Polanski and his Magic

When I wasn’t here I have been hanging out at the YouTube channel “Thinking Camera”.  The most recent entry there is about one of my favourites: “Chinatown”. 

Let me add a few things to the content there:  

I dared a risky thesis on a supposedly rhythmical arrangement of geometric values in the flow of composition there.  I haven’t checked/examined its validity yet but since then came across a wonderful podcast/conversation between Robert Town and David Fincher about the film.  There they discuss the rhythmical occurrences of the double elements in the film: glasses, car tail lights, eyes (you got a spot in your eye), cigarettes, even nostrils etc.  They say that Polanski probably wasn’t conscious of those rhythms, yet they are there.   So it’s possible that my statement wasn’t entirely bs.  If anyone out there is game - checking the rhythms of compositions in Chinatown is a project to jump start. We could do it together.

My short remark about the Gittes character is shallow and one sided.  In their conversation Fincher and Town examine Gittes with his ambitions, limitations and values.  What emerges is a full scope character.  Needless to say I regret a fast wording to describe a complex being.

The origin of the magic of the film is an interesting issue. Polanski says he wasn’t really thinking while making the film that it was something special.  It was just a job, he says.  On the other side of the spectrum is Robert Evans - the force behind the production - who says that magic happens when you’re a bit irreverent, almost as if a certain modicum of irreverence is a must for magic to happen.  

Unrelated to Chinatown: Polanski’s conversation with Charlie Rose is fabulous. You can see there how a person with a massive intelligence reacts with respect to a journalist whom he considers solid and worthy to be treated seriously.  I suspect that some of the questions that Rose asks if presented by somebody else would trigger quite different responses from the director.   

Philosophy and mystery

My favorite director, Roman Polanski, a very pragmatic, precise and logical filmmaker, when asked what’s more important in life: chance or fate, responds (in my translation from an interview in Polish) 

“To me it’s something between chance and necessity.  It seems to me that chance plays the main part, however if one thinks about it - if one has a realistic approach and thinks that the world begun with the Big Bang - then one has to conclude that everything that happens results from that which was before.  Therefore it can’t happen any other way.  If one talks to God, one is religious.  If however God responds to him, one is schizophrenic.  But these are philosophical issues, and we live in times that are unkind to philosophy.  Philosophy has been replaced by science.  There is no place for mystery.”  

Before Carnage

Carnage, dir. by Roman Polanski,

photographed by Pawel Edelman

Paul Mazursky in Vanity Fair suggests that the New York City opening shot for Carnage was done so uneventfully because the director could not do it himself. Yet this is a Polanski’s film and in his work no element is left to chance. Why then the film opens with a distant shot of boys’ fight, the fight which will provide the reason for subsequent psychological action? The shot is indeed restrained, almost a bare nod to the reason for the plot.

Could the opening be different? What would happen if for example the opening showed the pre-meeting nervousness of both parties? The hosts getting ready for the visit and the marching guests on their way to the (obviously) dreaded encounter. Then the title and as is now the shot with Jodie Foster concluding the drafting of the agreement.

Science and storytelling

"Tess", screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn,

based on the book by Thomas Hardy, directed by Polanski

Kevin Warwick from Reading University, UK, experiments with electronic enchantment of human senses. He hooks himself into a nervous system of his wife - which results in him knowing what she feels, or connects his system to a third, artificial arm which he can mentally control. He ponders how allowing our nervous systems to electronically read roentgen or ultraviolet radiation could change our perception of reality. Prof. Warwick assumes that since our inferior senses cut us off from 95% of electromagnetic radiation, for all practical reasons, we are death and blind. Furthermore, that which reaches our brains is represented via a very clumsy and primitive four dimension scheme. Thus, reality remains not-penetrable.

Enters Roman Polanski with Tess. The film uses techniques that seem to advocate a Warwick like approach to reality: throughout our lives we are subjected to huge forces which we only occasionally are aware of. In Tess these external forces present themselves in dreams, yearnings, premonitions, in sensitivities of animals and peculiarities of our fates. Those of us who are more attuned to that which is not blatantly seen and heard are weirdoes, aliens, Tesses (“sometimes we can make our souls leave our bodies”.) Society does not take liking to such creatures: Tess has to be sacrificed on the altar of Stonehenge to the god of Sun.

Polański said somewhere that for him each scene has to address more that just one element of plot, one plot point. This multidimensionality of events steams evenly during the unfolding of the story. Most beats seem to posses larger meaning than that of their immediate function in the story. We sense this via many narrative techniques: upcoming occurrences sneak themselves into events currently presented, scenes, backgrounds, actions return revealing their usually darker, tragic layers. The repetition of situations brings disaster. The second carriage - husband chasing scene throws Tess into the miserable relation with the fake d’Uberville, the second wedding night with Angel brings their capture and her death. Many key points in advancing the story - the decision to visit d’Ubervilles, a child delivery, christening of this child, his death, are not shown directly. The web of destiny is too permeating and ever present to naively zero in on its obvious singular manifestations.

Visually, characters are introduced with much delay (Tess, Angel) as if also emerging from a web of emotionality that hoovers over that which is. Emotions emanate outward into surroundings, or surroundings mess with the sensitivities of characters - the rows of maturing cheese hanging in the cellar are nothing less than the souls of young woman sleeping in the room above, the furious working of the threshing machine is the troubled and pained psyche of Tess. The forces that trash us are either social (Angel reads “das Kapital” and acts as its blind and idealistic follower) or metaphysical.

Tess gives a noble fight. Twice during her ordeal the storytellers (Polanski and the composer Phillipe Sarde) point their fingers at her struggle suggesting (inner) triumph. The same glorying music comes during her burring the child and her “burying” herself in the forrest. The second “advancement” is additionally attested by the appearance of a deer. A quite metaphysical, (approving?) deer, as if a messenger of the gods.

Polanski subscribes to “American Science”, has a predilection for clear, rational thinking, sneers at attempts to interpret his work through some cheap spiritual lenses, is furious when journalists suggest connections between his life and subject matters of his films (particularly Rosemary’s Baby). We may therefore safely assume that his storytelling perspective displayed in Tess is not a nod to some superficial “new age” leftovers but rather is a result of analysis of the forces that shape our world, the analysis coming close to possible future extended sensory perception suggested by prof. Warwick.

The difference is in timing: Warwick works to make additional sensory perception accessible to all by technological means, Polanski suggests the possibility of knowing right now more than is given by our five senses. It can be done through a properly constructed screen tale.

The fighters

Two quotes:

Victor Korchnoi, 79. Last year speaking to “The Independent”:

“Sometimes I felt I had to stop”, he admits. “They say: ‘You have done so much in this life. You can relax’. Then I play a game, and I lose to somebody. And I look at him. I look at who he is, as a chess player. And I look at who he is, in general. And when I do this, I know why I will never stop.”

These two words “in general” are troubling, aren’t they? No mercy to the weak ones? That’s correct, once they decide to enter the game.

Another quote comes from Andrzej Kostenko, a close collaborator of Roman Polanski, age 77, one of my favorite directors:

“Even when a director has talent, but lacks the tenacity - he lets things slip. But he (Polanski) does not allow things go (contrary to his vision).”

The same principle, isn’t it?

Both in chess and film one has to first fight one’s own weakness.

Only then comes victory.

Crisp, gripping and gloomy.

"The Ghost Writer" written by Robert Harris and Roman Polanski,
directed by Polanski

So does “The Ghost Writer” follow "Chinatown"?

Clearly the narrative technique has changed. The “camera talk” does not celebrate the events as much as it did when describing the ordeal of J.J. Gittes. The staging moves faster, is more compressed and more ... well nonchalant. This seemingly more casual approach again delivers the Chinatown truth about evil of the world. This time in an updated 21 Century way, mixing sophistication with in your face signals. The strong ones for example build the opening scene when the empty car on the prom is repeatedly “marked” by visual clues.

Polanski and Harris adapting the novel punch up the emotions every step of the way. The decision to move an empty car on the prom scene up front shows the problem instead of talking about it, which in the novel happens later. The ending of the film is a visual representation of the potentiality existing in the novel’s last paragraph. The entire final sequence of the film adds up to the character of the Ghost making him much more interesting. In short, the master storyteller when translating a novel into the screen makes the story and the hero stronger.

Is Polanski concerned with the things that jumped at me during the read? The verbalized reflections on the difference between the reality and its media representation achieved in the novel through the helicopter scene do not interest him at all. Yet, the bitter commentary about the difference between the reality and its media presence is telegraphed beautifully a scene later when Lang delivers a statement to the crowd of journalists. This short public persona of Lang when compared with his private presence speaks volumes about political truth. That’s clearly the way to address a serious “socio-psychological” issue if one has secured services of Pierce Brosnan.

Others do great work as well. Somebody wrote that in this flick Polanski and McGregor channel Kafka. Seems like a very perceptive comment.

Yes, a grumpy gardener from the "Chinatown" and the Harris novel has made it into the film. This time he appears with a new twist on his absurd work. With the exception of the final shot Polanski does not quote “Chinatown” directly. Instead he and Pawel Edelman spice up their visuals with comments on futility, madness and hopelessness that reign on this crazy planet of ours.

Because their work is so delicious I do not care that the novel-lifted plot is actually an outrageous (and I hope rather silly) Google advertisement. I guess within the “film noir” genre it has to be presented with a straight face, even though Harris himself calls his novel “satirical”. “The Ghost Writer” is still a great movie entertainment.