A Point of View

Movie Essay Account Treatment

I'm writing a film. It's about an essay about point of view. The impossibility. How absurd it is, when you look at it. And again, that's what it is: when you look at it. Point of view is an absurdity from another point of view. Where is the place of seeing when we tell ourselves stories made of pictures? And then there is writing. This writing. This writing? Writing in general? Is it the abstraction of the account that washes me up along with everything else in its current -- is that what makes it so absurd to pretend these pictures have the same generality, the same omniscience, the universal camera that simply is the showing of everything without any thought of this place or who is there looking?

What-where-who is this place of seeing, this point of view, when we see the rip in the dirigible that foretells the disaster? You insert a shot of this, made for this purpose, outside of what the passengers on the airship see, or the spectators on the ground, or the camera that caught the explosion.

In my movie, there is going to be a sequence of a car, to demonstrate the absurdity of all sequences of cars. A still shot of a car -- outside the car, a point of view where a camera was placed to take the picture of the car, presumably with a person there, though that is not certain, is given up to abstraction or not made the same matter of record -- appears in the uppermost left corner of a black screen, followed by another still shot, image, of the same size, to the right of it, continuing to make a row of shots along the top of the screen, and then another row of images counts off below that one, and so on filling up the screen to the bottom.

These are still shots of a car that emphasize, or insist on, the lapping and lapsing of those sequences that are supposed to be the single journey or trajectory of a car's movement, but are a composite, sometimes of these stagings and thus of various movements, stops and starts, sometimes perhaps of different camera placements along a route. Some of the shots will be from one side of the car, with the car facing in one direction, some will be from the other side, with the car thus facing the other direction in the image. Some will be from inside the car, as if from a driver's point of view. Some will be from overhead, as if helicoptors or airplanes were always ready to give us this bird or god's vantage, supposedly liberated from the dictates of gravity. Some of the shots will be of different cars.

Because the point of view is also this telling of the essay of the movie of the demonstration of the point of this point of view. Points of view cascading, lapping and lapsing each other like a rotating index card file, but that in turn behave like Chinese boxes, each a frame containing the other. A train of these thoughts framing thoughts. A Chinese box car train.

But it's absurd to think we can't show anything because of this absurdity of really showing anything.

The woman's face. Looking into the camera. She's looking at me, but then she'll really be looking at you. These words will be in voiceover. Perhaps mine, perhaps hers, perhaps a nice voice of an actor or actress, perhaps of her character or of the one she's talking to, perhaps her thoughts, spoken by her or to her, of her. Perhaps yours.

The woman looks into the camera while these thoughts, this point of view, this voiceover, this writing, goes on. And then there is intercutting. The car sequence. Then her face again. Then two people in a montage of various shots. Tilted. Ruffled. Smudge. Lifted murky and misty. Two other people. Two others, a man and a woman, perhaps an actor and an actress -- but who are these other people? Are they the woman looking in the camera and the one she is looking at? Perhaps they are stand-ins for them, for us.

Then, of course, it's like a Terence Malick movie that way, or a Chris Marker one. But then it goes on with all these different registers, perhaps all the different registers, all for the sake of demonstrating this pas d'absurdité -- now it is a Derrida movie, the step of absurdity, the not any absurdity -- to show how all the points of view are these hung gestures, these conceits, real and mundane all precisely in doing this unreal thing of posing some real view as some other, all views suspending views. A mundance. And again, the absurdity, the conceit, as if it could be all views. All itself being what any of us can call the sweep of our own slouching little lot. Rene Clair doing Bergman. Robert Bresson doing Charlie Chaplin. Fritz Lang doing Spielberg.

A Godard movie. Like all of them, it doesn't go. I don't really want to watch it. Then I start to and fall asleep. I wake up at different times and make my own jump cuts, my own dream version. Then I go back, and lap my lapsing. I realize the repeating of scenes, like Godard's lapping. They are slack, unruly, slouching from the manners of pretending, from the seriousness of pretending that this pretending is anything other than pretending. Godard does not want to pretend that we are not pretending, and in a kind of play of the mundane outside the lines -- the lines of what becomes the reality, of depiction, drama, passing one thing for another, that is only so because it is a convention of formality -- is more given to a ludic idleness that suddenly falls into and catches up the beauty of this idleness -- slouching, squatting, gratuitous -- this frame of hanging outside the frame. Godard's not going goes, suddenly inspires all this, the articulateness of the inarticulate.

Startle. A start. A grimace. An expression as if caught, frozen and cut, startled and startling. The look is on the face and of the face. The head as if caught in a backward movement is lit up, but flares between laughter and fright. A woman's face. Her expression strikes before that fact. Another face, such an exaggerated contortion of quizzical, it seems to be mocking more the freeze frame of an impact. A man's face, again a secondary fact. The same woman again, this time in a ridiculous burlesque of a pout. The man again, a travesty of maudlin pity, as if spoofing a silent film and its viewer at once. The sequence continues this way, back and forth, each face frozen in outrageous expression.*  Behind the woman, the action of a street, cars and passersby, can be cumulatively noticed. Behind the man is a window in which can be seen the reflection of similar. They may be at a sidewalk cafe. Perhaps the same one at the same time, perhaps together. But the movement serves to show, too, how these are not still shots, at least in the composite of the moving picture. They are holding these expressions in the duration of the moving pictures, the so-called live action. They are acting.

(What are they saying? Whose voices, thoughts? Is this my movie?)

There's a bullfight. The sequence of man against bull is the torrid suspense of closeups in relation to other views more plausible for spectators, how the context is suggested as not broken because of the propensity, not just in the spectator, in viewers, but in things, the whole matter, of following, what follows, and it's inverted, a la teleology and sine qua non, as if we're surprised that things don't require some immanent or essential or underlying rule (and this is also, in a way, the underlying, this is also the conundrum of it, the derivative itself, of combination, of juxtaposition, of difference), not the film narrative. There are views because there are viewers. (Including, for example, the bull.)

The thought comes in of some completely incongruous shot, in color (the bullfight is in black and white, you now remark). Of melons. It's rather difficult to disorient once the idea is in the head. Every shot will have context, familiarity right away. A string of unrelated shots will then have another context. The laws or rules of this combination, this cascading fall of law: an assemblage of various apparently unconnected shots gives precisely the context of collage. Shot composite meaning, ideography. The question is rather: how, then, to disorient. As if. It's not as if there can't be disorientation, but in fact even that requires some effort, because of this sticky quality of content/context. Or finding the balance of one context to another: at what point does the context shift so that, for example, the melon is dreaming of the bullfight?

Scene. Characters. One says, "I do not belong here." Cut to an entirely different setting, story, characters. Nothing of the first scene recurs.

Go from the sensational, the sweeping view -- statement with music, cadenza -- to the sensation of the waiting moment. Not the spectacle of projection, but what can then come to reverse the terms even of art. What's reduced out is what can't be encompassed, because it is surrounding. The surroundings. Passing itself, incidental sound as they call it in movie making. The din of this immersion that runs on, and runs off. The sussurations of this occulted space connected to the indefinite. The flow that is always else going on.