Two Master Miniaturists

Last year saw the release of two new films, each by a prominent European formalist. These are makers I should know a bit better than I do.

A Floating World (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2021)

Rousseau seems to be a bit of an anomaly in French film. His work has affinities with some of the more rarefied practitioners of the avant-garde, but he doesn't seem interested in abandoning the role of human beings as "characters," people we believe we get to know across the running time of the film. Thing is, there are no characters per se in A Floating World, since we don't learn names or gain access to private motivations. Instead, Rousseau articulates individuals and spaces through repetition, with gradual shifts in function and perspective.

Some commentaries I've seen describe A Floating World is being an homage to Ozu, and I suppose it could be, albeit in the same oblique manner as Kiarostami's Five. We move between specific locations in Japan -- a park, a hotel room, a bridge by a river -- and observe the permutations of camera set-up and physical stature of the people onscreen. One could perhaps call A Floating World a place-based diary, since Rousseau is showing us these locales across an unspecified period of time, as they are occupied by different individuals, each with their own posture and comportment. 

There are also extended shots of the landscape itself, as Rousseau observes the ordinary functions of the city of Tokyo. There are several shots onboard an elevated railway, watching as the passengers keep to themselves and are gently jostled by the movement of the train. There are also long shots of buildings and factories, and depending on the degree of cloud cover, we see Mt. Fuji hovering in the sky. Although A Floating World is the kind of film that could easily lapse into exoticism, Rousseau's camera emphasizes the mundane -- a trio of fisherman on a pier, or a classically inflected photo shoot in the part, involving women in kimonos holding parasols.

The problem of the Western observer in the East has long been a problem, one examined by people like Edward Said, Roland Barthes, and Chris Marker. Rousseau is not overtly challenging this trope, but subtly undermines it by making A Floating World a partial self-portrait. We see the filmmaker in his hotel room, wearing a floppy hat and moving his equipment out for another day of filming. We see his faint reflection in the window of a darkened bar, his shape holding the center of the glass while a Japanese man looks out onto the street.  It's not that Rousseau doesn't belong in Japan. Rather, he shows that he is looking at this culture from an unavoidable exterior position, one positioned somewhere between Ozu's formal rigor and the outsider's polite remove. When Rousseau has left his hotel room, it is occupied by a Japanese traveler, implying that there are no real cultural insiders in the contemporary world, only degrees of distance.

Picasso in Vallauris (Peter Nestler, 2021)

I should be more familiar with Peter Nestler's work than I am, given that I've seen about seven of his films. But much like the Berlin School directors who he directly influenced, it can be difficult to get a handle on what Nestler is about. I think that's because his mode of filmmaking is more about not doing things. Picasso in Vallauris is an expository documentary, commissioned to accompany an exhibition of Picasso's ceramic works at the Ludwig Museum. (Its founder, Peter Ludwig, has been a target of Hans Haacke, for reasons you might expect.) But Picasso in Vallauris is considerably different than the typical arts biography that institutions tend to produce.

For one thing, Nestler is committed to a unique type of lateral thinking. In under an hour, the film addresses Picasso's return to his Spanish hometown in 1950, mostly by contextualizing this decision in terms of the artist's community of like-minded modernists (Stein, Cocteau, others) and the artificial divide between art and craft. Vallauris was home to a centuries-old tradition of artisanal pottery, and Nestler provides archival footage of Picasso manipulating wet clay and warping freshly thrown pots. But he is also careful to juxtapose these images of Picasso with the humbler, more ordinary work of contemporary Vallauris ceramicists, a few of whom knew Picasso and worked alongside him. 

Nestler's editing reminds me of Artavazd Peleshian. Like the Armenian experimentalist, Nestler refrains from using montage to force connections. Instead, his editing shows great respect for the viewer, assuming that they can infer relationships across time. In the Vallauris film, this is most evident when Nestler describes poets and activists who survived the Holocaust, friends of Picasso who visited him in Vallauris. When he shows the black smoke billowing out of the building-sized kilns in the mountains, Nestler clearly wants us to consider humankind's age-old control of fire, and how such practices can so easily be perverted.

Nestler's film does imply that any artist has choices to make when working with vernacular forms, or laboring under the patronage of those in power. The film never flinches from Picasso's political commitments, and takes a detour to provide a history of Vallauris's anti-fascism, including a mayor who defied Franco and was executed for not selling out the Communists. Picasso in Vallauris ends with a close consideration of the artist's use of a former chapel as the location for a two-sided mural depicting war and peace. As the present-day potters explain, Picasso understood Vallauris, its architecture and artistic traditions, and made work that both honored and expanded them. This commitment can be read back onto Nestler's film, a promotional tool that does what it has to do, according to the precepts of its genre, but also does quite a bit more.