Up with bottoms: Belle de jour

According to the film’s co-scenarist, Jean-Claude Carrière, the great psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was once asked to present a lecture on female masochism. Lacan simply screened Belle de jour (1967), and afterwards claimed he had nothing more to add. Indeed, for all its fathomless mysteries, for all that’s abbreviated, blurred, mischievous or left unspoken, this sublime and, in its way, fairly radical adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel feels devoted to invoking the troubled psyche of its haut bourgeois Parisian housewife, married to a handsome and unspeakably dull young surgeon, who secretly becomes a prostitute so as to fulfill her desire for controlled debasement and humiliation. The film is faithful to Séverine’s experience of life as a merging of fantasy and reality. Whatever that is.

Belle de jour, now available from Criterion (with typically excellent transfer and supplements), was a turning point for its director, Luis Buñuel, the then-sexagenarian Spaniard and one-time card-carrying surrealist. It was an atypically elegant production, his greatest commercial success, and thus met with suspicion by the sort of admirers who are conservative in their ideas about subversion. It was also the turning point for its star, Catherine Deneuve, even more so than Repulsion (1965), because it used her icy reserve as a gateway to transcending reserve: the moment, following a date with a hulking Asian man who speaks almost no French and carries with him a lacquered buzzing box that scares everyone else away, when Séverine raises her tousled platinum head from the bed upon which she’s experienced what was likely her first truly satisfying sexual encounter, is one of the cinema’s great entrances. It’s the entrance of the complex, intimidating, empowered woman hiding behind Deneuve’s girlish neurotic.

The famous fantasy sequences, which find Séverine whipped, bound, and pelted with mud, were nowhere in Kessel’s moralistic novel; they were inserted by Buñuel and Carrière, based on interviews with women. They were integral to the film as an autonomous work, not just as a manner of asserting Buñuel’s signature but as a way of fomenting Séverine’s journey of self-realization. This is a story of a woman desperately attempting to juggle two seemingly irreconcilable worlds and it ends with what, however baffling it may be, functions as a convergence—the shot leading into the final sequence is, quite literally, a dissolve (photographed by Sacha Vierny, a guy who knew a thing or two about the textures of ambiguity). And as a way of resolving the conflicting desires that exist between a husband and wife, it is so much richer, and more haunting, than the somewhat similar but clumsy, over-explanatory ending of Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Interrogating images: Lacan at the Scene

If the title alone doesn’t grab you, let me offer the premise of Lacan at the Scene (MIT Press, $28.95) as a best-chance hook. Author Henry Bond’s opening statement is sufficiently clear and concise as to dissuade me from any fumbling paraphrasing. It asks: “what if Jacques Lacan—the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst—had left his home in the early 1950s in order to travel to England and work as a police detective? How might he have applied his theories in order to solve crime?” It sounds like the prompt for a work of speculative fiction, but what this book actually is—a study of an under-examined use of photography; a method of de-mystifying an ostensibly inscrutable body of work; a series of case studies intended for practical use in homicide investigations—probably makes for a richer and more satisfying read, if a tough slog for the squeamish. Considering how appalling some of the subject matter in Lacan at the Scene is, and how brutal are some of its images, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how utterly compelling I found it to be. But I digress—this post isn’t about my personal neuroses. Okay, at least not more than any other.

In developing his proposition, Bond—a London-based writer and photographer whose author photo suggests a guy suffering from chronic insomnia—became a regular visitor to the National Archive in order to study extant materials pertaining to murders that took place in England between 1955 and 1970. He was surely regarded by the more judgmental clerks with some suspicion. He offers an anecdote in which he requested to re-examine a case file he’d already looked over only to find that it had since been deemed unfit for public inspection. When he made inquiries he was escorted by a senior archivist through hidden doors and down a long corridor into a conference room where three men waited for him, the closed case file box resting on a table between them. These men explained that Bond’s previous access to the file was granted only by accident—the file was in fact still under a sort of quarantine. “Such material is not withheld for a logistical reason,” writes Bond, “…it is simply too contagious to release.” This assessment seems intended less as a way of poking fun at Archive policy or its cabalistic culture as much as to emphasize just how taboo the perusal of images of violent crimes is. Which goes some distance toward explaining why, despite the wealth of superb writing out there covering photography in myriad forms, the critical writing on crime scene photography remains undernourished. It is, nevertheless, the cornerstone of Bond’s thesis.

Henry Bond, looking a little more rested

Bond takes Lacan’s tripartite model of mental functioning—the categories of perverse, psychotic and neurotic—and meticulously “reads” a series of murder crime scene photos in order to uncover evidence as to under which model the killer could be classified. Bond also makes frequent use of Roland Barthes’ two categories of photographic observation, studium and punctum—respectively, the details that appear obviously relevant to an image’s context or meaning, and those that strike the viewer on a purely instinctive level—as laid out in Camera Lucida, so as to interrogate his own process of looking. Given that psychoanalysis urges us to regard the seemingly incidental as potentially significant, there’s a whole lot of punctum being heeded here, and fruitfully so. Bond suggests an apparent order in the chaotic disarray left in the wake of a psychotic murder, for example. Whether or not this methodology signals any sort of innovation in the established standards of police investigations I have no idea. But to the layman, especially one with a special interest in photography, psychoanalysis or both, Bond’s theorizing is both fascinating and enlightening. We may enter into each of these studies with only a certain morbid, perhaps guilt-ridden interest in the sick or tawdry aspects of their implied narratives, but in every case Bond goes deeper into the psychological ramifications implicit in these vestiges of murder than you’re likely to find in Faces of Death, a Weegee compilation, or whatever equally lurid work of exploitation—or, to be generous, exploitation art—you might find yourself compulsively surveying.

The perverse killer is found in a case where a woman is killed in her back garden, in full, almost theatrically staged view of a window, or potential witness. The psychotic killer is found in a confession that explains how murder was necessitated by mortal danger emanating from a bar of soap. The neurotic killer is found in a crime scene where beside a neatly piled column of books there lies both a confession to the killing of the corpse left behind and a polite request that these books be returned to the appropriate library before they’re overdue. The neurotic impulse to “undo” violent acts is further exemplified by a case in which the killer murders the victim and subsequently places a pillow under the victim’s head and a glass of water by the victim’s side. Imaginatively citing the writings of J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Slavoj Zizek—who also happens to be the curator of the series to which Lacan at the Scene belongs—and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others, Bond offers numerous points of reference through which to contextualize his investigatory process. Straddling fact and fiction, the established and the untested theoretical, using language that is always to the point without being excessively cold or alienating, he takes the reader through a labyrinth of nightmare to gain wider insight into how our minds betray us, and how we can understand the residue of trauma. It might even help you understand non-homicidal behaviour a little better.

The brutality of the bourgeoisie, the allure of apocalypse: 20 years of Michael Haneke

There are reasons to be grateful for the existence of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, even if you don’t exactly fall in love with his movies. He is a master craftsman, as devoted to technical precision as the finest Hollywood journeyman, as formally rigorous as the most innovative arthouse maverick, and, most impressively, has maintained this standard while working in different languages and different countries with distinct industries. He’s prolific—10 features in 20 years, with another on the way—yet a case can be made for his having never made a single film that’s contributed to what he describes as the disempowerment of the audience. Long after the golden age of foreign and art film distribution, Haneke has held unrelentingly to a mandate of consistently challenging movies and survived, even thrived. And that’s fascinating in itself: large numbers of people see Haneke’s films, yet not a one of them promises a good time in any normal sense. They’re downright unpleasant. And there is no release.

The ten features tell a story in themselves, of a singular career, of an aesthetic, of an evolving social critique, of an increasingly amalgamated Europe and globalized world. Thanks to Metro Cinema’s generous full retrospective, Edmonton filmgoers can watch it all unfold completely and chronologically, one chilling, enigmatic, unbroken single-shot scene at a time.

Based on actual events, The Seventh Continent (1989) is a sort of diptych that’s devastatingly effective in its simplicity. A bourgeois family of three is shown performing quotidian tasks—closing doors, preparing breakfast, tying shoes—often in close-ups that show no preference for faces or offer clues that might convey an internal life. This series of what would be inserts in a conventional movie is strangely riveting, brimming with a certain tension. Devoid of scoring and making use of black leader between scenes, there’s genuine beauty to the clipped rhythm of it all, to the collage of room tones, and the superbly specifying actors—including the late Ulrich Mühe, a Haneke regular—embody the tone plausibly. Haneke’s debut follows the course of the family’s routines, checking in to see how they alter over three years, until the machinery of their “lifestyle” suddenly collapses in one of cinema’s most sustained sequences of intensely concentrated, near-wordless action. The result is really a perfect movie on its own terms, with an inspired balance of overt polemic and ambiguity. It also, to a surprising degree, perfectly encapsulates so much of what’s to come.

Benny’s Video (92) advances certain aspects of its predecessor while focusing more pointedly on what is surely Haneke’s central zone of interest: visual media. The horrific Oedipal journey of teenage Benny (Arno Frisch) is one filtered through the abstraction of increasingly accessible video technology, which Haneke proposes as facilitating voyeuristic tendencies to ever-more alarming degrees. A crudely-made video of animal slaughter is slowed-down in replay, making what was initially intended as a quick, relatively painless death into a weirdly aestheticized bloodbath. Benny, almost always placid, seems completely untouched by the Real, in the Lacanian sense. He seems to process the world exclusively through video screens. Video becomes a component in teenage mating rituals, which themselves house experiments in punishment. So there is watching, there is death, and there is the cleaning up afterwards. There’s also a mother-son vacation to Egypt, where the unruliness of the greater word is still kept always at arm’s, or, as it were, eye’s length. It’s also kind of boring, but this very carefully-nourished boredom seems vital to how this all works. Haneke’s gaze can be at once that of a visionary director and that of an especially patient anthropologist. If you can jive with both sensibilities, you’re in for the long haul.

There is, however, the problem of Funny Games (97) to contend with. Haneke’s most notoriously merciless work, an anti-thriller in which a pair of absurdly polite hooligans (one of whom is Frisch, as though picking up where he left off) terrorize another of Haneke’s bourgeois families on holiday, is brutal, but it’s also quickly numbing and over-intellectualized while feeling intellectually facile. Haneke seems to have had a checklist of items he considered antithetical to genre moviemaking—kill the dog, kill the kid, break the fourth wall—and went about dutifully seeing each through. The irony lies in how, at the best of times, the very sort of polished Hollywood thriller Funny Games explicitly opposes can actually prove far more thought provoking than such exercises in didacticism. Yet Haneke was clearly happy with the results. He re-made the thing, shot-for-shot, as his English-language debut with Hollywood stars (07). I wonder if he liked the marketing—Warner pitched it exactly as if it were a generic thriller.


With Code Unknown (00), Haneke arrives at a major turning point and delivers what may be his finest work. His first film made in France inverted the hermetically-sealed strategy of Funny Games, broadening his perspective to take in a larger network of character types, relationships, social confrontations and causalities, and Juliette Binoche, who from her first moment onscreen introduces a warmth and fullness of character previously unseen, if not un-permitted, in Haneke’s work. Brilliantly book-ended with scenes of deaf-mute children playing charades—an elegant expression of the title—the remainder of Code Unknown consists of scenes, nearly all of them playing out in single, unbroken shots, that explore questions of what is and isn’t other people’s business, from an uppity young black man’s attempt at forcing an act of social justice to Binoche’s paralysis when overhearing domestic violence to a photojournalist’s resurrection of Walker Evans’ fabled journey through the New York subway system taking surreptitious photos of strangers. Like the unseen, rather obnoxious director who at one point auditions Binoche’s actress, the photojournalist seems to be hunting for a “real face.” Yet, while I’d argue that Code Unknown explores inter-connectivity with greater resonance than films like Paul Haggis’ Crash (04) or Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (07), Haneke is never so assuring. The characters here, spanning class, race, nationality, education and age, are given freer reign to reveal a richness of attitude, anxieties and even fleeting moments of happiness and relief. But their environment doesn’t make room for complete vulnerability and so many masks are worn that the very notion of witnessing truth becomes futile. This was the first Haneke I saw, and it remains a personal favourite.


Haneke’s embracing of France and its great actresses continued to great acclaim—and even greater controversy—with The Piano Teacher (01), an adaptation of fellow Austrian Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut, an instructor obsessed with a 17-year-old pupil, is a creature of a sort I’m not sure the movies had ever previously given us: intensely sexually repressed, sadomasochistic, obsessive, icy in that way that disguises overwhelming anguish, capable of Elektralian hysteria, and never for a moment less than magnetic. It is a career-capping performance, and with Huppert that says a lot.

When Huppert returns for Haneke’s criminally under-seen dystopian drama Time of the Wolf (03), the only way she can kick things off properly is to get sprayed with her murdered husband’s blood and then vomit in the first five minutes. From there, the apocalypse is a paddleboat ride. Whatever disaster befell society before the story begins is—and here’s a surprise—left undefined. Yet in destroying the social order, the media and consumer-based society, it’s also robbed Haneke of the key subjects of his entire canon. The good news is that Haneke not only rises to the occasion but also proves just what a shrewd and atmospheric storyteller he can be with a minimum of elements. And of course, as Huppert’s Anne and her children traverse the countryside to fend for themselves, the customs of civilized society will haunt them in their every encounter. (It’ll be interesting to see how this film compares to John Hillcoat’s forthcoming The Road.) Whether you know Haneke’s work or not, I urge you to catch this one in a rare public screening.

Haneke’s almost perverse emphasis on the irresolvable finds its apotheosis in Caché (05), another hit, and his most recent, though hopefully not last French film. Pairing Binoche with Daniel Auteuil, Caché returns to the sinister voyeurism of Benny’s Video by way of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (97), when a Parisian bourgeois couple starts receiving anonymous videocassettes that feature only unedited footage of their home’s exterior. Haneke has insisted in interviews that he hasn’t been especially interested in specificity of location in his films and that readings emphasizing the conditions of a certain national culture are usually made out of a failure to recognize how these stories could take place anywhere in the first world. It’s a respectable and quite instructive stance, but I still think it makes Caché that much richer a movie when we account for the particularities of the Algerian War and the Paris massacre of 1961. There is a ghost lurking in this story that demands to be reckoned with. It is a ghost not dissimilar to those haunting other nations, but it looms over these characters with a particular gravity, making it an interesting companion piece to Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Muriel (63).

Which brings up to the present, post-Funny Games US and pre-The White Ribbon, Haneke’s first Austrian film in a dozen years. Despite the divisive retroactive—not to mention reactionary—aspects of his last movie, Metro’s retrospective reminds us that there’s every reason to anticipate more provocative and fascinating work from Haneke. I only hope there continues to be room in the world for the likes of him.

The world upside-down: Zizek's Violence

Through countless cinematic detours in his enormous body of critical theory he has become one of the sharpest, most engaged writers on movies we have, so maybe it’s no accident that the theoretical tool he employs with relentless perfectionism is the very same tool most often used by the crack screenwriter: the good old-fashioned reversal. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes both dynamically and profusely, and he’s never met an assumption he didn’t feel the urge to overturn, a paradox he didn’t desire to give a thorough workout. He isn’t a shrewd contrarian so much as an intellectual showman—and I say this with the deepest admiration. The “Elvis of critical theory” tag he’s been given is not unearned.

Far too playful with Marx to convincingly be labeled a staunch Marxist, Zizek’s philosophy remains grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis—and this should itself impart upon his audience an emphasis on process rather than tidy results. With Zizek we are always on the couch, always left dazzled and maybe perplexed when our session has expired. To turn to his work for hard conclusions will inevitably frustrate, but more importantly will blind you to what he really places on the table, which is a feast of thoughtful, sometimes audacious stimulation, blending flavours well known, even vulgar in their appeal, with others that are exotic and in other settings would be intimidating. At the end, knowing hunger will return, you find yourself at the very least fortified, pleasured, and well fed.

That’s certainly the case with Violence (Picador, $15.50). In his contribution to the ‘Big Ideas/Small Books’ series, Zizek breaks his subject into three categories: subjective violence, such as crime and terror, the most visible form and one whose fascination we’re urged to resist; objective violence, which is symbolic and based in language; and systemic violence, the form addressed most enthusiastically, which lies in social structures and is the least visible and most dangerous. Zizek’s dissection of systemic violence starts coolly, drawing attention to such familiar phenomena as pleas for charitable donations that thrive on “fake urgency,” before building up to the hypocrisies of billionaires who claim to “give back,” in effect contributing funds to agencies attempting to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that in part was exacerbated by these same billionaires. Not to mention the hypocrisies of we who are outraged by the torture of individuals while virtually ignoring the overwhelming humanitarian crises of entire nations, ie: the Congo.

But things get more interesting once the groundwork’s disposed of—or, in some cases, trampled over in the heat of Zizek's spastic mental prowess. In examining terror, Zizek usefully distinguishes between “authentic fundamentalists,” like the Amish or Tibetan Buddhists, who convey “an absence of resentment and envy” and a “deep indifference toward the non-believers’ way of life,” with “so-called Christian and Muslim fundamentalists” who “in fighting the sinful Other” are merely fighting their own temptation. He later makes an intriguing parallel distinction between ideological governments who ostensibly offer sweeping freedoms while tacitly condemning the use of these freedoms and oppressive governments who tacitly encourage the bending of rules, leading to one of the most memorably succinct twists of common assumption in Violence: “totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing, and cheating are conditions of survival.”

Among the most substantial stances taken in Violence concerns Israel and Palestine, two nations who, Zizek argues, should recognize how a diasporic existence is essential to their identity rather than fruitlessly claim rights to a holy land. Intriguingly, he calls for the renunciation of political control of Jerusalem, making it a neutral zone, an “extra-state place of religious worship” that would ultimately have a liberating effect for both parties. And I mean it as no slight to the gravity of this proposal when I compliment Zizek on his ability to move fluidly in just a page or two from this to a parallel proposal that US Congress officially change the name of French fries to Muhammad fries.

It is among Zizek’s strengths that irreverence and the utmost seriousness are never rendered mutually exclusive, just as culture high and low are employed with equal relish. There are citations from Walter Benjamin, George Orwell and Elton John. There are analogies that unexpectedly unite the themes of M. Night Shyamalan's widely panned The Village with Alfonso Caurón's Children of Men. And let me stress this: the guy gets mileage from movies like no social commentator I’ve ever heard of. He discusses the unspoken sub-cultural order explored in A Few Good Men as a pretty brilliant lead-in to his insights into hazing rituals, the homophobic dualities of military life, and the abuses of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib: “in being submitted to humiliating tortures, Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” And he offers a striking reading of Taxi Driver that illuminates the essentially inwardly directed violence of Travis Bickle.

Alas, after a couple of hundred pages of stimulating riffing, Violence does finally have to draw to an end. Of sorts. Things get muddy. Zizek has us reject “false anti-violence” and endorses “emancipatory violence.” He writes how “to chastise violence outright… is a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.” Okay. But equally mystifying is his appropriation of the central conceit of José Saramago’s visionary novel Seeing, in which a government in thrown into panic over an epidemic of blank votes submitted in a federal election. Zizek clearly sees Saramago as a Marx brother, and his admiring assessment of Seeing leads to Violence’s final, enigmatic statement: “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” I’m mystified because casting a blank ballot is actually far from “doing nothing.” I’m mystified by Zizek’s peculiar and rather hazy conditional sanctioning of violence—we really need to get clearer on this “emancipatory violence” thing, no? But I’m also mystified by how such a bracingly curt, even puzzling finale can still leave me kinda satisfied, re-engaged in certain political arguments, and mentally invigorated in general. Perhaps it’s better for us to look at any single book by Zizek as just another edition in an ongoing grappling with irreducible ideas, and enjoy the ride.