SOCIAL JUSTICE WISH FULFILLMENT

 

กลุ่มหนังที่เราสนใจในตอนนี้ SOCIAL JUSTICE WISH FULFILLMENT

 

เหมือนหนังที่เราได้ดูหลายเรื่องในปีนี้มีจุดหนึ่งที่ตรงกันโดยบังเอิญ นั่นก็คือเหมือนมันเป็นความปรารถนาที่จะได้แก้แค้นหรือตอบโต้กับคนหรือกลุ่มบุคคลที่มีตัวตนจริง ซึ่งเป็นผู้มีอิทธิพลหรืออยู่เหนือกฎหมายหรือไม่ได้รับการลงโทษในโลกแห่งความเป็นจริง คือเหมือนกับว่าในเมื่อคนชั่วเหล่านี้ลอยหน้าลอยตา ลอยนวล เสวยสุขอยู่ในโลกแห่งความเป็นจริง และเราไม่สามารถทำอะไรพวกเขาได้ในโลกแห่งความเป็นจริง เราก็เลยลงโทษพวกเขาในโลกแห่งจินตนาการกันไปก่อนก็แล้วกัน อย่างน้อยโลกแห่งจินตนาการของเราก็เป็นสิ่งที่เราสามารถควบคุมได้และมีอำนาจเหนือมันอย่างเกือบจะเต็มที่

 

ไม่รู้ว่ามันมีชื่อเรียกหนังกลุ่มนี้โดยเฉพาะหรือเปล่า แต่ตอนนี้เราเรียกมันไปก่อนว่า หนังกลุ่ม SOCIAL JUSTICE WISH FULFILLMENT

 

หนังที่เรารู้สึกว่ามันเข้าข่ายนี้

 

1.ANATOMY OF TIME (2021, Jakrawal Nilthamrong)

 

2. NOCEBO (2022, Lorcan Finnegan, Ireland)

 

3. REMEMBER (2022, Lee Il-Hyeong, South Korea)

 

4.TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022, Ruben Ostlund, Sweden)

 

5.UNDERGROUND CEMETERY (2020, Wisarut Sriputsomboon)

 

6.กระเพาะพิเรนทร์ (2022, กรองกนก ฤทัยมาศ,70.29 นาที, A+30)

 

 

บอกไม่ถูกเหมือนกันว่าหนังกลุ่มนี้แตกต่างจากหนังกลุ่ม “ธรรมะชนะอธรรม” โดยทั่วไปอย่างไร แต่เหมือนกับว่าหนังกลุ่มนี้มอบ satisfaction บางอย่างให้กับเรามากกว่าหนัง “ธรรมะชนะอธรรม” โดยทั่วไปน่ะ คือเหมือนกับว่าเวลาที่เราดูหนังกลุ่มนี้ เรารู้สึกสะใจที่คนชั่วบางคนในโลกแห่งความเป็นจริง ดูเหมือนจะได้รับการลงโทษในภาพยนตร์น่ะ ซึ่งมันแตกต่างจากหนังแนวแก้แค้นคนชั่วเรื่องอื่น ๆ ที่เรารู้สึกว่าคนชั่วในหนังมันดูเหมือนไม่ใช่บุคคลที่มีตัวตนจริงที่กำลังลอยนวลอยู่

 

จริง ๆ แล้วเมื่อหลายปีก่อนก็เหมือนมีหนังสั้นหนังยาวไทยที่เป็นการลงทัณฑ์ “แพรวา คดีรถชน” โดยทางอ้อมนะ แต่พอแพรวาเป็นคนที่สังคมรังเกียจโดยถ้วนหน้าอยู่แล้ว เราก็เลยเหมือนไม่ได้รู้สึกว่าหนังสั้นหนังยาวเหล่านั้นช่วยสร้างความสาแก่ใจให้กับเรามากนัก

 

ใครมีอะไรอยาก discuss เพิ่มเติมเกี่ยวกับประเด็นนี้ ก็ comment มาได้นะ

 

 

 

RIP JEAN-MARIE STRAUB (1933-2022)

ชอบหนังของเขาอย่างสุด ๆ อยากให้มีคนจัดงาน retrospective หนังของเขาในกรุงเทพอย่างมาก ๆ

 

หนังของเขาที่เคยดู

 

1.THE CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (1968, with Danièle Huillet) ดูที่ห้องสมุดมหาลัยธรรมศาสตร์

 

2.MOSES AND AARON (1975, with Danièle Huillet)

 

3.CLASS RELATIONS (1984, with Danièle Huillet) ดูที่ READING ROOM

 

4.EUROPA 2005 – 27 OCTOBRE (2006, with Danièle Huillet)

 

5.CORNEILLE-BRECHT OU ROME L’UNIQUE OBJET DE MON RESSENTIMENT (2009, with Cornelia Geiser) ดูที่ PARAGON ใน World Film Festival of Bangkok

 

6.LA FRANCE CONTRE LES ROBOTS (2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZyzWDXs7hg&t=72s

 

และเราก็เคยดูหนังสารคดีเรื่อง WHERE DOES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE LIE? (2001, Pedro Costa) ที่เกี่ยวกับการทำงานของ Straub + Huillet เราเคยเขียนถึงหนังเรื่องนี้ไว้ที่นี่

https://web.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10226397869516426&set=a.10225784745948720

 

และเราก็เคยซื้อหนังสือ “LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE: THE GERMAN FILMS OF DANIELE HUILLET AND JEAN-MARIE STRAUB” ที่เขียนโดย Barton Byg ด้วย ในหนังสือเล่มนี้มี quotes ที่น่าสนใจเกี่ยวกับ Straub มากมาย ดังเช่น

 

(เราเคยแปะ quotes พวกนี้ไว้ตอนที่เขียนคุยกับเมอฤดี คันฉัตรในเว็บบอร์ด BIOSCOPE ในปี 2007 เราก็เลย copy มาแปะอีกรอบในโอกาสนี้แล้วกัน)

 

Excerpts from the book LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE, written by Barton Byg:


1. Byg wrote about what he thought of NOT RECONCILED OR ONLY VIOLENCE HELPS WHERE VIOLENCE RULES (1965, Jean-Marie Straub). I think some of his thoughts are similar to what I think about EUROPA 2005 – 27 OCTOBRE.

“Not Reconciled was the first Straub/Huillet film I ever saw, and I remember the shock vividly to this day. The breathtaking frustration the film provoked can only compare to my first reaction to Kafka's German: How can anything so simple be so incomprehensible, so threatening? How can anything so short seem so long? And, like Kafka, the film kept drawing me back with its ability to crystallize the burden of the past and the impulse to resist in just a few seconds of film time.”

“In films that are simple in their visual construction, restrained in their camera movement, and precise in their editing, there are always brief points at which the reality of the world outside the film explodes with a violent, utopian force. In Not Reconciled , for instance, a tragic love affair is summed up in a single two-second shot of a young woman turning her head as she says, "They're going to kill you." An old woman shoots a Nazi sympathizer at the end of the same film, and another avenging woman shoots a gangster at the end of The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp , yet in each case the camera looks away. The "action" is always elsewhere, spilling out of the film.”

“When one begins to think about a Straub/Huillet film, one inevitably confronts subjects outside the film itself—questions of reality and history, of the "look of the world" that has become so vulnerable.”


2. I like this quote of Daniele Huillet

“Furthermore, Huillet does not see her work as part of a countercinema that simply destroys the pleasures of the conventional narrative by reversing the system: "I don't believe that one can replace one oppression with another, and I also don't believe that one can fight one system with another, because then a thing becomes simply too rigid."



3.Their favorite films

“In 1982 at the most recent U.S. retrospective of their films at the Public Theater in New York, they requested screenings of Glauber Rocha's Antonio das mortes (1969), Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943), Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York (1957), D. W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (1909), Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread (1982), John Ford's Civil War (from How the West Was Won , 1962), Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), Erich von Stroheim's Blind Husbands (1918), Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine (1943), Kenji Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), and Luc Moulet's formal Western satire A Girl Is a Gun (1970). Straub/Huillet refer to cinematic forerunners in regard to the two areas in which they are the most original, in the treatment of space and the treatment of sound. They have consistently stressed that each of their films begins with a place, a location, and is built from there.”


4. Their style

“Straub/Huillet attempt to simplify each shot to the point that it conveys one idea clearly; it becomes an empty frame, devoid of all expression. Only an "empty" frame can capture the invisible textures of the surface of the world that were the essence of cinema for Kracauer and a poetic salvation for Holderlin. Straub refers often to Griffith's statement of 1947: "What the modern movie lacks is beauty—the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely”


5. Straub talked about his conflicts with Alexander Kluge

“Kluge always goes on about the film which is created in the minds of the spectators; I don't believe it. Then I react like Rivette and state that film—let's not quibble over the words—is only based on fascination, and that it only touches people, and touches them deeply, when it is based on fascination, i.e., the opposite of distance or participation or some such thing, that the traditional attitudes of people . . . one never invents very much, Renoir said, not like Kluge, with whom I quarreled in Mannheim. He climbed onto the stage and said, well, what we are doing is new. We make films which are going to be created in the minds of the spectators. That is completely new and nobody has done it before. My films are like—and then he saw me down in the audience—my films are like those of Straub, for instance—then I was furious and stood up and said, the things I do are not new at all, they are traditional.”


6. Rainer Werner Fassbinder talked about Straub

“What was more significant for me was that Straub directed a play, Krankheit der Jugend (Ferdinand Bruckner) with the Action-Theater, and even though his version was only ten minutes long, we rehearsed it for all of four months, over and over again, for only two hours a day, I admit, it was still really crazy. This experience I had with Straub, who approached his work and the other people with such an air of comic solemnity, fascinated me. He would let us play a scene and then would say to us, "How did they feel at this point?" This was really quite right in this case, because we ourselves had to develop an attitude about what we were doing, so that when we were acting, we developed the technique of looking at ourselves, and the result was that there was a distance between the role and the actor, instead of total identity. The films he's made that I think are very beautiful are the early ones, Machorka-Muff and Not Reconciled , up to and including Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach , though Othon and other films since then have proved to me that what is most important to him is not what interests me in his work.”


7.Their ideas about films

“STRAUB: . . . I think the deception comes about when one gives people the impression that something is happening in the moment the film is running, something they call "action." It isn't true; when a film is running which doesn't rest on deception, nothing is happening, absolutely nothing. That can only happen in the spectator, whatever happens. And that can only come about through the combination of the images and sounds . . .

HUILLET: That is, of forms . . .

STRAUB: . . . of forms that go through the ears and the eyes and through the minds of the spectator and into his [sic ] reflections”


8. Serge Daney on the Straubs

“With their well-oiled war machine, their sacred egoism, their fine vitality, too, and the clear ideas they have concerning their work, the Straubs are probably the last to create a cinema for loners that can nevertheless be brought into regular theaters. They are squarely in cinema and I would have given up on them long ago with their garbled political ideas, had I not understood that they were the last great film-makers of the history of modern cinema, perhaps of the history of cinema, period. I harbor no illusions about the receptability of their work; they set out to teach people something and people will always hate them for that”


ส่วนอันนี้เป็นเรื่องจดหมายที่ Straub เคยเขียน

In the book WEST GERMAN FILMMAKERS ON FILM: VISIONS AND VOICES (1988, published by Holmes & Meier), there are two interesting letters concerning Straub. So I would like to quote them here:

“Dr. R. F. Goldschmidt, Delegate of the Board of the Export-Union of the German Film Industry, had written Richard Roud, Director of the New York Film Festival, on 9 July 1975, in English:

Thank you for your letter of June 30, 1975, regarding the German participation at the New York Film Festival.

We are sorry to tell you that we are in no position to help you with airfares for Daniele Huillet and J. M. Straub to come to your festival as both are French nationals and therefore the German authorities will not give any funds for such a trip.

The airfare for Werner Herzog will be paid so that there is no problem that he will be present at your festival.”


Then Straub wrote a letter. I love his letter very much

“July 28, 1975

You Fascists, you Ignoramuses, you Hypocrites,

Richard Roud sent me a copy of your letter from July 9, 1975 (DR. G/E1). I wouldn’t think of accepting a penny from you pimps (Roud had written you without my permission), but I want you to know that I am registered as a German film director in the West German Office of Employment, and will—with your letter in hand—make every possible publicity against you.

With hate,

Jean-Marie Straub”