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The Fullness of Minimalism

 
Yvette Bíró

In the last few years I have been interested in the neglected values
of slowness, an urge against the over-praised fast pace, the
infatuation with feverish quickness, as it has become idolised in
life as well as film. I wrote a series of essays about it, borrowing
Italo Calvino’s favourite motto, festina lente (‘hasten slowly’),
and have looked more closely at its major masters. Also, a new book,
called Turbulence and Flow: Rhythmic Design in Film (forthcoming
from Indiana University Press) was born, discussing what there might
be to gain, the magic to be found, in dedicated attention, in
patiently lingering on details. While analysing the best examples of
both classical and new films, I detected another important aspect of
the phenomenon: the beauty of a reserved economy in storytelling,
the intensity gained through a deliberate reduction to a very few
elements. I started to evaluate not only the Asian masters’
inclination toward calm meditation, recognised already by Ricciotto
Canudo, but learned to enjoy on the whole the measured, saturated
representation of arte povera filmmaking. It became pertinent that
the scarce description of events and gestures, which suddenly take
on the power of rituals, the tacit hiding of emotions, verging on a
severe discipline, do not create distant coolness, but, on the
contrary, in this withdrawal a new suspense may come to life.

It is not only the already paradigmatic films by Wong Kar-wai (In

the Mood for Love, 2000, Days of Being Wild, 1991, ‘The Hand’ in
Eros, 2004), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s delicate Café Lumiere (2003) and
Three Times (2005), the solitude of Tsai Ming-liang’s protagonists,
the wise irony of Kiarostami, or the newly met Koreans, Kim Ki-duk’s
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring (2003), and 3-Iron
(2004) and Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow (2005), that address us in this
    same quiet, purified voice. Even sensitive European or American
 
filmmakers, like the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismaki (The Match
Factory Girl, 1990), the unexpected Kazakh Darezan Omirbajev, or the
young New Yorker Lodge Kerrigan venture to use this method and the
force of their restricted language became truly strong.

The archetype or distant relative is undeniably recognisable:

Bresson, the always solitary and consistent artist, is the long-
lasting origin or influence. (He is the sole idol of the young
Kazakh filmmaker!) I do not want to imply a direct influence, but
rather the common use of a rarely experienced point of view, an
‘irregular’ approach to the story as opposed to more traditional
forms of storytelling. But can we really consider it as irregular?
Rather, isn’t it a deeper ability to observe which not so frequently
infuses the whole narrative, and in these cases the profound insight
justifies the fullness of lengthy time and modestly simple settings.

Because of the applied reduction, conspicuous economy is not the

result of some formal decision. Stoical wisdom feeds it. The
voluntary banishment of any loud ornament signals the stern striving
for the substantial. Instead of attractive, spectacular devices the
authors try to focus on the fundamental. Restriction postulates
endurance, uncompromising determination, which pushes the artist to
the more and more precise ‘naming’ of things. ‘Every truth is
revolutionary’ said Witold Gombrowicz in his aphoristic sharpness,
for the real core, the true heart of things uncovers the invisible,
shedding light on the not customary features. Here are revealed the
always unique and individual forms, the unknown faces of odd
potentials, lending them a subversive power ...

1. Robert Bresson, Notes on the
Cinematographer (London: Quartet
Books, 1986)
 
 
The ascetic concentration, the lack of emotional manifestations
bring about concision through repetitive approaches. Its exactitude
stems from the continuous process of denuding, peeling off the  
superfluous. So, the pulsation of nature appears as naked. It is
also interesting that in his preface to Bresson’s famous notes the

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French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio discovers the connection

with oriental art. (1) He mentions Hokusai, whose Zen Buddhism shows
similar sensuality by means of his extreme parsimony of tools.
‘Traduire le vent invisible par l’eau qu’il sculpte en passant’ to
quote Bresson’s poetic image. (Render the invisible wind by the
water it sculpts in passing.) In other words, only by being
restricted to the most refined alterations, expressed within
ephemeral traces, can we grasp the quivering existence. Humbleness
  and reticence don’t contradict richness, to the contrary, they
reveal the momentum of each distinct moment. Moving from the outside
inward, downward, toward the hidden, this is the inspiring strategy
  of Bresson. He wants to ‘smooth’ the image, to work with only a few.
‘If one violin is enough, why use two’ he warns us, referring to
Vivaldi’s famous quote. For in the drop, in the unmoving and in
silence is the movement accumulated, he stresses. Therefore his
enthusiasm for Mozart’s statement about his own concertos becomes so
telling: ‘They are brilliant ... Yet, they lack poverty’. Bresson
ruminates over the paradox, qualifying it as the real treasure of a
work of art.

This is a bold, apparently resigned statement, despite the amount of

tension it assumes. Since multitude, cramming things in on each
other, may easily conceal the energetic drawing of a statement. It
is not the abundance of adventures, the dazzling light effects, that
produce originality, but the chosen point of view, the new angle
that suddenly illuminates a genuine interpretation. Only in this way
can effort lead to meaningful discoveries. According to Bresson,
this should be realised by ‘contiguity’, putting like with like,
assembling the comparable parts. When we are following the leading
voices of Un condamné à mort ... (1956), Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
(1962), or Pickpocket (1959), we have to live through each stage of
the path to redemption (to use Bresson’s vocabulary) with all their
repetitive variations, in order to arrive at its final sense.

Each creation strives for a delicate balance between order and

disorder, abundance and laconism. There are artists who prefer
emptying their presented world and bring to light in this way their
personal design. Then things may become visible like fish on the
bottom of the lake. Only in this strict, sharp vision does the
meaning of a shape, the relationship among parts become
unmistakable.

Bresson belongs categorically to this trend, searching for the

expressive power he creates by emphasising the connections among the
narrowly selected elements. There is no image by itself, only
combined effects realised in the configuration. Juxtaposition always
modifies the previous image, like colours that exist only in their
    togetherness, never isolated. Contact and ellipse go hand by hand,
 
like in Au hasard, Balthazar (1966), in which the physical reality
of the poor donkey and its metaphoric meaning emerges when we
experience the parallel between the two destinies, the suffering
animal and the human being. We know well that pulling together two
apparently distant things is, already according to Baudelaire, the
true force of the metaphor. Although it may seem to be the
application two different methods, showing matters in their
puritanical uniqueness and yet stressing the constructive power of
their unity with others, it is in this dynamic balance that the
sensibility of the artist resides.

Needless to say, in his unique style Ozu is another solitary classic

who elevates the quotidian to a transcendental level. And
doubtlessly his direct impact on Asian film is strong and visible.
But whether consciously or unconsciously, among the European
directors, it is mostly Bresson, and often also Tarkovsky and
Antonioni, who have had a lasting influence on contemporary
filmmaking. I think that in the case of Hou Hsiao-hsien we do have
the right to refer to these masters.

In this article I’d like to concentrate on his abovementioned films,

Café Lumiere and Three Times, as the best examples to see to what
extent he reveals something intriguing about the paradoxical power
of minimalism.

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Both Hou’s Café Lumiere, a deliberate homage to Ozu, and Three

Times, surprise us with their low key tone and modest plot. Indeed,
the human stories they relate are almost uneventful, ordinary
occurrences as they mark the protagonists’ lives. The heroine of
Café Lumiere, though she tries to find the man by whom she got
pregnant, is not overly focused on this quest. She has time enough
to make new relationships, being equally interested in her family’s
life, telling them just incidentally of her condition, or she is
engaged in other friendly encounters.

However, there is a telling phenomenon in this fragmented

storytelling which speaks very significantly about Hou’s conception
of time. He lovingly resorts to some visual elements which have
barely anything to do with his protagonists’ worries. They belong
more to the comprehensive feeling of daily city life, and with their
repetitive rhythm add an odd though distinct charm to it. In the
loosely unravelling episodes we repeatedly see trains moving through
viaducts and overpasses; they appear, come and go, just as normal
accessories of the environment. They carry on their monotonous yet
rattling presence, representing at once the weight of their metal
structure and the impression of unstoppable movement. This modest
yet telling detail, a favourite of Hou, shows how things, common
objects, are constantly and unyieldingly all around us in our life,
reminding us of both what is fleeting and what is lasting. Without
the frequent appearances of these heavy and mobile bodies the scenes
could not have the same meaning. Beyond the incidental we always
have to feel a kind of permanence that defines everyday lives.

Three Times, which is actually a series of three short stories,

conveys even more emphatically this sense of different time
dimensions. The stories deny any chronology or severely consistent
style. 1966, 1911 and 2005 are the chosen dates, and each evokes
with the most appropriate ambience the authenticity of the given
times: the ‘best moments’ or ‘best of times’, as the Chinese title
more literally translates. ‘A Time for Love’, ‘A Time for Freedom’
and ‘A Time for Youth’ are the respective titles of the episodes,
and the reduction comes into full play through the fact that all
three stories are performed by the same leading couple, stressing
the stylised, symbolic nature of the tale.

Yet, the protagonists never appear in any kind of abstract space-

time. The tiniest accessory, object and gesture, including the play
of rhythm and light, or the application of music and colour, refer
to an entirely closed, self-contained universe, though relying on
only a very few elements. The first film shows the adolescent
confusion of awakening, the growth of a timid desire. A bare
poolroom is the setting of the evolving relationship, and the
filmmaker spends more time on the careful striking of the colourful
balls than on the psychology of the two young people. They watch
each other, awkward smiles; little fragmented words weave the
secretly developing emotions, disturbed only by the military
service’s interruptions. Barren environment, abandoned villages, and
then the enduring search of the young man for the girl fill the
time, before we arrive at the clumsy, almost mute encounter, crowned
finally with a faint enlacing of the two hands, under a soaking
umbrella, bringing them close. Shu Qi’s girlish, embarrassed
giggling, the boy’s ‘virile’ tenacity and seriousness tell us with
minute precision the birth of love and its cautious passion.

Hou works with devices light as air, constructing a film from almost
nothing. His camera looks at people’s movements and circumstances
always from a distance, from a bit above, preserving the richness of
each ongoing, diffuse moment. Registering without loud emphasis both
the ‘important’ and ‘non important’, he calls forth, instead, the
whole fabric of a segment of life. The more insignificant or
ordinary a gesture is – closing a heavy door, gazing again at the
little opaque window, moving to the blackboard to write on it the
new results of the game – the more weight is associated with them.
Or to put it in another way: dramatic action is never the leading
force. We experience much more a subtle, levelled vision that is
trying to seize all the present components. Therefore the daily
comings and goings are repeated with such refined touch, that we
gladly feel a sense of familiarity, a warm aura. The number of

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recurring objects is less than a dozen: a cheap, clumsy washbowl,

next to it the wrinkled towel, the eternal pool table with its
coloured balls, the creaking floors...all again and again the same.
A small world? Definitely. Undramatic encounters? Doubtlessly. And
notwithstanding this, or precisely for this reason, whatever is seen
becomes livelier, fuller than duels and outbursts of emotions would
be.

The second story, ‘A Time for Freedom’, is even more closed and
elliptical. Here indeed we are faced with one unique setting in
which the two characters are to perform, again and again, their
repetitive encounters. The man, a monk, but also a secret freedom
fighter, the woman a privileged geisha in a rich man’s house. What
happens is nothing else but the always-similar arrivals of the monk,
his almost solemn hand washing and the beautiful courtesan’s silent
craving for more intimacy, expressed merely through the way she
arranges her earrings, combs her hair. On top of this extreme
austerity the film is literally silent, following the language of
the epoch and that of early filmmaking. We visit a remote historical
time, and the vanished, bygone past is evoked with sensuous beauty.
Silence is not only the unsaid, but also the rule of the
unspeakable. In this way the lack of words gains a charge and when
at their final encounter, the woman dares to ask (in an intertitle!)
whether the man would have any serious intention with her, the terse
‘no’ speaks with the tragic force of predestination.

Thus, the title, the time for freedom is obviously ambiguous. It

alludes to the unbreakable lack of freedom, and to the fact that if
anyone tries to revolt against the ruling order, it may only happen
by sacrifice, surrender. The time of freedom remains merely the
interior freedom, noble but deprived of individual happiness.

Finally, the last short story leads us to the chaos of a

contemporary metropolis, Taipei, seemingly in opposition to the
atmosphere of the former episodes. True enough, the rhythm and
texture of the film work in a contrary sense, but the succinct
presentation is similar. No explanations or detailed information are
offered about the protagonist’s background, ongoing intentions or
feelings. They live their vegetative life, wildly, yet mechanically.
Pieces, like stones put next to each other, unfold. Continuity is
created through mere succession.

I think there is a secret buried here: we have to understand how

this ‘nothingness’ and deliberate austerity transcends the ordinary
and builds to such a captivating emotional impact. It appears, even
if it sounds terribly simple: the filmmaker succeeds to elevate the
small parts to the higher level of metaphor, i.e. a hardly
perceivable transfer. Instead of using analogy, accumulation, the
naked demonstration of recurring details entail a deeper meaning.

The metaphor/Metaphor is the most elegant ‘transportation’

(remembering the Greek etymology of the word): thanks to the
reductive abstraction when stressing a single feature. By engraving
the same or similar in a repetitive way we associate a further
meaning to it. We feel and visually perceive the substance. Banality
conceals more than what the surface speaks. We attribute
significance to the pool game, to the fine and clean hand towel, to
the easily changeable partners ... Lingering on their real time
vitality they gain an unexpected light. Duration lends to them a
radiation, another illumination. Consequently, the series becomes
more than the mere sum of the components, it is another, broader
whole.

On the other hand, repetition dares to lift out physical details,

tiny occurrences from their customary context. While, true enough,
we do experience the characters being entwined in their environment,
we suddenly embrace the roots in which they are embedded as organic
entities. Yet the nakedness of these small components reveals their
earthy existence, their essence. If the world of our protagonists is
restricted to a pool hall, or some other quotidian space, the
framing of these lives stresses through repetition the potential of
transportation. They appear as free options, and precisely in this
freedom can it be associated with something else, going beyond the
appearance. The pool hall or the recurring white hand towel become

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true abstractions: they stand for something more, not exclusively

for their practical functions. We can call them elements of
ritualised actions, but for me the notion of metaphor is stronger
and more succinct. The bold retake accentuates the weight of small
things. If the recognisably, deliberately limited depiction, the
decentered camera angle, as critics like to label it, and the often
telling smoke in the foreground, define the scenes in unusual ways,
as a consequence of this, our attention turns to the ‘invisible’. We
have time to enter into the meaning of the ambience: what kind of
feelings, pain, concealed desire feed the allusive evocation.
However, there is nothing mechanical or automatic in the build up.
In the first film we move toward a promising accomplishment. Thus
the rhythm gains a certain accelerando, though always a very
moderate one. In the second part, where the story closes with
sadness and melancholic separation, the rhythmic design of the
missed union brings a sense of decline, of silence, of decreasing
dynamics in order to feel the weight of loss. Consequently, the
principle of the reiterated set up doesn’t result in a levelled
monotony; to the contrary, it reflects the heartbeat of the story
with a subtle, expressive rhythm that conveys their respective
meanings.

To what extent does the third story, ‘A Time for Youth’, show
similar features? Although the protagonists’ behaviour, their
restlessness, bring along a wild and throbbing texture, they just
follow the media-dominated reality of the twenty-first century, in
the same way as in Hou’s previous Millennium Mambo (2001).
Certainly, in this story the fever might be high but the
presentation maintains its non-dramatic nature, with scant use of
speech, as if the characters could be marionettes. Hou always spares
the spectator factual information or explicit dialogue. Instead of
an explicit exposition, he resorts to repetition which has nothing
to do with redundancy, but is the sign of a most consistent
reduction. Through recognition, by returning to a similar
constellation, the director suddenly directs the eyes to the
significant, and calls attention to the substantial. Through the
famous long takes, the smoothly moving camera focuses on the mood,
the emotional attributes of gestures and actions, leading beyond
customary details.

Like in Millennium Mambo, space is again unusually spare. The very

few settings are only touched upon, never fully revealed. We are
given very slight indications about the homes, rooms, in which the
protagonists live, meet, maybe suffer ... Fragments and allusions
are intended to help our orientation, part of the substantial
emptiness of emotions, although on the surface we often see the
outbursts and passions people enact.

Many critics call Hou’s inclination to depict the very ordinary as

an attraction to the ephemeral. I see it just in the opposite way.
It is Hou’s perception of time which creates the unusual dimension
between the moving and the perdurable, the small and the big ...
Time exists so far away that it behaves like a strange celestial
body. It doesn’t have any direct impact on confused or disturbed
people’s life. The emphasis on the ephemeral would mean the
corrosion of time. As if events and emotions would fade away under
the pressure of passing time. As if it would be a higher authority
(Time itself) which constrains people to traverse their path towards
the inevitable fall, to the ‘bitter end’. But here it is their
interior, earthy, maybe bodily law they have to follow, pursuing
their trajectory through small steps. If this is by principle
transient, the weight of this temporariness is set against the
permanence of time. As in the case of his great predecessor and
model, Ozu (or again maybe unconsciously Bresson), the solemn aura,
the elegiac tone derives from this wider vision of human life:
isolated, separated from a mightier power, people are vulnerable,
they weave their daily actions under the constancy and continuity of
a larger universe.

The sensuous doesn’t know analysis. Elliptical freedom, if not

arbitrary selection, governs the director’s universe: minimalist
communication in order to leave place for sensation. But the overall
experience goes much beyond the merely visible. The rhythmic design
is telling, pregnant, suggesting and hinting at the duality of

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times. For next to quotidian time, the slow and patient lingering,
the dominating long takes and long lenses magically place us into a
larger cosmic fabric, in which we meet a more universal vision.

The plenitude of minimalism is not automatically achieved. With

courageous restriction a much sharper observation is required in
order to bring about novelty, emotionally rich experience. Only a
sensitive and sharp eye can discover the telling and hidden values
of a given aura. Beyond the detailed analysis of Hou’s recent films,
the above mentioned other contemporary directors, I believe, share
with him this kind of sensitivity and patience. Lodge Kerrigan’s
Keane (2004) focuses on a truly heated and nervous central
character, looking desperately for a lost child. Here, too, the
young director dares to come back, again and again to the same
location (The Port Authority Terminal), exploring every corner, the
escalators, fast food stores. His restlessness never eases off, but
precisely through this irresolvable tension gains the drama of high
suspense. One state of mind, basically one location, few and
transient secondary protagonists, but the attention is relentless
and brings about a thrilling intensity. We are moving around in a
hopeless circle and only this compulsion, being fixed to the
traumatic place, this firm concentration (that characterises both
the hero and the filmmaker) could lend authenticity and unusual
sensuous power to the simple story.

The fullness of guarded storytelling is a rare gift, but it offers

deep sensation only in a particular case if it is able to intimate
that the visible foreground does comprise more than the obvious, and
beyond the incidental events a more substantial experience exists.

  ©permission
Yvette Bíró and Rouge 2006. Cannot be reprinted without
of the author and editors.

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