Chelsea the Cinéaste

  In search of what he called an “astral America” in the early 1980s, Jean Baudrillard came upon its ultimate symbol - the desert: “ Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” This initial ecstasy soon gave way to sobering contemplation - of technology, the ravages of modernity, the vacuity of the American dream, the mindless luxury of civilisation…”All societies end up wearing masks,” Baudrillard pronounces, tying his observation in with the premise of his seminal work,  Simulacra and Simulation , published just a few years back, that “artifice is at the very heart of reality.”   Baudrillard’s Delphic prose, which comprises the book  America , is echoed in the strange, banal imagery of  3 Women  (1977). The locales were Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs - arid plains where spirit decayed and hopes foundered. As is frequently the case, the drab physical landscape triggers an inverse response from the psycho...

  The war between humans and nature is endless, with the victory of one implying the defeat of both. This rather frightening truth cannot be more understated, especially in light of today’s global environmental crisis, which seems all but irreversible. The prospect of restoring the supposed equilibrium we have with the natural world has at the most an equivocal basis: has humanity ever conformed to any state of existence other than itself?   In Roberto Rossellini’s  Stromboli  (1950), the first of the Bergman-Rossellini collaboration, the contrast is made starkly clear: the outsized ego of mankind versus the impregnable, and impenetrable, all-powerfulness of Mother Nature. Bergman played Karin, a Lithuanian exile dreaming of a better life but marrying an ex-POW fisherman out of desperate need to be released from the refugee camp. Her husband takes her back to his home, the volcanic island Stromboli, where a bemused Karin is greeted by its dour-faced people - mostly e...

  The comparison of human eye to a camera is a well-worn trope in photography and cinema. In a photograph or film, the camera quite naturally stands for the artist’s gaze. As passive consumers, we do not normally question the validity of such equation: the camera’s mechanised functionality is presumed and taken for granted - it is only a tool. Another line of thought undertaken by, most prominently, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, hints at the complex roles the act of taking a photograph automatically assumes: “…the Photograph,” writes Barthes in  Camera Lucida , “is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” Every subject is an object in a photograph, and the lived moment captured and, accordingly, preserved. Time is especially a knotty matter here: it is ever-present but frozen at a particular juncture, at the past; anticipating an unestablished future, a sure course to death.   To see myself as “other”, as a stranger in a ph...

  Made at the tail end of a decade marked by the nation’s slow recovery from war and its subsequent democratisation, Mikio Naruse’s  When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) addresses a subject at once bold and timely: the travails of womanhood in a patriarchal society. Social commentary was primarily what Naruse aimed for but in place of irony and satire one finds, by turns, empathy and a dispassionate understanding of the still repressive mores of ‘50’s Tokyo. This apparent contradictory tone in a sense parallels the heroine’s central conflict in regards to financial independence and the inevitable loss of dignity and personal values that comes with it.   Keiko, lovingly called “mama” by her friends and customers, struggles to keep afloat as a bar hostess in Ginza, the locus of Tokyo’s cocktail tradition, amidst a growing shift of business trend that promotes a more accentuated fusion of alcohol and sex. Widowed from a young age, Keiko adheres to a strict moral code that ...

  Having left his sister’s family at the end of  Mon Oncle  (1958), a bittersweet coda which I take to symbolise in some way the irretrievable loss of an age of innocence, Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s beloved and bumbling alter ego, finds himself amongst other ill-adapted, increasingly mechanised denizens in a near-futuristic Paris -  Playtime  (1967), Tati’s penultimate full-length feature and arguably his best, involved a constructed set so lavish and enormous that the director was near bankrupt when he finished the film, three years after its start date. The so-called “Tativille” blends the Kafkesque with an impersonal internationalism; the scope of vision is at once grand and restrictive - there is space within a wide interior space and, as evidenced by a now canonical image of Hulot overlooking a grid of office cubicles (this anticipated by at least 20 years the dominance of such design), each inhabitant of the space seems contented and in a way codepende...

Billy Wilder, by way of dubious compliment, says of the master of early humane comedy: “Ernst Lubitsch, who could do more with a closed door than most of today’s directors can do with an open fly, would have had big problems in this market.” [i] The time was 1975 and Wilder’s observation betrays his concealed repugnance at the contemporary film scene. As is natural to the law of history, the past decays and whatever that has been salvaged from complete obliteration is bound to seem a little peculiar to the posterity. Wilder in the 1970s was coming to terms - although not without certain resentment - with the expected depletion of creative ideas brought on by old age and a growing sense of alienation from the prevailing cultural climate. Lubitsch, on the other hand, had his name and legacy established but his films in a steady process of obsolescence.  There is a misplaced tendency nowadays to view those films, which enjoy a resurgence of interest, as lighthearted and slightly whims...