The Beautiful and the Pointless | Little White Lies

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The Beau­ti­ful and the Pointless

27 Sep 2023

Words by Esmé Holden

A black and white portrait of a man playing a harp, surrounded by large pink flowers.
A black and white portrait of a man playing a harp, surrounded by large pink flowers.
If sex scenes, or any oth­er type of scene, don’t need to serve the plot, do they need to serve any­thing at all?

At a cer­tain point in most every Marx Broth­ers film, all the build­ing chaos and thin­ly spread dra­ma sud­den­ly comes to a stop – Chico sits down at a piano and Har­po picks up a harp and, for a few min­utes, they just play. This might seem strange, espe­cial­ly in 1931’s Mon­key Busi­ness when it comes a scene or two before the cli­max, and maybe it’s not sur­pris­ing that their most acclaimed film is one of the few with­out a musi­cal inter­lude. But Jonathan Rich­man, one of the first to recog­nise the genius of The Vel­vet Under­ground, thought they were worth ded­i­cat­ing a whole song to. In When Har­po Played his Harp’ he asks the most impor­tant ques­tion: if some­one else can do it, how come nobody does?”

Every few months, some­one, usu­al­ly from out­side of the online film space, will post about sex scenes. They will com­plain of their gra­tu­ity and how they do noth­ing to fur­ther the plot, as if pro­ject­ing their dis­ap­proval to an uncom­fort­able par­ent sit­ting next to them. Then, nat­u­ral­ly, every­one will dunk on them. The counter argu­ments — that think­ing of art only in terms of func­tion­al­i­ty mir­rors capitalism’s belief that there is only val­ue in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty — almost don’t bear repeat­ing. But of course they will be the next time some­one makes a sim­i­lar post. It hap­pened while I was writ­ing this. It always loops back around, the argu­ments nev­er go any fur­ther, few think to ask that if sex scenes, or any oth­er type of scene, don’t need to serve the plot, do they need to serve any­thing at all?

In cinema’s ear­li­est days, when it was just a car­ni­val attrac­tion, its appeal was part­ly tech­no­log­i­cal. There was a thrill in images mov­ing, so those images could exist for their own sake. The plea­sure was not so much in look­ing as it was in see­ing (whether a for­eign coun­try, a dance or a kiss).
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
This isn’t to say that ear­ly cin­e­ma was entire­ly base. There was, in fact, great artis­tic beau­ty (Hong Sang-soo includ­ed the Lumières 1895 film Boat Leav­ing the Port on his Sight & Sound list of the ten great­est films ever made) but the medium’s com­plex­i­ty, in terms of nar­ra­tives and spe­cial effects, hadn’t yet grown to obscure the pow­er it has in and of itself. 

For all their extrav­a­gance, Hollywood’s large sets, stylised per­for­mances and for­malised gen­res often felt like an espe­cial­ly thin lay­er. Even in the mys­tery film, a genre that, in the­o­ry, is the most con­cerned with nar­ra­tive. Most of the time the plots made no sense; they were impos­si­ble to fol­low because they weren’t meant to be. They cre­at­ed momen­tum between the scenes, the moments that we actu­al­ly engaged with. The best exam­ple being The Big Sleep, a film that is as plea­sur­able as it is inco­her­ent; even the author of the orig­i­nal nov­el didn’t under­stand the end­ing. Howard Hawks’ film of spark­ing chem­istry and straight-for­ward beau­ty made us aware”, Pauline Kael wrote in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, how lit­tle we often had cared about the ridicu­lous­ly com­pli­cat­ed plots”.

Few under­stood this as well as the peo­ple mak­ing mar­tial arts movies in Hong Kong through the 70s and 80s. The action sequences were some­times shot over months, while plots were gen­er­al­ly con­trived lat­er and filmed quick­ly after the real work was done. The thrill of see­ing bod­ies in motion – an intri­cate and art­ful evo­lu­tion of the Edi­son films of ath­let­ics and weightlift­ing – was the entire point. That’s why they so often end sec­onds, frames after the last ene­my is defeated. 

Shirtless man gesturing dramatically, man sitting on chair in traditional clothing.

Lau Kar-leung, one of the genius­es of their sys­tem, made a joke of this in his 1979 mas­ter­piece Dirty Ho: once the low­er class Ho has escort­ed Wang, a dis­guised prince (a per­fect excuse for a fight scene where he pup­pets some­one else’s body to keep his iden­ti­ty hid­den) to the Emperor’s palace, before find­ing out who is next to be crowned, the prince grabs our hero and throws him out, and us along with him. It sim­ply does not mat­ter. The film doesn’t even last long enough for Ho to hit the ground; it ends in motion. 

But some­thing has changed since then. It’s not just that action movies, to stay with his par­tic­u­lar­ly clear exam­ple of the plea­sures of see­ing, are now so over-edit­ed that the behind the scenes clip of Tom Cruise break­ing his foot is far more excit­ing and vis­cer­al than the scene that footage end­ed up in. That lost sense of real­i­ty also comes from the medi­um itself, which has moved from phys­i­cal to dig­i­tal: the images are no longer pho­to­chem­i­cal reflec­tions of some­thing phys­i­cal but col­lec­tions of end­less­ly mal­leable pixels. 

The arti­fice of Old Hol­ly­wood always point­ed back to real­i­ty: the fake sets point­ed to the craft of build­ing them and the unnat­ur­al per­for­mances point­ed to the much-loved stars. But dig­i­tal arti­fice points only deep­er into itself; even that which looks the most real, we all know, is like­ly enhanced, if not cre­at­ed whole­cloth by some impos­si­bly com­plex com­put­er soft­ware. In the defin­i­tive dig­i­tal meta-film, James Cameron’s Avatar, the CG world of Pan­do­ra seems so pro­found­ly real to the audi­ence-insert main char­ac­ter – enhanced, no doubt, by the cut­ting edge 3D – that it starts to feel more real, more all-con­sum­ing, than his own life. Even­tu­al­ly he dis­solves into it, his soul trans­ferred to anoth­er real­i­ty that J. Hober­man describes in Films After Film as: unbear­ably dis­tant, yet over­whelm­ing­ly close.”

But this is only the most com­mer­cial and inac­ces­si­ble end of the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion on which Agnès Varda’s 2000 doc­u­men­tary The Glean­ers & I sits oppo­site. On her small, con­sumer-grade cam­era, Var­da col­lects footage of aban­doned paint­ings, sur­plus pota­toes and the peo­ple soci­ety has left behind, but not in a point­ed way. Her film is like a dig­i­tal scrap­book, she only fol­lows her intu­ition, and, in doing so, trans­forms the pas­sive plea­sure of see­ing into some­thing active: a shared act of dis­cov­ery. She finds a new beau­ty with clear echoes of Lumière films. Maybe this promise for the dig­i­tal age has been left most unful­filled, but if Varda’s film shows us any­thing, it’s that that which has been aban­doned is only wait­ing to be re-discovered. 

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