Let the Darionioni Nuovo entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)

Stendahl syndrome is a real thing and now I know because it happened to me with this experimental-narrative post-modernist hybrid fairy tale-erotic awakening giallo bit of mind-melting genius, Amer (2009). I didn't pass out but I did get a full bore panic attack mind shatter moment of pure Vulcan mind meld between image and reality. I have fallen into this film like Alice into that K-rabbit hole down through the 'a female David Lynch twisted up with a giallo fan version of Maya Deren' Wonderland. Amer isn't just a film, it's a disintegration engine, sucking up the distance between the viewer's mind and the screen like lovers on either end of a twizzler, swallowing towards the middle and into the blackness.  What sets Amer apart from all other films is that it's written and directed by a couple - Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani - they come together like the reunification of the conscious mind and the unconscious. "It’s because we are a couple that we can work together," the couple noted in a 2010 desktop interview. "It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate." They sure can. Their names represent Italian males and French femaleness which makes sense because there are certainly strains of Catherine Breillat as well as Argento, Antonioni as well as Claire Denis in them, but they're Belgian. They're Belgian and beautiful.

 If helps the process to have seen enough experimental cinema, Antonioni-ish ur-ambiguous 'intentionally signification resistant' art, and Argento-ish European erotic fairy tale horror films from the 60s-70s, so the analytical signifiers and references can cascade upon you, the way Un Chien Andalou cascaded horror upon rioting Parisian art critics in 1929, or the Basilica of Santa Croce cascaded upon poor Stendahl. Thanks to these two kids who made this wild film, Stendahl syndrome's not just for Florentine tourists, or Asia Argento, anymore. This time it's poison L. This time they came for me. I fell.

Until mon Amer there's always been a weird dissonance, a grinding disagreement, between the iconography of experimental film and narrative film, even in Europe, where art doesn't have to be framed and velvet roped the way it does here. A mirror to this twin dissonance might be found between the Jungian anima and the Mulveyan male gaze, between Jess Franco's 1967 Succubus, let's say, and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman. But Amer brings to this twin dissonance (experimental vs. narrative / male fantasies about what girls dream vs. female artist's impressions of girls dreaming about men) a twin serpent DNA lover's frequency that harmonizes all those dissonant tones, and the resulting unified field harmony expands wider and wider until it envelops and entrains other dissonances, widening its wave until even the most ideal sympathetic response to the film is swamped and carried off ever outward into space until the floor rises up to meet you like a wall.

And then forward into an outright panic attack as the construct of self within your mind shatters like Ellison's glass goblin.
Your head's shambling pedestal falls
to the museum's dirty marble Florence floor
Your back's against the couch still --watching
the shattered shards scatter off the diving board couch
and you swim

deep

deep down - the floor comes towards you like a mouth,
Betty Blue Boy delivers a candy colored poke
in the outcast cowboy burning constantly at stake

But what mouth?

And what is the difference between faking not having amnesia and not having it but secretly pretending to (secret as in pretending you know what's going on when you don't but not really, i.e. faking it even to yourslf? This is what we black-out drinkers are familiar with --easing our way into our lives each morning like we know all that happened the night before but we don't - it's an art).

Many have tried and a few have come close to harnessing the kind of alternating current a romantic male-female directing-writing team couple can generate: Debra Hill and John Carpenter came as close as anyone with Halloween (1978) but every film has to get up from the table and go pick a bathroom sooner or later, and Halloween eventually chooses the Men's, which means John Carpenter in the limelight, Hill to the side. No film has made it all the way past the border of gender and to the boundary of the split subject, avoiding picking the man as the director, woman as producer, or vice versa --no film makes it past nationality, temper and even age, smashing through the wall between the bathroom doors and finding its own special hidden alcove. Amer isn't male gaze or the female gaze but both gazes sliced up in long celluloid pupil Laura Mars strips and arranged in Sergio Leone eye close-up layers to form something as new as neither, as referential as Tarantino and transgressive without relying on anything so paltry as meaning, story, narrative, coherence or logic... or even cheap shocks. Would your dreams ever deign to use them? Why should Amer? Instead it resists even the fundamental hazard at a guess of meaning critics might find in something similarly post-structuralist like Antonioni's Red Desert. It's something as slick and enjoyable as any modern movie but deeply entrenched in the experimental and certain to confuse or irritate anyone expecting signifiers and the real to properly adhere.

The male-female creative interaction of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani seems mirrored in the zig-zag rhythm of the shots - one step into giallo narrative, one step back along fractured dream abstracted surrealism, each refracting and reflecting the predecessor - move, countermove and so nothing is ever clear or unclear. Everything resists a concrete interpretation but beguiles us into wanting one, uses that want for its own purposes: it doesn't charge ahead like a boy with an uzi and climax or dissolve into curios like a girl with a flower, yet if you don't run away in disgust, or boredom and if you don't dismiss it all as girly stuff or misogynist or think you don't know what's going and and just ride with it, but remain alert and enthralled and ideally high on lack of sleep and Jung and art and Robitussin, then there it is, in its sublime perfection, the mind--both halves--inner and outer, conscious ego and unconscious animus locking into place while busting open at the same time, the unconscious's language signifiers become reshuffled, the normal narrative progression cracked open like a nut, the inside goodness free falling in slow motion and for a moment you and the unconscious and the images onscreen are all one - the barrier of screen and speaker between you has evaporated.

When dealing with the giallo genre in the scope of female fairy tale icongraphy it's important to stress that the collective as well as personal unconscious does not recognize the border between life and death, between the alive and dead version of you, the ego/soul/body/consciousness. Your dreams are the same whether or not you die outside of them - death in your bed doesn't wake you from the nightmare. The razor in the hand of the man chasing you is never just a phallus, penetration anxiety or even fear of death. It's a fear of dissolving, a loss of self, the split - you are afraid to turn around and face the demon chasing you in your nightmare for a very good reason - once you turn around and face it the demon will merge with the 'you' who stopped running, both will cease to exist and a new life will begin. Only through fear of change, or merging, of opening the self's border, does one hold onto the virginity of a tangible unchanging self. All else is transition. All of Amer is this transition - it is a coming attractions highlight reel of infinite length, the narrative arc of the 90 minute film split three ways, and from there three more.

The first such split occurs during childhood - the Freudian key that unlocks Bluebeard's secret dead bride storage: Bava's Black Sabbath, Suspiria, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm, and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The second turns sunny and erotic with the girl on the cusp of sexual maturity: Rohmer, Betty Blue, Emmanuelle, Fellini, Blow-Up and Chabrol, and even maybe Cocteau. The third and final turns to the dark again: Argento, later Bava plus Blood and Black Lace, Soavi, Fulci... but with the jittery bipolar modern 'twang' of Antonioni's Red Desert, the eternal dance of metatexual refraction never ends. The movie becomes a male-female duel in exquisite corpse fashion, not scene by scene but shot by shot, each image reinterpreting the one that came before, ever circling dark truths but resisting meaning and remaining the pinnacle of cinematic 'dream logic.'

The only way to describe what's going on is to give these kids a name, so I'm calling them the Darionioni Nuovo, a group of filmmakers who have melded the experimental and deeply psychoanalytical styles and substances of Argento and Antonioni into a modern new vision for cinema, one geared towards not just the moviegoer's eyeball but their pupil, not just their ear but their ossicles. This is a zone that we usually don't trust 'new' filmmakers with, especially not in America where everything has to be laid out with big yellow lines and breasts and 2.3 children and token minorities and police and moral lessons and zeitgeist-dictated products placed according to rating and market. But in Europe and places where socialized education and less hysterical reactions towards sex and cigarettes lets the youth get super intellectual for free here they are, in three films reachable via Netflix, Berberian Sound Studio, Only God Forgives, and Amer but mainly or totally in this instance, Amer. Maybe they can't be appreciated, or even endured, without familiarity with the 60s-70s European horror film canon, but if you haven't experienced any of it, then what are you, un poulet?

Now when a guy, a bro, a dude tries to make a female coming of age story, no matter artsy or 'feminist' it's still a male fantasy, in the end, am I right guys? And that's a shame, because on the one hand we're not allowed to get turned on by the Blue is the Warmest Color because it's still the leering male gaze, and on the other we can't enjoy Chris Lilley's HBO show Private School Girl because our anima gets jealous. And when a woman makes a coming of age film she either lets her animus, "her master's voice" lure her into a phallus-sacrificial circle in the forest, ala Thirteen, or she projects said voice clear out of the room with the cricket bat-like swipe of a musketeer's sword (Breillat's Bluebeard). Amer rolls elegantly along the straight razor length of the blade and into the 'win a free game' hole at the end. When it emerges it is, como si dice?, ready for the Lynchian eraser factory.

And what then? The lights come in corners of this massive eraser factory that have been dark for years! You forgot those lights were even there; forgot the corners were even there; forgot the machines that now start whirring and you forgot what they do or where they came from. People are applauding you, Nina! You didn't even know you were onstage. Who are those people? You've moved from being just another American whining for his climax to a European calmly engaging the sensual. Now, Nina, Now! Now you really are the Black Swan. And some trick velvet light choker snaps shut behind you, the concrete Basilica floor snaps up to greet you like a grounding lover. And on the count of three you are back to one true unified / split.

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Amnesiac Cinema: THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) and SUCCUBUS (1968)

  "I would have preferred modernity. Here you move and everything squeaks."

The amnesiac occupies an understandably hallowed place in European cinema, where endless language barriers, culture shock, and class stratification work both for and against a sense of formed identity. If a woman wakes up and doesn't remember her own name or what she's supposed to be doing with her life she can still get by fairly easily if she's wearing decent clothes and doesn't have a panic attack. Whole European films can go by with this uneasy sense of displacement. Do these people talking even really know each other? Is the girl in THE HEADLESS WOMAN trying to conceal that she doesn't know who she is or who anyone else is, or is she faking to avoid having to report possibly running over a child? No one asks her anything specific, she's able to cruise through her Argentine town on auto-pilot, everyone preparing for her arrival and departure like no matter where she chooses to go she's expected.

Unless it comes with a big forwarding narration or establishing title crawl (i.e. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") we come into each new film we see just as uncertain about everything. We are all amnesiacs in the audience, unless we've seen the movie before, so an amnesiac heroine can just seem... modern. She actively resists interpretation, as if she wandered in from the movie across the multiplex and no one dares tell her she's in the wrong place. She resists our using her words and expressions to establish her identity and relationship to those around her. She stays neutral so as to not admit she doesn't know the correct response to each new challenge. A man keeps bothering her, touching her, and she doesn't know if its her husband, a lover, a brother, or just a pesky stalker, and she doesn't dare ask.

The drawback to being so free of class distinctions here in the U.S. is that you can't just walk up to random people and start conversations and expect to be taken care of by the indentured class. Who do you choose to ask for directions when you're lost? What economic/class group are you in? Can we ever be sure the person who approaches us and seems friendly won't in the end be just some homeless bum asking for money, or a serial killer? Are you one?

In THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the (possible) amnesiac is Veronica (Maria Onetto), a dentist in a small Argentine town. Wherever she goes people know just who she is, or seem to, and someone seems to be cleaning up her past behind her as she goes. Her amnesia begins when she hits her head on the roof of her car after running over... something, either a dog or a small boy - she can't trust herself to remember, and as the film goes on, we don't know what her game is. What first looks like a cop digging up bodies on the side of the road turns out to be a plumber digging up a clogged pipe; the droning dissonance of pop songs on the radio seem halfway to being haunting ghost voices in her head, they almost seem to accuse her. In one of the greatest scenes she hides out in a bathroom in the hospital and neither she nor we quite realize the nurses barging in are not after her at all. The only thing we do know: director-writer Lucretia Martel is a friggin' genius.

It helps to understand socialism and the much more enlightened way that doctors and dentists don't automatically get to be rich in places with truly socialized medicine. Argentina's doctors still make house calls and hospitals, like museums, have a rundown look we usually associate only with public high schools in this country. Frankly this how it should be, and having been there twice with my ex-wife, once before once after the economic collapse, I can vouch for the casual, physically affectionate way people relate to each other, based almost purely on signifiers of either the young intellectual class, which included doctors and dentists, the noveau riche (which most Argentines refer to simply as "gangsters") and the very poor, the local Indian class who here in the complex mise en scene of THE HEADLESS WOMEN have a kind of mystic spiritual omnipresence.

When looking for comparisons one must go to Russia, a huge cultural influence on the hip socialism of Argentina. Woody Allen's CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS covers similar ground but is a shrill Jerry Lewis face compared to the subtlety of Lucretia Martel, which is born of Chekhov. Argentina has a close relationship to Russia, to the point where many people are given Russian names (1), Russia is certainly a land of an illustrious but strange, violent past and the 'amnesia' of THE HEADLESS WOMAN recalls the mystery of Anastasia,  the black spots in Russia's history thanks to its various purges and Argentina's own 'Reign of Terror.'

To explain, I quote this passage from Suddenness May Happen's Adrian Bregazzi:

On 24th March 1976, a military junta under General Jorge Videla overthrew the Perón government in Argentina. On 19th May, Borges, Ernesto Sabato and other writers met with Videla, expressing their support for the overthrowing of the Perónista terrors, and for Videla's stating that "the development of culture is essential for the development of a Nation."

Between 1976 and 1983 an estimated 30,000 people were 'disappeared' by the Argentinian Dictatorship. On 15th December 1983, writer Sabato became president of the newly-formed National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, the government-established commission empowered to investigate the 'disappearance' of persons in Argentina over the previous 20 years.

In 2007, in his book “Cultural Amnesia”, (the now) Clive James published a personal diatribe against Borges, confiscating his years of creative work and judging him posthumously guilty of silence during the Dirty War of the Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983).

Not to get into the whole mess down there, as Martel's protagonist is so strange we're never quite sure if she even has amnesia. And I don't want to spoil the 'surprise' or lack thereof, let's just say that the openness of interpretation is key, because there are two ways to watch an amnesiac movie, and only one will give you pleasure, the other will make you feel 'left out'. If you assume the woman doesn't have amnesia, for example, the films listed here can seem distended, dull, unfocused, sort of like if you walk into an Antonioni film halfway through with a head full of sugar. If you bear in mind the amnesiac precept, you can get your mind kind of blown thinking about the world, language, cultural and gender barriers that separate us and make it relatively easy for a woman--or a country--to go through life with no sense of the past. And the best of both worlds is to have a protagonist who shares our foreign film culture shock in such a way as we never know which one of us really knows what's going on, and that's what ART is all about!


I first came to this conclusion watching SUCCUBUS (AKA NECRONOMICON), the 'Sensation of 67' a few years ago, who has a similarly amnesiac heroine, this one a nightclub performer who loses touch with reality and can't tell if she really is a sadistic killer or just plays one on stage:

Strange characters come up to her at the various soirees, seemingly thrilled to have found her at last, as if they've been looking and looking for Lorna since they last met. She merely stares at these interlopers blankly, not doubting what they say, but also not caring. In this context, the pick-up line, “Haven’t we met before?” takes on an extra creepy overtone. Anything that happened before the credits of the film--anything that we have not seen on-screen--does not exist for Lorna or for us. Thus relationships between Lorna and her lovers are always in flux. After her first performance, which is the first lengthy scene of the film, Lorna mysteriously appears at Mulligan’s (Jack Taylor) front door. He’s already in his bathrobe and when he answers, and seems to not remember who she is. As viewers, we can’t tell whether she’s just shown up uninvited like a stalker from the club or whether they in fact live together and are just playing a sexy game, or whether this is merely the result of language difficulties. Is he just hungover and doesn't trust his own memory? Is he used to inviting women to "come over later" and then forgetting who they even are? Or is he just, by default, unable to say no to a sure thing?




Whatever the real truth might be, the not-knowing works to both excite and disconcert. As the pair move playfully into the bedroom, we begin to think that maybe Lorna herself isn’t sure why she came there. Anyone who has ever tried to hide the fact that they don’t remember someone who knows them will relate. Is she taking advantage of his amnesia, or is he taking advantage of hers? Or is Franco's sporadically amateurish direction and the bad dubbing (2). In the cat and mouse game of who remembers what, it’s the being in the moment that counts, and Franco’s sense of the moment, and the erotic by extension, is very advanced—and perfectly suited to the world of jetsetting, booze-swilling, partner swapping glitterati of swingin’ ’67!

From there the film just keeps rolling back and forth through a haze of flashbacks, dreams and different countries. Lorna feels her way through events by the impulses coming from her unconscious, be they to seduce, kill or spout poetic monologues. She bears her amnesia close to the vest and in this way she is a perfect stand-in for the viewer, the "art film" viewer in particular, who may be forever wondering what's going on in the narrative themselves. We've all walked into the middle of a movie before, and had to instantly guess what was going on and who was what to who, people sshhh-ing us if we asked what was going on. So wither la Succubus? Is Franco a bad director with no vision, or is he a genius whose films improve on repeat viewings?” To paraphrase the stilted English dialog in the film: “What good would it do to freak out about amnesia when not knowing can be so pleasurable?”

(...) And of course, with the ancient architecture of Europe backing her up, Lorna’s amnesia stretches back far longer than her American counterparts: the amnesiacs in Memento and Mulholland Drive can only regress a little ways in their young, gaudy, pre-fab countrysides. Vertigo’s Carlotta Vance has to come from the pre-U.S., version of California, requiring long drives in Scottie’s car out to nationally preserved landmarks. Lorna’s European location allows for so much ancient architecture all around her that her amnesia can slide back through several centuries without much effort.





(More here: Time Travel for Amnesiacs: Succubus and the Moebius Love Strip)
 NOTES:
1. My Argentine ex-wife was given the Russian name Natacha, for example, and strangely enough, she looks a lot like the girl in the upper right of the top picture. 
2. Inevitably these 'international' productions are filmed MOS or with actors all speaking in their own languages, then for the dubbing the actors contribute to the language track of their native tongue, so Jack Taylor might contribute to the English track but not the French, while a French actress vice versa, etc.

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