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“I return to you as an emigre returns
to his own country and rediscovers it:
I made a fortune (in the intellect)
and I’m happy, as I once was,
destitute of any norm,
a black rage of poetry in my breast.”

                                       ^{Pier Paolo Pasolini}

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Jane Han is a filmmaker and photographer. She is completing her DPhil in Fine Art at Christ Church, Oxford. Most recently, her films were shown at Modern Art Oxford, and her photographs exhibited in Treviglio, Italy. Her documentary Urban Scribe won the CINE Golden Eagle prize for best documentary and was broadcast on Comcast on Demand (USA).

Rome, Italy—These days, Cinecitta is a place entrenched more in the mythic imagination than the geographic one. The birthplace of a bewildering number of accomplished filmmakers from the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Vittoria De Sica, the fabled Italian film studios are a virtual pantheon of cinematic history. Reaching a peak of activity in the 60s and 70s, its lore was augmented by the glitterati while films such as Roman Holiday and La Dolce Vita passed through its lots. In 1987, it became a character in its own right in Fellini’s Intervista—a love song of sorts to the place he once called his “temple of dreams”.

As I walk through the empty lots one spring morning, however, I am struck not by its storied glamour but by the crumbling facades and general state of disrepair. Once impressive props are now skeletal frames exposing the thin foundations of their artifice. Sets appear to be assembled then abandoned, entrusting time and nature with the task of their dismantling. The vast, 100-acre plot of land located on the outskirts of Rome is generally empty, eerie, and beleaguered by a sense of reality belying a motto which touts itself as the “factory of dreams”.

I am quick to realise, of course, that this is precisely the ruse of the movies—to emolliate the hard stuff of life with the sweet tonic of fantasy. Undoubtedly, here, in the shroud of nostalgia, it is easy to overlook the very origins of the place, founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini for propaganda purposes under the slogan “Il cinema è l’arma più forte” (“Cinema is the most powerful weapon”). In the front lot, a large head from Fellini’s Satyricon is half-buried in the ground, its wide, curious eyes averting the direction of a small plinth erected as a monument to the National Fascist Party. Etched with a fasces—a bundle of sticks bound together with rope—the image is a simple but effective symbol of the idea of strength through unity. I think how alluring this concept is, a pictorial parable of Biblical proportions, and how cleverly it has been reified into the easy veneer of the image.

I continued to wander through the lot, camera in-hand, letting the wilderness of my thoughts pave my trail. Circling through the maze of the back lots, I walked until I became increasingly less sure of my whereabouts, ultimately unable to distinguish between a dilapidated set-piece or the crumbling façade of a studio building. I was, nonetheless, diligent about snapping shots, happily abandoning myself to the small window of the camera.

This series of photos reveals my journey through Cinecitta over the course of one day. Though my intention was, in the most journalistic sense, to capture some documentary sense of the place, it became obvious that the camera could mask as much as it could reveal. The results are a series of images in which I leave the viewer to distinguish which space is imaginary and which is real.

Il cinema è l’arma più forte…

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Jane Han is a filmmaker and photographer. She is completing her DPhil in Fine Art at Christ Church, Oxford. Most recently, her films were shown at Modern Art Oxford, and her photographs exhibited in Treviglio, Italy. Her documentary Urban Scribe won the CINE Golden Eagle prize for best documentary and was broadcast on Comcast on Demand (USA).

Michael Haneke
The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band)
Filmladen, 2009
144 minutes

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A few years ago in an interview, filmmaker Michael Haneke used the phrase “emotional glaciation” to describe the particular froideur that characterizes his Brechtian style—long takes, detached perspectives, little resolution, and the dearth of pleasure we equate with the slam-dunk glee of a blockbuster film. Despite his efforts to dispel this easy tag, the term has been associated with his films ever since.

Haneke’s latest effort, the recent Cannes Palm d’Or winner The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band) is no exception. Shot in razor-sharp black and white and composed in static frames and austere compositions, the film employs his signature restraint to portray the calcifying moral values of a small village in Germany. Not long ago, the filmmaking world was compelled to undergo a re-examination of auteur-filmmaking in the nearly simultaneous loss of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, a quandary now compounded by the recent passing of another canonical filmmaker, Eric Rohmer. Haneke’s The White Ribbon may be the most assured answer to the gap left in the wake of their absence.

At first glance, the film’s concerns seem culturally specific, perhaps even parochial. A period piece set in the years just before World War I, The White Ribbon painstakingly depicts particular aspects of “German-ness”. Indeed, the film comes down to the precision of its regional detail—in a casting search that spanned Europe, there were allegedly no fewer than 7,000 auditions for the role of just a handful of children. The result is a story told as much by the striking physiognomy of hard, Lutheran visages as by the terse, wooden dialogue.

In this sense, The White Ribbon is a bracing look at the morals of the old country. The film portrays a community still caught in the throes of feudal hierarchies, severe patriarchy (one character warns, “Women. Don’t take them too seriously.”), and brusque, matter-of-fact judgments (another exclaims, “My God, why don’t you just die?”). It is a world of unambiguous values, where rationality, rule, and law are the prevailing orders and Kant’s categorical imperative is taken to its dogmatic extremities.

In this particular village, the old ruse of religion is especially shown to be a case of errant dogmatism, as rigid ecclesiastical values draw strict lines between good and evil. In one of the most harrowing scenes, a father in priestly garb reprimands his young son, Martin, for indulging in his private, sensual whims. “For months I’ve tried to bring you closer to God and make you responsible human beings”, says the father, as he unequivocally damns the act as a type of disease. Meanwhile, Martin’s face grows red from restraint. One wonders when this repressed desire will explode.

This dogmatism culminates symbolically in the white bands the children are forced to wear as a reminder of their guilt. “As everyone knows, white is the colour of innocence”, the priest decrees. But in this world of black and white, where one is seen as depraved before innocent and where repentance is the perpetual goal, thwarted emotions and desires degenerate into strange behavior. Crimes begin to happen left and right—the doctor’s horse is tripped by a carefully planted wire in his front yard; a barn burns down mysteriously in the middle of the night; and Martin teeters on the perilous plank of a bridge, after which he confesses, “I gave God a chance to kill me but he doesn’t want me to die.” All the while, the children gather around in clone-like formations and watch the events with stony impassivity.

There are, as one would expect, a few figures who oppose the unbending strictures of the village. One comes in the painful guise of Karli, the village doctor’s mentally handicapped child. Due to his affliction, Karli cannot be made to follow the rule of reason or to repress his emotions. When he falls victim to one of the terrible crimes, he screams out in primal pain. The effect is searing, standing out as one of the film’s few moments of genuine emotional release.

In this scene, Karli represents the affective qualities so missing in the village’s moral code, what Nietzsche would call the “subtle, mad, divine” qualities which keep a society from calcification and degeneration. This affective quality is also preserved by the story’s two protagonists—Eva and the schoolteacher, whose budding romance, while awkward and stilted, stands as the sole testament to the vital, variable, and elusive necessity of human emotions. For, as Nietzsche said, “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

While the cultural specificity of the film can be rooted in a long tradition of German intellectual history, or what many have attempted to define as the “German character”, the story’s folk-tale framework, complete with a friendly, grandfatherly narrator, suggests its larger allegorical implications. One popular reading interprets it as a critique of the ideological excesses that could have given rise to fascism.

Yet, the complexity and scope of the narrative suggests that its focus lies beyond narrow cultural concerns. For what ultimately inspires these demons of doctrine is the rejection of the varieties and complexities of the human character. In this regard, The White Ribbon is finally a fable against the dangers of dogma—the dogma of religious extremism as well as the zealotry of capitalism. Considered in this light, one can see how The White Ribbon expands far beyond the parochial concerns of a specific cultural study or an easy allegory on the ills of nazism.

In the end, contrary to its critics’ claims, the film does not impart a sense of emotionless froideur, nor is it meant to be yet another brutally pessimistic view of human nature. In line with Haneke’s belief that such an experience can make an audience more sensitive, this modern masterpiece incites our sensibilities against the ills it portrays. Consequently, The White Ribbon exhibits one of Haneke’s most assured and striking uses of his austere style and critical eye.

Jane Han is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.

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Jane Han is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. She is a contributing editor at the Oxonian Review.

Tom Ford
A Single Man
Icon, 2009
99 minutes

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When it is announced that a film financed and directed by Tom Ford is debuting at a major film festival, visions of sultry models in scant clothing prompt a strong dose of cynicism. One expects Ford, the former creative director at Gucci, to deliver feline men in ebony, perhaps the zippy, canted camerawork of the fashion world, and all of the fleeting superlatives of haute couture. It is a surprise, then, when A Single Man begins in the lower octaves and proceeds at a slow, burning pace through a day in the life of a middle-aged literature professor.

The film is a smashing directorial debut, thanks in large part to Colin Firth, who gives a career-topping performance as a man grieving over the accidental death of his lover. In one of the opening scenes, a motionless Firth sits sunken in his chair paralyzed by the slow curl of loneliness—a moment so imbued with the grain of loss it elicited audible sobs from the audience within the first ten minutes of the film.

Ford professes to have been captivated by Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same title as early as 1982. Though he identified strongly with the protagonist, it wasn’t until decades later, after quitting his post at Gucci, that Ford found creative reserves to fashion the novel into a film. The original story is deceptively simple: it is at its barest a portrait of an ordinary man named George Falconer during the course of a single day, 30 November 1962. Through idle peregrinations and Woolfian interior monologue, we follow George as he grieves over the accidental death of his partner. Dubbed “the founding text of modern gay literature” by Edmund White, the novel was a favorite amidst the author’s nine books—the one Isherwood himself confessed had come closest to saying what he meant to say.

But A Single Man fits neither neatly nor solely into the genre of gay film or literature, if such clear tropes can be said to exist. One of the true successes of Ford’s adaptation is that he takes pains to diverge away from simplifications. Instead, the film highlights the broader themes of love and isolation, the perennial search for human connection in the face of irreparable loss, and the continual churn of an indifferent world. Crucially, these themes are expressed on the film’s own terms, transforming some of the novel’s more esoteric New Age musings into bold, risk-taking fluency in cinematic composition and style. Ultimately, A Single Man is a film about seeing—as George inches closer and closer toward suicide, he comes to discover the paradox of grief: that it takes one to a place of genuine emotion where life burns with stirring depth.

It would be a mistake to attribute this phenomenology to Ford’s own devising, as his concerns are less philosophical than emotional. Rather, these insights arise out of the camera’s latent ability to bracket the world, to bring us into the intimate, hermetic radius of isolated grief. Ford’s directorial coup stems from his ability to amplify this vision with a plethora of close-ups, jump cuts, and slow-motion in tandem with Shigeru Umbeyashi’s (In the Mood for Love, 2046) locomotive score, which navigates repetitively around the orbit of George’s drowning emotions. Much of the film’s power, aside from Firth’s compelling performance, comes from this scrutinizing, obsessive quality of filmmaking. It is as if Ford wants to compress everything in dense, rotating spaces to heighten the natural huis clos of the camera.

And yet, surprisingly, the film is neither depressive nor suffocating. In one of the opening scenes, George lays inert and deadweight in his bed, a bloom of black ink accidentally seeping onto his white sheets. The banal grid of his daily routine is spread through with many of these ambrosial flourishes—moments of lush, transparent beauty thriving amidst looming morbidity. The result is operatic, elegiac, and above all, cinematic—the opulence of Wong Kar-Wai with a dash of Hopper.

In another scene—one of the most revelatory, if not strangest moments in the film—George watches his neighbors out the window from the seat of the loo. He sees only a mundane scene of domestic suburbia: a girl catching a butterfly, a mother and father standing in the middle of a driveway. But the close-ups are uncannily unflinching and open, devoid of judgment or commentary. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”, Isherwood famously wrote in Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These are the scenes where the film approaches the novel’s original Buddhist incantations, where the chasm of grief opens not onto nihilistic emptiness, but toward the sublime. Building from such moments, George finds himself—despite his ultimate intentions—increasingly seduced by the inexorable, enchanting drive of life.

Ultimately, there are flaws to this kind of expressive, drenched filmmaking. Colour saturation is cranked up like a volume dial when George reaches his strongest epiphanies—a bold and original gesture, but one that can seem contrived and manipulated. There are also one too many a mascara’d eyelash and shots of rippling bodies, a tendency that reaches its excessive peak in a scene where two immaculate, shirtless men play slow-motion tennis. These moments are perhaps best read as Ford’s attempt to capture the sensuality and eroticism of Isherwood’s novel, but their delivery borders on the parodic, distorting the emotional intensity of the film. In Ford’s world, doubtless influenced by his forays into fashion, the beautiful body rather than the charm of flaw comprises moments of disclosure.

Despite these minor slips, though, Ford reaches something truly resonant, for his film convincingly portrays one man’s continual attempt to enter the tireless throw of life. In the end, George comes to realize that his isolated existence reaches beyond the limits of his own consciousness toward something quite wonderfully beyond his control.

Jane Han is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.  A Single Man will play at the London Film Festival on 16 October.