In a 1965 collection of critical articles titled I Lost It At The Movies, Pauline Kael unsheathed her razor-sharp tongue to shred Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), and Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1962). The latter truly provoked the Wrath Of Kael after Resnais invited critics and audiences to “make of it what you will”, allowing viewers to, according to Kael, “make fools of themselves” by using silly metaphors like “inkblot tests” to describe the picture. Kael explained that “a rorschach test is a blot, an accident onto which you project your own problems and visions; it is the opposite of a work of art, which brings the artist’s vision to you”. It’s a persuasive statement, but not one that I necessarily agree with: what exactly does Kael mean by “brings the artist’s vision to you”, and what is anti-art about an accident?
It can appear inappropriate to liken a film to an inkblot because filmmaking is a series of yes/no decisions. Yet the finished project, no matter how carefully constructed, is still a chaos of unintended and unexpected meaning. The human brain craves order in this chaos and will find it even in incidental details; we make narrative connections between unrelated events to form coincidences, get lost searching for keys to labyrinths as in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and the phenomenon of pareidolia means we see shapes in nebulous clouds.
Kael seems to reject the inkblot metaphor because a rorschach is passive, whereas what she deems ‘vision’ is a direct message from author to audience. If this is the case, then Kael’s definition of anti-art is actually one half of all art’s possibilities: film with dogma is a megaphone, film without can be a mirror. Could the short films of Stan Brakhage or the paintings of Mark Rothko be said to have direct messages? Or do they rely on an engagement with the audience’s subconscious? Kael states that Last Year at Marienbad’s failures are that “the people we see have no warmth, no humour or pain, no backgrounds or past, no point of contact with living creatures”. This is an almost perfect description of the film-as-mirror effect. The abstract film-mirror is a void until we look into it, filling its space with ourselves, our warmth, our humour, our pain, and our pasts. This reliance on audience interpretation doesn’t denigrate the artist, as constructing a mirror is no easy feat.
The ‘accident’ as anti-art in Kael’s quote is fascinating because accident is so imperative a function in the artistic process. In the opening of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (2010), a film about a psychic rampaging killer tyre, a policeman exits the boot of a car to give a lecture to the audience about No Reason: why is E.T. brown? Why do the Love Story couple fall in love? Why does no one go to the bathroom in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? These details or lack of them, as in every film ever made, are there for no reason because life has no rea- son. ‘Reason’ is defined for my purpose as the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically. These elements aren’t logical choices, they are accidental, or more precisely, instinctive.
While making The Red Shoes (1948), director Michael Powell and writer Eric Pressburger argued furiously whether Moira Shearer should be wearing the magic slippers in a pivotal moment. Pressburger, the logical side, argued that the dancer couldn’t wear the slippers in the shot because it made no sense. Powell, the impulsive side, abandoned the logic and argued only that she must. The final image of Moira Shearer wearing the red shoes is both striking and indispensable, the film simply cannot be complete without it. What Powell was doing here was following the non-logical instinct, which must also be poetic.
On a sunny afternoon stretched on a grassy hill, cloud-spotters could end all discussion of what passing formations look like and call them all lumps of mashed potato. But no one ever does. Clouds are dragons, pirate ships and aliens because our imagination is not prosaic, it is poetic. Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Kubrick’s stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and William Burrough’s cut-up technique in literature cannot be created by design but by ‘accident’; the artistry is knowing when the work is complete. The same can be said of David Fincher’s infamously excessive number of takes,
there is a script, a rehearsal, a storyboard, but the takes go on and on waiting for the moment
of spontaneity that cannot be pre-planned.
La Notte, La Dolce Vita, and Last Year at Marienbad are ambiguous pictures crafted by relying on and encouraging poetic instincts, which is imperative in an art-form that flashes inkblots before us 24 times a second. Film is a kind of mass rorschach test; sessions spent in the darkness interpreting strange shapes, surrounded by others doing the same. It makes us aware of the inner workings of ourselves and those around us, and with this ongoing discourse where the same movie can, to the same person, mean different things at different times. The inkblot never dries.
Jack Wightman is that film nerd who works in a bookshop. He loves writing screenplays and articles, but sweats over the simplest of paragraphs, this bio included.