Cinema's Recounting of the Ordinary. (Book Review).

Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film By Andrew Klevan

Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000

Aptly enough, it is in his entry on Douglas Sirk that David Thomson waxes poetic on the connection between the descriptive qualities of melodrama and the experience of cinema. From his Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994) he writes:

Cinema-as an entertainment, an art form, an academic topic, or an institution-is addicted to melodrama. What greater contrast of chiaroscuro is there between burning screen and darkened audience? ... What medium is so dependent on sensation, with the screen so much larger than life and the constant threat that in a fraction of a second the image we are watching can change so unimaginably? And what are the abiding themes of cinema but glamour, sexuality, fear, horror, danger, violence, suspense, averted danger, true love, self-sacrifice, happy endings, and the wholesale realization of those hopes and anxieties that we are too shy to talk about in daylight? Why is it dark in cinemas? So that the compulsive force of our involvement may be hidden.

Strange though it might seem for a scholar focused on films committed to the ordinary, Andrew Klevan would only concur with Thomson. But by following Stanley Cavell's premise that film's characteristic melodramatic mode reflects modern society's struggle with the burden of skepticism, he is able in Disclosure of the Everyday to launch into a horizon-setting analysis of film style by exploring cinema's capacities for the undramatic.

The line of skepticism in Western metaphysics, beginning with Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and involving major interventions from Kant, Emerson and Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell himself, posits the condition of a subjectivity made isolated after having been stripped of the Eternal Verities once supplied by religion and state ideologies. Falling back on nothing but its own existence, the self frantically seeks proofs of connection in which to feel and understand the world. (To make matters more desperate even the self's existence is doubted.) A question like "How can I make myself known to another?" acquires vital meaning, for example, in the conversation of marriage. Without common objective points outside of the self the basis for matrimony, at the very least, becomes deeply problematic.

Yet rather than avoiding the gap that exists between the self and the world, Cavell builds on Thoreau's notion of "neighboring the world." Shunning the attempt to lift the burden of skepticism by offering further proofs, he calls instead for forms of acknowledgment in relation to the world which respect autonomy without denying connection. (Surrendering to the skeptical burden--that is, refraining from such acknowledgement in the obsessive quest for certainty--forms a major theme in modern tragedy ranging from Shakespeare's Othello to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo [1958, US].) And, like a Zen practitioner scorning any movement toward transcendence (the "odor of abstraction" as D. T. Suzuki put it), Klevan chimes: "To acknowledge and live with skepticism means not craving for something out of this world to satisfy our sense of the world, our touch with the world; instead, we must seek what is not out of the ordinary." (p. 22) It is this way, according to Cavell, that the experience of cinema, like that of skepti cism and melodrama, makes "displacement appear as our natural condition."

Departing from what Adrian Martin (quoted in Klevan) deliciously calls established film scholarship's "gothic orientation" with its "eyeball subjectivity" (where individualized states of heightened feeling like fear or desire reign in genres like film noir, melodrama, and romance), Klvan analyzes four films which thoroughly forgo, in subject matter and technique, the temptation to melodrama. He states, "I take this study to be concerned with illuminating those disclosures [of the everyday] and the manner of their disclosing, discovering in the process the possibilities both for the cinema outside melodrama and for cinema to satisfy our cravings to reconnect with the world." (p. 30) The films selected are: Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un cure de campagne, Robert Bresson, 1950, France), Loves of a Blonde/A Blonde in Love (Lasky jedne plavovldsky, Milo. Forman, 1965, Czechoslovakia), Late Spring (Banshun, Ozu Yasujiro, 1949, Japan), and A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps, Eric Rohmer, 1989, France ).

Before analyzing these films, he looks at a representative moment, aspect, or scene from a half dozen other movies which, however "naturalistic" or "realistic" they might appear, are nonetheless organized around events or crisis. For instance, Klevan reveals Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955, India) to employ a use of soundtrack that conceives of life as a series of ruptures and crescendos, Bill Douglas's My Childhood (1972, GB) to pitch a treatment of poverty that gives undue weight to familiar objects like a cheap teacup, and Roberto Rossellini's Paisa (1946, Italy) to adopt stylistic contrasts of lighting even as it nixes overt artificial illumination. These examples allow him to define further his sense of the ordinary, selecting films which disclose, to use Heidegger's wonderful phrase, the "worldhood of the world." Rejecting views that romanticize the ordinary, he contends that "we must embark on a quest to find fascination in the parts of the world we share (not parts we create privately), even tho ugh it is exactly those shared things that might appear boring because of their obviousness and repetition--indeed, because they occur each and every day." (p. 23) Toward this end, he sees in a kitchen scene in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D (1952, Italy) and, better still, in Vermeer's "Woman Pouring Milk" (1658-60) occasions in art where the world is allowed to impart itself through the precise, unemphatic composition of everyday objects, set within everyday situations.

Now on to the main films. Eschewing a theological consideration of Diary of a Country Priest, Klevan analyzes the skillful diffusion of its inherently melodramatic story. For him, the film's rendering of the priest's relationship to the diary is emblematic of its understanding of the everyday: "The diary encapsulates the reticent nature of the priest's sensibility; it is not exploited to provide a more florid, vivid or verbose version of events. The diary's utilization is not to enhance the narrative with rhetoric; its prosaic language refuses to enrich the story." (p. 73) For Loves of a Blonde he not only explores film's possibilities for expressing the visually unexciting states of boredom and waiting, but how humdrum characters can be made interesting. And like the unknown women played by Greta Garbo or Bette Davis detailed in Cavell's work, he finds in Andula, its heroine, a fellow sister but with debilitating differences: "a character who repeatedly undermines drama because she so effortlessly slides in to self-deception while having so little capacity for self-promotion." (p. 126)

In Late Spring he finds in its style a significance that accrues obliquely through patterns of domestic routine and character-associated gestures and objects. He also recognizes in it the moving picture's capacity for stillness. Both aspects come together, for example, in the use of static cutaway shots which occur throughout the narrative. Rather than seeing them as sites of transcendence (Paul Schrader), traditional "pillow shots" (Noel Burch), or avant-garde defamiliarizing devices (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson), Klevan argues for their integration within a fuller consideration of the film's visual field. Finally in A Tale of Springtime, he sees in its framework of deceptions a deliberate resistance to criminalizing seduction and intrigue. Featuring a missing necklace that functions as a "MacGuffin" (an object which only serves as the ostensible catalyst for a plot), Klevan contrasts Jeanne and Natasha's friendship with that of Guy and Bruno's in Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951, US). But unli ke the sinister lurking beneath the ordinary that characterizes Hitchcock's cinema, here the revelation of truth behind the MacGuffin is that such deceits are benignly undramatic. (Worth noting is Klevan's insightful contrasts of a seminal feature of each of the main films with that of a Hollywood text, proving that Thomson's thesis is never more accurate than in classical and post-classical US movies. It's wholly clear from these contrasts that Klevan loves Hollywood's romanticization of the ordinary, but his point is in the disclosure of another aspect of film.) As such, he demonstrates how the film entertains "a conception of important actions or happenings that lie outside of confrontations." (p. 193)

With his synthetic approach to interpretation, what he declares of Ozu's film applies to all four movies in his keenly ambitious and absorbing book debut: "It is a distinction of Late Spring that its visual effect and relevance will not be wellexplained within critical paradigms concerned with arresting images." (p. 160) Exhibiting in Disclosure of the Everyday a study of film experienced once or twice a generation, Kievan, a Lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury, strikingly expands Cavell's work while challenging the limitations of much of contemporary film analysis. Perspicacious, aphoristic, and even tangy (never better than in his example of the witty banter between Irene Dunne and Gary Grant forming a "mode of association" in overcoming the threat to marriage at the close of Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth [1937, US]), his writing radiates clarity and a Renoir-like spirit of generosity. Behind his book is the influence of V. F. Perkins, and arguably there has never been a better-or more origina l-realization of the old master's critical sensibility. His study invites us to examine the possibilities within film even as his book displays wider capacities to write about them.

Jeffrey Crause, who teaches film history and aesthetics, heods the film program at Bishop Gorman College Preparatory High School in Los Vegas. Holding a PhD. in Film Studies from the University of Warwick, he also teaches an Honors College course on Cavell and film at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.