◡◶▿ Encrypted characters and password-protected plots
🔑 The secret movie beneath your movie | The insomniac’s IMAX | Hogg | Schanelec | Argentinian mazes | The 'hotel procedural'
Good morning. And a special welcome to our new subscribers!
Unfound Peoples Videotechnic is still on winter break. New term at our absurdist film school begins next week. A new set of weekly emails that look a bit more like this one:
And yet. Today, you find me, the principal, back on campus, harping on about the unusual cinematic mechanisms that link the movies I watched over the break.
Tl;dr (after all, we’re still on winter break) - I found an improbable number of hidden ‘keys’ that recontextualise these movies, two lesser-known genres, and a lot of empty space. And a lot of characters lying around in bed. After all, it’s winter break.
You don’t need to have seen these movies to benefit from this text, and I’ve avoided spoilers - apart from revealing a late cameo by Adrian Rawlins in the latest Hogg. (Which is a public service, since he’s uncredited in the movie.)
Cześć!
January is the time of year when I decamp with my family to a snowy hideout up in the Polish cloud region. And sleep alone on a prison cot perpendicular to my wife and child (which is no way for a film school principal to sleep). And construct an “insomniac’s IMAX” with my knees, the duvet, and my oversized Samsung Galaxy smartphone, to catch up on movies new and old. (Which is exactly how a film school principal should study movies.)
This insomniac’s IMAX is how I’ve seen films as diverse and ambitious as On the Silver Globe, Villeneuve’s Dune, The Green Knight, and - several times - the first five minutes of Swiss Army Man. So perhaps not so diverse. At least in terms of sand content and magic man quests. But.
This winter’s viewing had less sand content and fewer magic man quests. Still, it did offer some surprising through-lines. “Coin-cine-dences” between movies from far-flung countries and separated by three decades. Accidental echoes in my viewing program included:
Borgesian plot circuitry,
the hotel procedural genre, and
cheapskate minimalism.
There was also a lot of “lying around in bed” content across these films. Which was comforting, watching alone beneath the spare duvet. In fact, all five of the movies I’d like to share with you had significant “lying around in bed” content. A coincidence I shall leave unexamined until a later date.
I hope that you, the filmmaker, or other lost artist, might take inspiration from a brief stroll through this nocturnal Resnaisian landscape. Let’s go!
Angela Schanelec’s Dancing with the Stars
Ostende (2011) is a short feature about a woman semi-alone on holiday in a hotel where things may or - and this important - may not be happening. The movie continues director Laura Citarella’s Antonionish project of absence, anti-presence, and re-tuned perception. It’s good. And short!
I did not know much about the film before it started. But I had seen Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2023). So, I got a real buzz when the connection between the films was revealed by a few bars of music. A few bars of music that shift the nature of what you’re seeing.
Nothing too dramatic. No tectonic shift. More like a cue to turn the map around the right way and see the film as something slightly different to what you thought - if you didn’t know too much about the film before starting. And you’d seen Trenque Lauquen first.
(You could also watch them the other way around for the same effect.)
On the subject of re-contextualisation: if you know absolutely nothing about Angela Schanelec’s Music (2023), there’s a single word that will change your whole experience of the movie. Kind of give it an overlay. To help make sense of an otherwise slight and obscure plot.
Whether this is impressive meta-textuality or over-ascetic storytelling, I don’t know, but the idea tickled me. A password to the real film!
On the other hand, the ‘password’ is one of the first things that comes up if you read a synopsis of the movie. (Don’t do that if you’d prefer to watch Music ‘naked’ without its overlay.) So perhaps you’re supposed to have the password, or to be classically educated enough to work it out for yourself. But I don’t know if I would have made it through the movie if I hadn’t gone on a bored Google detour after 20 minutes looking for clues.
‘Music’ has lots of cinematic devices under the covers. (Just like me with my Samsung!) Such as actors who don’t age as decades pass in the plot. And Schanelec’s carefully-cranked framing sensibilities (link includes the spoiler). And she prepares her images and ideas with a touch so light it becomes otherworldly.
But Music was a tough watch at 4.30 a.m. Warsaw time with my spectacles steaming up under the blanket. So minimal that it’s barely there, especially if you don’t have the password. Anti-present, maybe.
I would like to see Schanelec do a cover version of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The ‘events’ and ‘emotional responses’ of that movie kept tastefully out of shot. Could be good.
Minimal Hogg & the disappearing Adrian
Onto the next movie. Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is:
also minimal (like Ostende and Music),
also about a woman semi-alone on holiday in a hotel where things may or may not be happening (like Ostende), and
also has a “key” piece of knowledge that unlocks a different film if you know it (like Ostende and Music).
There are only five actors in the main body of the film. Two of them are Tilda Swinton, and one of them is a medium-sized dog. Minimal! A minimal cast.
(Important side note: the cast also features, in a brief late appearance, Adrian Rawlins, who is always welcome.
Rawlins usually plays Adrian-coded characters. And indeed, in this case, the hair and make-up team have hyper-Adrianed him to the extent that I LOLed from beneath the duvet, briefly disturbing my wife and child in the next bed. I don’t think our four-year-old even knows who Adrian Rawlins is!
Hogg shoots Rawlins as an Adrian, with oblique angles and a refusal to bother going closer with the camera. Or maybe she did get closer with the camera and I didn't notice; maybe the peripheral optics were just a false impression I got through Siobhán Harper-Ryan’s hyper-Adrianed hair and make-up designs.
To add more Adrian to the Adrian pot: I now discover that Rawlins - who is from Stoke in real life and plays a character called Alistair - is not even credited in the movie! There’s zero evidence on the internet that he appeared. Was he even there? It’s all gone very Antonioni again.)
Like Ostende, The Eternal Daughter can be categorised as a hotel procedural. We’ve all seen movies in the hotel procedural genre:
A character arrives at a hotel;
we already sympathise because we’ve all enjoyed the crushing anonymity of arrival in a strange and sterile place.
She checks in with some difficulty (imposter syndrome) or no difficulty (NPC syndrome).
Slowly maps the terrain, including the staff and/or fellow guests,
who move like (sometimes faulty) clockwork, exposing the irregularities in our hero’s identity and/or emotional state.
And then mysterious things happen - or do they? - because a hotel is a huge and marvellous structure which you access at some cost but are forbidden from seeing 99% of.
She checks out, in a cathartic release of withheld familiarity with the desk staff.
Great! Can’t get enough of them. (Hotel experiences like this and movies of this genre.)
Since Tilda Swinton stars, The Eternal Daughter is also a Tilda Swinton procedural. Now, Swinton is an icon and a great actress. But one could argue that these responsibilities are conflicting. In a Tilda Swinton procedural, the audience watches Swinton expertly assemble carefully-observed or imagined tics and responses as character scaffolding around Swinton the icon.
Which is fine! Impressive. And particularly so in The Eternal Daughter. Because The Eternal Daughter is mostly a “two-hander” in which Swinton plays both hands - daughter and mother - and has no pre-written dialogue, improvising both characters’ speech.
That’s right: “Tilda is improvising with herself, which seems an impossible thing,” explains Hogg, who would sit opposite one Tilda or another in rehearsal and then “disappear after we just tried it once like that,” leaving Swinton “having a conversation into thin air.”
Well, when you watch it knowing that, it becomes hard not to watch The Eternal Daughter as a Tilda Swinton procedural. Indeed, a meta-Tilda Swinton procedural in which she constructs separate but genetically-aligned Tildas, off-the-cuff, while playing opposite her own absence. (And also the absence of Hogg, who - along with Hogg’s mother, and Swinton, and Swinton’s real-life mother and daughter - inspired the fictitious characters that Swinton plays/dematerialises.)
(On that note:
This video of Kristen Stewart is doing the social media rounds after somebody fed her a line from one of her films and asked if she could name the film. In order to prompt her memory, Stewart did “a Kristen Stewart impression” of reading the line.
Careful, Kristen! Careful not fall into an infinite, Iconic Kristen recursion loop!)
Elsewhere in the meaningful universe adjacent to ours
Very briefly, the last couple of sub-duvet movies with shared characteristics.
Like Ostende and Eternal Daughter, Rapado (directed by Martín Rejtman, 1992) had some bold un/comfortable silences between characters. I really enjoyed these scenes of characters just pausing, without dragging their movies into ‘slow cinema’ territory. Just sharing a presence.
And Rapado also unlocks a moment of extraordinary catharsis and minor revelation with a single gesture towards an absent prop.
Hong Sang-soo does most of the above (although without Adrian Rawlins) in In Our Day (2023). But In Our Day is a little more “in your face” about these techniques. Echoed dialogue and shadow props across twin plots exposing secret narrative tunnels between parallel narratives. Played out without gravity on the neutral black and white video of the arts lab.
The techniques sort of become the point of the movie. The critics say In Our Day is a fine formal experiment; whereas the playful formal devices of the other films I’ve mentioned are more naturally integrated into their plots, pictures, props, and sounds. Either is fine! It’s all interesting. Don’t you think?
Those were my insomniac IMAX movies this year. Small, clockwork movies rather than massive, silicon-driven wizard melodramas. Silence, absence, and withheld plot points: with tools like these, filmmaking should be cheaper!
Okay! Term begins next week. “Back to school.” “Back to normal.” Lots to do. Pencils to sharpen.
By the way, if you click the speaker icon on this page, you hear Adrian Rawlins say his own name. Great! And then his voice disappears, as quickly as you can say “Adrian Rawlins.” Love him.
Take care.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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