Camille Claudel 1915

La Valse/The Waltz (Camille Claudel, 1893)

Camille Claudel

CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915      B        
France  (95 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Bruno Dumont 

There is always something missing that torments me.

Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering…I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures. 

—Camille Claudel in letters to her brother Paul

Another realistically severe Bruno Dumont film that seems designed to inflict as much misery and punishment on the audience as is humanly possible, an arthouse trend that is happening all too frequently these days, as if forcing the viewer to experience such extreme degree of discomfort is somehow a doorway into artistic perception, as if the rigors of sadistic horror from Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) or Michael Haneke’s punishing Funny Games (1997) have somehow been unleashed upon the industry, and what was once considered rare and extreme is now more commonly accepted.  Violence has made its inroads into the human psyche to the point where no one blinks anymore at human torture.  While no one is accusing these uncompromising artists of exploitation, but Dumont joins a growing field of highly acclaimed directors, like Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy, Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) (2012, 2013), or Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), who are perfectly willing to unsettle and extinguish any comfort zone with the audience, where if the expression is slavery, humiliation, or human torment, by God that’s what they will make the audience feel.  Perhaps it’s this insistence that the director must inflict trauma into the lives of the audience that comes into question, as art has the unique capacity to get “inside” a subject and explore internally without making the audience personally experience subjects like war, for instance, or suicide, incest, or murder, but instead poetically explore the subject through psychological implications.  One of the very best war movies ever made is Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), which powerfully examines the unending dread, fear, and madness associated with the conditions of war without accentuating the graphic nature of battle scenes, where the audience is lured into this dizzyingly intense psychological state of mind without forcing the audience to endure spilled guts and mutilated bodies.  Nowhere in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, perhaps his darkest tragedy, are we placed on the front lines, as the human drama takes place almost entirely behind the protected walls of a castle under assault—the point being, we don’t remember the blood of the battlefield afterwards, but are instead riveted by the human torment.  Somewhere along the line modernism has become associated with emotionally browbeating audiences, forcing them to capitulate to the director’s terms of emotional assault.  Thankfully, freedom of choice still offers us the capacity to say no to these rules of engagement.

Dumont is perhaps the closest practitioner to the Bressonian school of cinema, a formalist whose minimalist structure reflects an economy of means, known for reducing film to its bare essence, something of a perfectionist in filmmaking, where questions of faith constantly arise throughout his body of work, and this is no exception.  Up until this film, Dumont never used a name actor before, preferring to use unknowns, as his films are more about ideas and concepts and not about performances, a view shared by Bresson, where instead their artistic greatness relies upon the meticulous construction of their work, paying great attention to detail, where the viewers begin to identify with the world as the characters do, literally transporting the audience to a different time and place, where it becomes immediately recognizable and familiar, effectively using silences and long, observational gazes.  Veering away from the animalistic brutality of his earlier work, this is a thoroughly undramatic historical drama based on actual events, drawing upon the life of Camille Claudel through letters and medical records, much as Bresson relied upon actual historical trial records in The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) (1961), yet where Bresson’s Joan remains impassive and overly detached, Dumont uses perhaps the most internationally acclaimed and highly expressive French actress Juliette Binoche in the role of Camille, where in keeping with Dumont’s portrayal of realism, he has chosen an artist to reflect the life of another artist.  While Dumont doesn’t concern himself with the backstory, Camille was 19 in 1883 when she became a student of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, 24-years her senior, which developed into a passionate but stormy love affair where she inspired Rodin as a model for many of his works while also assisting him, as the two artists mutually influenced one another.  Rodin also had another longterm mistress, Rose Beuret, the mother of his son, and despite Camille’s pleas, Rodin refused to leave the stability of his family, so Camille left him in 1893 after a 10-year symbiosis of art and romance, continuing to communicate for another five years before a final break up, moving into her own studio and working feverishly, exhibiting her works at recognized art galleries.  Camille’s mental outlook, on the other hand, deteriorated, suffering from paranoid delusions, developing a persecution complex where she believed that Rodin and his supporters were plotting against her, becoming obsessed by the injustice of her mistreatment, suddenly finding herself alienated from the inner circle of artists, with Rodin taking credit for her works, she felt betrayed and persecuted by Rodin until her dying day, believing she was exploited as a woman.   

While she lived in a filthy art studio with her cats, broken sculptures, and her shutters sealed from the light, Camille remained critical of Rodin even as his fame and public prominence grew, believing Rodin wanted her voice silenced and was trying to poison her.  Her family, on the other hand, found her behavior intolerable, believing her “scandalous” actions only undermined the family’s reputation and good name, and just three days after her father died in 1913, the man who largely supported her and was her biggest defender, the family placed her in an asylum, where the perception is she was literally driven insane by the prejudice and discrimination of a male-dominated art world that was incapable of accepting a woman’s talent as equal to a man’s, where like so many other neglected women artists she was perceived as threatening.  Even today she is largely considered to be the most gifted female sculptor that ever lived, yet her accomplishments remain overshadowed by her infamous relationship with Rodin, who went on to fame and glory afterwards, apparently at her expense.  While this background history is a footnote, it is not included in the film which opens two years later in 1915 with Camille inside the Montdevergues Asylum, a Catholic run mental institution with Dumont using actual caretakers and mental patients from Saint Paul de Mausole, the institution in the south of France where Vincent Van Gogh stayed for a year in 1889 creating numerous works of art, where a similar device was utilized decades earlier by John Cassavetes in A Child Is Waiting (1963), which includes handicapped children from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California, one of the first State facilities for mentally impaired children.  In both films, professional actors are seamlessly integrated into an actual hospital setting.  The audience is immediately pulled into the noise and incoherence of the sounds of an inexplicable madness, where Binoche sits silently and plays uncomfortably off other patients.  Dumont creates an impressionist, near wordless work where sound alone is so oppressive that one instantly senses a need for relief, yet Camille is stuck in the suffocating atmosphere of endless rooms with no relief, made worse by being unheated, so one can only imagine the cold in these massive rooms where humans tend to get lost in the enormity of the empty space where time can only linger, becoming a matter of little consequence, as no one is “living” a life here, but instead exists in a state of mental paralysis.  The only way to survive in this madness is to lose one’s humanity, as you can’t allow yourself to feel the forcible oppression without being reduced to tears.  Powerlessness is everywhere, as patients can’t control their disturbing behavior, where one can’t help but be affected by it, as in this setting there is no place to escape from the surrounding madness.

Much of the first half of the film simply captures the rhythm of the daily life, where despite having the freedom to walk the grounds as she pleases, the interactions with others are mostly unpleasant, and the overwhelming feeling of boredom and endless confinement pervades every moment.  Camille, while profoundly unhappy, is not as seriously disturbed as the others and is often asked to look after some of the other patients, while it’s obvious she seeks solitary quiet and reflection every moment she can, simply overwhelmed by the unending noise and the horrifying effects of being stuck there.  When it’s announced that her brother Paul will be visiting in two days, it’s the first time we see her smile, where it gives her something to look forward to, changing the focus, as for her this moment offers a glimmer a hope.  Through the incessant unpleasantness of her confined life, it’s quite clear how important this opportunity is and Camille looks forward to being released, something even the doctors are recommending.  When we are introduced to Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent), a Christian poet, playwright, and diplomat, the point of view shifts, no longer seen through Camille’s eyes, but through diary entries and a few lengthy monologues about Christianity from the brother, an ardent believer whose beliefs border on mysticism.  While his presence is altogether bizarre, seen having dumfounding conversations alone in a room, as if conversing with his own soul, casting a dark shadow across an already dour picture, this inner narration is difficult to stomach because of the sheer fanaticism it exhibits, where the viewer is likely to be put off by the otherworldy tone of his outbursts, yet he is the rational member of the family, and the only one the family allows to have any contact with Camille.  But once he gets into a room with his sister, where the viewer is highly sensitized to the ramifications, Camille literally pleads for her life, but faraway brother Paul is unmoved and undaunted, convinced more than ever that her Godless sins have not yet found the light, that she still needs to accept God in all his crooked wisdom, not always easily ascertainable, even as she questions His existence anywhere on the premises, as what kind of God would allow people to suffer so?  It’s a cruel fate, made even crueler by the devout Christian rationale of her brother who insists she still needs time to get well, and exits unceremoniously, where imprisoning his sister is his way of saving her, reflective of the tortuous struggle for women to find a voice and a place in art history.  Twenty years later she would write, “I live in a world that is so curious, so strange.  Of the dream which was my life, this is the nightmare,” where Dumont’s portrait of doom expresses the reality of that nightmare in just three days.  Camille would spend the rest of her life (nearly 30 years) in that asylum, dying of malnutrition at age 79 during the height of WWII, where her family refused to retrieve her body, eventually buried in a communal grave.

Come and See (Idi i smotri)

Elem Klimov and his wife Larisa Shepitko









COME AND SEE (Idi i smotri)                        A-                   

Russia  (140 mi)  1985  d:  Elem Klimov

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
 
—Revelations 7-8

Both physically attractive and both filmmakers, Klimov and Larisa Shepitko were married shortly after film school where each were hailed as major new talents.  But after the post-Stalinist cultural thaw came to an end in the late 60’s, they found it increasingly difficult to find work, where there was a greater duration between films, which came under increasing scrutiny, with multiple demands for cuts and outright censorship.  When Shepitko’s film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976) won the Golden Bear 1st Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, she was on the verge of international recognition and acclaim, but unfortunately was killed in a car accident in 1979 while working on her next film (which Klimov completed), an exclamation point symbolizing the end of a remarkable generation of Soviet filmmakers.  Like Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov before him, Klimov was forced to leave the Soviet Union, spending more time battling the Soviet film authorities than making films, eventually driven away out of frustration, never making another film after COME AND SEE, which won the Moscow Festival Gold Prize Award in 1985.

Like The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), this is a painful and haunting film set during the 3-year Nazi occupation of Belarus in 1943, generally regarded as the most graphically realistic war film ever, bar none, especially vivid in depicting the atrocities of war, notable for its searing poetic intensity, which opens with an old man’s mystical declaration of impending doom, followed by a brief interlude of innocence between a young 12-year old boy and a young girl, Florya and Glasha (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova), but after a glimpse of a German bomber flying overhead, something like an angel of death, bombs drop, the earth explodes, the young boy temporarily loses his hearing and then bears witness to the horrors of war, joining the partisan resistance movement against the Nazi’s.  Adapting a screenplay by Ales Adamovich, the film plays out like a road movie taking us through the gates of Hell, given an autobiographical sense of immediacy and authenticity, where we witness the destruction of innocence by the devastation of war.

Initially the Nazi’s are nowhere to be seen, but their presence can be felt everywhere in the frequent eruptions of gunfire and in the death and destruction left in their wake.  Much of the imagery feels dreamlike or like nightmarish hallucinations, such as the slowly evolving scene where he and the girl fight their way through a muddy swamp that nearly engulfs them, the initial horror of seeing herded, starving people, his neighbors, with nowhere to go, seen almost as corpses or ghosts in a fog, as he wanders through the countryside in search of food, finding a cow, but the animal is shot and killed in the crossfire of stray bullets that appear as laser beams across an open field.  He discovers one house with all the neighboring people huddled inside, a shockingly dreadful scene of terror made even more horrible by the arrival of the Nazi’s who round up all the people in the countryside, herd them into a church, lock them inside, and then burn them alive while they feast and get drunk, even take photographs, like it’s a fully entertaining and festive occasion, the season of the sadists.  This film was produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Russian triumph over the Nazi’s, but in 1943 as the Nazi’s retreated from Ukraine and Belarus, they applied a scorched earth policy, burning 628 Belarussian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally trying to wipe these Russian people off the face of the earth, where it was impossible to view this film in 2001 and not think of the recent Serbian excursion into Kosovo.  Despite all efforts to teach and remember and learn, history repeats itself.     

A film of utter horror and confusion, the last hour of the film is truly mesmerizing and is a great cinematic exhibition, but there are also excessively agonizing moments where the director over accentuates the anguish and despair, including lingering shots of corpses in death camps and large, expressionist facial close-ups, where both Florya and Glasha’s childlike faces have evolved into grimy portraits revealing the shocking aftereffects of war, becoming brutalized masks of horror.  The images are powerful enough, but the silent over-acting depicting traumatizing moments of horror and grief only exaggerates the painstaking authenticity displayed in the earlier build up of the film.  While graphically intense, it lacks the inner psychological complexity of his wife’s film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), which examines not just the visualized outer horrors, but Shepitko uses equally searing images to reflect the insanity within.  Compare the faces of children in the two films, where Klimov dramatically shows the exterior tears and horror, while Shepitko on the other hand goes for that haunted, ghost-like look, finding poetry in the faces of the walking dead, contrasting those about to die with those forced to bear witness, where an underlying hatred seems to be spawning in the next generation.  The ending of The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), which doesn’t spare the lives of children, is literally unbearable, and is a beautiful companion to this film, which feels more like an apocalyptic wrath of God where the beasts of the earth are unleashed.   

The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye)

Larisa Shepitko with cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov








THE ASCENT (Voskhozhdeniye)                    A                    

Russia  (111 mi)  1976  d:  Larisa Shepitko

Shepitko, who died in a car accident a few years after making this film, is the wife of Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, who directed the more commercially known film Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1984), generally regarded the most graphically realistic war film ever, bar none, notable for its searing poetic intensity, but perhaps lacks the inner complexity of this even greater Russian film, arguably the best Soviet era war film ever made that examines not just the graphic outer horrors, but Shepitko finds truly inspiring images focusing on individuals or small groups of characters that reflect the absolute insanity taking place inside these human beings, the ending of which is simply awe-inspiring.  Set in Belarus, bullets are flying and bodies are dying in a gun skirmish over the opening credits, where the intensity of the film never lets up throughout the duration, focusing on grim faces, worn out soldiers with next to nothing to eat, a terrified population under occupation, starving children with petrified mothers, all cast in an immense landscape of endless white snow.  Like The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957), this features a Russian army in retreat, a traumatizing shock early in the war when they were nearly wiped out.  The Russian countryside has been overrun by German Nazi’s who are terrorizing the citizens, stealing what food they have, forcing them under duress to become their informant eyes and ears.  What Russian soldiers are left hide under cover of forests, but are forced to send food expeditions out to neighboring farms.  This film follows two soldiers that from the outset are on a near impossible mission, as there’s little food left anywhere in the dead of winter.  One is healthy and fit, Vladimir Gostyukhin as Rybak, while the other, Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov, is slowed down by a tubercular sounding cough and eventually a bullet in his leg that nearly leaves him for dead, but his partner heroically rescues him.  As they step through knee deep snow drifts, crawling at some points with insufficient protection against the harsh elements, like so many other Russian films, nature itself becomes their toughest foe.  

Everything is reduced to a matter of survival.  When they reach their destination, the farm has been demolished and left in a state of rubble, pushing forward into German occupied territory where the next farm is manned by an elderly Soviet collaborator who fears Nazi retribution.  The partisan soldiers think him a coward but move on, where they are eventually captured and brought to a Nazi camp in a nearby town and held as prisoners, along with a proud and protective mother (Lyudmila Polyakova) who helped hide them.  Tarkovsky stalwart Anatoliy Solonitsyn appears as Portnov the interrogator, a Russian teacher from a nearby academy turned Nazi sympathizer.  Russians torturing and executing fellow Russians is the depth of war depravity and Solonitsyn is brilliant in a despicable role he’s perfectly suited for.  From what we can see, as Nazi officers chat jovially in close proximity to one another, he is an outsider even among this group, seen instead as a kind of gruesome black-cloaked undertaker who routinely sends men to their graves.  The audience is not spared from witnessing acts of torture to Sotnikov, who offers nothing but contempt, while Rybak speaks freely, hoping to save his life, but both are condemned to die, though Rybak is offered a chance to serve the German Reich as a police agent.  The mother, the elderly collaborator, and a child are added to this group, spending one last night together alive where together they discuss the merits of a soldier’s mission, of being a patriot, a mother, a coward, or a collaborator.  Each seems individually driven by a desperate need to survive, but Sotnikov offers himself as a selfless example, attempting to confess his guilt to spare the others, where the aptly chosen title reflects his (and his nation’s) spiritual redemption.

By the next morning, Portnov seems mildly amused, mocking them at their sudden willingness to talk, but spares no one except Rybak, who changes sides to keep his life, rationalizing in his thoughts that if he’s alive, at least he has a chance to escape.  But there is no escape—not from this torment.  What happens is shown with exquisite delicacy and poetic grace, an elegy, a remembrance of the dead, as we witness the treachery of war without a single shot being fired, as the execution by hanging is turned into a public spectacle, where the villagers at the point of a gun are forced to witness.  The pace and harrowing interior intensity of this film is relentless, as there is never a moment without impending menace, gorgeously shot by Vladimir Chukhnov (who died in the same tragic car accident as Shepitko), featuring perfectly composed landscapes and plenty of camera movement, much of it at close range showing the visceral physicality of exhaustive effort, such as the single extended take of Rybak’s rescue of Sotnikov, breath by breath, foot by foot, literally dragging him through the snow, but also using portraitures, especially that of a fierce young boy at the end who eyes the condemned men, the next generation making a surreal sympathetic connection without any words being spoken, accentuated by the psychologically horrific music of Alfred Shnittke which resembles the transcendent yet furiously disturbing monolith music from Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968).  The sound design of this film is highly advanced and uniquely modern, where the use of offscreen sound continually exposes the raw nerves of each moment, dogs barking, wind blowing, bullets firing, nearby Nazi’s chattering in untranslated German or laughing sadistically at their helplessness, which only ratchets up the hideous tension to insane heights.  In many ways resembling Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), utter insanity is exposed here, the relentless realization that you have no choice, yet you are forced to make one anyway.  The nightmarish inner thoughts at the end are expressed wordlessly, where the nobility of the dead speaks volumes, where voices continue to reverberate inside the heads of the living like an explosion of neverending echoes, yet only silence fills the crisp wintry air with a mournful reverence and a profound sense of loss.