Life in Film: Rebecca Warren

Rebecca Warren is an artist who lives and works in London. She has been short-listed for the 2006 Turner Prize, which is currently on view at Tate Britain.

‘That was the day I stopped believing in the wild ardour of things. Perhaps in love … the love in books and films … that tells us to abandon our lives and plans all for one brief touch of Venus… The world just seems too fragile a place for it … Perhaps it’s just we who are too fragile.’

This is the wife talking in Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), (a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, 1955), to her black gardener with whom a tender forbidden love is developing, as her husband descends into a hell of homosexual guilt. Haynes stays with Sirk’s post-war New England suburbia, and it seems a delicious perversity that at a time of almost unlimited technical and narrative possibility he’s chosen to work within this tight 1950s’ frame. The film is artificial and exultant, but so cruelly truthful it made me feel sick and afraid for three days. It’s completely airless. The décor in the family home is so dominating that the place starts to look like a prison in which the husband and son’s lives are shaped by the furniture. Watching the confused prejudices, aspirations and ludicrous taboos and hypocrisies is equivalent to listening to a long, bad joke. The auburns and oranges, the wife’s flame hair and the autumn leaves, produce an over-heated nostalgia, which becomes sickeningly suffocating. No amount of gorgeous hue can dispel the sadness of observing recurrent, wilful human error.

In Luis Buñuel’s El Angel exterminador, (Exterminating Angel, 1962) an extravagant dinner party degenerates into primal squalor when the guests find themselves inexplicably unable to leave. All propriety disappears and they end up gnawing on bones, expressing primitive tenderness to each other and crawling around on the floor.

In his Cet obscur objet du désir (Obscure Object of Desire, 1977), without explanation two actresses play the same part. One is cold and French and the other is steamy and Spanish and they hilariously come to represent two sides of love, being cooled and heated by turns. Meantime, order and social breakdown wrangle in bombed-out shopping arcades.

David Lynch has said ‘there are explanations for billions of things that aren’t so understandable and yet inside – somewhere – they are understandable.’ His film Lost Highway (1997), is a terrifying purgatory full of doppelgangers and menace. In it there are complete transformations of identity, and death is not necessarily fatal; less storytelling than emotional onslaught. The film is disturbing on a nervy, anxious level; it’s like flashing a light into some dark place. Lynch wrote that ‘It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.’ His Mulholland Drive (2001) is loaded with disintegration, decay and Hollywood’s constant menace to creativity. Everything feels threatening, even the doddery old holidaymakers. In one scene a woman terrifyingly seems to drift, as if by some occult power, behind a pillar.

In Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind (1985), a sweet couple from the country move to the mythic ‘Rain City’ and their relationship becomes corrupted. Their marriage breaks down as the husband’s reckless ambition, dishonesty and criminal ways (which are induced by the city) are reflected in his increasingly bizarre coiffed hairdo. It even gets in the way of the tender break-up scene during which his wife uses most of the emotional energy to suppress her laughter.

Le Boucher (The Butcher, directed by Claude Chabrol, 1970), is a strangely moving tragedy about the love of a murderous butcher – traumatised by scenes he witnessed in a horrific war – for a gentle schoolteacher. He brings her a tribute of a leg of lamb as if it were a bouquet of flowers, but any profound redemption is scuppered by the teacher’s inability to engage emotionally and the relationship stalls at an early, sexless stage. Ultimately the butcher is left alone with his disgust and fear. The film is less about the murderer being discovered than about trying to understand something complicated about human nature. What is the relation between her attraction to him and his primeval behaviour? Why does his tender care for people result in their deaths? In one scene the teacher and her pupils are picnicking in an idyllic spot beneath the cliffs. One little girl wonders if it is raining when two drops of blood fall on her sandwich from a corpse hanging from the cliff-top above.

In Den Goda viljan (The Best Intentions, directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1992) a poor preacher and his wealthy bourgeois wife, who are already parents to one small son, decide to altruistically adopt an orphan boy. The arrangement sours and the orphan overhears the mother describe him as a cuckoo. His response is to try to dispose of their natural child in an icy, fast-flowing river. Changes of heart, sudden bursts of malice, social and family contracts momentarily evaporating – there’s a mystery here that Bergman is terrific at meticulously examining.

Michael Haneke’s film, Caché (Hidden, 2005), is made of pieces assembling themselves into a story. An injustice from the past returns to haunt a successful bourgeois couple. There’s a burden of guilt that’s the subject of a complex internal negotiation, yet despite this anxiety the smooth running of a dinner party takes precedence. Haneke seems to exact his own subtle revenge on this culture of power and responsibility; there’s a scene where the husband wears a grey dressing gown in a grey room with grey blinds.

Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991) is the story of a frustrated snob killing herself in a fit of pique. Every attempt to realize her ambition for a more civilised life of poetry, romance and glamour has been blocked by her own choking rage at her circumstances. Her increasingly extravagant dresses, the disappointing balls she attends, her love affairs, and her hopes of promotion for her mediocre doctor husband – all are useless. She commits suicide as revenge against her own life, a comprehensive resolution of its complications and a sort of transcendental achievement; but, dying in the grip of protracted physical agony, even fails in this.

In Bambi (directed by Michael Hand, 1942), in the middle of a snowstorm, the baby deer searches in vain for his mother who has been shot dead. The screen is very white. The sequence lasts about three minutes and I remember it as silent.

In Robert Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped or The Wind Blows Where it Wants, 1956) a prisoner secretly makes a rope. It takes a very long time. Despite the title, the suspense must still be endured. The making of the rope is beautiful.

And lastly, the miracle of another film by Bresson, Au hasard Balthazar (1966), is difficult to articulate. It’s the story of a donkey (Bresson famously used non-professional actors) that dies alone in a field after being brutalized, loved and abandoned. The film’s profundity perhaps issues from the relationship between the real and the dramatized, embodied as a single entity in the person of the donkey.