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.
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