The Struggle

The Fall

Broadcast unannounced last Halloween on BBC2 before Live At The Apollo, The Fall was shown with neither introduction nor credits. The measure it took to catch as large amount of the casual viewer as possible, scheduled immediately before a crowd pleasing comedy show, running at around the length of a political broadcast, one wonders if the filmmakers didn’t want the piece to have a moral impact. Almost like a cartoon b-movie during the war years. A warning against something. Satisfyingly, it also works as a little trick or treat in keeping with the hi-jinks of the evening it was shown.

  Anyone who has seen Under the Skin will be aware of the kind of work Jonathon Glazer and Mica Levi can create, so it is just as well it came out of nowhere, out of context, eschewing anticipation and obverting preconceptions, for it’s a great little shock, a poetic piece that gives the audience the jitters by disturbing them into engagement rather than scaring them to the point where they have to close their eyes.

  You can watch by clicking the image below.  

In analysis,

The film starts with the shaking of a tree. The next shot is of a gang surrounding the man who has fallen to the floor from his refuge point amongst the leaves. Everyone wears masks. The aesthetic is a blend of the oriental Noh play tradition mixed with occidental symbols of Melpomene and Thalia (the expressions of tragedy and comedy that have become the symbol for drama in the West). A trial of sorts takes place. Glazer’s visual reference points seem to be a combination of Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and the photographs the soldiers took of themselves torturing the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Thus the notion that the man on trial being an individual who has wronged the society and is facing justice becomes an unlikely conclusion, and it seems much more probable that he is someone trying to evade the oppression of a corrupted authority. Levi uses traditional instruments on her soundtracks while utilising modern sound technology. This takes the film out of any time period past or future. This accentuates the suggestion made that authority has been power’s insidious tool throughout the ages. A timeless tyranny. It is a warning not to see the atrocities of the past as done and dusted. Oppression mutates, it doesn't end, the set design just changes over the ages. The trial concludes with a hanging. The gibbet opens from under the condemned man’s feet and he plummets. However, he doesn’t stop plummeting. The rope around his neck is not connected to a branch. The rope keeps falling after him. The hangmen look down from the top of hole, as people peer down a well, to see the man descend out of sight. Satisfied, they skip away. However, a long way down the man has caught himself by wedging his legs against the walls of the hole. He takes the noose from his neck and the rope falls and falls and falls and we can’t help but think that there is no bottom, the fall is endless. Slowly the man looks down, and then he eventually looks up. Does he cease the struggle and let go and fall, or does he hold on and start the long arduous, quite possibly impossible, climb back up to the top, and out, of the pit and go quite probably back into the hands of his persecutors?

  Glazer has said that he likes the idea of a short film being like trying to compose an articulate sentence. I think The Fall is something like the following two.

   In conclusion, the film forces the viewer to consider the protagonist’s options for themselves, does one either commit one’s self to the difficult climb onward into inevitable uncertainty and little possibility, or resign one’s self to the fall into endless inconclusion? The film advocates that we be brave regardless of the sparsity of hope.

i. the moon is not only beautiful, it is so far away

  I'm thinking about how life changes after something seismic happens. Something that takes us outside of our way of living. Outside of how we thought it was. I’m wondering if it’s a bit like coming back from the moon. I wonder if we don’t come back with a different point of view. Coming back to Earth from the moon is written about very well here lazenby's moon.

  It’s funny to think that already within the space of a fortnight we have a delineating sentiment. Already we’re starting to talk about before the virus in the same way people used to talk about before the war. And now we have a life during the wartime delineation. During the lockdown. And there shall be a hereafter where it will be after the lockdown even if not after the virus. The lockdown is an unimaginable difference to some. An existence outside of hyperreality. It’s been described as surreal, but really is it anymore so than the way were living? Something I’ll be interested in seeing is the immediate fallout of after the lockdown.
  I’ve a funny idea. Not amusing. Just funny. There’s a book that Kurt Vonnegut wrote when he was an old man who’d earned his wrinkles in both thought and biography. It’s called Timequake. I looked up the term timequake in the OED and it lacks a definition. I’ll try..

Timequake.  noun

A timequake is a fracture in the space time continuum where all existence is put in a timewarp where they have to relive the last ten years of lives their as an observer, as in the great timequake of 2003 and when everyone was transported back to 1993 and had to relive the same thwarted flirtations, the same bad hairstyles, the same culinary mistakes, the same corny jokes, and the same deaths of those they held dear over the last ten years again. Hardly a barrel of laughs.

  After the timequake ends, at the precise second where people can continue their lives rather than relive them, everybody just freezes. A kind of apathy petrifies humanity in the same way Ice9 froze the ocean in Vonnegut’s earlier novel Cat’s Cradle and brings an end to man’s existence. A question of free will has inadvertently, inevitably so, has been planted in the everyone’s heads. They are depressed at what they’ve been through. We have to grapple with the idea of determinism. There's a stark ennui revolving around the painful acceptance that the lives we’re living are not necessarily the ones we’d choose. This is true for all (see The Prince and the Pauper for example), but it is most noticeable in the realm of the quotidian, i.e. teachers complaining about marking, nurses complaining about being overworked, waitresses complaining about sleazeballs, prostitutes complaining about cops, cops complaining about being called pigs, students complaining about homework etc &c. Vonnegut illustrates this in the scene where the novel’s hero, Kilgore Trout, the only person not affected by this apathy, and thus not frozen to the spot, looks at the motionless city and tries to wake up the citizens. He runs around and around, wake up, you’ve got free will! he shouts declaringly at the human statues. He spends a long time doing this with no results. Finally he runs into the foyer of a hotel and shouts at the single figure in it wake up, you’ve got free will! Slowly the person in the distance starts to move. They gradually pick up motion. Back and forth they start to move. Free will says the stranger. Why, free will’s a crock of shit says the black janitor as he gets back to mopping the floor. After this Trout amends his message. To revive the people he begins to say You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do. 
  Of course, the implication isn’t that the sickness wasn’t necessarily the timequake. 
  I can’t fully remember what follows. However, I do remember that it contains a very tender scene afterwards. Kilgore Trout’s swansong. Before he dies there is a ceremony organised to send Vonnegut’s much loved character off. Naturally Kurt is there himself. It would be rude if he weren’t. There’s a lot of love going round. Trout himself is at his most charming. At one point he puts out the idea that Stonehenge was built in a time when the Earth’s gravitational pull was much less and that the ancients could throw around these giant rocks like pillows. I suppose that’s what happens afterwards is that people reconnect. Or, simply, they connect. They've good reason to. they've good reason to do it meaningfully. They develop a human feeling. One which may have been not have been all that there beforehand. Or one that had been lost. 

part of an ongoing series..