Look at that. I think about posting a review of Revanche today, and Ron posts on the same film in Au hasard. I managed to catch this on the Filmladen DVD, but it is slowly making its theatrical rounds over here and will get the full Criterion treatment at some point.
Reviews of films by people like Spielmann often resort to words like “clinical,” “cold,” “sterile,” and other quasi-backhanded descriptions for an approach to filmmaking that banks on long static takes across uncluttered narratives. This kind of pacing and mise-en-scène appears to consist of a detachment that results in that unclassifiable kind of cinema transcendence or functions as a set of artificial barriers against trite excesses of expression and emotion.
This detachment feels like a broken current between director and actor, or director and this world within the lens. Or more specifically, the director and everything that exists in their neatly constructed universe conjured out of the barest minimum of narrative material and set in motion even thought it feels a bit incomplete. Too soon it seems, because we want more to sink our teeth into. So we say: sterile, clinical. They seem detached in the same way that Paley’s watch is disconnected from the Watchmaker, but with less moving parts.
And this kind of detachment is often mistaken for some kind of clinical or cold attitude in the director’s work, which I have noticed in reviews of Revanche. But often the opposite is the case, and Revanche is a great example of how this works. Spielmann’s camerawork is completely controlled and moves in unadorned angles across its planes of action. It spends long periods of time watching its central character chop wood, traveling, thinking, etc… Whether via Tarkovsky’s plaintively spiritual pacing or Dumont’s steely resolve to resist expressive embellishment, these kinds of films are not as much about ideas and gestures as they are about passing time in a particular way – in Revanche for example, passing time after a staggering personal loss.
But it isn’t quite the case that Revanche is completely controlled because there are several instances in which the camera begins to move of its own accord. In the most striking of these, Spielmann tracks with a car turning off into the forest, but at the apex of the turn the camera continues moving forward, slowly, into the trees beyond and then it sits for a moment and stares blankly at the trees.
This momentary lapse in Spielmann’s grip on the film is telling. It tells us that his control over the lens isn’t sterile, or clinical, or cold. It is actually very compassionate and benevolent. It directs the entirety of our focus to the gnawing despair felt by its main characters, and allows us to track the fragile spread of pain and loss throughout the film as plainly as possible. This particular scene comes at the awful moment on which the rest of the film pivots, Spielmann’s small personal gesture here echoing loudly in its spacious interior. It is a sad moment, this drift the cinema equivalent of speechless shock.
Spielmann’s frame by frame decision not to rifle through the emotional toolbox for pat soundtracking, editing, or similar devices is actually very impassioned. His apparent detachment is the only way that these images can actually contain the unruly mess of real emotions that are at the center of the film. So Spielmann isn’t clinical as much as he is sacrificial, abandoning personal flourishes for the sake of his agonized characters. We wouldn’t be able to see them as clearly through the haze of less exacting edits.
And what we are left with is a study of that kind of despair that leaves us reeling, confused, and unwilling to be part of a life that works like it does in Revanche. It is not really about coping with trauma as it is about how silly it sounds when people talk about “coping mechanisms” after tragedy. It is an excellent film about panic, revenge, violence, and the thought processes of healing.