The Poverty of (Film) Philosophy

The recent Cambridge appearance of two plans by Alain Tanner, a young Swiss director, provides a suitable target for thought for those concerned with contemporary moral and artistic decay. The widescale ballyboo over these films seems to indicate the final jading of the already over cultized Cambridge film audience.

The theme of both La Salamandre and Charles Dead or Alive is the plight of "free spirits" in bourgeois Swiss society Charles is the third-generation head of a highly successful family watch-making firm the House of De. The symbolic keynote comes in the opening moments when, at a cocktail party given by the firm. Charles is interviewed by Swiss TV. He toys with the interviewer for most of the five minutes. But his enigmatic answer to the question "Are you a businessman or a watchmaker?" is the opening of a floodgate that ends in his being carried, two long hours later, to an insane asylum : "My grandfather was a watchmaker. Father was a mixture, and my son here is entirely a businessman...I'm just a chap who does his job and tries to make an honest living."

From this point we follow Charles on his odyssey through the cracks and chinks of Geneva existence when he joins the somewhat enervating life of a Bohemian couple who take him in: in contrast to his seedy surrounding Tanner wants us to feel that Charles's perception and moral purity increase with each passing day. The contradiction is heightened by Charles's capture and internment in a mental hospital: as he understands more and more his society can tolerate him less and less.

Making films about such refugees from rationalized society requires full characterization in order to draw us into the sadness of their fate. Here Tanner's films fail.

The father, while easily the most sympathetic character, comes off real only on TV. When we see him on TV. We feel the Swiss who watch this man could believe him and be moved by the pathos of his "wasted" life. But he is real only as a TV personality--and if you come from anywhere but California, the paradox should be obvious.

In a symbolic act before spilling his secrets, he takes off his glasses and crushes them, noting wryly top himself that he could always see perfectly well without them. When his son notices and asks why he wore them for all those years, he smiles softly and says "to see less clearly."

Does Tanner seriously expect us to feel compelled by characters who deliver such pithy nothings as if they were peace of wisdom? In his next film, we expect to see someone facing the camera head-on and solemnly intoning, "many people say many things," Give me Mr. Natural say day.

La Solamandre does have a chance to be something better, but ends up being worse. While the theme remains the doomed future of a "true individual" in monotonous and mediocre Switzerland, the plot is much more ingenious. Two out-of-work writers are commissioned to do an historical fiction for TV based upon the facts of a bizarre shooting of a retired army man. The army man claimed that his niece did it out of anger. She claimed he did it out of his gun. The writers investigate the story: both, in one way or another, fall in love with the girl and forget their work.

The story possibilities are quashed by an inane and deadening parade of spiritless symbols and visual shortcuts. Perhaps the film was meant to be funny. It could be an excellent parody of Eric Rohmer's more pointless works, La Collectionneuse and Claire's Knee.

We meet Pierre first -- out of a job, low on money, bored, restless, anomie personified. He calls on his friend Paul for help on this TV project. Just as Pierre is city-loving, and cynical. Paul is sweet, sincere, imaginative and rustic.

Paul's "sensitivity" is displayed in the pair's first writing session. Paul, the child-man who takes such pride in his "stylograph deluxe" and long underwear, spins out a story about the girl without knowing anything about her. Pierre rebuffs him for being fanciful. But soon after, the audience gasps and laughs with the typical existential "shock of recognition" when an interview with the uncle coincides in every way with Paul's fantasy.

When the work goes badly, Paul returns to his home outside Geneva. His common roots are revealed when he got a back to house-painting as if he'd never left. We see him there playing games with his young daughter--and later, both holding hands in mystical communion with each other and with nature. Ah, sweet mystery...

We never really learn too much about Pierre either. We do see the way Pierre Paul work together, laugh together, and play together -- like young colts frisking about. To raise their lowered spirits, they pull a stunt on the tram that is screamingly funny; but even there, something rings false. It is too collegey, too typical of the type of thing that populates Annette Funicello movies to tell us anything about what they feel for one another.

We see them gallivanting in the woods, shouting political and philosophical slogans to each other that clearly mean a lot to them, and by implication should mean a lot to us. We are expected to wink knowingly at this badinage and say to ourselves, "don't we, too, have such warm and intimate joking relationships with our friends. "But after the scene, we know nothing more about them than we did before.

Rosemonde, the girl, really falls flat. She is "la salamander." If she could have been genuinely conflicted, perhaps the film could have made it. But of all the characters, She is the least defensible. At least Charles has spent his whole life working -- unhappily, it is true, but he made a commitment to something and followed it through.

Rosemonde is simply doomed; she came from the lower classes and (to Tanner) never got an even break. There is no element of originality in such a story. We would hope there would be some in the treatment of it. There isn't.

When Pierre wants to take her picture. She demurely tells him to wait, to let her clean herself up. Pierre's camera focuses on this helpless babe crying to be heard. How she should be protected, not accused. Her shiftlessness comes from her need for love. This is the epitome of innocence.

And yet she did shoot her uncle. (Paul had predicted it, so how could it be otherwise?) But both writers love her anyway. I don't The poor girl from a big rural family at one time might have move some people to tears (not me, however) but at this point the images reek of pulling at the heartstrings. The straight-on camera angles with which she is photographed are visually insulting and emotionally unconvincing.

For if it were to convince us, we would have to feel there was some spirit on her part. But Rosemonde is incredibly immature -- spoiled, willful, and foolish. At the end of the film, we see her swirling amidst the Geneva crowd, Free and Happy. Loving Life.

But that is a false ending. Rosemonde still has nothing and knows nothing except her own desires. She is not happy, not in any own desires. She is not happy, not in any real sense. She is still enchained by irresponsibility.

Try to imagine her in a week. It will be the same old story. And Tanner himself is irresponsible to close the film the way he does. If he had really thought this film through to its own logical conclusions, he would have shown Rosemonde trapped. Such a conclusion would require detailed characterization and not just a bunch of symbols.

Now the copout of Tanner's ending becomes clear. To leave her unhappy, given her shallow personality and Tanner's feeble analysis would have been too heavy-handed given the film as it stands. To make his social criticism, she must be unhappy. To make his "artistic" statement, she must be happy and free. Neither solution is satisfactory.

Tanner's employment of soft close-ups and "picturesque" imagery grates against sensibility. In trying to make social criticism, he forgets that he is working through human beings. If his point is to convince us, his people must be real. But his frames are as hackneyed and as fired as TV images, his visuals in general signify rather than explain what is happening to the people in his film.

I am hardly denying his right to make social statements. But like Godard, he forgets or ignores the fact that in art as implicit social criticism is far more effective than explicit didacticism. Thin of Rules of the Game. Unlike Tanner, Jean Renoir understand that the best way to show how society maltreats people was through the struggles of his characters to define themselves while playing their game. In the Renoir film we are dealing with people who are truly caught between expediency and integrity.

Rosemonde, however, has given up--if she ever struggled. Because of Tanner's inability to flesh out character, we have no reason to sympathize, for we do not know her, She rebels, but we are at a loss to understand why She is mysterious at the beginning and doesn't change.

Some of the bleeding-heart au courant might say that this extraordinarily harsh, the Tanner is a new artist with promise. Tanner's actual promise seems more in the line of a director of television documentaries a comment which is not meant to be entirely demeaning.

For Tanner certainly addresses himself to important and serious questions. Malaise does overhang much of Western Europe Society seems to be stifling, mediocrity seems the rule.

But this is expressed much more acutely in any of Bergman's completely non-dogmatic films about human relationships. We understand the anomie which faces Elis in Passion of Anna as a personal problem. To understand Flis it is important for us to understand his comments on the stupidity and boorishness of the European bourgeoisie. The social comment is penetrating because it arises from a central character's dileruma. Tanner's explicitness cannot begin to approach. Bergman's artistry.

But Tanner's films are only part of the disturbing trend in film to rely on visual and emotional shorthand, on elliptical reference, on stock symbolism, and on inadequate artistic explication in dealing with human problems. I am tired of being manipulated without compensations. Modern life is too complex to be treated with Tanner's irresponsibility--or without the artistic and moral understanding of Bergman.