Chelsea the Cinéaste

  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...

  In general, screwball comedies epitomise Bergson’s definition of the comical: a certain “materiality that succeeds in fixing the movement of the soul”, that is opposed to grace and manifestly out of sync with the prevailing order of society and the normal functioning of human body. A typical example for this is the slipping on a banana peel, which occasions a disturbance of a flexible and continuous body movement and its harmony with the environment. Once repeated, this incidental moment of hilarity persists, but insofar as its oddity comes to be asserted as the new order, the laughter may more or less cease. It is thus an imperative with screwball comedy to negotiate and maintain a balance between surprise and repetition, although, admittedly, in terms of the genre’s distinction from other forms of comedy, what makes its “screwball” is also its capacity for and inclination towards overemphatic effects, which are less calculated to elicit laughter than to censure or survey the ab...

According to Albert Camus, rebels are not egotistical individuals. For an act of rebellion to succeed, suffering must be seen as a collective experience. The dictum, whatever its words, is invariably along the line of “I rebel – therefore  we  exist.” Any occasional indulgence in individual self-interest would derail the movement from its primary motivations, which comprise, above all, a resolute denial of superior authority and a dogged pursuit of the common good. For a rebel, his final choices inevitably boil down to either “All” or “Nothing” – all of his appeals answered and sufficiently taken care of, or to concede defeat, which means, in many cases, death: “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knee.” The Rebel  was published in 1951, a seminal essay that heralded the upcoming “age of revolt”, which, as history shows, has soon evolved into a subculture of its own. A growing interest in challenging the entrenched, antediluvian societal values and ...