Articles

I love this moment:
this moment belongs so much to the experience of theatre:
this blackout before it all begins.
there is something slightly romantic and very powerful about the anticipation of a beginning.
Because now everything is still possible⁵.

As soon as the film projection begins, as soon as the plot begins to unfold, however, it progressively takes away the magic inherent to any new beginning. "Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne, der uns beschützt und der uns hilft zu leben."⁶ The first scene of the film tells me all about the style of the film, the time it is set in, perhaps the main characters. It defines the genre. Only a few seconds into the film, 99% of it is already determined. Little by little, the projected images and sounds shrink down what has begun as a whole glorious universe of unlimited possibilities, events and atmospheres. It narrows down a promising wide field to but one narrow path, the terror regime of just one linear story. And no matter how good the film - each and every one of its frames is a disappointment, a rejection of so many beautiful and promising alternatives, options and possibilities.

The film unfolding before my eyes asks me to identify with a hero. I am supposed to love (resp. hate) him or her. I may also decide for myself to remain indifferent. But my precious solitude, my limitless hope for an unlimited choice of options rapidly vanishes into thin air. In this process, I gain contingency but I lose myself. That is, I am losing the flamboyant projection of myself that I cast against the silver screen when it was dark, before the tyranny of storytelling and the brutal, flattening rule of the plot forced me back into the bland reality of cause and effect.

I use the term "contingency" here meaning the incidental way things are, and why they seem to be necessarily so⁷, the circumstances that define me. The film unfolds a story, a plot - for instance the story of one of its character's life. If you look at this story from the point of its ending (or at your own life from the point of your dying day), everything seems completely defined and determined. It has simply been this way and no other. But looking at it from the starting point of the story, everything seems open. Contingency means the narrowing in on but one single chain of events. Abundance turns into poverty. In the beginning, everything seems possible. In the end, however, nothing else at all is possible any more, all the potentialities have been used up. All the choices have been made.

If this makes you think that I hate films, because they force upon me the straightjacket of linearity, the progressive exclusion of detours, the negation of alternatives, you are wrong: the opposite is true.

Deep in my heart, I (the audience) know I have to make decisions all the time. In fact, that choice-making is exactly what my freedom amounts to. I know I cannot just sit in the dark all the time and stare at an invisible silver screen. In real life I have to face problems and make decisions I am not prepared for.

As a matter of fact, the inspiring darkness, the intriguing, sizzling darkness before the screening of the film owes its magic to our trust in the images, the possibilities we are waiting for. We expect the images to release us – if only for 90 minutes or so – from the tiresome decision-making process of everyday life. The contingencies and necessities of life are always chipping away at both our freedom and our graceful solitude. This darkness, however, is a state of entropy taking us way back before everything was the way it finally has turned out to be.

Take me back to when the world made more sense⁸

Our lives once were as open as that – at least this is what we would like to believe.

The Film Plot

It's getting dark, dark enough to see⁹

What do we see when the beams of light finally hit the screen, when they begin their deadly transformation of chaos, hope and solitude into contingency, into the banality of a plot and the terror of communication?

The second kind of here and now belongs to the time after the darkness, and the time after the silence... to the time when the first lights appear on stage and we start to get into the "show"... or if you prefer into the "shown", into the light, into the visible, into what is there to be seen.¹⁰

What is there to be seen? It is the lonely hero, the lone rider, left all alone to face the world. It is Fred Zinneman's sheriff in "High Noon", "alone and forsaken by god and by men"¹¹, left but with the rules he has made for himself to live by. We see Gregory Peck as the stubborn Captain Ahab of "Moby Dick", waving at us one last time. We see a lonely samurai in Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog", a man who decides to live his life according to the rules he comes across in a book he found. We see Aki Kaurismäki's wonderful world of loners and losers. We watch Travis Bickle turn from a taxi driver loaded with complexes into a killing machine – out of mere loneliness. We see a lonely man in Tarkovsky's "Solaris" who does not even know whether his wife is real or whether he himself is still alive. We see a grey and old Pat Garrett who, in Sam Peckinpah's movie, stands alone to kill "the man who was [his] friend"¹², a young man full of joy, full of life and spirit. And of course, we enjoy the hopeless, stoic loneliness of Buster Keaton in much the same way as we enjoy Charlie Chaplin's characters who seem to fight their desperate fates with a smile.

Cinema, at least Western cinema, is manned by lone wolves, lonesome long-distance runners who do whatever they think they have to do. I suppose one could trace all of them back, if one wanted, to Ulysses as their common ancestor, the prototype of the lost traveller. All of our heroes try very hard to convince themselves of their plight – and of its necessity. It comforts us to watch them struggle.

Our solitude results from our consciousness. But then we do understand that in the end it does not really matter in our lives – at least not all that much – whether we make a decision this way or another. A film lasts 90 minutes or so, and then it is over. We are aware that, at the end of the line, after 90 minutes or 80 years, there will be a final flicker of light on the screen. Perhaps it will reveal the words "The End" or "Fin". And that will be what all of this beautiful, half-shaped wilderness around us will add up to in the end: the fullness of time, all problems solved, all decisions made, nothing left open, all chaos turned into information, no questions left open, no entropy, all contingency, the curtain closing. "Das Chaos ist aufgebraucht. Es war die beste Zeit."¹³, says Garga at the end of Bertolt Brecht's play "Im Dickicht der Städte".

Of course, even during the film, we spend about one third of our time staring into darkness:

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. [...] We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.¹⁴

Not everybody is strong enough for this kind of adventure. For some of us, darkness and silence are hard to bear. For some people the uncertainties of life are too hard to handle. They search for shelter, guidelines, simple answers and Manichaean black and white systems of right or wrong. They don't appreciate even well dosed silence, darkness and solitude. This is why there are ideologies, religious organisations, screenplays and totalitarian systems in this world. Their reason to exist is that they take away our anxieties and doubts. They take away the darkness, the doubt, the most precious things we have. They take away our lives.

I believe darkness and solitude are the basis, the pre-requisite, for the perception of films. In the darkness I can feel my solitude. In my solitude, I am in possession of myself, and I can look at the world outside. I see representations of the world from a viewpoint of total darkness. Of course, this darkness would be meaningless, were there no film to follow it, no lone ranger to identify with. But I do trust there will be a picture. In the cinema, the solitude of darkness comforts me more than any film ever could.

Andreas Ströhl