If you’re into sociology, and you’re curious about Deleuze, then read this one first. Skim some of the bits on psychoanalysis. But read the opening and the sections on representation closely. This is the book that gives birth to Empire, currently a hot one in the anti-globalism movement. It’s in this one that D/G show how any social order requires a means by which to articluate desire. They argue that desire is fundamentally productive, creative. But that it must be harnessed if a society is going to survive it’s chaotic impulses and forces.
Anti Oedipus is really a book of anthropology. It shows how “primitive,” “despotic,” and finally “capitalist” regimes differ in their organization of production, recording (inscription, representation), and consumption. It’s also a history insofar as it covers the process by which capitalism ultimately commands all the flows and chains of production, submitting them to a form of organization that is abstract (money is abstract) rather than local and physical.
The oedipal part of it is a critique of the Oedipal complex insofar as the complex articulates a model of society based on the family triangle. They want to show that the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of contemporary society.
Their alternative, to be taken literally, is schizoid: subvertive, resistance, and always escaping capture by slipping in between the categories that organize capitalist society and its way of thinking.

This little film has all the treatment and feel of a low-budget indie production, but it’s actually directed by well known Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou, commissioned by Japan for the 100th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu birthday. And it’s a perfect homage to Ozu, “more Japanese” than a Japanese film could have been (notes one commentator).

Partway through this film I noticed something strange about the relations between actors. I don’t think there’s a single reaction shot in this film. Certainly no use of the shot-reaction shot technique that’s conventionally used by film makers to get across how actors feel about each other.

Shot: actor’s attention directed to another actor.
Reverse shot: other actor’s face gives away the relationship between the two.

The shot/reverse shot technique seems to work so well, I think, not so much because it’s hard to put two actors on the screen at the same time, but because we (audience) relate uniquely to the face and emotion of a single face, and it’s that—the film’s relationship to its audience through the camera, which places the audience in relation to actors on the screen, that motivates an emotional response in the viewer that’s always different with one face on screen than with two or more.

Cafe Lumiere contains no shot/reverse shot sequences. In fact the actors don’t make eye contact. And this decision, conscious or not, creates a film in which its characters are always in a scene. Even when they are alone toghether in the smallest of bookstores, we are given a scene and not a relationship.

The camera’s still disposition to scenes, urban and interior, captures a landscape of objects and places through which the trapped love of our two lead characters journey in pursuit of a way to connect. Their affections for each other play like muted horns amidst a jingle of train station announcements and contemporary piano movements, there but not together. They are like two passengers, at times on parallel trains (and this is the film’s crucial scene), traveling in the same direction but separated by the window panes (pains) through which they direct their looks in a longing to collapse the space between the tracks, able to make the journey, but not together.

Beneath the film’s unfocused care and tenderness is the story of Yoko’s adoption, her pregnancy, and her decision to repeat her own past by bringing up the child without a father. And her friend’s (non-lover’s) silent yearning, “at the edge,” as he puts it in one scene, pictured in a rendering of his own (yes the actor actually made that drawing) as a lonely fetus (perhaps crying, he notes) in an eyeball surrounded by trains and tracks, alluding of course to suicide, preoccupied with a passion for recording trains and their sounds in order to capture evidence (he notes, and does he mean, of his death, should he join his trains on the tracks?)...

This is a great little film about hesitation and the desire to overcome it, a film that leaves open the possibility of redemption and which attaches it to the younger generation, who in their innocence and freedom might stand a better chance than the bound generation that brought them into the world to begin with.

“The first is Hamlet’s great formula, ‘The time is out of joint.’ Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. Everything changes, including movement. We move from one labyrinth to another. The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple, inexorable as Borges says, ‘the labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant.’ Time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the Critique of Pure Reason.” Gilles Deleuze, Preface “On four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy”, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, vii.
And might not the last sentence of this first paragraph in Deleuze’s brilliant and brief study of Kant, be a statement about film?

“Time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the first great achievement of film…”

Ever since film began to un-spool its own version of time at 24 frames per second, synthesizing it through simple optical illusion and the narrative innovations of montage (editing), film-makers have enjoyed the magic of imaginary time. And on occasion, a film-maker arrives who has an entirely different sense of time, a different breath, a gait out of step with the rhythms of time common to the moving picture.
Bela Tarr is one of those film-makers. And while he is often compared with the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky (also a time-maker), Bela Tarr’s temporalities are material, where Tarkovsky’s are often symbolic and visual.
Asked once why the scene of villagers marching towards the town square in Werckmeister Harmonies lasted as long as it did, the director answered, simply, “that’s how long it took to get there.”
As simple as this is for an answer, there is something else at work in Tarr’s camera work. Werckmeister Harmonies, at over 2 hours, contains only 39 shots. It took the director a day to edit together. But the effect of storytelling in so few shots is not just a reduction to the straightforward and direct capture of time. He is, I think, making film think with the body; and it is the body which, set in motion, resides in time.
Werckmeister Harmonies opens with a shot of town drunks in a bar enacting the orbits of the planets. A lone bulb hangs from the ceiling as the men spin and tumble slowly about the room, their bodies taking up heavenly relations. And this is what they do throughout the rest of the film: bodies move and are moved, they plod along empty roads by night; they gather in tedious crowds; they assemble for a march on the town square; they pillage a hospital; they walk adjacent to one another (there is a two minute tracking shot for which the director laid down over 300m of rail). And as the villagers in Werckmeister Harmonies are set in motion, so too is the viewer. Tarr makes the viewer think his film, and live its time, with him. I have watched as friends adjust their seats during many a shot, their own physicality coming under the spell of Tarr’s temporality.
Can bodies think? Can minds think without bodies? Can we have social relations as heavenly as the relations among the heavenly bodies? Tarr’s opening shot, in which we found the drunks losing themselves to vertiginal rotations, culminates with an eclipse. Tarr shows us an eclipse, an eclipse in the heavens, staged by village drunks. Light, obscured, is not darkness, as time, out of joint, is not motion.

warning: contains spoilers

What a splendid film. This film is perfectly structured as a story of friendship, trust, and possibly love (left open to the viewer’s perception, of course) that unfolds in two parallel series. The decision to write this story in parallel was brilliant, for the commonalities in each character’s life are the basis for the question Capote addressed in his book: the encounter of two layers of society, the bourgeois and the seedy underbelly, an encounter that results in violence for no apparent reason.

Capote admits that he feels as if the killer his novel circles around is like a brother to him. And that their lives could have started in the same house, the criminally-inclined and murderous brother leaving through the backdoor, he himself through the front (and into the limelight of high-society hobnobbing).

The parallel construction works perfectly because this is a film, after all, about the writing of a novel. While it’s a crime novel, the crime under investigation in book is doubled up by the criminal’s execution. A criminal under study by an author is himself subjected to a crime—one that unites the two men, again, in a familial logic.

Violence, random and senseless violence in particular, gets Capote’s attention as a somehow emblematic and symbolic microcosm of what he sees occurring in society at large. He wants to write about the brutal murder of a countryside family because there must be something in a criminal’s life that explains how such a thing can occur. An explanation for the rip and tear in society’s fabric that makes sense…

Two men, two paths, two crimes, one logic.

Capote’s own life will lead him, too, to a crime. His writing of the crime, his writing of the criminal, will unfold in time as a relationship, virtual and actual, between him and the criminal. And it, too, will terminate in the violent hanging that permits Capote to finally conclude his novel and unleash its success on his own tragic lifeline. It’s the last thing he writes, because it’s a story written in blood, and the tears he sheds over this prayer answered are indeed more painful than those shed over unanswered prayers.

Capote knows that he let the criminal down, sold him out for the sake of a story, and that in so doing he sold his soul. What then to distinguish him from the criminal whose brutal act was, too, the unexplained choice made out of passion and defensiveness, pride and prejudice?

Two men, two paths, two crimes, one logic. A logic of violence to replace the logic of a relationship. Termination of the series.

When little frank announces to his mother and her boyfriend, his tennis coach, “I wish I could come with you guys,” hidden meanings tumble out from between the lines as if the wheels on this family had detached and the carriage return simply departed the vehicle. And that, loosely, is how this little bumper car of a film goes. It’s an amusement in a parking lot of prep school American culture, where books are praised and besmirched, studied, written, and plagiarized. “Rather Kafkaesque,” as elder son Walter describes The Metamorphosis, by Kafka.

The phrases that spew and exit from Mom and Dad, and sons Walter (teen) and Frank (adolescent), hit you viscerally, punch-lines to the gut, funny and painful at the same time. Could they be more dysfunctional, this lot? If you put them in Scotland and wound back the calendar to, say, Thatcher’s reign? Is it possible that a kid might have an Oedipal conflict with his mother’s boyfriend? Or his mother, an Oedipal conflict with her son? This is not Capturing the Friedmans, but it could be “Letting fly the Freudians.”

Ultimately, the Squid and the Whale steps back from analysis and leaves the viewer to piece together the verbal dribble, miss-cues, and malaprops where they belong: as out of place as the characters that produced them. A broken home leaves pieces behind. No analysis puts it back together, no humor can mend its holes. A hilarious and poignant film.