Consolations in Isolation
Shane Danielsen on cinema without cinemas
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times.
— Bertolt Brecht, “Motto” from Svendborg Poems
Chances are, you don’t care very much about movies right now. I can’t say I blame you. My father died two months ago, about 11 days before the world began tipping into chaos, and my mother spent the following five and a half weeks in hospital, slowly receding from a life whose terms she no longer appeared willing to accept. And in the anguish and uncertainty of those weeks, I found myself thinking hard about what people call “the consolations of art”, and whether this might in fact mean anything beyond an elegant turn of phrase.
Artists, of course, will swear that it does. Right now our newspapers – accessed online, like so much else – are filled with helpful and presumably encouraging dispatches from the creative sector, meditations in the present emergency. “Antony Gormley and Grayson
Perry help design the ‘ultimate artists’ activity pack’,” ran the headline of one recent Guardian feature, a 700word piece detailing its “creative ideas for the coronavirus lockdown”. (“Jeremy Deller suggests we write songs about toilet roll” … Not quite Eno’s Oblique Strategies, is it?) Patrick Stewart has been reading a Shakespeare sonnet a day on social media. Billie Eilish performed an acoustic set from her couch. Which is nice of them, I guess. But at the end of the day, the world’s still in lockdown. And my dad’s still dead.
Twitter and Instagram feeds, meanwhile, are alight with a new strain of virtue signalling: a kind of performative erudition. The classic movies we’ve been watching or revisiting, the great novels we’ve finally read. The poems or songs that have sustained us in our isolation. Yes, people are shouting, I hoard toilet paper … but I also have a rich interior life! Theatres are streaming past productions; museums have thrown open their virtual gates. One can visit the website of the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Prado, and gaze for free at a beautiful thing, and perhaps forget, at least for a few seconds, the
ceaseless flow of statistics and projections, what may or may not be happening in India, the incredible, thundering idiocy of Donald Trump.
Perhaps.
This month, with the cinemas closed and social distancing in force, I’ll write about two films – one of which you may have seen by now, and another you almost certainly have not. One is good and one is great; both are available to stream in Australian homes.
Neither, however, is especially consoling – neither was fashioned for that purpose. But they might distract you for a while, might hold your attention for as long as they last. And that’s probably as much as we can hope for right now.
Much has been written about the heavy toll COVID19 will exert upon the poorest and the most vulnerable communities – and rightly so. We’re at a fracture point, and many of the truths we accepted, either blindly or as a matter of convenience, are being revealed as inadequate or simply false. Yet we should also pause to acknowledge the few beneficiaries of this crisis, and I really don’t think there’s been a director in history quite as lucky as Spain’s Galder Gaztelu-urrutia, whose debut feature The Platform has become a Netflix sensation nearly as ubiquitous as the true-crime series Tiger King.
A low-budget horror-thriller, The Platform premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September in the Midnight Madness section, where it earned a handful of admiring reviews – mostly from genre websites – before being acquired by the streamer. From there, it might easily have languished in the algorithmical void, yet another tile in a “Movies to Scare You” list. But with much of the world confined to their living rooms, it instead became that unlikeliest of things: the perfect distillation of its historical moment.
To earn some kind of diploma (the details remain vague), Goreng (Ivan Massagué) volunteers to enter “The Pit”, a vast, vertical prison facility that houses just two inmates on each of its 200-plus levels. In the centre of each cell is a rectangular hole, into which a platform descends daily, like a dumbwaiter, filled with freshly prepared food. Those on the top level have their pick of the feast, what they leave goes to the second level, and so on, and so on. If each level took just enough to sustain them, there’d be enough for everyone – but of course, society doesn’t work that way. And to complicate matters further, every 30 days the prisoners are relocated, seemingly at random, to a new floor, either higher or lower on the food chain than before. A blunt-force allegory of capitalism, the film proceeds bloodily and amusingly until the moment, about an hour in, when it abruptly shifts gears, to become an equally grim satire of revolutionary socialism. Which, for me, was the moment it became truly interesting.
Not quite as original as you might think (its central conceit borrows heavily from Denis Villeneuve’s 2008 short Next Floor), and hobbled by a weak-tea ending, The Platform nonetheless mostly satisfies, not least for its Brutalist production design, a concrete and neon dystopia worthy of Ernő Goldfinger. Its depiction of enforced confinement, its fascination with scarcity and deliberate cruelty – all of it seems precision-built for RIGHT FUCKING NOW; you’d almost suspect it had been created by algorithm itself. Yet watching it, I felt that these details might be less important, somehow, than the circumstances of its distribution. A bona fide global hit, it seems to me less a reflection of its moment than a harbinger of something to come: a cinema that forgoes actual cinemas. Its audience decentralised, its lifespan viral and momentary.
If this proves true, it’s going to require a major recalibration on the part of the studios. In future, only a handful of flagship titles may command blockbuster budgets, since the returns will inevitably be lower: streaming-led revenue models can’t support too many Avengers: Endgames. And while on one hand this is the economic rupture a sclerotic film industry deserves – a longoverdue levelling of the pitch, a movement away from spectacle and back to story – on the other it’s assumed to mark the death of something: a shared communal experience of cinema.
But does it? Art – the experience of art – is essential to humans; that much is clear. But how much of that experience is genuinely collective, in the same way as is, say, going to the football? For me, art has always been a singular pursuit, and filmgoing most of all. Part of that, of course, comes down to the particular experience of watching a movie in a cinema – sitting in darkness among strangers, removed from your surroundings and even your awareness of yourself (assuming, that is, that the film is doing its job). But part of it is also about how, as our viewing choices proliferate, our choices inevitably isolate us from one another.
the other film i want to recommend is exactly the kind of thing streaming services are made for: a chance to stumble upon something excellent but unheralded, which went almost unnoticed upon release. Made in 2014, Free in Deed (SBS on Demand) is a small movie, but a remarkable one, a study of faith and obsession almost as crushing as Bergman’s Winter Light.
Its writer-director, Jake Mahaffy, is an interesting and oddly overlooked filmmaker. I programmed his debut feature, War (2004), with pride when I was at Edinburgh. A black-and-white indie made more or less singlehandedly, shot with a hand-cranked camera, it followed the separate journeys of four men through rural Pennsylvania, and reminded me of the Maysles brothers’ great 1969 documentary Salesman, if it had been remade
With much of the world confined to their living rooms, ‘The Platform’ became that unlikeliest of things: the perfect distillation of its historical moment.
in the wake of some vast and unnamed catastrophe. (Per the filmmaker’s website: “This is the world after the end of a world … the remnants and the present decline of an America which nothing will replace.”)
Mahaffy seems as much an anthropologist as a storyteller, and for Free in Deed, his third film, he immersed himself in the African-american Pentecostal community of Memphis, Tennessee. A janitor by day, silent and solemn, Abe (David Harewood) spends most of his nights in a storefront church, praying for a salvation of which he clearly believes himself unworthy. (He alludes, at one point, to various misdeeds in his past, sins for which he must atone.) It’s there he meets Melva (Edwina Findley Dickerson), a single mother exhausted by the demands of her autistic son, Benny, whose locked-in demeanour frequently explodes in bouts of extreme, mostly self-harming violence.
A tentative bond forms between the couple, as much mutually supportive as romantic. But Abe begins to believe something else: that his faith might somehow hold the key to Benny’s affliction, and that, by “curing” him, he might also redeem himself. And so he begins praying over the child, a cause soon taken up by others at the church. But laid out on the floor of the chapel surrounded by chanting congregants, thrashing wildly as Abe holds him down, Benny begins to look more like a sacrifice than a cherished son.
For an atheist like myself, this all makes about as much sense as voodoo, or the Kaparot. Yet Mahaffy also takes care to show how secular institutions fail people like Melva and Benny every day – from the health authority worker who shuts down a badly needed soup kitchen because its papers were incorrectly filed, to the various doctors and teachers and social workers too overwhelmed to give the ailing child the attention and care he requires. In such a pitiless world, who can blame these luckless people for turning to something vaster and more mysterious? But the Lord, of course, remains silent.
That it’s based on actual events only amplifies its power. Mahaffy captures the action in fragments: closeups of praying hands and swaying bodies, elliptical and occasionally oblique spaces in the narrative. But this elevated style is anchored by the concrete realities of the setting – every location feels gritty and lived in, every detail keenly observed – and by the extraordinary finegrained performances of its cast. Dickerson is remarkable as the boy’s mother, finding flashes of tenderness as well as heartbreak in her character, and so tightly does Harewood constrict Abe’s physicality, it seems he might snap in two. This is precisely the kind of work that should earn Academy Award nominations, but never does. (That these films never even enter the “awards discussion” for me only encapsulates the pony-show irrelevance of the Oscars.)
Most astonishing of all, though, is Rajay Chandler as Benny, who inhabits a difficult role with incredible, unwavering conviction. It is, to date, his sole screen credit.
I tried to watch the film again for the purpose of this review, but a little over halfway through my attention faltered, and grief and hopelessness flooded back in. If I’m honest, movies just aren’t doing it for me right now. The night I brought my father’s ashes home, sitting alone in my parents’ apartment, I tried to watch Valerio Zurlini’s Le soldatesse (1965), mostly because I’d been listening that afternoon to an album by Marie Laforêt, who stars in it. But her songs hadn’t consoled me and neither did the film, with its bleak depiction of World War Two privation and lovers finding each other amid adversity, only to be parted forever.
With me here is a hard drive I gave my dad a few years ago, of movies he loved and some others that I thought he’d like: Anthony Mann’s The Furies, Fabián Bielinsky’s El aura … Maybe I’ll watch some of them sometime. But not yet.
Instead, I find myself returning to a link forwarded by a friend in London: the pianist Angela Hewitt playing J.S. Bach’s “Little Prelude in D minor, BWV940”, in her words, “a beautiful gem with many problems waiting to be solved”. Little indeed, at just 10 bars, it has consistently reassured me in these past weeks. The architecture of it. More than the films I can’t concentrate on, or the books I try and fail to finish, it seems capable of something approaching actual consolation: I close my eyes and listen, lost in a minute’s worth of beauty, and imagine one day arriving, after the overwhelming difficulty of this moment, at a resolution almost as satisfying.
M