To accompany my recent post on the reception of M. Night
Shyamalan’s films at Cahiers du Cinema,
here are two more smaller pieces from the magazine about Shyamalan. Where the
last post consisted of selecting the ostensible reviews of his films as they
were being released in Paris, instead here the two pieces are brief overviews
and critical evaluations.
Les meilleurs films des années 2000 (Cahiers
Jan ’10, N.652)
After Cahiers acknowledges
the importance of a filmmaker this position then becomes integrated into the
magazine. For example, Steven Spielberg, who is a championed Cahiers director (e.g. War of the Worlds was
voted as one of the 10 best films of the 00s), his legacy is rearticulated by Cahiers through their championing of films that have been inspired by his (J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, which made their cover) as well as by comparison. So like how in their review of The Tree of Life they compare the dinosaurs to those in Jurassic Park and in their review of Moonrise Kingdom they compare its coming of age tale with E.T..
To offer another example on a different topic, in Jean-Philippe Tessé’s review of Spring
Breakers, Fluo et sang (N.687),
he writes that “Spring Breakers is like
Film Socialisme and Cronenberg’s
Cosmopolis, which described a
terminal state of the contemporary capitalist civilization. With these three
films we have a kind an irreconcilable triptych of our times.” This judgment by
an important Cahiers critic cements the importance of these films
at the magazine. So you can now expect that these films (and perhaps also Holy Motors and Lincoln, which were also deemed important) to reappear in later writing at Cahiers
and perhaps also in their highlights of important films from the first decade of the
21st century.
*****
100 Cinéastes Americains
(Cahiers, May 2003, N.579)
The opening essay Les nouvelles têtes du cinéma américain is by Olivier Joyard and Jean-Marc Lalanne (and is
accompanied by a photo of Shyamalan on the set of Unbreakable). To
accompany a previous issue that had interviews with people from the American
film industry, this unique feature is a critical biographical dictionary of 100
directors, “An exercise to clearly articulate our relationship with these
American cineastes.” The emphasis is on new directors of the last decade
(starting in ’92) instead of a reevaluation of the perennials (Lynch, De Palma,
Carpenter, Van Sant etc). After acknowledging a disappointment with the quality of
many new American films, they note, “Some new names by emerging directors show us
that auteurs are still being made: the Farrelly brothers, Sofia Coppola, James
Gray, M. Night Shyamalan and Larry Clark count for some of the best new
discoveries from America.” The survey is also interested in less singular
authorial figures so people like Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro) as a way to hypothesize what makes some of their
films good or bad. The selection is full of interesting choices. The
evaluations are varied from standard observations to eccentric readings:
curiosity with Albert and Allen Hughes, appreciation for E.H. Deborah Kaplan and
Harry Elfont, fascination with Joseph McGinty Nichol (McG), interest in Jim KcKay, admiration for Raphael Nadjari, skepticism regarding Christopher Nolan, reserved admiration
for Andrew Niccol, interest in Peter Sollet and Stephen Sommers, fondness for Barry Sonnenfeld etc.
***
M. Night Shyamalan
How to rank the Indian of Hollywood, Manoj Nelliyattu
Shyamalan? People are talking about this everywhere and especially here. Those
that are against him accuse his films of an integral range of stylish
disguises, that they are awful post mortems of recanned goods, gray scenarios
about bereavement, a cinema for old people. The people that are on his side are praising a totally different Shy. He is less the juvenile genius that he
rapidly became known for with one (Sixth Sense), two (Unbreakable) and
then three (Signs) films. But
instead his cinema is that of the X mark, which is the exact spot, where a
well-constructed story and a doubt of today’s cinema can be found. X, crossed at least three
times. One: the return of the heroic father
(Bruce, Mel) isn’t separated from the tropes of the genre – terror, action,
fantastic – which reinvents it. This is closer to the narrative science of
David Lynch with his dry irony, allegory and mystery. Two: the apparent classicism of the process –
frontality, framing, shot-reverseshot, unrivaled fluidity of editing – radicalize
the actuality of the evolution of its images. It fuses bodies in familiar
spaces and creates an incorporation of domestication. Three and go: Shyamalan is sneaky and with him there is something
cooking. Look at his films that are so smooth and so cryptic. Look at him,
there, with his cameos and in the interviews. What a bizarre mixture of
seriousness and buffoonery. In America, like elsewhere, the range of postures
for filmmakers is never like this. Those of the 21st century might
be like the nice Manoj, which is a little charming and a bit of a swindler. At
this hour, it is too early to say. – Emmanuel Burdeau
*****
Les meilleurs films des années 2000 (Cahiers
Jan ’10, N.652)
This is from the Cinq cineaste pour les années 2000 section, which also included short-takes on
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gus Van Sant, Wes Anderson (written by Miguel Gomes)
and Pedro Costa (written by Olivier Père).
***
M. Night Shyamalan
Born in France at the end of the 19th
century, cinema relived the history of the narrative arts that preceded it:
myths, epics, tragedies, comedies, realism and satire. In one century, that of
the cinema, they have been degraded to the point that they have now been
deteriorated into an irreversible irony. The heroes of the 2000 years, a
synthetic hero, have been invented by Stan Lee and his blood relative Harvey
Kurtzman, the creator of Mad magazine.
They have our neuroses and our powerlessness. The only “marvel” that the cinema
can produce is those from “Marvel.”
Born
in Indian in 1970, M. Night Shyamalan incarnates more or less his own role in
his first full-length feature (Praying with Anger, 1992), returning to India from America where he learns to pray to the
Hindi divinity. This film has barely been seen. The next one, Wide
Awake (1998), tells the story of a boy
that is searching for God in a catholic school that Shyamalan went to during
his childhood in Philadelphia. His difficult school year relies on the
discovery that his friend that has been helping him survive remains invisible
to everyone except himself. Shyamalan directed a remake of Wide Awake – a cataclysmic commercial failure – and entitled
it Sixth Sense, a commercial
success so enormous that he has never bee able to live up to or forget it.
Then
mounting criticisms and commercial failures has handicapped him in the 2000s,
despite his decision to remain with the fantastical which has been nourishing
Hollywood during this decade: ghosts stories, comic books, science-fiction,
gothic, fairy tales, and animation. There have been many sublime moments that
have been reached through the descent into the grotesque and profound
confusion. But this parallel search for the treasure chest, today is pilled
against much more inferior works (toys, video games), which ends up deceiving
the public that made Shyamalan “bankable.”
Someone must have misread the instructions on the back of the cereal box…
The
characters in the story of Lady in the Water are trying to find their place (which isn’t even a story but a game –
this film really anticipates The Last Airbender: cinema as virtual reality) but don’t know their
significance, just like the stories that are told between the eccentric and
comic tenants of this apartment building (like quirky characters from an unmade TV pilot). The experts talk about a “Grand Narratives”
of the American national cinema, which is a contested term; but Lady
in the Water is the story of these
stories.
Shyamalan,
like Joe Dante two generations before him, is the anti-Spielberg of his
generation. He is a make believe prophet whose capacity to find in an animated TV
cartoon an eschatological has always been his strongest asset (he is about to
film Avatar: The Last Airbender). A
force that is revealed at the spot where for Spielberg is a weakness, where everything is
inevitably revealed: at the end of the film. The end of Lady in the
Water, when the residents of the apartment
see the young women being picked up into the sky by the eagle, is as beautiful as that of The Space Children (Jack Arnold, 1958): it is a poetry of recycled religiosity.
By daring to speculate onto the screen a message of salvation, the importance of his body of
work will only be revealed when he will be dead or killed. This makes M. Night Shyamalan the last rock star of the 60s. – Bill Krohn
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