Bearing witness: the Dardenne brothers' and Michael Haneke's implication of the viewer.(Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne)(Critical essay)

 
I never really bought into this whole notion that characters have to be, 
first and foremost, likable. They have to be, first and foremost, 
interesting. You don't have to give Travis Bickle a dog. 
--Paul Schrader 
 
... without judgment, without judgment! 
--Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), Apocalypse Now 
 
The cinema seat is of greater assistance than the analyst's couch. 
Sitting in a cinema seat we are left to our own devices and this is 
perhaps the only place where we are so bound and yet so distant from 
each other: that is the miracle of cinema. 
  In cinema's next century, respect of the audience as an intelligent 
and constructive element is inevitable. To attain this, one must perhaps 
move away from the concept of the audience as the absolute master.... 
  For one hundred years, cinema has belonged to the filmmaker. Let us 
hope now the time has come for us to implicate the audience in its 
second century. 
--Abbas Kiarostami, from a text written for the Centenary of Cinema and 
distributed in December 1995 at the Odeon Theatre, Paris 

CINEMA AS COMPLEXITY

The great paradox of our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) world is that we know more than ever before and yet can ignore more than ever before. In our hyper-communicative, high-tech society, we can desensitize ourselves to the human rights injustices, environmental abuses, and war crimes going on around us. Even the flashing news bulletins, pulsing updates, and streaming information tickers only wash over, in their surface coverage and sound-bite interviews, the most inescapable political fact of our time: we are complicit. Always running counter to the free-will "choice" mentality of the economic dream--that anything is possible, we all make choices, and enough good ones can help us climb the rungs to success--is the basic political truth that we cannot choose the cultural, social, economic, familial, and genetic conditions we are born into and, to a great extent, constrained by for the rest of our lives. (I am using "political" in its original sense, from the Greek "polis," or city-state, relating to citizens, and so considering everything as political--all vote-eligible, tax-paying citizens are part of whatever their country does.) Furthermore, we are even complicit in the compromised choices that we can make--as users of polluting vehicles, discarders of non-biodegradable containers, purchasers of foodstuffs manufactured by companies that also make cigarettes, members of a nation that is at war or supports war, etc.--and so we are constantly buying into a system that we cannot escape. The reality of our age, then, is a cultural consciousness of complicity which is so paralytically overwhelming to most that, for instance, people feel a sense of despair when confronted with the fact of global warming and continue their energy-wasting habits because they want to believe that they can do little on their own. Every single day, we are complicit--in that we are citizens of a society run by elites whom we elect and tacitly allow to broker power over us--in bloodletting, arms trading, profiteering, and wealth-hoarding. But such implication is easy to ignore when we are surrounded, soothed, and anesthetized by illusions of progress and convenience, from vehicles and consumer goods to technology and entertainment.

Yet the political reality of complicity is ever-present in television and cinema, whose visual propping-up of the patriarchy through the fetishizing gaze, for instance, is best explained by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Mulvey contends that "patriarchal society has structured film form" (14) and that "Hollywood style ... [is based on the] skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure" (16). More generally, I would add, the scopophilia created by commercial narrative cinema, in order to instill a sense of fetishistic desire in the viewer for the object being sold or person being glamourized on screen--"By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too" (21), or "it," whatever product, brand, or ideal is being advertised--is part of an aspiration-based, bourgeois-directed, mainstream televisual culture. Such aims may have been most effectively put into motion in the Depression-era United States, as Anna Siomopoulos traces in her analysis of Stella Dallas, when films such as the "maternal melodrama reinforced the consumer rationale of the liberal welfare state by suggesting that the sympathetic response of charity can substitute for a more pointed critique of consumer capitalism" (5). This televisual rhetoric has been countered, with limited success, by low-budget alternative filmmaking, often fuzzily liberal humanist in its aims, which still often uses conventional "reaction shots, glance-object cutting ... shot/reverse shot exchanges," steady camerawork, and close-ups of carefully coiffed and made-up actors in order to "construct a spectator who identifies" (13) with the basically likeable central character; as Mulvey puts it, narrative films are structured "around a main controlling figure [usually male] with whom the spectator can identify" (20).

The camera, then, primarily as Hollywood has used it, is not only a tool for patriarchal but capitalist oppression, stripping and exploiting not only women but also the poor in its fetishization of a white bourgeois world, (1) where even the media "enables appropriation of images of violence as 'infotainment' to feed global commercialism ... normaliz[ing] suffering and turn[ing] empathic viewing into voyeurism" (Kleinman 226). How, then, to take our cue from Mulvey, can "we begin to make a break by examining" oppressive cinema "with the tools it provides," namely the camera's gaze (15)? While Mulvey is interested in "daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (16), I wish to look at three recent European films which are daring to break with conditioned bourgeois cinematic expectations--of escapist, voyeuristic entertainment or well-meaning, heartfelt, liberal humanist drama--in order to conceive a new language of political cinema that challenges the viewer. (2)

Mulvey wrote that the "character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator" (20) and, unfortunately, such is still the case in most narrative films that come to your local cineplex today. Yet the three early 21st-century films discussed here respond to Abbas Kiarostami's challenge for directors in the second century of cinema by making the viewer privy to more while able to judge less, and in ways more profound and complex than Mulvey's example of Vertigo, where "the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate [policeman Scottie], sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking" (24); the Dardennes offer no surrogate, while Haneke uses a bourgeois surrogate, and both the Dardennes and Haneke undercut the conventional gaze of the camera on which the bourgeois viewer has come to rely in order to identify with a usually bourgeois, male protagonist. Mulvey writes that "Camera technology ... and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action" (20). The Dardennes' Le Fils and L'Enfant, and Michael Haneke's Cache, however, offer unorthodox camera movements which are often not related to the protagonist, Haneke calls attention not only to editing, but to the rewind-able and fast-forwardable nature of recording itself, (3) and all three films utterly undercut their protagonists' command of the stage. While most narrative films strive to "eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience" (24), the Dardenne brothers and Haneke draw attention to the camera and disturb the audience's usual comfortable distance in their recent films. These are not celluloid spectacles that reinforce the voyeuristic, usually male gaze, but transgressive, openly challenging cinema which breaks down those "cinematic codes [that] create a gaze" (24), reveals the viewer's complicity, and forces the viewer to bear witness.

BEARING WITNESS