9th May 2008

Zentropa

Lars von Trier 1991

I set myself the task of sitting in the sun and trying to write something interesting about the films we saw on Friday. I certainly succeeded in getting slightly burnt. What did stick in my mind in relation to von Trier’s Zentropa were the various, quite radical, treatments of the image/screen, especially when considered in relation to Rancière’s writings that we’ve been looking at and to the other films we’ve been watching. I thought Zentropa was visually very complex (the plot wasn’t uncomplicated either), with a lot of things going on within the same ’screen space’, the full extent of which perhaps only apparent with repeated viewing. Certain effects were broad-stroked, others seemed subtly buried within the body/material of the final, presented images of the film. The uses of back projection, superimposition, switching from colour to black and white, as well as other odd tones, etc. seemed to stage specific and controlled collisions throughout the movie, though they were strewn throughout the duration with no straightforward correlation to the content of the scene – at least, I didn’t a sense of it. Though there seemed no obvious logic connecting a given shot (what kinds of collisions/splits it contained) and its content, these processes built toward a cumulative effect – a gathered momentum (a kind of nausea too) that tied in with the hypnotist’s voiceover from Max von Sydow. That voiceover, in fact, seemed to lay down an affective territory, or ambition, for the images – if that makes any sense. The visual (and textual) elements were brought together in such a way as to transport the viewer to Europa, in a kind of bawdy collage version of a swinging watch – some kind of regressive therapy lulled you into the same ambiguous spaces as the characters on screen. I was reading somewhere that the film was considered by some to be a cold, clinical demonstration of technique, and this is perhaps a valid criticism, if a little too straightforward. Apparently, Von Trier himself considered the film’s style to be ‘excessive’, and I think this that is one of its problems, but at least the director was not afraid to make bold statements, taking different approaches and visual orders, and slamming them all into the pot. I really enjoyed this ‘excess’ and I wonder why these techniques aren’t used more often.

The story’s focus could be said to be on various types of isolation and contamination. Leo Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an American working in post-war Germany (or a spooky, Kafkaesque version thereof) as a sleeping car attendant for the Zentropa railway company, gets involved with a mysterious woman and her Nazi-implicated father, his mad uncle, the American Occupation authorities, pro-Nazi terrorists, as well as the bureaucracy of the Zentropa company itself, all resulting in a cacophony of confused loyalties and shady pasts, such that the young man’s intention to operate in that uncertain, volatile country in an “impartial” way gradually slides away, doomed to failure. Kessler makes clear that he is on “no one’s side” in this fragile land, a place that “needs kindness”, but his attempts at “doing some good” leads, inevitably, to his furthering the motives of others, carrying out their tasks by default or by accident. The specific ways in which the director has treated the film, closing off and reopening the image/screen, seem centrally important to this idea of uncertain involvements and isolations – the dissolving image somehow symptomatic of the uncertainties and latent betrayals that figure so strongly in the story. In one short sequence, for example, we might cut back to a shot where characters are seen ‘behind the glass’ of another screen or projection (perhaps this ‘nested’ more than once…) or where midground action suddenly dissolves into a grainy image on a back wall, both overtaken by additional scenes paying out ‘over the top’. Various tones and colorations made it seem as though certain exchanges were isolated even further, placed within further recesses of memory – caught in amber. A backdrop scene might simply fade into towering letters ['WERWOLF'], in a style suggestive of propaganda posters from the war; disparate objects and POVs might be surreally juxtaposed in ways that made me think of Peter Kennard, Vertov and Harold Lloyd, all mixed in the pot.

In fact, thinking about it, this type of layering of images (theatrical backdrops – you can sense the presence of Dogville here too…?), reminds me of the uses of photographic images/documents in Shoah, which came up previously. The primacy of the screen surface, or its structural integrity and layers of prominence, so to speak, seem to be in play here too. The collage effect of different threads of imagery competing at different ‘altitudes’ within one image-screen, as well as the question whether one image, be it a still photo, an artefact or some other overlay, is allowed to fill the entire ‘image space’ and comprehensively transfer the narrative to an entirely different register, runs through the whole film. Though in a much more stylised and minimal way, these processes also brought to mind aspects of Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema. Like that piece, the effect was something of an unsettled flitting through image sequences, as if skirting back and forth through ‘history’, restlessly probing for connections and discrepancies, trying to activate some crystalline combination to induces an effect. [TL - I think you mentioned something about the hypnotic voiceover in connection to some of the sequences of Shoah - was it Jan Karski's equally hypnotic tones assuring us that he, rather, "doesn't go back"? - perhaps there might be something interesting about the type of regression demonstrated in all three of these films - Histoire(s) du Cinema, Shoah and Zentropa - which relates to different ways historicity is induced through moving images...? Everyone must become unhinged slightly and travel back... the different visual orders of regressive therapy...) A good score on the W-Ometer is on the way.]

With all these techniques combining, the depth of field was continually prominent – the film often like looking into a tunnel, rather than a window onto a world. The film’s air of a hallucinatory, monochrome dream, seemed to be deliberately mixed up or mirrored by the strategic use of physical sets. For example, there were instances when characters were placed at different depths of the scene (back-, mid- and foregrounds – we mentioned this type of thing in relation to another film too… was it Cassavetes?), or the camera pulling back from a window through an elaborate set of a train moving past, segueing into a scene set the next day, etc. This was another part of the general sensation the film encouraged, that, at any point, elements of the image might ‘peel away’ or otherwise dissolve – as if they weren’t really there, but were distortions or imaginings of events. That the ‘real actors’ might suddenly turn into images – if you see what I mean – not only compounds and complicates some of the mysteries of the plot and structure, but also questions the viewer’s own trust in what he’s seeing, and where one could judge the true ’surface’ of the image to be – perhaps like the accuracies of history and the intentions of others.