Cowards Bend the Knee

This Reel Sounds column takes the form of a dialogue as it is an edited extract of an episode of Resonance FM’s visual culture show I’m Ready for my Close-Up broadcast in September 2008, in which Alex Fitch and Virginie Sélavy discussed modern silent movies, including the work of Guy Maddin.

Alex Fitch: Before we discuss Guy Maddin, I want to bring up the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called ‘Hush’, which – suitably as it celebrates a form of filmmaking that most people think is anachronistic – was the last episode to be broadcast on TV in the 20th century. It won many awards and is based on German nightmarish tales like Struwwelpeter; by removing the dialogue from the soundtrack Buffy’s creators have brought something very primal and nightmarish to the storytelling.

Virginie Sélavy: Yes, it is a bit like one of those nightmares that everybody has at some point: you’re running away in slow motion from something scary that is chasing you! It’s the same idea in ‘Hush’: the characters scream as they are attacked but no one can hear them. The other interesting thing is that it shows how powerful the human voice is when Buffy finally gets her voice back and screams, breaking the silence and killing the evil guys.

AF: Maybe it’s because we grew up on a diet of MTV, or rather TV influenced by MTV, where the combination of music and visuals became a new language for film. That said, people from the ‘MTV generation’ are increasingly reliant on bad dialogue rather than visual storytelling to drive the plot of their movies, which is bizarre.

VS: It’s not surprising that someone like Guy Maddin is attracted to primarily visual storytelling. I think that it’s much easier to create surrealist types of narratives or fantasy worlds with silent film because dialogue can make certain scenarios seem a bit trite or too literal. I think Maddin avoids the excesses of melodrama by not having dialogue. Through silent film you’re able to create a more poetic world, because it is not purely representational. It’s a bit like animation: it can’t be realistic, it doesn’t attempt to recreate the real world, which makes it a lot easier to create a convincing fantasy world.

AF: I thought Maddin’s first film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, which does have dialogue, wasn’t particularly good. It could just be because he was learning as a filmmaker, but I think he found his voice – ironically – when he started making silent movies. He started using dialogue again a few years ago in The Saddest Music in the World, but that works really well because it feels informed by his silent work. It is as if his development reflected the history of cinema itself: he had to learn how to make sound movies by doing silent films first. He doesn’t need dialogue to tell a story, but The Saddest Music in the World is as much about music as it is about pictures, and I guess that also came from his work on the ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary the year before.

VS: These modern silent films are different from the films from the silent era because old silent films didn’t have a synched soundtrack – it was generally played live in each cinema, and improvised by the pianist. In a film like Cowards Bend the Knee, the soundtrack is very important and so suggestive and well used that you don’t feel the need for dialogue at all.

AF: It makes me think of animation, from Fantasia to episodes of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes – the ones that won awards were quite often the ones without dialogue, I’m surprised people haven’t noticed this correlation over the years! Film is such a visual medium; particularly when you’re making something like a cartoon, when you’re drawing a character 24 times every second, to have to then think about how the mouth might move and dub over it seems a needlessly convoluted way of telling a story.

VS: Definitely. Hitchcock once said something like ‘silent film is the purest form of cinema’, and I can really understand that, it’s often a much more poetic form than sound film. It is unfortunate that modern silent films, like Guy Maddin’s movies, or Esteban Sapir’s La Antena, are categorised as ‘arty’ movies, and therefore only get the attention of a minority audience, because if more people got to see them they would realise that not only are they stunningly beautiful, but they’re also really entertaining…

Listen to the podcast of the discussion of modern silent movies.

Photo: Billy Childish
© Tate Media

TateShots

Release date: 21 January 2010

Watch on TateShots Website or download from iTunes.

TateShots is an ongoing podcast series produced by Tate Modern, and the latest six films in the series investigate the links between music and visual art through interviews with musicians who are also artists. Even though they’ve been well-researched and curated, watching five-minute podcast films on a cinema screen is disconcerting. Because the podcasts are meant to be watched in short online bursts, teased out over a few weeks, the artists are asked many of the same questions. This probably helps give the segments cohesion when watched in chunks over time, but it grates when all are watched in one sitting. The Flip Cam wobbles of some interviews sit uneasily with archive footage, concert images, and extracts from other interviews shot from many angles, with tricksier shots. (The series is funded by big media corporation Bloomberg so it’s hard to tell if the low-budget feel of some of the filming came from financial limitations or was a deliberate choice to replicate a YouTube DIY aesthetic.)

The artists interviewed – Lydia Lunch, David Byrne, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Billy Childish, Jeffrey Lewis, and Mark E Smith – are all safe choices. Most of these artists came of age during punk and post-punk (with the exception of Lewis, whose work owes such a stylistic debt to Daniel Johnston that he might as well have done). All are established as having been cool. But what about some interviews with musician-artists whose work in one or both fields is a bit naff, or awkward, or embarrassing? It might have been more interesting to hear someone like Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, say, talking about his collection of sexy Polaroids.

What we get is a lot of talk about art school experimentation and subversion in the 1970s, which is fine – but it’s nothing new or unexpected, and not terribly illuminating. Shock has an increasingly short half-life. For Lydia Lunch to explain how she loves Goya’s devils or Duchamp’s Etant Donnés (an installation that lets viewers look through peepholes in a barn door to see a faceless naked woman) will surprise no one. Though she gives an intelligent and impassioned explanation of her choices, her segment makes those works, and the dark, violent sexuality of her songs, all seem oddly quaint.

Mark E Smith, on the other hand, sinks into self-parody in his segment. He talks about painters who work while listening to his music, and about hitting Damien Hirst in the face at a long-ago Fall gig. Mostly he’s just swinging a bottle of beer around, picking his nose and gurning like the old drunk priest in Father Ted. His segment will probably go viral because it’s so obnoxious – and good for the Tate if it can trawl some hits in with this for bait.

Billy Childish’s film is the standout of the bunch. Childish dresses in his onstage clothes and in an exaggerated painter’s smock and neck scarf so that the ‘artist’ and ‘musician’ can interview each other, and both characters play with the questions, pulling faces while joking about the Beatles, punk and Edvard Munch. He’s funny and charming, and his interview shows what the format can do. If the series continues, the curators would do well to try more such experiments.

Emily Bick

This TateShots series of films can be watched on the TateShots Website or downloaded from iTunes from 21 January 2010.