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Finding the way home - Faces 1.1
by: daniele
(the following lines are far from being a well-shaped and rigorous reflection, they’re rather a carnet of scattered notes, the nucleus for a discussion, and this is how they should be taken)
When Deleuze says:
“This is what Cassavetes was already saying in Shadows and then Faces; what constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself in people rather than in the film, in the human problems more than in the problems of the mise en scene; so that people do not pass over to the side of the camera without the camera having passed to the side of the people” (Deleuze, Cinema 2; p.149)
the philosopher shows a great profundity in understanding Cassavetes’ cinema.
When Cassavetes says:
“People patrol certain streets, patrol their house, and they know their way home. You somehow, drunk or sober or any other way, always find your way back to where you live. And when you cease to know the way home, things go wrong. And then you get detoured. And when you can’t find your way home, that’s when I consider it’s worth it to make a film” (R.Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes; p.161)
the director is putting forward the whole intensity of his mature work, something that Deleuze had not fail to understand.
Deleuze saw how Cassavetes was one of those directors walking the thin line, the frontier between reality and fiction, bringing the cinematographic image to a point where what is at stake is not fiction or reality, but the frontier itself, its continuous crossing (a sort of double-crossing), both fiction and reality and all the possible combinations between the two. Deleuze’s analysis already consumes, to the point of exhausting them, the plethora of critics interpreting Cassavates’ work mainly in terms of its improvisational quality.
What Cassavetes said and restated throughout his career is that cinema is all about taking the risk of tickling the ‘right distance’. Deleuze saw that what makes Cassavetes a great director is his ability to create an ‘indirect discourse operating in reality’, pushing further the powers of the false. The philosopher saw that the director was concerned with getting to people, to others (or even, in a formula, probably not far from Deleuze’s: getting to people as the other of cinema, although this other is not in any way beyond cinema, rather its very evidence). (another consideration on the side drives me to this quotation: ‘Cinema shares the intensity of a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel’; to be reconsidered elsewhere).
On how people joined in
There are two ways in which, in my opinion, Cassavetes accomplished his plans: making movies on people who cease to know their way home, making movies with people. The first one passes through the analysis that Deleuze devoted to him, the second one is far more radical and somehow might also be interpreted as an exacerbation of the manners Deleuze highlighted. Before we can find our way into Deleuze’s analysis, a first detour is needed here. Although this is not the site for technical remarks, in order to do justice to the director we should mention here a few characteristics of his directing style. This was very much forged around a feeble presence behind the camera, balanced by a strong presence in front of it; we should not forget that he was primarily an actor and that he responded to actors (to people) rather than to photography (mise en scéne). In other words Cassavetes was a director of latitudinal instructions, one who would fade out rather than impose a reading.
With Deleuze we could say that Cassavetes maintained his promises by interpreting cinema mainly as a cinema of body. Cassavetes would approach the cinematic by undoing the plot and exposing characters to the experience of the camera. This means that characters would not present themselves through the internal consistency implicit in or delivered to the plot, quite the contrary they would come to the screen by opposing themselves to the birth of the image. In Cassavetes characters are constraints, barriers placed in front of the camera, turning the camera movements upside down, or even moving the camera in an uneven way (another necessary remark: most of Cassavetes movies were shot with handheld cameras, in Faces it was an Arriflex). The confusion a movie like Faces might create depends exactly on this. The character must struggle with the story and with the presence of the camera to get there, to see his birth on the screen. Once dialogue and situations migrate from the script to the screen, what takes place is an operation of undoing, as if the script was banging into bodies, it literally stops flowing, it stops ‘behaving himself’, but let bodies coil it (example: Gus love night in Husbands, Mabel struggle with the doctor and Nick in A woman under the influence). In Cassavetes we always start with nothing, that is to say we start with a complex set of exposures, but we have no time and no spaces, no characters, we have bodies exposing one another: “cinema of bodies: the characters is reduced to his own bodily attitudes” (Deleuze, Cinema 2; p.185). This development in Cassavetes takes place beyond any role as if he wanted to restate once again a tendency to get people behind the camera: ‘I only know people who are terrific one minute and absolutely bastards the next’.
Having traced back Cassavetes’s strategy to Deleuze’s analysis doesn’t conclude our discussion, as we have left open the question relating to the second strategy, the second entrance as it were into that demand Cassavetes expressed, making a cinema on people. The point to be made here relates to something peculiar to one film, Faces, while at the same time it broadens its scope towards a larger point, that is how the presences on the cinematic screen trigger a particular kind of relation.
We should not forget our initial remark: Cassavetes’s aim was to make movies on people, on people who cease to find their way home (on how this happens it would take another kind of reflection). Cinema of bodies, but also a cinema with people.
Although Deleuze, as we have seen, spends a consistent amount of pages on Cassavetes in Cinema 2, there’s no mention of the American director in the well - known study of the close-up. For the sake of clarity we would need here to retrace again the steps of this analysis. Deleuze, quoting Eisentein, defines the close-up as ‘the face’. The face acts on two poles, as reflecting surface/quality and intensive series/power, although the two poles do not occur by closing out one another, preventing the other from appearing, they always realize themselves by letting open a possibility. When Deleuze is reflecting on ‘the face’ he is not concerned solely with the human visage, but with any image that bears these two poles: “each time we discover these two poles in something […] we can say that this thing has been treated as a face” (Deleuze, Cinema 1; p.90). Opposing to the idea of the close-up as the upsurge of the partial object, Deleuze turns to Balász to say that the close-up ‘abstracts it [an object] from all its spatial-temporal co-ordinates. That is to say, it raises it to the state of an Entity” (Deleuze, Cinema 1; p.98). What is more, the close-up allows us to abandon the three ordinary roles of the face: individuating, socializing, and communicating. “The close-up has merely pushed the face to those areas where the principle of identification ceases to hold sway […] The close-up suspends individuation”. (Deleuze, Cinema 1; p.102).
Deleuze names Bergman has the director who had it done with the face: “Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest”.
The philosopher this time doesn’t mention the director we are concerned with here.
I believe there is a reason for that. Cassavetes operates a very different gesture with regard to the close up; he does erase the face (or objects standing for a face) but not just to have it done with identification, rather to add a condition, a co-essential condition to it, to any identification, both that of a face and that of the image capturing it and captured by it.
Faces is a film where the close-up is used to the point of violence, that is to the point where somehow makes violence to the whole film. In the next lines I will try to explore why it is from this that an analysis of Faces should start, while at the same time formulate from these initial (and confused) notes a few suggestions on how the cinema is concerned with people, not as its beyond but as its innermost outside.
a) As Bergman, Cassavetes erases the face. He does so in that, surpassing the face as entity, surpassing the poles of quality/powers, he places it there where it shouldn’t be; there where everything else should be, where all the others should be, but do not fit into the frame. Saying that doesn’t amount at affirming the face as a bearer, an icon, as if it was a sort of visual synopsis, a herald or promise, but exactly to take it as that which testifies for the dispersion of the evidence, that which goes as far as saying: there’s no film here, rather the dispersed presence of a limit on which the camera starts playing. Faces is a film of dispersed presences, who, perversely, find their peak of dispersion in the play of close ups. The close up is constantly trapped in this leap towards an outside of itself as if it was there to declare its impossibility, the impossibility of recollecting in itself any meaningful statement.
b) The faces in Faces do not just suspend individuation; they trigger the circulation of sense within the film. At least in two ways: the sense of the film as situations rendered by a sending rather than by a meaningful closure; the sense of the film as materiality and technique on and through which situations make sense. These two points explain one another, or better no attention can be drawn on one without paying also a price to the other. In other words, Faces is a film where none is allowed to stay alone; conditions, locations and positions open into absences. Close-ups link one presence to another; they do not lead anywhere as they are there to underline the importance of what the spectators cannot see. Returning for a moment to Deleuze we might say that not just faces but every object is de-faceifeid. Close-ups show what is beyond their reach.
c) Cassavetes managed to put in the close up the openness of a long shot (plan américain) by accumulating one close-up after the other. Once the face appears, it appears as the excluded and the intruder at the same time. Close-ups serve to allow the characters to stay together and to prevent one character to stand out, to be singled out. Therefore what is at stake in Cassavetes’ use of close–ups is the impossibility of affirming the face as this always come as the presence of what lays outside the frame.
d) Cassavetes’ close-ups work towards establishing a mode of relation without relation, a model where what is at stake is a coming of the relation without this having to be announced. The face becomes the origin making visible all that is outside the frame, invisible. In this resides also the great vulnerability of the faces of the film.
Two examples
1.10.32 – John Marley and Gena Rowlands are dancing. The camera stands still while they spin; what we see is an alternate close-up; a constant twisting that, while avoids the structure of the shot-reverse-shot brings the two together in a fashion that erases the faces and leave us with the exposure of one to the other. The moment we see Rowlands is the moment where we realize the presence of Marley and viceversa.
1.24.35 – we are now at Maria Frost’s house. Florence is dancing with Seymour Cassel. The camera zooms her face. The close-up in fact seems to include the women sitting on the sofa more than her, Florence’s face seems just to express that no space is left to her if this space is not shared out with the others. The one in the close-up is not the centre of attention.
A further reflection should probably start by paying attention to the fact that “the capturing of images in a film captures nothing if it is not to let it go free again. The framing, the light, the length of a take, the camera’s movement contribute to free a motion, which is that of a presence in the process of making itself present”
Posted on: Tuesday November 27 2007 ______________________________________
________________________________
Finding the way home - Faces 1.1
by: daniele
(the following lines are far from being a well-shaped and rigorous reflection, they’re rather a carnet of scattered notes, the nucleus for a discussion, and this is how they should be taken)
When Deleuze says:
“This is what Cassavetes was already saying in Shadows and then Faces; what constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself in people rather than in the film, in the human problems more than in the problems of the mise en scene; so that people do not pass over to the side of the camera without the camera having passed to the side of the people” (Deleuze, Cinema 2; p.149)
the philosopher shows a great profundity in understanding Cassavetes’ cinema.
When Cassavetes says:
“People patrol certain streets, patrol their house, and they know their way home. You somehow, drunk or sober or any other way, always find your way back to where you live. And when you cease to know the way home, things go wrong. And then you get detoured. And when you can’t find your way home, that’s when I consider it’s worth it to make a film” (R.Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes; p.161)
the director is putting forward the whole intensity of his mature work, something that Deleuze had not fail to understand.
Deleuze saw how Cassavetes was one of those directors walking the thin line, the frontier between reality and fiction, bringing the cinematographic image to a point where what is at stake is not fiction or reality, but the frontier itself, its continuous crossing (a sort of double-crossing), both fiction and reality and all the possible combinations between the two. Deleuze’s analysis already consumes, to the point of exhausting them, the plethora of critics interpreting Cassavates’ work mainly in terms of its improvisational quality.
What Cassavetes said and restated throughout his career is that cinema is all about taking the risk of tickling the ‘right distance’. Deleuze saw that what makes Cassavetes a great director is his ability to create an ‘indirect discourse operating in reality’, pushing further the powers of the false. The philosopher saw that the director was concerned with getting to people, to others (or even, in a formula, probably not far from Deleuze’s: getting to people as the other of cinema, although this other is not in any way beyond cinema, rather its very evidence). (another consideration on the side drives me to this quotation: ‘Cinema shares the intensity of a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel’; to be reconsidered elsewhere).
On how people joined in
There are two ways in which, in my opinion, Cassavetes accomplished his plans: making movies on people who cease to know their way home, making movies with people. The first one passes through the analysis that Deleuze devoted to him, the second one is far more radical and somehow might also be interpreted as an exacerbation of the manners Deleuze highlighted. Before we can find our way into Deleuze’s analysis, a first detour is needed here. Although this is not the site for technical remarks, in order to do justice to the director we should mention here a few characteristics of his directing style. This was very much forged around a feeble presence behind the camera, balanced by a strong presence in front of it; we should not forget that he was primarily an actor and that he responded to actors (to people) rather than to photography (mise en scéne). In other words Cassavetes was a director of latitudinal instructions, one who would fade out rather than impose a reading.
With Deleuze we could say that Cassavetes maintained his promises by interpreting cinema mainly as a cinema of body. Cassavetes would approach the cinematic by undoing the plot and exposing characters to the experience of the camera. This means that characters would not present themselves through the internal consistency implicit in or delivered to the plot, quite the contrary they would come to the screen by opposing themselves to the birth of the image. In Cassavetes characters are constraints, barriers placed in front of the camera, turning the camera movements upside down, or even moving the camera in an uneven way (another necessary remark: most of Cassavetes movies were shot with handheld cameras, in Faces it was an Arriflex). The confusion a movie like Faces might create depends exactly on this. The character must struggle with the story and with the presence of the camera to get there, to see his birth on the screen. Once dialogue and situations migrate from the script to the screen, what takes place is an operation of undoing, as if the script was banging into bodies, it literally stops flowing, it stops ‘behaving himself’, but let bodies coil it (example: Gus love night in Husbands, Mabel struggle with the doctor and Nick in A woman under the influence). In Cassavetes we always start with nothing, that is to say we start with a complex set of exposures, but we have no time and no spaces, no characters, we have bodies exposing one another: “cinema of bodies: the characters is reduced to his own bodily attitudes” (Deleuze, Cinema 2; p.185). This development in Cassavetes takes place beyond any role as if he wanted to restate once again a tendency to get people behind the camera: ‘I only know people who are terrific one minute and absolutely bastards the next’.
Having traced back Cassavetes’s strategy to Deleuze’s analysis doesn’t conclude our discussion, as we have left open the question relating to the second strategy, the second entrance as it were into that demand Cassavetes expressed, making a cinema on people. The point to be made here relates to something peculiar to one film, Faces, while at the same time it broadens its scope towards a larger point, that is how the presences on the cinematic screen trigger a particular kind of relation.
We should not forget our initial remark: Cassavetes’s aim was to make movies on people, on people who cease to find their way home (on how this happens it would take another kind of reflection). Cinema of bodies, but also a cinema with people.
Although Deleuze, as we have seen, spends a consistent amount of pages on Cassavetes in Cinema 2, there’s no mention of the American director in the well - known study of the close-up. For the sake of clarity we would need here to retrace again the steps of this analysis. Deleuze, quoting Eisentein, defines the close-up as ‘the face’. The face acts on two poles, as reflecting surface/quality and intensive series/power, although the two poles do not occur by closing out one another, preventing the other from appearing, they always realize themselves by letting open a possibility. When Deleuze is reflecting on ‘the face’ he is not concerned solely with the human visage, but with any image that bears these two poles: “each time we discover these two poles in something […] we can say that this thing has been treated as a face” (Deleuze, Cinema 1; p.90). Opposing to the idea of the close-up as the upsurge of the partial object, Deleuze turns to Balász to say that the close-up ‘abstracts it [an object] from all its spatial-temporal co-ordinates. That is to say, it raises it to the state of an Entity” (Deleuze, Cinema 1; p.98). What is more, the close-up allows us to abandon the three ordinary roles of the face: individuating, socializing, and communicating. “The close-up has merely pushed the face to those areas where the principle of identification ceases to hold sway […] The close-up suspends individuation”. (Deleuze, Cinema 1; p.102).
Deleuze names Bergman has the director who had it done with the face: “Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest”.
The philosopher this time doesn’t mention the director we are concerned with here.
I believe there is a reason for that. Cassavetes operates a very different gesture with regard to the close up; he does erase the face (or objects standing for a face) but not just to have it done with identification, rather to add a condition, a co-essential condition to it, to any identification, both that of a face and that of the image capturing it and captured by it.
Faces is a film where the close-up is used to the point of violence, that is to the point where somehow makes violence to the whole film. In the next lines I will try to explore why it is from this that an analysis of Faces should start, while at the same time formulate from these initial (and confused) notes a few suggestions on how the cinema is concerned with people, not as its beyond but as its innermost outside.
a) As Bergman, Cassavetes erases the face. He does so in that, surpassing the face as entity, surpassing the poles of quality/powers, he places it there where it shouldn’t be; there where everything else should be, where all the others should be, but do not fit into the frame. Saying that doesn’t amount at affirming the face as a bearer, an icon, as if it was a sort of visual synopsis, a herald or promise, but exactly to take it as that which testifies for the dispersion of the evidence, that which goes as far as saying: there’s no film here, rather the dispersed presence of a limit on which the camera starts playing. Faces is a film of dispersed presences, who, perversely, find their peak of dispersion in the play of close ups. The close up is constantly trapped in this leap towards an outside of itself as if it was there to declare its impossibility, the impossibility of recollecting in itself any meaningful statement.
b) The faces in Faces do not just suspend individuation; they trigger the circulation of sense within the film. At least in two ways: the sense of the film as situations rendered by a sending rather than by a meaningful closure; the sense of the film as materiality and technique on and through which situations make sense. These two points explain one another, or better no attention can be drawn on one without paying also a price to the other. In other words, Faces is a film where none is allowed to stay alone; conditions, locations and positions open into absences. Close-ups link one presence to another; they do not lead anywhere as they are there to underline the importance of what the spectators cannot see. Returning for a moment to Deleuze we might say that not just faces but every object is de-faceifeid. Close-ups show what is beyond their reach.
c) Cassavetes managed to put in the close up the openness of a long shot (plan américain) by accumulating one close-up after the other. Once the face appears, it appears as the excluded and the intruder at the same time. Close-ups serve to allow the characters to stay together and to prevent one character to stand out, to be singled out. Therefore what is at stake in Cassavetes’ use of close–ups is the impossibility of affirming the face as this always come as the presence of what lays outside the frame.
d) Cassavetes’ close-ups work towards establishing a mode of relation without relation, a model where what is at stake is a coming of the relation without this having to be announced. The face becomes the origin making visible all that is outside the frame, invisible. In this resides also the great vulnerability of the faces of the film.
Two examples
1.10.32 – John Marley and Gena Rowlands are dancing. The camera stands still while they spin; what we see is an alternate close-up; a constant twisting that, while avoids the structure of the shot-reverse-shot brings the two together in a fashion that erases the faces and leave us with the exposure of one to the other. The moment we see Rowlands is the moment where we realize the presence of Marley and viceversa.
1.24.35 – we are now at Maria Frost’s house. Florence is dancing with Seymour Cassel. The camera zooms her face. The close-up in fact seems to include the women sitting on the sofa more than her, Florence’s face seems just to express that no space is left to her if this space is not shared out with the others. The one in the close-up is not the centre of attention.
A further reflection should probably start by paying attention to the fact that “the capturing of images in a film captures nothing if it is not to let it go free again. The framing, the light, the length of a take, the camera’s movement contribute to free a motion, which is that of a presence in the process of making itself present”
Posted on: Tuesday November 27 2007 ______________________________________
________________________________
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London SE14 6NW, UK Tel. +44 (0)20 7919 7774 | E-mail inc@gold.ac.uk