Abrahamson’s short film. In one of the earlier scenes, having been woken by his alarm clock, Joe Sleeper chases an annoying fly around his bedroom with a shoe. The fly gag places the film’s comedy within the slapstick mode and indicates a level of self-consciousness on which the film works by declaring its deliberate framing of certain comedic conventions. There is even a sense of the clichéd two-men-on-a-bench comedy routine as Joe Washer sits at the table hidden behind the newspaper that he’s reading: a recognizable set-up that characteristically suggests there will soon be a victim. In the first garden scene, as Washer and Smoker stretch and flick a laundered bed sheet – forcefully done by Joe Washer at one end, and lazily received at the other by Joe Smoker – their activity flicks Smoker’s cigarette from his mouth into a pair of Y-fronts hanging on the washing line. Once again, the joke works because of the predictability of the event, although it also frames the moment as another comical set-up for a later pay off in the film, when the underwear is presented to the naked Joe Sleeper with a hole burned in the crotch. The predictability of the ‘fly’ joke mentioned above has its own pay off when Joe Sleeper ultimately throws his shoe through

26

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

the upstairs window, and we see it landing on the grass outside near the other two. This assists in creating spatial continuity when the connection between the actions is confirmed as a perfect lead-in to the establishment of their relationship. A political game of affiliations begins when he shouts out, ‘Where’s my fucking clothes?’, and the two in the garden react with a slight smile towards each other. At this point, the relationship dynamics of the film’s drama begin. In that instant, it becomes a story about how two of the characters are allied in a series of revenge games – presumably punishing the late-riser for his idleness – perpetuated against the third man. During the breakfast table sequence, the routine of dining together is comical in its rhythmical efficiency and absurd meticulousness. This introduces an idea of routine comedy that is entertaining precisely because of its Beckettian predictability, in much the same way that Krapp’s jettisoning of his banana skin can only and obviously lead to his later slipping on it and falling to the floor. The comedy of the Joes’s interactions is designed around a silent language of gesture that becomes effective because what could have been more succinctly and rapidly resolved in a pithy verbal exchange is extended in games of silence. The language of gesture has been identified as performing significant roles by Anne Rutherford in two filmmakers whom Abrahamson admires. When she analyses the elements of the performances in the films of Terrence Malick, Rutherford finds that silent gestures are an essential component of how the characters manipulate their environments and communicate with each other, but suggests that this in turn has wider ramifications for the narratives and stylistic designs of various films. She notes, ‘Malick seems to work from a […] principle of how to build a scene moment by moment, but this understanding is extended beyond simply the gestures and words of the actors; the actors form only one fragment of the performative dimensions of the scene’ (2011, 28). Rutherford finds similar evidence in the work of John Cassavetes, and quotes Sylvie Pierre and JeanLouis Comolli in that regard. They have written of one of Cassavetes’s films: ‘the characters in Faces […] are not […] put there once and for all, arbitrarily, at the beginning of the film; rather, they define themselves gesture by gesture and word by word as the film proceeds’ (2011, 326). Writing on the films of François Truffaut, Toni Pipolo draws a comparison with Pier Paolo Pasolini that is equally traceable in Abrahamson’s film. He suggests that Truffaut ‘founded his approach on the “natural” language of the world – the language of action, behaviour, corporeality, and written and spoken words – he strove to concentrate the means of the cinema toward a more forceful enunciation of that given language to which we are generally indifferent’ (2010, 12). Abrahamson’s reminding us of this indifference, by forcing us to confront the unuttered layers of meaning behind his characters’ gestures is a core quality of how comedy is created in 3 Joes. In the film, confined gesticulation and slight repetitions of movement creates comedy, and these

3 JOES

27

moments and gags are based on performances of power positioning, and ideas of ‘conflict resolution’. These are also complemented by the absurdity of existence represented here in the effecting of menial tasks with the passage of time; just as Beckett did in an exaggerated way in Act without Words 1 and 2. In all of these cases, characters are by virtue of what they do, and their actions expose and represent what they become, in an Aristotelian way. This mode of comedy generation in the represented interactions of the three Joes accords perfectly with earlier claims by Henri Bergson who wrote that it ‘will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence’ (1914, Chapter 1, 1). Bergson continues with a specific focus on the potency of gesture: INSTEAD OF CONCENTRATING OUR ATTENTION ON ACTIONS, COMEDY DIRECTS IT RATHER TO GESTURES. By GESTURES we here mean the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching. (1914, Chapter 3, 1) Indeed, at times the spectator may feel that for all of its meticulous attention to detail and complex silent interactions, the film is far too slowly paced. The precision of cinematic concentration on the minutiae of the mise en scène and performances – notwithstanding their relative simplicity – creates a type of filmic communication that earlier critics have elsewhere identified and found alienating in even the most celebrated European and independent American directors. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith speaks of varying responses to the films of John Cassavetes whose subtleties eventually allow a magnitude of detail to unfold before the camera. He has noted that ‘Cassavetes’s films have had a mixed critical reception and their unwieldiness has made them hard for the current critical vocabulary to come to terms with’ (1997, 542). Carol Brightman also speaks about the measured pacing of character development in Ingmar Bergman’s films, in one case specifically concentrating on the role of space in its relation to the characterization in The Silence (1963), another favoured by Abrahamson. In that case, the character ‘doesn’t interact; he does not develop in time – but in space. His being expands, gesture by gesture, until by the end he has revealed himself within the configuration of objects (including the human) into which he is thrown’ (1975, 241). This approach towards decelerating the evolution of character, and requiring greater interpretive work by spectators, would be ordinarily unorthodox in a mainstream film. However, it may go some way to explaining how many audiences feel on viewing 3 Joes for the first time; namely that its scenes are excessively long and unnecessary. Abrahamson, himself, later expressed concern over the length of the piece: ‘If I was making 3 Joes now I’d take 10 minutes out of it!’ (Holohan 2008, 164).

28

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The film also bases its comedy on the connections forged between its characters, often made with objects that are used for their cause and effect consequences. The bed sheet is tossed and flicks the cigarette from Joe Smoker’s mouth into a pair of Y-fronts, the clothes pegs are used to hold and dry cigarettes, another bed sheet is used by Joe Sleeper as a toga, and the shoe becomes a weapon and ultimately smashes the window. At the same time, each of these material elements is used to develop the power play and political dynamics between the Joes. A balance is struck as each of the Joes uses objects for abnormal purposes and this creates imbalances of power between the characters. The lethargic Joe Smoker reaps the rewards of Joe Washer’s work – he gains three cigarettes – while Joe Sleeper, as his name might suggest, loses out: his clothes are not available to him, so he is forced to search for something to cover his nudity. The film is punctuated by moments where Joe Washer smiles knowingly to himself as the other two benefit from, or lose out because of, their start on the household chores. As so much of the film is dependent upon non-verbal communication between the characters, legitimate questions might be asked about the extent to which this quality is acting in the service of Abrahamson’s cinematic style, or might be reflective of the kind of culture of quiet that George Steiner asks more generally about a modern era: ‘Are we passing out of an historical era of verbal primacy, out of the classical period of literate expression – into a phase of decayed language, of “post-linguistic” forms and, perhaps, of partial silence?’ (1969, 13). While his rhetorical question points to a movement from verbal expression, the concept of the role of language in intra-character or filmmaker/spectator communication cinematically comes to the fore with this proposal. To a major extent, the idea comes down to inner speech and the notion that even with non-verbal, or silent, communication, linguistic operations and structures unavoidably work in our comprehension of the world.

Inner speech and cinema: What 3 Joes does not say There are two ways in which the concept of inner speech has been invoked in film studies with a view to understanding how meaning is created by filmmakers and received by the viewing spectator. On one level, inner speech is used to explain how basic visual semantics of narrative communicate ideas without requiring audiences’ vocal recognition. A fade to black, for example, connotes a temporal or spatial transition or the conclusion of a sequence or plot segment. A point of view shot using soft focus, on the other hand, is read to represent the blurred vision of a character. Under expected circumstances, neither of these requires a conscious or audibly

3 JOES

29

expressed use of language – either by filmmaker, character or spectator – yet it is accepted that these can only function because of the internal functioning of unexpressed silent language that is unconsciously at play. This reading considers the extent to which we learn the codes and conventions of cinematic narration through our experience of films. There is ample evidence – especially, although not uniquely, in the pioneering days of film – of various techniques for expressing cinematic ideas that have been adopted, adjusted or jettisoned based on whether or not audiences might learn to understand the codes. On the other side of the debate, theorists have proposed that we understand functions of cinematic expression and representations because their semantics or linguistic conventions align with real-life experiences that we have come to recognize innately, and that such conventional strategies of communication do not require the knowledge of any special cinematic codes. So, the first school of thought holds that we understand a cinematic fade to black because we have already learned through film viewing what it means, while the second would argue that it is legible because it corresponds to real-life counterparts such as closing our eyes, falling asleep, passing out or observing nightfall. The key question at the core of both of these approaches is whether subconscious linguistic operations are working (or are indeed necessary) for moments of film comprehension. This relates directly to the contentious idea of pre-linguistic thought, which holds that some of our conceptualization can occur without language. In rejection of this idea is the notion that thinking is dependent upon the workings of language at a subconscious level (even in the case of cinematic observation, as we watch screen representations). In providing a lead into addressing this theoretical area, it is first necessary to clarify that ‘thought’ here goes beyond the cognitive ideas of reflection, consideration, problem solving and determined analysis and delves more deeply into passive notions of seeing, noticing, daydreaming and observation. While the former list of activities appears to involve processes of silent, and ego-centric subconscious ‘speech’ – or, at the very least, linguistic mechanics – it is generally accepted that actions on the latter list also require the functions of language in inner speech. Already, in this designation, two levels of inner speech operation are established: on one level of conscious and deliberate intention, and on another with more preconsciously, less-determined cognitive linguistic ways. While it is worth giving some nuance to this dual-layered structure, by proposing a set of varying depths to the process of inner speech, I want to suggest that the silent representation of the characters’ interactions in 3 Joes performs in ways that evade simplistic description in language. I will propose that the wordless communication between the three men facilitates not only much of the film’s comedy but also that the comedy works to a large degree as a result of our inability to reproduce their actions with simple verbal description, in a

30

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

straightforward way. The ambiguous position of how cinematic actions are presented without the requirement of verbal exchange – a mechanism that is otherwise a necessity in any literary form and most drama – comes from the fact that there is nothing that cannot, ultimately, be verbally described a posteriori. Even with subtle and complex gestures or actions, words can be summoned to describe the facts regardless of the need for longwinded detail. What I hope to suggest is that the greater the labour required to address the gap between the ease of visual presentation and the equivalent description in words, the greater the potential for humour. This has a correlative in other performative acts like mime and music – when a corporeal or musical inflection can provoke laughter without immediate verbal iteration – but also has an equivalent in improvisation on stage and screen. In the film, non-verbal connections between the Joes communicate a changing set of political alliances and affiliations, especially between Joe Smoker and Joe Washer who take sides – without any expressed justification – against Joe Sleeper. Notwithstanding our interpretations, we recognize the game in a fundamental way; not just in spite of the absence of accompanying verbal explanations for the actions but also largely because of it, during which the games of nasty and sneaky retribution become all the more comical. Paul Willemen has addressed the concept of inner speech in a comprehensive way as it works for the cinematic spectator. Ultimately, he refuses to grant a space for any film understanding that works independently of ego-centric, silent internal language. He details the methods by which we read films by giving prominence to the idea of visual metaphors; the most direct way in which on-screen iconography invokes a linguistic counterpart. In a 1975 Screen article, he cites examples where film images – props, actions and characters’ behaviour – bear metaphorical as well as literal meanings for the spectator. Most of these require no linguistic translation or diegetic contextualization and relate to specific languages – English, French or Japanese, for example – and can be understood by participants in the same linguistic group. In a case from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001), a film that post-dates Willemen’s writing, when the eponymous heroine sees her love interest, she literally ‘melts with emotion’. Francophones have a linguistic correlative for this representation with the phrase ‘elle s’est effondrée’ (‘she collapsed with emotion’), and there is a direct connection made between the existing phrase and its metaphorical rendition on screen. Willemen gives nuance to the simplicity of the on-screen and linguistic relation here, by offering further examples in which the association is less clear, and requires the establishment of a narrative context. In cases when objects or actions take on meaning through connotation Willemen prefers to use the term ‘literalisms’. A prop like an apple, a rose or a handkerchief, which is associated with one character, can become romantically charged if it falls into the possession of another who might have an emotional attachment to the original owner. If something should happen to the prop –

3 JOES

31

if it is lost, broken or soiled – a visual shorthand seems to establish an immediate understanding of not only the concrete change to that object but to the emotional state of either or both of the two characters connected with it. Again, in spite of this immediacy of comprehension, Willemen holds that the communication with the spectator is still embedded in linguistic operations through inner speech. Having asserted that ‘film metaphor is entirely dependent on verbal metaphor’, he clarifies that an ‘extremely interesting aspect of this question is that a verbal metaphor per se does not leave the boundaries of purely verbal semantics’ (1975, 30–31). Willemen’s examples of literalisms are based on Boris Eikhenbaum’s Screen essay (from Autumn 1974), and he specifically mentions both the downfall of a character being depicted by the collapse of a statue, or a billiard ball rolling into a pocket, and even cites framing details of high and low camera angles which construct the ideas of ‘looking up on’ or ‘down on’ someone. He explains how, with the case of a lit match, fire or candle (all of which can connote ‘passion’), the cinematic ‘silent’ language always echoes the language spoken by the filmmaker – even though some notions do translate across linguistic geographical borders – and that the director’s literalisms will usually work from his or her own language (Japanese structures, for example, if he or she is Japanese). He notes that ‘this presence of internal speech, tied to a specific verbal language, nevertheless deals a serious blow to any notion of the cinema as some “universal” language. Moreover, internal speech not only brings into play the code of language (langue) but also the mode of speech (parole), including specialised languages, dialects and jargons’ (1975, 68). In the case of Abrahamson’s film, certain caution should be taken in overprescribing visual metaphor or literalisms, where qualities of characterization or mise en scène are communicating on more basic levels than the aesthetic. Although, for example, the three Joe characters may be read as microcosmic representations of social types in their designations as ‘smoker’ (consumer), ‘sleeper’ (idler) and ‘washer’ (worker), and they might also be seen as existing representatives of different stages of human evolution as they appear to be either in the guise of primitive man, semi-nude or wearing a Roman-like toga, neither set is constructed by the filmmaker as metaphor, and so need not be interpreted as such by the spectator. More interesting, perhaps, are the ways in which elements of gestural or improvised performance that are not literalisms, in Willemen’s sense, can be seen to be creating meaning in specific scenes. Questions about the spectators’ interpretation of characters’ knowing side glances or silent nods are not always reducible to descriptions in equivalent ways verbally. When a character slowly and provocatively pours tea from an exaggerated height into the mug of another, or deliberately and unhurriedly crushes sugar on the table with the bottom of the same mug, the precise actions can be verbally described as easily as they appear. However the meaning of, and

32

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

the motivations or intentions behind, such gestures are not so simply drawn in words, even though we come to understand them through operations of inner speech. These actions are clearly not ‘literalisms’ in Willemen’s use of the term, and they require broader understanding of cultural and diegetic contexts that are less directly communicable. There is only preconscious cognitive activity at work during these moments and most of the theoretical writing in the area would conclude that our comprehension of their meaning cannot be removed from the field of verbal activity (albeit ego-centric and silent). The question arising from this is twofold: first, is it possible that at these moments pure perception is coterminous with comprehension so that the latter occurs pre-linguistically, or even without the subconscious mechanisms of language and inner speech? Second, if no pre-linguistic simultaneity of the occurrence of perception and understanding is possible, then how deeply subconscious and immediate is the operation of thinking at this moment? The list of theorists who have historically rejected the first possibility is considerable. Those who have contributed to supporting one side of the debate, arguing that all thinking is done, and all meaning accessed, solely and totally through language, ultimately work from the assumption that language is not a reflective medium for the description of our reality, but is wholly constitutive of it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for one, argued that ‘the limits of language … mean the limits of my world’ (1961, 5.62), and added, ‘what cannot be said cannot have meaning’. Both Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes hold that language doesn’t reflect the world, but constructs it; their positions are summarized by David Clarke when he notes that there is ‘no meaning which is not designated, and the world of signifieds is none other than that of a language’ (1990, 140). Drehli Robnik (2009) also uses cinema as a paradigmatic example of how, even if, or especially if, you take the human factor out of the equation, what is presented (supposedly directly) on the screen can be as constitutive of our understanding of the world as it has been constituted by it. While Roman Jakobson in Questions de poétique (1973) reiterates that language is the ultimate symbolic expression and all other systems of ‘non-verbal messages’ presuppose it, he emphasizes that the reverse is not necessarily true. Other writers have traditionally traced the development of inner speech to the child’s moment of conceptualizing the world by mechanically making sense of it silently, and then expressing this sense in private voiced dialogues with the self. When communication later occurs with other subjects, a residue of this ego-centric speech remains in thought processes. This invariably leads to a permanent merging of thinking with language, and language with the comprehension and conceptualization of the external world. In his early essay on the subject Essay on Scientific Psychology, Pavel Petrovich Blonski argued that thought and language have the same ‘genetic roots’, and that inner speech worked similarly to ‘silent thought’, as it was

3 JOES

33

utterly linguistic (1964). Meaghan Morris invokes the writing of Charles Sanders Peirce to identify in this primordial moment how the subject of inner speech is split in the tension between ‘I’ and ‘other’ as a ‘process of signification providing the conditions of existence for any social discourse’ (Willemen 1994, 40). Willemen adds: ‘This lining accounts to some extent for the difference between the subject-image produced by a text and the historical, biological subject which presided over its manufacture’ (41). In his comprehensive study on the relationship between understanding and speech processes, Thought and Language, Lev Vygotsky concluded his analysis of the child’s acquisition of language by affirming that there is a resolute connection between linguistic structures and cognition which he reiterates throughout his work as ‘thinking in pure meanings’ (2012). Furthermore, with a consideration that has a distinctly cinematic focus, Christian Metz suggests that while inner speech is unspoken, it is nonetheless equivalent to phonetically enunciated speech (1974); a claim that leads Willemen to summarize Metz’ conclusion that inner speech is ‘no more than an unspoken “actualisation” of the meanings produced (by thought)’ (1975, 60). What I want to suggest here is that there is some merit in prizing open the association between primordial thought and language that limits readings of the two as coterminous and contiguous. If, for example, language is a prerequisite for thought and new language utterances – paroles – can still happen within this established functioning order – of langue – can new thoughts not also come about with less direct an involvement of the mechanisms of language working as they had preliminarily for the infant? Furthermore, if we concede the idea that, early in infancy, the development of the procedure for thought comes about through the acquisition of certain linguistic and language capabilities – and is determined by, in and through language, and so is facilitated by, and dependent upon, this mechanism – is it also necessarily, invariably true that the process/procedure must recur with every new thought procedure? Like stabilizers on a bike, could we not offer that once we’ve used them to learn how to cycle we no longer need them to try out new manoeuvres, and that the cyclist is not limited to only those once mastered while first practising with the stabilizers in place? The extended metaphor here might help us to understand the development of new thoughts, through creative impulses with neologisms or original grammatical gestures and grammatical rules, which occur without recourse to existing ones that had primordially assisted the development of our thinking. This approach does not deny that inner speech establishes with it the inevitability of any thinking without linguistic functioning, but it should be understood to allow readings of new levels in its functioning and may go some way to comprehending aspects of ‘non-verbal’ creative practice and thinking. Ron Burnett finds resonance of this possibility when he considers musical expression and composition.

34

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

He suggests: We listen and perhaps visualize, but there isn’t a dictionary that would correlate the one activity to the other. In that sense music has an autonomy that precludes reductive forms of referentiality. Music works directly on what we would describe as our senses, says Lévi-Strauss, and the result is that we are left, not with a defined set of correlations between fixed meanings, but with relations of meaning that may not be found within any specific set of elements, but across them. (1995, 139) Even Paul Willemen invokes the concept of Julia Kristeva’s chora as the space in the symbolic system within which there occurs a ‘slack’ which she describes procedurally (Kristeva 1977). Willemen points out that the ‘gradual nature of this process through which language as a symbolic system is anchored in the chora’ and goes on to explain that this quality ‘accounts for the slack in the system, the lack of the fit between the code of language and that which it organises’ (1994, 45). Willemen then expands the idea by connecting the functioning of the chora with the notion of ‘coded contiguity’ and explains how it has a residual consequence for all speaking: Entry into the symbolic then becomes the recognition of a social relation vis-à-vis the code of language, an ability to place ‘I’ in language, an ability that will always operate in the face of and against the pressure of the process of Kristeva’s notion of significance, the pressure of the chora. In other words, the practice of coded contiguity in language will always retain the trace of that movement towards/into the symbolic. (1994, 45) Thus, at the point of a child’s positioning within the symbolic system, the experience of an ‘I’ is established permanently and is remembered, becoming an indelible quality of the unconscious mind for the thinking and speaking subject. The trace of this experience – borne by us all as we use language – can be understood to accord with what Roland Barthes has called ‘the obtuse meaning’. In his 1977 work Image, Music, Text, Barthes explains this term in a paragraph that is worth quoting in its entirety: The obtuse meaning is not in the language-system (even that of symbols). Take away the obtuse meaning and communication and signification still remain, still circulate, still come through: without it, I can still state and read. [T]he obtuse meaning is not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence (but then what is an objective reading?); and if to me it is clear (to me), that is still perhaps (for the moment) by the same ‘aberration’ which compelled the lone and unhappy Saussure to hear in ancient poetry the enigmatic voice of anagram, unoriginated and obsessive. (1977, 60–61)

3 JOES

35

Literalizing his point more succinctly, Barthes then offers a description that moves closer to the visual that has resonances of David Bordwell’s cognitivist approach to comprehension in the cinema, in which the latter places the emphasis on meaning construction by the camera as thoughts are immediately available to consciousness without the need for language. Barthes notes that if the obtuse meaning ‘could be described (a contradiction in terms), it would have exactly the same nature of the Japanese haiku – anaphoric gesture without significant content, a sort of gash rased [sic] of meaning (of desire for meaning)’ (1977, 62). In this way, Barthes prizes open the direct connection between thought and language and rereads the complexity of how inner speech is used to inform narrative comprehension, by introducing a third category on the spectrum between the absolute impossibility of pre-linguistic thought and the notion that all thinking is inevitably language-based. I want to propose here that Barthes’s ‘obtuse meaning’ might help in addressing the interplay between different expressive levels of understanding in Abrahamson’s film. In 3 Joes, we recognize and understand the gestures as they evolve with the complexity inherent in the developing relationships at the table. We can definitely describe what happens – what the characters are doing, and what they intend – but the words used in any such reductive description would only belie the complexity of what they’re ‘up to’ (cunningly, politically). Eventually, with a lot of consideration and skill, this too could be rendered in language, but it would require significantly more detail and, likely, clarification even on the linguistic descriptions used. In this, the real difficultly would be in finding appropriate language to match the manifest actions with the latent intent; a variation between being wholly ‘in sync with’, and then ‘at odds with’. Examples of the silent taunting of Joe Sleeper – all in moments of slight antagonism intended for deliberate annoyance – occur throughout the film. In one of the table scenes (see Figure 1.1), we are given an angle on the action slightly over the shoulder of Smoker and Washer from Sleeper’s point of view. Smoker pours milk into his own cup of tea, and then slides the bottle towards Washer, as if doing so surreptitiously. Washer picks up on the implication of this gesture and pours milk into his own cup, before he continues the mockery by sliding it in Sleeper’s direction, bit by bit, clearly with the intention of annoying him. Ultimately, angered by the two, Sleeper snaps and grabs it to fill his mug. In the next move, Sleeper takes a spoon to stir his tea, Washer grabs it and tauntingly stirs his own. In another twoshot, Washer breaks some bread off a loaf and eats it. The scene cuts to Smoker looking down and away from Sleeper’s eyeline. In the next two-shot of Washer and Sleeper, Washer reaches across the table to dunk his bread in Sleeper’s mug. To mark the significance of the taunt, we are granted a single shot on Smoker who watches smugly. Another shot of Sleeper shows

36

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURE 1.1 Power dynamics played out at the breakfast table in 3 Joes. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Lenny Abrahamson.

him looking disgusted. Smoker then also reaches across the table, to dunk his bread ruefully with both hands in Sleeper’s tea. Smoker eats, simianlike, and then looks down at sugar bowl. Seeing another opportunity for mischief, he lifts spoon, taps it on the far side of the bowl, deliberately knocking sugar onto Sleeper’s side of the table. In a shot of all three men, Smoker ostentatiously stirs his own tea with the spoon before using another cup to grind the spilled grains noisily into the table. At this point, we are given another reaction shot from Sleeper, now clearly framed as victim of the others’ teasing. Shortly after this set of physical interactions, the cigarette that Smoker is playing with goes out. Seeing this, Washer offers him a light and starts to strike a match. He throws a couple of duds away – actually directly at Sleeper, which get caught in his chest hair – and then lights Smoker’s cigarette. When it doesn’t light properly, after a beat, Smoker throws it into Sleeper’s cup of tea which we are shown in close-up as it lands, with a reaction shot from Sleeper who is shaking his head. He stares in exasperation at Washer, who looks back for a few seconds, but then without warning escalates the conflict by coughing tea over Sleeper’s face. In the next shot, containing

3 JOES

37

the three, Washer continues to splutter histrionically at the far end of the table. During Washer’s ostentatious coughing fit, the defeated Joe Sleeper finally breaks the silence: ‘I could have had somewhere important to go this morning.’ He adds, ‘Didn’t even have a bloody pair of kaks’. The next close-up is on Smoker, who slowly looks below the table. He holds up the pair of shorts taken earlier from the clothes line, with the hole burnt in the crotch. Sticking his finger through it, as he continues to chew soggy bread, with his mouth full he says: ‘There’s these ones … You’d have to watch it though … the hole in them … the willy falls out … the balls are … put a zip … wobba, wobba. ’ The music starts. After a few shots forward and back from Smoker to Sleeper, we return to a three-shot, and Smoker puts the whites on the table. At this point, the film fades to black. What should be clear from the prosaic description of these paragraphs is the discrepancy between the simplicity of the cinematic depiction in its surface action, superficial gesture and facial reactions and the complexity of the verbal account. In spite of, or indeed because of, such unamusing descriptions in words, sentences and paragraphs here, it should become all the more evident that it is not the representation drawn cinematically that is somehow more hilarious, but that it is how the visual rendering differs from the verbal one, the gap between the denoted and the connoted, that the comedy is generated. Furthermore, this manifestation of the comedy is all the more acute because of the discrepancy in the mode of inner speech – in Barthes’s terminology, the ‘obtuse meaning’ – from the gap between the (spoken/written) denoted meanings and the (visually enacted) connotations. Samuel Beckett, who was noted for the precision and details of his stage directions, was deftly poetic when it came to using verbal designations and instructions in a comical way, so that both the reading and the observation of specific scenes could provoke laughter. Where the meticulousness of his prose and textual descriptions were rhythmical, and established clear cyclical patterns that thematically echoed his protagonists’ existential situations, they nonetheless became all the more comical when played out on stage with exaggerated absurdity. In one obvious example of this – the famous hat-swapping sequence of Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot – the linguistic cycles are rendered as mechanical functions. When performed by Didi and Gogo, the action reduces the characters’ corporeality to a struggle of humanity against the world of things in an attempted (but ultimately always failing) denial of its physicality, in ways similar to the struggles by many of the silent cinema pratfall comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Whereas Didi and Gogo’s hat exchange is marked by a comical meaningless absurdity, the sequence detailed beneath from 3 Joes is additionally humorous because of the ways that language fails to describe exactly the implications of their

38

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

table game. The sequence from act two of Waiting for Godot, as described in the play text, begins thus: VLADIMIR: I knew it was the right place. Now our troubles are over. (He picks up the hat, contemplates it, straightens it.) Must have been a very fine hat. (He puts it on in place of his own which he hands to Estragon.) Here. ESTRAGON: What? VLADIMIR: Hold that. (Estragon takes Vladimir’s hat. Vladimir adjusts Lucky’s hat on his head. Estragon puts on Vladimir’s hat in place of his own which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes Estragon’s hat. Estragon adjusts Vladimir’s hat on his head. Vladimir puts on Estragon’s hat in place of Lucky’s which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes Lucky’s hat. Vladimir adjusts Estragon’s hat on his head. Estragon puts on Lucky’s hat in place of Vladimir’s which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes his hat, Estragon adjusts Lucky’s hat on his head. Vladimir puts on his hat in place of Estragon’s which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes his hat. Vladimir adjusts his hat on his head. Estragon puts on his hat in place of Lucky’s which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes Lucky’s hat. Estragon adjusts his hat on his head. Vladimir puts on Lucky’s hat in place of his own which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes Vladimir’s hat. Vladimir adjusts Lucky’s hat on his head. Estragon hands Vladimir’s hat back to Vladimir who takes it and hands it back to Estragon who takes it and hands it back to Vladimir who takes it and throws it down.) How does it fit me? The comparable sequence from Abrahamson’s film may be described in this way and is rendered in one take: Joe Smoker and Joe Washer are eating cereal happily. Joe Sleeper is slicing bread. Sleeper reaches across Washer for a knife. Smoker reaches across Washer for a knife. Washer reaches across Smoker for the teapot. Sleeper returns the knife. Washer reaches across Smoker to return the teapot and take the milk. Smoker takes the knife and butters his bread. Washer replaces the milk and takes the sugar bowl. Smoker takes the teapot and pours some tea. Washer puts sugar in his tea. Smoker takes some sugar. Washer drinks from his tea, and glances quickly to Smoker.

3 JOES

39

Smoker pours some milk into his tea and eats his bread. Sleeper, who has been chewing on bread, now takes a Weetabix. He takes the milk and pours. Smoker reaches for matches, shakes the box, takes a cigarette from his ear and lights it. By the end of this sequence, the power dynamic between the men has been established, and the victim has been – instinctively, mechanically and silently – identified. Washer glances at Smoker and then again at Sleeper, but no looks are returned by any of them. Once again, while the mechanical aspect to what’s being done gesturally can be pronounced, a description of our understanding of the motivations of the psychological ‘chess playing’ is much more difficult. This is also evident in the fact that the spectator understands the games; that the film is harmoniously acknowledging what is going on in terms of the developing power-structures; that, in the first instance, Washer and Smoker instantaneously recognized each other’s intensions to victimize Joe Sleeper. The middle one of these – that which grants the film’s ‘conscious involvement’ – is a part of the narrative construction of play that happens in most of Abrahamson’s films. The mechanics of the sequence in the case above actually emerged during the shoot after careful rehearsal and improvisation. In the fissure between verbal instruction to the actors (as is the case with Beckett’s stage directions) and the spontaneity of the live performers lies the obtuse meaning of Barthes’s thesis. His qualification of the definition and function of the term justifies the connection proposed here: The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty in naming it […] The pictorial ‘rendering’ of words is here impossible, with the consequence that if, in front of these images, we remain, you and I, at the level of articulated language – at the level, that is, of my own text – the obtuse meaning will not succeed in existing, in entering the critic’s metalanguage. Which means that the obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlocution. (1977, 61) Barthes then summarizes his case by noting that ‘what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism)’ (1977, 61). The penultimate scene of the film is one marking a kind of epiphany that is typical of the short narrative, whether film or fiction, but also occurs in most of Abrahamson’s feature films as they concentrate on the central character. Once again, Abrahamson returns to silence between the Joes, this time with the tension between them neatly resolved. As Joe Sleeper walks around the kitchen, now separated from the other two who have been allied over the morning’s events, he contemplates his next move. After some time, he accepts his position as loser and concedes victory to the others. He laughs to himself and sticks up

40

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

his middle finger at them through the window. After a pause, he acknowledges defeat again by shaking his head and goes outside to the other two. Washer is lying and Sleeper sitting on the grass throwing the shoe forward and back to each other (see Figure 1.2). Sleeper drags the washing off the clothes line and throws it everywhere. He puts a pair of pants on his head and joins in throwing the shoe to the others. Cymbals begin an extra-diegetic beat and the music rises with a keyboard melody. The camera zooms out slightly. The tracking shot that had begun the action by picking up the first two characters in their enclosed garden starts again and moves into the hedge, where it fades. At this moment of concession and truce, they begin tossing the shoe – which had earlier been used as the weapon to kill the offending fly in the bedroom, and had broken the window – forward and back to each other. The film that began with three separate and distinct individuals ends with a more harmonious ‘community’, as they have become unanimously and, for the purposes of the story, anonymously the ‘Joes’ again. The optimistic ending is unique in Abrahamson’s film work which, as we will see, usually withholds an affirmative merging of the separated individuals back into society.

FIGURE 1.2 Reconciliation in the suburban garden in 3 Joes. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Lenny Abrahamson.

2 Adam & Paul

Celtic Tiger cinema: From short films to features In the wake of the critical success of 3 Joes, and drawn from his doctoral research towards more cinematic work, Lenny Abrahamson decided to return to Ireland in 1991 from Stanford University. Although he was determined to develop his career in film, he arrived during the years of the suspension of the Irish Film Board and was, like many of his contemporaries, driven by an enthusiasm that was not matched by a commensurate official statutory recognition of the art form. He spent a lot of time working on screenplays and developing ideas for scripts but, never satisfied with what he was writing, he realized that his natural talent and strength lay behind the camera, and that he had an acute ability to negotiate with film producers and financiers. Experimentally, he made a promotional television commercial for a newspaper, which was seen by Jonny Speers, owner and director of Speers Film Production Company. Speers hired Abrahamson and for the next decade he produced some memorable commercials for Moro Bar, The Irish Times magazine, Meteor Broadband, Master Card, Guinness and, perhaps the best-known, a series of the ‘Carlsberg don’t do…’ advertisements. In 2003, Speers introduced him to actor and writer Mark O’Halloran, who had been working on a day-in-the-life script based on the wanderings of two homeless heroin addicts around Dublin city. Abrahamson and O’Halloran recognized that they were thinking on the same wavelength and began collaborating on the screenplay. His friend Ed Guiney, who had already worked on both of Abrahamson’s short films, had been Head of Development at Windmill Lane from 1989 and established Temple Films in 1991. Guiney also managed Strongbow Productions, which was a satellite of Temple, and through that he produced a number of critically successful lowbudget films like Ailsa (Breathnach, 1994) and Gerry Stembridge’s début feature Guiltrip, in 1995. On the back of later production successes with

42

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The Tale of Sweetie Barrett (1998), Disco Pigs (Sheridan, 2001) and On the Edge (Carney, 2001), he established Element Pictures in 2001 with Andrew Lowe. By the time Abrahamson and O’Halloran had begun work on Adam & Paul, Guiney and Lowe had already noteworthy success with the film Magdalene Sisters (Mullan, 2002). However, it was the daring move by, and encouraging support from, Jonny Speers, who enabled Abrahamson’s move from director of over a decade of successful television commercials, that ultimately facilitated the career development of the rising filmmaker with the production of Adam & Paul. Ed Guiney’s schedule later became amenable to his coming on board as executive producer. In the decade following Abrahamson’s festival circuit release of 3 Joes, the landscape of Irish film had changed utterly, and a host of films had emerged with notable common characteristics. The significant output by Irish directors at the time, working within the context of the revived Film Board in 1993, was not always critically successful or profitable at the box office. Nonetheless, an identifiable set of trends and a commendable number of films had emerged that established a new wave of optimism across the sector. The sense of a strengthened industry was celebrated and it was connected with the notable and unprecedented growth in the Irish economy over the same period. After the much-condemned suspension of the Film Board in 1987, many of the first-wave directors, without any formal state-sponsored mechanism to keep feature projects actively financed, turned to lecturing in film schools where a new generation of filmmakers was learning its trade. This not only gave a whole new set of enthusiasts skills and knowledge in film directing, writing, editing, camerawork and design, but also generated a keen group of dedicated cinephiles who were ready and waiting to produce projects by the time the Board was reactivated in 1993. In a move of filial disobedience, many of the second-wave filmmakers rejected the aesthetic practices and political objectives that had informed their cinematic parents’ modus operandi and films. The aspiring filmmakers benefited from access to the body of Irish ‘social realist’ films from the 1980s from which they learned, first, by seeing directly their own social reality reflected on screen, but also by experiencing the aesthetic rendering and cinematic techniques applied in the construction of the earlier films. As I have argued elsewhere, in their recalcitrance ‘they sought a uniquely visual form of film expression, and what one filmmaker of the time called “cinematic charisma” and a “sense of humour”’; they felt both qualities were absent from the majority of Irish films in the 1980s. Their expressed objective was that their films ‘could be both fun and a valid form of visual artistic expression […] They set out to make films that were ironic, and were motivated by a desire to get into dialogue with their audiences and to challenge and entertain them with frequent intertextual references to, and toying with, mainstream cinematic forms and conventions’ (Monahan 2009, 91). With recognition that both

ADAM & PAUL

43

nationally endorsing and challenging endeavours still remained caught in a restrictive tautological historical dialectic, they sought to avoid in their cinema the arguments that fuelled the mythical status of nationhood. Motivated by market concerns of entertainment, they were less interested in addressing the dialogues of national self-determination. While the firstwave directors sought to address, deconstruct and overturn many of the monolithical shibboleths of Irish cultural and political nationalism that they deemed to be restrictive of healthy social growth, this became a side line issue for many second-generation Irish filmmakers. The pattern in Ireland was not unprecedented in other countries, and largely informed the aesthetic cinéma du papa rebellion in France in the 1950s’ and the New German Cinema manifesto in the 1970s, of which Tom Bergfelder has noted: To a certain extent, the New German Cinema’s antipathy towards ‘Daddy’s cinema’ centred primarily on the fact that it was ‘Daddy’s’, and only secondarily on its merits or otherwise as ‘cinema’. (2005, 2) Some film historians have located a desire to evade reductionist national themes in the work of individual filmmakers and to interrogate universal questions. One case in point was Bill Douglas, whose films interested Abrahamson. Eddie Dick, Andrew Nobel and Duncan Petrie find in Douglas’s films ‘a hard enough edge to cut through the bland cinema of nationalist nostalgias and clearer ironies, or the “made for television” cinema of production values and quality quotas’ (1993, 204). This quality was not accepted by many funding associations in the British national context and, as Sarah Street has noted in reference to John Caughie’s writing, ‘although the British Film Institute funded the Trilogy, it became more and more critical of Douglas’s working methods and conflicted with him over editing decisions’ (2009, 225). Closer to home, in the case of Ireland’s Bob Quinn, a filmmaker noted for his deconstruction of problematic representations of the country by American and British producers, Martin McLoone has even identified a usefully paradoxical element at the core of Quinn’s projects which exist ‘in an intensely contradictory relationship to both tradition and modernity and, as such, they reflect the complexity of cultural debate in Ireland generally’ (2000, 86). There was some criticism of the second-wave films on grounds of aiming to reach audiences with lighter, non-nationally concerned productions, and denying their role in the very negation and discursive definition of what Irishness was. In spite of new debates around post- and transnationalism, the important role of cinematic culture in the fostering of a healthy national society seemed a lesser concern to the second wavers. Luisa Rivi emphasizes this central role of any national cinema when she notes that it ‘is precisely the persistence of the nation-state, with its form of political associations and communal belonging that will provide a unique opportunity to shape

44

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

and sustain such a supranational enterprise’ (2007, 3), and thus implies the responsibility of all filmmakers to engage with earlier discourses around national identity and belonging. John Hill explains the difficulty in the Irish context for any such avoidance when he argues how difficult it is ‘in the case of Irish films, for the audience to avoid reading the presentation of the past in contemporary terms’ (1999, 31). In an effort to conceive of an indigenous cinema politically and to produce a body of films with appropriate and exceptional thematic and aesthetic relevance culturally and socially, both filmmakers and film critics are bound in an inevitable set of dialectics riven with a paradox of revolt and revolution. Sometimes the attempt to loose oneself from the ideologies of the past means becoming all the more bound to, and restricted by, them. However, deliberate and concerted attempts to reject popular paradigms of the central hegemonic cultural market force in Hollywood can marginalize (for the peripheral audiences) an already peripheral cinematic product and leave it (while perhaps yet culturally, socially, politically and intellectually significant) economically unviable and, therefore, unseen. These three binaries of negotiation – the thematic (in tradition versus modernity), the aesthetic (in content versus form), and the economic (in industry versus culture) – were ones that played a significant role in the 1980s’ Irish film community and in its debates. To a greater or lesser extent, second-wave filmmakers and their work – the people and their films’ critical and commercial success – would be determined by or, at the very least, interpreted through means by which they were positioned within and against these debates. In general, the body of films produced in Ireland since 1993 eschewed rather than confronted many of the earlier debates. In contrast, another set of dialogues informed the work of the new generation of 1990s’ filmmakers, and these largely emerged from trends in that group’s short film work. Their experience in that category of production created an energy of collaboration and cooperative discussion, all around filmmaking and film history, that resulted in three tonal and thematic consequences that became evident in their later feature-length work. First and foremost, their films were designed with the objective of reaching and speaking to audiences in highly cinematic ways. Rather than engage with historical debates about current social and political situations, the films address the history of cinema and contemporary practices, codes and conventions. McLoone has identified an affirmative aspect to this quality noting that the ‘spirit of critical self-reflectiveness is the constant element in all great film movements and national cinemas over the years’, adding that the ‘national and transnational film policies of the European Union should aim therefore to nourish and promote this spirit, and ensure that specific, critically engaged film cultures continue to flourish parallel to Hollywood’ (1994, 171). I have also suggested that this perspective is a healthy way of considering recent Irish productions ‘that is based on a dialectical connection between core and periphery that benefits indigenous cinematic development and also provides

ADAM & PAUL

45

transcultural contact points’ (Monahan 2007, 45). Following from this was the aim by the second-wave filmmakers to place entertainment of audiences high on the agenda. Editor and director Paul Fitzgerald expressed the ideal of many of his contemporaries in the 1990s when he spoke of ‘an agenda of entertainment. We always started from the belief that entertainment – not film – was our medium’ (quoted in Monahan 2009, 90). Cinematically literate audiences would enjoy even subtle cinematic in-jokes and stylistic references, and the more playful approach to conservative mainstream conventions. This tendency also displays a confidence among Irish producers in a deliberate violation of traditional binaries of ‘art/national’ and ‘Hollywood/ mainstream’ cinema along the lines that Thomas Elsaesser has drawn when he notes that, at a cultural level, ‘Europe used to stand for art and Hollywood for entertainment, personified in Europe by the auteur, and in Hollywood by the star; in Europe, the product is a unique work of art, in Hollywood it is a standardized commodity’ (2005, 491). Now the aesthetics and conventions of the peripheral and minor cinema could be set to intervene – usually for comical purposes – into the structures and codes of the mainstream, and this formal meta-cinematic contravention could work for spectators’ amusement. Thirdly, there was a notable desire to address, and even confront, the standard and recognizable tropes of mainstream cinema. This endeavour sought less a cultural compromise than an empowering interactive play, by borrowing elements from a longer established, hegemonic force, for reiteration and repossession by a smaller contributor. Mike Wayne approaches this possibility with certain affirmation when he notes that even ‘under conditions of economic inequality between film industries […] cultural exchange has its benefits, but it is a skewed and one-sided process, with Hollywood conceding rather less culturally, than its competitors’ (2002, 3–4). I have more optimistically suggested of such tendencies that they include ‘formal aspects of contemporary Irish films that display acute awareness of the value of engaging dialectically with historically developed and inherited mainstream cinematic systems’ (Monahan 2007, 45). Writing about the work of Werner Herzog in such a context of practice, Thomas Elsaesser also concedes affirmative potential in finding novel ways of working within an international mainstream system of production by contending that ‘what from one perspective may appear as backwards (and a consequence of the uneven development noticeable whenever Hollywood confronts different national or independent cinemas) can also be an advantage and an exhibition in its own right’ (1989, 102–103). John Hill also addresses the question in clearly positive terms, identified periodically in the Irish context when he uncovers ‘a cinema, rooted in the particularities of a specific culture, which “replies” to the “universalising” discourse of Hollywood’s global cinema in the accent of the local and the regional’ (1994, 6). In turning away from direct commentary upon the contemporary political and social situations in Ireland in the 1990s, the filmmakers of the period looked outwards towards

46

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

movements in mainstream cinema and backwards through the history of cinematic representations and found in both material to renovate, quote and merge with their own formal expression. This resulted in a group of films that was self-referential, intertextual and meta-cinematic. Perhaps the most influential element in the development of Irish cinema in the 1990s was filmmakers’ access to financial support. Both Ruth Barton (2004) and Lance Pettitt (2000) have detailed the specific ways in which the broader economic boom had direct consequences for filmmaking in the country. By inverting the causal relationship between the rise of both, Barton marks the inevitability of placing the industrial at the heart of the conversation: This economic boom mirrored the filmmaking boom and both were constructed on similar premises – that inward investment by multinational corporations would enable the country to develop an economy and infrastructure that it could not otherwise secure from internal resources. (2004, 109) So it was in Ireland’s case that production strengthened favourably and with some serendipity in line with the reestablishment of Bord Scannán na hÉireann in 1993, a new proliferation of feature films emerged in Ireland. When viewed as a cluster, the films produced in the first decade after the relaunch of the Film Board are identifiable inasmuch as they are formally reflective of the nation at the time experiencing economic prosperity. In films like The General (Boorman, 1998), When Brendan Met Trudy (Walsh, 2000), About Adam (Stembridge, 2001), Goldfish Memory (Gill, 2004) and Man about Dog (Breathnach, 2004), recurring tropes were evident. Many of the films displayed a narrative tendency towards concerns with leisure time and consumption, engaged in formal play, with an almost ‘art for art’s sake’ frivolity though meta-cinematic and intertextual referencing, and represented characters who might be more at home in a Woody Allen film; constantly on the move around public spaces, frequenting trendy cafés, clubs and wine bars, and neurotically caught in self-reflective and self-obsessed dialogues and short-term relationships. Aesthetically these films were fastpaced and, while their mise en scène contained recognizable and identifiable urban landmarks and backdrops, they gave the image of a capital city that was lacking a definitive identity and uniqueness in favour of a more general metropolitan ambience. Settings and locations were designed and photographed with postmodern edifices and architecture as the backdrops, and the look was one of fluorescence, colour, metal and glass. The characters were playful, even frivolous, and their situations were impermanent and causally divorced from ‘real world’ concerns and, as Martin McLoone has observed, less encumbered by social and political questions and injustices, than they were showing material acquisition, easy living and characters indulging in a ‘hip hedonism’ (2007, 205–216).

ADAM & PAUL

47

In many ways, Abrahamson’s early features reflect the consequences and narrate alternative stories of the economic boom, and so work counter to the cinema that was born from it. Stylistically austere, they avoid a metacinematic intricacy that was common in other Irish millennial films. His films transcended the immediate context of their production, by acting as social realist commentaries. In this way, they bridge the gap between the local ‘home’ and international ‘human experience’ that McLoone has identified as a multifaceted part of exploring existential questions in a globalized age. Setting his reflections within a postcolonial nationalist framework, McLoone noted a refocusing of ‘questions on the moment of encounter between the centre and the periphery, between the particular and the universal, [which] suggests a more complex relationship than that offered by Irish-Ireland nationalism or that implied in the cultural imperialism thesis’ (2000, 117). A significant device that facilitates the universal resonance of Abrahamson’s characters and their situations is the way that he excavates certain contextual circumstances from his narratives and mise en scène. In Adam & Paul, this cinematic sculpting is not merely effected to universalize and de-contextualize the plight of the drug-addict protagonists, but it serves to mark the ways in which they and their situations have been divorced from the prosperity bestowed upon the country with its economic boom. In fact, as Nicholas O’Riordan has argued, even the use of a local Dublin accent serves perfectly to situate the characters both spatially and temporally outside the landscapes of prosperity. O’Riordan gives a concrete example of how the Dublin accent is used tonally to connote the notion of a by-gone era, or inaccessible moment which he has traced as being used ‘to strong effect in “counter-Celtic Tiger” films including Kisses (Daly, 2010), Dollhouse (Sheridan, 2012), Adam & Paul (Abrahamson, 2004), Stalker (O’Connor, 2012)’ (2015, 41). As social pariahs, the addicts are marginalized, and are thus as absent from the earlier Celtic Tiger Dublin representations in films like When Brendan Met Trudy, About Adam and Goldfish Memory, as the aesthetic and tonal qualities, characters and locations of those films are absent from Adam & Paul. In the light of this set of deliberate stylistic omissions, I want to offer the notion of ‘structuring absences’ to explore some of the ways in which the film is working to manage our empathy for, and relationship with, the characters and the precise micro-society that Abrahamson constructs on screen.

Structuring absences: Aesthetic sculpting The concept of structuring absences has not informed film studies to the same extent that it has been applied in literary theory. As an approach to textual criticism, it is not without problems. It is founded on the notion that a text can reveal as much about its ideological position through what it is not saying,

48

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

not doing and not representing as by what constitutes its formal qualities, manifest themes and constructed narratives. As a theoretical framework, it must start by justifying how absences from given texts can be considered for a greater understanding of how they are working. The difficulty is where the critic draws the line. Evidently, more extreme cases of omission are used to justify the approach so that, for example, a narrative about a 1950s’ white middle-class family based in Mississippi that has no mention of the contemporary civil rights struggles there can be considered in the light of that absence, and this quality of exclusion can be addressed for alternative readings of the text. The problem arises when, from the analyst’s point of view, any absence whatsoever is taken as significant and is therefore invoked to facilitate a given personal or political reading. In literary criticism, the concept of structuring absences has most often informed discourses around the politics and negotiations of identity and identity struggles. Maggie Humm has offered a synopsis of the critical approach by concentrating on the ideological gaps and breaks in literary works by noting that ‘literary texts can be understood by examining their “absences” as much as their content, since these absences reveal the ideological assumptions which a text finds difficult to voice – for example, the absent centre of whiteness in imperial texts’ (1994, 77). Werner Sollors gives an example of a mother looking at her child, who contemplates how her situation might have been if a twin infant had been born. He suggests that this, and similar cases, ‘constitute a thematics of absence – according to which we look at a given text in a certain way by drawing on details that are present only in other works’ (1995, 74). Using a gendered example, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick writes of the relegation of a sexual voice and identity in historical terms noting that in ‘“The Beast of the Jungle,” written at the threshold of the new century, the possibility of an embodied male-homosexual thematics has […] a precisely liminal presence. It is a present as a – as a very particular historicised – thematics of absence’ (1988, 520). The value of emphasizing breaks and fractures in patriarchal language has been foregrounded to celebrate an écriture feminine and has constituted key observations in the writing of many theorists. Dani Cavallaro cites Roland Barthes, who ‘argues that texts come across as most intensely physical and sexual when they gape – i.e. reveal their gaps and fissures, their divided character, what is lost to them’ (2007, 68), and Diane Long Hoeveller mentions important feminist writers by indicating that in concentrating on the ‘gaps and fissures’ within language ‘French feminist critics of the period (i.e., Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, among others) were concerned with the way the masculinedominated system of language produces meanings that tend to objectify or erase women’s voices’ (2003, 45). When Dina Georgis discusses the effective textual negation of the queer, she advocates its reinstatement from the margins where it has been forced to reside. She explains that ‘since what has been severed in the making of shared meaning always leaves affective

ADAM & PAUL

49

remainders […] the traces of queerness always emerge from within the gaps and fissures of the symbolic, never outside of it’ (2013, 130). Instances of theoretical applications of structuring absences in the field of film studies are relatively rare, but two examples focus on the specific details of films within historical frameworks. Mervyn Stokes’s ‘Structuring Absences: Images of America Missing from the Hollywood Screen’ (2001) is concerned with the dearth of representations of African-American stories within that context of production, and in ‘Phantom Cinema: Illuminating the Structuring Absences of Film History’ (2013), James Kendrick looks beyond the mainstream circuit to special collection and rare video content that is relevant to marginal cult markets. Both establish a new mode of thinking about gaps in the film market due to the lack of certain characters and narratives on screen, or the unavailability or limited access to some that have been produced. Together these approaches offer two out of three possibilities for coming to understand the notion of structuring absences. A third method also looks analytically into individual films and considers how their aesthetics might be working, by virtue of a cinematic sculpting and removal components and creative essences with a certain stylistic minimalism, restraint or paring back of representational modes. What I hope to argue here is that there is evidence in Abrahamson’s work of a thematic and aesthetic approach that relegates contextual circumstances in affecting and effecting the action of his stories. His feature films present characters and narratives that are conveyed without the traditional shorthand narrative mechanisms or using recognizable moments of social and political contexts to motivate actions and events. In this, the structuring absences become all the more potent as the films avoid official representative methods and causal relations in a way that allows his films to transcend their context of production. Existing cinematic representations of a given time and place need not merely endorse the dominant contemporary aesthetics that best suit prevailing discourses. One recurring device – evident in several sequences from When Brendan Met Trudy and Goldfish Memory – was the use of national media to voice the celebrations of Celtic Tiger success. Other contemporaneous films displayed tonal qualities of this optimism and represented characters typically unencumbered by financial woes, and narratives constructed with a formal playfulness and superficial energy. In this way, many of the films produced in Ireland in the decade following the reactivation of the Film Board not only drew on the Zeitgeist of prosperity for their stories and inhabitants, but they also established an aesthetic mode of representing the country that became a standard in the ways of its seeing, looking at and reflecting the contemporary social and economic backdrops. Against this (less officially endorsed than officially acceptable) visuality, Adam & Paul works with an unconventional style and narrative form. Its qualities, which avoid a direct exploration of unseen realities of the Celtic Tiger landscape, make the film all the more politically and ideologically powerful. As spectators we are forced

50

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

into reflection upon, and contemplation of, the characters’ situation by virtue of what we are not shown, what we do not see and what has been removed from the film. We therefore experience a substratum of Celtic Tiger Ireland in whose visual and discursive relegation we have been complicit or, at best, ignore. As Abrahamson refined his aesthetic and intellectual awareness of this cinematic potential, he was cognizant of the capacity of the medium to reveal so much about its context, and engage the spectator so profoundly, by sculpting away material to provide structuring gaps. This mobilized a powerful element of the medium, which Andrew Noble has identified in the films of Bill Douglas as that filmmaker celebrated the ‘pristine capacity to see the objects of the world as if for the first time’ (1990, 136). The styling of absences is infused into Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘intolerable’, which can be usefully applied to cinema. On the relationship between thought and film, Deleuze draws together the two ideas: For it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures the intolerable in this world, but, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. (1994, 169–170) With a similar vein, Michael Gillespie addresses the emptiness of the cityscape and the environment in which we find Paul and Adam and notes the consequences of this discovery for the spectators of the film. It is clear, for him, that the ‘nihilism that defines Adam and Paul makes viewers that much more aware of the environment that they inhabit, for their stark isolation gains its definition in contrast to the communal rhythms around them’ (2008, 110). While I will suggest that structuring absences should play an important role in understanding the operation of most of Abrahamson’s films – a notion that will recur in the following chapters – it is through the specific lens of ‘countervisuality’ as expounded by Nicholas Mirzoeff that we might begin to consider Adam & Paul. In his book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Mirzoeff argues for a political mobilization of ways of seeing, observation and visual representations and communications that run against the standards of accepted – and therefore ideologically loaded and problematic – methods. Countervisuality can avoid recognizable, and hermetically sealed, operations of showing and seeing that might be otherwise ideologically reductive in narrative representations. According to Mirzoeff, it can thus act as a possible subversive swipe against the authority of visualization and visualizing. The media forums – their official producers, disseminators and consumers – are implicated in regular, naturalized and authenticated (authenticating) mechanisms and strategies of visualization. However, we must also be open to challenging normalized qualities of the displayed, shown and represented at any historical moment so that even the

ADAM & PAUL

51

idea of aesthetics – anything from formal symmetry and seductive beauty to visual harmony – as well as details of perspectival ways of looking, point of view and the concept of focus (mechanical and positional) may be deconstructed in order to challenge prevailing practices. Having charted several historical examples including direct visual representation and modes of surveillance, from the Panopticon to CCTV, Mirzoeff contends not only that the practice of countervisuality can expose truths about the world around us through new ways of seeing but also that we can learn a lot about the mechanisms of mediation through which we have always inevitably come to access, exist within and understand our environment. In outlining the ideological angle, and political scope of his project, Mirzoeff invokes the writing of Antonio Gramsci when he notes that the Marxist ‘was equally concerned to restore what he called the “history of the subaltern classes” that the “modern dictatorship” tried so hard to eliminate from what he called the culture of the period […] ranging from popular culture to newspapers, gossip and myth’ (2011, 234). Addressing the quality of style and how aesthetics can be validated by visuality, he states, by invoking Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, that the ‘aesthetic is not a classificatory scheme of the beautiful but “an ‘aesthetic’ at the core of politics … as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience”’ (2011, 4). Examples of cinematic attempts to circumvent or confront hegemonic systems of visuality are common enough, but a description of Werner Herzog’s negotiating the standard mechanisms of visuality is neatly summarized by Noël Carrol. When he considers Herzog’s attempt to sidestep the acceptance of the visual and its rationality in many of his films, Carrol notes that he ‘and other celebrants of experience, seek to acknowledge the unexpressed or ineffable aspects of experience that have been filtered out and suppressed by routine forms of schematization, such as language’ (1998, 297). Elsewhere, although Francesco Casetti is not directly invoking the idea of countervisuality in the cinematic context, its importance as subversive strategy may be implied from his claim that ‘the visible side defines what we are aware of, the way in which we notice it, the shape we give to it in order to communicate it to others, and the importance we ascribe to it in context’ (1999, 129). This is true for all of Abrahamson’s films, but in particular for Adam & Paul. In a very precise way with this film, Abrahamson reconfigured the morality of conventional visuality: what it then became normal to represent, and to reveal in the light of, and against the backdrop of, accepted ways of seeing national tales of cosmopolitan success and neon and metal aesthetics, and of narratives about contemporary people in postmodern Ireland. Casetti concludes in a fitting comment for the current context that ‘through its visible side a society reveals its interests and the way it frames them; it reveals the horizon of what it believes to be worthy of discussion’ (129). Through his structuring

52

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

absences, across his cinematic project, Abrahamson rises continually to no less a challenge than this. We can read Adam & Paul as it works beyond the standardized aesthetic and thematic representations of Celtic Tiger Irish cinema and narrates a story of characters who also exist on the margins of that society. As a result of, or in spite of, the protagonists’ forced nomadic displacement, and the city’s flexible penetrability and failure to settle and accommodate the two, Conn Holohan has suggested that ‘in films such as Adam & Paul and Crushproof, which deal with those marginalised in the city, there is little attempt to explore the social and economic causes of their marginalisation’ (2010, 127). Holohan is correct to suggest the absence of backstory and motivating narrative causes and effects which allow us to read the characters in the situation in which we discover them, but this is precisely the mode in which the film works through structuring absences. Michael Gillespie hints at this elsewhere in his analysis of the film, when he points to ‘the starkness and alienation that characterises the lives of the motion picture’s central figures [which] have the paradoxical effect of throwing into relief the communal conditions from which these marginalised figures have excluded themselves’ (2008, 108). In a later piece, Holohan suggests another reading of the film’s contextual detachment, and proposes a connection between this and the characters’ deracination. He suggests that more critical images of the country’s capital city, ‘such as Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul (2004), did offer a counter balance to the celebratory city films of the Celtic Tiger era, the placelessness of that film’s central protagonists has prefigured many of the recent images of Ireland’s urban space’ (2015, 23). Indeed, in spite of the protagonists’ peripatetic movement within the city and the ground that they cover, we have the feeling that the actual backdrop of economically prosperous Dublin is always just around the corner, close but absent, near but out of reach, and never available for access by the displaced addicts. The consequence of Abrahamson’s countervisuality is a tonal, thematic and narrative relegation of Dublin’s contemporary affluence and fortune, and all evidence of a capital city experiencing an evenly beneficial economic boom. By virtue of this, the film offers an implicit critique of the official discourses that elsewhere celebrate its prosperity. This inference works not only in the way that it echoes a wider social ignoring of, and disregard for, those without access to the country’s wealth but also in its writing them out of any meaningful discourses of critique about it. By this ostensible formation of real and discursive areas of inclusion and exclusion, Abrahamson’s mise en scène becomes reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s bleak theatrical landscapes, and the absurd and meaningless actions and situations that the dramatist establishes against them. Thus, several of the tonal, aesthetic and narrative qualities of the film bear important similarities to Beckett’s work, and most often to Waiting for Godot.

ADAM & PAUL

53

Dual protagonists and the cyclical narrative When we first find Adam and Paul, they are waking from a drug-induced sleep, placed on a jettisoned mattress in an unidentified location on a hill overlooking the suburbs of Dublin. Within a few moments, Adam discovers that he has been glued to the mattress and Paul struggles to tear his jacket from it, freeing his friend and initiating their walk into the centre of the city, and then around it in search of a score of heroin. The similarities to Beckett’s tramps Vladimir and Estragon are apparent, but the men’s ostensible joint struggle and the haphazard direction of their rambling leading them into sites, situations and encounters with other random characters also resemble the plight of Jean Renoir’s protagonists in La Grande Illusion (1937). In one significant scene, Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Cartier (Julien Carette), who have escaped from a German First World War prisoner camp, awake in a ditch on the side of a country lane. While it is likely that Samuel Beckett, who had returned permanently to Paris around the time of the release there of La Grande Illusion, might have seen the film, it is improbable that he was making any intertextual reference to it in Waiting for Godot, either directly through Didi and Gogo’s similar circumstances or in their occasional reference to having slept in a ditch. In fact, Anthony Uhlmann has identified a painting as the image that inspired much of the situational imagery of Beckett’s later play: Beckett told Ruby Cohn that he had remembered a Caspar David Friedrich painting, Two Men Looking at the Moon, which he had seen during his trip to Germany prior to World War Two and had adapted this image, staging it in En Attendant Godot. (2006, 1) However, the connection between Renoir’s film, Beckett’s play and Mark O’Halloran’s screenplay might be made on the grounds of the ways in which dramas which explore an existential human suffering through specific thematic and dramatic tropes and dialogue are often rendered in similar ways. All three present male protagonists who have been deracinated and forced to keep moving due to circumstances beyond their control. All three use their couples to explore questions about solidarity, isolation and the often futile struggle for meaning with unclear objectives. And all three present the underlying tension inherent in the requirement to recognize a mutual self-support and inevitable need to fill their passing time with chatter and attempts to overcome minor handicaps along the way, while being presented as caught in a cyclical Sisyphean purgatory of doing and waiting. The consequences for each of the three couples are also borne out with notable likeness. One man of each pair is represented as the more introspective of the two, while the other is accursed by physical challenges: Maréchal, Vladimir and Adam all take at least some time to reflect on their

54

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

conditions and frequently express the need to keep moving, while Cartier, Estragon and Paul are constantly hindered by physical impediments – in all cases stones in their shoes, or injured feet – and thus become a burden to their counterparts’ desire to continue on their journey. In a way that is applicable to the representations of Maréchal and Cartier, as well as Adam and Paul, Hélène Baldwin proposes that Didi and Gogo may represent two aspects of humanity and that their names likely justify the set: she has written that ‘Vladimir and Estragon represent soul and body, however unfashionable that word “soul” may be. The symbolism of their names – Vladimir, the eleventh-century czar who was converted to Christianity and who is also called Saint Vladimir, and Estragon, the French for the herb tarragon – is an indication that Vladimir is the leader, the consciously reflective of the two’ (1981, 114). Paul may also bear the name of another Christian saint, and Adam could represent the original man of Genesis, although this connection should not be forced. In relation to Adam’s more determined attempt at direction and leadership, and Paul’s more reactive demeanour, it is fitting that they are often shown in long shot, progressing from one side of the framed space to the other, with Paul scuttling ahead only to pause and wait for his master to follow with a more languid step. The posture of the two resembles a master taking his dog for a walk, something ironized at one point in the film when Paul protests: ‘I’m not having a shite down a lane: I’m not a fuckin’ dog.’ Our experience of the paired protagonists is that they are connected in their common suffering and goals, and as if in a variation of Hegel’s master– slave relationship (2003), that they require each other’s friendship. In this, all of the male couples mentioned above and their situations and relationships resemble that of the Laurel and Hardy coupling which, as Andrew Klevan has noted in reference to the comedies, always worked through the rapport between the two men, whose ‘friendship and behaviour at the truest and deepest level was never about stupidity: they were actually an extreme rendering of the inevitable need for, and yet the difficulties of, human relatedness in the middle of the desperate endeavour to stay devoted to the world of one’s life’ (2000, 26). The comedic connection established here, and the tonal similarities that might be drawn to the Laurel and Hardy films by comparison to the dual male protagonists’ relationship in Abrahamson’s film, are also evident in much of the tragi-comedy of Beckett’s dramatic writing. Many of the aspects of the comedic mechanics that have been elucidated by Henri Bergson in his writing on comedy come to inform Valerie Topsfield’s analysis of Beckett’s work, in particular when she emphasizes the clowning of ‘Waiting for Godot, which uses the automatism, exaggerations, repetition, and circularity of plot which, for Bergson, are the essence of comedy’ (1988, 21). Topsfield later focuses her attention on another of the plays, which is also structurally comparable with Abrahamson’s film. On the absurd mechanics of the diurnal in Act Without Words II, which also hamper the characters

ADAM & PAUL

55

in Adam & Paul, Topsfield explains that ‘Beckett exploits this notion, for instance, in the mime […] in which two characters get up in the morning, dress, go out, return in the evening, undress and go back to bed, illustrating conventional life and habits, which do not seem grotesque until demonstrated theatrically’ (21–22). Elements of plot cyclicality, as opposed to the traditional linear development of narrated action, which are so characteristic of Beckett’s canon, are dynamically performed in O’Halloran and Abrahamson’s film. The film offers some sense of linear progression presented with an inevitability of the characters’ fate. Where the extra-diegetic backstory hints at three drug-addicted friends (Adam, Paul and Matthew), the film begins with only two, and will end with one alive. At the same time, within the fabula, the syuzhet contains cyclical moments of diminishing space and time: the characters embark on a trail around the city from beginning to end, and their conversations work by iterations and reiterations of purpose. Individual encounters frequently end as they have begun, with nothing achieved and often with even more confusion about what is actually going on. Stephen Rennicks’s music echoes this structure, as it contains both tonal qualities of mischievousness and comedic possibility that play in counterpoint to the grim visual aesthetic established in the opening shots, but offers a cyclical quality as well as a climactic rise to a falling cadence that mirrors the narrative of the film. This contributes to the tragi-comedy of the diegetic world where we find the protagonists, like Beckett’s characters, placed in an unnamed, and even unnameable, location. Music hums – through its tinkling rhythm – ‘Adam and Paul’, so that its sound becomes complicit in their being named, and remaining anonymous. The circularity of narrative, in line with a certain fatalistic inevitability, is also presented in minor episodes and elements of the film’s design. Georgie and Georgie Junior, for example, are not only similarly named but also wear the same Irish soccer jersey. A structural mirroring happens around the possibility of stealing not one but two televisions, and the repetition of the protagonists’ relationship with the mysterious ‘Clank’ works towards a surprise pay off intervention by that character. Valerie Topsfield might have been writing about Adam & Paul when she notes of Beckett’s celebrated play that the ‘exaggerations, and repetitions of Waiting for Godot provide a lighter side to the otherwise tragic situation of Vladimir and Estragon. The circularity of the plot, which gives the audience a sense of going somewhere, only to arrive at the point of departure, has a comic effect’ (1988, 22). With a similar perspective, juxtaposing plot linearity with circularity, Steven Connor argues that some ‘of the repetitions in Waiting for Godot seem to indicate not endless reduplication, but entropic decline […] All these suggest repetitive series rather than repetitive circles’ (1988, 121). Michael Worton’s description of the narrative structure of Beckett’s plays offers an analysis that comes closest to the gradual structural deterioration that is evident in Adam & Paul. He has argued that

56

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

[i]nstead of following the tradition which demands that a play have an exposition, a climax and a dénouement, Beckett’s plays have a cyclical structure which might indeed be better described as a diminishing spiral. They present images of entropy in which the world and the people in it are slowly but inexorably running down. In this spiral descending towards final closure that can never be found in the Beckettian universe, the characters take refuge in repetition, repeating their own actions and words and often those of others – in order to pass the time. (1994, 69) A similar rendering of Paul and Adam’s situation occurs as the film resists simplistic narrative linearity and, at times, carries resonances of Beckett and Cathal Black’s outsider characters in his 1984 film Pigs. On the politics of space and place in Black’s film, Jim Loter has written that the film contains no establishing shots to aid in mapping the position of the house in relation to any Dublin landmarks or any of the other places described by the diegesis. Likewise, nothing exists to set a specific period to the film. (1999, 133) With comparable mise en scène and framing of twenty-first-century Dublin, Abrahamson represents the liminality and social exclusion of Paul and Adam; both alienating factors that force the deracinated characters into an eternal search for place in an unending series of narrative cycles. This allows him to show the characters as being on the outside of any conventional narrative structure as well as displaced socially. Werner Huber identifies this formal quality of the film when he suggests that the protagonists’ ‘quest for the next fix or the means that might supply it determines the structural framework of this film’ (2009, 200). While the spectators are always ‘with’ the characters, experiencing Paul and Adam’s present experience, Abrahamson consistently reinforces idea that they are outside of their own narrative: they have, even before the drug-induced sequence in which they lie stoned on the James Joyce millennial bridge, literally ‘lost the plot’. Not only is their narrative journey constantly interrupted with false leads and dead ends, but there is always the sense that another narrative and other events that are relevant to them, but in which they are not involved, are taking place elsewhere. Because of Paul’s need to throw up, they are forced to get off the bus bringing them into the city centre, when they get to Martin’s flat he will not open the door to them; they forget about and miss Matthew’s month’s mind mass; they have no ostensible early contact with Clank, in spite of a subplot that forces them to meet him; and they later steal and crash a car, which they are then forced to abandon. The film presents this quality visually. Often, they are placed in the foreground of a shot when the important or revealing action takes place in the background. The sleeping bag boy, who appears from nowhere in one

ADAM & PAUL

57

scene and assumes that they owe Clank money, is seen in the background of a shot when they move away from him, lighting a cigarette although he has just led them to believe that he has none. They regularly appear in front of railings and partial fences that separate them from a world of daily events, and in the scene when Clank and his gang enter and begin thrashing a petrol station, Paul and Adam stand in the foreground unaware of the Keystone cop action going on behind them when the police arrive, arrest and remove the criminals. Having visited Janine’s flat, where they discover the ‘baba’ and discuss their friend’s newly cleaned-up situation, they are granted an insight into another possibility for them should they overcome their addiction, but this is never a realistic option and, in implicit confirmation of this, they soon move on their quest again. As they leave Janine and her baby, she talks to the child: ‘Say “day, day” to your daddies’, leaving open the possibility of either one’s paternity, and providing another backstory from which they have been excluded. In one of the later scenes, when they find themselves sitting on the steps below Martin’s flat, we can hear him being beaten up and his place ransacked by vigilantes; again they are within earshot of action to which they have no immediate access. Two examples of camera positioning also suggest that the film is ahead of, or leading, its trailing protagonists as they fumble to gain control of their personal stories. During the opening sequence, as they overlook the city, we observe them from behind facing in the direction of the distant Poolbeg Generating Station chimneys (see Figure 2.1). The towers are set at first in sharp focus, with the men’s outlines soft, until a rack focus reverses this, sharpening the silhouette

FIGURE 2.1 Rack focus from the chimneys to the characters establishes fatalistic narrative line. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

58

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

of Adam and Paul. This slight detail foreshadows the final scene where both men will end on the strand beside the towers, thus suggesting where the day’s journey will lead them. In the lead into the scene in which they waylay a Down Syndrome boy, the camera is situated, fixed, for a long shot of the two men. While Adam stops, mid-frame, realizing the potential in mugging the innocent boy, Paul has already kept walking, beyond the centre of the shot, thus needing to return to the appropriate position of the action. It is a movement that is echoed in the final scene where Paul leaves the frame and returns after a beat. In both cases, the camera is ahead of the narrative action, positioned and waiting for Paul to return to the place of the event. At times, the narrative conspires against them with a dramatic irony that often misleads the audience as much as it deceives the protagonists. The film uses a number of Hitckcockian ‘MacGuffins’ which serve as misdirecting, red herrings, that at first seem to contribute to the development of the action, but are only catalysts in moving from one sequence to another. The clearest example is the almost magical and convenient appearance of a television set, at a moment when the coincidence at first seems to offer Paul and Adam a lucrative possibility. The fluke occurs as the two men sit on a cooker and a refrigerator, and Paul bemoans his misfortune: PAUL: Me fuckin’ hand. And me fuckin’ leg, and now me fuckin’ head. Why can’t things be easy? Just for once. Just for once to be easy, and fine, and relaxed? And to be lucky … Just a bit of fuckin’ luck … is all. In a misleading response to his supplication, which toys as much with the spectator as it does with the characters, two men appear carrying a flatscreen television which they ask Paul and Adam to mind until their dropoff contact returns. We recognize the humour of the situation based on the exaggeration of the narrative coincidence, but within a few scenes come to realize that we, too, were duped, as the television plays no useful role in the character’s struggle and is ultimately jettisoned as easily as it has been acquired. In an earlier scene, also involving the possible procurement of a television, several layers of dramatic irony are established through both literal and purported meanings in the dialogue, and by virtue of how the scene plays out in relation to the audience’s expectations. When Adam and Paul first enter Janine’s flat, and find that she is not at home, they stand for several minutes in front of her valuable television, contemplating stealing it. While they never state this as they look at it, their conversation is ironic in its off-the-nose insincerity. It is worth reproducing the conversation in full to appreciate the richness of its nuanced insinuations: PAUL: The whole place is spotless, too. ADAM: Lovely. PAUL: Yeah. (Beat) Crazy.

ADAM & PAUL

59

ADAM: What? PAUL: Spendin’ all your money on your flat. ADAM: D’ye think? PAUL: Yeah … Only gets robbed in the end. ADAM: I suppose. PAUL: Definitely. (Beat) Sure that telly’s worth money. ADAM: A few bob … PAUL: Askin’ … ADAM: Askin’ … PAUL: It’s a bit heavy, though. ADAM: No way. PAUL: D’ye think? ADAM: Yeah … PAUL: (Lifting the set to check its weight) Yeah. It’s light enough. ADAM: Yeah. Easy steal. PAUL: Yeah, easy. (Beat) You’d never get away with it, though. ADAM: I suppose. PAUL: Unless you took it straight out the front and down to Kitser … ADAM: Yeah, that’d be the thing … Rid of it fast. (Beat) Could it be carried that far, do you think? PAUL: I don’t know, do you want to try it there again? (They try) Yeah. ADAM: Yeah, I’d say. PAUL: It’s askin’ to be robbed so … ADAM: Askin’ … This exchange works on three levels based on the reliability of what the language is stating literally, and how that deviates from the intentional and implied meanings. While Paul and Adam feign their gradual realization that they ought to steal the television, and on the surface their conversation reads true to this interpretation, it is apparent to the viewer that they have already made up their minds to do so. We may not be morally unquestioning of their dubious intent, but we are complicit in the performance and insincere negotiation around the endeavour, even as they pretend to check the weight of the set – not once, but twice – to ensure the feasibility of the theft. Finally, we come to understand that the whole sequence has been a narrative ruse, leading to nothing, as the noise they create wakes a sleeping baby in the next room, and puts paid to the enterprise. Once again, in spite of clearly stated purpose, dialogue has prevented any narrative outcome, and the joke is as much on the spectator as it is on the characters. The dialogue bears a certain characteristic that is typical of many of the exchanges in the film, in which words are used for their tonal, poetic, resonance and lyrical qualities rather than for what they are communicating. Often, in Adam & Paul, language is rendered useless in its communicative capacity and is valued instead for its rhythmic or ironic capacity through banal reiterations and repetitions.

60

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Consequently, repetition enables the voiding of meaning, enhancing the social alienation of the pair all the while foregrounding the absurdity of their connection – or lack of contact – with other characters and society at large. Thus, the definitive utility of language as situating the characters is through the rendering of its uselessness. While in Adam & Paul there is no direct interrogation of the distrust of words, their ambiguous potential and textures are used stylistically throughout. In cases of other national cinemas, some historians have demonstrated that this quality can be read as an aesthetic rejection of the work of preceding generations, as Thomas Elsaesser has shown in the case of New German cinema. Citing the work of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders, he has proposed that this quality of overt rejection of language and the logic embedded in it is something that the cinematic medium offers. A certain undermining of the spoken word is evident as it is juxtaposed with the image, in a way that shows how formerly ‘words only served to aggravate the sense of being alienated from what is of value and from true feeling […] or words were simply superfluous when compared to the self-evidence of images viewed through a camera’ (1989, 57). A perfect example of this quality occurs after an exchange between Paul, Adam and Georgie, when the emptiness of the dialogue is actually stated. Having engaged in idle banter, Paul attempts to deepen the conversation, but retracts and dismisses his line of questioning: PAUL: Where are you living now, Georgie? GEORGIE: Why do you want to know? PAUL: I don’t. I was just asking. Throughout the film, attempts to keep moving from situation to situation, without ever knowing exactly where, also demonstrate a certain communicative vagueness: ADAM: Come on. PAUL: Where? ADAM: We’ll see if what’s-his-name’s around. PAUL: Who? ADAM: Fuckin’ what’s-his-name … Small fella … Relating a similar characteristic in Samuel Beckett’s theatrical situations, Steven Connor has identified a poetic cyclicality in the dramatist’s work that is evident in Abrahamson’s films. Linguistic reiterations and repeated utterances form ‘a language which has a life of its own; and it takes the disabling effects of repetition to highlight its arbitrariness and selfenclosure’ (1988, 23). John Fletcher might have been as easily speaking of Abrahamson’s characters’ speech when he notes in Beckett’s language a quality ‘to convey the impression of a possible indefinite repetition of the

ADAM & PAUL

61

same recurrences, with only slight alterations’ (1967, 68). A part of the deconstruction of meaning in language is identifiable in how certain phrases and expressions are repeated, voiding them of communication potential in favour of marking an inexorable passing of time by filling it with chatter. Connor identifies this as a useful aesthetic quality of linguistic repetition when he notes how this threatens language ‘even as it constitutes its possibility. It is impossible to say anything in a language in which there is no repetition, but it is equally impossible to say anything if one merely repeats oneself’ (1988, 16). During the conversation between Georgie, Adam and Paul quoted here, the latter says in response to Georgie’s description of his state of affairs: ‘It’s the same all over.’ This mirrors Beckett’s ‘Nothing to be done’, in which – as in other cases from Waiting for Godot – Ruby Cohn reads ‘an insidious undermining of language as means of communication or expression of intelligence. Flat and literal repetition becomes a major technique. Dominating all repetitions are the “waiting for Godot’s.” Other refrains have wider ironic implications than in their specific context – “Nothing to be done,” “I’m going,” “It’s not certain,” “It hurts?,” “It’s inevitable,” “What’ll we do now?”’ (1962, 216–217). In the scene in the Market Café, where Adam and Paul attempt to steal a handbag, Paul tries to distract the lady behind the counter from the theft but, unable to think quickly enough of anything to say, falls back on ‘We’re havin’ loads of weather at the moment, aren’t we?’; a rhetorical question which he then recognizes as logically flawed. A connection between failed language and spatial confusion is made in another conversation when the addicts meet Marian, Orla, Wayne and Georgie having drinks in the park, after Matthew’s month’s mind mass. Having evoked better times, when Matthew, Adam and Paul used to hang about everywhere ‘like the three Musketeers’, Marian somewhat vaguely asks them what they have been up to. The question only sets up another dead-end and more imprecision: MARIAN: So? PAUL: So? MARIAN: So, where have yous two been? ADAM: Around. PAUL: Yeah. MARIAN: Right. That each of the linguistic failings provides much of the film’s comedic tone is in line with Ruby Cohn’s analysis of how most of the comedy is generated in Beckett’s work. Noting the main aspects that provide tragicomedy in his plays, she concludes with emphasis on the significance of the linguistic qualities, all of which stand beyond the basic irrelevant function of language as mechanism for communication: ‘Of the three domains, situation, character, and language, it is mainly upon the last that Beckett’s comic effect

62

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

depend’ (1962, 22). In his overview of Beckett’s work, and on how language provides the thematic effects of alienation and absurd purposelessness, John Calder notes, ‘man is what he is, each one different, each in his private hell, living a life trapped in a situation that he did not and could not choose, as good or as bad as his individual nature allows him to be: he is unimprovable and unchangeable in any significant way’ (2001, 51). Like the addiction that Paul and Adam suffer, they are metaphorically caught in a constant cycle of confused expression, participating in, but adjacent to, coherent and useful social communication through language.

A dystopian urban fairy tale This linguistic lends to the whole film an otherworldliness as Paul and Adam embark on their quest. These qualities, and many other tonal and narrative elements of the film, also establish their circumstances within a framework that is similar to that of the fairy tale. Like the characters who inhabit Beckett’s theatrical mise en scène, Adam and Paul are represented in another fictional realm, outside contemporary Irish society and, as noted above, even beyond their own narrative. The natural backdrops within which we first discover them, and where their story ends, are already removed geographically from the city around which they will journey for the greater part of the film. As is frequently the case in Irish films, death by the sea – near that liminal expanse – presents a setting where both everything and nothing can be seen. Thus they exist suspended in hesitation beyond time and space. Catherine Russell comments on this tendency to place characters in a nowhere place of nature, a characteristic that she finds in films as different as Le Mépris (Godard, 1963), Pierrot le fou (Godard, 1965), Nashville (Altman, 1975) and Lightning over Water (Wenders and Ray, 1980), although, in the instance of Irish cinema, the quality is also evident in the endings of films as diverse as Angel (Jordan, 1982), Lamb (Gregg, 1985) and Disco Pigs (Sheridan, 2001). Russell has written, in the light of the ultimate threat of death in these films, that it offers ‘the potential of narrative to create a void, a desire for meaning. In the empty image of sea, sky, or both, nature provides the background for a historiography of catastrophe in which nothing and everything happens’ (1995, 209). The social alienation of a character that results in a geographical displacement akin to that of the (usually young) protagonist of the fairy tale is evident in many of the films of Aki Kaurismäki, another filmmaker admired by Abrahamson. Reflecting on Kaurismäki’s films, Thomas Elsaesser notes the strangeness of the world that his characters inhabit, and while he concentrates specifically on The Man without a Past from 2002, the title of one of Abrahamson’s favourites by the Finnish director – The Match Factory Girl (1990) – should also indicate the fairy tale nature of Kaurismäki’s

ADAM & PAUL

63

playful realism. Elsaesser describes the narrative mechanisms of exclusion that facilitate the creation of an unearthly backdrop: ‘The protagonist’s stories generally take them through this progressive stripping of all symbolic supports of their selfhood, they lose their jobs, their friends, their family, their mind, or their memory’ (2005, 125). While Adam & Paul follows a fairy tale narrative structure in opposition to the mythical quest (one in which heroin replaces the heroine), its dystopian quality removes any possibility of hopeful redemption through self-revelation, enlightenment or discovery. This dystopian distinction sets the narrative of Adam & Paul apart from any straightforward fairy tale comparison but, in doing so, makes the film’s structural and tonal similarities to the oral fiction all the more significant. Bruno Bettelheim points to a chief characteristic of the fairy tale, and one that in its ostensible absence makes Abrahamson’s film all the more absurdly tragic: ‘Far from making rather impossible demands to emulate great heroes, as myths often do, the fairytale reassures: it gives hope for the future and holds out the promise of a happy ending’ (1976, 25). Furthermore, the sense of a utopian outcome, projected onto the fairy tale by the lower classes who Jack Zipes identifies as upholding and transmitting the tradition of the oral narratives historically, is one that is dismantled in Adam & Paul. The context of the socially marginalized underclass is maintained against this in the film, but what has broken down is any affirmation that Zipes has noted in the tradition when he writes of the ‘initial ontological situations in the tales [that] generally deal with exploitation, hunger and injustice familiar to the lower classes in pre-capitalist societies’ (2002, 8). This is precisely what Adam & Paul does, without holding the hope of any utopian outcome. Zipes continues in a way that may elucidate what is going on in, or absent from, the film: The passivity of the hero is to be seen in relation to the objectively hopeless situation of the folk-tale audiences. These classes have practically no opportunity to resist the increasing exploitation since they were isolated in their work, geographically spread out, and always stood as mere individuals in opposition to their lords and exploiters. (2002, 9) Even the potential of a better life has become an impossibility for Paul and Adam, and the qualities of the fairy tale that still inform its narrative, tonally and structurally, make the inevitable pessimism of their situation all the more severe, tragic and poignant. One of the motivating overarching devices that initiates the action of the fairy tale is the embarkation by the characters on a quest that becomes a voyage of self-discovery. While the situation in which Paul and Adam find themselves is prompted by such an expedition, any hope that this might lead to a moment of self-awareness is undermined by the series of cyclical narrative sequences in which they are caught, and which are wrought in the

64

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

conversational non-sequiturs that have been indicated above. Jack Zipes situates this journey as an elemental structuring device of the fairy tale narrative and explains how the protagonist is positioned within a landscape through which he or she moves in a succession of episodic events. While the context of Adam & Paul is the contemporary Dublin cityscape, that milieu behaves in a way similar to the traditional forest of the child’s tale. Zipes notes that the characters predictably find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great, and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest possesses the power to change lives and alter destinies. In many ways it is the supreme authority on earth and often the great provider. (1987, 66) One of the consequences of Abrahamson’s insistence on our being ‘present with’ his protagonists is that they and their peregrinations become a unifying principle across the randomness of the locations in which the action takes place. Thus, as the cityscape appears to us – for the most part in the film with a topographical fidelity to the actual city – it is mediated for us and remains at one remove of accessibility. Jim Loter has identified this feature in many representations of Ireland’s landscape – both rural and urban – on screen. His argument is broadly inclusive of many visual texts when he proposes that ‘Irish culture is defined […] by a sense of placehood that is not predicated upon the construction of enclosures, monuments, or structures but by a placehood that exists primarily through representation’ (1999, 128). His argument links Adam & Paul diegetically with the fairy tale whose unfamiliar environment is always for us proximate but unavailable, expressionist or surreal but rarely metaphorical, and which we discover not as an independently existing setting but as a succession of locations always connected by the protagonists whose journey we follow. This quality in Adam & Paul resolves an apparent contradiction where even though the characters emerge almost naturally, organically from their environment, they are detached from it, socially isolated and forced into permanent peripatetic movement in a futile search for self and place. This is something to which Conn Holohan refers when he proposes that while it is true that ‘these socially marginalised characters are permitted a remarkable degree of mobility between city spaces, it is also true that the city denies them a homeplace in which they can rest’ (2010, 127). As with the protagonists of the fairy tale, a moment of geographical confusion and feeling of dislocation marks the beginning of Paul and Adam’s narrative. While Michael Gillespie notes the fact that ‘neither man has any idea of how he ended up there simply underscores the sense of randomness dominating their existence’ (2008, 109), the characters’ recognition of this

ADAM & PAUL

65

– Paul asks ‘Where the fuck are we?’ – draws attention to how, although real, the place in which we discover them is strange and unfamiliar. Even having made the first leg of their journey, which brings them to a flat complex nearer to the centre of the city, they comment on their geographical confusion: ADAM: How the fuck did we end up out here? PAUL: I haven’t been out here in years. In a comparable case study, Thomas Elsaesser finds a recurring societal and spatial detachment of Werner Herzog’s characters when he suggests that in implicit social critique that director’s protagonists are ‘always extreme, marginal, and outside, in relation to the center, which is the social world, the world of history, that of ordinary beings. Thus, the existential dimension of his characters seems to take precedence over any social ill against which they might revolt or from which they might suffer’ (2005, 473). Elsaesser’s emphasis here goes beyond straightforward social liminality as thematically presented and infers a double narrative separation too: on one hand, the characters are marginalized from the narrative space that surrounds them, and this occurs in a genre informed by structural and tonal qualities of the fairy tale, but it is significant that this genre also stands beyond the formal, fictional canon of Western literature. In this way, it is noteworthy that Abrahamson constructs the relationship between his characters and their narratives as doubly liminally positioned. The protagonist/story constitution and the means in which they are represented as within or beyond the act of being narrated accords with how they have been positioned within, on the margins of, or outside of the societies that they inhabit. In their liminal positions, Paul and Adam become very real corporal contact points between the spectator and the presented narrative scenery, and this aspect for their physical presence is often mobilized of comedic effect. Their bodies are framed so that they are made both recognizable and also strange and unfamiliar. Just as objects in the film invoke an Unheimlich by virtue of their displacement – recognizable domestic items have been rejected and scattered on the external landscape – so too do Adam and Paul’s abused physical forms become the discarded shells of individuals. This is clearest with Paul who collides, or is forced to interact, with objects in the world. His is shunted in the bus and then throws up, he is hit on the face with the football, damages his hand when he strikes a passing car and is injured when he is struck on the leg by a passing moped. In one scene, he is punched on the face by Clank and he breaks his nose on the dashboard of the car which Adam drives into a concrete pylon. In ultimate abject disgrace, he is forced to substitute a Tayto bag for toilet paper when he has to defecate outside. In fact, many of the comedic moments work because of unexpected collisions between the characters – in this case mostly Paul – and their fairy tale setting. As Andrew Stott observes, this repeated corporeal collision is the

66

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

mainstay of much physical, pratfall and gag humour. ‘A slapstick is where the body meets the world of things, it is suitably fascinated with objects. By examining the identity and utility of things and playing with the space they occupy, their dimensions, properties, and cultural significance, the body’s relationship to the external world is made strange’ (2005, 94). This physical aspect of the comedic relationship formed when the corporeality of the protagonists comes into mismatched contact, or conflict, with their environment underscores another aesthetic feature that recurs throughout the fairy tale. While in that genre the precision of topography as ‘mapped place’ is not of primary importance as the characters undergo their journey through that landscape, the objects that they encounter take on a quality of the Unheimlich by virtue of a similar dislocation. Máire Messenger Davies emphasizes temporal and spatial transposition as a marker of this quality in the fairy tale, when she notes the fact that the ‘stories take place long ago and far away, in places with no obvious name, about characters with no real identity or history’ (2010, 125). The sense of detachment from causal political circumstances in Adam & Paul can be explained by how the film concentrates on the sole inner motivation and struggle of the protagonists by jettisoning contemporary contextual realities in the same way that their society has already rejected them. Bettelheim identifies this feature of the fairy tale which ‘makes it obvious that the fairytales’ concern is not useful information about the external worlds, but the inner processes taking place in an individual’ (1976, 25). Thus the child’s tale disregards the need for and understanding of (adult) historical teleology in favour of a synchronic consideration of a given moment of time. Karen Lury has justified this tendency in consideration of the child’s relationship with history, explaining that the tale provides access to incidents that are banal and traumatic, events and scenes that we may recognise as symbolically dense and significant – historically, emotionally and politically – but which cannot satisfactorily be ‘made sense of’ by the child. The child does not represent innocence but rather challenges the conventions of a certain kind of history-telling which demands a chronological narrative determined by cause and effect. (2010, 143) Jack Zipes endorses this cardinal function of the tale: ‘Their own specific ideology and aesthetics are rarely seen in the light of a diachronic historical development which has great bearing on our cultural self-understanding’ (2002, 6). The temporal and spatial deracination of the protagonists in Adam & Paul is echoed by the displacement of recognizable items that become strange by virtue of their relocation. This is a common feature of even the best known fairy tales and their cinematic adaptations – Alice in Wonderland is one obvious example – and Lury indicates how it provides an important texture to the tales:

ADAM & PAUL

67

[I]mages present uncanny changes and familiar objects in ways that are both mundane and magical. These images, transformations and objects are encountered by the child as part of the natural and economic trajectory or movement of the plot, which is frequently episodic and constrained in terms of context. (2010, 141) Throughout the film, remnants of used commodities litter Paul and Adam’s landscape, providing an Unheimlich displacement as their practical use serves no further purpose. This aspect of the failed utility of things is marked more than once as is the case with the carton of milk that has no straw, the Tayto bag that is to serve as toilet paper, the broken stolen baguette, and the jacket that has been glued to the mattress. Adam’s failed attempt at stealing a handbag with his feet could also be included in this non-exhaustive list. In one scene, even the marker of excessive and unfulfilling consumerism in the form of an overturned shopping trolley is tossed on the landscape, and domestic items such as a mattress, fridge freezers, televisions and a microwave are familiar objects given an uncomfortable unfamiliarity in the mise en scène of the film. Indeed, the film nods towards the payoff of overcoming one’s addiction with the reward of reestablishment within the successful world of comfortable commodified living, when Orla and Marion speak about Janine’s ‘cleaned up’ situation and her new flat: ORLA: Total straight and narrow. Very healthy. And she does keep that flat lovely and all. Full of lovely gear and all, it is. Where did she get all that stuff from, Marion? MARIAN: Wayne got it for her. For gettin’ it together like. Nevertheless, the clinical normality of Janine’s domestic space and the doubt with which she inhabits her new life style are itself rendered as ‘other’; inaccessible, unfamiliar and inauthentic to Paul and Adam. As they contemplate stealing her television, the inevitability of their fate and their discomfort in the clean domestic space is marked by two cartoon characters on the screen who are seen to run off a cliff before falling to the ground (see Figure 2.2). The incongruity of discarded objects, rejected and made rubbish by society, in Paul and Adam’s background gives their unfamiliarity a tragic inflection. This cinematic quality is one to which Antonin Artaud has referred in his description of things in the world, captured in frame in a pure separation that calls for use in situations where they are rendered unusable. With this separation, Artaud has noted, ‘objects obtain a life of their own which becomes increasingly independent and detaches them from their usual meaning. A leaf, a bottle, a hand, etc., live with an almost animal life which is crying out to be used’ (1972, 65). The positioning of the familiar into unfamiliar places is something to which Stanley Cavell refers in finding a sublime quality in the everyday

68

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURE 2.2 Adam and Paul’s cartoon counterparts on Janine’s television. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

Unheimlich when he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson on the physiognomy of the ordinary, and lists the banalities of the normal which can become extraordinary within the cinematic frame. His examples include props that form part of the film world that Paul and Adam inhabit: ‘The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form of the gait of the body’ (1981, 20), and all mark a combination of the magical and the diurnal which is, for Karen Lury, ‘mirrored by the way in which the fairytale requires a move between the mundane (the everyday world) into the miraculous (the fantasy or potential of the fairytale narrative)’ (2010, 140). The magical quality in Adam & Paul reaches its apogee in the scene set on the James Joyce bridge when they are stoned on heroin. With a gentle heightening of the unreality of both the mise en scène and the images, and corresponding tinkling otherworldly extra-diegetic music, we are granted a number of point of view shots, which have been limited in the film. As the characters notice rather than observe a discarded apple core and an empty cigarette packet, the Unheimlich insert shots of the litter characterizes a similar magical, ethereal quality of estrangement and the drugged protagonists’ state of mind. Although Robert Kolker is writing of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise, 1951) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), his reference to a superhuman force – in Abrahamson’s films, the drug – is relevant in the fatalistic inevitability faced by the characters. Kolker explains that this overwhelming quality is shown to ‘place the human figure in a passive role, creating narratives that implicitly or explicitly indicate an inescapable human destiny at the mercy of some superhuman force’ (2000, 139). Elsewhere Siegfried

ADAM & PAUL

69

Kracauer notes how this cinematic component has the unique ability to ‘expose physical reality as it appears to individuals in extreme states of mind generated by such events as we have mentioned, mental disturbances, or any other external or internal causes’ (1965, 58). During the James Joyce bridge scene, the music becomes essential in adding to the banal images and grim background, and to the mystical quality that pervades the landscapes of the fairy tale. Stephen Rennicks’s score reaches a crescendo with high piano notes in a short run, like dropping liquid, which begin and sustain the surrealism of the sequence. This works in parallel with the scene’s compositional Unheimlich of images that are tightly focused and sharply coloured in close-up, so that random objects and parts of the characters’ faces become unfamiliar by virtue of a disturbing visual proximity that replaces the wider shots of the rest of the film. Another recurring trope in Adam & Paul, which is reminiscent of the fairy tale, is the quasi-magical way in which characters are invoked into existence by the mere mentioning of their names. In several cases, characters are named before they appear and, whether or not they are presented in person or disembodied as voices, they are situated in precise locations across the route that the protagonists take. The boys whom Adam and Paul meet outside the flats tell them where they might get a ‘score’: ‘Well, you could try Martin in Block B, Flat 63’, although the addicts ultimately only come into contact with Martin by communicating with him from behind a closed door. The boy in the sleeping bag seems to appear from nowhere, unmotivated, Clank is discussed several times before his violent arrival, and Matthew’s ‘Ma’ – whom both Janine and Marion say has been asking about them – only enters the story in the later scene in the ‘Coal Bunker’ pub. Elsewhere, characters remain vaguely referenced and, significantly in the light of Paul and Adam’s social detachment, do not materialize. Such elusiveness informs many of their exchanges: PAUL: We were just waiting to see if what’s-his-name is around … ADAM: Jaysus, do you see who’s over there? PAUL: Where? ADAM: It’s fucking Monkey. Thus a sense of an existing, but unavailable and almost imaginary, community is built up by references to characters whom we never see, or by the unexpected random appearance of others whose names we’ve already heard. This randomness echoes a structural quality of the fairy tale inasmuch as it works episodically rather than through a strong through-line of sequential narrative causes and effects. From the beginning, without any clear initiating action, a purported necessity clause is established, and the

70

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

protagonists’ objective clearly stated. Shortly after tearing Adam’s jacket from the mattress, the addicts express their aim: PAUL: Do we have a plan? ADAM: Into town … see who’s around … what’s going on, like, get some money … And then score … After this, moments of narrative action in the film ‘are heaped so that they become less important as consecutive instances, and more like interchangeable set pieces’ (Monahan 2013, 52–53). This accords well with Julia Hallam’s reading of expositional films which ‘include characters without clear-cut motives or goals who are less constrained by the chains of cause-and-effect motivation typical of classical films, more dependent on chance meetings and the chaos of uncontrollable events’ (2000, 105). Hallam continues, finding qualities in other films that are structurally in line with the plotting of Adam & Paul as she identifies how they ‘depict relationships between characters and events without providing external motivations to drive the action; events happen, they are not always explained, their purpose and significance serving to reveal character psychology rather than drive the plot’ (105). When Toni Pipolo assesses the canon of Robert Bresson, whose work has inspired Abrahamson, he notes how ‘coincidence in his films is tinged with destiny […] Chance encounters in Bresson are saturated with the taint of human cruelty and indifference, evidence of the flawed human condition and fall from grace’ (2010, 5). Not only does Adam & Paul foreground the characters’ tragic fall, but their random ambling is enabled visually and narratively by the film’s episodic structure and its emphasizing coincidence as the only connecting feature between scenes. This suggests an absence of controlled resolution reminiscent of that of the fairy tale’s ‘and they all lived happy ever after’. Mary A. Doll traces a similar characteristic of the open-ended narrative in the work of Samuel Beckett who presents ‘stories that never come to an end, myths build upon basic patterns, giving an opportunity to create endings and to re-create beginnings’ (1988, 1). At the core of Doll’s thesis are not only some of the key attributes of the standard fairy tale but the concept of the utopian around which those standards work. Once this is inverted, as is the case in Abrahamson’s film, in order to offer a dystopian perspective, each of the other characteristics mentioned here can be seen to contribute to how the story of his film works. In this resides the main difference between Adam and Paul’s story and that of the fairy tale as the characters begin and end their destructive cycle in the city (see Figure 2.3). Jack Zipes points to the more affirmative resolution of the child’s tale, but marks the quality that haunts Abrahamson’s characters. While Zipes considers how the wonder tale usually ends positively, with a triumph over the forces of darkness and death he notes, nonetheless, that it

ADAM & PAUL

71

FIGURE 2.3 The destructive cycle and a new generation. The boys encountered outside the flats at the beginning of Adam & Paul reappear later in the film. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

begins with ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘once there was’ and never really ends when it ends. The ending is actually the beginning. The once upon a time is not a past designation but futuristic: the timelessness of the tale and its lack of geographical specificity endow it with utopian connotations – ‘utopia’ in its original meaning designated ‘no place’, a place that no one had ever envisaged. (1991, xiii) Just at the moment when Paul and Adam appear to be giving up, they come to rest on some steps outside the flats where they first sought Martin (Figures 2.4 and 2.5). An audible fight goes on upstairs at Martin’s flat, which is evidently being ransacked. Indiscriminately, a microwave oven, some books and a phone are thrown from the balcony above and land in front of them. The two converse briefly in exasperation: Paul: Jesus, fuck. Adam: Back where we started. Paul: I’m gonna die. At this point, two bags of heroin fall down in front of them haphazardly completing the objective of the whole film’s quest. They embark on the final stage of their narrowing journey around the city, now in an intoxicated state. The final scene concludes with a new horrific revelation for both the spectator and, once again after the fact, for Paul.

72

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURES 2.4 and 2.5 The narrative cycle and place. Images copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

We are given an extreme close-up of white feather, blowing on the beach in the sand caught in bright morning light. An insert of a sea shell confirms the new location and time, but with fatal inevitability also echoes the individual shots of flower and grass at the beginning of the film. The next shot presents Paul asleep and then gradually waking up. After a point of view shot of the sun behind a beach plant, he sits up and hesitates as he looks at Adam’s pale face.

ADAM & PAUL

73

FIGURE 2.6 Paul realizes that Adam is dead. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

FIGURE 2.7 Paul immobile and behind the narrative. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

We are given a shot of Adam lifeless as Paul remains behind the narrative and the spectator’s realization of what has happened (see Figure 2.6). Finally, it dawns on Paul that his companion is dead. Failing to grasp the gravity of the whole situation, he sits and makes a quiet sound in tragic recognition.

74

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Once again, immobilized, he lies back down (see Figure 2.7). With another suggestion that considerable time has passed in the next transition, the sound of the ship’s horn in the distance echoes one heard at the beginning of the film. Paul stands and walks out of shot but, after a beat, he re-enters both the frame and, by implication, the narrative, to retrieve a bag of heroin from Adam’s pocket. After another brief beat, and as the music begins with a tragically languid rhythm, the film ends with the disturbing sense of the inevitably of Paul’s demise although on this occasion he is left to live through another day.

3 Garage

A second collaboration with Mark O’Halloran Following its release on 27 August 2004, Adam & Paul went on to receive reasonable box office returns and very favourable critical acclaim on the back of both mainstream distribution and festival circuits. At the Galway Film Fleadh that year, the film won the Audience Award, echoing Abrahamson’s success there in the same category as 3 Joes thirteen years previously. In 2005, it was nominated for the Irish Film and Television Awards, the European Film Awards and for the Golden Iris Award at the Brussels European Film Festival. At the former of these Abrahamson won in the ‘Best Director’ category and in the same year he also took home the Gran Prix and FRPRESCI Prize at the Sofia International Film Festival. By the time its success had been critically celebrated in print media and at festival competitions, Mark O’Halloran and Lenny Abrahamson had already begun work on a second feature-length script, this time set in a rural location, with a single protagonist and against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger prosperity that had not yet met its fatal decline. While the setting and the narrative circumstances of Garage are far removed from those of Adam & Paul, many of the stylistic qualities and thematic concerns with a humanistic struggle, which had been central to the first film, are at the heart of the second feature. Garage presents a number of days in the life of another social outsider, Josie, a middleaged single man who lives and works in a traditional petrol station on the outskirts of a small Irish rural village. Once again, rather than offering a linear plot, O’Halloran and Abrahamson present Josie’s circumstances as his story unfolds across a series of trivial events. In this we observe the finer details of his life, work and interactions with patrons of the garage, members of the village community and, most significantly, his relationship with David, a teenager whom the garage owner Mr Gallagher arranges to do some part-time work with Josie. Josie is given a pornographic video

76

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

cassette by a trucker who fills up at the garage, and in an innocuous move, he invites David to watch it with him. Disturbed and embarrassed by the images, David leaves the back room of the garage, with Josie naïvely reflecting on what he has done. When word gets out about the event to residents of the small town, and it is also revealed that Josie had innocently given the underage boy cans of beer after a few of his days at work, the matter is brought to the police, who detain Josie for questioning. Having been released, the enormity of the matter dawns upon Josie, who, unable to face the consequences of his actions, takes his own life. With aesthetic and structural resonances of the Beckettian canon, in much the same way already manifest in Adam & Paul, Garage is interested in our observing its protagonist suspended in situations of loneliness and isolation, filling time with banal daily chores and in his liminal location. In spite of his many walks in natural environments, and to and from the centre of the village, Josie’s rootedness in his place, and the final recognition that he will never leave the town is underscored with some irony by his job, which is to provide others with petrol. Garage is a slow-paced film in which the elements of action normally considered extraneous to mainstream plot progression are included and dwelt upon as significant details in our exploring Josie’s world and circumstances. In a similar way to how the prosperity of the economically comfortable metropolitan Ireland was omitted from Adam & Paul, the strength of Abrahamson’s film comes from an alternative focus onto the unvoiced and unheard tale of the individual who, it is implied, has been left behind. In this point alone the value of Abrahamson’s first two features offers a powerful expression of the social consequences of the Irish economic boom on both individuals and the marginalized societies that they inhabit. The desire in both films to turn our attention to less frequently represented narratives in film accords well with Luke Gibbons’s call for this endeavour as an instrumental strategy for how national cinemas should work. He has noted that a peripheral cinema should not be judged only on its ‘economic performance, or in terms of establishing a native film industry (crucial as these are), but also on its capacity to engage with the multiple national narratives preoccupying a society, and its specific ways of telling its own stories’ (1996, 22). Where Abrahamson’s short film 3 Joes told a national story in a microcosmic way, as a slice of life in a confined setting, his features Adam & Paul and Garage locate their protagonists in exterior places, without recognizable spaces of belonging. Neil Cornwell has identified this characteristic in the work of Samuel Beckett and has justified the evolution thematically. After Endgame Cornwell notes that following on from its domestic mise en scène, ‘we are plunged into an almost primeval wasteland; the social misfits of the first become what we can now see as Beckett’s near-regulation perpetual vagrants’ (2006, 227). In developing this line of thinking, Paul Davies finds common traits in the playwright’s work that become all the more relevant

GARAGE

77

for an understanding of the protagonist of Garage. He lists these qualities in detail: In the prose and plays alike, the same description fits them all: the homeless, wandering, ageing male, with hat; boots; long coat; infected scalp; speech impediments; general sensory confusion; a special fondness for small objects; sensitivity to animals and plants and dawn/dusk twilights; a tendency to aporia (purposiveness without purpose); hatred of sexuality, conception and birth; isolation and relationships with human beings; varying degrees of cripplement; and a rarely failing sense of humour in the midst of these deprivations. (1994, 46–47) Aside from the noteworthy similarities to Josie, the social misfit, one element of the list stands out in terms of how we might understand the protagonist of Garage. While insight into Josie’s isolation is informed by gentle suggestions about his attitude to human sexual relations and intercourse, these do not amount to anything as radical as a ‘hatred of sexuality, conception and birth’. It is therefore because most of the details of this list, as identifiable characteristics of so many of Beckett’s protagonists, are so apposite as descriptions of Josie, that this deviation might stand out. Nonetheless, the absence of this quality in Josie’s character and the fact that he lives in a state of childlike innocence with his world and its inhabitants does not mean that he is rendered as utterly ignorant or asexual. At judiciously placed points in the film, there are subtle suggestions of his naïvely prurient wonderment at the world of titillating sexuality and the adult world of sexual relations to which he has only imagined access. These are not positioned as pointers to the narrative consequences that his actions later require him to face, nor are they removed so that his sexual predisposition becomes an overarching thematic structuring absence. With boyish innocence, he comments to the driver of the truck about what he might get up to alone on long journeys abroad. Hinting that he has fun with ‘ladies in the cab’, the driver replies ironically, ‘Don’t tell the wife!’, but Josie takes this literally and replies, ‘Jesus, no!’. With a gesture that makes local shopkeeper Carmel uncomfortable, Josie makes a remark about her ‘in her swimming bikini’ as she peruses a holiday brochure. At this early point in the film, we do not register much significance to his comment beyond having some attraction to her – something confirmed later when he dances with her in the pub – and we have no reason to read it in the light of his later watching pornography and showing it to his young assistant David. As it is introduced, this moment is not flagged for us as a significant plot point, although his honest and inappropriate comments on the pornographic images reveal his obliviousness to socially acceptable behaviour. From these we learn of his natural interest in, but not disturbing or pathological fascination with, the world of adult sexuality. Present, but not overwrought, these moments contribute to the comprehensive way in

78

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

which his character is drawn, and they are not overtly ostentatious. The minor interludes of dialogue and comments about sex do not amount to anything more than candid and interested, but harmless and misinformed.

Aesthetic minimalism of action and dialogue The film works with a restraint in its connotation, stopping short of symbolic coding. In other words, what is presented on screen – in terms of sections of narrative, objects of the mise en scène or moments of dialogue – is what it is and does not mean something else by serving either a metaphorical purpose or a plot point set-up that will have a payoff later in the film. Garage presents its reality in a fullness that does not require the spectator to read its signifying totality as a set of codes that connote meanings beyond what they are. Garage signifies only the ontological completeness of its story, events and characterization, and there is neither the requirement for the spectator nor the intention by the director to read secondary meanings into objects, events or utterances. In the work of Christian Metz, Paul Willemen finds the possibility of understanding the filmed story through functions of signification that need no secondary interpretation. He has noted ‘Metz’ introduction of the concept of filmic writing to account for the displacements, transformations, substitutions and overlaps affecting the play of codes in any given signifying network, and any particular text […] There is something at work in signification which exceeds the interaction of semiologically defined sets of codes’ (1983, 148). This excess comes close to a transcendental expression of the medium, which relates to André Bazin’s concept of ‘ontological wholeness’ (1967; 1971). It is an operation that Dudley Andrew also underscores when he gives prominence to the metonymic over the metaphorical application of signification. Whereas the metaphorical use of cinematic codes ties signs to alternative meanings so that, for example, a horse on screen actually represents human freedom, metonymy frees the representation from connotative association so that we see in the horse all of its Platonic ‘horseness’. Andrew summarizes his point in reference to Metz noting that ‘metonymy is the key and most usual figure, the figure of association by which we pass from one aspect or image to a related one in search of a satisfying final picture’ (1983, 135). The innovation of Abrahamson’s restraint in this regard – in having the faith to allow things to appear as they are – is evident throughout the film as even the most diurnal and banal objects, such as oil cans, tubing, biscuits, cups of tea, lamb chops and apples, are disarmed of their hermeneutic possibility and are presented in their purity as things in Josie’s world. The most obvious one in this case is the horse, which Josie befriends early in the film when he finds it tethered to a tyre in a field. Over successive encounters, the horse is

GARAGE

79

less bound, until its final appearance when it walks free along train tracks and towards the camera in the final shot of the film. The horse can be read metaphorically, or understood in any number of ways; but the point is that it need not be, and any such interpretation serves no purpose in the light of its position and appearance to us as fully present ‘there’ on screen. This dissolution of meaning making by connotation, and the parallel deemphasizing of symbolism, operates within scenes and at various moments when Josie interacts with the world. It also functions across scenes as the story unfolds in a way that David Bordwell has identified as a cinematic ‘parametric style’. Laura McMahon has traced this stylistic tendency throughout the work of Robert Bresson, but identifies its exemplary expression in his 1959 feature Pickpocket whose ‘combination of nonlinear spatio-temporal construction and psychological opacity exemplifies what David Bordwell terms “parametric” style’ (2012, 38). Susan Sontag also deemphasizes any need to read significant and signifying cinematic cuing across Bresson’s narratives in a way that is immediately reminiscent of Garage. She writes of Bresson’s attempt ‘to insist on the irrefutability of what he is presenting. Nothing happens by chance; there are no alternatives, no fantasy; everything is inexorable. Whatever is not necessary, whatever is merely anecdotal or decorative, must be left out’ (1966, 194). Mark Betz summarizes Bordwell’s classical film interpretation by noting the latter’s emphasis on plot. In this cognitivist approach, features of style serve the progression of plot, but are subordinated to it. Betz references Bordwell’s canonical text Narration in the Fiction Film in his synopsis, which is worth quoting fully here: Narration consists of the interaction of the plot with story via style, a film’s systematic use of cinematic devices. In the case of classical narration, ‘stylistic patterns tend to be vehicles for’ the plot’s ‘process of cueing us to construct’ the story. In other words, style is subordinated to plot, which itself is subordinated to the needs of the story – the ‘invisible style’ of classical Hollywood cinema being the most notable example. (2010, 34) Contrary to the hierarchy inferred here, in which stylistic devices are subservient to linear cause-and-effect plot progression, Garage excavates all forms of leading signifiers and invites a different kind of audience emersion in its presented events. This rarer style of narration is no less manufactured and meticulously planned, but may be seen to allow greater access to an authenticity of the presented world. As Timothy Clark has suggested, ‘Economy is the guarantor not simply of aesthetic force – the lapidary, the aphoristic – but of truth’ (2006, 109). The reference to ‘economy’ here is not absolutely synonymous with the narrative sculpting out that is a central characteristic of Abrahamson’s work. In this instance, it describes the effective use of narrative codes and conventions measured in terms

80

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

of how certain elements facilitate our understanding of the plot. They perform a directional function with neither a deficit of information nor a surplus of material that serves no cause-and-effect, set-up and pay off or resolution purpose. What is noteworthy about Abrahamson’s film narratives is the absence or relegation in importance of such mechanisms. In fact, as most of this chapter will attest, Abrahamson establishes an environment for Josie in Garage by reinserting objects, gestures, dialogue, actions and events, that would actually be seen to hinder or to confuse plot progression in a conventional mainstream narrative. The detailed construction of the cinematic world of Garage offers not only a rich spatial tapestry against and within which the story unfolds but which also grants the audience a unique sense of time shared with its protagonist. Not all reviewers received the film favourably and, as Isabelle Le Corff has noted, some of the French press were critical of its aesthetics. Surprisingly mistaken in the provenance of the film (as British), even the Cahiers du Cinéma criticism failed to appreciate the significance of the film’s attention to detail. Le Corff notes that the left-wing daily paper L’Humanité expresses a negative opinion on it. Garage is said to be deprived of interest and boring (L’Humanité, May 2007). The prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma does not praise Garage in unison either. They do identify the story as taking place in Ireland, but they castigate the film for its ‘usual British morbid paraphernalia – tea bags, biscuits, oil containers’ (Cahiers du Cinéma, February 2008). (2015, 165) Abrahamson’s stylistic approach is not unprecedented and a comparison to other filmmakers whose work has had some influence on his throws light on how we might begin to understand the depth of Garage. The work of John Cassavetes is noteworthy in this regard and points to some of the ways in which Abrahamson’s film achieves a humanistic quality that transcends the immediate context of the situations and context of the story. In relation to Cassavetes’s narration, Ray Carney has identified the independent director’s desire to move us into the places that conventional narrative, by its very nature, excludes because they won’t be harnessed to advance the plot or to contribute to the concise characterization of a figure: places of uncertain, ambiguous, undefined, contradictory feelings and states of awareness. (1994, 215–216) In similar ways, Jacques Chevallier identifies an aesthetic minimalism in the canon of Robert Bresson with his ‘attempt to reduce the film art to even purer and more essential lines, to an ever more austere expression,

GARAGE

81

with each of these sketches portraying special truths through the dictates of the style’ (1967, 129). Writing about the same French filmmaker, Lindley Hanlon also draws attention to how he ‘reinvented a cinematic language with only those elements absolutely necessary for the movement of the narrative in his particular direction and style’ (1986, 20). When Hanlon goes on to explain how this innovation is manifest in Bresson’s work, she might have been writing about Garage, and how its director omits ‘all extraneous detail, information, explanation, and interpretation, building on the barest form of cinematic articulation’ (20). The theatrical intensity of our immediate – if not unmediated – connection with Josie, sharing his time and space, moment by moment and gesture by gesture, is also one that echoes the cinematic style of Ingmar Bergman. Connecting the Swedish director with his theatrical forefather August Strindberg in his unrelenting intensity, Lise-Lone and Frederick Marker have noted the tendency in both artists towards ‘the distillation of a single unifying theme, its muted, unhistrionic expression in a compressed and fluid form, and the suppression of all distracting effects and disturbingly ostentatious’ (1982, 67). Such paring back of mise en scène, evident also in O’Halloran and Abrahamson’s first collaboration, is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s œuvre. John Fletcher emphasizes this quality in the dramatist’s style when he demonstrates that ‘the “maximum of simplicity” is Beckett’s ideal, and he is said to have disliked the clutter deemed appropriate for the London première of Waiting for Godot’ (1967, 46). He goes on to put the audience into the picture noting that the ‘extreme simplicity, the deliberate bareness, provokes in the spectator a state of mind appropriate to the theme of the play he is about to see’ (47). The practice of such representational hollowing out in Garage emphasizes minor elements. Josie is not without tasks, but their narrative pointlessness creates tonal and aesthetic effects in a way that intensifies our relatively direct connection with him. On a similar objective of Beckett’s characterizations, Steven J. Rosen has noted ‘the futility of goal need not, for Beckett, diminish its value – it may well increase it; in any case, a goal, even if impossible to realize, does indicate a value and supply a direction’ (1976, 11). This chapter will explore how in the film we are ultimately invited into as pure a presence with Josie as the representational apparatus will allow, but always with the expectation, as Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment have contested with the work of Beckett, that observing ‘a character performing routing tasks takes precedence in spatial and temporal terms to the demands of narrative action and progression’ (2000, 107). Roy Armes describes the function of certain plot point codes and conventions in the context of Bresson’s work, when he notes that filmmaker’s ‘refusal of a conventional dramatic approach and omission of the customary linking passages’ (1975, 200), an attribute on which Abrahamson relies in a dilution of logical cause-andeffect consequences.

82

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The thread of diachronic actions, utterances and hesitations in Garage replaces a more meaningful and central synchronic causality. The latter is more typical of mainstream structuring of plot identified by Carol Brightman in terms of the progression of stories in which events and actions are always performing practically. Actions are relevant and meaningful, Brightman argues, because they are ‘synchronous; the dramatic whole emerges in the overall pattern of juxtaposition’ (1975, 245). This linearity is dismantled in Garage, as it is in many non-mainstream films, in a way that Gilberto Perez finds in Bresson’s work. Perez identifies the aesthetic arrangement of Bresson’s narratives as ‘a chain of shots, not events but bits of events, fragments picked out from the world and put in a row like so many items being counted’ (1998, 59). Therefore, plot points are not given or delivered sequentially in Garage to determine fully rounded events, but as identifiable moments interwoven into a plane of possibility instead of performing a syntactic part within a narrative chain. The direct consequence of this is a narrative openness whereby the spectator need not concentrate on the potential outcome or result of given presented moments, but rather can remain with the protagonist as they are effected. John Ellis identifies this quality as a key device in the work of John Cassavetes in which, narratively speaking, ‘important events appear in the same mode as, in the interstices of, the everyday […] where it is never certain which events are providing the onward movement of the film’ (1995, 75). In removing typical mainstream plot points, Abrahamson shifts the form of his narrative communication from what Roland Barthes has called ‘kernels’ to what he has named ‘catalysts’. Jakob Lothe summarizes Barthes’s terms quoting his chapter ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ in synopsis: A kernel is a ‘cardinal function’ which promotes the action by giving the character one or more alternatives to choose between; it can also reveal the results of such a choice […] A catalyst accompanies and complements the kernel, but the action to which it refers does not ‘open (or continue, or close) an alternative that is of direct consequence for the subsequent development of the story’. (Barthes 1982, 265; 2000, 75–76) Some of the most obvious stylistic paring back in Garage relates not to what the film is showing through restrained visuals but through how it is aurally and audible muted. As was often the case with 3 Joes and Adam & Paul, much of the dialogue is given a poetic inflection rather than merely used to communicate information. Torben Grodal has noted the cinematic potency that is available to the silent filmmaker with the technical requirement to emphasize the mimetic over the diegetic. Moments of stillness and silence enhance our time observing Josie in ways that are often aesthetically evident in cinema of the silent era which could therefore ‘tell a story by showing

GARAGE

83

protagonists perceiving objects and displaying emotional reactions, possibly followed by physical acts; and, in dreams, visual perceptions, emotions, and acts will often be linked without any verbalization’ (2000, 10). In the case of Josie in Garage, many of his verbal exchanges become redundant because his repetitions and reiterations merely offer information already known. Although we have witnessed Mr Gallagher’s request that he work additional hours at the weekend, Josie goes on to announce this on two other occasions with a redundancy that is informative of his character and demonstrative of his feeling the need to fill time with banter. As is the case when he tells Carmel, other characters’ reactions to the news are indifferent. JOSIE: I’ll have to tell you my news. CARMEL: What? JOSIE: We’re goin’ late above. CARMEL: Really? JOSIE: Weekends only. Regularly throughout the film, we share moments with Josie in silence during which thinking and reflection replace actions, reactions and meaningful dialogue. One example of this private contemplation begins in a shot when we find Josie standing alone at the petrol pumps. Against a light blue sky, there is an inserted close-up of his face as he looks diagonally downward to the bottom middle of the frame, from the left side of the screen. The moment is noteworthy because when Abrahamson cuts away he avoids disclosing what Josie was studying. Rather than provide a point of view angle on the object of his gaze, our perspective changes to a long shot from across the road showing Josie standing at the pumps, looking down and to the side but staring at nothing in particular. If he is looking at something – which is not determined – we cannot see it, so the shot is all the more powerful for its lack of satisfying revelation. The second of these two shots holds him for several seconds. Eventually he bends to pick up two watering cans and moves back towards the garage as if his thought processes had only caught up with him and motivated his reactions after the fact. By the end of this brief sequence, David has cycled into frame asking: ‘All right, Josie?’ The film cuts to a reverse angle, mid-shot point of view of David on his bike. Once again, Josie is positioned in the shot for several seconds before he finally moves. Empty narrative time places him passively in the frame, and he pauses again for a few seconds before he moves into action. Verbal repetitions in the film relate to their linguistic (communicative) redundancy. These monosyllabic utterances have been classified as examples of conversational deixis. Ross Chambers invokes Emile Benveniste’s Problèmes de linguistique générale (1966) and Oswald Ducrot’s Le mots du discours (1980) in defining the term and its use:

84

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The resources of language include markers of what E. Benveniste calls énonciation (‘utterance’), as opposed to énoncé (‘statement’): the pronoun system, the tense system, modes of deixis. O. Ducrot and his group have shown in turn that innocent little words like mais or d’ailleurs cannot be correctly analyzed in their linguistic functioning except situationally. (1984, 28) Elsewhere Jacob Lothe emphasizes the rootless signifying of deixis, that is entirely meaningless when decontextualized. Marking its main feature as ‘a specifically demonstrative function’, Lothe states that ‘such words are the, this, that, here, there, now, I, you, tomorrow, yesterday. None of these words can be understood properly unless we bring in “the point of orientation” (both in space and time) of the person (addresser) uttering them’ (2000, 39). At the end of Josie’s exchange with Carmel, in which he announces the additional hours’ work at the weekends, he says ‘now’ and then repeats ‘the weekends, just’. This verbal characteristic is echoed later when he’s talking with Mr. Skeritt at the lake: he repeats words and phrases not because they hide him behind their meaning but precisely because they are meaningless. When David first arrives at the garage, Josie attempts to introduce him to the mechanics of the petrol pumps. Following a markedly useless explanation of the simple operation, Josie stands for a long pause with both characters framed in a long shot by the pumps. After another pause, Josie awkwardly repeats ‘the pumps’. The comedy here works because of the futility of his utterance, designating something, but unnecessarily because of its presence. Furthermore, the rhythm is unlike the declarative ‘voilà’ of a magician who produces a rabbit from a hat as he announces the trick with a performative gesture that works dramatically because of the speed of the revelation. The humour in Josie’s case works because of the long delay before the indication of ‘the pumps’, a gesture in any case of which we had no need. In a later scene, following a mocking exchange with the group of inimical locals in the pub, Josie steps outside for a cigarette. Sully, who we interpret as a more sympathetic participant in the earlier jeering, and who wants to distance himself from the nasty conversation that has just happened, follows him outside. Josie’s upset and feeling hurt by the sarcastic victimization is revealed by what he does not say, and his responses to Sully’s comments are reduced to empty repetitions and dismissive asides. SULLY: JOSIE: SULLY: JOSIE: SULLY: JOSIE: SULLY:

Cold enough. It is. Cold enough, now. Things good with you, Josie? Now. Good enough. Good enough. What’s eatin’ Breffney inside?

GARAGE

85

JOSIE: Ah sure, grand. Bit of craic. SULLY: (With a side glance towards Josie) Don’t know why I come in here sometimes. JOSIE: Few pints. SULLY: You’d go mad otherwise, I suppose. JOSIE: Stone mad. Similar failure at communication, marked by a linguistic repetition that shows Josie’s discomfort in handling emotional questions and his awkwardness with others’ display of upset or anguish, is evident in the later bench scene when he talks with Mr Skerrit. Mr SKERRIT: I come out here a good bit on me own now. JOSIE: Do ye? Mr SKERRIT: Yeah. Used to come out with Senna when he was a little fella. JOSIE: Now. Mr SKERRIT: Yeah. Before she took him. Just out by the water there. Walking, or dropping a line. JOSIE: Fishing. Mr SKERRIT: Yeah. Pike. Auld pike. JOSIE: Or eels. Mr SKERRIT: Aye. Pike or eels. (He laughs) And he loved it. JOSIE: (Awkwardly) Never caught a pike here myself now. Mr SKERRIT: Pike. JOSIE: Hard old fish to clean, pike. Full of bones. Mr SKERRIT: … loved it … JOSIE: Only ever caught eels here now … Mr SKERRIT: Right. JOSIE: I had a great run of eels one time. Never forget it. Kept them in a bucket in our yard. Four days. Tyin’ themselves in knots. Till they died. Then I threw them out. Dirty ol’ things. (Skerrit starts crying) You’re keepin’ well anyways? Mr SKERRIT: Ah … JOSIE: Dirty ol’ things. Mr SKERRIT: Sorry, I’m bad some days. JOSIE: Now. Mr SKERRIT: You think it’s going to stop. It never stops … JOSIE: There’s some buildin’ in town, isn’t there? Mr SKERRIT: Ah to hell with the town, Josie. No such thing as towns anymore. I’m sorry, Josie, I’m heavy. JOSIE: Now. Mr SKERRIT: Sorry. JOSIE: Nice here, anyway.

86

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Mr SKERRIT: Yeah … Nice. You’re a great man to listen to me. Thanks. JOSIE: You were good to me in your time. (Beat) Pike … and eels. This kind of awkwardness with language also works when Samuel Beckett suggests a sense of the character’s social isolation. As with O’Halloran and Abrahamson’s dialogue here, Micheal Worton finds that Beckett constantly presents ‘silences of inadequacy, when characters cannot find the words they need; silences of repression, when they are struck dumb by the attitude of their interlocutor or by their sense that they might be breaking a social taboo; and silences of anticipation, when they await the response of the other which will give them a temporary sense of existence’ (1994, 75). The patterns in linguistic repetitions with words like ‘now’, ‘the oils’ or ‘eels’ serve to emphasize the fissures and verbal silences of inarticulacy that mark Josie’s social mal à l’aise. At the same time, they produce gaps that punctuate the soundscape of the film. When Duncan Petrie discusses the modulations and orchestrations of everyday sounds in cinema, he concentrates on how the aesthetic soundscape has an impact on the spectator. Comparing acoustic with visual minimalism, he suggests that ‘just as the stillness of the images forces that audience to look, so the relative silence encourages greater attention to those sounds which are in evidence – boots scraping on asphalt, the chirping of birds, the rumble of vehicles, the timbre of voices – granting them much more emotional significance as a result’ (2000, 160). In Garage, Josie’s contemplation of his environment also connects him to it through the sounds produced (ones coincidentally listed by Petrie) and aligns our perspective with his as we pay attention to acoustic details like birds chirping or his feet scraping along the ground. As we will see below, these aural qualities play an important role in how Josie is connected with his natural surroundings, whether they are constructed diegetically as a part of his space, or extra-diegetically by the score. While a standard ninety-minute film contains anything from dozens to hundreds of musical cues, some based on recurring leitmotifs and others that make intertexual connections to identifiable compositions, the score of Garage by Stephen Rennicks is notable for its restraint. At eighty-five minutes, the film contains only three cues: one is embedded in the film as a non-diegetic transitional piece, and the other two serve as leads in to and out of the opening and closing credits. As the music appears, it works as a bridge between the base details of the world inhabited by Josie and the universality of his human position. It stirs empathy in the spectator by revealing a transcendental quality in the cold, muddy and barren landscapes through which Josie ambles, and it connects him with his surroundings and places him comfortably in the natural setting. For Debbie Ging, this has a humanizing effect that works succinctly in ways that dialogue could not have done lightly. Ging draws attention to how ‘Abrahamson renders Josie emotionally articulate by showing us the complexity and beauty of his take on the world through images and music instead of words’ (2013, 116). Although the musical interludes are rare and

GARAGE

87

delicate, they are powerful in their subtlety and tonal depth, and refocus our attention on details of Josie’s physical appearance in ways that Susan Sontag has identified in the still framing of faces and corporeal forms by Robert Bresson. For Bresson, she has noted, the ‘face is very quiet, while other parts of the body, represented as humble servants of projects, become expressive, transfigured’ (1966, 190). Discussing the musical refrains in his own films, Andrei Tarkovsky has emphasized the transformative effect that they can have on the image. On their aural capability he has written, ‘music does more than intensify the impression of the visual image by providing a parallel illustration of the same idea; it opens up the possibility of a new, transfigured impression of the same material: something different in kind’ (1996, 158). When Stephen Rennicks’s stringed motif plays for the second time, a series of shots of natural backdrops forms a transitional lead into the scene during which Josie walks along the wall, back to the garage after a morning stroll. This echoes the opening of the film as both music and action are mirrored, with a different effect, in the later scene. While the community of Garage is somewhat insignificant for Josie, his marginalized position is nonetheless affected by the power-structures of that social setting. In fact, as we will see, the film works by exploring the interrelationships of Josie’s reactions and responses to external events, in balance with the circumstances and situations occurring around him. Exemplified by the minimalism of Josie’s actions and often inconsequential daily routines, Pat Shortt’s performance is perfectly calibrated so that even the simplest tasks that he undertakes become important in their meticulous detail. In a comparable way, this quality is typical of John Cassavetes’s spatial construction of characters’ performances. It results, as Ivone Margulies has indicated, in a careful ‘moment-to-moment self-creation, based mostly on a collapse of distinctions between acting and being […] inviting into the director’s work a continuous tension between spontaneous and scripted actions’ (1998, 276). In relation to the management of performance and the cinematic consequences of this, Paul Schrader foregrounds a minimalist approach noting that the ‘acting process is one of simplification; the actor modifies his personal, unfathomable complexities into relatively simple, demonstrable characteristics’ (1972, 65). Abrahamson has also described his process in working with Shortt on the character of Josie by indicating some of his influences. In order to establish a credible presence with the character, he avoids shorthand codes of acting so that the director makes ‘the scene so familiar that it becomes invisible. That repetitive method [of preparing actors] is something which I got a hint of from Bresson’s films’ (Holohan 2008, 162). Michael Gillespie focuses his attention on this quality in Shortt’s performance indicating how his ‘command of subtle variations of gesture and expression evokes the powerful response one experiences in seeing the best silent film actors’ (2008, 138). Sarah Street turns her attention to the director’s role in restraining the performance of an actor, when she concentrates on the approach of Bill

88

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Douglas, one of Abrahamson’s influences. Street might have been discussing Garage when she comments on Douglas’s interaction with actors during the filming of his Trilogy, and notes his success ‘in drawing performances from them which relied on gestural condensation: understated actions and subtle facial expressions which were nevertheless capable of conveying a complex emotional spectrum’ (2009, 226). Abrahamson has also reflected upon the achievement of greater verisimilitude by reducing extraneous gesture, performance and tonal and stylistic theatricality when directors take ‘chunks out of a performance which is pretty unreal, and they know that either they’ll bring the unreality of everything else up, in terms of the art directing, the music, the pacing and the editing, so that it all feels ok for the hour and a half that you’re in there’ (Holohan 2008, 162). All of the qualities detailed above act in the service of enhancing the spectators’ emotional and empathetic connection with Josie. Abrahamson has made a point of facilitating audiences’ experience of being present with the protagonists of his films, by allowing their interpretation, experience and understanding of them to occur in as pure a way as the medium can allow. This does not simply presuppose a purposeful lack of cinematic construction; our reading of Josie is not unguided by intentional and meticulous design (in Abrahamson’s words, ‘When you meet Josie, you know immediately lots about him: you know he’s not a property developer, you know he’s not a gigolo, you know loads about him’) (Interview in Chapter 7). Rather, the process of filmmaking requires a regulation of shorthand stereotypical coding, and the management of narrative conventions that would otherwise focus the viewer’s attention on the mechanisms of plot design. While laying the ground for this does involve what Jill Forbes has called an ‘aesthetics of austerity’, and this is abundantly evident in Garage, it is not simply reducible to stylistic minimalism or cut-to-chase editing for plot economy. Garage manages with fastidiousness what Forbes has identified as ‘the contrast between decorative restraint and emotional excess’ (1992, 213), and this involves discovering a fine line between the provision of visual, aural, narrative and character detail and restraint and a direct capturing of things as they are in the world. The reasons for avoiding typical cinematic coding are not just informed by a penchant for reduction and omission, but are often a consequence of the simple inadequacy of the standard formal conventions of narrative cinema. Andrew Noble points to this in Bill Douglas’s Trilogy in which he finds ‘an innovative use of image, narrative, language, natural sound, song and, not least, silence. This is because no conventional forms could possibly cope with the fraught heart’s areas of feeling and being which are under exploration’ (1990, 134). As Fredric Jameson has indicated, films like Garage do not simply dispense with the recognized tools of plot construction off-hand, rather in such cases the narrative ‘has not here been subverted or abandoned, as in the iconoclasm of experimental film, but rather effectively neutralized, to the benefit of a seeing or a looking in the filmic present’

GARAGE

89

(1992, 149). This ‘filmic present’ equates well with Abrahamson’s ‘being present with’ characters. It does not create a realist aesthetic, but it comes closer to a recognizable verisimilitude discussed by Siegfried Kracauer when he identifies how certain works have ‘a characteristic in common which sets them apart: unlike the contrived plots of the contemporary screen, their tenuous intrigues were in the nature of real-life episodes’ (1965, 179). What George Kouvaros calls ‘dead time’ also becomes relevant in Garage in line with Abrahamson’s notion of being present with his protagonists. Although Kouvaros finds the quality most often in the work of Stanley Kubrick, attention to time unfilled by action is constantly evident in Abrahamson’s films as ‘an expenditure of energy and film stock that contributes little to our understanding of the characters, their motivations or problems […] as a deliberate attempt to open the film up to questions and points of view which cannot be answered or contained by the narrative’ (1999, 57). In the work of Werner Herzog, Stan Brakhage and Terence Malick, Noël Carroll goes as far as to suggest the extreme – aesthetically enriching – consequence of this kind of cinematic ‘presence’. He notes how ‘sights and events are portrayed as “too much there,” resistant to satisfying description or explanation in terms of narration, psychology, and sometimes even physics’ (1998, 285). An important aspect of allowing time to unfold in its fullness recurs in Abrahamson’s restraint by not always providing cuts to point of view information, reaction shots or by cutting to details of mise en scène. Long shots of landscapes through which Josie saunters (see Figure 3.1), or which he contemplates, often serve a temporal continuity avoiding cuts to closer mid-shots that would otherwise flag meaningful moments for

FIGURE 3.1 Finding Josie positioned in the natural landscape. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

90

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

the spectator. Andrea Truppin finds a similar visual restraint in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky in which long-distance or tracking shots ‘may take several minutes to finally reveal the “subject” of the shot – a person, an action, an object – the journey is as vital to the mood and meaning as the destination’ (1992, 237). Things exist in Garage as pure entities which do not require interpretation. Robin Wood points to the value of this denotative purity in the films of Ingmar Bergman, noting with specific reference to The Silence how, in that film ‘the dwarfs are dwarfs, the tank is a tank, and the horse a horse: there they are on the screen, fully integrated in the action, to prove it. There is nothing in The Silence [sic] that cannot be explained “naturalistically”, in the generally accepted dramatic-cinematic use of the word, and the film is not particularly obscure’ (1969, 123). He goes on to point out the value of avoiding applying connotative meaning to objects, gestures and events by stating that ‘it would be a pity if any “symbolic” reading were allowed to detract from the significance arising naturalistically out of the action’ (128). The same sentiment is expressed by Mark Le Fanu in relation to Andrei Tarkovsky’s nature shots. On that stylistic feature, which predominate in Mirror, he has noted that the ‘overarching sky announces eternity, the water underneath has the placidity of dreams. Tarkovsky places the shots in the film without any explanation, and you feel any explanation would be impertinent. Their refulgence and beauty speak for themselves’ (1987, 77). The stylistic directness with which Abrahamson presents his cinematic worlds to us allows them to appear in their totality. This ontological wholeness, based on a fidelity to the complex simplicity of the presented world and all of its minutiae, is most evident in Garage and operates in line with the philosophical procedure known as phenomenology. Indeed, the way in which Josie and the details of his setting and story are offered might be as usefully informative of the phenomenological approach to understand human being-in-the-world as that methodology is conversely relevant in coming to engage with Abrahamson’s aesthetics.

A phenomenological consideration of the film Frist proposed by Edmund Husserl in his 1900 book Logical Investigations, phenomenology sought to address what he understood to be a crisis in the logical, rational sciences. These had come to interpret the world by objectifying its elements and by detaching the human experience from the analytical process. Husserl hoped to emphasize the interrelationship between the analysing subject and the analysed object as they were connected by an active consciousness. For Husserl, objects – or things-in-the-world – were not separate from the mind. Nor were they entities that existed prior to human reflection, independently set in the world as they awaited the

GARAGE

91

interpretation of rational scientific thinking. At the same time, they were not simply composed by and inside the human consciousness, and configured for our understanding before they existed in the real world. As Husserl understood it, the subject and object existed – and should only be interpreted – as dynamically interacting, in a process where the conscious mind reached out to grasp objects in the world as those same things simultaneously reached back to our various modes of perception. Working from this basic belief, Husserl prioritized the idea that the world should be considered first and foremost as a lived experience, as a process of consciousness, before it became a separate entity for us to study and deconstruct objectively. His emphasis on lived experience meant that he rejected simple idealism – where the world was a mere construct of our minds – as much as he eschewed notions of realism or scientific naturalism that posited the world as existing detached, available for our analytical scrutiny. Garage operates in two ways that echo a phenomenological predisposition to celebrating our interactive being-in-the-world. First, it gives measured time to presenting Josie’s interaction with the objects that form his story world: it does this by spending time with him during reflective moments, and also by concentrating on his physical connection and touch. Second, it offers the spectator the experience of observing its universe at one remove, appearing before us immediately and organically (while not unmediated or unconstructed), in a way that allows us to become aware of our own processes of conscious reflection. A similar mechanism informs the ways in which the surrealist dreamscapes work for the spectator on screen, whereby we are observing a presentation of the functions of the unconscious mind with its irrational narratives and characters but always advantaged by being at one remove, consciously aware and awake as we perceive the images. At the heart of the phenomenological method is the concept of ‘bracketing’ – called ‘epoché’, by Husserl – during which we suspend our automatic tendencies to come to grips with the world before us as a material of scientific study, and refocus our understanding of our complete being, surrounded by things that exist with us in our lived experience. This bracketing is inherent in film’s framing of the reality in front of the camera, and in the boxing off of the world by the cinematic window. It grants us not only a proximity to, and immersion in, the presentation but also an ability to observe it at one remove. As we have already seen in Garage, objects are experienced for Josie and the film spectator as pure things, not to be interpreted, analysed or assessed as carrying loaded or connotative meaning. John Calder’s synopsis of how Immanuel Kant understood the operations of the conscious mind bears resonances of the screen world/spectator relationship when he explains that ‘Kant also saw the world in dualistic terms, as the coexistence of the real outside world (the thing in itself) and the world of appearances. For Kant, the mind perceiving the world is also part of that world perceived, and is therefore real; the world of phenomena,

92

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

which we never really understand, but investigate, is the world of shadows’ (2001, 21). Henri Bergson identifies how this implies a separation of subject and object that Husserl and his followers would later seek to reconnect. In Time and Free Will, Bergson argues that Kant establishes ‘an impassable barrier between the world of phenomena, which he hands over root and branch to our understanding, and the world of things in themselves, which he forbids us to enter’ (1910, 235). In this way, he holds to the possibility of scientifically analysing the world because of a convenient spatial separation between the objects of study – the things-in-themselves – and the studying subject. Morris Beja points to Kant’s erroneous focus on the spatial aspect of this subject–world relationship suggesting that the ‘mistake is in his failure to comprehend the true nature of duration, which leads him to suppose that the obstacle to union between subject and object is space, when it is actually time’ (1971, 55). This temporal quality is one that the cinema is uniquely positioned to offer and explore and is a facility that Abrahamson invokes in the aesthetic of Garage. The spatial relations between objects in the world of Garage, Josie as corporeal entity and the things with which he interacts are instrumental for understanding the purity of their being. This takes precedent over their metaphorical or symbolic application, use, meaning or relevance to the overall plot of the film. As a distinct example, in one scene we see Josie carrying a long piece of yellow tubing to the forecourt of the garage (see Figure 3.2). He balances it on his shoulder and the moment is presented as visually ridiculous. In a later scene, we watch as he slices a section off it in order to cover air and

FIGURE 3.2 Comedy through useless action. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

GARAGE

93

water hoses, but at the earlier moment it is clear that he is not aware of what he intends to do with it. The tubing becomes a superfluous thing, comically out-of-place and incongruous in the mise en scène. Following Beja, who cites Bergson, we can see that it is the screen time invested with Josie and his selected object that allows the spectator to experience him, the tubing and the captured moment afresh, as pure things-in-the-world. The films of John Cassavetes, Robert Bresson and Bill Douglas assemble objects for the same cinematic effect, presented in detailed screen time. It might be helpful to give some examples from these directors in respect of this particular endeavour. Ray Carney has compared Cassavetes’s work with conventional mainstream standards suggesting that where the latter ‘encourages us to tunnel under perceptual instabilities and expressive vagaries, Cassavetes holds us on the phenomenal surfaces of life […] There is nothing but surface. There are no clarifying essences, explanatory metaphors, or private depths of subjectivity by means of which we can get inside characters and events to simplify them’ (1994, 10–11). Writing about Bresson’s films generally, but A Man Escaped specifically, Toni Pipolo finds ‘an ongoing dialogue between the prisoner and objects in his cell (e.g., the door as he works patiently to dismantle it)’ (2010, 42), later adding that in that film ‘the physical tasks Fontaine performs in his cell […] are almost never used for dramatic effect’ (100). From the same list of directors, Andrew Klevan also finds justification for Bill Douglas’s attention to the presentation of things in their cinematic wholeness, as the minor activities and gestures of characters are focused upon ‘objects (a teacup, a picture-book, a birdcage, a bicycle, an apple)’, and giving a precise example, he goes on to state that My Childhood ‘is about the psychology of possessing, about the importance, and consequent strangeness, instilled in the possessions you have […] the currency of ordinary objects achieves a more urgent worth’ (2000, 38–39). In all of these cases, film has been mobilized by its directors for a ‘seizing of the phenomenologically visible and audible world of bodies and faces, actions and spaces, sounds and words’ (Pipolo 2010, 22). The effect of Abrahamson’s insistent attention on objects in Josie’s world is not simply about recreating a naturalistic or scientific verisimilitude. In the work of Werner Herzog, objects do not serve a decorative purpose, nor do they facilitate for Brad Prager any ‘capturing everyday life in its rawest form, but rather the opposite: the sublime. That is to say that it is a search for that which exceeds language’s capacity to express it’ (2007, 5). As Prager goes on to show, this technique demonstrates the German director’s more basic desire to depict ‘the world as it generally appears to us’ in his ‘striving for an aesthetic height akin to that attainable by poetry’ (5). As is the case with most of Herzog’s work, Abrahamson is interested in revealing truths about his protagonist’s situation by letting us discover Josie in his environment. With both directors this works by rendering their central characters comfortably in their natural setting and at odds with their social one. In fact, with Josie, the more that Abrahamson grants him time manipulating the smaller objects

94

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

in his space – a time that is deliberately expanded as Josie arranges biscuits on a plate, prepares dinner by struggling to open a tin of beans or dips his greasy finger into a glass of Fanta to stop the fizz overflowing – the more at ease he is shown to be in solitude and removed from social interactions. Stephen Brockmann proposes how this thematic concern can be seen to impact directly on Herzog’s style in his laying out of space in time and indicates how the German director was interested in ‘human beings who are, for various reasons, independent from or separated from such social systems’ (2010, 330). Drawing on a distinction between the spatially and temporally exaggerated worlds of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, Robert Kolker notes the humanistic attention given to characters by the former as they are set in natural locations, but at odds with the political interrelations of broader societies. Before focusing on Welles’s work, Kolker notes how both directors are ‘concerned with the ways humans inhabit environments, and both use cinematic structures to observe this. Welles is a humanist, one of the last in the classic sense of the word. He is deeply aware of the power, the inviolability, and the fragility of the human subject’ (2000, 108). By magnifying our time in the presence of Josie, Abrahamson does not intend to create a visually or tonally epic effect – quite the contrary, in fact – but concentrates on the banalities of typically unnoticed elements, rituals and utterances that make up our daily experience. As Vivian Sobchack praises faith in the medium to connect with the raw elements of the world, she emphasizes that its purpose should be ‘not to arrive at the “essential” and proscriptive categories but to address the “thickness” of human experience and the rich and radical entailments of incarnate being and its representation’ (1995, 39). While Abrahamson emphasizes the ordinariness of the tasks that Josie performs, he shifts the concentration of Josie’s overarching narrative agency onto sets of minor agencies relating to the character’s interaction with things. Even when we discover him one evening in the garage doing stretching exercises against the wall, the routine does not look convincingly useful. After the half-hearted workout, and a brief contemplative pause, he switches off the light and gets into bed. Josie’s corporeal presence, to which attention is drawn by virtue of his physical ailment – he specifically mentions his ‘bad hip’ – also unites him with his physical space. By emphasizing this physicality and juxtaposing it with more sublime natural backdrops, we experience a certain transcendental quality that Slavoj Žižek finds throughout the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. He connects the transcendent with cinematic time, noting that the ‘inert insistence of time as Real, rendered paradigmatically in Tarkovsky’s famous slow five-minute tracking or crane shots, is what makes Tarkovsky so interesting for a materialist reading […] in Tarkovsky’s universe one attains spirituality only via intense direct physical contact with the earth’ (2001, 102). Abrahamson has summarized this objective by pointing to a tension ‘between the transcendental element and the more mundane psychological or social […] if you are going to be transcendental, you need something to

GARAGE

95

transcend’ (Holohan 2008, 164). Not only do Abrahamson’s compositions confirm a comfortable relationship between Josie and his environment, but the framing also marks his liminal position in relation to the wider society in which the events of the film is set. In this respect, and many other besides, the protagonist of Garage is comparable with the eponymous hero of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser who is, for Stephen Brockmann, ‘that rarest of human individuals, a person at one with nature’ (2010, 337). In his ostracization, Josie is shown to inhabit a no-place of industrial and social development, reflected in the references to the housing being built ‘around the lake’ and the impending threat that the garage will soon be knocked by its owner and replaced with more lucrative apartments. These, and the sense that any upward mobility relating to moving away from the town, are conversations that resurface throughout the film. The liminal positioning of not only Josie but also of the other locals and the town itself echoes Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment’s discussion on social development and the outsider. They have described the situations of those who can be found living in the gaps left by successive waves of industrialisation and economic redevelopment. The landscapes of contemporary social realism and abandoned inner city areas, satellite housing estates built to rehouse those displaced by either urban regeneration schemes, projects built to house migrant labour, industrial towns where the industries that once provided jobs and relative affluence have moved to new locations. (2000, 193) In Abrahamson’s film, Josie’s liminal position is marked by reference to his opening doors or standing on the hearth as he contemplates the framed external world. Often, he moves in almost total blackness as he shuffles around, unlocks and then pushes open the unwieldy doors of the premises. In one of the first of these sequences, a shot/reverse shot shows him in silhouette, literalizing his in-between positioning as he is framed by the borders of the double doors. The moment is held as he contemplates the next task to be undertaken. Finally, and as if to undermine the necessity of his meditation – ironizing the fact that he has not actually been asked to anything – he says to himself definitively: ‘Right, Josie, move the oils.’ The locals in the town pigeonhole each other as either ‘established’ or ‘blow ins’. Whereas David’s friends mock him as one of the latter, Josie is never acknowledged as either insider or outsider. His rootedness is however expressed when he says that the current garage owner, his boss Mr Gallagher, was in the ‘same class’ at school with him, and his fixed position is also hinted in some of the exchanges with the truck driver. The subtle addition of Josie’s ‘Australia’ cap also marks an ironic incongruity of his immobility that is underscored at certain moments, such as the one where he discusses with David a one-time opportunity to leave the town:

96

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

DAVID: You never wanted to leave? JOSIE: No. Could have … DAVID: Yeah? JOSIE: But I didn’t. DAVID: No. JOSIE: England. Had a job lined up in Ipswich and all. DAVID: Really. JOSIE: Yeah. Cousin of mine was a renderer in a meat factory there. Set me up with something. DAVID: Could have been nice. JOSIE: Could. But then I stayed. DAVID: Right. As language is connected with social communication and integration, Josie’s awkward relationship with the spoken word further exemplifies his exclusion from that group. The silences identified as stylistic devices are instrumental in marking Josie’s social separation. Brad Prager has found similar thematic contrivances in the films of Werner Herzog, which he identifies as manifest in ‘the solitary figure amid the foggy landscape, the encounter with the limits of language, the recreation of traumatic experiences, the endlessly spiralling camera, the comparisons between the human and animal worlds’ (2007, 18). In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, where the central character is freed into society as an adult after years of isolated captivity, Kaspar’s socialization is underscored by his struggle to acquire language and, with it, the related rationality through which that society works. The film ironically foregrounds a critique of the irrationally normative and ideologically blind ways in which social participants understand their world and interact with one another. For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Kaspar Hauser ‘critiques the unctuous pomposity and ridiculous pedantry of the villagers from the perspective of the natural man unspoiled by the phony rites of “civilized” society’ (1997, 621). In line with this, Michael Gillespie positions Garage as a film that is concerned with the restriction of individual freedom as it ‘outlines the complex rituals of tribalism that define behaviour while withholding social, spiritual, and emotional support. In ways in which other rural motion pictures have only gestured, Garage is a prison film’ (2008, 139). Debbie Ging places the resulting social alienation in a broader Irish context of ‘male depression and suicide’ and indicates how the film aligns the spectator perfectly with Josie’s position. Garage, she notes, ‘allows the viewer to see the world from the perspective of characters who are, more often than not, understood merely as members of socially problematic demographic groups’ (2013, 116). Thus alienated from the dysfunctional community, Josie is shown as comfortable in his natural environment; something indicated through his connection with the horse. Fintan Walsh goes as far as to justify this relationship on grounds of Josie’s social exclusion and, it is implied, as a result of his alienation from social systems of rational behaviour and thinking. This is bound with Josie’s ineptitude with language so that in

GARAGE

97

Garage, we witness how ‘non-normative relationships between humans and non-humans are engendered when linguistic meaning fails or when individuals are failed by logocentric registers of knowledge’ (2013, 220). Examples of this thematic concern abound in the work of many directors who have inspired Abrahamson, and Noël Carroll points to how Herzog, Stan Brakhage and Terence Malick regularly explore the problematic nature of the so-called ‘normative’ societies by concentrating cinematically on ‘forces in the world and in us that are available for experience and that cannot be reduced to the categories of language or science or of psychology or bureaucracy’ (1998, 284–285). Carroll goes on to acknowledge the central role that film is capable of playing in exploring the qualities of more ‘things – experientially available things – than are represented by our languages, sciences, and bureaucracies’ and he adds the failure of language in its representative capacity as ‘no account of what is can be descriptively adequate unless it acknowledges this’ (1998, 285). Jodi Brooks identifies this as an existential predicament of modernity and quotes Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘memorative content’ in this conceptual failure. She has noted that ‘for Benjamin the crisis of experience that characterises modernity is integrally tied to the inability of traditional modes of communication to grasp contemporary experience and the absence of “memorative content” in new cultural forms’ (1999, 98). Because the natural landscape remains untouched by the impure modern mechanisms of ‘languages, sciences, and bureaucracies’, in Garage it provides a raw, but richly textured, backdrop that will ultimately become the tragic resting place of the film’s central character. In a gentle foreshadowing of the conclusion of the film, there are indications of Josie’s sensitivity about nature, and often this is shown in opposition to the apathetic attitudes of other characters. In one scene, late in the evening, having undertaken the usual ritual of moving the oil stand inside, Josie emerges from the garage as David sweeps the forecourt. He stands contemplating the sky and the peaceful natural setting. Abrahamson dwells on the moment and inserts a shot of the evening sky, with a sprinkling of birds floating upwards. After a pause, Josie addresses David who is still preoccupied with his task: JOSIE: Great colour in the sky all the same. DAVID: Beautiful. JOSIE: It is. Beautiful. David’s response shows a similar thoughtfulness, which is telling as he too is represented as separate from his own group of peers. Later that evening, having finished a few cans of beer with David, the boy heads of to join his friends and Josie goes to Duignan’s Pub. As the owner cleans up for the night, Josie repeats his earlier remark, and Val’s reply is indicative of the more common, less thoughtful, attitude of the other locals.

98

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

JOSIE: Lovely sky tonight. VAL: Was there? JOSIE: There was, beautiful. In respect of Josie’s connection with nature, another poignant scene also foreshadows his fate. One morning he encounters Sully on the bridge holding a bag of puppies. Josie ambles over to him: JOSIE: What has you here? SULLY: Taking care of some pups. JOSIE: Right. SULLY: Nuisance. The bitch was caught by Tierney’s collie when she was in heat. I couldda strung the bastard up by the balls. JOSIE: Bad enough. Sully tosses the sack of yelping pups over the wall and it falls several feet down into the water. Josie’s failure to grasp the rationality of Sully’s decision to dispose of the pups is marked when he looks several times over the wall into the river where they have been thrown. This repeated gesture is not used by Abrahamson merely to demonstrate Josie’s slowness but to infer the oddity of the common social practice. Brad Prager finds similar cinematic moments in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and demonstrates, as is the case with Garage, how the role of the social outsider with whom we are aligned ‘casts light on the difference between society’s centre and its periphery; this figure – the film’s protagonist – by virtue of his failures, illuminates what it is about society that is criminal in its heartlessness, and how its hyperrationality manifests itself as irrationality’ (2007, 71). The scene also bears resonances of the basket of kittens that Daniel is intending to drown in JeanPaul Sartre’s L’âge de raison (1945). Significantly, on the way to the banks of the Seine, where he will perform the act, Daniel has an out-of-body experience of epiphany that stalls him in his determination. Sartre’s description of his character frozen in hesitation before the act of destruction also bears similarities to Josie’s moment of epiphany later in the film before he decides on his own suicide. Sartre’s account is wrought with existential elements: Daniel s’aperçu qu’il était à quelques pas en avant de son corps, par là, au niveau du bec de gaz, et qu’il se regardait venir, boitillant un peu à cause de son fardeau […]; il se voyait venir, il n’était plus qu’un pur regard. (1945, 109) [Daniel noticed that he was a few steps ahead of his body – at the level of the gas-lamp – and that he was watching his own progress, stumbling slightly because of his load […]; he saw himself arrive, he was no more than a pure disembodied vision. (Author’s translation)]

GARAGE

99

In the penultimate scene of the film, Josie’s fate is paralleled with that of Sully’s puppies. As we follow him on another morning walk in the woods, the mise en scène is more colourful and tonally warmer. What appears to be a point of view establishing shot (at 1:13:06) is disturbed as Josie moves directly into frame. He walks towards the river bank and observes the flowing water for several seconds before he sits down. The composition of the framing is delicate and the natural moments are presented serenely. Two insert shots – first in mid-close-up, then in close-up – focus on insects walking on the skin of the water, creating tiny ripples. When we cut back to Josie, he is removing his shoes and placing his ‘Australia’ cap on them. He wades gently into the water and, in another close-up shot, we see him go from waste-high to fully immersed. Another succession of lingering shots of the natural setting closes the sequence; all in warm hues and soft composition contrasting them with the earlier shots of the garage. Paul Schrader finds a similar sublime quality in the composition of the closing sequences of many of the films of Yasujirô Ozu and Robert Bresson. In these cases, the concentration on the specific cinematic details of a situation allows it to be ‘transcended by a universal form of expression. The static view at the close of Ozu’s and Bresson’s films is a microcosm for the transcendental style itself: a frozen form which expresses the Transcendent – a movie hierophany’ (1972, 86). Josie is always shown to be slow in the recognition of the potential significance of what he does, and the events that take place around him. This is often manifest in how he narrates actions to other characters with unnecessary repetition. Even having reiterated to Mr Gallagher his intention to move the oils onto a display stand, he sits having awkwardly completed the task, reflecting for several moments on his accomplishment. With most of the characters to whom he relates his general ‘news’, the reaction is apathetic. Politely feigning interest in one account, the truck driver humours Josie when he discusses the oils: DRIVER: Are you keeping well? JOSIE: Dead moving things … DRIVER: Are ya? JOSIE: I am … Makin’ improvements … DIRVER: Go on! JOSIE: I moved all them oils there, see. Next to the door on the stand. DRIVER: Yeah. JOSIE: Me and Mr. Gallagher were talking about it for a while. So I got the rep to give me a stand there a few days ago … DRIVER: Looks great … JOSIE: I’ll take them in then at night, and move them out again in the morning. Mr. Gallagher hasn’t seen it yet. DRIVER: Well I’m sure he’ll be delighted, Josie.

100

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The film’s – and, by implication, the spectator’s – being ahead of Josie is rendered in several shots that place the camera in a position waiting as it frames a landscape or location into which Josie soon ambles (see Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Echoing the lead into the scene from Adam & Paul in which a Down Syndrome boy is mugged, Josie is seen to pass a mid-point at which the camera is set to capture all of the ensuing action. One afternoon Josie walks along a road passing a lane that is framed centrally in front of the camera.

FIGURES 3.3 and 3.4 Mirroring action, we and the camera are always ahead of Josie. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

GARAGE

101

FIGURE 3.5 Another example of futile action for comedic purposes. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

Having gone too far, he realizes that it is the same lane in which he first encountered the horse. After a moment’s reflection, he turns around, moving centre-frame, to follow the lane back to the animal. A more comical example of this shows Josie gather several empty beer cans in his arms, balancing them in an effort to clean up the patch of land where the teenagers have discarded them. Having collected the last one, he hesitates only then coming to realize that he has nowhere to put the pile. After a beat, he moves to the left of the frame, and tosses them carelessly into the ditch.

Self-enlightenment and Josie’s epiphany Ultimately, Josie’s tardiness in appreciating the consequences of his action takes a tragic turn. When he is brought to the Garda station for questioning about reports that he had provided David with alcohol and shown him a pornographic video, Josie sits alone shot in profile at the table. His awkward responses to the Garda, who has explained the situation, are as linguistically repetitive and hesitant as those in earlier emotionally complicated conversations. Now they take on deeper dramatic significance. JOSIE: Will people know I’ve been arrested, Michael? GARDA: You haven’t been arrested Josie. You’re just making a statement.

102

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

JOSIE: But will people know, like? GARDA: I don’t know. It’s a small town. JOSIE: Right. GARDA: We’ll just wait to see if the lads pick up anything at the garage, and if not, I’ll drop you back. JOSIE: Thanks Michael. GARDA: We’ll see how things pan out from there. JOSIE: Right. Could say sorry to David. I’d like to say sorry to David. No harm intended in it, just sorry, like. GARDA: No Josie. JOSIE: Send a letter. I could send the mother a letter. Tell her I’m sorry. No harm done. Nothin’ like. Just innocent old craic is all. Just stupid. GARDA: Josie. Listen to me now. Stay away from them. Do you hear me? Things is bad enough without making them worse. Stay away. JOSIE: Sorry. Much of the tension created by Abrahamson in this interview scene, especially as we observe Josie when he is left alone, comes from our awaiting a moment of recognition as to the gravity of his situation. Instead, as Josie remains slow in his reflection, this is withheld and we are only granted vague indications from him, through uncertain and unreliable utterances, that something is dawning on him. As Carol Brightman reflects upon the viewer’s reading of Ester, in a similar position in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963), she notes how the protagonist’s existential dilemma leaves us equally suspended awaiting action. Brightman explains how we reflect on Ester’s condition and ‘find ourselves still observing her phenomenologically, with no real explanation of the origin of her breakdown, no real expectation of a solution, but waiting nevertheless for the act of recognition which will seal her fate’ (1975, 247). As the spectator of Garage is aware of Josie’s critical circumstance, and of the innocence that brought it about, the tragedy is exacerbated by his remaining inertly fixed behind his own narrative. Unlike his cinematic precursors, Adam and Paul (who had literally lost the plot), Josie is not incapable of personal epiphany. However, the emotional potency of this scene rests in Abrahamson’s masterful forestalling on any moment of self-enlightenment for Josie. His tragic position as social outsider is echoed by his narrative position, and the inevitability of his fate lies in our recognition of his need to understand. Robert M. Torrance finds similar characteristics in the hero of the comic drama, which underscore the misfortune of Josie’s circumstances as the spectator understands ‘an inherent pathos – and potential danger – in this different outsider’s attempts to abide by the rules (and even win the esteem) of a social order whose human deficiencies he challenges almost by inadvertence. Because he envisages no viable alternative to the world as it is he cannot exempt himself from its characteristic lack of direction’ (1978, 255). We observe Josie attentively,

GARAGE

103

in expectation of some flicker of recognition, but all indications that an epiphany is imminent are deferred. Frank Kermode discusses in depth one of the best known epiphanies in literature – that of Gabriel Conroy in James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ – and points to how the writer ‘held that the artist could find his epiphany in a vulgar or commonplace speech or gesture as well as in more “eucharistic” moments’ (1962, 88). Shortly after Josie’s encounter with the police, Abrahamson presents a scene in which the former will be the case. Josie’s epiphany is played out and shot with a subtlety and restraint that are representative of Abrahamson’s entire cinematic style. In the key scene, we discover Josie eating alone at a small table in the living section of the garage. Shot from a low angle, and from a few feet behind the character, we are only granted an oblique profile of his face mostly from the back of Josie’s head. Having taking a few bites, he puts down his fork and raises his hand to cover his mouth and pauses. Where a typical film would cut, at this moment, to a close-up of the protagonist’s face from the front, Abrahamson holds back, requiring that we observe the scene from the same position in which it began. Josie remains inert; his hand frozen over his mouth, as the full consequence of his actions, his interrogation by the police and what the public fallout will be become apparent to him. After eight seconds in this position – an overtly long time of screen stillness – he recommences eating. At this moment, but for entirely different reasons to those outlined by Robert Torrance in the case of Gabriel Conroy, Josie’s hesitation encapsulates the sense that with his ‘realization he feels himself irresistibly drawn toward the vast impalpable region of the dead’ (1978, 253). As words and language have already been deemed inadequate in Josie’s articulation of deeper emotions and feelings, the simple manual gesture is enough. Jodi Brooks invokes the writing of Walter Benjamin, whose commentary on the gesture takes on poignant relevance for Josie’s motionless moment of consciousness. As with the simplicity of Josie’s stasis, ‘the gesture is characterised by a dual force – as an interrupted fragment it is both framed and enclosed, but as an interrupted fragment it also gestures beyond itself. The gestural practices […] entail a compression and contraction of time into an instant, charging it and infusing it with a shock’ (1999, 93). Elsewhere, Brooks has identified that ‘the gesture stands as the site of a forgetting: the meaning of a gesture is barely known by the character who undertakes and carries it out’ and concludes that it is ‘the site on which the forgotten is to be remembered’ (85). This moment is doubly charged for Josie as the character catches up with his own narrative. What have been presented as meaningless, impractical or superficial gestures and activities until this scene have been eradicated by the still moment at which Josie’s body and hands freeze, as his reflection and requirement to act are realigned. The instant is captured in its ontological purity and corresponds with Gilles Deleuze’s description of the ‘sensory-motor break’ which ‘makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable

104

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

in thought. Between the two, thought undergoes a strange fossilization’ (1994, 169). The corporeal feature of this rupture between cognition and physical self is borne by Josie’s hands which, up to this point in the film, have been often closely framed in innocuous fidgeting activities, or as passive instruments held lifelessly as awkward appendages to Josie’s body. In an earlier scene, for example, when Josie is discovered by the side of the lake, Abrahamson introduces us to his presence by shooting his hands in close-up, dangling by his side as if from a body that has been hanged (see Figure 3.6). The importance of this focus on his apparently lifeless limb is marked not only by the camera’s proximity to it but also by the unusual position that it occupies in the frame. Held at one-quarter of the space from the right side of the frame, the shot lasts several seconds before it pans across his front waste line, to bring his second motionless hand into view. One of the more acute connections made between human volition and hands as actants that manifestly fulfil the role of executing what the subject wants and wants to do has been drawn by Jean-Paul Sartre. In a detailed section from Being and Nothingness (1984), Sartre focuses on the hand as the object that demonstrates whether a person is, or is not, acting in ‘bad faith’. This situation arises, according to Sartre, when the subject is required to make a decision and take appropriate action, but rather than choosing one option over another, as the conscious being is empowered (and therefore obliged) to do, that person instead ignores the responsibility and postpones the moment of decision and action, thus acting in bad faith. Sartre’s example of this deferral of duty is based upon a scenario in which a woman has agreed to meet a man in a bar, knowing that he has romantic

FIGURE 3.6 The framing of Josie’s motionless hands. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

GARAGE

105

designs on her. At some point in the encounter, she is aware that he is likely to make an advance that requires her to react, in good faith, by indicating whether she wishes to proceed with the development of the relationship to the next level, or to call a halt to it. Sartre describes the situation at the moment when the male participant places his hand in a romantic gesture onto hers, as it rests on the table top. He explains that the act of her companion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave her hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. (1984, 55–56) At the heart of Sartre’s picture of the critical moment is the question of how the female – acting in bad faith – divorces her body from her mind, in order to deny her obligation to act and demonstrate her desire, or lack of it. He describes how her ‘hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion – neither consenting nor resisting – a thing’ and explains that ‘she realizes herself as not being her own body, and she contemplates it as though from above as passive object to which events can happen but which can neither provoke them nor avoid them because all its possibilities are outside of it’ (56). Lest Sartre’s anecdotal scenario be considered too remote from real-world possibilities for practical purposes, it is worth mentioning a real-life case. In an interview with Mia Farrow, used by Alex Gibney in his 2015 documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, the actress describes her first meeting with the crooner and how she was charmed by him. At this encounter, Sinatra invited Farrow to attend a screening of None But the Brave (1965), which he had directed. She recalled: I don’t remember much about the movie. What I remember was that at some point he held my hand. I didn’t know what to do because my … I immediately started sweating. It was such a quandary that I mentally amputated from the wrist down. (2015) This ‘thingness’ of the hand, as detailed by the existentialist philosopher, and its bad faith separation from the subject’s directing consciousness, is validated in another way in the writing of Sigmund Freud when he describes the infant’s playing the ‘Fort/Da’ game (Gay 1995, 599–600). Throwing toys away with the expectation that they will be returned, the child is enacting a primordial control of volition and mastery of longing by using the hands. Michael Worton argues that this quality of our behaviour was central to Freud’s understanding of human desire and activity, stating that this ‘fundamental defensive need to move from the passivity of an experience to the activity of a game is characteristic of much human psychology’ (1994, 72).

106

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Cinematically, the hands are often framed as significant in relation to the actions that they perform, and the close-up shot grants them an importance uniquely available to the filmmaker. In writing on film’s potential to rediscover the common object anew, Fernand Léger mentions the hand in particular when he maintains that before the invention of the moving picture no one knew the possibilities latent in a foot – and hand – a hat. These objects were, of course, known to be useful – they were seen, but never looked at. On the screen they can be looked at – they can be discovered – and they are found to possess plastic and dramatic beauty when properly presented. (1974, 97) In documenting more specifically how the hand serves as a recurring device in the horror film, Barbara Creed notes its monstrous role in films such as Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel and Dali, 1929), Mad Love (Freund, 1935), The Beast with Five Fingers (Florey, 1946) and The Exterminating Angel (Buñuel, 1962). She justifies the recurring horror film motif ‘because of the link in mythology between severed hands and spiders. Minerva punished Arachne by turning her into a hand, which then changed into a spider’ (1995, 144). Beyond the context of the horror genre, Paul Schrader connects the activity of the hands to notions of human self-determination, citing Robert Bresson’s prison films as exemplary in their insistent concentration on the hands as cinematic actants. In Bresson’s obsessive attention to the performing hands in lingering close-up shots, Schrader proposes that the director manifestly explores themes of ‘freedom and imprisonment, or, in theological terms, of free will and predestination’ (1972, 59). All of these examples show that whether mobilizing the image for terrifying purposes or using them as expressive agents in effecting the drives of human consciousness, hands are cinematically used as both a concrete manifestation of desire and a means of acting on it. Beyond the medium of film, commentators have emphasized the importance of the organ in its relation to the intentions of the subject. Stanley Cavell draws upon the work of Martin Heidegger in this respect and references What Is Called Thinking? (1976) and the phenomenologist’s notion of ‘thinking as a handicraft’ by which he means, according to Cavell, that ‘thinking requires training and makes something happen, but equally that it makes something happen in a particular way since the hand is a uniquely human possession’ (1981, 146). Addressing the cinematic context, Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the aesthetic quality possessed by the hand, even granting to it more potency than the framed face as it ‘takes on a role in the image which goes infinitely beyond the sensory-motor demands of the action, which takes the place of the face itself for the purpose of affects, and which, in the area of perception, becomes the mode of construction of a space which is adequate to the decisions of the spirit’ (1994, 12). Maurice Merleau-Ponty draws the cinematic connection

GARAGE

107

even more explicitly in noting that ‘the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other’ (1964, 58). The tragedy of Garage is that Josie achieves this ‘manifest union of mind and body’ and of ‘mind and world’ concurrently and literally, as he submerges himself in the river. Identifying suicide as a final option, Albert Camus acknowledges its rationality as man is faced with an existence ‘suddenly divested of illusions and lights’ (2012, 3). David Galloway references Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and the existential question where ‘man must decide either to live or die. If suicide is eventually rejected as a solution to man’s absurd situation he is left with the problem of how he should live’ (1981, 8). The tragic outcome of Garage does not wholly reside in a sense of Josie’s loss or his ultimate separation from his social circumstances. Because of his earlier alignment with the natural world, we could read his final act as one of liberation. As an act of good faith, and in line with Josie’s avoidance of what he understands will be the local’s interpretation of the sequence of events, Abrahamson nods in the direction of a somewhat affirmative resolution. The final shots of the film offer a warmer mise en scène: if there is tragedy to be recognized, it remains with the spectator, as the film has only presented its conclusion in line with Josie’s departure. Catherine Russell notes the potential disruption of the kind of narrative closure that is associated with death, when she emphasizes how spectators’ desire for neatly managed plot resolution can implicate them in a need for represented death. She has noted that the ‘conventions of cinematic narrative, as they were developed out of the bildungsroman tradition of literary narrative, codified for the desire for meaning as a desire for meaningful death, and the desire for ending was formalized as a desire for death’ (1995, 3). It is significant, in this respect, that Abrahamson has decided not to return to reactions by locals to the news of Josie’s suicide. That closure is denied to the viewer who must address the situation in private. In a reversal of the conventions of the cinematic narrative identified by Russell, rather than having a plot-dominated structure that requires the death of Josie, the protagonist’s chosen suicide brings about another kind of narrative resolution.

4 What Richard Did

Characters in context A preliminary consideration of Lenny Abrahamson’s third feature film could indicate two key shifts from earlier thematic concerns that were at the heart of Adam & Paul and Garage. What Richard Did turns its attention to the lives of participants in, and the primary beneficiary generation of, Irish Celtic Tiger prosperity. In the world of the affluent, middle-class Dublin teenagers – those who have been inauspiciously called ‘Celtic Tiger cubs’ – the protagonists live with as little concern for the provenance of their economic benefits, as those of Abrahamson’s preceding films were unselfconsciously caught in struggles affected by their social isolation from the same prosperity. The comfort of the teenagers’ situation in What Richard Did has left the young characters with a vacuous disinterestedness and cavalier attitude in the surroundings that make them fortunate bystanders of the contemporary society. The story focuses on Richard Karlsen, a typical pre-college teenager from a privileged south side Dublin family. While it is not named, largely because the film is set during the summer recess after his final high school year, his education has been in one of the more prestigious Dublin schools. Aspects of his situation, including indications that he attends an ‘all-boys’ secondary school with considerable importance placed on the rugby culture there, positon Richard socially for an Irish spectator. Richard holds a respected place on the school senior rugby cup team and the school prizes its performance in the Senior Cup Championship, its team and its managers, and also holds Richard in high esteem. Other semiotics such as costumes, turn of phrase and accent also place the protagonist and his peer group among the affluent social set. His parents are not lacking materially, are close friends with the rugby team coach and have connections in high places. Richard’s comfortable situation is reinforced for the greater part of the first half of the film by a somewhat arrogant sense of entitlement that leads him to pursue the

110

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

girlfriend of Conor, one of his teammates. The courting leads to conquest, and this creates a repressed tension between the two males that escalates over a number of scenes, before culminating in a jealousy-provoked fight between them. During this brawl, as Conor lies wounded on the ground, Richard kicks him in the head and kills him. Interpretation of the film’s narrative and its thematic content is complicated by the fact that the circumstances depicted were inspired by a series of events that took place in Dublin on 31 August 2000. During a similar fight, eighteen-year-old Brian Murphy was beaten to death by a group of peers outside Annabel’s, a south side Dublin nightclub. Media attention and public interest at the time were to some degree concentrated on, and fed by, the perceived incongruity of the social position of the antagonists; not ‘thugs’ from a socially disadvantaged background, but ‘respectable’ well-to-do teenagers from affluent families. This element of the reporting and reactions to the event continued through to the ultimate verdict and sentence which, following a manslaughter trial of thirtyfour days, found the primary defendant, Dermot Laide, ‘not guilty’ on grounds of manslaughter but ‘guilty’ of ‘violent disorder’, for which he subsequently served nineteen months’ imprisonment. The other defendants Andrew Frame and Desmond Ryan were released without charge, while the fourth Sean Mackey served sixteen months in prison for violent disorder. Although the verdict was later quashed on appeal, the Director of Public Prosecutions consequently entered a nolle prosequi, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence against Laide. This outcome further enraged several commentators as it was perceived that the leniency was due to the social standing and influential legal connections of the defendant’s family. One viewing of Abrahamson’s film should highlight the differences between both accounts: not only in the discrepancies in the factual representations and the dissimilarities in the details of both situations and their protagonists but also in the different thematic focus of the film. However, the situation alone was enough for some to measure the cinematic version against its real-life counterpart. This was complicated by the fact that, in 2008, Kevin Power published Bad Day at Blackrock, a novel also loosely based on the events, and that Power also went on to co-write the screenplay of What Richard Did with Malcolm Campbell. Abrahamson has consistently denied not only any intention to present the factual real-life events in the film but also any validity in attempting to make such connections. To place Power’s book, or Abrahamson’s film, in any category of adaptation has misleading implications for how the later work is held within frameworks, as Linda Hutcheon has argued, that overshadow it (2006). Robert Stam echoes this cautionary approach to the consideration of any text as adaptation with an explicit listing of the critical terms often applied in its positioning as subservient to the text on which it is based. He notes how

WHAT RICHARD DID

111

Infidelity resonates with overtones of Victorian prudishness; betrayal evokes ethical perfidy; deformation implies aesthetic disgust; violation calls to mind sexual violence; vulgarization conjures up class degradation; and desecration intimates a kind of religious sacrilege toward the ‘sacred word’. (2000, 54) An instrumental element that underpins all of these adjudicative qualities (italicized by Stam here), and many other arbitrating benchmarks – such as ‘inaccuracy’, ‘aberration’, ‘alteration’, and ‘revision’ – is the concept of intertextuality. While on a subconscious level, intertextual components may be found tonally or aesthetically in adaptations, when it comes to the areas of thematic exploration or narrative construction, it is reasonable to assume that the author’s expressed intention to make connections to an existing text must be explicit for any invocation of the idea of ‘adaptation’. This is not the case with What Richard Did, as it cannot be considered a parallel reconstruction of Power’s novel or the original events that took place outside the south Dublin nightclub. Not only does the film refocus its attention onto an exploration of the qualitative states of mind of its protagonist, and onto broader philosophical questions relating to human agency, responsibility and personal crisis, but little in the film (and as little in the book) proposes a working through the circumstances of the actual original real-life events. At the core of the film, although not overtly drawn by Abrahamson, are questions around social class and masculinity that inform the action and events. Like Abrahamson’s earlier feature films, the sociological backdrop against which the action takes place in What Richard Did is not so much relegated and ignored as it is positioned beyond the diegetic world. This acts in the service of wider existential questions enabled by the aesthetics of the film. What Richard Did focuses on its teenagers as benefactors of an economically prosperous class, and on Richard as he performs his identity through this. As we are invited to consider their social standing, there are two significant factors that inform the group’s, and Richard’s, social performances. In the years around the release of What Richard Did, three publicized scandals emerged in the international sporting world, each of which was underscored by pathological behaviour of male sports personalities. Following revelations of an extra-marital affair in November 2009, and subsequently published by Tim Dahlberg in Fox News Associated Press, the world champion golfer Tiger Woods took a sabbatical break from his sporting career, and confessed publically in February 2010 that he had been in a rehabilitation facility to treat a sex addiction. In 2012, after years of investigating the Tour de France champion and world leading cyclist Lance Armstrong for allegations of steroid use, the United States Doping Agency found him guilty of taking banned performance-enhancing drugs. Having denied the charges for several years, Armstrong finally admitted steroid use in

112

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

an interview in January 2013 (Reilly 2013). In March of the following year, the multi-medal Para- and Summer Olympian track athlete Oscar Pistorius was put on trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steencamp and, although acquitted of murder and found guilty of ‘culpable homicide’, the ruling was overturned in December 2015 and Pistorius was sentenced to six years for Steencamp’s murder. In each case, questions of the individual pathologies and behavioural patterns were in different measures explicitly associable with excessive sexual drives and a commensurate sporting ambition. At the heart of the stories were implications of connections between sporting excellence and the nature of a masculinity seduced by the achievement of celebrity. In a micro-cosmic rendering of similar qualities, What Richard Did presents some of the consequences of an excessive ambition towards athletic accomplishment in the male-dominated world of competitive high school games. This is never offered as a motivation for Richard’s destructive action, but there is an underlying sense that the protagonist’s pathology finds a socially acceptable channel in the testosterone-fuelled, rugby arena. Exchanges with his team coach, Pat Kilroy, are marked by the clichés and superficial posturing that typically celebrate and embolden attitudes around sporting accomplishment. With hackneyed phrases glibly delivered, Kilroy warns Richard: ‘You’re putting on weight’, ‘I’ve only spent the last six years teaching him to be a winner’, and ‘Failure’s not an option’, and the film implicitly questions what can happen to the frustrated, highly charged aggression when it is not vented in a socially appropriate way on the sporting pitch. Precedent for an immature posturing of masculinity is set early in the film when a barmaid in one of the public houses warns them: ‘And no flashing your mickies … I know what you rugby lads are like.’ The second social factor in the film relates to an Irish class-based context. At a number of moments, the Dublin 4 youths express or imply an attitude of distain for qualities or peers that might be associated with ‘traditional Irishness’. Defined and performing as social urbanites of the Celtic Tiger cosmopolitan capital, now thoroughly ‘postmodernized’ with what is projected as globalized outlooks, fashion, dialogue, accents and behaviour, they show notable disregard for a traditional Irish heritage and its trappings. Characteristics of a pre-Celtic Tiger prosperity that emerge from a legacy of romantic nationalism and its associated cultural identity are no longer merely irrelevant, but are considered backward, conservative, regressive and untrendy in all of their pre-modern incarnations. While the film leaves open a possibility of interrogating the value of several of the traditionally nationalist cultural qualities and manifestations – even the more openminded member of the post-millennial social set, Lara, mockingly chastises Richard saying, ‘You’re like the fucking Rose of Tralee’ – it does not stop short at exposing the snobbery of the Dublin teenagers. Therefore, while the Gaelic Athletic Association is the object of many disparaging comments by the cynical group of elite youngsters, there is evidence of the film’s critique

WHAT RICHARD DID

113

of their condescending insincerity. In an early scene, when Richard and his friends are buying sandwiches in a supermarket, they openly mock the working-class Dublin accents of the checkout girls. When Conor – identified with a rural background and as a GAA (The Irish Sporting Foundation, the Gaelic Athletic Association) member – is called to sing, he sings a ballad in Irish. Unimpressed with the cultural moment, Richard leaves the scene and is joined outside by Lara. They comment on the performance taking place inside the pub in an opening exchange that reveals a different attitude among the two characters: LARA: You not a fan? RICHARD: I just don’t get all of the ‘lost in the Celtic mists’ intensity of it, you know what I mean? (They laugh) Plus, nobody knows what the fuck he’s sayin’. LARA: ‘Táimse I Mo Chodhladh Is Na Duisigh Me’: ‘I’m asleep and don’t wake me.’ RICHARD: Well, I obviously got that bit. LARA: Obviously. Later, as a group emerges from the minibus that has brought them to the GAA club where Conor’s birthday is taking place, the teenagers mock the location and the colours of the GAA jerseys, before being warned by Richard that they might be overheard. Finally, as the fight begins that leads to Conor’s murder, Richard shoves him calling him a ‘fucking culchie fuck’. In the film, all of these interactions are rooted in various comingof-age, rites-of passage, that have been connected by theorists to moving the individual from a position of ‘liminality’, as Victor Turner describes it (1969), to establishing a role within the social group. Turner echoes earlier writing by Arnold Van Gennep, who had already concentrated on such rites of passage as occurring at transitional periods in life (1960); ones that define the self in terms of status and property. Ivone Margulies offers a summary of these systems of socialization and their ‘demarcating the passage between two major moments in life – for instance, before marriage, childbirth, and puberty – involve the stripping away of one’s public identity, staging a sort of invisibility, a form of death that is followed by rebirth’ (1998, 290–291). Not only are the social performances of What Richard Did informed by such individual negotiations of self, but Richard will encounter, and go through, a process of rebirth in the wake of his fatal action. The whole film is concerned with how Richard is socially situated, and with questions of the marginal position of the individual in contemporary Ireland; central concerns that were present in Abrahamson’s other stories. In this respect, Richards’s liminality and agency in constructing his social role are foregrounded as we follow him with intimate proximity and in the ways we thus interrogate his pathology.

114

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The unsuccessful verbal exchanges of Adam & Paul and Garage drew attention to the extraneous fumbling and useless mechanics of their actions, in a way that David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson find in the films of Robert Bresson. In those cases, consideration of characters’ actions – as opposed to their eloquence – ‘focuses our attention on details of action we never notice in most movies’ (2004, 205). In the case of Richard, Abrahamson keeps us distant from him by virtue of his verbal dexterity. However, his eloquence is tested in a few key instances throughout the film, and we can assess his reliability along the lines with which Manuel DeLanda relates characters’ speech acts to their plot actions. DeLanda notes that if ‘a speech act has been performed on the screen, any failure on the characters’ part to act appropriately will only undermine the relative credibility of the plot’ (1984, 112). As Abrahamson’s emphasis shifts our attention from plot structural development to the exploration of character, we can read DeLanda’s ‘credibility’ here in relation to the latter. Here, too, Richard is shown to be untrustworthy. In one scene, where he has joined Lara outside a bar for a cigarette, he comments on the fact: RICHARD: I don’t actually smoke. LARA: You cutting loose? RICHARD: Yeah, I’m going totally wild. Within a few scenes however, we discover him smoking alone outside the family summer home. During one of the group’s ‘deep meaningful conversations’, Richard confesses in a gendered way: ‘Without etting’ too fucking gay about it, right. I would, I’d talk to you lads about pretty much anything’, an assertion that we ultimately discover to be contrary to the truth. In another gesture of bad faith, although we have come to trust his benevolent gesture towards the coach’s daughter Sophie when he rescues her from an assault in the toilet cubicle of the bar, he has sexual intercourse with the underage girl before running away to leave her alone. The scene that began with Richard’s overt performance with a mockery of the Dublin 4 accent as he introduces himself to the younger group – ‘Oh my god, what’s this? D4 youngsters drinking in the scrub land?’ – ends with him skulking away from the scene of his inappropriate behaviour with Sophie. Elsewhere there are tangential references to where he may have been dishonest with other characters. At his birthday party, Conor notices that Richard has a pint of beer and checks him: ‘I thought you weren’t drinking.’ Having evidently misled Conor earlier, Richard casually replies: ‘So did I!’ Whether we are present at the time of any assertions made by Richard, or come to hear of them indirectly, we are always put into a position of adjudication on the reliability of the character, and he is habitually found lacking in that. In a number of scenes, Lara acts as a correctional commentator against which his sincerity is tested. As he playfully tries to give her his phone number,

WHAT RICHARD DID

115

she mocks him saying, ‘You are so full of shit’, to which he replies simply: ‘I am.’ In contrast with the protagonist, whose sincerity is at the core of the film’s examination of human volition and bad faith, Lara offers truth in the way that she understands things. In one intimate scene between them, she confesses the deceit in her having invented a word in a school essay – significant as Richard is shown to be a master of verbal manipulation – and when she has been socially awkward during her first meeting with his parents, he questions her on her silence saying; ‘You were quiet’.

Richard, narrative and Sartre’s ‘bad faith’ When Jean-Paul Sartre discusses the notion of ‘bad faith’ – as we have seen in the last chapter – he separates that mode of insincerity from the simple lie that one tells oneself, and explains how the self-deception creates a split in the person. He suggests that the ideal description of the liar would be a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and denying that negation as such […] The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek to hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; on the contrary, he has recourse to it when there is a question of deciding secondary behaviour. (1984, 48) On the other hand, when acting in bad faith, the subject is caught not in a dividing but in a unifying state of self-deceit. In spite of the self-centeredness, a split occurs where the external actions do not align with the internal volitions or requirements to behave in line with situations. As an example of such a public social performance, Sartre describes a waiter in a café, observing the details of his demeanour and his self-representation as he ostentatiously acts as a waiter should. He notes how the man’s movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. […] But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. (1984, 59) In a similar way, Abrahamson uncovers Richard’s performance as constructed and calculated, as he tailors his requirements to fit with various social groups: at different times team player, charismatic peer leader, heroic defender of the vulnerable and, as his father calls him, ‘beautiful son’. Examples of the social

116

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

types that Richard performs abound and are identified and congratulated by accompanying remarks of approbation. When he first arrives in his car to collect the waiting girls, they declare overtly, ‘How nice of you to show up!’, indicating that the show is ready to begin. Shortly after this as he arrives at the beach party, he marks the occasion as near-theatrical event: ‘Somebody said there was a party going on here lads!’ Having spotted Lara with her group, Richard lets his friends know that he’s about to introduce himself to her and indicates his intention by saying: ‘All right lads. I’m gonna go and be social.’ Once again, the turn of phrase and his words ‘be’ and ‘social’ define his acknowledgement of the public role that he acts out. In another example of his disingenuous manipulation, he deceives the mother of a younger member of the group (Jake, known as ‘Magic Boy’). To hide the fact that Jake is accompanying the older group members on the trip away, he takes the phone from him and speaks directly with his mother. Charming her with the same insincerity with which he handles most of the adults he encounters, Richard convinces her that all is well and that Jake’s presence is more about an induction onto the rugby team than a weekend of boozing. While Richard lies with ease to the younger boy’s mother on the phone, the others feign having sexual intercourse with Jake in the background. When Richard returns the phone, having accomplished the subterfuge, the others acknowledge his success with applause and comments like ‘Outstanding, sir!’, ‘Now isn’t that great!’ and ‘What a performance!’. The climactic moment of Richard’s bad faith comes in the final sequences when we are awaiting his decision on what he will do following his killing of Conor. After a number of sequences presenting his contemplative assessment of the situation, the question inferred by the film’s title remains suspended, and the viewer must adjudicate on the final decision of the consummate performer. Once again, he is untrustworthy, and his deceit is articulately delivered in voice-over, feigning his intention to turn himself in. During a series of post-coital exchanges with Lara, set against warmer hues of softly lit mise en scène, he suggests that they run away and live ‘completely different lives’, before expressing his relief, and with a slight silent laugh says: ‘I can breathe!’ Framed alone in one shot, he proposes, ‘I’m gonna hand myself in’, at which point Lara sits into the shot with him. After a beat, he adds: ‘It’s what I have to do’. With a slow montage sequence, the audio track is detached from the diegetic visuals, and the asynchronous separation emphasizes the mismatch between what Richard intends to do and what he is claiming that he will do. This is further confirmation of his bad faith and the fact that when he could avoid action that was earnest, what Richard did was nothing. The articulate chatter and fluid conversations of Richard and his peers prevent revelations about the characters and their motives. Brad Prager identifies the potential inherent in the opposite possibility of cinematic silence, often seen in the films of Werner Herzog. He indicates that certain

WHAT RICHARD DID

117

moments ‘in which silences communicate most powerfully are presented as prone to interruption by everyday uses of language, or the talk that is part and parcel of human communication and which Heidegger described as “chatter” (Gerede)’ (2007, 4). Taking his cue from Brigitte Peucker (1986), Prager goes on to suggest in Herzog’s work ‘an unseen realm beneath the veil of experience, and that for him, daily, prosaic language is understood as that which interferes with our openness to a comparably untarnished world’ (2007, 4). It is therefore by virtue of Richard’s linguistic performative confidence that the viewer remains in present contact with his public persona without gaining complete access to his private covert self. As with Abrahamson’s earlier films, What Richard Did is informed by the same objective of placing the spectator in a position of proximity to the central character. In this way, Richard’s existence and circumstance are revealed as we experience him wholly present to us. This has consequences for many of the aesthetic qualities of the film. In fact, in What Richard Did, the ontological wholeness of many scenes echoes a quality that Robert Kolker finds in the more intellectual approach of Stanley Kubrick in whose films he observes that the more that ‘the viewer tries to come to terms with what is seen and felt, the more distance and isolation are forced on him [sic]’ (2000, 152). The arising paradoxical circumstance, whereby proximity to Richard leads to the conclusion that as a result of his pathology he is inherently unknowable, is rendered in a number of ways. We are allocated a space and time shared with Abrahamson’s protagonist, but the film’s mediation of our connection to him is neither straightforward nor simple, in spite of first appearances. The cinematic image, in its representative completeness, is perhaps uniquely able to disclose the conflicting tensions and contradictions in any situation or characterization. Andrei Tarkovsky has acknowledged this paradox by describing how ‘the image signifies the fullest possible expression of what is typical, and the more fully it expresses it, the more individual, the more original it becomes’ (1996, 112). In What Richard Did, Abrahamson resists tampering with, or closing down, the potential visual richness in this paradox, and just as he had done in his earlier films, he withholds use of symbolism and metaphorical connotations. When a thing appears, it is that thing and nothing else. Abrahamson works in this respect like John Cassavetes, about whom Ray Carney has summarized that instead of ‘giving us intellectual outlines of experience, metaphoric or symbolic summaries, conceptual shorthand sketches about material decline, Cassavetes forces the viewer to live through a confusing welter of ungeneralizable perceptual events’ (1994, 13). The consequence for Cassavetes’s style, as later described by Carney, is of particular relevance to the aesthetics of Abrahamson’s work as it ‘shows us what it looks and feels like to be in an experience, puzzling over it, emotionally involved in it, intellectually responding to it (and adjusting one’s responses to it) as it happens’ (1994, 189). Herein lies the key to understanding the cinematic

118

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

construction of Richard about whom all is revealed, with whom we spend prolonged time, and through whom we experience the narrative world of the film. With deeper consideration, it becomes apparent that as Richard Neupert identifies Robert Bresson doing so often, in What Richard Did, Abrahamson ‘regularly denies the audience the very shot it needs to see to understand the event fully’ (2007, 218). Aesthetically, Abrahamson entangles us in Richard’s space and time but always marks him as being at one remove from his own social environment. Laura Oswald identifies how metonymy regularly functions in cinema, and her description is useful in highlighting its absence from What Richard Did. She notes how the metonymical reference ‘is the point of entry par excellence of the spectator into the text, since it expresses an absent but contiguously related element that can only be inferred by the spectator. For this reason, the suspense film, whose raison d’être is the almost visceral assault on the spectator’s sensibilities, is filled with metonymies’ (1983, 124). While we wait for a better understanding of the film’s title, What Richard Did is not a suspense film. Abrahamson never leaves us hesitating over any assessment of narrative facts that must be reconciled in the resolution of enigma, plot or psychology. But there are, nonetheless, questions posed about the central character that keep us fascinated by, but separated from, him. The film constructs this relationship so that we are disinterested but not uninterested in its protagonist. In a way evident with the socially detached protagonists of Werner Herzog’s films, in What Richard Did, ‘the mystery created around the central character deflects psychological identification away from the person, in order to intensify identification with the setting, the objects and places’ (Elsaesser 1986, 153). Richard is all of what he performs in bad faith so we can only be uncertain about getting to know his ‘true’ character. The ways in which Abrahamson uses cinematic techniques reflect Paul Schrader’s emotional constructs, identified as ‘plot, acting, camerawork, editing, music’, which he calls ‘screens’, before stating that they ‘prevent the viewer from seeing through the surface reality to the supernatural; they suppose that the external reality is self-sufficient’ (1972, 63). There is a concerted effort made to emphasize the extent of our being present with Richard, when lingering mid- and long-shots position him alone, motionless within the frame, or with mobile tracking shots that follow him as he walks or runs through scenery. On the morning after the sleepover and the group’s conversation about friendship, we find Richard alone in the holiday home. Gentle music begins as we follow him out the back door and down to the beach. The length of this tracking shot and Richard’s position within the frame emphasize the extent to which we are privy to his moments of solitude. It is also significant that in this and other similar sequences, we are following him. He is shown to be leading the narrative, and ahead of it at this point, moreso than we might have already been aware. Furthermore, for most of the shot, we only see him from behind (see Figure 4.1): there is a sense here

WHAT RICHARD DID

119

FIGURE 4.1 Following Richard as protagonist leading the narrative. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

that there’s more to see, to learn and to know about this protagonist. In all of these respects, Richard stands in direct opposition to the protagonists of Adam & Paul and Garage. Our position as spectators on the central characters of those films was one of waiting: we were ahead of them narratively and cinematically, already positioned awaiting their arrival into some landscape, scene or shot, and we were always aware that they had yet to reach a moment of self-awareness. Although we remain in Richard’s present tense, the conditions of his immediate background circumstances are withheld. In this, the significant narrative details of the investigation into his crime are only peripherally available. It is his father who keeps us and Richard updated as to how the enquiry is proceeding, and when Richard goes to the police station to explain that he was present at the party on the night of the murder, and to offer details to the detectives, the short scene is shot entirely with the camera focused on him, keeping the detectives out of frame and without reaction shots. As we have already seen with Abrahamson’s other narratives, here there are merely passing references to backstory, and these are never loaded for plot or psychological interpretation. Tom Charity identifies the same characteristic in the work of Cassavetes where that director ‘omits “important” narrative or psychological developments’ (2001, 151), and in the case of What Richard Did, there are only three examples. In the scene in which Richard’s parents entertain his rugby coach and his wife, we learn of a period of depression in his Scandinavian father’s past. In spite of its subtlety, the moment is significant for the ease with which the topic is casually introduced: RICHARD: Failure’s not an option, that right Pat? PAT: That’s it. PETER: You’re right. Failure’s not an option, it’s a certainty … KATHERINE: Oh … Come on, here we go …

120

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

PETER: Well it is at some point for most people. I mean, it makes them human. LIV: It’s true! RICHARD: Very deep, dad. All those long winter nights back in the day, huh? KATHERINE: Scandinavian thing, I reckon. RICHARD: Scandinavian. PETER: Naw, it’s not a Scandinavian thing … it’s just a manic depressive thing. In another scene, following their first romantic interaction, Richard tells Lara a story about how as a young child he accidentally killed his pet gerbil by washing its head. The tale is dismissed by its narrator and the death of the rodent is laughed off, and the film is complicit as it is delivered in voice-over, and not diegetically synchronized. The third of the backstories provided is offered by Richard’s father as he recollects how determined his son was as a boy. Before Richard confesses his crime, Peter reminds his son of his eagerness to build a tree house. As they sit in the garden together, the father glances in the direction of the construction: PETER: That tree house. You were on and on about that, you know. ‘Can we get a tree house?’ ‘When can we get a tree house?’ I just … I couldn’t help you at that point. I was … I wasn’t up to it. So you just … started it yourself. You must have been what? … Ten? Nine? Nine years, nine years, nine years old! Yeah. You were dragging out the planks from the shed and digging in the posts and eventually I had to help you. Remarkable little boy. You didn’t let me drag you down. That’s a great instinct son. Don’t change that now. Don’t. As with every narrative case of the provision of additional diegetic information that invokes time beyond the syuzhet, the temptation is to interpret the minor stories and require that they assist in understanding the fabula. These may be useful considerations in coming to construct the protagonist of the film. However, they should not become points of reference against which the current action of the narrative is assessed, for to do so would draw attention from the moral imperative placed on Richard to act in accordance with his conscience. Every stylistic indication of the film demonstrates how Abrahamson requires that we remain in the present with Richard and observe the details of his action and inaction as a complex human being. To be drawn from this would create what Catherine Russell has called a ‘cinematic mortification’ that results in a ‘killing of the “eternal present tense”’ (1995, 6). We are always with, moving with and attentive to the situation in which Richard finds himself. However, we should become aware of the extent to which he is separated from the narratives that have

WHAT RICHARD DID

121

brought him to the point at which we discover him, and how these are all used to suggest an estrangement from his current environment. He is often shot alone in exterior spaces, in scenes shot against warm sunsets and delicate natural backdrops of trees, the sea, hedgerows and sand dunes, but he is never shown to be contemplative of, or to be reflecting on, the surrounding beauty, as was demonstrably the case with Josie in Garage (Moore 2009, 112). This positioning of the character against, but separate from, the natural environment suggests his self-centred focus. Morris Beja finds that this possibility of characterization often leaves open the opportunity for a moment of epiphany that emerges from a ‘contemporary preoccupation with the sense of isolation, the despair of ever having true contact with another human being, the fear of always remaining an outcast and a stranger among the rest of mankind’ (1971, 47). Richard is presented as unaffected by any sense of solitude, a quality that Abrahamson shows during peer-group conversation scenes, which serve to camouflage Richard’s social role-playing among his friends. The extemporaneous quality of the teenagers’ exchanges draws attention away from otherwise isolating contemplation that individuals may undergo when shown at moments of solitude reflecting on their past or future. Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith have identified in the films of John Cassavetes a stylistic quality that Abrahamson mobilized when working with the young actors in What Richard Did. They have explained how the independent director used ‘largely improvisational acting and filming techniques to create a rough but compelling immediacy’ (2007, 409). The spontaneity that emerges from the careful rehearsal of group scenes also assisted in marking a certain performativity of social roles being played by the young characters. Within the peer group, this ‘sincere insincerity’ is especially apparent during their ‘deep meaningful conversations’, (ironically, superficially) designated ‘DMCs’ by the participants. This forum exposes Richard’s duplicitous performance for the spectator, while other aspects of our connection with him are reserved. Abrahamson keeps Richard’s point of view shots to a minimum, and thus restricts our identification with the character’s figurative and literal perspective on the events, backdrops and personalities around him. Mark Betz identifies this reservation of mainstream cinematic coding as typical of the ‘art house’ standard, noting ‘deferred or absent reverse shots, minimalism, serialism, ellipses, long takes’ (2010, 32), although none of these qualities serves avant garde or non-naturalistic aesthetic purposes for Abrahamson. In What Richard Did, they are used to manage the information available to the spectator about its protagonist. We are granted only two clearly motivated point of view shots as Richard looks at Lara at key moments. The first (see Figure 4.2) occurs before he introduces himself to her at the beach party, as he catches a glimpse of her with two friends. She is placed centre-frame, and a reverse shot confirms Richard’s growing interest in his new-found mark. The second (see Figure 4.3) frames Richard looking

122

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURES 4.2 and 4.3 Richard’s two point of view shots of Lara. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

across the room at Conor’s birthday gathering, and frames Lara at the bar alone. Once again, a reverse cut back to Richard indicates his intentions, and in confirmation of this we see him in the next scene approaching her outside the club. These are straightforward shot/reverse shots that serve to convey, as directly as possible, Richard’s interest in the girl without leading the viewer. Their potency is in their simplicity and direct, non-connotative presentation. However, it is when Abrahamson deviates from this conventional coding, that his innovation comes to the fore. In the key confessional scene, when Richard tells his father that he has killed Conor, the two are sitting in the garden on a weight-lifting bench. The presence of the piece of furniture fits with Richard’s sporting endeavours, but it serves a more important function in the light of the emotional content of the scene as the revelation is made to the paternal figure. Abrahamson had already used significant bench scenes in Adam & Paul and Garage (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5), and the emotional impact of interactions in those cases was served by virtue of the

WHAT RICHARD DID

123

characters’ respective positions; sitting alongside one another, and facing forward towards the camera. During extended sequences in both of those films, Abrahamson harnesses the powerful impact of awkward or failing communication between characters who were not facing each other and, at the same time, granted his viewers full access to silent facial reactions. Set in the same direction, his characters were required to invest more energy in making connections with their counterparts in conversation.

FIGURE 4.4 The bench scene from Adam & Paul. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

FIGURE 4.5 The bench scene from Garage. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2007 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

124

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

There is no intertextual reference to these earlier scenes in What Richard Did, but Abrahamson has both a practical and stylistic justification for his bench scene in the later film. The physical configuration of the weight-lifting bench – a ‘T’ as opposed to a straight seat – allows the characters to sit at right angles to each other (see Figure 4.6). This means that their eye-line match is not closed as it would have been if they had been facing each other, nor is it broken as it would have been had they been sitting on a regular straight bench, looking in the same direction. Instead, they sit close to each other but not positioned so as to connect face-to-face. This opens for Abrahamson a wide range of camera positions that grants him control over the visual proximity of the characters to one another, and the creation of multiple possibilities of emotional tension. Richard meets his father’s eyeline and looks straight at him at only two points in the scene, and Peter’s point of view is open to 360 degrees of focus so that he can be shot looking both towards and away from Richard. At the same time, Abrahamson uses their physical closeness to allow them to embrace and connect tactilely, or with different camera angles to make them appear awkward together. In this, Richards’s father comes to occupy a position in relation to Richard that the spectator has held in the rest of the film: we have been physically close to Richard but emotionally disconnected from him. Ray Carney identifies this quality in John Cassavetes’s work as that director creates a distance between the spectators and the representation so that it ‘empowers us as independent thinkers and forces us to assume a critical perspective on what we are watching. Rather than have us blend into the characters, he wants to compel us to maintain an adversarial, diacritical stance with respect to them’ (1994, 208). The difference in the case of Abrahamson’s scene is a sudden and fleeting connection with Richard’s father who, at the moment leading to his anagnorisis, is also distanced from the total truth of the situation that will presently leave him in a state of disembodied shock. At this moment of

FIGURE 4.6 The bench scene from What Richard Did. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

WHAT RICHARD DID

125

realization, we experience with him a jolt from our previously unbroken association with Richard in what Vivian Sobchack has called the ‘the inhabited space of direct experience as a condition of singular embodiment’ (1995, 41). According to Sobchack, this cinematic quality can produce an alignment of spectator and character by making the moment ‘accessible and visible to more than the single consciousness who lives it. That is, direct experience and existential presence in the cinema belong to both the film and the viewer’ (41). In this scene alone, the two possible meanings of the film title coincide momentarily, as what Richard does in confessing the truth to his father accords with the actual events and with what he actually did. Rosalind Galt gives some attention to the titles of art house films by suggesting the ways that these should be interpreted differently to their mainstream counterparts (2006). It is often the case that these can be indicative of a broader narrative intention to present states of mind, random events and conditions by avoiding a clearly established plot goal. She cites Cristian Mungiu’s Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2005) and (one of Abrahamson’s personal favourites) Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) as examples of this. Both are interesting cases for different reasons, and both have notable similarities to the title of Abrahamson’s 2012 film. Mungiu’s film not only suggests the political aspect of the film’s principal theme – centred on an unlawful abortion forced upon a woman who is pregnant beyond the time in which the operation may be performed legally – but it determines the starting point of the syuzhet. On the other hand, Puiu’s title encapsulates a broader overarching theme with a more metaphorical use of the word ‘death’ and postpones the conclusion suggested in its title beyond the end of the film. Although Lazarescu does not die before the film does, we come to understand that his situation is one in which his death is not only imminent but has already taken place symbolically. One of the more frequently discussed films in the category beyond the mainstream circuit is another of Lenny Abrahamson’s favourites. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) is often cited as one that sets out to dismantle any possibility of emotional tension and suspense across its plot, because the title reveals the conclusion of the film. Since it divulges the end of the story, many commentators have discussed how the effect of the a priori disclosure is to disarm the film of any uncertainty. The suggestion is that the spectator’s attention is thus refocused onto a different kind of dramatic suspense that comes from the processes and procedures – and not the product and result – of Fontaine’s attempt at escaping incarceration. Paul Schrader correctly proposes that the feelings of Bresson’s viewers have no effect upon their relationship with the outcome and states that ‘A Man Escaped would seem of all Bresson’s films the most plot-oriented; it is about a prison break. But the title dispenses with any possibility of suspense – Un Condamné à Mort S’est Echappé (a man condemned to death has escaped)’ (1972, 64). Elsewhere, Roy Armes works along the same line of thinking by

126

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

noting that ‘if there is a chance of suspense, it is stamped out from the outset (Bresson’s prison film reveals the outcome of the hero’s efforts in its very title: A Man Escaped)’ (1976, 89), and Leo Murray describes in detail how the film cannot be considered a suspense thriller because of its confessional title: We know from the start what the outcome will be. The title has already indicated this. And yet there is a certain suspense as we watch Fontaine make his ropes and hooks, as we see him overcome one difficulty only to be faced by another, and finally as we watch his agonised passage over the roof-tops with Jost and his moment of indecision before making the final leap to freedom. (1969, 70) In seeking to give appropriate attention to the way in which Bresson foregrounds minor actions over plot progression and denouement, and how the title of the film plays a central role in this, these commentators (and many others) seem to miss another point. First, none of them acknowledges any possibility of irony or duplicity which might be used in the title of a film to mislead the viewer. Cases of such titular trickery abound in film and very frequently come to play important roles in the cinematic hermeneutic and pleasure experience. One need only recall films such as Alan J. Pakula’s Consenting Adults (1992), Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) or The Idiots (Von Trier, 1998) as noteworthy examples of this. Secondly, even if a given title can be trusted, it can be misleading about the extent to which its purported goal will be achieved, or the order in which concluding or resolving events will be offered. Again, there are many examples of this device, with Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell, 1994), Se7en (Fincher, 1995) and 5 X 2 (Ozon, 2004) being effective cases. Thirdly, and specifically in the case of Bresson’s film, by the second act the possibility of another escapee has been introduced so that we can no longer make any assumptions as to which of the two men will be the successful ‘condamné’ of the title (the word is used in the singular). Ultimately, of course, the pedant may point out that the title will always have been erroneously deceitful as both of the prisoners manage to break free by the end of the film. Attention to the title is critical in the case of understanding the position of the protagonist in relation to the narrative of What Richard Did. While it is not interrogative, it is set so as to invite the spectator into speculation about the story as it unfolds. The potency of the film escalates because the destabilizing action suggested by the title is postponed until the thirty-fifth minute, when the first possible interpretation is answered with a clear event. This delay in what would be a standard ‘initiating action’ of mainstream film results in the enlargement of the exposition around the characters, and their situation and environment. It also emphasizes the choice that Richard is required to make, something considered by Gilles Deleuze as

WHAT RICHARD DID

127

embedded in every cinematic decision in its most existential significance. As Deleuze notes, ‘in philosophy as in the cinema, in Pascal as in Bresson, in Kierkegaard as in Dreyer, the true choice, that which consists in choosing choice, is supposed to restore everything to us. It will enable us to rediscover everything, in the spirit of sacrifice, at the moment of the sacrifice or even before the sacrifice is performed’ (1992, 116). In his overt extension of the expositional information, Abrahamson activates an uncommon cinematic device whereby our attention on the central character is given time to refocus and intensify our critical understanding of him and the choice that he must make. This controlled presentation of the fabula of the film, by expanding its syuzhet is an infrequently mobilized tactic marked by Thomas Elsaesser when he notes that such a stylistic use of exposition ‘can be concentrated into a few scenes or, more rarely, diffused throughout the whole films’ (2002, 173). The extension of the syuzhet across contextualizing expositional scenes works in What Richard Did by emphasizing the time between the two potential points of narrative realization invited by the title, and it accords well with John Ellis’s description of filmic narration as an ‘economic system’ that balances ‘familiar elements of meaning against the unfamiliar, it moves forward by a succession of events linked in a causal chain. The basic terms of this movement which recur throughout are those produced in an initial disruption of a stable state’ (1995, 74). The delay in the disruption of the stable state in this film works entirely in the service of framing and foregrounding Richard’s bad faith. In spite of the film’s thematic focus on Richard’s avoidance of action, the character is shown in control of his narrative fate. In fact, Richard’s situation as central driving character is one that holds the extended expositional sequences together, rather than initiate actions that have consequences for a cause-and-effect unfolding of the plot. Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment identify specific significance of this quality for the characterization in expositional films when they note that these films ‘explore social issues through character-centred narration but have looser, less predictable plot structures than classical films, emphasising the locatedness of characters in particular environments. These films explore the milieu of characters who lack motivation in the conventional sense, people who are often alienated from themselves and their social world’ (2000, 104– 105). In this, Hallam and Marshment pinpoint the paradox of what we find to be Richard’s situation: not only inactive in terms of plot development but also manifest in his being located in a particular place and alienated from it. As Richard is placed in isolation against natural environments, these backdrops release him from the social situation of his performance and, in their simplicity and vastness, the landscapes suggest other possibilities for him, which he tragically avoids. What Antonin Artaud has identified as a ‘first step in cinematographic thought’ (1972, 61) that emerges from natural backdrops should bring Richard through solitary contemplation to epiphany

128

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

because, as Artaud notes, ‘nature is profoundly, infinitely versatile’ (61). Our attention shifts, therefore, from Richard’s disingenuous social performance when he is surrounded by people to moments when he is alone in open natural spaces. It is at these times that we should expect him to achieve a self-realization and determination to act in accordance with good faith, ethics and morality. The ultimate tragedy is that this is never accomplished.

Withholding expressionism: Richard separated from narrative space Richard’s environment is never shown as an expressionistic externalization of his inner turmoil but as disinterested of the crisis that he faces. In a manner similar to John Cassavetes, Abrahamson empowers the protagonist in fully respecting his authority to come to decisions and to act upon them. Ray Carney has noted of Cassavetes’s style that ‘film does not represent the contents of thought, but figures the actual process of noticing, wondering, and understanding’ (1994, 187), and when Abrahamson observes Richard alone in the natural world, he does so by avoiding what Morris Beja speaks of as ‘broad narrative summary in favor of indirection and the recording of individual, apparently trivial dramatic scenes’ (1971, 23). The spectators discover Richard alone facing key decisions as the director judiciously avoids ‘offering the landscape as itself an active, multi-layered discursive space demanding to be read in its own right’ (Willemen 1994, 156). The same quality, whereby the environment plays no signifying narrative role, is evident in several innovative early films cited by Siegfried Kracauer. What Richard Did creates a tension by placing an onus on Richard to act in accordance with best faith without enabling him, or the spectator, to come to conclusions by rendering backdrops and landscapes as deterministic or instructive. Kracauer summarizes the cinematic potency available for the more expressionist director by proposing the alternative whereby films which aim at the straight implementation of a theatrical story have the following, easily recognizable features in common. They emphasize the actors and their interplay. In keeping with this main concern, they further coincide in assigning to inanimate objects and environmental factors a subsidiary role. Finally and most important, they include practically no image that would not serve the ends of story construction. (1965, 223) The tragedy for Richard is that what would otherwise be a faith in the romanticized natural environment to bring about personal revelation through epiphany, or personal comfort in working towards that – as was the case with Josie in Garage – is here denied. Abrahamson’s protagonist

WHAT RICHARD DID

129

ultimately fails to develop as anything other than a competent performer. The tragedy is underlined by Richard’s position as master of his own will and controller of our access to his narrative. Abrahamson’s cinematography and editing, and how both relate to the film’s use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, alter in important ways throughout What Richard Did. These may be categorized broadly into three methods, all of which perform and convey different thematic concerns. First, for the greater part of the first third of the film, Richard is shown as if unmediated, directly present and accessible to our scrutiny. Abrahamson restricts his use of the shot/reverse shot and maintains long take tracking shots that focus upon Richard from a fixed perspective, whether he is in motion – in a car, walking or running – or sitting or standing still. There are some moments during which this coherence is interrupted and we observe a detachment of Richard’s diegetic voice from the visual, but these only serve to highlight the stability of the rest of the film. Secondly, for a brief transitional section of the film encapsulated in a single scene, which I will discuss below, cinematic elements are stabilized to produce a coherent ontological moment, ordinary in its representation, but slightly jarring in its symmetrical configuration. Finally, in parallel with the protagonist’s emotional breakdown, confusion and loss of personal and narrative control, there occurs a fragmentation of the film’s temporal linearity and the coherence of its synchronous sound at key moments during the final third of the syuzhet. The inevitable reading invited by the first of these, which shows Abrahamson’s marked reservation in the use of Richard’s point of view shots, could be an invocation of the well-contested theoretical area of suture. Borrowed from the medical term that describes the anatomical stitching together of a physical, open wound, the notion was interpolated through psychoanalytical studies into film theory. In the latter field, it refers to the process whereby a film establishes its viewer in its imagined space. This works, it is proposed, mostly visually through the use of the shot/reverse shot formations. First, the spectator is given a framed view of one section of the cinematic space (the other remaining beyond the frame and behind the camera). In the following shot, she or he is granted the reverse angle of the same mise en scène, thus providing the experience of a complete, 360-degree plane. The viewer is placed at the middle of this imagined space and is thus centralized and sutured into the film’s action and setting. Debates around the applicability and sturdiness of the suture theory to film have been energetic, with responding critics such as William Rothman (1975), Noël Carroll (1988) and David Bordwell (1985) being adamant opponents. It is founded upon ideas of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage of development, at which point at some age between six and eighteen months, the infant is said to perceive its reflection in the mirror and experience a simultaneous sense of corporeal wholeness, and separation

130

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

from the world (and mother), and an internal split (known as ‘Spaltung’). This interior division is caused by the observation that the child is at the same time both here (‘where I am’) and over there (‘my image in the reflecting surface’) and inaugurates a primordial recognition that the ‘I’ can be represented, rendered as an image, and can become a symbol. For Lacan and his followers, this stage of primal development instigates a recognition of a broader possibility of the representability of things in the world, and the beginning of understanding the symbolic world of signification through (primarily) language. Therefore, when a splitting of the child’s sense of completeness of self occurs at the mirror stage, and awareness of the possibility of representing things begins, the infant is ready to acquire and use language: the universal signifier par excellence. This splitting is a fraught moment of identity tension for the infant and, it is proposed, one that leaves a painful trace that the cinema can relieve or satisfy by suturing the viewer. For anti-Lacanians, who argue a problematic dearth of empirical evidence in support of mirror stage theories, suture theory cannot hold. We neither need nor gain any putative satisfaction or relief from cases of cinematic suture, and even knowledge gained from the provision of a reverse field of view does not satiate the viewer on grounds explained by a primordial phase of pre-linguistic development. The most sustained advocates of the suture approach have been Jean-Pierre Oudart (1969) and Daniel Dayan (1974). In a long deconstructive attack on the feasibility of the framework, and on the details of the argument offered, Noël Carroll mentions another sceptic when he challenges Oudart arguing that there are perfectly plausible, alternative hypotheses to the invocation of the unconscious Absent One by which we may organize the relevant spectator activities. Bordwell himself favors an account which presupposes the existence of spatial, temporal, and logical schemata which a spectator antecedently possesses and uses to test the visual array for intelligibility. (1988, 191) One of the main ways in which Jean-Pierre Oudart and Daniel Dayan propose that the system of suture dupes and upsets the spectator is by providing absences. These are the non-presences of backgrounds or the world cut off by the frame and can even include the viewers themselves as specular entities. These absences create gaps that engage the viewer in the provision of missing details, as the film ‘presents the spectator with structures marked by the absences which the spectator fills in, momentarily completing them and, thereby, deriving a sense that the film is coherent, unified, and homogeneous’ (Carroll 1988, 187). As Carroll rejects the suture theory, he points to a deficit in empirical subject-specific evidence suggesting that the ‘neglect of cognitive-perceptual psychology in contemporary suture theory is extremely troublesome’ (1988, 192). Carroll is joined in his repudiation of

WHAT RICHARD DID

131

the theory by William Rothman who concludes his polemic by stating that ‘Dayan has not succeeded in demonstrating that a point-of-view sequence as such, by its very nature, necessarily turns any film that depends on it (and thus the whole body of “classical” films) into a system of bourgeois ideology’ (1975, 50). If there is to be any redemptive allowance for the suture theoretical framework, I would propose that its conceptualization must first be prized from the Lacanian mirror stage foundation on which it was constructed. It might be more reasonable to suggest that the holding off of a reverse shot, which suspends knowledge of the visual field behind the camera or the limited frame, may be destabilizing for film viewers because of the unnatural denial of the individual’s ability to turn the head and see a full 360-degree panorama. Because certain shots in film grant the spectator an abundance, or ‘adequate’ amount, of information, others are restrictive in this provision and can play with this epistemological deficit. Thus, I suggest that a sustained directed focus and camera eyeline can become a disturbing and limiting way of seeing the cinematic world. Whether we decide to understand the reasons for this effect by studying them on a conscious, preconscious or subconscious level is for the critic to decide. Reverse shots can provide evidence to answer any epistemological desires or questions or, as is often the case, offer information that confuses the spectator when there is in a visual inadequacy or logical mismatch across shots. The latter case is evidence at many key moments in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which reverse shots create an unexpected or illogical discrepancy between them and what we have seen in the establishing shots and, by doing this, disturb the spectator’s expectations. In one scene in the deserted Overlook Hotel, the alcoholic Jack Nicholson is shot in profile as he sits on a barstool facing the vacant bar and its empty drinks shelves. After he says, ‘I’d give my goddamn soul for a glass of beer’, Kubrick cuts to a frontal shot of his face as he raises his head and adds: ‘Hi Lloyd … A little slow tonight, isn’t it?’ Kubrick cuts to reverse shot of the bar, now decked out with bottles, and showing a barman standing before them ready to serve. In a later scene, a high-angle shot of Danny shows him playing with his trucks on a patterned carpet for several seconds before a ball rolls into frame towards him. The next shot is from behind the boy and reveals the long hotel corridor in front of him giving no apparent source of the ball. In both of these cases, any comfortable suturing through shot/reverse shot cutting is destroyed for the spectator as the deficiency in continuity logic requires that only supernatural possibilities and motivations could be causing the events. Another case that is more relevant for the construction of What Richard Did relates to extended tracking shots that have a singular line of focus and deny provision of the reverse angle for the completion of spatial knowledge. In Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, his 2003 story of high school shootings by two students, long shots follow characters around the school and its grounds, constantly maintaining a single perspective. As the spectator is limited in

132

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

the full visual panorama available and as Van Sant follows both the victims and perpetrators around the premises, he creates a disturbing tension in the lead up to the carnage. We are aware of what the attackers are intending to do, but the manner in which it is executed is unexpected and all the more horrific because the close following of framed characters on the move restricts our visual fields; a device complemented by the Shining-like labyrinthine corridors followed, the softer focus background used during interior shots which separate the characters from their environment, and the refusal to provide reverse shots. In What Richard Did, as in The Shining and Elephant, the limited provision or mismatching of information by the withholding of the reverse shot or the extension of the trucking shot creates a palpable sense of mal-à-l’aise for the viewer. While this denial of suture need not be explained as working on subconscious levels that relate to the primordial mirror, in a basic way the lack of visual and epistemological closure does relate on the surface to how some aspects of suture theory have been set out. As Noël Carroll has indicated, there is no guarantee that denial of the suturing device will inevitably disturb the spectator and that this is explicable on a psychoanalytical level; however, this method of withholding visual information is still available to the filmmaker. Carroll is clear in his interrogation, when he states that ‘I see no reason to think that one cannot arrange a row of shots without reverse shots to which audiences will respond without indications of unease, aggravation, boredom, or whatever other behavioural evidence the suture theorist would like to correlate with his theory’ (1988, 189). Nonetheless, as the cases here attest, we must draw a distinction between assertions that because suture might work in a psychoanalytically informed way, it always necessarily does so, and the alternative possibility that because suture might be a comforting revelation sometimes, it may be used for purposes of destabilizing the viewer’s position of knowledge. For the most part, the expositional sequences in What Richard Did work with a moving fourth-wall perspective on the action that typically keeps Richard centre-frame. This is conveyed with a cinematic – visual and acoustic – coherence that is disturbed in the latter section of the film, following the murder. Notably, however, in the transition from the earlier to the later section, Abrahamson includes a single, self-contained short scene in which Richard hears the news of Conor’s death for the first time. Significantly, it also foregrounds a key moment of structural peripeteia, at which we as spectators are ahead of Richard in relation to the information that he is about to hear. The scene is only seventy-eight seconds long, but it is designed with a balanced interaction of movement, action, visuals and sound that settle the spectator with a definite false sense of security. Richard wakes on the morning after the fatal fight and enters the living room where his parents are reading newspapers. For about thirty-five seconds, the radio is discernible but only murmuring in the background, until a gap in the

WHAT RICHARD DID

133

casual conversation between the three allows us to notice the beginning of a news broadcast. With a slight rise in the volume of the radio, three seconds later the film ‘becomes aware’ of the relevant news segment. Across the next four seconds, the viewer becomes focused and, with a cut to a frontal mid-close-up on Richard, Abrahamson directs our attention to the character’s insight. Over ten seconds the truth dawns on Richard as the film lingers on this enlightenment until a final cut to a wider shot that echoes the opening one shows him leaving the room. As if to pre-empt the cinematic unravelling of synchronous visuals and sound in the following scene when he meets Cian and Stephen and they confirm the death, this intermediate moment is perfectly self-contained and coherent and is marked by a symmetry reminiscent of many of Hitchcock’s pre-disturbance (calmbefore-the-storm) sequences. This bridging scene, in its symmetry, marks the onset of what Paul Schrader has called a ‘decisive moment’ that leads in turn to the protagonist’s requirement to take ‘decisive action’ (1972, 79). As the reality of his situation becomes apparent to Richard, Abrahamson creates a tension by settling the cinematic presentation with an equilibrium of editing and a synchronous matching of image and sound. This scene embodies a connection between Richard’s past and future which sets him in what Mark Le Fanu calls a cinematic ‘stasis’. The tragedy of What Richard Did comes from the tension of this stasis, and what Le Fanu identifies in the work of Bergman as a terrible but ‘vital belief […] that nothing of importance ever changes’ (1987, 73). After this scene, and in order to offer more details on the radio news report, Richard meets Stephen and Cian. What follows in that sequence is a contraction of a cinematic unravelling that has been taking place from the beginning of the film. Once again, the presentation of Richard’s encounter with his friends is managed so as to limit the viewer’s identification with him, and yet to ‘move the spectator’s viewpoint inside a scene as if it were another environmental factor, not passively to remain outside it’ (Tyler 1972, 48). Richard drives to the meeting with his friends, but his control of the scene and of the narrative are undermined because it is set up so differently from the equivalent opening sequence. In order to suggest the imminent shift in Richard’s narrative position, the scene in the car bears elements that work in direct contrast to those that opened the film. Richard must now face the consequences of his actions alone, and he markedly set in the vehicle in isolation (see Figures 4.7 and 4.8). The unsteadiness of the camera and Richard’s unease contrast with the demeanour of the earlier moments. He has been decentred as ‘beautiful son’ and charismatic peer performer and is thus framed off-centre as he drives. He is no longer ahead of the spectator in controlling the narrative, nor in a position of greater knowledge, and the scene is shot with an edgy unbalanced urgency. While he drives on to meet the boys, he does so out of necessity and under instruction, and is no longer posturing as the comfortable and carefree

134

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURES 4.7 and 4.8 Contrasting demeanour during the first and later driving scenes. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

hero of the opening shots of the film. Gone, too, are the sunglasses that hid his eyes from us, and the cavalier and mocking banter between the same friends whom he is now driving to meet. Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie and Marc Vernet foreground how uncommon it is to find a perfect synchronicity of fabula and syuzhet in postclassical cinema – as is the case here – but their claims point usefully to how such a construction can inform our understanding of a scene such as this one. They indicate that the notion of duration ‘concerns the agreement or disagreement between the imagined duration of the diegetic action and the time of the narrative as it presents that action. It is very rare that the narrative’s duration agrees precisely with the duration of the story being told’ (1992, 93). This scene reveals Richard’s worst fear; the moment at which he learns of Conor’s death and comes to understand the full consequence of what he has done, and must now do. Structurally, the meeting scene reveals how our relationship with Richard has been managed by Abrahamson during the earlier part of the film. The aesthetic and formal design of our identification with Richard – wholly

WHAT RICHARD DID

135

proximate to him, yet in a position of detached adjudication on this – reaches a climactic point during this scene. It is informative to compare the moment of Josie’s epiphany in Garage with that of Richard’s in this film. The former was rendered in one coherent long-take, in mid-shot and from behind the protagonist. In the latter, the spectator is drawn closer to Richard’s mental and emotional state through the total synchronous, spatial and temporal fragmentation of the film. At this point, temporal coherence is replaced with ellipsis and asynchronous audio-visual mismatching. Across a series of ten cuts, Abrahamson uses informative voice-overs that overlap with shots that jump forward and back in diegetic time. At the centre of the sequence, as Stephen tells Richard that the investigation into the murder is underway, the question of narrative integrity and the need to ensure its veracity arises when Stephen advises: ‘If we stick to our story nobody can touch us.’ It is important that the expression of a desire to repossess authorial control of their account comes at a moment of complete fragmentation in the integrity of Abrahamson’s diegesis and syuzhet. This scene articulates an already established rupture of Richard’s relationship with his environment, his social set-up and (as we will presently learn) his personal situation. It is configured so that each of these background elements and their details are blurred so that our attention is concentrated on the protagonist. This reveals the cinema’s unique capacity to present, as Morris Beja has put it, ‘a distinct awareness of the self rather than the denial of it [where] the emphasis is frequently on the personality of the subject, not on the object revealed’ (1971, 25). Yet Abrahamson binds the spectator all the more to the universal condition informing Richard’s requirement to behave in accordance with moral responsibility, thus suggesting that the real tragedy has yet to occur. David Galloway gives weight to such a universal imperative by emphasizing a broader rationality of ethical behaviour rendered at times when the ‘breaking or “fall” of the tragic hero is in itself an affirmation of the logos of the universe, of the fact that the world is governed by “rational reasons”’ (1981, 99). It is important for Abrahamson that a distinction is maintained between ethical and moral responsibility and any rationality sustained by human communication and language. Not only has the film demonstrated certain suspicion in the light of any competent linguistic performance but it has mobilized cinema’s unique capacity to offer time in the presence of a character, as if unmediated by words. This quality has been identified by Noël Carroll in the work of innovative filmmakers who ‘regard experience as the logical contrary of language. Authentic experience is that which is left undescribed or unexplained after language has done its work’ (1998, 287). Following scenes that have shown Richard’s articulate agility of performance through conversation, this scene prepares the spectator for several sequences in which the character will remain in a position of stasis, cut off from his social world. The climactic instance in the final act of the film occurs with Richard’s breakdown, which appropriately takes place with a dissolution of language. Jan-Christopher Horak identifies such moments as manifesting ‘various

136

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

deprivations, both physical and psychological, that result in language-loss’ (1986, 58). In a specific reference to how Samuel Beckett has tested the reliability of language at similar times of intense corporeal emotional turmoil, Steven Rosen gives prominence to the reality of experience over its manifest linguistic expression. Beckett consistently used repetition – rather than Abrahamson’s preferred character’s inarticulacy – to dramatize what Rosen has called ‘great realizations’, which as ‘moments of conversion, revelation, or rebirth, resolutions to do better, are all moods whose claim to significance lies in their claim to permanence; they lose their meaning not only if they are renounced, but also if they have to keep on being repeated’ (1976, 114). The tragedy is accentuated in What Richard Did because of an ostensible failure of verbal communication. At this moment, the medium encapsulates a breakdown of character, narrative and language. In this respect, Vivian Sobchack does not discuss the role of silence in the cinema but, in tying it to human experience, she implies how even its disintegration can be used to replicate a parallel emptiness of being. She refers to ‘a language of direct embodied experience – a language that not only refers to direct experience but also uses direct experience as its mode of reference. A film simultaneously has sense and makes sense both for us and before us’ (1995, 42). This dialectical function of language – echoing experience and providing access to our understanding of it – is invoked by Brad Prager when he quotes the opening title of Werner Herzog’s film about the feral and alienated Kaspar Hauser. In that film, Herzog is concerned with the relationship between language (and, it is implied, logic) to living (and the human experience). Prager suggests that these themes may contribute to explaining those vexing words with which The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser begins. The film’s epigraph – ‘Don’t you hear the horrible screaming all around us, the screaming that men usually call silence?’ – either bespeaks the knowledge that there is a language of nature, one that we are prevented from interpreting, or an awareness of the frightening fact that nature simply has nothing to say to us. (2007, 13) After a series of episodes during which Richard is represented contemplating his circumstances, Abrahamson grants an ontologically complete – cinematically coherent – observation of his breakdown. In the key scene, as Richard awakes from sleep on a couch, his full comprehension of the situation is literalized as he stands, physically disoriented, and slowly collapses in a silent roar that echoes Herzog’s ‘horrible screaming’. The scene is framed in medium-shot and includes only one cut immediately after Richard stands from the sofa, and so respects the temporal consistency of its emotional intensity as Abrahamson did with Josie’s epiphany in Garage (see Figure 4.9). However, the fundamental difference between both protagonists is not suggested here, but in the closing scene of the film. Like Cosmo’s hesitation at the end of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Richard’s stillness offers the only clue at understanding his future. Writing

WHAT RICHARD DID

137

FIGURE 4.9 Richard’s horrible screaming. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

on the Cassavetes’s film, Tom Charity notes a central characteristic of that protagonist that is also revealed of Richard. Charity has suggested that if ‘there’s any doubt at the end, as to whether Cosmo will live or die, stepping out of the club onto Sunset Strip just as he did in the opening shot, the ambiguity shrouds the more important truth, that at best he’s been existing on a half-life the entire movie, running away from everyone, and most of all from himself’ (2001, 149). The anagnorisis in the Cassavetes’s example is pertinent in the case of Abrahamson’s film. Regardless of how soon the spectator realizes the unreliability of the Richard presented – in actions and words – the formal qualities of the film are structured so as to facilitate a gradual recognition that assessing Richard’s reliability might be a futile endeavour. The closing shot of the film shows him having attended a university lecture and sitting studying alone at a desk. After a beat, he takes a drink from a glass of water and looks out of frame to the left (see Figure 4.10).

FIGURE 4.10 Simultaneous closure and withholding resolution. Image © Element Pictures Limited, 2012 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

138

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Now the title of the film can be reconsidered as the spectator may be disposed to ask what Richard did. In order to find a response, two of three answers have been manifestly addressed in the film: in the first case he killed Conor, and then he avoided responsibility by concealing the fact from the investigating authorities and those close to the victim. The third possible response performs an overarching structuring device for the core thematic concern of the film and is displaced beyond the evidence that we can assume about the protagonist. Ultimately, what Richard did was to act in bad faith, avoiding moral and ethical imperatives. The contentment in which we observe him in the final shot should be all the more disturbing for us because of his apathy.

5 Frank

Inside the head of the character in early cinema The spectacular nature of the earliest cinematic projections enthralled audiences because of the ways that details and movements were captured, framed and projected in a context apart from the everyday. This ‘cinema of attractions’, as it was subsequently named (Gunning 1990, 56–62), offered not only a new way of perceiving the world but a certain pleasure for viewers in its having been mechanically recorded. The spectator and the spectacular were bound in an event that would evolve rapidly and innovatively during the first decade of its existence as films improved their capacity to tell stories about characters’ situations, struggles and states of mind. In order to begin this process of narration – so fundamental an achievement, yet so complex in the rendering – one of the subtle developments was a movement away from direct fourth-wall framing of the events depicted. Even with the earliest attempts at telling more complicated stories by editing together sequences of events – as was the case with Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon in 1902 – the camera was set before the action, effectively taking a position that the theatre spectator would have occupied in front of the proscenium arch. The on-screen actions were thus displayed for the viewer as moments for pure observation; the subject–object relationship akin to that of the process of perceiving any real-world experience, now only differently framed, enlarged and seen in the group context of the darkened auditorium. However, even before Méliès had created his pioneering narratives A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage (from 1904), a convention had been used that was mechanically slight but historically profound, technically experimental but narratively radical, aesthetically simple but cognitively complex. In 1897, the American Mutoscope Company had produced Peeping Tom, a short film that showed a man salaciously watching a young woman through a key hole. The film denoted the man’s perspective by including a point of view insert that was signified by the masking of the shot with a

140

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

key-hole shaped ‘letterbox’ within the conventional frame. Now audiences were not merely watching the events unfold but, in a move that explicitly displayed how all of the early cinematic representation had already been working implicitly, spectators were invited to become aware of watching the watching. The French filmmaker Ferdinand Zecca also employed this device in his 1901 short film Par la trou de la serrure, as he openly drew attention to the prurience of the viewing, while tantalizingly recreating and diegetically framing the scopophilia that was a part of every cinematic experience. The consequences of this subtle development would be considerable in their changing everything about how the medium would mature over the next century, how its audiences would relate to it and its narratives and how theorists would engage with its mechanisms of representation. This meant that the spectator’s mediated access to the goings on was re-mediated so that a whole set of alternative interpretations became possible in relation to the diegetic world. Questions around the character-spectator perspective, identification, implied moralities, and imagistic reliability and control developed and have come to inform almost every aspect of film analysis. The spectator’s experience of the events was less interrupted or suspended by the point of view shot than it was to some degree cognitively im-purified or interpolated by the additional perspective. The possibilities that this technique granted the cinematic artist were profound, and inaugurated an array of novel aesthetic devices relating to the mind’s way of observing, distorting, imagining and misperceiving the world. Within a short period of time, film had established a new kinship with the deepest functions and operations of the human mind. Even the simplest, shortest point of view insert shots could allow the reproduction of complex formal and aesthetic connotations of the mental conditions of the characters seen to be seeing. This capacity achieved a certain zenith with the development of German Expressionism in which, now taken to its logical extreme in the construction of the whole cinematic syuzhet, every aspect of a character’s (often distorted) cognition was outwardly projected onto the design of the film; from lighting, to mise en scène, to editing and performance style. Exemplary in this instance was Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, often offered as the epitome of the expressionist movement, in which the production design of the film was transformed by the externalization of the protagonist’s mental condition. Cinema had thus developed the capacity to include in its palette the long-established literary device of the unreliable narrator; a quality that it would retain and refine perennially over the next century. In films as varied as Possessed (Bernhardt, 1947), Roshomon (Kurosawa, 1950), Stage Fright (Hitchcock, 1950), The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995) and Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), the character/narrative relationship was organized for different and innovative effects. The contrivance of the unreliable narrator and its enduring popularity only serve to demonstrate the extent

FRANK

141

to which the medium found a natural affiliation with the ways in which the human mind captured and constructed the world experientially. Alongside the recurring use of the unreliable narrator trope were many others that inherently celebrated the natural and obvious mind-cinema connection. On minor levels, films continued to use diegetic inserts with distorted point of view perspectives – soft focus, double exposure or blurred images for inebriated or heightened states of mind were a common example of this technique – but expressionistic conceptualizations of world perspectives also informed the construction of entire film narratives and their aesthetic presentation. As a consequence of this new potential, the medium was drawn to the more extreme representations of the cognitive mindset and, along with the narrative and thematic mobilizations of the unreliable protagonist, filmmakers often explored darker and more disturbing pathologies. The voyeuristic camera often stood in an uncomfortable position of detached observation of insanity, depression and psychosis. The Czech director Miloš Forman, for example, invited audiences to explore the nature of mental illness and its institutionalization in both One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984), by what Roy Armes notes as applying ‘immensely skilfully but quite unselfconsciously, the camera’s observational power’ (1976, 186). Other directors also placed an investigative focus on forms of institutionalization by establishing the camera’s position of detached surveillance. In cases as diverse as Fritz Lang’s M (1931), Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) and Twelve Monkeys (1995), film’s ability to place the spectator into the position of the external observer was instrumental in recreating a perspective that embodied the empowerment of the clinical gaze and the discursive subjugation of the subjects under scrutiny. Although Lenny Abrahamson’s fourth feature-length production differs from the cinematic precursors here that shared an interest in exploring themes of mental illness, unlike many of those, it is not set within or against the context of a psychiatric institution. Nor does it place its characters under the scrutiny of any clinical observation. Rather, like Werner Herzog’s early films, as identified by Thomas Elsaesser, ‘the distrust of signification was always a matter of refusing to have the handicapped, the blind, or the sick be subsumed under the discourses of institutionalized medicine, charitable religion, or the welfare worker. Instead he intended them to have the chance to appear first and foremost as human beings’ (2005, 480). This is also the case with Abrahamson’s protagonist whose fake head (which performs a number of significant functions that will be discussed below) doubly removes Frank from our inspecting gaze.

142

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

The Frank behind the head inside the head Like What Richard Did, Frank is not a direct adaptation of an existing text, although it is loosely based on a Guardian newspaper article by Jon Ronson (2006) about his introduction to, and musical association with, the 1980s’ eccentric ‘pop’ musician Frank Sidebottom (whose actual name was Chris Sievey). Both the article and the film (co-written by Ronson and Peter Straughan) take their inspiration from the story of Ronson’s touring with Sidebottom’s fringe group, Frank’s esoteric approach to musical composition and performance and the oddity of his musical style. With some tonguein-cheek, the eponymous entertainer of Abrahamson’s film wears a large cartoonish papier-mâché head corresponding to the one that Sidebottom used to wear while performing. Just as both the Franks’ heads seem to be concealing deeper mysterious truths so too is the film self-consciously offering only a playful version of the 1980s’ cult musician and children’s television entertainer. While it represents the exterior image of the real-life Frank, none of its narrative is offered as biographically true. After the impulsive invitation to Jon to join the musical crew as he is attempting to compose a song one afternoon, the new recruit is asked to travel with the players to Ireland where they intend to record an album. Isolated from wider society in a remote rural location for the creative process, the group undertakes a set of sound recording experiments during which Jon becomes acquainted with the individual musicians and their personal foibles (see Figure 5.1). Frank remains the driving force behind the creativity and connects the other members as each is defined by being in awe of his charismatic musical

FIGURE 5.1 Jon’s first contact with Frank; notably on stage marking the performative nature of their relationship. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

FRANK

143

gift. Even though his death is the tragic outcome for Don, with some irony it is at this desperate point that he achieves some tentative identification with Frank by ending his life wearing the musician’s fake head. With a romantic artistic gesture towards the infinite, Dan accomplishes an uncertain immortality that Catherine Russell has traced in the writing of Walter Benjamin. Linking this idea to cinema’s capacity to record and contain the past, and to deny death, Russell notes that as ‘repetition becomes a dynamic passage through history, it is emblematized in the representation of death. As a “ruin” of the performance of the body, the image is radically split between the sign of death and its referent – an idea tacked onto a body: a presence and a past’ (1995, 5). Of the band, Jon is the one who projects on to Frank the more egocentric desire to explore and realize his own self-identified (and as yet un-tapped) personal musical genius. Somehow, Jon states in his commentary, he believes that if he can understand Frank’s creative instincts and access his own core, he can fulfil his ambition of pure artistic expression. Jon also appoints himself unofficial publicist for the band and, following the completion of their album, he announces that there has been sizeable on-line interest in their work on his promotional sites. They have also received an invitation to perform at the South by South West independent music festival in Texas. Dejected by the suicide of Don, they head off to America at first to scatter his ashes on the American landscape, and then to participate in the festival. A failed attempt at a live performance leads Frank to an emotional breakdown and his fleeing to his parents’ home (see Figure 5.2). Jon tracks him down, and his parents confirm that Frank’s musical talent was not in any way connected – as Jon had believed it to be – with his mental illness, but that he had shown aptitude even as a child, long before he took refuge in the false head. In the case of each of the characters, as

FIGURE 5.2 Jon arrives at Frank’s parents’ home. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

144

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Timothy Corrigan has identified with the socially alienated protagonists of Werner Herzog, ‘the significance and the articulation of their radical ways of seeing become dependent on a kind of death, failure, or expulsion’ (1986, 13). This is precisely the situation of the musicians of Frank who position themselves and their music liminally. With interconnecting themes, Frank sets up and explores the relationship between: (1) the social position and conceptualization of the fringe artist within and against mainstream standards; (2) the notion of how mental illness has been associated with the creative personality and genius; (3) the nature of inspiration, imagination and personal talent. In this, the film plays with foundational ideas relating to form and content, surfaces and depth, inasmuch as these hold open the possibility of ever understanding the creative process, person or product. The members of the group are eccentric and have curious quirks that are not explained for the viewer in any clinical way by recourse to institutional or epistemological terms of reference, or psychoanalytical frameworks and language. In a way similar to Ovid’s mythical characters Echo and Narcissus – where the former is dispossessed of her voice and falls in love with the latter conceited, self-obsessed youth – Jon vicariously projects himself, by excessive and fascinated identification with his new hero, onto Frank, who possesses the mythical-like disembodied voice. Don, who was formerly the band’s keyboard player, but now produces their tracks, suffers from a self-confessed carnal attraction to mannequins; the paraphilia clinically designated as ‘Pygmalianism’. By the end of the film, any possibility for Don to resolve what may be a more deeply rooted depression is shattered with his tragic suicide. Indeed, his sexual fascination with the inanimate versions of the human form echoes in varying ways the other characters’ captivation with Frank, and the allure that comes from the mystique of his persona hidden behind his large cartoonish, doll-like head. Clara’s volatility is manifest in both her comically vented sexuality and in her stabbing Jon. A final scene set in a grubby bar where the band is playing has Frank reappear – now without the concealing prosthetic – and perform a number with the band (see Figure 5.3). Jon listens to the improvised number from the bar, before we see him outside on the street walking away from the camera, the venue, and (by implication) the group, with some sense of resolution in his having finally accepted the limits of his artistic capabilities. The story works with a more traditional tripartite structure than any of Abrahamson’s earlier films. It begins with an economical exposition set in England that introduces us to Jon, and him to the band, and also provides their motivation to travel to Ireland to make their album. From there, their decision to travel to the United States for the festival in Texas is partly driven by their new-found public recognition and to have Don’s ashes strewn on the American desert landscape. This three-act framework is complemented by major and minor structural devices around a mirroring effect that also

FRANK

145

FIGURE 5.3 Frank’s final improvised performance, now unmasked. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

reflects Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus myth. Jon and Frank are positioned against each other in a way similar to the mythical Latin heroine and antihero, although in Abrahamson’s case there is no intertextual reference to the classical story. Sequences from the opening section of the film, during which Jon is seen walking home to his parents’ suburban house, are replicated when he walks to Frank’s parents’ home near the end of the film. The characters are developed to varying degrees with arcs of self-realization, and there are a clearer denouement and narrative resolution than was the case with Abrahamson’s earlier films. Notwithstanding this, and apposite for Frank’s thematic reflections on the position of fringe art in relation to mainstream practices and distribution, the film sustains an indie aesthetic and identity that has led Abrahamson to identify it as his most ‘art house’ work to date (‘DP/30: Room, Lenny Abrahamson and producer Ed Guiney’, 2016). Abrahamson merges philosophical thinking and filmmaking in a way that Jill Forbes has identified at the heart of the nouvelle vague movement in France in the 1960s which ‘offered an occasion for critics and policy makers to come together in support of the cinema. Although the art film in general benefited from the structures of support, the nouvelle vague provided an instance of the combination of theory and practice that has remained exemplary’ (1992, 7). This implies what David Bordwell has called a ‘domestication of modernist filmmaking’ that allowed a questioning of the role of the auteur as locus of meaning and creative expression, in the way that the esoteric artistry of Frank is considered in the film. Art cinema, Bordwell has argued, engages audiences by requiring an examination of the artist’s world view by softening ‘modernism’s attack on narrative causality by creating mediating structures – “reality,” character subjectivity, authorial vision – that allowed a

146

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

fresh coherence of meaning’ (2002, 100). As the characters around Frank – and especially Jon – come to reflect upon his mysterious personality and eccentric style, the spectator is also required to think about the complexity of categorization of what David Andrews identifies as ‘a genre so eclectic that we might even be tempted to call it an “open” formal category’ (2010, 66). In effect, the suggestion is that embedded in any modernist, minimalist or avant garde practice is the requirement that audiences reconceptualize their role in narrative construction and comprehension. For a brief period of Hollywood’s development in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jim Hillier finds this stylistic tendency when the ‘looser, less consequential narratives of many of these films are frequently led more by character than plot. Their often more introvert than extrovert characters and their play with generic expectations’ (2006, ix). The implication for more open narrative structuring (character-driven over plot-driven) is a different engagement of the spectator, who becomes more active in respect of reading characters presented from an existential perspective. Roy Armes notes that this ‘humanism is typified by the maintenance, in some form, however embryonic or rudimentary, of a narrative line. Often, however, this is not the kind of story that can be reduced to a synopsis’ (1976, 11). Pam Cook and Mike Bernink identify this characteristic as central to the art film whose characters are required ‘to deal with real contemporary problems such as “alienation” or “lack of communication”’ (1999, 108), and Barry Langford cites Bordwell’s insistence on ‘the inconsistent attitudes and motivations, the self-questioning and undefined objectives of characters in films such as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (It 1960) or Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Swe 1957)’ noting ‘the absence of clear choices/turning points and the “drifting, episodic quality” such elements lend to many art film narratives, and contrasts these to “clear cut traits and objectives” of Hollywood film’ (2010, 150). In a synoptic attempt to categorize the key qualities of the art film, and those that situate it in opposition to its popular mainstream counterpart, Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover note art cinema’s ‘modernist tendencies in its privileging of internal conflicts, self-reflexivity, extradiegetic gestures, and duration over empiricist models of knowledge and pleasure’ (2010, 16). Arguments against any clear labelling of the art house film have been informed by criticisms of an a posteriori categorization. These contentions blur the distinguishing lines between mainstream and fringe productions by interrogating a priori the value and rationality behind attempts to define the entity in the first place. Galt and Schoonover argue that the mainstream/fringe comparison is ‘appealing but hard to sustain in practice’. They go on to indicate the vast disparities in form, style, and historical and economic context that make taxonomy so difficult. Moreover, the systems of distinction and evaluation that would label a film more mainstream or more independent are also historically and geographically contingent. (2010, 6)

FRANK

147

In spite of this generic shapelessness, Andrew Tudor has noted a recurring tendency in which certain ‘European films [become] stylistic parodies of their directors’ earlier films [in] a combination of the earlier films and the newly established conventions of the genre’ (1976, 123). This identifies a deeply rooted quality that sets art cinema as one working meta-cinematically; both in relation to an auteur’s self-reflexivity and in a direct address to the market limitations of all filmmaking. Frank stands out in its thematic foregrounding of processes of artistic creation and in the ways that these are aesthetically drawn. As the film invites consideration of the extent to which it may be classified as a nonmainstream production – in its casting, its formal play and existential character study – it also offers reflection on the very processes and value of fringe designations. Some fringe cinema also sets its protagonist’s struggle in line with that of the independent director. Ivone Margulies points to John Cassavetes, and specifically The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, as a useful example of this tendency. In that film Margulies suggests that the director ‘creates a character whose poise in pursuit of his artistic and showbiz beliefs stands as a mirror image for an independent filmmaker living in Los Angeles’ (1998, 278). Galt and Schoonover identify independent cinema’s constant granting ‘priority to the downtrodden, the underdog, and the abjected members of human communities’, as the stylistic and thematic concerns of certain films and filmmakers ‘make visible what otherwise goes unseen [and] meshes with art cinema’s attempt to represent the forbidden or unspeakable’ (2010, 15). Put simply, Frank can be read as a rumination on the processes of economic operations and social appraisals of the value of cultural and artistic expression and, within the cinematic context, of relations established between what are understood as ‘art house’, ‘independent’ and ‘mainstream’ film production. Although the film is about musical creativity and the song writer, it is significant that the South by South West festival to which the band is invited is also known for its international independent film festival. Much of what Frank explores in the musical arena is therefore applicable to the economic ways in which cinema works.

The ideas behind the face inside the face The possibility of knowing people and things as they appear is most clearly interrogated with the use of Frank’s fake head. With that prop the film invites questions about surfaces, the superficiality of performance and the possibility of discovering deeper truths, and also dramatizes one of the basic ways in which cinema functions. The Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov is perhaps best known for a montage experiment that he first carried out in the 1910s (Kuleshov 1974, 199–200). The ‘Kuleshov effect’,

148

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

as it came to be known, relates to a montage sequence in which the director intercut shots of the expressionless, static face of matinée idol actor Ivan Mosjukine (also anglicized as Mozhukhin) with three unrelated images. Contemporary Russian audiences saw the sequence as shots of Mosjukine separated by a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin and a pretty woman. In spite of the unchanging expression on the actor’s face, spectators commented on the subtlety of his performance; apparently altering minutely in reaction to each of the images presented, and sequentially interconnected with it. Two consequences evident from the viewers’ response to the sequence are informative. First, there was the tendency to assume that the insertions were point of view perspectives; things being seen by the character, although there was no spatial or temporal, real-world continuity or commonality between the on-screen viewer and the things viewed. Second, the experiment demonstrated the audience’s propensity, inclination or desire to project their own emotional responses to the content of the three inserted shots onto the face – and thus onto the performance – of the indifferent actor. From these observations, a third consequence emerges in relation to how the medium works hermeneutically. Film spectators seek comprehensive patterns of meaning across shots in any sequence, assuming a coherence to the ensemble by virtue of logical (epistemological and cognitive) details of cause and effect. In this, what Kuleshov revealed was not merely a quality relating to how viewers come to construct meaning in the film but, more profoundly, how observers seek deeper patterns of meaning on the basis of superficial qualities in the world under observation. Carl Theodor Dreyer has been celebrated for what Paul Schrader identifies as a ‘transcendental style’ (1972) evident in the Danish director’s intimate, proximate and detailed framing of character’s faces. While Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc is exemplary in this respect, his acknowledgement of cinema’s capacity to facilitate a connection between the concrete material world and more evanescent transcendental qualities was manifest across most of his canon. This capability of the cinematic medium was connected to its capturing and rendering of perceivable surfaces and a belief in its propensity to expose deeper ontological truths from certain framing of the same. Jean-Luc Godard actually made this question a central theme of his 1962 nouvelle vague film Vivre Sa Vie. In fitting intertextual homage to Dreyer, the film opens with a number of silent and still, frontal and profile shots of his protagonist Nana (played by Anna Karina). Noteworthy, too, is the French director’s inclusion of a scene in which Nana goes to the cinema to see The Passion of Joan of Arc, during which Godard includes a sustained sequence of the face of actress Maria Falconetti intercut with others of Nana watching in the auditorium. With Frank’s fake head – in a way reminiscent of Dreyer and Godard’s search for a truth in the facial close-up – Abrahamson invites reflection on film’s ability to reveal truths from surfaces.

FRANK

149

The significance of all of these examples for Frank should be immediately apparent. Even a single viewing of the film, with its inserted close-ups of Frank’s painted head, gives the impression that the character is reacting with slight variations of expression at different moments. More importantly, this effect is tacitly connected to the film’s broader thematic concerns and explorations about the cognitive connections that we make between superficial observations and more deeply rooted revelations. Many decisions taken in the production also endorse the fringe aspect of the project. The casting of Maggie Gyllenhaal is a good example of this as the actress is known for a professional portfolio that has seen her move comfortably between large mainstream projects such as The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) and World Trade Center (Stone, 2006) and smaller-scale independent work like Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001) and Sherrybaby (Collyer, 2006). Domhnall Gleeson, who has also adeptly managed his career across mainstream and lower-budget projects, was cast as Jon. While there is some irony in Abrahamson’s casting of Michael Fassbender in the titular role, as an established and recognized mainstream performer often known for scenes of corporeal exposure, here he remains concealed for the majority of the film. These judicious casting choices were paralleled in Abrahamson’s selection of filming locations. Although identified by the characters, none of them is immediately recognizable by distinguishing landmarks, although they are meticulously represented in rich details that add to the visual ambience of the film. In perhaps the greatest formal deviation from the realist style of his earlier work, here Abrahamson fittingly plays with one of his central themes of surfaces and superficiality, and depth and essences, by including an extradiegetic narrating voice-over by the story’s centre of consciousness, and by providing several on-screen pop-ups of Tweets, Facebook notes and Blogs that Jon has posted on line. With slight irony pointed at contemporary means of on-line communication and virtual interpersonal connections, we discover Jon at the beginning of the film seeking inspiration for the song that he is composing as he posts Tweets about his progress. Inviting the spectator to question the veracity and accuracy of his posts, Abrahamson represents Jon’s typing with on-screen textual pop-ups. The usefulness of the titles is undermined by that fact that Jon’s extra-diegetic voice-over repeats them in first-person narration for us. With little evidence that Jon has been engaged in musical composition for any significant length of time, he writes: ‘Working hard on songs all day. Now for dinner. Hashtag nomnomnom.’ Another mildly mocking gesture towards the superficiality of such internet texting is hinted when, armed with a sandwich, Jon tells the world: ‘Cheese and ham panini. Hashtag livingthedream.’ As he composes lyrics and a melody for his new song, the film playfully acknowledges the direct, unprocessed and superficial way that Jon interacts with his environment. Standing by a pebbled shore, observing the landscape for inspiration, after a shot in which he is centrally framed,

150

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Jon’s point of view is picked up with a gentle pan that shows some children playing in a group. He sings: ‘Children building castles in the sand in my town.’ The line is heard in voice-over and without lip-synching, and Jon is shown writing it down in his jotter. A subsequent profile shot of Jon shows him discovering a poster that announces Frank’s band – ‘The SORONBRFRBS’ – who are to play a gig the following evening. This inspires his next line: ‘A band’s playing … A band’s playing tomorrow night in my town.’ His corrective hesitation over the melody of the first three words (discordantly delivered both times) amusingly adds doubt over the extent to which we are actually witnessing the labour of a great composer. The frustrated and forced delivery of the next three lines confirms this, and the film intensifies Jon’s exasperation at not finding an appropriate opening for his song by shifting into diegetic lip-sync. The film’s formal coherence is set by the convergence of visual and aural tracks using what Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis call ‘progressive diegeticization’ (1992, 61) by moving from voice-over singing to synchronized sound. This change also comically marks the bland directness with which Jon unthoughtfully rehashes details from his immediate surroundings. As a woman passes him pushing a buggy, he chants: ‘Ladies with babies, that’s how it works … ’, and then he adds when two more pass: ‘Lady in the red coat, what you doin’ with that bag?’ and ‘Lady in the blue coat, do you know the lady in the red coat?’ The banality of Jon’s spontaneous first line here is reinforced by the connection that his equally trite second line makes to it. Although we do not need to muse upon the profundity of the artistic creation, the two-line composition ironically draws attention to aspects of the formalist intertextual self-reflexiveness of much modern and postmodern art, which inherently serves to provoke questions about the very nature of artistic practices in the first place. Lest there be any doubt as to the eventual success of Jon’s afternoon of song writing, he dashes from the bus stop home to his bedroom where he constructs a melody that has emerged organically in his head. As he plays a syncopated set of chords on his keyboard, adding lyrics, the song gradually evolves into the Madness tune ‘It must be love’, which he comes to remember that he (and we) had overheard from another passenger’s headphones on the bus ride home. Disconsolate and defeated by the recognition of his derivative, he beats out the final three chords from the British group’s 1981 hit which, with appropriate coincidence, was already a cover of the 1971 original by Labi Siffre. All of the key thematic questions are set down in these opening scenes with a sophistication and comedic tonal quality that establishes the central struggle of the aspirational musician. With a child-like innocence, Jon scarcely encounters, observes and reacts to his environment in any way other than as pure, unmediated and undigested response. While he seeks what he believes to be his inner capacity to write music, his approach demonstrates that he is merely aping the superficial aspects of how true artistic genius

FRANK

151

appears to work. As we doubt his assessment, we also come to question his innate ability, and know that his journey of creative self-discovery is likely misguided and liable to fail. He is dreamily set at odds with the diurnal circumstances of his existence – reflection on his day’s composing and panino consumption are somewhat overstated as ‘livin’ the dream’ – as he ascribes to his position a loftier romanticized ideal of the solitary, socially detached artist. Recognition that his new composition, beginning with the fey line ‘I dream of an angel, to take me away … ’, is in fact a reiteration of the Madness song nevertheless shows that he is not mindlessly un-self-aware. But we are offered a sense of his hubris from the establishing moments of the film as he clings to the belief that discovery of his deeper artistic expression is available to him if he can only find a way to become the eccentric artist that he longs to be. His encounter with Frank presently offers him a tantalizing look into the world of that creative type, but for much of the film his idealized view of the artistic personality obstructs a truer understanding of his own weakness. While Jon embarks on his journey of self-discovery, Frank asks questions about the creative personality and artefact. It invites reflections on the nature of cinema, on its capabilities and limitations, and on the extent to which film has a relationship with universal truths and beauty. Can art be spiritual and transcendent in and of itself, or does it merely harness concrete real-world elements for the manufacturing of a sense of the mystical and unworldly? Do these qualities emerge from the artwork as we experience it or do they actually reside within the perceiving subject who uses the representation catalytically? These questions have been of special interest to filmmakers and theorists of cinema from the earliest years of the medium, and in Frank they are offered in consideration of the cultural value and function of art in general, and of music and cinema in particular. All of these questions touch upon notions that relate to the position of art as either physical or metaphysical, leading to immanence or transcendence, based in the empirical or the sensual. As it takes us through subtle reflections on art as sublime and numinous, Abrahamson’s film also asks about how the cultural creation might be overvalued beyond its aesthetic and expressive capabilities, and fetishized in the process. I will consider these ideas under two conceptual categories below: idealism and materialism; and phenomenology and photogénie.

Idealism and materialism in Frank We might usefully ask the question: can cinema, through its base materiality as an apparatus, capture qualities of the ineffable? It is often the case that film taps into notions of a certain anti-representational form; something

152

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

that Laura McMahon has identified in the work of Marguerite Duras, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy and Robert Bresson, all of whom have used recognizable techniques in an attempt to represent the inexpressible in the surface realities of things and people on screen. McMahon has noted how by privileging ‘the unseen or partially seen, Bresson, Duras and Denis create forms of cinema which deliberately move away from a logic of scopic display, testing out the limits of the filmic frame via the use of off-screen space and sound’ (2012, 4). As one of McMahon’s identified proponents in this endeavour, Bresson constantly attempted a revelation of the inner conditions of a character or situation by forcing a truth from their exterior surfaces. That the French director believed in the existence of some unifying truth, and in films’ capacity to expose it, has been noted by many commentators. Paul Schrader’s sustained work on Bresson was informed by numerous analytical examples of how the framing of object reality – especially of the human face – might lead to transcendental expression, and Keith Reader endorses the same in his book Robert Bresson (2000). In that work, Reader references another Bresson scholar and explains ‘P. Adams Sitney’s view that Bresson “thoroughly empties out the projection of intention, conflict, and other signs of interiority”. For Sitney, he “invests the act of seeing – and therefore the shot-countershot structure – with the full burden of fictional psychology”’ (2000, 3). By situating Bresson’s operation in the area of the scopic, he emphasizes a certain inclination towards the ‘off screen space and sound’ that McMahon had already described. Noël Burch elsewhere notes how the film director is empowered in the management of relationships between spatial zones within and beyond the frame, and his point is applicable to the use of the present/absent voice in Frank. Burch proposes that the ‘off-screen space has only an intermittent or, rather, fluctuating existence during any film, and structuring this fluctuation can become a powerful tool in a film-maker’s hands’ (1973, 21). Taking his lead from André Bazin, Stephen Heath makes a comparison between the frame and the mask in a way that accords perfectly with the pure cinematic quality of Frank’s prosthetic. Bazin stated that the screen is not a frame like that of a picture, but a mask which allows us to see a part of the event only. When a person leaves the field of the camera, we recognize that he or she is out of the field of vision, though continuing to exist identically in another part of the scene which is hidden from us. (1971, 100) Heath however concentrates on the spectator ‘who can only inspect the damage of “camera angles or prejudices”, [and] acknowledge none the less the frame, the scene, the mask, the hidden, the absent’ (1993, 82). Keith Reader endorses Noël Burch’s earlier writing on Robert Bresson’s use of sound for the designation of spatiality beyond the frame when Burch draws

FRANK

153

‘attention to the importance of empty and off-screen space from Bresson, notable in Pickpocket and Un condamné’. Reader adds that space in the second film mentioned – a favourite of Abrahamson – is constructed by Bresson so that ‘even more than in the earlier film, [it] goes beyond the formal just as it does beyond the visual’ (2000, 59). For Paul Schrader, psychological interiority was not, or could not be, directly externalized, projected or performed by an actor, and in his work Bresson eschews all constructed naturalistic approaches in this regard. Schrader argues that ‘[p]sychological acting is the easiest and most appealing of all the screens, and therefore Bresson must work the hardest to avoid it […] In order to reduce acting to physiology, Bresson carefully instructs his actors in nonexpressiveness’ (1972, 66). In any attempt to find the sublime in the material, Bresson sought a connection with the film viewer, formulated according to Michel Estève as the director ‘demande au spectateur de s’élever au-delà du sensible, de refuser l’apparance pour tenter de découvrir l’essentiel’ (1962, 82) [‘required that the spectator rise above the merely perceptual, and refuse appearances in an attempt to discover the essential’ (author’s translation)]. All of these writers find in the cited works an enduring faith in an idealized sense of liberation from the manifest world, and an aspiration towards the possibility of revealing in it, or drawing from it, a numinous quality. Morris Beja quotes Henri Bergson’s writing in this regard and proposes how cinema can provide access to a sublime experience. Bergson has suggested that there are ‘two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it … The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to attain the absolute’ (quoted in Beja 1971, 55). More conventional ways of denoting psychological complexity and depth in characterization have been read critically by Ray Carney, who suggests a disingenuous method employed by filmmakers who seem to offer deeper interiority, but who actually only defer to a shorthand process of semiotic coding and stereotypical essentializing. According to Carney, this occurs in films in which ‘the act of moving from surfaces to depths is facilitated by having the character simply tell us what his or her essential attitudes and feelings are’ (1994, 4). Although voice-overs and on-screen texts are used throughout Frank, Abrahamson avoids a positivistic approach to revealing deeper essentialized truths about characters, situations or interactions with such mechanisms. Ray Carney identifies what he calls ‘veiling’ in many of John Cassavetes’s films, and the literalization of this manifestly in Frank works in a similar way in Abrahamson’s blocking of reductive semiotic coding that might otherwise reveal characters’ interiority. With particular attention given to one of Abrahamson’s favourite Cassavetes’s films – The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – Carney explains how this ‘veiling goes on in different ways throughout the films. Not only is our knowledge of interiors

154

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

blocked (what characters feel, intend, know, or essentially “are”); our view of exteriors also is frequently occluded’ (1994, 79). In its aesthetics, Frank foregrounds these elements so that they are seen to withhold any possibility of a disclosure of deeper realities in relation to mysteries surrounding the artist, the artwork or the creative process. In this, they are resonant of the film’s overarching questions about the enigmatic quality surrounding how the composing of music emerges organically and without obvious motivation. Laura McMahon’s emphasis on certain directors’ interest in exploring notions of ‘off screen space and sound’ both acoustically and cognitively are formalized in Abrahamson’s use of the prosthetic head as visually inaccessible, hidden space that acts as a source of much of the film’s speech and song. With this device, the off-screen space is incorporated into the diegetic space, now visualized but retaining an inaccessible synchronicity. The effect produces a certain irony in that the diegetically motivated singing voice and its accompanying soundtrack, both ordinarily recorded in postproduction, are here wholly manufactured in the pro-filmic mise en scène but without the lip-synching and aural and visual track matching that film ordinarily works to conceal. This acoustic property of Frank has a correlative in the incorporation of both Jon’s voice-over narrative and its over-determined accompanying reiterations of his internet postings on the screen. Even these hover in a space between the diegetic and non-diegetic levels when, on a number of occasions, characters walk in front of the in-frame text and lettering, or wipe them away as they move laterally across the screen (see Figures 5.4 and 5.5). As detailed above, Ray Carney’s critical rejection of simplified modes of psychological revelation and character exploration is most apparent when personal thoughts and feelings are expressed in narrating voice-over. Paul Schrader’s identification of a ‘nonexpressiveness’ – as already mentioned in Bresson’s actors – is neatly rendered in Abrahamson’s framing and closeup inserts of Frank’s fake head. As the prosthetic remains motionless, metonymically reproducing the effect acknowledged by Schrader, it becomes a useful screen onto which the viewer’s emotional and intellectual responses can be projected. The experience of perceiving slight alterations in Frank’s facial expression is not empirically provable, but even the extent to which the stillness of the face remains unchanging in contexts where reactions should be expected creates both comical and tragic tensions. Thus, comedic moments often work with the inserted shots of Frank’s fixed facial expression precisely because the reactions are not in line with viewers’ expectations of normative responses. Examples of such ‘reaction’ shots occur often when Frank has listened to Jon’s mediocre compositions, or when he appears to express satisfaction at the results of the group’s sound experiments. In one sequence, Jon finds Frank sitting alone, apparently looking out the window at the evening landscape. The conversation between them ironically marks

FRANK

155

FIGURES 5.4 and 5.5 On-screen messages as surface and superficial communication. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

the oddity of the situation and the impossibility of reading Frank’s actual state of mind. Having discussed Don’s sexual attraction to mannequins, Frank declares with stoical advice: ‘I say tell everyone everything. Why cover anything up, right?’ Jon asks him why he wears the fake head and the conversation continues: JON: Your head is still sort of intimidating. FRANK: Well, underneath I’m giving you a welcoming smile. Would it help if I said my facial expressions out loud? JON: Well maybe … FRANK: ‘Welcoming smile … ’ A more moving example occurs when Frank arrives as the others are taking Don’s dead body down from the branch from which he has hanged himself.

156

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

A cut away to Frank and the stillness of the background against which he is shot underlines the tragedy of the event. All of these examples invite reflection on the extent to which the base materiality of the cinematic projection can provoke emotional and intellectual reactions when ostensibly nothing has changed on screen. This also questions how much the apparatus can capture in a fleeting moment of truth from an expression or gesture. It is possible to study this notion by looking at another way of considering the cinematic operation theoretically.

Phenomenology and photogénie: Frank’s head as seeing and seen This conceptual pairing posits phenomenological approaches against the cinematic concept of photogénie, which was offered initially in a sustained way by the filmmaker and theorist Louis Delluc. While Delluc’s work posits the existence of an essential, normally elusive and indescribable quality in things that the camera can draw out at precise moments, as they are intuitively found by the director, the phenomenological approach suggests that the observational act brings meaning to the observed world. As I have argued elsewhere in a synopsis of the phenomenological method, it is possible to read the recording apparatus dialectically in terms of what it captures of the world, and what it simultaneously adds to the meaning of that world. In this case the notion of intentionality may be usefully invoked, as the idea actively considers how the human mind – or for us here the cinematic apparatus – reaches out both to receive meaning from and bring meaning to the world. (Monahan 2013, 46) In a direct way, the fixed expression of Frank’s face invites – and draws attention to the invitation – contemplation and reflection of what is going on beneath. This does not suggest a tabula rasa for subjective interpretation by the spectator. Rather, because any understanding of Frank’s reactions to events is contextually informed by the information around the fake head, the viewer’s understanding of the character works manifestly in a dialectical way; by an interaction between what the film displays for the observer and what that subject brings to the meaning of the presented details. Theorists who have faith in film’s capacity for photogénie leave open another possibility to this phenomenological one. In this case, some essential aspect of the image object is harnessed by the filmmaker and the spectator is gently disempowered or overwhelmed by its mystical quality. The represented feature qualitatively surpasses regular interpretation or analysis in what might be described as akin to the effect of Kant’s sublime on the onlooker.

FRANK

157

After Delluc’s 1920 book Photogénie, Léon Moussinac’s Naissance du cinéma (1925) used the concept of photogénie extensively and in that work, as in others by Jean Epstein and later references by Delluc, it came to mean the spontaneous capturing of a beautiful moment found by the filmmaker in a fleeting gesture or expression. Ian Aiken has traced the origins of the term and emphasizes how directors of the French impressionist movements in the 1910s and 1920s relied on finding an essential quality in the object that could be grasped by the moving images. Aiken proposes that ‘aestheticization is primarily directed at displaying the essence of an object, or the spirit of an individual, as intuitively comprehended by the vision of the film-maker’ (2001, 82). While this acknowledged the near-impossibility of verbally expressing the elusive and ineffable quality of photogénie, Aitkin’s final words (and especially his reference to intuition) mark the filmmaker’s agency and complicity in Western ideological conceptualizations of authorship and personal creative expression. For directors and theorists who, like Jean Epstein, sought a mystical and unearthly quality that they believe the apparatus was capable of locating, Robert B. Ray noted that the cinema was essentially ‘spellbinding’, ‘mesmerizing’ and ‘wondrous’ (1998, 69). In French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, Richard Abel defined Louis Delluc’s term ‘photogénie’ as a certain cinematic quality of objects and people that is sublime and beyond definition (1988, 110). Because Frank’s mask blocks his facial expression, we are invited to question its contiguity and coherent matching with the words that he utters. Stephen Connor uses Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape as an informative example of how the disembodied voice, formally arranged in proximity to the face that is its apparent source, can open up a rich array of hermeneutic possibilities. He proposes that the ‘difficulty and multiplicity of interpretation comes about because of the separation of the voice from the face, a separation which compels us to try to unify the two, without even offering the prospect of complete success’ (1988, 138). On the same acoustic property in Beckett’s radio dramas – equally, although differently based on the disembodied voice – Mary A. Doll suggests a jarring effect for the differently engaged listener and its inherent toying with the temporal progression of the narratives. Doll outlines how we are drawn to the characters through sound in the plays for radio, and so are the characters drawn into our minds through sound. The effect this has on us is unsettling; for, while we expect plot to be charted in a forward movement of time, we are disappointed at every turn […] These speakings, however, are the voices of Echo, who opens old egos to ‘occasions’ for self-reflection. (1988, 33) This corporeal separation of gesture and expression plays a key role in the work of Steven Shaviro in his study on the cinematic body. On the practices

158

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

of Robert Bresson and Andy Warhol, Shaviro argues that the body’s responses and movements as caught cinematically are used to de-essentialize both ideas of coherent subjectivity and to undermine all shorthand coding of performance. He notes how Bresson and Warhol ‘record the minutest details of bodily response and movement; they both present (often nonprofessional) actors who don’t “act” in any conventional way, who do not manifest or project emotion, and with whom that audience consequently cannot identify […] they are both concerned to produce the effect of evacuating subjectivity and of subverting canons of representation’ (1993, 243). He goes on to note how even the faces of Bresson’s actors, of course, are blank and devoid of sentiment; the films insistently focus on gestural and behavioural details, to the exclusion of any facial, vocal, and tonal expression. There is no correspondence between inner and outer, between visible surface and emotional or spiritual state. And the spectator is drawn into this state of inexpressive stasis. (1993, 244) Shaviro’s analysis is innovative in that it proposes a method of working – an intention to achieve ‘inexpressive stasis’ – that offers a middle term that moves beyond photogénie-based approaches. In these case studies, the directors trust a quality of the static and minimalist performances that does not necessarily rely on finding and projecting a moment of pure photogénie, but which is available in all external rendering of characters’ interior states. Equally, the directors presuppose a sense of interpretation or direct experience for the viewers who ‘intend’ meaning without undermining the provenance or initiation of the meaning in the image itself. The provision of cinematic ‘meaning’ – whether it achieves a realization of the transcendental or not – does not come uniquely from interior conditions or subliminal states of mind and personality that have been rendered externally or as outward expressions of gesture, body or face. Yasujirô Ozu has explained his motivation to discourage his players from performing deliberately through coded and conventional gestures of dramatic acting. This tendency may at first seem counterintuitive in the light of the Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatrical traditions which are so heavily based upon semiotics of gesturing. However, the same theatrical context might in fact explain Ozu’s desire to capture an alternative performative style in his cinema. Rejecting the highly refined system of communicative gestures in his films, Ozu noted how easy it was for the performers ‘to show emotion in drama: the actors cry or laugh and this conveys sad or happy feelings to the audience. But this is mere explanation’ (quoted in Schrader 1972, 66). This characteristic is one that, according to John Dara Waldron, Susan Sontag identifies throughout the work of Robert Bresson. Referring to Sontag’s analysis of that body of films, Waldron emphasizes a redirection of audiences’ attention from characterization onto formal play in a way constantly rendered throughout Frank. He notes that the

FRANK

159

dénouement occurs in an aesthetic in which the expressive features superfluous to the action are rejected. Grace occurs when everything but the spirit is excluded […] If psychology prevails, as in psychological realism, then characters dominate the art form. When domination such as this occurs the spectator will most possibly identify with ‘character’ at the expense of ‘form’. (2006, 119) The strategic effect of Frank’s ‘unmotivated’ voice marks one of the fundamental ways in which the cinematic medium – so inherently based on absences – differs from the live theatrical performance. The formal and aesthetic consequences of Frank’s heard dialogue, with the concealment of its source, creates a new dramatic tension that opens up both comedic and tragic potential that are available to the filmmaker in the diegetic splitting of visual and aural tracks. Referring specifically to Beckett’s theatrical innovation, but also to a quality embedded in all live performances, Stephen Connor emphasizes this feature of the stage presentation that is open to challenge the prestige of dramatic speech […] The two alleged characteristics of drama, its phonetic immediacy and its physicality, are closely connected, of course, for the critical ascendancy of voice in the theatre derives from and is reinforced by the sense of the origin of the voice in the body. (1988, 140) Therefore, it is in the fissure created in Frank between the conventionally matched diegetic tracks – the aural (speech) and the visual (gesture) – that several aesthetic and formal possibilities are mobilized by Abrahamson. While the unnameable effect of our being moved by Frank’s unchanging expression might be compared to a sublime emotional photogénie, the gap between spoken words and gestural silence also emphasizes the spectators need or desire to fill the space with meaning, and – in line with the characters who surround Frank – to question the validity of this interpretation.

Barthes and Deleuze: The framed face as approach to cinema Two key theoretical approaches to the kind of cinematic play evident in Frank also point to (or imply) the gap between the fixed facial and dynamic vocal expressions, and both focus on the human face in different ways. Roland Barthes uses a case study of the face of actress Greta Garbo as a way of celebrating a certain capacity of the film to capture the quality

160

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

identified above as photogénie, and Gilles Deleuze places the face at the core of his analysis of cinema as mechanism for replicating our observed experience of the universe. I want to suggest that Abrahamson’s film can offer a nuanced approach to understanding both of the ways in which these writers consider the framed face as close-up in the cinema. A cursory introduction to both theorists’ writing will be useful in setting up a contextual framework. The more straightforward of the two proposals is Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Face of Garbo’, a short piece in his collection Mythologies (1972). Barthes’s fetishistic celebration of Garbo’s face is underwritten by an implied (although not pure) faith in cinema’s aptitude for photogénie. Beginning with the idea that any cinematic capturing of ‘the human face still plunges audiences into the deepest ecstasy’ (56) and moving to a more divinely inscribed suggestion that Garbo’s face seems to have ‘descended from heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light’ (57), Barthes is clearly committed to maintaining that the actress is the source of a sublime quality that can provoke an ecstatic reaction. Nonetheless, his suggestions that her face offers ‘a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature’ (56) also implies the dialectical interaction of the spectator’s consciousness, who might conceive (Platonically) of this face as an idealized example of all ‘faceness’. Rupert Wood finds this possibility as it is identified in the writing of Arthur Schopenhauer for whom the only way of escaping from this futile force which controls our lives lies in the aesthetic experience […] In these all too rare moments, the subject can contemplate the pure timeless essence of the world, the Platonic Ideas. (1994, 5) This phenomenological inference implicates the viewer conceptually as understanding the facial luminescence of the actor on a more ethereal level. It is significant that, in line with this, Barthes ends his piece by emphasizing cinema’s role in drawing out the photogenic quality, as if it were a conscious, mechanical spectator. He indicates this filmic element with a slight, but significant, comment when he notes that ‘Garbo’s face represents this fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty’ (57). Thus, in spite of Barthes’s identification of a mystical  – almost-heavenly – quality found in the framed face of Garbo, he does not deny the more intuitive way in which the cinematic spectator intentionally endows the subject with an aura of charismatic beauty. In positioning his reading between pure phenomenology and photogénie, Barthes steers a middle course between both perspectives. Precisely this position is echoed in Abrahamson’s film when a defetishization of the mystical human face is delivered directly in a conversation between Frank and Jon:

FRANK

161

JON: Can I ask you something? FRANK: Sure. JON: Why do you wear that? FRANK: You think it’s weird? JON: Kinda. FRANK: Well, normal faces are weird too, you know. The way they’re smooth, smooth, smooth, and then blaagh! You know, all bumpy and holes, and I mean, what are eyes like? Like a science fiction movie. Don’t get me started on lips: like the edges of a very serious wound. The use of ‘wound’ as a simile here not only marks the physical flesh-based reality of the surface of the face, but it also suggests a violent violation of its integrity by an external penetrating force. Barthes invokes the same idea when he focuses on Garbo’s eyes which ‘black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive, are two fairly tremulous wounds’ (56). He goes on to emphasize its radiant, auratic mysteriousness by inferring the power of its ‘inexpressive stasis’ because its ‘make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the colour, not by the lineaments’ (56). Frank and Frank de-romanticize the ways in which both the star persona and the cinematic face have been fetishized (socially, culturally and aesthetically), as the painted mask hides Fassbender, screening instead a fixed, magnified cartoonish appearance that invites contemplation and interpretation, and at the same time blocks access to meanings that are ordinarily generated by facial expressions (see Figure 5.6). Whereas Barthes’s celebration of Garbo’s face is a one-off consideration of the human feature in his cinematic writing, focused on a singular case, a considerable section of Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of cinema is set around the human countenance. Deleuze studies the cinema not only as an apparatus of modernity but also as a symbol and mechanism that represents our ontological position in the world. His methodology is categorical and Deleuze begins by designating broad, general groups to propose how our perception and cognition of the universe work, and then he divides these into even more detailed sections and sub-sections. All of our conceptualizations of the world are understood as slices of action – parts as fixed images – that are permanent only because they are in a constant state of change. This flux can be perceived by our eye as actual movements, or it can exist on molecular and quantum levels of invisible motion. Like cinema’s filming and projection of even a static image – say a ten-second shot of the ‘Mona Lisa’ – changes are occurring at an imperceptible level with transitions across twenty-four frames a second (or 240 photographs of the Da Vinci painting). Deleuze’s broadest designation is thus what he calls the ‘movement-image’: and this is represented by every cinematic image or slice of the universe as we perceive it (for example, a short film of a match, a flame or a candle).

162

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURE 5.6 Frank is simultaneously revealed and disappears. Image © EP Frank Limited, Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute, 2013 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

Within this group, Deleuze proposes sub-divisions: the ‘perception-image’ (an image or world-slice, in which we can see how things in the universe or on film are interrelated), and the ‘action-image’ (one in which the specific consequences of causes are seen happening). Between these sets are images that are interconnected with, and connect, both. He calls these ‘affectionimages’ and explains that they display the ways that things are successively related by causes and effects. A match striking is an action-image. If it then lights a candle, the new flame emerging is a perception-image, as if the wick ‘perceives’ the heat from the flame of the match. The whole process of lighting the candle is based on the affection-image of the transferral of heat in making fire and light. The human face falls into the category of the affection-image and for Deleuze its close-up exemplifies this, because the face (and the close-up) combine qualities of the action-image and the perception-image. The way that he understands these two key attributes of the face is not only relevant to Frank, but the character’s prosthetic head has actually something to add to Deleuze’s theory. This is because Frank’s mask is not the motionless head of a real-life statue, a museum bust or a poster of a celebrity’s face (all mediated, but un-performing); instead it is a cinematically framed, projected and performing entity in the film. In his later work, Deleuze offers a synopsis of his cinema-perception/worldperception alignment when he emphasizes the break in the sensory-motor link (action-image), and more profoundly in the link between man and the world (great organic composition). The second aspect is the abandoning of figures, metonymy as much as metaphor, and at a deeper level the dislocation of the internal monologue as descriptive material of the cinema. (1994, 173)

FRANK

163

As Deleuze pulls his action-image and perception-image together, and designates the overlap as ‘affection-image’, he suggests that this interstitial quality resides wholly on the surface of the face. On the one hand, the face is actively involved in creating expression through fine muscular movement; action-images that can be far less perceptible or obvious than the larger movements of the rest of the body, but which are all the more potent as a consequence of the minutiae of their parts’ contribution to a total meaning. In this, they have a certain power as they outwardly render feelings, thoughts and emotions. On the other hand, the face is a concentrated receptor of sensory nerves as a surface of input from the world; perception-images manifestly imbibing the environment through at least four of our senses. (While touch also occurs on the face – such as with kisses or other contact – it is done less so than through the rest of the body’s largest organ: the skin). This case emphasizes a degree of quality as all of our nerve networks of communication actively participate in processing the outside world to form internal coherence in our mind’s understanding of it. Thus, in the cinematic close-up of the human face we are privy to – actually, directly exposed to – a pure affection-image as a combination of the action-image at work (the power of muscular expressivity) and the perception-image in operation (the quality of the mind being impacted, and processing the information outside of it). Deleuze’s ultimate innovation, insisting the cinema-world/ontologicalworld comparisons, as he draws the operations of the medium in parallel to the operations of our understanding and cognitive response to the universe, is in how he proposes that all cinematic close-ups can be read as faces. The close-up shot in film is an affection-image that always contains the two parts: the action-image in its outward movement, and the sub-surface perception-image as it reacts to the outside world. In order to explain his categorization of the close-up as face, Deleuze offers an example ‘which is not a face: a clock which is presented to us in close-up several times’ (1992, 87). Hoping to argue that even this metaphorical face contains the two poles of movement and affect, Deleuze suggests: On the one hand it has hands moved by micro-movements, at least virtual ones, even if we are only shown it once, or several times at long intervals: the hands necessarily form part of an intensive series which marks an ascent towards … or tends towards a critical instant, prepares a paroxysm. On the other hand it has a face as receptive immobile surface, receptive place of inscription, impassive suspense: it is a reflecting and reflected unity. (87) The prosthetic face in Frank perfectly encapsulates both of these elements, and acts on an even deeper level because – unlike the non-human face of the clock – it simultaneously is and is not a face. It exaggerates all of the facial features just as it exaggerates our possibility to read its expressionless

164

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

expression, and it combines an inability to observe the world beyond it (as none of its painted features is actively functioning as a sensing organ) with the reality of there being a real perceiving person inside it. Just as Frank’s head objectively dramatizes the inclusion of the extra-diegetic sound source within the diegetic, so too does it present a mid-point between Deleuze’s action-image and perception-image: the meanings that we read as its ‘expression’. Our observations of it as affection-image are returned to us, thrown onto the gestures of the rest of Fassbender’s body before they are reconnected with Frank’s characterization as we try to imagine what is happening on the face beneath the face. This operation is echoed in two aesthetic elements in the film: those of music and comedy. These represent a juxtaposition that places a faith in cinema’s inherent capacity to capture a transcendental quality of the immanent world against a semiotic methodology that reads all representation as pure signification. In this dialectic, the former suggests a numinous revelation that comes to our senses through the projection of light and moving images, and may be especially discovered by the use of certain framing of images and closeups on the face. Against this, the study of film as signs and sign systems proposes that the construction of all meaning – and emotion – comes from arbitrary, historically established conventions and a coding that are not unlike a grammar of the cinema.

Concrete becoming abstract: Comedy and music in Frank Music and comedy exist in a shifting dialectical position between the semiotic and the transcendent. They are grounded in basic signifying frameworks of reference, and culturally specific codes, and also achieve a transcendental quality that supersedes these. Frank celebrates music and comedy in both of these capacities, as they vacillate between concrete manifestation and universal expression. The laughter provoked by comedy works by rising above the base materiality of the concrete words and gestures of verbal jokes and gags, and the physical pratfalls that are its origin. In this, the source of comedy gives rise to the more abstract and transcendental quality of comedy. Andrew Stott traces such a feasibility of interpretation at the core of Henri Bergson’s writing on humour, situating it at a ‘division between the perceived and the actual, and the possibility of reading situations in a number of different ways’, which Bergson identified as a situation that ‘belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time’ (quoted in Stott 2005, 9). Its transcendental capability might be found in the way that it overwhelms modes of rationality,

FRANK

165

as Kirby Olsen infers when she states that ‘laughter is strangely fluid and cannot be contained by rational thought’ (2001, 5). The transcendental and non-representational sensory effects that music can achieve also echo this characteristic of comedy. It too can be concretely represented and communicated in notation, waves of sound – in chords, keys and notes – and also instrumentally. However, the realized combinations of tones, harmonies and intertwined sounds in motion – and their emotional impact on the listener – rise above all of the material mechanics of its sources. Although Roger Hillman begins by identifying a transcendental potential in cinematic silences – concentrating on the films of Ingmar Bergman – he moves to foreground a similar capacity in film music. He proposes that in the cases of both silence and music, it is the materiality and meaning of words that are overcome: Beyond Bergman’s film silence is in fact the alternative narrative possibility for conveying what transcends words. More pervasive is the Romantic perception of music as an expression of the ineffable. Nonrealistic or functional music is what we probably most readily think of in connection with film, music designed to further effects and mood and in some cases overdetermined to the point where it is meant to create them. (1995, 185–186) Andrea Truppin brings a broader range of acoustic properties into the analysis when she considers the soundscapes of another filmmaker who has influenced Abrahamson. On Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, Truppin suggests how a certain ‘persuasive quality allows sound to function, for Tarkovsky, as a material with which to represent a numinous realm. The spiritual is mysterious, inaccessible to sensual experience. It becomes perceivable only through phenomenological representation’ (1992, 236). In Frank, the frequent failure of verbal communication and misunderstanding of words as their semantic meanings become pure sound, provide much of the humour of characters’ interactions. Dan’s first phone call to Jon, in which he invites him to join the band, is full of odd noises and vocal breaks, and Don goes as far as to suggest that the whole offer may have been based on a miscommunication. He tells Jon: Frank said that he thought you brought something cherishable that night, but he can sound really muffled under that head, so … so I thought he said that you brought something ‘perishable’ … you know, like food that decays easily, like fish or fruit. More linguistic failure is later marked when Jon’s incomprehension of French is shown after Baraque’s insult on his having joined the group. The Frenchman complains:

166

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

Bon. Je sais pas pourquoi Frank a voulu vous fassiez partie du groupe, mais moi, j’ai pas confiance du tout … Vous me dégoûtez! On the last insult – ‘You disgust me!’ – Jon taps his arm repeating in a selfsatisfied way, under his breath, ‘Vous me dégoûtez’. Linguistic confusion occurs again as Baraque’s doubts of Jon’s artistic ability are confirmed after Jon has played some of his compositions for the others. Having heard the music, Frank’s static expression is immediately legible as unimpressed and is echoed when Baraque adds: ‘C’est d’la merde, ça!’ When Jon returns to the Texas hotel to collect Frank before the gig, Baraque says in response to how the lead singer is: ‘Il dort!’ In horror, Jon gasps ‘he’s dead?!’ before the French guitarist corrects him: ‘Putain … “ASLEEP”!’ In one of the final scenes, Jon believes that he has found Frank in the garden of his parent’s home in Bluff, Kansas. Walking over to the man whom he believes is Frank, now without the concealing head, he addresses the individual: JON: Frank? Frank, I’m so ashamed. I should never have tried to pull your head off. MAN: I’m the tree surgeon … I’m just here to look at the tree … Even the name of the band – ‘The SORONPRFBS’ (and later ‘OECCSCCLHJHN’) – a sound rather than a communicable word, composed of recognizable letters but nevertheless unpronounceable, is a basic example of this. Neither group name is humorous on paper but they take on a comedic tone as soon as characters attempt to say them aloud and then stumble over the impossibility. The enigmatic Frank, both as identifiable on screen and as the invisible character (and Michael Fassbender), is significantly the source of the story’s music, and yet while his actual presence and existence are never under question, phrases associated with where he is – the provenance of his inspiration and the soul of his music – are always spatially vaguely offered. Don tells Jon early on that Frank ‘lives all the way out there in the furthest corners’. Identifying as closely as he believes with Frank-as-artist, Jon expresses his desire to throw himself into the ‘creative maelstrom’ by reaching his ‘furthest corners’. With a formal sophistication, the comedy is often subtly embedded in the music. Series of montage sequences throughout the band’s experimental collection of sounds are noteworthy for the comical esoteric sources that are found to generate the musical tones required. These include swishing a sword, pouring water into a metal bucket, striking a grater and, in a further fitting example of the breakdown of verbal expression, a scream of pain that Jon emits having cut himself shaving. Replaying the noise that she has furtively recorded, Clara calls it the ‘idiot shriek’ and, in her characteristic practical approach to the artistic process, continues to demonstrate her distain for Jon. In fact, in a move away from an ethereal celebration of

FRANK

167

music’s transformative emotional potential, and a denial of Jon’s access to such a transcendental possibility, Clara is positioned as the character who debases Jon and demotes him to the simple material and purely physical world. She reminds him of his function – as mere instrument and not artist – when she tells him that he is no more than ‘ten little bits of bone and skin’ before warning him ‘someone needs to punch you in the face’. Later, not only does she exhibit her animalistic carnality by having wild sex with him, but she also follows through on her promise to stab him and does so at the music festival. Where Frank is creator of the ephemeral, Clara as pragmatist devalues Jon to base physicality as he aspires to the position of transcendental artist. This is made clear at one moment in a sequence when during one of the group’s musical games, as the musicians run between two posts, Frank calls out ‘someone’s thinking in the key of C’. When Jon apologizes ‘It’s me … it’s me’, Clara stands from her deckchair and punches him in the head to punish him for his transgression. The stillness of the comical painted expression provides another possibility for humour as our attention lingers with greater focus on Fassbender’s corporeal posture, movements and gestures. As these are placed in disharmony with the world – like the silent performances of Chaplin, Lloyd or Keaton – much of the film’s physical comedy is generated. Andrew Stott identifies this aspect of cinematic humour at the heart of much on-screen comedy noting how the spectators can be ‘presented with the projected body that draws attention to its surface movements, placed among a world of things over which it cannot claim superiority’ (2005, 93). At many moments, the humour is set into the lyrics of the songs and, while Frank’s extemporizing of words for musical compositions performs a comedic role in their turn-of-phrase, this is also seen when Don – suffering from Pygmalianism – performs his love ballad for Jon. Isolated from the context of Don’s paraphilic attraction to mannequins, the lyrics and music function with some degree of tonal harmony. It is only when the deeper meaning of his words are understood that the whole composition takes on sophisticated comedic irony. At the keyboard, Don sings as he plays: The stillness of the winter night: The frozen water’s icy skin, Is broken by the boatman’s oar: ‘Be still and let me in, and let me in, and let me in … But stay still … ’ The double-layering with which the comedy works at this moment is faithful to, and in line with, a structural doubling that informs much of the film. Generated in the mid-point between the literal meaning of the words and what they connote figuratively in the wider narrative context, the irony here functions by marking the discrepancy between surface manifestation

168

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

and a deeper implication. As I have already proposed, the same device of surface/depth play has been used in the divergence of Jon’s on-screen texts with the actual events that he is narrating and is marked throughout the film by the surface/depth use of Frank’s false head. With another level of irony that emerges less obviously from the diegetic and extradiegetic split, the actual composer of the film’s music – as invisibly present as the character of Frank – is Abrahamson’s long-time collaborator Stephen Rennicks. While Rennicks has been responsible, to date, for all of Abrahamson’s scoring, it is with Frank that he was faced with a twofold challenge: to compose music that was being composed ‘live’ diegetically, and also of a credibly unorthodox and innovatively artful style. Along with Ed Guiney of Element Pictures, Stephen Rennicks has been the only other collaborator to have worked on all of Abrahamson’s cinematic projects. In each case, Rennicks created a score that functioned in perfect tonal harmony with the on-screen settings and events, but added a background texture that lifted the soundscape beyond the recognizable localities presented. In 3 Joes, Rennicks used a relaxed but strong melody that encapsulated the lethargic and casual interactions of the characters, but raised it tonally beyond the suburban Irish location by infusing it with an African and Caribbean percussive quality. Adam & Paul’s score also moved with a rhythm that echoed the languid peripatetic strolling of the drug addicts, but Rennicks gave the tune an undertone with an Eastern European inflection that added to the Unheimlich of the protagonists’ situation, and subtly connoted their detachment from the local Dublin setting. Josie’s social alienation in Garage, marked by his inarticulacy and frequent silences of solitude, was dramatized by a similar restraint in provision of non-diegetic music and, apart from the pieces that covered the opening and closing credits, Abrahamson only used one transitional cue late in the film. The music for Garage was richly layered on a base string melody, perfectly set to accompany the open, cold rural Irish landscapes, but which transcended the emptiness and natural rawness of that environment with a sound somewhat reminiscent of the darker string compositions of Dmitri Shostakovich or Sergei Rachmaninoff. With an interesting creative turn, the long-held notes on base strings were actually used in reverse, in order to create a haunting, suspended and ineffable effect, vacillating in a sustained way that denied a more common, comforting harmonic resolution. A similar sense of haunting uneasiness pervades the music written by Rennicks for What Richard Did. The introductory credit sequence score plays with spectators’ expectations with a gentle sound reminiscent of a toy electronic xylophone, lightly donging like a wind-chime almost without any identifiable melody. This served as a perfect accompaniment to the performed banter of the three male friends and suggested the childish bravado behind their dialogue. The second cue begins after approximately ten more minutes and underscores shots of Richard alone, on the morning

FRANK

169

after a party in his parent’s summer home. Now isolated from the social group and the attention on which he thrives, the music is steadier, even hesitant, as it unfolds incrementally from single chords on the solo piano. From a lower range of notes, the melody gathers, offering higher and more base tones that seem to separate and strain against each other. This music is suspended during a shot of the group of teenagers playing an impromptu rugby game on the beach, but is picked up again when Richard is shown alone that evening outside the family house. An up-tempo reiteration of the same music returns for sequences after Richard has had his mutually felt feelings for Lara confirmed, and a guitar now accompanies the piano section. The piece continues across a montage series of gentle romantic encounters between the two lovers, and seamlessly moves the film through this set of moments without overtly idealizing the courtship. When the first suggestion of jealousy enters the relationship, as Richard discovers that Conor has bought Lara a jumper, Rennicks returns to a darker, more uncertain version of the instrumental sound that covered the opening credits, but only plays it fleetingly and with hesitation, again echoing the situation of the protagonist. This kind of metaphorical, connotative connection between Richard’s state of mind and the music continues through the party scene and then up to the moment at which he kills Conor. Throughout What Richard Did, the music invites the viewer’s partial alignment with the eponymous character during his moments of solitude as it hesitantly begins to form slowly progressing melodies that build in tonal complexity in order to connote a state of mind faced with options, or in denial of the same. Significantly, however, the soundtrack withdraws at moments of decisive action – notably when Richard kills Conor, or comes to conclusions about what his next steps should be – as Rennicks and Abrahamson refuse any leading moralizing cues to the spectator, and undermine any possibility of a neatly packaged unambiguous ethical position for the viewer to occupy impartially. In composing the music for Frank, Rennicks was faced with several challenges, both formally and tonally. Not only was he required to create music that could have been credibly written by Frank and the other members of the group, but the score also had to contain an esoteric oddity, humorously diverging from even more alternative fringe styles and yet remain aesthetically intricate, un-clichéd and compelling. Furthermore, in what was perhaps the greatest test for Rennicks, Abrahamson and the musicians (and moreso the actors who were not as accomplished instrumentally as the seasoned performers drummer Carla Azar and guitarist François Civil), the score had to be playable so that each individual’s contribution could be recorded on set as live, with no post-synching or dubbing. The obvious effects created by post-production lip-synching, and the ostensible trickery often executed – for example, cutting away from hands on keyboards, guitars and drums at judicious moments in order to mask performers’ mimed playing – were common conventions that Rennicks and Abrahamson wanted to avoid. The

170

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

degree of skill of the non-professional musicians – Fassbender’s ability to play guitar, and Gleeson’s aptitude on the keyboard – was mobilized so that the band played as a coherent whole inasmuch as talent would allow, and their pro-filmic numbers were as true to the time and space of their live performances as they could be. Formally, it might be useful to equate the music and character of Frank with that of Daniel Johnston, but the comparison only holds as far as both operated stylistically on the fringes of mainstream circuits. The eclectic style of their music is certainly linked to an entirely alternative approach to composition, but Rennicks’s accomplishment is noteworthy for his artful creation of compelling melodies that are entirely original tonally and yet remain beyond any simplistic categorization. The eccentricity of the film’s lyrics – sometimes devised from spontaneous ideas by the cast musicians, and sometimes written by Abrahamson or Rennicks – fits perfectly with the tonal quality of the music. In a daring move, the challenge to design songs that were peculiar, artistically coherent and yet absorbing is explicitly stated. During a scene before their live festival performance, Frank gathers the group to play what he tells them is his ‘most likable song’. Setting such a benchmark, within Frank’s esoteric canon, and confessing its exceptional popular potential (setting it up as the most ‘mainstream’ song that he has written), Rennicks was then required to provide a piece that was as credible and alternative as the other pieces, and yet offered the promise of popularity. With a wry gesture to the marketability of the new composition, Rennicks designed the music so that it resembled the catchy turn of a television jingle, and scored the melody with lyrics based randomly on a popular soft drink: Coca Cola lipstick ring, go dance all night, dance all night, I’ve got dancing legs, woah, I’ve got dancing legs, They won’t stop the dancing, no, they won’t stop the dancing. Kiss me, just kiss me, kiss me Nefertiti. Just the way you like it, just the way you like it, kiss me, kiss me, Lipstick kiss me, lipstick Ringo, That’s the way you like it. Yeah. As he finishes the piece, played on an electric keyboard, Abrahamson and Rennicks further underscore its exceptional quality and its potential market success when Clara dryly asks: ‘This is your most likable song ever?’ As Frank answers in the affirmative, she adds: ‘People will love it.’ This verbal exchange plays with the prescriptive (a priori) and postscriptive (a posteriori) notions associated with art house classification, and bears some relevance for the market position of Frank. Although the film has done moderately at the box office, both Abrahamson and Guiney have suggested that it will be a slow burner, only finding its audience gradually in time

FRANK

171

(‘DP/30: Room, Lenny Abrahamson and producer Ed Guiney’, 2016). Both acknowledge this quality as perfectly in line with the film’s esotericism, and definitively non-mainstream form, and also read its finding its audience as a characteristic of its longevity. In a further demonstration of his creative flexibility, Abrahamson was about to commence a project that was certainly ‘his most likeable’ yet, and with the tremendous accolades that his adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room would receive, after only four feature films the Irish director would find himself with an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

6 Room

Contexts for the novel and its adaptation On 19 April 2008, as three hostages were released from a cell in a small town near Vienna, international media began to report on the horrific story of Josef Fritzl. The Austrian had incarcerated his daughter, Elisabeth, and sexually abused her over a period of more than twenty-four years’ captivity. When the authorities opened the doors to a cellar that Fritzl had constructed in the garden of his Amstetten house, they freed his daughter and two of her children – Stefan and Felix – who had been conceived by her father’s incestuous rape. Of seven children born to Elisabeth during her incarceration, six survived, and three of those were taken from her to live with Fritzl and his unsuspecting wife, above ground in their house. The 2010 documentary Josef Fritzl: Story of a Monster, produced by David Notman-Watt, went some way to attempting to explain the sadistic and sexually psychotic nature of the man behind the events. In spite of detailed written testimony (including diary entries by Fritzl himself), assembled official evidence and interviews with people close to him, the documentary ended with inconclusive perplexity at the extent of the depravity involved. Indeed, even the subtitle of that non-fictional production is telling: the ‘story’ suggesting that the extent to which a fully comprehensive and conclusive narrative might be constructed (or constructible) is merely aspirational. What becomes clear from NotmanWatt’s documentary is that any attempt at rendering the story completely fictionally would have been beset by the limitations of not only up-to-date psychoanalytical and psychological knowledge but also by a profound sense of the unlimited capacity for levels of evil that distort all ideas of natural parental responsibility, love and protection of children. Fittingly, therefore, when Emma Donoghue was moved to write her novel Room, based on her understanding of the events in the small village to the west of Vienna, her starting point was on the experience of Elisabeth’s children – and specifically

174

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

on the youngest, Felix, who was five years old when released – whose only life experience and understanding had been in the confined space of Fritzl’s prison. What is designated as narrative ‘point of view’ in literature, the representational arts and cinema, can be an overly restrictive construction, as it is reduced to formal techniques and structural codes and conventions that cue audiences’ and readers’ expectations as to who is observing, and what is being observed of, the diegetic events. In Donoghue’s novel, we are taken through the story by the young protagonist’s commentary, and use of the literary ‘voice’ – akin to Seymour Chatman’s cinematic ‘sender’ (1986, 140)  – is constant. This allows the author considerable leeway in the withholding of, or even stepping around, some of the more inexplicable psychological elements and behavioural information. This strategy avoids a situation where the reader is left unsatisfied, without closure and as frustrated as the first witnesses of the gruesome real-life events revealed in Austria in April 2008. Donoghue’s young central character Jack is a shrewdly created, innocent narrator whose interpretative sense of his world and its counterfeit actuality are excusable because of the limitations of his situation and are astutely presented for our adjudication by the author. Jack’s distillation of information from his restricted environment, already mediated to some extent by the television that he watches and protectively managed by Ma, is something through which the reader can infer deeper implications beneath which we can always appreciate a more latent and horrific truth than the young narrator describes, or is capable of assessing. The book is divided into two sections of approximately the same length. The first begins with Jack’s turning five and establishes the context of his present environment as the only reality that he has ever known. The section culminates with a series of revelations – notably that owing to their captor’s prolonged unemployment, Jack and Ma’s situation is likely to change for the worse – that force Ma to devise a strategy for escape in order to avoid the risk of severe imminent danger for the two of them. A transitional episode narrates their escape, which includes Jack’s feigning death to have their kidnapper (named ‘Old Nick’) remove his body from ‘room’ (always designated by Jack without the definite article), and then his fleeing to alert the police of Ma’s whereabouts. The second half of the book deals with their coming to terms with their new lives in the world outside; Ma burdened by the horror of her experience in captivity, and Jack required to renegotiate his experience of an established notion of ‘the real’. The novel ends with hesitant affirmation for their reintegration into society and a sense that the worst is behind the two. With some reflection, the reader can appreciate the extent to which any possibility of redemption for Jack is rooted in Ma’s strength of character and purpose, and her selfless unconditional love as a parent. That the novel stops short of the sentimental pitfalls to which such a story is so evidently susceptible is in no small way due to the linear interiority

ROOM

175

of the child’s restricted epistemological point of view, and in Donoghue’s cautiously managed restraint on offering psychological explanations and motivations behind Old Nick’s criminal behaviour. Because Jack’s voice is the mechanism through which the story is revealed to us, and words inherently leave much sensory interpretation to the reader, a generically coherent verisimilitude adequately takes the place of a complexly riven realism. What is presented, because of the way in which it is offered, does not have to be true, only credible. Room was published on 6 August 2010, and while the contract offered to Donoghue was already a notable marker of potential success, the novel went on to gain considerable critical acclaim, huge sales and accolades including being shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and then further recognition by winning the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the W. H. Smith Paperback of the Year Award, among a host of others. Perhaps counterintuitively, formal elements that contributed to the book’s success in many ways became significant obstacles for Abrahamson’s adaptation, also scripted by Donoghue. On a basic level, readers’ expectations had to be satisfied by the film’s retelling, and the cinematic version could not count on any of the surprise elements or basic revelations with which the plot of the novel worked. The viewer had to accept Jack’s ultimate having faith in Ma’s explanation that a great world existed beyond their four incarcerating walls, their method of escape, and their small steps in coming to grips with their new lives on the outside; all as moments that were no longer providing tension by dramatic disclosure. The subtly rendered openness of Jack’s unique perspective in the novel had to be carefully managed by Abrahamson as the verbally two-dimensional descriptions became a plenitude of cinematic visuals and sounds. In a similar way, those added dimensions – leaving less to the imagination of the spectator – provided an inevitable fuller realism that could jeopardize the credibility of scenes that had been acceptable in the novel; especially those involving the planning of the escape and its execution. Most significantly for the tonal integrity of the film, Abrahamson had to avoid conventional techniques that could create a melodramatic effect and have it slide towards a sentimentality, or easy sentiment, as are often associated with mother and child relationship tales. Abrahamson’s degree of success in avoiding these traps cannot be considered merely by recourse to healthy box office takings, a host of highly favourable critical reviews, film festival awards and, ultimately, four Academy Award nominations, as each of these has distinctive criteria for any categorization of excellence that may not accurately reflect on the quality of the film. Nonetheless, these accolades and endorsements cannot be ignored. That Room managed so well within all of these networks, however, is testimony to Abrahamson’s canny awareness of how audiences might need to be satisfied on one level in order to invite viewers to consider more profound and probing existential questions. With

176

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

the film, Abrahamson remained true to his personal commitment only to embark on a project in which he could place genuine conviction and by which he would be stimulated as a filmmaker at every point in its execution. Indeed, he expressed his personal connection to the story more than once, noting that it captivated him because his own son was the same age as the central character when he first read the book (‘Brie Larson & Lenny Abrahamson | Room Interview Special’, 2016). Compelled by the book’s humanistic exploration of the mother–child relationship, as a fundamental one of protection and imagination inspiration, but forced into a dreadful situation under extreme circumstances, Abrahamson was motivated to recreate the tonal coherence of the piece by rendering it in the most direct way possible, with the spectator as present in the characters’ story as the readers had been immersed in the novel. In the way that the film’s aesthetic integrity works in understated harmony with the thematic questions arising from its narrative, Room contains many of the qualities evident in three of Abrahamson’s identified long-time favourite films. Each of these is a story about incarceration and attempts at liberation that are worked through in both figurative and literal ways. Robert Bresson’s Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956) is the one in which the question of escape is manifestly plotted as the raison d’être of the protagonist, Fontaine, who is attempting to avoid execution having been imprisoned by the German army in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. Structurally, what happens in Bresson’s film is comparable to the first half of Room. A specific relationship is established between the characters and their spaces of confinement by drawing together splintered elements of the finite mise en scène visually within the structuring device of the protagonist’s voice-over commentary. Furthermore, in both cases, the goal of escape is explicitly stated, although the potency of Ma’s not immediately inviting Jack to consider the possibility and its implications is deftly handled by Abrahamson. The tension created by Bresson by cinematically cutting framed details of the cell’s interior with reaction shots by Fontaine (as he listens to the goings-on outside the walls) has similarities to Abrahamson’s juxtaposition of images and sound. Michel Estève has noted of Un Condamné that A l’intérieur de chaque sequence, la repetition des plans pris sous des angles comparables et comportant des cadrages similaires suit d’une part la perception du héros et, d’autre part, nous communique un sentiment d’intimité inconsciente établie entre les hommes et le décor. (1962, 76) [At the centre of each sequence, the repetition of shots with comparable angles and similar framing echoes the hero’s point of view, and equally conveys a sense of the unconscious intimacy established between the men and the setting. (author’s translation)]

ROOM

177

In a similar way, in Room, we come into contact with the story world through a multi-layered structure of the child’s perspective, provided by voice-over narration, and the ways in which the visual and acoustic filmscapes are offered. A second relevant film for the current discussion concentrates on the story of an individual held in solitary captivity from birth. Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) begins with the protagonist’s release into society and his first-time exploration of the world and its inhabitants. In a way that accords well with the second part of Room, Kaspar Hauser uses its eponymous character’s innocence and purity as a degree zero in human development (socialization) and, by juxtaposition with the cultural standards of his contemporary environment, reflects upon those standards as the adult Kaspar begins to acquire language and, with it, to foster an understanding of how the world works. Of central importance for Herzog is an avoidance of any simplistic critique of society as a ‘contaminated other’ for Kaspar, into which he must inevitably be thrown in a shattering of his naïvety and simplicity. Thomas Elsaesser indicates how the film is existentially probing when he explains that ‘in Kaspar Hauser Herzog seems less concerned to juxtapose innocent nature and the inarticulate foundling with corrupt and fallen society (a possible but simplistic reading). Kaspar’s non-natural as well as non-human condition challenges both society and nature’ (1989, 90). Precisely the same avoidance of any simplistic binary of inside/evil and outside/good is managed by Abrahamson in Room. Rather than set the atrocious circumstances of the characters (especially that of Ma) against a utopian promise of flight from the room (a quality that would over-dramatize the escape plot line), or turn the tale into one of discernible conflict with the finally achieved external reality (which would have turned the filmed version into a hackneyed narrative of self-discovery), Abrahamson focuses solely on the characters and the ways in which, through layers of processes, the reality of their existence is mediated for them. Thus, for Jack, his experience is not a tortured one of suffering and loss but, because of Ma’s exhaustive drive to normalize his situation, it has become as ordinary as it can be. Abrahamson plays subtly with a significant dramatic tension that is created as a result of Ma’s ongoing and horrific suffering and the normality with which Jack understands his situation. This ontological focus brings Room in line with Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963), which isolates three characters – two sisters and a young boy – on a short-term hotel stay in an unnamed European city before the outbreak of what is likely the Second World War. Ester, her sister Anna and Anna’s son Johan are voluntary visitors to the near-empty but oppressively claustrophobic hotel. Their movements are not restricted as physical comings and goings; however, the complexity of their various psychological complications – in the case of Ester psychosomatically manifest – leaves the three in different states of paralysis. Their personal struggles are implicitly connected with sexual repression or thwarted sexual expression; in the

178

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

boy’s case, a burgeoning sense of maternal detachment, and in the women’s case, a haunting of tortured and confused past relationships. In Bergman’s characters’ separation from the external world, and through his study of their complex relations and interactions, the film repositions the spectator’s focus from plot development to character study, in much the same way that Donoghue and Abrahamson do in Room. This aesthetic decision was essential in its deemphasizing the generic qualities of the story that would have directed audiences’ expectations in a misleading way. As a narrative that readily fits into the melodramatic mode and contains certain generic thematic concerns of the melodrama – microcosmically representing a fragment of society and social relations, firmly situated within a ‘domestic’ setting – Room might have easily moved towards a sentimentally inflected use of cinematic coding in its music, dialogue and plot. Some may question the extent to which Abrahamson stuck to or avoided stock melodramatic semantics and syntactics, and the degree to which he relegated these in favour of foregrounding the mother-son story (for an example, see Culloty 2016). In fact, Abrahamson has shown adept management of the character/ spatial connection as inner and outer worlds of psychology and politics, and the public and private spaces of the typical melodrama are ordinarily played out. In The Shining (1980), for example, Stanley Kubrick magnifies the melodramatic domestic backdrop for horrific effect and distorts the familial relationships with a supernatural haunting. Similarly, in The Silence, Bergman uses the hotel as an exaggerated home in order to disturb psychonormativity, and to throw his characters – literally or metaphorically meandering – through the sterile corridors and rooms of shadows, intoxication, hallucination and confused imagination. With Room, Abrahamson has been attracted by a human relationship story that goes in another direction, and compresses the domestic relationships of the genre and its participants into a space that is too confining to be pure horror and too protected to become a psychological thriller (see Figure 6.1). Read in this way, Room is not a generic film – although it contains tropes from recognizable genres – but it might be understood as invoking what Christine Gledhill identifies in genre cinema as certain ‘horizons of expectation’. Gledhill has emphasized how ‘the making and use of genres rely on accumulated experience of films constructed within the parameters – the horizon of expectations – of the particular generic worlds in question’ (2007, 21). In Room, the frameworks of the generic contract are spatially set down in a manifest way so that the architecture in which we discover the characters plays a role in conveying a sense of the film’s generic boundaries. While the confinement requires consideration of the possibility of the characters’ (self-)liberation, key aspects of the opening sections of the first half of the film – many occurring even before the first suggestion by Ma of any possible attempt at escape – obliquely inform the spectator that this

ROOM

179

FIGURE 6.1 Compressed domestic space in Room. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

will not be a traditional escape film. By placing their central characters into a ‘Russian Doll’ effect of enclosure – and Jack at the heart of that as he is protected by the inner sanctum of his wardrobe or even imagination – Donoghue and Abrahamson invite key ontological questions about the way that we construct, and have constructed for us, a sense of our lived reality. The intensity of the focus on Ma and Jack, as protecting and protected, places the question of human relationships at the heart of that structure. Through Jack’s naïve point of view, the horrific consequences for Ma of Old Nick’s nightly visits are simultaneously dampened and made more painfully acute, as the innocent child counts himself to sleep in the wardrobe while his mother is being sexually assaulted. Unlike the ominous haunting of Kubrick’s The Shining and Bergman’s The Silence, Room understates the menace so that, as Robin Wood has noted of Bergman’s film, the spectator’s ‘sense of the child’s vulnerability is intensified by the film’s suggestions that potentially corrupting or stunting forces can be present in even the most relaxed and innocent-seeming encounters’ (1969, 126). Wood goes on to discuss the external threats in Bergman’s film by focusing on its young character’s perspective when he notes that ‘there is another whole range of dangers with which the boy is particularly associated: the mysterious outer world, from which the characters are cut off, but which is felt as a potent menace’ (1969, 127). The heightened consequence of this is identified in other philosophical questions throughout Bergman’s canon by Pam Cook and Mike Bernink when they suggest how many of his ‘characters are shown to be caught in the conflict between the inner emotional world and the menacing outer world of society, often depicted in a state of upheaval’ (1999, 239). In this quality, Abrahamson’s use of cinematic point of view in its widest meaning informs how we come to understand Ma’s role in

180

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

designing Jack’s environment. The construction of a cinematic perspectival equivalent to the book’s coherent first-person narration afforded some flexibility to the filmmaker. Although characters’ perspectives can be directly and literally created by the basic visual device of the point of view shot, a much broader audio-visual palette of possibilities is open to the filmmaker than merely the camera’s selection and framing of parts of the pro-filmic action. Every aspect of the design of the image and sound can be infused with information regarding the mood, the tone and the cognitive perspective of the diegetic participants. Room may even be understood to be foregrounding this somewhat, as Jack’s artificial mise en scène has already been composed and decorated for him by Ma, who has become something of a production designer in the context.

Room’s innocent first-person narrator The mechanisms of the construction of the visuals and sounds of a given film impact upon how the spectator engages with the cinematic experience through the identification of a series of modes. Stephen Heath has explained that point of view in its broadest cinematic sense ‘depends on an overlapping of first and third person modes. There is no radical dichotomy between subjective point-of-view shots and objective non-point-of-view shots; the latter mode is the continual basis over which the former can run in its particular organization of space, its disposition of the images’ (1993, 85). Vivian Sobchack draws the notion of mediation of reality deeply into that of cinematic point of view in a way that allows the spectator simultaneously to experience Jack’s world, his experience of it and Ma’s role in its protective filtering. Sobchack emphasizes how film is both a direct and mediated experience of direct experience as mediation. We perceive a world both within the immediate experience of an ‘other’ and without it, as immediate experience mediated by an ‘other.’ Watching a film, we can see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as see the moved. As viewers, not only do we spontaneously and invisibly perform these existential acts directly for us and as ourselves in relation to the film before us, but these same acts are coterminously given to us as the film. (1995, 42) In its cinematic capacity for ontological wholeness, Room makes explicit the implicit quality of the novel wherein Ma has constructed a world for Jack that is sheltered from her real suffering and the violence that can occur in the external world. As sophisticated spectators, even though these qualities have

ROOM

181

been filtered through Jack’s naïvety, we gain a clear sense of Ma’s resolute strength as she becomes the means by which her son is protected from the cruelty and horror of their victimization. Room is formally designed to provide a deliberate balance between Jack’s singular perspective point of view and an informed plenitude of significations that have been inflected by Ma’s management of her son’s experience as narrated. The introductory shots softly pass in a montage sequence between pairs of images that reveal minor details from the mise en scène and then black screens that include the opening titles. These are underscored by a rich but gentle audio track composed of sounds of Jack tossing and turning in a semi-woken state, barely consciously discerning different parts of his environment. This partially active observation establishes his point of view as not entirely complete, but at the same time singularly motivated (see Figure 6.2). Later, shots of Jack – playing in the room or from above as he falls asleep in the wardrobe – which would have otherwise broken the continuity of his perspective, work seamlessly to maintain it because of the way that his position as narrator has been established in the opening sequence. His voice-over commentary is also peppered with turns of phrase that are evidently not his own, so that even his processing of his limited world has been coloured by the stories and explanations that Ma has offered him. In another way that leads to the coherence of Jack’s narrated descriptions of his world, while inflected by an alternative perspective, decorative aspects of the space – toys made from the remnants of used objects and the art and craft creations on the walls – have also been designed by Ma in an effort to normalize the space for her son. In all of these qualities, Abrahamson shows restraint in the sensory plenitude that becomes an automatic part of the translation from the literary word to the cinematic audio-visual register, and

FIGURE 6.2 Jack’s point of view maintained tonally. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

182

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

thus modifies the latter with the sensibility of the mother seeking to stimulate her son’s imagination and protect him from the pervasive horror of their reality. With similar restraint, Jack’s voice-over is never used as an extradiegetic provision for narrative deficiencies, but as a textural component that is imbricated with every other stylistic aspect of the diegetic space and sound, in a way similar to Bresson’s technique in Un Condamné á mort s’est échappé. The authorial position granted to Ma in this instance is indicative of how a kind of structuring absence is working across the first half of the film, as the hidden real world filters only partially into their space until it is fully replaced in the second half. Whereas Adam & Paul worked generally by removing a Celtic Tiger Irish background from the horizon of the protagonists’ experience, and withheld it throughout, Room can be seen as a story that withdraws the external world in part one, only to replace it – effectively freeing its protagonists into it – in the latter section of the film. The absent-present structure not only holds out the ultimate promise of full integration for Ma and Jack, and a complete immersion into the reality that is initially denied to them, but it also invites key existential questions about our inherent relationship with, and understanding of, the world that we inhabit. Two important elements arise in respect of how Donoghue and Abrahamson’s story is set to interrogate such ontological concerns about our comprehension of, and access to, our lived experience of the world. The first might be best read by reference to Plato’s cave allegory, as aspects of the characters’ situation accord well with the spatial construction detailed there. The second relates to the position of the television in the space; how it offers a mediated representation of the world that is liminally placed to represent and reconstruct it for, in particular, the child who has no other external point of reference. In both cases, a dramatic intensity is achieved not merely through a sense of confinement – in actual fact, in accordance with Jack’s imaginative outlook, even the eleven by eleven foot space stretches beyond its actual limitations – but rather by a sense of the restrained potential of the outside world pressing in from all sides. Occasionally, that reality intervenes in simple ways such as the sounds of Old Nick pressing the bleeping buttons on the metal door lock, the provisions that he brings in to them, the raindrops and the leaf that appear on the surface of the skylight, and the mouse that gets in to nibble dropped crumbs. Although these may indicate some permeability of the incarcerating walls, the impenetrability of the space is reinforced frequently through other tonal and stylistic effects. Such aesthetic devices and decisions by Abrahamson accord well with Birgitta Steene’s reading of Bergman’s The Silence in which, along with many of his other films, she notes how the director ‘discards the historical milieu, the psychoanalytical use of flashbacks, all technical experiments and tricks, and concentrates on conveying a visual nakedness, an asceticism that breaks through also in The Silence in spite of its overly decorative setting’

ROOM

183

(1968, 113). Despite identifiable sources of light, present but restricted, a sense of Room’s pervasive dark haunts the mise en scène at even its brighter moments, in a way that Charles Affron identifies stylistically in many 1970s ‘New Hollywood’ films ‘of our becolored era [which] hark back to a cinema whose screen held as much darkness as it did light, if not more, and whose light-streaked fields engaged us in processes of search and discovery’ (1982, 63). Without supressing light levels to the extent of expressionistic shade, Abrahamson provides just enough spatial definition to suggest sources of power and illumination beyond the boxed walls of Ma and Jack and, with that, implies a wider culture and society awaiting discovery by the boy, although never suggesting that these are without their own restrictions. As Noël Carroll has identified in Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser, those external realities are not innocently, affirmatively held in waiting as perfect antidotes to the character’s original position of incarceration. Outside the walls, reality has its own torments into which Abrahamson’s young protagonist has yet to be thrust and, like Kaspar, for him ‘the various forces of culture that can be seen as functioning to suppress authentic experience […] include, first and foremost, language, which, in turn, is associated with practical and instrumental reason, with science and bureaucracy, with religion and civil society’ (1998, 288). The connection between Jack’s use of language and the existence that he has come to know is significant in a number of respects; all of which will be explored below. In anticipation of this, it will be important in the first instance to consider the spatial configuration of Abrahamson’s mise en scène, and the identification of the world beyond it in the light of Plato’s cave metaphor, and the presence of the television in the room.

Levels of reality in Room: Aristotle’s cave and Baudrillard’s Simulacra The Greek philosopher used the image of prisoners in a cave to describe various levels of our experienced reality (1999, 265–291). Chained to a wall, behind which puppeteers are holding likenesses of human forms and other objects whose shadows are projected by a fire onto a surface in front of them, the captives believe that both the light source and the shadows are ‘real’. They accept that they are seeing the forms of actual beings projected onto the wall by the sun. Only when one escapes and climbs to the other side of the wall does he see the full picture and, now enlightened, realizes the extent to which he has become better informed by the knowledge to which the other captives have no access. Further intrigued by his new information, he continues his climb out of the cave and into the real world, ultimately seeing it in its totality. He finally discovers all of its elements and the actual sun, as they have always been, but of which he had only an inadequate

184

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

awareness and understanding. Plato’s allegory has been used by many film theorists because of the obvious way in which the cinematic experience of watching moving pictures in a darkened room equates with the prisoners’ watching flickering images on the cave wall (Baudry 1976; Jarvie 1987; Litch 2002). No deliberate intertextual reference by Abrahamson to the cave parable needs to be proven for the obviousness of the comparison to hold. Even while the skylight of their cell provides the beam of light – like that from a cinema projection box – with which Jack at one point makes shadow puppets on the wall (see Figure 6.3), the series of structured concentric circles – from wardrobe, to room, to real world, to universe – justifies enough of a comparison so that the boy’s levels of reality can be equated with those of Plato’s prisoners. Any ultimate reality may actually be a metaphysical one that exists beyond the corporeal world, and Joseph Peter Stern explains the Platonic possibility of ‘a Reality outside the shadowy world of the cave resembles the Christian belief in a transcendent God’ (1973, 46). However, although Jack’s earlier voice-over tells us that he came down from ‘heaven’ to Ma, the religious element is not placed so as to be a significant theme in either the book or the film. Rather, Abrahamson’s version involves us with Ma and Jack, in their entrapment, as agents with whom any potential for escape is rendered by marking the proximity of the spectator who becomes as confined in their presence as they are spatially. In fact, what we witness at first appears to be a piece of theatre, and the confined space is drawn almost as a theatrical set. However, with the characters’ containment reinforced by a constantly budging camera, and as they are set beneath the projectionlike skylight, what has initially the feeling of a theatrical mise en scène soon shows itself to be more like a cinematic projection. This cinematic framing of a constructed theatrical setting highlights, as Vivian Sobchack

FIGURE 6.3 Jack’s shadow games. Image © Element Pictures/Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

ROOM

185

notes, ‘an inscribing autobiography of exploration […] the immediate and direct enunciation of its own present engagement with a world’ (1992, 216). As the characters are contained within their incarcerating space, and the opportunity of escape from their present situation is offered, the film’s representation of their stage encapsulates André Bazin’s notion of a coherent ontological wholeness beyond which (but through which) the cinema offers putative access to higher orders of truth. Room grants its trapped characters only concrete immediate presence or mediated represented access to external reality by suggestions of the other level of the real beyond the walls. The act of their escape and liberation simultaneously holds out a transcending possibility as it does a renewed connection with another level of Platonic reality. The film makes an implicit connection between levels of its characters’ existence and Bazin’s concept of access to higher levels of experience through the cinematic ‘real’. As Hunter Vaughan has noted: Bazin holds a strong affinity for the somewhat metaphysical notion of existential unity that can be found in both Emersonian transcendentalism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: no doubt why some may accuse Bazin of a non-materialist metaphysics and, yet, also why I make here the argument for an understanding of Bazin’s theory of immanence. (2009, 108) Each successive step towards the outside represents for Jack a broadening of his complex understanding of what his reality can be and, in a nod to the innocence that he carries with him to each new level, it is he who encourages Ma in the final instance to leave their room behind. Her physical liberation therefore precedes her psychological one in a way that further endorses the film’s exploration of levels of actual reality as much as it assesses conceptual ones that we construct for ourselves. In this, the television represents the first point of access to the external world for Jack; something in line with the way that the apparatus has appeared before in film (see Figure 6.4). In the genre of the melodrama, the television has often been used as a minor thematic element and as a symbolizing objective correlative. Combining both of these narrative functions, it has acted as a metaphor for connecting the external, political (social) space with the interior personal, domestic space in which the struggles with socially acceptable norms are negotiated and fought by the (mostly) female protagonist. It occupies a liminal position between the public and private domains and acts as a metaphor for hegemonic (or oppressive) intervention of the former into the latter. At the same time, more affirmatively, it symbolizes the potential for personal liberation of the character who is in conflict with the oppressive ideological forces of the patriarchal social and familial orders. The placement of the television as a gift to her from Cary Scott’s grown children in Douglas

186

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

FIGURE 6.4 The television as mediating apparatus. Image © Element Pictures/ Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) is doubly significant as it suggests her possible escape from the confines of her domestic, familial and social-class positions, all of which stifle her emotional freedom of expression, and is at the same time a threat to keeping her entrapped, immobile and passive in her current situation. It is noteworthy that in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 remake of Sirk’s film – Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – when Emmi, a German woman in her mid-sixties, announces to her adult children that she has married a young Moroccan man, it is Fassbender himself, playing the role of one of her sons, who reacts to the news by standing, kicking the television screen until it smashes (see Figure 6.5), and then storming out of the room. The liminality of the broadcast apparatus is also strategically positioned in more contemporary films as diverse as Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994), Pleasantville (Ross, 1998), Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000) and Good Bye Lenin! (Becker, 2003), and in all of these cases the medium is shown to be offering a liberating possibility for reconstructing the characters’ realities, as much as it is shown to be reinforcing more conservative social and political ideologies. For the hostages of Abrahamson’s film, the oppressive capacity of the apparatus is removed and that aspect of its traditional metaphorical use in the melodrama is neutralized. In Room, the television only serves the purpose of the characters’ (re)connecting affirmatively with a reality – albeit one that is still constructed for them – beyond the walls. This significant epistemological shift in the use of the domestic prop plays an important role in repositioning Room beyond the traditional structures of the conventional melodrama. The television also sets up a dual-sided interrogation of how we might assess the reality from which Jack and Ma have been hidden. On the one hand, from a narratological perspective, the captives can only gain

ROOM

187

FIGURE 6.5 A similarly shattered television in Adam & Paul. Image copyright of and reprinted courtesy of Speers Film.

a sense of that reality by virtue of its televised representation. On another thematic level, it is inferred that while the external world is available for experience, it is nonetheless wholly constituted for them through mediation. This notion accords well with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of ‘simulations’ which, at the height of postmodernity, held that copies (images, representations and reproductions) of our world had proliferated and replaced the things to which they referred. Simulations – or simulacra – were copies of which no originals existed. We have therefore come to live in a state whereby many of the signifiers that we encounter refer only to conceptual, and not ontologically extant, signifieds. When, in 1983, Baudrillard attempted to locate this phenomenon as a condition of the cultural logic of late capitalism, he used the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as a symbol of the end of the dialectical historical struggle between socialism and capitalism, concluding that the latter was victorious. In setting up a Marxist reading of the postmodern moment, Baudrillard first contextualizes the rise of the simulacrum by arguing that: Three orders of appearance, parallel to the mutations of the law of value, have followed one another since the Renaissance: – Counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the ‘classical’ period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution; – Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era; – Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by the code. (1983, 83)

188

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

He goes on to develop his Marxist justification for the shift towards the ubiquitous ‘simulation’, explaining that Walter Benjamin (1968) had already demonstrated that ‘reproduction absorbs the process of production, changing its finalities and altering the status of product and producer’ (1983, 98). Baudrillard then draws Marshall McLuhan’s ideas into the mix: Technique as medium dominates not only the ‘message’ of the product […] but also the force-of-work that Marx wished to make the revolutionary message of production. Benjamin and McLuhan saw this matter more clearly than Marx; they saw the true message: the true ultimatum was in reproduction itself. And that production no longer has any sense; its social finality is lost in the series. The simulacra win out over history. (1983, 100) Ultimately, his thesis leads to his use of the Twin Towers as a symbol of the contemporary situation, as he amalgamates his thesis on simulacra with his understanding of the ‘postmodern condition’. Baudrillard later asks, rhetorically: Why are there two towers at New York’s World Trade Center? All of Manhattan’s great buildings were always happy enough to affront each other in a competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, all the buildings attacking each other. (1983, 135) He then concludes, by extending the metaphorical example: The architectural graphism is that of the monopoly; the two W.T.C. towers, perfect parallelepipeds a ¼-mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. (1983, 136) Thus Baudrillard equates the imagistic qualities of the skyscrapers – evenly tall, equally high – with their competitive corporate functioning. In a twist of fate, almost two decades after the publication of Simulations, the world was transfixed by images of the attack on the Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001. This event was so ubiquitously mediated that the representations of the collapsing buildings blurred the lines of reality and experience for many subsequent commentators (see Winston Dixon in Cummings et al., 2002). The extent to which analytical observations of the occurrence were read against developments of reality television in the twenty-first century also revealed how, for some, ontological access to our contemporary environment had been dramatically mediated, produced

ROOM

189

and constituted for us, by screens of varying sizes – from the cinematic to televisual, computer screens to smart phone technologies (Cummings et al., 2002; Bignell, 2005).

Jack’s language as mediating and constituting reality Room has something interesting to say about the ways in which our reality is constituted for us, even though the extreme situation of the film is imbued with the pathological sexual and physical domination and control of Ma by Old Nick. As we will see below, because a considerable part of Jack’s reality is formed by the images that he sees on the television, a parallel can be found in notions of the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and structural linguistics. As noted in the chapter on Abrahamson’s short film 3 Joes, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s proposal that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (1961, 5.62) explicitly implicates our use of words in the construction of our realities. Offered by Wittgenstein on the grounds of a constraint of ways of thinking and imagination, the point can help us to reflect upon the centrality of language, and especially Jack’s use of words, in how his reality is and has been constructed in Room. In the wake of what has come to be designated as the ‘linguistic turn’ – presented in a detailed way in Richard Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method – most related approaches to the language/reality relationship work from the starting point that rather than describing our reality, words actually construct and constitute that reality for us. In this sense, fortified by sustained arguments by structural linguists, words are not held to be attached to concepts and things out of a functioning necessity as we experience them. Rather, words give us cognitive access to elements of our environments, experiences and objects and people, as the meanings that they offer act as bridges between our sense of the world and how it appears before us. When our language is limited, so too are the ways we can comprehend the world. When our words are inadequate, so are our thinking and imagination stifled and finite. In Room, images and representations on the television play a central role – comparable to the standard operations of language – in how Jack formulates his understanding of his world. However, not even the position of the television of Room holds steadfastly to any coherent notion that reality is constituted purely a priori (as it might equate with the construction of our actualities through language). Sarah Cooper identifies a strand in the writing of Vivian Sobchack that holds out for some possibility of an existing objective reality prior to language when she identifies how Sobchack ‘takes up discussion of its mechanics in terms of her concern with embodiment, rather than the transcendent, all-seeing

190

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

mechanism that apparatus theory focused on […] When describing her difference from the work of Metz and Baudry she argues that they suppress the dialectical and dialogic nature of the film experience’ (2013, 111). This line of argument, as it withholds the notion that our experience of reality is only ever constituted for us through images – and, by implication, through words – is also traceable in Jean Baudrillard’s writing. Ron Burnett proposes that in his work ‘even as the real, so to speak, disappears, Baudrillard feels impelled to talk and write about it. And as he does, he invokes precisely those levels of rationality he feels have become dependent on simulation’ (1995, 328). Elsewhere, hoping to offer an alternative to arguments that put forward a dialectical reading of history (arguments holding that words give us access to our reality, without any epistemological possibility of a word/ reality, reality/word interaction), Robin Nelson proposes that if ‘language did not reflect the world but instead constructed it, as Althusser and Barthes amongst others alleged, the bourgeoisie could be said to have constructed reality to suit itself and presented its version to the world as natural’ (1997, 107). This is something that Nelson ultimately denies to be the case. Even Fredric Jameson holds open the possibility for not entirely sublimating external reality to a network of self-referential signs, through which our only access to that reality is available. He suggests that a modernist ‘disjunction does not completely abolish the referent, or the objective world, or reality, which still continue to entertain a feeble existence’ (1991, 96). In Room, it is only in the first part of the film that their captivity suggests that the television is constructing Jack’s sense of reality beyond the walls. Once they have escaped, a telling sequence in which Ma is forced to do a television interview describing her experience to a network audience invites questions about the idea that reality is entirely constructed through mediation, either broadcast or linguistic (see Figure 6.6). Now, on the outside, it is Ma who attempts to represent the reality of their incarceration; a situation to which the film spectators have been granted privileged access, and so against which they can measure the accuracy of how Ma’s account is being mediated and delivered. Her narrated version is shown to be problematically distorted and managed by the sensationalizing objectives and insincere questioning of the interviewer. Abrahamson designs the sequence of her cross-examination by shifting his aesthetic mode from a cinematic one to that of a televisual rendering. A number of common devices, such as sudden zoom ins or more fidgeting hand-held camerawork, occurs once the network crew has arrived. When filming the scene, Abrahamson displays the interview so as to expose the mechanisms of the televisual apparatus at work in the construction, as well as to show both Ma and her talking-head TV shot juxtaposed in the same frame. Furthermore, during Ma’s description in response to the prurient questions posed by the interviewer, Abrahamson cuts occasionally to Jack, who is watching the proceedings through staircase railings. Having so

ROOM

191

FIGURE 6.6 Ma mediated by television monitor. Image © Element Pictures/Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

markedly established the narrative from Jack’s point of view, these inserts and the other techniques here suggest that what is being displayed for the cable network viewer – while evidently in the process of being constructed and created for that spectator – nonetheless stands in a clear relationship with an actual reality, distinct from it, with a truth of its own of which we have already witnessed a small part. Room does suggest that the child’s world of the real is constituted by the televisual experience, but by using the actual world as possibility outside the walls of the room, the film still holds out for a real referent existing in its own right. By deferring this reality to the second half of the film, and thus using it as a structuring absence, Abrahamson traces a line between opposing ideas that offer the world as mediated and the mediation as constituting our relationship with it. In the incarceration segment the world is mediated, in the liberation section it becomes an accessible reality. Although we cannot deny that representations are not merely reflective, but constitutive, of reality, we need only propose a second order of that reality in representations that foreground the act of construction. This is precisely what happens during the extended interview sequence in the film. The reality of Ma’s new situation following their escape has apparent levels that she has yet to access for various reasons – psychological security, therapy and even survival – but that the film holds out the hope of accessing these in a meaningful way is also demonstrated in this scene. Máire Messenger Davies begins her book Fake, Fact and Fantasy: Children’s Interpretations of Television Reality (1997) by drawing together concepts of children’s understanding of representations of the real world with their linguistic development. She offers an example of a young boy’s first experience of a train when, standing on a station platform, he asks his

192

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

mother about an approaching locomotive: ‘Is that a real train?’ Messenger Davies probes the reasoning behind the question by asking a set of others, all rhetorically posed: What idea of a train was in the little boy’s mind when he asked this question? The question implied that the little boy had some conception of ‘unreal’ trains against which he was comparing this one. Would this conception of real/unreal be based on experience of pictures? Or stories? Or fantasy play? Or television, or film, or toys, all of which, as an urban child in the 1990s, he would have had experience of? (1997, 1) The implication here is twofold. Not only is the child attempting to formulate a comprehension of the real by making reference to prior experience of televised representations – or other images of trains – but he is doing so by establishing language as a mediating bridge between his ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ knowledge; requiring that the verbal confirmation work as an adjudicating principle between both. Brad Prager identifies the same operation at play in Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, in which the feral protagonist grapples with language as a means of understanding his personal world. Prager notes that for Kaspar there is ‘no recognition that the toy horse is a horse, it is a plaything that moves back and forth, but because he has never seen a horse he cannot identify the thing before him as a horse any more than a pre-lingual child can meaningfully “name” the mother’s breast’ (2007, 65). Brigitte Peucker expands on Kaspar’s identification of the actual horse by explaining how, at the early stages of linguistic acquisition, words are meaningless until their real-world referents are symbolically placed into real-world contexts. She notes how the German word for ‘horse’ – Ross – is a sound he learns to connect with the wooden horse with which he has hitherto existed, not in a subject-object relation, but in a state of animalistic identification […] At first, both speech and writing are only conditioned reflexes for Kaspar, actions emptied of significance, just as he himself is still blank, a tabula rasa: the next word he speaks, we recall, is leer, empty. (1986, 108) For Jack, in Room, televised images and the words that he uses are charged with an irrational rationality as a result of his acquiring and learning them detached from their real-world counterparts. As Ma attempts to explain to him how another reality exists outside the walls of their cell, she asks him if he remembers the mouse that had appeared to feed on crumbs. When he confirms that he does, the conversation continues: MA: Do you know where he is? JACK: No.

ROOM

193

MA: I do. He’s on the other side of this wall. JACK: What other side? MA: Jack, there’s two sides to everything. JACK: Not an octagon. MA: Yeah … But … JACK: An octagon has eight sides. In the first instance, and not without a degree of humour, the exchange reveals how Jack’s innocence allows him to use a certain rationality of language to undermine its inherent structural logic. Jack identifies with the concept of ‘side’ – and therefore ‘one side’ and ‘a second side’ as quantitative things – in a way that deconstructs the notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as qualitative notions. But this is also revealing of the way that he has come to perceive the simplicity of the situation in which he has always lived, whereby the oppressive state of his four-walled incarceration is shown as meaning something vastly different to him than it does to Ma and the film viewer. He understands this reality as it has been offered visually through the television and as explained by Ma’s stories, and these have resulted in a conceptualization to which we and Ma may not relate logically. His constant interrogation of notions of the real – what might be considered to be ‘real’ and ‘not-real’ – is displayed in many of his early voice-overs. Creatively and imaginatively, in ways that often surpass common linguistic logic, these even allow him to invent a third category at one point when he wonders about Old Nick: There’s room, then outer space with all the TV planets. Then heaven. Plant is real, but not trees. Spiders are real, and one time the mosquito that was sucking my blood. But squirrels and dogs are just TV. Except Lucky: he’s my dog who might come some day. Monsters are too big to be real … and the sea. TV persons are flat and made of colours, but me and you are real. Old Nick … I don’t know if he’s real … Maybe half. The ontological status of Old Nick – at this point in the film, not yet encountered by Jack – defies regular verbal rationality, even in the context in which the boy is separating things as being either ‘real’ or ‘not real’. As these categories are only conceptually designated in language, and without recourse to empirical situations or evidence, it is entirely acceptable for Jack to invent and give credence to a category for Old Nick that is ‘maybe half’. Without real-world referents, Jack remains ahead of a linguistic logic that has yet to be tied to a semiotic system of pragmatic communication and its rules. However, this is only one of the more complex notions embedded in the boy’s monologue. From Jack’s process of classification comes the suggestion at first that the real and non-real categories are founded on sets of empirical evidence for, or experiential presence with, the items identified.

194

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

If he has been in direct physical contact with something or someone, Jack assumes that it is real. This is nuanced in the second half of the voice-over to include magnitude and scope: certain things are deemed ‘not real’ by virtue of their size, and because it is unlikely that they will fit into the world that he inhabits. In a final complication of both of these groups, Jack also mentions his dog ‘Lucky’, who is neither empirically available nor verifiable, yet designated as open to being either. In this instance, merely because Jack can summon an idea of a friendly dog, and then name him (almost biblically giving him existence), the dog becomes a potentially real entity. At first, this might seem to endorse arguments for a verbal a priori constitution of reality (as we have seen operating in the thinking behind the philosophical ‘linguistic turn’). However, by exaggerating the imaginative capacity of the child, whereby verbal descriptions can overarticulate or over-determine the actuality of things, it also problematizes this idea. Mark Le Fanu cogently summarizes the problematic nature of the relationship between language and truth, as it has been raised (or razed) in contemporary philosophy: In the debates about philosophy and literature that have taken place in the West over the last fifteen years or so there has emerged a tendency to deny the relation between speech and authenticity. Language, it has been remarked, speaks us (rather than the other way round). The self is a fiction, an impossible metaphysical entity. In the general trawl of ideologies (going with a concomitant decline in religious faith) an extreme scepticism has grown up about whether language can ever find, or master, truth. (1987, 82) Room invites questions around the degree to which language ultimately grants, gives access to or constructs truth for us. Jack is placed at a point not only developmentally but also as a result of his extreme circumstances, where his fundamental truth is based on his negotiation of the use and meaning of words. Thus, a significant aspect of his reality, before it becomes a relationship with the world, is the actuality of his relationship with language. It is noteworthy in this respect that the boy has come to drop the definite and indefinite articles in most of his designations. Máire Messenger Davies offers a synopsis of research on this facet of children’s use of language. In a section of her writing, in which she ties the child’s use of grammatical structures to notions of communal understanding and point of view, Messenger Davies notes that children ‘learning to speak English in their second year of life hardly ever say “the” or “a.” They say “want drink” or “dropped teddy” or “see car.” But research has shown that children as young as 17 months can distinguish the appropriate use of “the” and “a” by other speakers’ (1997, 14). Relative to their ontological positions, therefore,

ROOM

195

FIGURE 6.7 Ma and Jack suspended above the real world as they come to terms with their freedom. Image © Element Pictures/Room Productions Inc./Channel Four Television Corporation, 2015 and reprinted courtesy of Element Pictures.

children use the articles in ways that express relational situations to others in their world. Without requiring the need for definition of his position in relation to a group, Jack often omits the definite article, most noteworthy (although not uniquely) when he refers to ‘room’. Were there other rooms in Jack’s world, distinct from his, with other occupants, some sense of marking the difference linguistically would be necessary. Messenger Davies subsequently notes that ‘young children can understand that the word “the” implies a shared knowledge between speaker and hearer and is thus different from “a.” “The car” is a special car – our car, the one we both know about; “a car” is any car and does not imply any particular mutual knowledge’ (1997, 14–15). Jack’s personal linguistic pattern marks the way in which his world is suspended from the external one where language connects people in social groups. In the penultimate scene, this is rendered with a subtle objective correlative suggesting that Ma and Jack, now liberated, have yet to make complete contact with the real world. Abrahamson shows them lying in a hammock together at a point when Jack proposes returning to the place of their captivity in order to say goodbye to it, and begin their final process of emancipation (see Figure 6.7). The film closes with a single climbing shot, framing Ma and Jack as they walk away from the camera and their cell. The conclusion is clear and affirmative, yet holds some tentative idea that both have more obstacles to overcome. Audiences accepted this resolution and the tonal confirmation that it offered, and the film was endorsed with favourable critical commendations. The height of Room’s success for many came with its four Academy Award nominations – for best picture, best screenplay, best director and best lead

196

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

actress – of which Brie Larson won in the last category. To date, the film’s box office takings of over $200 million have reflected its popularity. By far the most lucrative of Abrahamson’s feature productions, the revenue and the acclaim of the film have opened doors of possibility for Abrahamson that promise more flexibility of choice for future projects and have established him as a world-class filmmaker with an exciting future.

7 Interview with Lenny Abrahamson (Dublin, 1 June 2014)

Barry Monahan: I’d like to start with the idea that cinema is useful for representing the individual. In a way, you could talk about television in probably most of the ways you could talk about cinema, but just in terms of the other arts – the plastic arts – that not only do you have the chance to get close and explore the person from different angles in a way that’s very untheatrical but you also get point of view, which is a wonderful commodity that’s open there. I was thinking about your films because all of them have that lonely individual who moves in and out of different social groups, but ultimately whom we will discover on his or her own. Adam and Paul are different, but that’s nicely blurred – for me anyway – ‘How are ye Adam and Paul’ … you don’t know which is which until we see the final credits, technically. So they are very much together. Lenny Abrahamson: For me, anyway, the possibility that cinema gives you is this sort of present tense encounter with a person which at least appears, or can appear, as unmediated by an author … and it’s in that space of almost unmediated presence of that character, that the most, sometimes I think that the finest things can be … that cinema is at its best. And that the director is obviously all over it, but there is a way of providing this space at the centre that even for me as a director I can experience as if I’m not really doing it, but I’m really encountering it. And in the best of what I’ve done, that experience comes over for the audience as well … that they appear to be watching an unmediated experience, or having an unmediated encounter with a person. And that’s why I always go on about, and why I’m so sceptical about, the classical obsession with back story and understanding your character from a psychological point of view. This obsession that haunts development meetings that talks about characters in mainstream production. The reason I’m so allergic to that is it jumps into that space and fills it with meaning

198

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

– pre-digested meaning – and what I try to do is to allow the audience not to know, and to experience something like an idealized or perfect encounter with anyone that you might have in life: where you meet somebody whom you’ve never met before. BM: There are moments when suggestions of back story come into it. I think the first probably, in Adam & Paul is when Matthew is mentioned, in Garage the first is quite late on because I think it’s when Josie mentions that he was in school with Mr Gallagher, in What Richard Did the first back story is, perhaps interestingly, when Richard mentions the father’s ‘dark nights back home’. LA: Yeah, it’s all there, lots of it is there about the person. And, of course, it’s not that you’re actively stopping meaning, because meaning is all over these people, it’s all over these scenes. I mean when you meet Josie, you know immediately lots about him: you know he’s not a property developer, you know he’s not a gigolo, you know loads about him. You know loads about Richard: you know exactly who the types are in Adam & Paul in fact, if anything, there is an invitation to see them in very simplified terms. BM: … and yet you do it without any stereotypification … LA: That’s right. So in fact what I think I try to do is just not to build too much in. This is really interesting territory: how we talk about this, how I think about this, and how I can express to you most clearly? So, obviously, I’m hyper-conscious of those opening scenes and what you’re telling and what you’re not telling. So it’s not like I’m a kind of documentary filmmaker, say, arriving in a new town and having the audience discover things with me. It’s carefully structured: you are telling people things. There are plenty of hints and, as I say, all the facts and all the information that you get when you meet a person on the street are there in the characters in my films. So, what isn’t there? What isn’t there is a kind of instrumental toolkit of back story which is specifically designed to be exploited through the plot of the film. What you don’t get is the bits of back story that are going to become plot-relevant presented neatly in a way that is then going to be decoded through the rest of the film. That’s what you don’t get. Although, what you feel like you’re getting is very close to a real encounter as it might happen. However, I think there are moments where I genuinely, myself, felt like I was learning something about the character in the doing of that shot. Like looking at Pat [Shortt]’s face when we were working together, and he was sitting on his own in his room about to decide whether he would go out for a drink in the pub, that first night he’s on his own. And I was talking him through that shot and we had already discussed the idea of how he would defocus and do the opposite of the intense acterly middle distance … just really having him disappear into himself. But having achieved that, once it was there, it was real for me as well. So it’s a bit like drawing – artists can

INTERVIEW WITH LENNY ABRAHAMSON

199

know that by using the techniques of perspective, that they can draw three dimensions: something on a flat surface that looks like a three-dimensional cube. But once they draw it, it’s a three-dimensional cube for them as well; in other words, the illusion becomes something beyond the technique. BM: Can I ask you something, then, about Adam & Paul? It’s not quite back story because it’s based on a material object and not a human being, but a little intervention early on in Adam & Paul that is precisely positioned for plot-point pay off and that is the ‘Made in Bulgaria’. Now, how do you feel about that, because Adam’s jacket wasn’t made in France or China? LA: Adam & Paul is a little different to the others because it starts off toying with the idea of being kind of a fairy tale film by starting in such a deliberately formal way of two men waking up in an abstract, quasiBeckettian world. Having them wake up saying ‘How did we get here?’ and ‘Made in Bulgaria’, Adam & Paul has a quality of fairy tale about it. There’s a determined respect or nod towards the vaudeville tradition in that film, so the film is full of those gags. I mean Clank is invented to pay off later, Bulgaria is invented to pay off later. I think it’s not until very close to the end of Adam & Paul where there’s something of the ‘Hang on a second: am I out in the cold air of the world now, and outside of the story world of this film?’ That happens through the beginning of the baby sequence, after they’ve been talking with Janine after she catches them with the child, and more so it happens after they get stoned: that whole last sequence when you see there’s no fairy tale, there’s no comfortable bearded storyteller here, and I’m actually looking at people. So when Adam dies and you’re left with Paul, that’s shocking because the film sold you a kind of a bit of a lie at the beginning, telling you that you’re in a closed and relatively safe world. BM: I always read the line in three different ways – the line that the Bulgarian asks as he’s leaving – ‘What are you doing here?’, and I always thought that as much to mean, not just physically ‘in Dublin’, and secondly ‘in their lives’, you know ‘you’re screwed up guys, what are you doing?’, but also ‘Where are you in this story? Come on get back on track … .’ Because our story until thirty minutes into it is. We don’t know where it’s going. LA: That’s very true, and after that, the Bulgarian scene ends a kind of very pleasurable section of Adam &Paul which I used to always enjoy when I was in the cinema because I thought that I now know that the audience is going to be very comfortable having been brought through a very entertaining section: from hit by the car, the sleeping bag boy – which is a really satisfying self-contained sequence – they go into the café, which is very funny, ‘Could I have a pot of tea, please?’, into the shop, where ‘You can’t bar me for feelin’ bread’, which is another lovely self-contained thing, and into the Bulgarian, which ends that. Adam & Paul solves that question of back story – here’s a thing – of conventional back story stuff or conventional film plotting,

200

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

character with a problem. It solves that where other films pull it away so that you don’t think it’s there even though there’s enough, Adam & Paul goes the other way and gives it to you like really naïvely: ‘What’ll we do? … Into town, see who’s around, get some money and score.’ BM: Adam & Paul is the one that has the biggest, as they say, ‘necessity clause’. … LA: Exactly, and myself and Mark [O’Halloran] talked about that explicitly. We said – you know the way they’re always saying that the character has to have a drive – well let’s just give them the fucking … ‘state the absolute obvious’ and then we’re free. We’re free to take them on a meandering journey, because everybody knows what the ultimate lead is. So instead of kind of milking it in that supposedly naturalistic, but ultimately, highly manipulative opening, bantery dialogue and postponing the need to know, we just said right up front: ‘let’s state it’. BM: The other nice thing is that there are two consequences by virtue of stating that straight up. One of them is that in other films you’ve to dangle it and put it away, and that doesn’t really happen. And then the other thing is that when it does happen, it’s on a stupid, ridiculous, coincidental, useless beat. It just falls down in front of them. LA: The film will not let them out of this story. You start by sort of wanting them to score, and then you almost feel excited when they get the stuff. You think ‘at last … ’, but, of course, that’s the thing that kills them. But it is given to them. So the whole film does have that kind of thing. You could have, in another stylistic universe, come down through the clouds and found Adam and Paul as our representatives of humanity on the mattress, you know, two kids in the middle of nowhere. Whereas when you get to Garage and Richard, you’re in a much more real place, the structure is much more open. With Josie, you don’t really know where the film is going to go at the beginning: you just watch it. And the stuff that you need to know is incredibly simple – that this garage is not going to stay open very long – and it sits there, then. It’s not like we go through the machinations of Josie trying to find a way of keeping it open and you think it’s going to work and there’s somebody in the town who’s going to help him and lets him down. That’s just a plot and that’s just not it. The oils are just a ridiculous way of getting it going. One thing that does continue is the idea that, you know, I always say that you think you know who the character is and you don’t. So the film presents Josie pretty much as the town’s people see him at the beginning. Why that also works is because when it comes to the truck driver giving him the porno you just think of it as another episode because you’ve learned not to have your antenna up for significant plot points. And we can plant them now in a much less blocky way. You just let them sit there and the ones that are going to come back will come back, and it only achieves its totality at

INTERVIEW WITH LENNY ABRAHAMSON

201

the very end, as opposed to announcing things in a more conventional way; announcing its meaning and then you just work it out. And the film is just in how well that’s done. BM: When I watched it, I was surprised at how slow I was – but this is definitely because the film put me in the right place, I think – I didn’t question twice the fact that he had given Conor alcohol. I didn’t think twice about the fact that he had invited him in to show him the porn. It was only when he comes around that corner for the second time and the police are there that I started to go: ‘It all fits in!’ LA: It’s funny because the film is so simple. It’s like there are no parallel narratives, there are no sub-plots, it’s a very simple chronicle of the summer for that character. And it doesn’t trick you, it says: you see the main character at the very beginning of the film, it’s going to be a story about him, it is ultimately a story about the garage, and Mr Gallagher is relevant, and all of that, but nevertheless what it’s amounting to, what it’s searching for is hidden. But hidden not completely from me but not fully revealed to me until the whole process of making the film is over and discovering that ending. One thing that Mark and I said from the beginning was that we would like to do justice to this man, because there was a guy who vaguely inspired the film. And we wanted to do justice to that life, to make it an elegy to that life. And what I think we managed to do was, I think, we didn’t just assert the social value of Josie and make you feel for him – I mean it does do those things – but I think it talks about very deep things that are very hard to put into words, about the ontological value of Josie, the fact that he is a real person who is now absent from nature, that he is now gone, and that whatever way you thought you understood him, there were depths and spaces – interior spaces – that none of us will ever know, but you believe in him as – for somebody defined by his limits – you hope that he’s somehow infinite by the end of the film. BM: That’s something that I particularly like about it. There’s never the sense that while we will learn from this experience, or should as cinemagoing conscientious people, that while we should learn from it, he’s not teaching us, in a way that the onus is on us. This is not a messianic character who’s coming down, he appears and then goes … LA: No, he’s not the classic holy fool or anything. BM: No, there’s a very clear responsibility on us, and it keeps coming back. LA: I am always resistant to certainty. That’s probably what I feel. I think that what I do somehow is to have a sort of awareness of the reality of things, and that’s non-negotiable, that’s not doubtable for me: the fact of a person. And any attempt to reduce that person to a kind of a description or to evaluate that person: I’m very sceptical of that. And so with Richard,

202

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

I just didn’t allow myself to come to a conclusion about him. The real difficulty is how do you do that and not just have an incoherent character. The screenwriting manuals that think that the screenplay is the thing say that if you do that you just have an unfinished character. The point is – going back to your first question – given that cinema allows you this encounter with ‘the thing’, the thing is not undermined by that uncertainty, for me, so Richard’s presence in the film is strong and constant but the aspects under which we observe him are shifting and never define him, never fully define him, and this never settles. And I think that I’m always trying to break that idea that you can reduce a person to an account of that person. BM: In most of the films we’re not getting the star persona that gets in the way. What about Pat Shortt? Because he had a very clearly identifiable persona, in Irish culture at least. LA: I think that I’ve the faith always that audiences are so sophisticated really, that if you speak directly to them, and honestly present something, that it may take a few moments for them to adjust their expectations, but that the power of cinema is so strong and so immersive that very quickly it will work. I think the trick was not to try to fix that perception, and to know that it would fade away as the film started. To give the film a long enough, simple enough, opening so that you could adjust yourself into Josie, and that’s what it does. It just takes him on this long walk and shows you his world, brings you home. So I think by the time it starts going, it’s happening. And I think there’s a kind of tension in Garage as well, there’s a kind of a tension from the beginning, and that impulse to move the audience through the film takes over and that any preconceptions about the actor that they had are gone fairly quickly. BM: Maybe you have to cue that up for your audience, like a reverse cuing, ‘well let’s get it out of the way’, what if it’s: ‘well that’s why you’re here, that’s why we’re here, now let’s get it out of the way and watch us for 80 minutes … ’. With Garage there are other little moments that are about diffusing expectations: just saying: ‘We’re working on a different thing here.’ LA: That’s right. One thing that Garage does is, it has this very dramatic music at the beginning and then you go into this kind of super-prosaic stuff with Mr Gallagher and it’s shot hand-held, there’s nothing remarkable about it, except that it’s confident about what it’s doing. I think that what actually happens, for me anyway, is that the music is a pre-film statement of purpose that this film will take you somewhere, also with a lot of depth. Then when you start it, somehow that echoes, not consciously, that shot of him walking across the bog echoes and holds you there so that you’re always watching this simple stuff to see where this film is going to open, these spaces that are promised at the very beginning. Getting in and getting out of a film are the two things. Getting in is fine once you make sure that there’s enough of a

INTERVIEW WITH LENNY ABRAHAMSON

203

thing to allow people to settle. Getting out is a little tricky because, for me, the credits are really important in a film. And yet you know that at some festivals they just cut the credits, like at Cannes. At the end of Garage in Cannes, as soon as it went to black after the image of the horse disappears, the lights came up and there were spotlights on us in the audience with people clapping: it was awful. BM: And if you’ve been taken as deeply as you are – say in Adam & Paul – it’s difficult. For example, the consequence of the closing sequence in that film, when Adam is dead, but Paul sits for a long time … LA: Yes. I always remember that example given by Tarkovsky where he says that he heard about executions at the time of the Civil War, or the Second World War – I think it was the Civil War – and how on a muddy day some man who was about to get executed had to take his shoes off prior to execution, and he looked for somewhere dry to put them, and then he went off to be killed. And the thing is that inertia is probably the strongest force, so he [Adam] is dead and a second passes, and then another second passes, and another second passes, and you find yourself in these spaces in life where really it’s very hard to impose a narrative on what you’re doing. You know, because the narrative should either be weeping, or shock, or running to get help, but there are all of these moments there for Paul where his universe has just shifted. Everything has changed. BM: And again, the important moment in Garage that represents, for me, the whole narrative, and the whole relationship with the Pat Shortt character, and his relationship with his reality, is that scene where he stops eating – I know that you’ve spoken about it frequently – but it is that moment where a massive world catches up, and the inertia sets in, and it’s a smaller inertia for him, but then he pulls out of it. It’s almost as if he’s coasting then he’s free-wheeling. LA: I think that the anxiety lurks underneath all the way through from there. We always said that, that Josie’s a bit behind, the way he experiences things, that he experiences things in a way that takes him a while. That was very interesting: it was really interesting to do scenes in which you don’t get to live through the experience via your main character, because normally quite often the main character’s reactions are kind of your reactions. In a way Josie is lost in a scene where something big happens, you can see it’s affecting him but at the same time he’s not conscious of it. So those were very important moments. In Richard, it’s driving the car probably when he’s on the way to meet the lads and later when he’s seen driving as a part of the montage. Richard is more recent for me and I’m not sure. I have a very good friend who didn’t like it at all; a very sensitive person and I don’t know … It’s too recent for me to have a good sense of how Richard works. I think there are probably some great things in it but I don’t have as full a sense of it as an object as I do with the others.

204

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

BM: One of the big differences – in spite of the similarities – between Richard and Josie – as fluctuating between outsider and maybe having some hold on the social group – is that the film seems to give more allowance to Richard’s not taking so long to process things. He is in front of the stuff, we have to follow him somewhere to know where he’s going. With Josie we’re already there and he arrives … LA: I think in a way that Richard runs past you and the film never catches him. At the very end, we don’t know, I think, who he is at all. And that’s probably the bit that I feel is very good in the film, that that particular section there at the end leaves you. And there are moments, I think also for me, where they’ve had that long conversation, that drunken conversation that they have down at the beach house, and the next morning is the first time that you’re alone with Richard and he’s walking down to the beach and he swims, and you go with him, where the orchestra turns into a solo, and you realize that this film is going to have a different set of notes and other harmonics in it than you see at the beginning. BM: In Garage, Josie is behind the narrative, but so too in an odd way are the other characters. The film ends before their reactions to events take place. LA: Well, I’ll tell you what was talked about in Garage, and I resisted it, and we never did it. What was talked about was shouldn’t we see the town after he’s gone. Shouldn’t we feel his absence through the other people, and have shots of the town almost people reacting? Apart from what I feel it would become like that bit in the angelus, you know, when everybody stops and thinks. I just didn’t feel it. And the biggest one in Richard is: ‘What happened? Why didn’t you show whether he was found or not?’ And the thing about it is, well apart from anything Richard doesn’t exist, it’s not like ‘Was he caught?’: well, no, there’s no answer to that question, it’s not a wellformed question because he’s a fictional character. Why didn’t we decide to tell that story? Well because everything that’s interesting to say about Richard, I think, is said by the end of the film. BM: Yes, because the police are absent – and notable so – even when he’s interviewed we don’t see them. LA: Yes, it’s all about him, it’s all about the effect on him, and that allows you think that this is not a film about the procedure. You don’t have to worry about it, I just want to know what’s going on for that person. BM: Something that immediately struck me about Garage was that if you imagine hearing: slight outsider working and living alone in a garage, maybe not the brightest character in the village, no relatives, no friends, alcohol, under age boy and then pornography. What is the whole country going to think? What I liked about the absence of the media or any other mediation

INTERVIEW WITH LENNY ABRAHAMSON

205

in Garage in its purest form was that we got to see the inside. It opened up another possibility to our regular perspective. LA: You’re absolutely right because myself and Mark actively talked about that: I think that within ten minutes of speaking about the project, we decided that it would be basically innocent, basically stupid. And nothing. Because who’s interested in that other story? What is really interesting, what it’s really saying is that Josie sees himself as a teenager. He wants to share a sexual space with his mate, just like every teenage boy: they look at porn together and they go through that phase. That’s what it is, and that’s why it’s relevant to that story of this person. And, you’re right, it is what it would be like. And for me also what causes Josie to kill himself is not even, I think, the anticipation of public response, which in his case may only be the townspeople, it may never get to the media even, he’s not even thinking of that. Because, I’m sure this stuff has happened all over the place and is never brought to national attention. So actually it’s the fear that he’s done harm to David, it’s the belief that he’s a bad person; that he’s done harm. I do think that if it causes you to think about a character like Josie in a deeper way, or see him as a more complete person worthy of respect and valuable, that would be the thing … and for Adam and Paul similarly. And then Richard, if it’s like in a really basic way, if it makes a person, if it makes a kid think about killing somebody it’s working. Richard is really more of a formal kind of final statement about what I don’t want to do in a film. It very consciously reverses the direction of the flow of knowledge in that it really does start with somebody you think you know and it’s a questioning of our categories of personality, and our ideas of a fixed person. BM: Can I ask a very practical question about Richard in terms of your audience, and the reception? Because in Ireland the reception was so positive. LA: Yeah, massive. Even though Frank is bigger in the British Isles, What Richard Did did better at the box office than Frank did. And for such a small, difficult film it was extraordinary. I think parents probably responded to What Richard Did, so the film mostly struck hard at teenagers and young people in their early twenties, and then parents because people who have children will think about their responsibilities towards them and question the fundamentals of how they relate to their own children. Those were the constituencies that I think were most affected by the film. But it really did – even when it was screened on RTÉ 350,000 people watched it – have an impact. And at the box office, it did nearly €400,000. Something about Irish filmgoers is that it doesn’t really matter who made it or who’s in it, if it feels like it’s a bit art house, then it gets treated as art house. Because Richard was effectively an art house, is an art house film, Frank because I made it, and I have a track record, and Fassbender was in it, it was such a marketable film, it effectively did the sort of numbers that a successful art house film

206

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

would do here. It didn’t break out of that. I had hoped that Frank would do better in the Irish box office, really thought it would. Because there was such momentum behind it, the PR campaign was great, the reviews were amazing, and people really got it. It did fine, but I thought it would do better. And I was slightly disappointed, but no, not really. I think it’s a film that will have huge longevity and it’ll be watched a lot, and be talked about, and come back and do well on DVD and all that stuff. And then, of course, I don’t know how it’s going to do abroad, it may be picked up somewhere and really kick. BM: I’m wondering, if I were to guess which one – purely because it’s so zeitgeisty – Richard mightn’t be the one that people would come back to again and again … LA: I think so. And I think that Adam & Paul has a kind of crazy life that will continue: it just sold again to Channel 4 for a few years, and it’s broadcast every so often. Garage, which is probably the purest of the films, will be watched again I think, definitely. And then Frank definitely has that cult film quality that people go after. BM: To move on to Frank, then. I felt that it was full of really, terribly sad moments, but wonderful. They were beautiful, but that there was an over-hanging sad moment and it only really came to me when we meet his parents. Something about going home with somebody, and the whole question of mental illness is there. LA: That’s right, and also, I think it’s about, it’s about lots of different things. I mean it’s about our obsession with celebrity, I mean, the thing that people seem to have: why are people so obsessed with what their heroes are like, really? People always say things like: ‘Well you met Harrison Ford, what was he like?’ Well, you know, what do you think?! Another thing is the idea that the creative person has … that there are secrets, that there are things to be learned that will release you from the kind of boundaries of your own life. And that’s all Wizard of Oz stuff, that’s all the stuff of fiction. BM: It’s all very much a part of the culture industry. LA: Absolutely, it’s the fetishization of these people. And Frank is an antifetishizing film. So what we do is just create one level of distance from the main character, when you’re with him, and then that allows all of these silly projections from Jon. And of course even though the film isn’t saying that there’s no connection between genius and madness, it’s just saying ‘Isn’t that a bit of a cliché?’, I mean, or if there is a connection, it’s not the conventionally expressed, nonsensical, trivializing one that Jon sees. So Jon thinks it’s cool, it’s cool to be fucked up. It’s just like people who think that Kurt Cobain’s suicide was the final act of a demented genius. And that’s kind of cool, but the actual reality of that is much more crucial.

INTERVIEW WITH LENNY ABRAHAMSON

207

BM: The opening sequence then makes a lot of sense in the light of that where he thinks he’s got an original tune, and the closer he gets to playing it, he realizes: ‘Oh, dear!’ LA: … it’s the one he heard earlier, I know! I really like the opening. I think it’s a really nice opening sequence in that it goes back to Adam & Paul in that we are telling you what his problem is right from the beginning. BM: How did you find working with the ensemble, because that was a big jump from the others? LA: It was very hard. I mean, we shot it in six weeks – it should have been nine, really – because I had music to deal with as well, and two countries. So six weeks of actual shooting, plus a couple of days we got in the end, we did a couple of pick-ups. It was really hard because you’re tracking quite a large group of people, we also have stars and that brings with it a certain kind of set of negotiations about how people are doing things and you want them to do them that way or not, and their views are going to be strongly expressed and you’re going to butt heads sometimes. But it was incredibly difficult; it was an incredibly difficult film to make for me. It was exhausting; it was hugely challenging to find a line through it. The film takes these massive turns and it continues not to go where you think it’s going to go, and for me to take those corners with an audience and not have them crash off and fall down into the valley was very difficult. And I think some viewers probably struggled: around the time of Don’s death where the film takes a sharp left turn, a few people are still waiting for the laughs, in other words a few people will still go straight through. But, yeah, the fact is, ultimately, even though it deals with serious things sometimes and is sad, it is also a kind of playful film … like at least it is to me. It’s not a dark film really. BM: Tonally it has those gags and slight – not ‘frivolity’, but just below that – there was something … LA: What I was trying to do was not make it quirky. I think it is very easily seen as that, or where you’re led to expect from what you know of its content that you’re going to get into a very quirky kind of indie comedy. But it isn’t that really at all, it’s a much more serious comedy. When I say it’s playful, I mean it retains its playfulness right to the end, even in its dark parts it remains a comedy, in a way that Adam & Paul probably ultimately doesn’t at the very end. Although all in all, I think that Adam & Paul as well is a tragi-comedy and Frank is probably the same, or maybe not a tragi-comedy maybe just a tender and thoughtful kind of comedy. BM: There’s a nice mirroring there, although the more I look at them, the more I find nice little mirrors in all of the films: for example, in Richard he saves his coach’s daughter [Sally] but then he ends up with her …

208

THE FILMS OF LENNY ABRAHAMSON

LA: Yes, exactly … BM: … and here we start with Domhnall’s parents in the conventional house and we end with Frank’s parents. There are lovely little symmetries. LA: There are, yeah. Frank also has that – like Adam & Paul – that circular structure … BM: The two Ringsend towers that begin it, and then the one at the end … LA: Exactly, and then the thing of Jon desperately believing that if he hadn’t had that bourgeois upbringing instead, he would have been great, and then he finds Frank with exactly the same set up. It’s almost identical, and things are taken from him, like he says ‘ … the suffering that he needed to go through to write the great music … ’ and the mother says: ‘No, it’s not even that, he was writing great music beforehand, if anything it slowed him down.’ So that Jon’s just left … The whole film is the removal of excuses from Jon’s character. It starts with a guy who has all sorts of self-justifying illusions, and it ends with somebody who’s had those illusions extracted by the story. It’s going in that Adam & Paul way in that, just like Adam and Paul are placed under the balcony for the smack to fall, Jon is brought by the film – and via the same bicycle, the same one man washing the car, and passing him – is brought to the door of Frank and shown who Frank really is. The film takes him and shows him and then lets him go at the end. BM: On the music, was it the score that most challenged Stephen Rennicks, who’s done all of your music so far? LA: Oh, absolutely. No composer would have that: it would almost never happen. When we initially thought about Stephen writing the score and finding a band or a solo artist to write the songs for our band, and we talked to some very big names, but actually everything that Stephen did was better. All his stuff was amazing. So then we had to write stuff: we had ideas for songs and then went back to put them into the script, and then on the day we had effectively two sound set-ups. We had location sound, and then you’ve got a mobile recording studio set-up that’s happening at the same time. And you’re shooting drama with a single or two cameras. The reason you have multi-cameras at a concert is that you have all of your shots during the same piece of music which means that it will always fit. Or, if you’re working with single camera, you have playback so that the music is the same every time and every angle will fit. We didn’t have playback and we were using one – maximum two – cameras. So sometimes, people were getting clip tracks to keep them in time, into ear pieces. But with the song in the first gig that collapses, that has three time signatures in the same piece, and it was so complex to do that. It allowed us to be spontaneous and to do it differently every time and to allow the actors really to be in character.

INTERVIEW WITH LENNY ABRAHAMSON

209

BM: So, how do you match cuts then later on? LA: There’s just lots of planning that goes into that, how it’s going to be. And sometimes we may play back what they just played, so it is real, and then they’re able to play it again. Like I say, you can have ear pieces with sound play tracks for the drummer. You could use two cameras so that each take you get gives two shots the will work: a huge amount of work … so difficult. It’s also drama interacting with music, so say with the master takes on two cameras you see all the instruments, and then on other stuff when you’re picking it up, you just make sure that you’re not really seeing the fretboards … but like you can imagine the complexity of that. It was really mad. BM: I hope going back and watching them with distance will make it all worthwhile! LA: Well I hope so. I know I’ve said this before, but I feel like I’m only starting and that I haven’t really got to grips with the medium yet. I know that sounds like an invitation to say: ‘Oh, no, but you’re stuff is so good!’, I know it’s good, I know it’s really sophisticated. I mean it has great depth and in places it breaks through into something fine, I know that. But I almost feel now that I would love to take a year and go back and watch selectively through the history of cinema. I would love to do that. And if I’m in a position to do something like that I will, because I think now it would benefit me greatly to re-watch films: that I was a very naïve viewer at the time I watched some of those films. And I think I would see more and I would be less inclined to sanctify particular works. But there are some filmmakers’ work that I think I could now really appreciate and learn from at a deeper level.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Richard, ed. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907– 1939, Volume 1: 1907–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Affron, Charles. Cinema and Sentiment. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Aitken, Ian. European Film Theory and Criticism: A Critical Introduction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992. Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Andrew, Dudley. ‘The Primacy of the Figure in Cinematic Signification’. In Cinema and Language, edited by Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp, 133–140. Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1983. Andrew, Dudley. ‘Forward’. In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, v–xi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Andrew, Dudley with Hervé Joubert, ed. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and its Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Andrews, David. ‘Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema’. In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 62–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Arendt, Hannah, ed. Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1968. Aristotle. ‘Poetics.’ In The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch (General Editor), 90–117. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. Armes, Roy. Film and Reality: An Historical Survey. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1975. Armes, Roy. The Ambiguous Image: Narrative Style in Modern European Cinema. London: Secker and Warburg, 1976. Artaud, Antonin. Collected Works: Volume Three. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder and Boyars, 1972. Aumont, Jacques, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie and Marc Vernet. Aesthetics of Film. Translated and revised by Richard Neupert. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Baldwin, Hélène L. Samuel Beckett’s Real Silence. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lewis. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

211

Barthes, Roland. ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’. In A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, 251–295. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Barton, Ruth. Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Baudry, Jean-Louis. ‘The Apparatus’. Camera Obscura 1, no. 11 (Fall 1976): 104–112. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Volume 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Volume 2. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. London: Peter Owen, 1971. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 214–218. London: Fontana, 1968. Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Bergfelder, Tim. International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London and New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Betz, Mark. ‘Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence’. In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 31–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Blonski, Pavel Petrovich. Essay on Scientific Psychology. (Izbranniye psikholgicheskie proizvedenie.) Moscow: Prosveshcheniye, 1964. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film, Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Bordwell, David. ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Practice’. In The European Cinema Reader, edited by Catherine Fowler, 94–102. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 7th edn. New York: McGrath Hill, 2004. Bracken, Claire and Emma Radley, eds. Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts. Cork: Cork University Press, 2013. Bremond, Claude, Joshua Landy and Thomas Pavel, eds. Thematics: New Approaches. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Brightman, Carol. ‘Problems of Evaluation: The Word, the Image, and The Silence’. In Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, edited by Stuart M. Kaminsky with Joseph F. Hill, 239–252. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

212

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. New York: Camden House, 2010. Brooks, Jodi. ‘Crisis and the Everyday: Some Thoughts on Gesture and Crisis in Cassavetes and Benjamin’. In Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, edited by Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros, 73–104. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999. Burch, Noël. Theory of Film Practice. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. Burnett, Ron. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Butler, Eoin. ‘Frank Talk’. Sunday Independent. May 2014, 11. Byrne, Terry. Power in the Eye: An Introduction to Contemporary Irish Film. Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. New Jersey: Riverrun Press, 2001. Cameron, Ian, ed. The Films of Robert Bresson. London: Studio Vista, 1969. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. New York: Doubleday, 2012. Carney, Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Carroll, Noël. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Carroll, Noël. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Carroll, Noël and Jinhee Choi, eds. Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Casetti, Francesco. Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Cavallaro, Dani. Critical and Cultural Theory. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2007. Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Manchester University Press, 1984. Charity, Tom. John Cassavetes: Lifeworks. London: Omnibus, 2001. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1986. Chevallier, Jacques. ‘France’. In Art of the Cinema in Ten European Countries, edited by Andrew Lovell, 107–135. Strasburg: Council for Cultural CoOperation of the Council of Europe, 1967. Clark, Timothy J. The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Clarke, David S. Sources of Semiotic: Readings with Commentary from Antiquity to the Present. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1962. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Cook, Pam and Mike Bernink, eds. The Cinema Book. 2nd edn. London: BFI Publishing, 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

213

Cooper, Sarah. The Soul of Film Theory. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Cornwell, Neil. The Absurd in Literature. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Corrigan, Timothy, ed. The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. London: Methuen, 1986. Creed, Barbara. ‘Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous’. In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, edited by Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, 127–159. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Culloty, Ellen. ‘Sentimentality and “Difficult” Art in Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015)’. Estudios Irlandeses 11 (2016): 295–297. Cummings, Dolan, Bernard Clark, Victoria Mapplebeck, Christopher Dunkley and Graham Barnfield. Reality TV: How Real Is Real? Oxon: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002. D’agostino, Peter and David Tafler, eds. Transmission: Toward a Post-Television Culture. London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995. Davies, Paul. ‘Three Novels and Four Nouvelles’. In The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, 43–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Dawson, Jan. ‘Werner Herzog’. Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1980. Dayan, Daniel. ‘The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema’. Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 22–31. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. DeLanda, Manuel. ‘Wittgenstein at the Movies’. In Cinema Histories: Cinema Practices, edited by Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen, 108–119. Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1994. Delluc, Louis. Photogénie. Paris: Maurice de Brunoff, 1920. Devereaux, Leslie and Roger Hillman, eds. Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Dick, Eddie, ed. From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book. Edinburgh and London: Scottish Film Council and BFI Publishing, 1990. Dick, Eddie, Andrew Noble and Duncan Petrie, eds. Bill Douglas: A Magic Lanternist’s Account. London: British Film Institute/Scottish Film Council, 1993. Doll, Mary A. Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988. Donoghue, Emma. Room. London: Macmillan Publishers, 2010. Ducrot, Oswald. Le mots du discours. Paris: Éd. De Minuit, 1980. Easthope, Anthony, ed. Contemporary Film Theory. London and New York: Longman, 1993. Eikhenbaum, Boris. ‘Problems of Film Stylistics’. Screen 15 (Autumn 1974): 7–32. Translated by Thomas Aman. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema: Television: Video. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

214

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘An Anthropologist’s Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream’. In The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, edited by Timothy Corrigan, 133–156. London: Methuen, 1986. Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. London: BFI Publishing, 1989. Elsaesser, Thomas, ed. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute, 1990. Elsaesser, Thomas and Warren Buckland. Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movies Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, Arnold, 2002. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Estève, Michel. Robert Bresson. Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1962. Fletcher, John. Samuel Beckett’s Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967. Forbes, Jill. The Cinema in France after the New Wave. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: BFI, Macmillan Press, 1992. Fowler, Catherine, ed. The European Cinema Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. French, Philip. ‘Is There a European Cinema?’ In Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, edited by John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth, 34–52. Belfast and London: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University Belfast and the British Film Institute, 1994. Galloway, David. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Galt, Rosalind. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Galt, Rosalind and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gay, Peter, ed. The Freud Reader. London: Vintage, 1995. Gellner, Ernest. National and Nationalism. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1983. Georgis, Dina. The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Gibbons, Luke. ‘The Esperanto of the Eye? Re-thinking National Cinema’. Film Ireland 55 (October/November 1996): 20–22. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. The Myth of an Irish Cinema: Approaching IrishThemed Films. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Ging, Debbie. Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Gledhill, Christine. ‘Genre and nation’. In Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism, edited by Brian McIlroy, 11–25. New York: Routledge, 2007. Grainge, Paul, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith, eds. Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Grodal, Torben. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Gunning, Tom. ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde’. In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 56–62. London: British Film Institute, 1990.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

215

Hallam, Julia and Margaret Marshment. Realism and Popular Cinema. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Hanlon, Lindley. Fragments: Bresson’s Film Style. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986. Heath, Stephen and Patricia Mellencamp, eds. Cinema and Language. Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1983. Heath, Stephen. ‘Narrative Space’. In Contemporary Film Theory, edited by Anthony Easthope, 68–94. London and New York: Longman, 1993. Hegel, Georg W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York: Dover Publications, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking? London: HarperCollins, 1976. Hill, John, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth, eds. Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe. Belfast and London: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University Belfast and the British Film Institute, 1994. Hill, John and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hill, John. ‘“The Past Is Always There in the Present”: Fools of Fortune and the Heritage Film’. In Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa, edited by James MacKillop, 29–39. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Hillier, Jim, ed. American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader. London: British Film Institute, 2006. Hillman, Roger. ‘Narrative, Sound, and Film: Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun’. In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, edited by Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, 181–195. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Holohan, Conn. ‘Interview with Lenny Abrahamson’. Estudios Irlandeses 3 (2008): 161–165. Holohan, Conn. Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film. Dublin and Portland: Irish Academic Press, 2010. Holohan, Conn. ‘“Nothin’ But a Wee Humble Cottage”: At Home in Irish Cinema’. In Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts, edited by Barry Monahan, 13–23. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Horak, Jan-Christopher. ‘W. H. or the Mysteries of Walking in Ice’. In The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, edited by Timothy Corrigan, 23–42. London: Methuen, 1986. Huber, Werner. ‘Celtic Tiger Cinema: Irish Dramatists and/as Filmmakers’. In Cinemas of Ireland, edited by Isabelle Le Corff and Estelle Epinoux, 192–204. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Humm, Maggie. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism. London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. London: Routledge, 2001. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Iordanova, Dina, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal, eds. Cinema at the Periphery. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2010. Jacobs, Lewis, ed. Introduction to the Art of the Movies. New York: The Noonday Press, 1974.

216

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jakobson, Roman. Questions de poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991 Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York, London: Routledge, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Surrealism without the Unconscious’. In Transmission: Toward a Post-Television Culture, edited by Peter d’Agostino and David Tafler, 21–52. London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995. Jarvie, Ian. Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics. New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Kaminsky, Stuart M. with Joseph F. Hill, eds. Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Kendrick, James. ‘Phantom Cinema: Illuminating the Structuring Absences of Film History’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30, no. 1 (2013): 62–73. Kermode, Frank. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958–1961. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Klevan, Andrew. Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. Bradford: Flicks Books, 2000. Kolker, Robert Phillip. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kosovsky Sedgwick, Eve. ‘The Beast in the Closet’. In Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 506–530. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Kouvaros, George. ‘Improvisation and the Operatic: Cassavetes’ A Woman under the Influence’. In Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, edited by Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros, 49–72. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory on Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Kracauer, Siegfried. History: The Last Things before the Last. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Polylogue. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977. Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov. Translated and edited by Ronald Levaco. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1974. Langford, Barry. Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Le Corff, Isabelle and Estelle Epinoux, eds. Cinemas of Ireland. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Le Corff, Isabelle and Estelle Epinoux. ‘Irish Cinema: A French Perspective’. In Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts, edited by Barry Monahan, 158– 169. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Le Fanu, Mark. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. London: BFI Publishing, 1987. Léger, Fernand. ‘A New Realism – The Object’. In Introduction to the Art of the Movies, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 96–98. New York: The Noonday Press, 1974. Lewis, Jon, ed. The New American Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Litch, Mary. Philosophy through Film. New York: Routledge, 2002. Lodge, David and Nigel Wood, eds. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

217

Long Hoeveller, Diane. ‘Frankenstein, Feminism, and Literary Theory’. In The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, edited by Esther Schor, 44–62. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore and São Paulo: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Loter, Jim. ‘Cathal Black’s Pigs: Ambivalence, Confinement, and the Search for an Irish Sense of Place’. In Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa, edited by James MacKillop, 128–138. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Lothe, Jakob. Narrative and the Fiction Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lovell, Andrew, ed. Art of the Cinema in Ten European Countries. Strasburg: Council for Cultural Co-Operation of the Council of Europe, 1967. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. MacKillop, James, ed. Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Margulies, Ivone. ‘John Cassavetes: American Director’. In The New American Cinema, edited by Jon Lewis, 275–306. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Margulies, Ivone, ed. Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Marker, Lise-Lone and Frederick J. Marker. Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. McIlroy, Brian. ‘History Without Borders: Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins’. In Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa, edited by James MacKillop, 22–28. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. McIlroy, Brian, ed. Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism. New York: Routledge, 2007. McLoone, Martin. ‘National Cinema and Cultural Identity: Ireland and Europe’. In Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, edited by John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth, 146–173. Belfast and London: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University Belfast and the British Film Institute, 1994. McLoone, Martin. ‘December Bride: A Landscape Peopled Differently.’ In Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa, edited by James MacKillop, 40–53. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. McLoone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000. McLoone, Martin. ‘Cinema, City, and Imaginative Space: “Hip Hedonism” and Recent Irish Cinema.’ In Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism, edited by Brian McIlroy, 205–216. New York: Routledge, 2007. McMahon, Laura. Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis. London: Legenda, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘The Film and the New Psychology’. In Sense and NonSense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

218

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Messenger Davies, Máire. Fake, Fact and Fantasy: Children’s Interpretations of Television Reality. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. Messenger Davies, Máire. Children, Media and Culture. London and New York: McGraw-Hill, Open University Press, 2010. Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema. The Hague, The Netherlands: De Gruyter Press, 1974. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Monahan, Barry. ‘Playing Cops and Robbers: Recent Irish Cinema and Genre Performance’. In Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism, edited by Brian McIlroy, 45–57. New York: Routledge, 2007. Monahan, Barry. ‘The Pedagogical Culture of Irish Film Production: A Short History’. In Cinemas of Ireland, edited by Isabelle Le Corff and Estelle Epinoux, 86–100. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Monahan, Barry. ‘The Phenomenological Narrative Shift between Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam and Paul and Garage’. In Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts, edited by Claire Bracken and Emma Radley, 42–57. Cork: Cork University Press, 2013. Monahan, Barry, ed. Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Moore, Coinín. ‘Ireland and Hollywood Standards’. In Cinemas of Ireland, edited by Isabelle Le Corff and Estelle Epinoux, 102–113. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Morris, Meaghan. ‘Brasschaat – Bombay: A Way of Inhabiting a Culture’. In Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, edited by Paul Willemen, 1–23. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Moussinac, Léon. Naissance du cinéma. Paris: J. Povlovsky & Cie; Éditeurs, 1925. Murray, Leo. ‘Un Condamné a Mort S’Est Echappé – A Man Escaped’. In The Films of Robert Bresson, series edited by Ian Cameron, 68–81. London: Studio Vista, 1969. Naremore, James, ed. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Nelson, Robin. TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Nichols, Bill, ed. Movies and Methods: Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Noble, Andrew. ‘Bill Douglas’s Trilogy’. In From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, edited by Eddie Dick, 133–150. Edinburgh and London: Scottish Film Council and BFI Publishing, 1990. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. O’Riordan, Nicholas. ‘“Don’t Use Your Own Accents!”: Representations of Dublin’s Accents in Contemporary Film’. In Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts, edited by Barry Monahan, 35–46. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

Olsen, Kirby. Comedy after Postmodernism: Reading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford. Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2001. Oswald, Laura. ‘Discourse/Figure: The Inscription of the Subject in Surrealist Film’. In Cinema and Language, edited by Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp, 118–126. Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1983. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. ‘Bresson et la vérité’. Cahiers du Cinéma 216 (October 1969): 53–56. Park, James. British Cinema: The Lights that Failed. London: B.T. Batsford, 1990. Perez, Gilberto. The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998. Petrie, Duncan. Screening Scotland. London: BFI Publishing, 2000. Pettitt, Lance. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Peucker, Brigitte. ‘Literature and Writing in the Films of Werner Herzog’. In The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, edited by Timothy Corrigan, 105–117. London: Methuen, 1986. Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pipolo, Toni. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Plato. The Essential Plato. Introduced by Alain De Botton and translated by Benjamin Jowett. Uxbridge: The Softback Preview, 1999. Power, Kevin. Bad Day at Blackrock. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2008. Prager, Brad. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. London: Wallflower, 2007. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006. Ray, Robert B. ‘Impressionism, Surrealism, and Film Theory: Path Dependence, or How a Tradition in Film Theory Gets Lost’. In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 67–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Reader, Keith. Robert Bresson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University, 2000. Reilly, Rick. ‘Lance Armstrong Comes Clean’. ESPN News Services, January 2013, 17. Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Rivi, Luisa. European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Robnik, Drehli. ‘Siegfried Kracauer’. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, edited by Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 40–50. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Rockett, Kevin, Luke Gibbons and John Hill. Cinema and Ireland. London: Routledge, 1988. Rockett, Kevin. ‘Culture, Industry and Irish Cinema’. In Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, edited by John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul

220

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hainsworth, 126–139. Belfast and London: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University Belfast and the British Film Institute, 1994. Rockett, Kevin and Emer Rockett. Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003. Rockett, Kevin and John Hill, eds. National Cinemas and World Cinema. Dublin, Ireland and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2006. Ronson, Jon. ‘Oh blimey!’ The Guardian, May 2006, 30. Rosen, Steven J. Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1976. Rothman, William. ‘Against the System of Suture’. Film Quarterly (Fall 1975): 45–50. Rothman, William. The ‘I’ of the Camera. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1988. Russell, Catherine. Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Rutherford, Anne. What Makes a Film Tick? Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation. Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt, New York, Oxford and Wien: Peter Lang, 2011. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’âge de raison. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen & Co, 1984. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: Da Capo, University of California Press, 1972. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Sobchack, Vivian. ‘Phenomenology and the Film Experience’. In Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, 36–58. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Sollors, Werner. ‘The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoons; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign: The Study of Motif’. In Thematics: New Approaches, edited by Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy and Thomas Pavel, 69–88. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1966. Sontag, Susan, ed. A Barthes Reader. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, eds. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Stam, Robert. ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogues of Adaptation’. In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–77. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Steene, Birgitta. Ingmar Bergman. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968. Steiner, George. Language and Silence. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. Stern, J. P. On Realism. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Stern, Lesley and George Kouvaros, eds. Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999. Stokes, Melvyn. ‘Structuring Absences: Images of America Missing from the Hollywood Screen’. Revue Français D’Études Américaines 89 (2001).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

221

Stott, Andrew. Comedy. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Street, Sarah. British National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Topsfield, Valerie. The Humour of Samuel Beckett. London: Macmillan Press, 1988. Torrance, Robert M. The Comic Hero. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978. Truppin, Andrea. ‘And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky’. In Sound Theory, Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman, 234–248. New York: Routledge, 1992. Tudor, Andrew. ‘Genre and Critical Methodology’. In Movies and Methods: Volume 1, edited by Bill Nichols, 118–126. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Turim, Maureen. ‘The Place of Illusions’. In The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath, 143–150. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1980. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Tyler, Parker. The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building: A World Theory of Film. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. Uhlmann, Anthony. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Vaughan, Hunter. ‘André Bazin’. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, edited by Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 100–108. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Viano, Maurizio. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993. Vygotsky, Lev S. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language, edited and with a new forward by Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012. Waldron, John Dara. ‘The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: Between the Spiritual and the Ecological’. In National Cinemas and World Cinema, edited by Kevin Rockett and John Hill, 117–126. Dublin, Ireland and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2006. Walsh, Fintan. ‘Mourning Sex: The Aesthetics of Queer Relationality in Contemporary Film’. In Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts, edited by Claire Bracken and Emma Radley, 215–228. Cork: Cork University Press, 2013. Wayne, Mike. The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders, Diasporas. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2002. Wierzbicki, James, ed. Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema. New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. Willemen, Paul. ‘Reflections on Eikhenbaum’s Concept of Internal Speech in the Cinema’. Screen 15 (Winter 1974–1975): 59–70.

222

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Willemen, Paul. ‘Cinematic Discourse: The Problem of Inner Speech’. In Cinema and Language, edited by Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp, 141–167. Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1983. Willemen, Paul, ed. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Willemen, Paul. ‘The National’. In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, edited by Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, 21–34. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Williams, Linda, ed. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Wood, Robin. Ingmar Bergman. London: Studio Vista, 1969. Wood, Rupert. ‘An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist’. In The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Worton, Michael. ‘Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as Text’. In The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, 67–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Zipes, Jack. ‘The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimm’s Fairy Tales’. Germanic Review 62, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 66–74. Zipes, Jack, ed. Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztop Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory. London: BFI Publishing, 2001.

Audio-Visual and Internet Sources ‘Brie Larson & Lenny Abrahamson | Room Interview Special’. YouTube video, 10: 00. Posted by ‘Film4’, 12 January 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pSGpNkWB7jg (Accessed 16 December 2016) ‘DP/30: Room, Lenny Abrahamson and producer Ed Guiney’. YouTube video, 36: 39. Posted by ‘DP/30: The Oral History Of Hollywood’, 16 February 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI5rW7jPL8Q (Accessed 4 January 2017) ‘DP/30 @ TIFF: Room, Lenny Abrahamson, Emma Donoghue’. YouTube video, 33: 11. Posted by ‘DP/30: The Oral History Of Hollywood’, 12 November 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R2Tv39wV1Y (Accessed 12 March 2016) The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). ‘Room (2015); Awards’, 2016. http://www. imdb.com/title/tt3170832/awards (Accessed 14 July 2017)

FILMOGRAPHY

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 3 Joes (Lenny Abrahamson, 1991) 32A (Marian Quinn, 2007) 5 X 2 (François Ozon, 2004) A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) A Good Day to Die Hard (John Moore, 2013) A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) About Adam (Gerry Stembridge, 2001) Adam and Paul (Lenny Abrahamson, 2004) Ailsa (Paddy Breathnach, 1994) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984) Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) Angel (Neil Jordan, 1982) Anne Devlin (Pat Murphy, 1984) Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001) Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) Budawanny (Bob Quinn, 1987) Chance (TV Series; Created by Alexandra Cunningham and Kem Nunn, 2016– present) Consenting Adults (Alan J. Pakula, 1992) Criminal Conversation (Kieran Hickey, 1980) Crushproof (Paul Tickell, 1998) Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) Disco Pigs (Kirsten Sheridan, 2001) Dollhouse (Kirsten Sheridan, 2012) Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) Down the Corner (Joe Comerford, 1977) Eat the Peach (Peter Ormrod, 1986) Educating Rita (Lewis Gilbert, 1983) Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970) Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) Exposure (Kieran Hickey, 1978) Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2005)

224

FILMOGRAPHY

Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) Frank (Lenny Abrahamson, 2014) Game of Thrones (TV Series; Created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, 2011– present) Garage (Lenny Abrahamson, 2007) Goldfish Memory (Liz Gill, 2004) Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) Guiltrip (Gerry Stembridge, 1995) I Went Down (Paddy Breathnach, 1997) Josef Fritzl: Story of a Monster (David Notman-Watt, 2010) Kings (Tom Collins, 2007) Kisses (Lance Daly, 2010) La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1938) Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985) Lament for Art O’Leary (Bob Quinn, 1975) Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) Lightning over Water (Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray, 1980) M (Fritz Lang, 1931) Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) Maeve (Pat Murphy, 1983) Man about Dog (Paddy Breathnach, 2004) Mendel (Lenny Abrahamson and Stephen Rennicks, 1987) Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) My Childhood (Bill Douglas, 1972) Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994) None But the Brave (Frank Sinatra, 1965) On the Edge (John Carney, 2001) One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975) Our Boys (Cathal Black, 1981) Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) Par la trou de la serrure (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901) Peeping Tom (American Mutoscope, 1897) Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) Pigs (Cathal Black, 1984) Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) Prosperity (TV Series; Created by Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran, 2007) Reefer and the Model (Joe Comerford, 1987) Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015) Roshomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) Se7en (David Fincher, 1995) Sherrybaby (Laurie Collyer, 2006) Sinatra: All of Nothing at All (Alex Gibney, 2015) Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

FILMOGRAPHY

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950) Stalker (Mark O’Connor, 2012) Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984) The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946) The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) The Disappearance of Finbar (Sue Clayton, 1996) The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, 1974) The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962) The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991) The General (John Boorman, 1998) The Idiots (Lars Von Trier, 1998) The Impossible Voyage (Georges Méliès, 1904) The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976) The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002) The Man without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002) The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990) The Omen (John Moore, 2006) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963) The Tale of Sweetie Barrett (Stephen Bradley, 1998) The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961) Traveller (Joe Comerford, 1981) Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929) Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (Robert Bresson, 1956) Vikings (TV Series; Created by Michael Hirst, 2013–present) Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson, 2012) When Brendan Met Trudy (Kieron J. Walsh, 2000) Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006) Zulu 9 (Alan Gilsenan, 2001)

225

INDEX

Abel, Richard 157 About Adam (Stembridge) 46–7 Abrahamson, Lenny Best Director award 75 casting choices 149 cinematography and editing 129 countervisuality 50–2 early career 4, 15–17 favourite films 3 filming locations 149 interview with 197–209 low-budget productions 1 mise en scène 47, 52, 56, 89, 183 sharing ideas 2 stories on economic boom 47 stylistic approach 80, 88, 90, 103, 124 thematic and aesthetic approach 49–50 Academy Award 17, 171, 175, 195 Act Without Words 1 and 2 (Beckett) 27, 54 action and interaction 21–2, 38–9, 58–61, 65, 67, 69–71, 78–86, 96–9, 101, 113–14, 119–20, 155, 161, 166, 192–3 Adam & Paul (Abrahamson) 41–74, 76, 109, 122, 123, 168, 182, 187, 198–200, 203, 206–8 Affron, Charles 183 African-American stories 49 Ailsa (Breathnach) 41 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder) 186 Alice in Wonderland 66 All That Heaven Allows (Sirk) 186 Allen, Woody 46 Altman, Rick 62

Amadeus (Forman) 141 Amélie (Jeunet) 30 American director 27 American producers 43 Andrew, Dudley 19, 78 Andrews, David 12, 146 Angel (Jordan) 6, 62 Anne Devlin (Murphy) 9, 18 Aristotelian principles 22–3, 27, 183–9 Armes, Roy 81, 125, 141, 146 art cinema 9, 12, 145–7 Artaud, Antonin 67, 127–8 Audience Award 75 Aumont, Jacques 134 auteur cinema 9, 12, 19, 45, 145, 147 awards 1, 17, 19, 75, 171, 175, 195 Bad Day at Blackrock (Power; novel) 110 bad faith, notion of 109, 112–28 Baldwin, Hélène L. 54 Barry Lyndon (Kubrick) 3 Barthes, Roland 32, 34–5, 37, 39, 48, 82, 159–61, 190 Barton, Ruth 11, 46 Baudrillard, Jean 183, 187–8, 190 Baudry, Jean-Louis 184, 190 Bazin, André 78, 152, 185 Beast of the Jungle, The (Sedgwick; article) 48 Beast with Five Fingers, The (Florey) 106 Beckett, Samuel 20, 25–7, 37, 39, 52–6, 60–2, 70, 76–7, 81, 86, 136, 157, 159, 199 Behind Enemy Lines (Moore) 19 being-in-the-world concept 90–1 Beja, Morris 92–3, 121, 128, 135, 153

INDEX

bench scenes 122–4 Benjamin, Walter 97, 103, 143, 188 Benveniste, Émile 83–4 Bergala, Alain 134 Bergfelder, Tim 43 Bergman, Ingmar 3, 24, 27, 81, 90, 102, 133, 141, 146, 165, 177–9, 182 Bergson, Henri 24, 27, 54, 92–3, 153, 164 Bernink, Mike 146, 179 Best European Short Film award 19 Bettelheim, Bruno 63, 66 Betz, Mark 11, 79, 121 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica) 126 Black, Cathal 11, 17, 56 Blonski, Pavel Petrovich 32 Boorman, John 6, 46 Bord Scannán na hÉireann 4, 46 Bordwell, David 22, 23, 35, 79, 114, 129–30, 145–6 box office returns 5, 8, 12, 42, 75, 170, 175, 196, 205–6 Bresson, Robert 3, 70, 79–82, 80, 87, 93, 99, 106, 114, 118, 125–7, 152–4, 158, 176, 182 Brightman, Carol 27, 82, 102 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC2) 15 British director 18 British Film Institute 43 British producers 43 Brockmann, Stephen 94–5 Brooks, Jodi 97, 103 Brussels European Film Festival 75 Budawanny (Quinn) 18 Burch, Noël 152 Burgoyne, Robert 150 Burnett, Ron 33, 190 Butler, Eoin 3 Byrne, Terry 12 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Wiene) 140 Cahiers du Cinéma 12, 80 Calder, John 62, 91 camera 16, 21, 25, 27, 31, 35, 40, 41–2, 57–8, 60, 79, 91, 96, 100,

227

104, 118–19, 123–4, 129, 131, 133, 139, 141, 144, 152, 156, 180, 184, 190, 195, 208–9 Camus, Albert 107 Carney, Ray 42, 80, 93, 117, 124, 128, 153–4 Carroll, Noël 89, 97, 129–30, 132, 135, 183 Casetti, Francesco 51 Cassavetes, John 3, 21, 26–7, 80, 82, 87, 93, 117, 119, 121, 124, 128, 137, 147, 153 cause-and-effect consequences 70, 79–81, 127 Cavallaro, Dani 48 Cavell, Stanley 67, 106 Celtic Tiger films 41–7, 49–50, 52, 75, 109, 112, 182 Chambers, Ross 83 Chance (Cunningham and Nunn; TV series) 1 Chaplin, Charlie 37, 167 character’s faces 147–52 characters’ situation/behaviour 20–1, 23–6, 29–31, 37, 50, 52, 55, 60, 64, 69–70, 83, 87, 109–14, 123, 139, 144, 153, 158, 165, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184–6 Charity, Tom 119, 137 Chatman, Seymour 174 Chevallier, Jacques 80 chora (Kristeva), symbolic system 34 Cinema and Ireland 7 cinéma du papa 11, 19, 43 cinéma-vérité techniques 21 Cixous, Hélène 48 Clark, Timothy J. 79 Clarke, David S. 32 Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick) 141 Coen brothers 23 Cohn, Ruby 53, 61 comedy 22, 24–9, 37–8, 54–5, 61, 65–6, 84, 92, 101, 164–71, 207 Comerford, Joe 11, 17–18 Comolli, Jean-Louis 26 Connor, Steven 55, 60–1, 157, 159 Consenting Adults (Pakula) 126 conventional visuality 51, 55–7

228

INDEX

Cook, Pam 146, 179 Cooke, Gary 19 Cooper, Sarah 189 Cork Film Festival 19 Corn Exchange Theatre Company productions 20 Cornwell, Neil 76 Corrigan, Timothy 144 counter-Celtic Tiger films 47 Creed, Barbara 106 Criminal Conversation (Hickey) 17 Crushproof (Tickell) 52 Culloty, Ellen 178 cultural standards 4–5, 8–12, 17, 19–20, 32, 44–5, 47, 66, 97, 112–13, 147, 151, 161, 164, 177, 187 Cummings, Dolan 188–9 Czech director 141 Danish director 148 Dark Knight, The (Nolan) 149 Davies, Paul 76 Davies, Terence 6 Dayan, Daniel 130–1 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Wise) 68 Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The (Puiu) 3, 125 DeLanda, Manuel 114 Deleuze, Gilles 50, 103, 106, 126–7, 159–64 Delluc, Louis 156–7 dialogue 7, 20–2, 32, 42–4, 46, 53, 58–60, 78, 80, 82–3, 86, 93, 112, 159, 168, 178, 200 Dick, Eddie 43 Dillon, P. J. 19 Disappearance of Finbar, The (Clayton) 23 Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Klevan; book) 21 Disco Pigs (Sheridan) 42, 62 Dogme95 movement 10 Doll, Mary A. 70, 157 Dollhouse (Sheridan) 47 Dominic West 19

Donnie Darko (Kelly) 149 Donoghue, Emma 15, 171, 173–5, 178–9, 182 Douglas, Bill 3, 5–6, 43, 50, 88, 93, 185 Down the Corner (Comerford) 18 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 127, 148 dual protagonists 53–62 Dublin 26.06.08: A Movie in 4 Days (Abrahamson) 1 Ducrot, Oswald 83–4 Dun Laoghaire School of Arts 7, 16 Eat the Peach (Ormrod) 18 Educating Rita (Gilbert) 18 Eikhenbaum, Boris 31 Element Films 1, 42, 168 Elephant (Van Sant) 131–2 Ellis, John 82, 127 Elsaesser, Thomas 9–10, 12, 45, 60, 62–3, 65, 118, 127, 141, 177 emigration 11, 16 Endgame 76 Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The (Herzog) 3, 95–6, 98, 136, 177, 192 Essay on Scientific Psychology (Blonski; essay) 32 Estève, Michel 153, 176 European Film Awards 75 European Union’s film policies 44 Euro-pudding 23 Even Dwarfs Started Small (Herzog) 141 Excalibur (Boorman) 6 Exposure (Hickey) 17 expressionism 128–38 Exterminating Angel, The (Buñuel) 106 fairy tale narrative 62–74 fake head 141, 143, 147–8, 154–6 feminism 11 feminist writers 48 festival circuit release 42 Fight Club (Fincher) 140 Film Base 7 film-reality relationship 2, 8, 26, 32, 37, 42, 66, 68–9, 78, 88, 91,

INDEX

118, 133, 136, 145, 152, 161, 164, 174, 177, 179–80, 182–94 Finnish director 62 first-person narrator 180–3 first-wave directors 9–11, 17–18, 23, 42–3 First World War 16, 53 Fisher King, The (Gilliam) 141 Fitzgerald, Paul 45 5 X 2 (Ozon) 126 Fletcher, John 60, 81 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy 150 Forbes, Jill 88, 145 Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (Mungiu) 125 Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell) 126 Fox 21/Groundswell Productions 1 Frank (Abrahamson) 139–71 Frank Talk (Sunday Independent) 3 French directors 148, 152, 157 French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939 (Abel; book) 157 French, Philip 7, 8 Freud, Sigmund 105 FRPRESCI Prize 75 Fund for the Visual and Performing Arts 18 Gail, Lenny 15 Galloway, David 107, 135 Galt, Rosalind 125, 146–7 Galway Film Fleadh Award 19, 75 Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss; TV series) 19 Garage (Abrahamson) 24, 75–107, 109, 114, 119, 121–3, 128, 135–6, 168, 198, 200–6 Gay, Peter 105 General, The (Boorman) 46 Georgis, Dina 48 German directors 93–4 German Expressionism 11, 140 Gibbons, Luke 7, 76 Gilbert, Lewis 18 Gillespie, Michael Patrick 50, 52, 64, 87, 96

229

Ging, Debbie 86, 96 Gledhill, Christine 178 Golden Iris Award 75 Goldfish Memory (Gill) 46–7, 49 Good Bye Lenin! (Becker) 186 Good Day to Die Hard, A (Moore) 19 GRA Productions 16 Grainge, Paul 121 Gramsci, Antonio 51 Gran Prix 75 Greenaway, Peter 6 Grodal, Torben 82 Guiltrip (Stembridge) 41 Guiney, Ed 15–18, 41–2, 145, 168, 170–1 Guinness 41 Gunning, Tom 139 haiku (Japanese anaphoric gesture) 35 Hallam, Julia 70, 81, 95, 127 Hanlon, Lindley 81 Harris, Eoghan 23 Haughey, Charles 6 Heath, Stephen 23, 152, 180 Hegel, Georg W. F. 54 Heidegger, Martin 106, 117 Herzog, Werner 3, 45, 51, 60, 65, 89, 93–8, 116–18, 136, 141, 144, 177, 183, 192 Hill, John 7, 44–5 Hillier, Jim 146 Hillman, Roger 165 Hollywood cinema 8–9, 19, 22–3, 44–5, 146, 183 Holohan, Conn 18–19, 21, 27, 52, 64, 87–8, 95 Horak, Jan-Christopher 135 Huber, Werner 56 Humm, Maggie 48 Husserl, Edmund 90–2 Hutcheon, Linda 110 Idiots, The (Von Trier) 126 Image, Music, Text (Barthes; text) 34 Impossible Voyage, The (Méliès) 139 inner speech concept 28–40 internal speech 31

230

INDEX

Irigaray, Luce 48 Irish cinema. See also Celtic Tiger films binaries of negotiation 44–5 contextual categories 4–9 financial support 46 first-wave filmmakers 17–20, 23 political and aesthetic implications 9–13, 23, 43–4 social realistic films 1980s 42 Irish directors 20, 23, 42, 171 Irish Film and Television Awards 75 Irish Film Board 4–6, 41 reactivation 1993 42, 46 Irish Film Board Bill 6 Irish Film Centre 6 Irish Film Institute 6 Irish Times, The 19, 41 I Went Down (Breathnach) 23 Jakobson, Roman 32 Jameson, Fredric 88, 190 Jancovich, Mark 121 Jarman, Derek 6 Jarvie, Ian 184 Josef Fritzl: Story of a Monster (Notman-Watt) 173 Josie’s epiphany 101–7, 128, 135–6 Kant, Immanuel 91–2, 156 Kaurismäki, Aki 3, 23, 62 Keaton, Buster 22, 37, 167 Kendrick, James 49 Kermode, Frank 103 Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The (Cassavetes) 3, 136, 147, 153 Kings (Collins) 19 Kisses (Daly) 47 kitchen sink films 10–11 Klevan, Andrew 21–3, 54, 93 Kolker, Robert Phillip 21, 68, 94, 117 Kouvaros, George 89 Kracauer, Siegfried 69, 89, 128 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett) 157 Kristeva, Julia 34, 48 Kubrick, Stanley 3, 68, 89, 94, 117, 131, 141, 178, 179 Kuleshov, Lev 147–8

La Dolce Vita (Fellini) 146 La Grande Illusion (Renoir) 53 Lacan, Jacques; (and Lacanian) 129–31 Lamb (Gregg) 62 Lament for Art O’Leary (Quinn) 18 Langford, Barry 146 language, use of 11, 19, 22, 26–36, 38–9, 48, 51, 59–62, 81, 84, 86, 88, 93, 96–7, 103, 107, 117, 130, 135–6, 144, 183, 189–90, 192–5 Le Corff, Isabelle 80 Le Fanu, Mark 90, 133, 194 Le Mépris (Godard) 62 Le mots du discours (Ducrot; book) 83 Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Bergson’s publication) 24 Léger, Fernand 106 Levinson, Marc 10 Lightning Over Water (Wenders and Ray) 62 Linehan, Hugh 19 Linguistic Turn, The: Essays in Philosophical Method in Philosophical Method (Rorty; essay) 189 Litch, Mary 184 literary cinema 11 Lloyd, Harold 37, 167 Logical Investigations (Husserl; book) 90 Long Hoeveller, Diane 48 Loter, Jim 56, 64 Lothe, Jakob 82, 84 low budget films 1, 41, 149 Lowe, Andrew 42 Lury, Karen 66, 68 Lynn, Lenny 15 M (Lang) 141 Mad Love (Freund) 106 Maeve (Murphy) 18 Magdalene Sisters, The (Mullan) 42 Malick, Terrence 26, 89, 97 Man About Dog (Breathnach) 46 Man Booker Prize 175

INDEX

Man Escaped, A (Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé by Bresson) 3, 93, 125–6 Man without a Past, The (Kaurismäki) 62 Margulies, Ivone 87, 113, 147 Marie, Michel 134 Marker, Frederick J. 81 Marker, Lise-Lone 81 Marshment, Margaret 81, 95, 127 Master Card 41 Match Factory Girl, The (Kaurismäki) 3, 62 McIlroy, Brian 10 McLoone, Martin 7, 23, 43–4, 46–7 McMahon, Laura 79, 152, 154 Mendel (Abrahamson and Rennicks) 4, 15–17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 106–7, 185 Messenger Davies, Máire 66, 191–2, 194–5 Meteor Broadband 41 Metz, Christian 33, 78, 190 Mirror (Tarkovsky) 3, 90 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 50–1 Monahan, Barry 24, 42, 45, 70, 156, 197 Monteith, Sharon 121 Moore, Coinín 121 Moore, John 19, 24 Morris, Meaghan 8, 33, 92, 121, 128, 135, 153 mother–child relationship 176, 180–3 Moussinac, Léon 157 Murfi, Mikel 19 Murphy, Pat 11, 18 Murray, Leo 126 music 22, 30, 34, 37, 40, 55, 68–9, 74, 86–8, 118, 143–4, 150–1, 154, 164–71, 178–80, 202, 207–9 My Childhood (Douglas) 3, 93 Myth of Sisyphus, The and Other Essays (Camus; essay) 107 Naissance du cinema (Moussinac; book) 157 Narration in the Fiction Film (Bordwell; text) 79

231

narrative 21–8, 35–40, 47, 50, 56, 75–6, 102, 109–10, 115–38, 141–7, 154, 157, 165, 167, 173, 176–8, 182, 185, 191. See also expressionism cyclical 53–63 fairy tale 62–74 Nashville (Altman) 62 national cinema 8–10, 12, 17–18, 43–4, 60, 76 National Film Institute 6 National Film Studios 7 nationalism 8, 11, 19, 43, 47, 112 Natural Born Killers (Stone) 186 Nelson, Robin 190 neo-realism 5, 10, 11, 20 Neupert, Richard 118 New German Cinema manifesto 43 Nichols, Bill 131 Nobel, Andrew 43 Noble, Andrew 50, 88 None But the Brave (Sinatra) 105 nouvelle vague 10, 19, 145, 148 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 21, 27, 96 Oberhausen Manifesto 10 Oberhausen Short Film Festival 19 O’Halloran, Mark 1, 25, 41–2, 53, 55, 75, 81, 86 Olsen, Kirby 165 Omen, The (Moore) 19 On the Edge (Carney) 42 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman) 141 Orange Prize 175 Organisers’ Award 19 O’Riordan, Nicholas 47 O’Sullivan, Thaddeus 11 Oswald, Laura 83, 118 Oudart, Jean-Pierre 130 Our Boys (Black) 17 Ozu, Yasujirô 99, 158 Paisà (Rossellini) 5 Par la trou de la serrure (Zecca) 140 Park, James 5 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 19–20, 26 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dreyer) 148

232

INDEX

Peeping Tom (American Mutoscope) 139 Peirce, Charles Sanders 33 Perez, Gilberto 82 Petrie, Duncan 43, 86 Pettitt, Lance 9–10, 46 Peucker, Brigitte 117, 192 phenomenology 90–102, 106, 151, 156–60, 165, 185 Photogénie (Delluc; book) 157 photogénie-based approaches 151, 156–60 Pickpocket 79, 153 Pierre, Sylvie 26 Pierrot le fou (Godard) 62 Pigs (Black) 17, 56 Pipolo, Toni 26, 70, 90, 93 Plato 78, 160, 182–5 Pleasantville (Ross) 186 plot circularity 53–62 Politics of Aesthetics, The (Rancière; book) 51 Porter, Sally 6 Possessed (Bernhardt) 140 Power, Kevin 110–11 Prager, Brad 93, 96, 98, 116–17, 136, 192 Problèmes de linguistique générale (Benveniste; book) 83 Prosperity (Abrahamson and O’Halloran; TV series) 1, 24 protagonist 8, 16, 18, 37, 47, 52–8, 62–6, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76–8, 80, 82, 83, 88, 89, 93, 95, 98, 102, 103, 107, 109–12, 115, 117–21, 126, 128–9, 133, 135, 136, 137–8, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 168, 169, 174, 176, 177, 182, 183, 185, 192 queerness 48–9 Questions de poétique (Jakobson; text) 32 Quinn, Bob 11, 18, 43 Radio Telefís Éireann 16 Ramsay, Lynne 6 Rancière, Jacques 51

Rathmines Institute of Technology 7, 16, 19 Ray, Robert B. 157 Reader, Keith 152–3 Reefer and the Model (Comerford) 17 Reilly, Rick 112 religion 11, 141, 183 Rennicks, Stephen 15–18, 22, 55, 69, 86–7, 168–70, 208 Renoir, Jean 53 Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky) 186 Richard’s epiphany 121, 127–8 Rivi, Luisa 5, 43 Robert Bresson (Reader; book) 152 Robnik, Drehli 32 Rockett, Emer 6 Rockett, Kevin 6–9 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize 175 Ronson, Jon 142 Room (Abrahamson) 1, 15, 17, 24, 145, 171, 173–96 Room (Donoghue; novel) 171, 173–5 Rosen, Steven J. 81, 136 Roshomon (Kurosawa) 140 Rothman, William 129, 131 Russell, Catherine 62, 107, 120, 143 Russell, Willie 18 Rutherford, Anne 26 Ryan, Annie 20 Sartre, Jean-Paul 98, 104–5, 115 Schoonover, Karl 146–7 Schrader, Paul 87, 99, 106, 118, 125, 133, 148, 152–4, 158 Screen 30, 31 Se7en (Fincher) 126 second-wave directors 42, 44, 45 second-wave films 43 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky 48 self-enlightenment 101–7 Shaviro, Steven 157–8 Sherrybaby (Collyer) 149 Shining, The (Kubrick) 131–2, 178–9 short films 1, 4, 16–20, 24, 25, 41–7, 76, 139, 140, 161, 189 Silence, The (Bergman) 3, 27, 90, 102, 177–9, 182 Simulations 188

INDEX

Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (Gibney) 105 Sobchack, Vivian 94, 125, 136, 180, 184, 189 social exclusion 11, 56, 96 Sofia International Film Festival 75 Solaris (Tarkovsky) 141 Sollors, Werner 48 Sontag, Susan 79, 87, 158 Speers Film Production Company 41 Speers, Jonny 41–2, 57, 68, 71, 72, 73, 123, 187 Spellbound (Hitchcock) 141 Stage Fright (Hitchcock) 140 Staiger, Janet 22–3 Stalker (O’Connor) 47 Stam, Robert 110–11, 150 Stanford University 15, 19, 41 Steene, Birgitta 182 Steiner, George 28 Stern, Lesley 184 Stokes, Melvyn 49 Stott, Andrew 65–6, 164, 167 Stranger Than Paradise (Jarmusch) 20–1, 25 Street, Sarah 6, 43, 87–8 Strindberg, August 81 structuring absences 47–52, 77, 182, 191 Surrealist Manifesto 10 Swedish director 81 Tale of Sweetie Barrett, The (Bradley) 42 Tarkovsky, Andrei 3, 87, 90, 94, 117, 141, 165, 203 themes 2, 4, 8, 10, 18, 20, 43, 48, 81, 106, 109–15, 125, 136, 141, 144, 148, 149, 184 theory of ‘simulations’ 187 Thompson, Kristin 22–3, 114 3 Joes (Abrahamson) 4, 15–40, 41, 42, 75–6, 82, 168, 189 32A (Quinn) 19 Thought and Language (Vygotsky; article) 33 Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman) 141 Time and Free Will (Bergson; essay) 92

233

Torrance, Robert M. 102–3 tragedy 102, 107, 128–9, 133, 135–6, 156 Traveller (Comerford) 18 Trilogy 43 Trilogy (Douglas) 88 Trinity College Dublin 18 Trinity Video Society (Trinity Video Club) 16 Trinity Visual Arts Fund 18 Trip to the Moon, A (Méliès) 139 Truffaut, François 19, 26 Truppin, Andrea 90, 165 Tudor, Andrew 147 Turner, Victor 113 Twelve Monkeys (Gilliam) 141 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) 68 Tyler, Parker 133 Uhlmann, Anthony 53 Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel and Dalí) 106 Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (Bresson) 3, 176, 182 Usual Suspects, The (Singer) 140 Van Gennep, Arnold 113 Vaughan, Hunter 185 Vernet, Marc 134 Viano, Maurizio 19 Vikings (Hirst; TV series) 19 Vivre Sa Vie (Godard) 16, 148 vocal expressions 155, 159–64 Vygotsky, Lev S. 33 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 37–8, 52–5, 61, 81 Waldron, John Dara 158 Walsh, Fintan 46, 96 Walzman, Mendel 15–16 Wayne, Mike 45, 61, 67 West, Michael 20 What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger; book) 106 What Richard Did (Abrahamson) 109–38, 142, 168–9, 198, 205 When Brendan Met Trudy (Walsh) 46–7, 49

234

INDEX

W. H. Smith Paperback of the Year Award 175 Wierzbicki, James 12 Wild Strawberries (Bergman) 146 Willemen, Paul 5, 8, 11, 30–4, 78, 128 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32, 189 Wizard of Oz, The (Fleming) 206 Wood, Robin 90, 179, 190

Wood, Rupert 160 World Trade Center (Stone) 149, 187 Worton, Michael 55, 86, 105 Zeitgeist 11, 49 Zipes, Jack 63–4, 66, 70 Žižek, Slavoj 94 Zulu 9 (Gilsenan) 19