What's Missing
Later today I’m hoping to write about the Stan Brakhage films on a DVD titled “By Brakhage”. I just watched a small portion last night. The films are fascinating so far, but the most useful part was the interview, which I watched straight away. Lots of good stuff about “seeing” and “vision” and the difference between film and movies.
Which brings me back to “Triplets Of Belleville”, and hopefully forward again to more Godard films…
Something was bothering me about “Triplets” that I couldn’t put my finger on: The look of the animation was amazing, and they acknowledged a debt to “101 Dalmatians”. Music is an essential part of the story - I didn’t understand what bicycles had to do with singing triplets at first, but now I do…
But music is the clue to what’s missing: Hardly anybody says anything. As if words were not necessary for communication. A lot of effective communication is taking place in the story without anybody saying anything. It can’t be explained away in the story as a language barrier - everybody is French, and I even felt that the entire universe of the film was comfortably French. Belleville itself is clearly “overseas” based upon how they got there, but it is as much Montreal as it is Gotham.
I hope it’s not ironic to aspire to writing while wishing there were fewer words. It’s clearly ‘swimming against the current’ in some sense. When I see these animated characters express everything in glances or facial expressions, I see into some weird promised land of more effective communication, free of needless chatter. And when I look back at the real world around me, I think it’s because people are losing the ability to communicate non-verbally. And here’s where I also see more value in the written word, not less: Whether printed on dead paper, or glowing temporarily in phosphors switched by a microchip to match codes spinning past the detector on a magnetic platter, words are about durability - in how they can be selected, filtered and combined in thoughtful ways intended to last. So much of the volume is in redundancy - a form of distributed storage as old as the hills.
I also thought that the dog was the wisest character. The dog’s dreams convinced me: He spends his life barking at trains, and then has a dream of riding on a train past his house only to see a person barking at him. The dreams show the dog has a clarity of vision that few other characters in the movie share. The next best trait is determination / perseverance. The ambient humans are sloe-eyed and obese - whole families are sitting around a table eating and watching TV… Until you get to Belleville, where everything is exaggerated beyond belief. I can’t imagine any of the people would fit in the elevators to take them up the absurdly tall and slender skyscrapers.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT
