“A Crumbled Man Counts for Ten”
On Frans van de Staak’s
Wilfred Oranje, 1981
Translated by Veva Leye
The following essay is from the February 1981 issue of Skrien, a now-defunct Dutch film journal. Wilfred Oranje (1951 - 2011) was a translator and critic from the Netherlands.
“Like dipping your toe in the water. We search for images, representations that might explain something, rather desperately actually: we touch everything that seems promising, eager but at the same time also wary, longing but reluctant, therefore awkward, rather helpless. She is as indefinable as the sentences she pronounces and sends floating, half-finished. She is introspective: an intimacy that (an endless procession of people passes through me, I am not one person, I disintegrate into ...) consists of an almost silent but significant groping. Like dipping your toe in the water. Thus, not only locked in the room, but also in herself. When she spoke like this, pensive, she walked back and forth, sometimes with her hands deep in her pockets, like someone on a lonely walk, absorbed in pondering, occasionally stopping abruptly, with her head tilted upward listening to an intuition, an incidental remark, an objection, a new question.”
Somewhat solemn, difficult to grasp, jumping from first person to third person and vice versa, this monologue is the leitmotif, the refrain of Van de Staak's latest film People Pass Through Me In Endless Procession (with a screenplay by Lidy van Marissing and the director himself). Sometimes these phrases are expressed by a young man or woman sitting on a chair or a couch, other times by an older person in the background or even by someone off-screen—recorded with direct sound, in a static overall shot, yes even in a sequence shot, or in a scene which obviously has been subjected to découpage and in which the visual and auditive cuts are abrupt or even “ugly.” And although it may appear so, this monologue isn’t an existentialist confession or an elegiac effusion, because it is embedded in a cinematic structure in which naturalistic or “realistic” narrative elements are totally absent.
When this refrain appears for the third, fourth time, the meaning of the words no longer gets through to the spectator. His perceptual systems eliminate everything superfluous and focus exclusively on the construction of the “refrain,” on the way the actor in question recites, on the way he is framed and “composed,” visually and auditorily. The emphasis shifts entirely to the cinematic construction, to the demonstration of the actors' cinematic behavior. What is being told is less important and is replaced by the act of telling.
The spectator enjoys the freedom to be satisfied with this fait accompli. If he is not willing to do so, okay ... then things come to an end, and the film and the spectator can each go their own way. But in this case the refusal has come about voluntarily, by the spectator’s own choice. If, however, he does accept this “generous” offer of the film author, namely, to distrust the “beauty” of the world of appearances and to accept the filmic behavior as the only thing to which meaning can be attached, he enters—again by his own choice!—dangerous territory. He “breaks free from” the meanings attached to words and behavior in everyday practice, he “slides along” with the author into a no-man's land, which lies between the “homeland” of fixed, narrative, dramatic and deceitful structures (in film symbolized by Hollywood) and the unknown but equally hostile land of abstractions, otherworldliness, permissiveness and innocuity (in film symbolized by experimental film).
Composition
Van de Staak did not burn all his bridges. All the elements that make up the film—locations, actors, voices, colors, movements (including static ones) are extremely concrete but the automatism with which the viewer attaches meanings to all these figurative signs is constantly undermined by the way these elements are handled in the film. Sometimes direct associations can be discerned. In a scene in which the actors are making sandwiches, phrases such as “you can't stop crumbs” and “aren't we making too many sandwiches?” occur. But these phrases—like all other phrases—are recited as if they were ritual incantations. Halfway through this scene the actors switch places, without any concrete dramatically motivated reason, and so on.
At the beginning of the card game scene, there is a high camera angle. The card players are looked down upon as in the best examples of film noir—a seedy company playing cards, but at the same time thinking about murder and manslaughter and fatal loves. Halfway through, the camera lowers to eye level and a kind of humanization effect occurs. Suddenly there is off-screen sound: a voice lists an absurdly large number of short statements (Opposition leader tortured – Ninety dead in explosion – Contractor duo suspected of multimillion-guilder fraud – Demand of demonstrating farmers rejected – Eviction action brings traffic to a standstill – Reception of eleven dispatchers feasible, and so on). The camera slides away to the right and finally catches the speaker, who is reading out headlines. At the end of a bizarre scene in a garden, a kind of still life emerges: a classical pictorial composition, harmoniously constructed along the diagonals, the outstretched legs of two, three people in the foreground accentuating the depth of the image. The still life is accompanied by music (composed by Bernard Hunnekink), which, by the way, throughout the entire film rudely interrupts the actors during their “incantations” and in this way becomes more or less an actor itself. But this image continues so insanely long that the harmony of the composition becomes meaningless and slowly but surely the viewer comes to realize that the particular way (and not another) in which these actors have been placed in this image is due to a whim of the director.
Hollywood
What is thematized and problematized is not a link in a dramatic course of action, but the relationship between the act of telling and what’s being told, between the director and his “objects.” Of course, in traditional films this difficult hierarchical relationship also exists. But there it is always obfuscated, the manipulations by the director are rendered invisible. Van de Staak hopes—by exposing this relationship very emphatically, by saying: look, I am in a position to subject my “objects” (actors and objects, colors and sounds) to my wishes!—to be able to shirk the big lie.
Van de Staak still allows (albeit to a lesser extent than in earlier films) for chance factors to influence the course of events during filming: an actor slipping up, running too early or too late from place A to place B; the sound of church bells, cars rushing by or planes passing by. These hitches and irregularities in the cinematic structure could be called excuses, as if the director wants to impose on the viewer the suggestion that he is really not manipulating his material. In this way too he wants to make it clear to us that he abhors the “slick cinematic machinery” of traditional cinema.
On the other hand, his films make abundant use of techniques characteristic of the classic Hollywood film. In the “classical” film, the action moves from scene to scene, as if the story goes from A to B. All these transitions are justified by the dramatic development of the story. In Van de Staak’s films, the sets also change frequently, but there is no dramatic action, no story with a beginning and an end. The only thing that creates a vague suggestion of continuity—apart from the fixed number of actors per scene—is a cube-like object that Van de Staak stubbornly hides in each scene, sometimes in a conspicuous place, sometimes not.
There is also a scene in which eight, nine or even more actors are lined up in three rows on a platform while reciting their by now already familiar ritual incantations. Initially, this image brings to mind a photograph brought to life of a cabinet just sworn in on the steps of Soestdijk Palace or something similar. But after each sentence, the actors step aside, to the right or to the left. First there is a total shot of all three rows. Then follows a half-total shot. And finally, close-ups of the faces of the actors in the front row gliding by. The cuts are impeccable. The scene does not break the physical unity of time and space. There is continuity and the typical sequence of images also brings to mind a classic way to quietly intensify the emotional concentration of a scene (the most exalted moment being the close-ups of the faces). If you only pay attention to the cuts between the images, it’s Hollywood at its best. In Van de Staak’s film, however, the spectator cannot possibly attach emotional meaning to the “dramatic course of action” (which is not there), to “stars” (which are not there). And thus, the spectator's enthusiasm (which arises in spite of everything) must focus on the technical construction, on the cinematic behavior of the pontificating actors stepping aside.
In fact, Van de Staak's way of filming comes down to a disruption of the spectator's gaze, a disruption of all too familiar mechanisms of identification. Western art of roughly the last century and a half shows how it has come to this. Initially, there was a balanced relationship between the story and the way it was told, between the aspect of form and the aspect of meaning. The reader/spectator could easily put himself in the hero's shoes and thus share in the glamor, the beauty (or ugliness!) of the world (Stendhal, Dickens, but also the Hollywood movie). Then the parody arises: first, the aspect of meaning is perverted—the hero becomes a schmuck. But even this paltry hero is annexed by the audience. The real break only comes when the aspect of form is also perverted (Kafka, Joyce, Dos Passos, Döblin; in film Eisenstein, Vertov, Godard, Straub): the construction of the story devours the story itself, heroes and world included. Identification has become impossible or focuses on the construction. Which comes down to the fact that the reader/spectator identifies with himself because, after all, he is the one who, while reading/viewing, reconstructs the work of art.
Enchantment
Numerous questions remain unanswered in People Pass Through Me In Endless Procession and, of course, in this article. Why do the actors recite these phrases and not others? Why is the film 86 minutes long? Why is one scene longer than the other? Why are the scenes arranged in this particular order? Why does each scene include eight actors (always the same) plus one alternating, additional actor? If Van de Staak is to be believed, it is all a matter of intuition, of creative impulses—concepts by definition eluding critical consideration. Is each scene to be interpreted as a thematization of a particular emotion (fear, despair, resignation, and so on)? The symbolic designation of the chosen locations—a villa with a garden and white chairs as the site of elegiac and nostalgic feelings; a greenhouse as the breeding ground of strangling and painful feelings; an old wall as the symbol of dull resignation, and so on—is constantly crisscrossed by phrases expressing a different reality, by recurrent musical motifs, by the erratic behavioral pattern of the actors, and so on. A spectator determined to follow this track at all costs will soon be led astray.
Somewhere in the film someone declares “Apples of my eye taste like more.” The magnetism of the perfect, “sealed” film, the eye-catching and tasty world of magic of, again, Hollywood is huge. And Van de Staak feels compelled to rebel against this enchantment with all his might. I am firmly convinced that a meaningful reception of this film is only possible by always asking yourself: but how would this concrete scene have been realized in a “normal” film, in this setting, with these fragments of sentences? Only then do the differences, the irregularities, the new perspectives stand out, offered by this type of film by Van de Staak. First break down and only then rebuild, could be the motto of this film. Or as an actor casually puts it at one point: “A crumbled man counts for ten!”
- Wilfred Oranje
Translated from Dutch by Veva Leye
