TOERIFC: The True Meaning of Pictures

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's film was chosen by Marilyn of Ferdy On Films. Visit her site to see her thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Sometimes a piece of art, or an artist's body of work as a whole, will be as interesting for the questions it raises about the nature of art, of representation, of artistic intentionality, as for the artwork itself. This is definitely the case with the photos of Appalachian rural life taken by Shelby Lee Adams, the subject of Jennifer Baichwal's fascinating documentary The True Meaning of Pictures. To be sure, Adams' photos are enthralling in their own right. His photos document people who most of us would never otherwise see, people completely forgotten by the rest of society, their dilapidated homes located in isolated, lonely territory. They live in abject poverty, their faces living caricatures of the rural poor, the kind of people who are dismissed as "rednecks" or "hillbillies" by city-dwellers. Adams was born and grew up in this milieu, not in total poverty — he describes his childhood as "middle class for Appalachia" — but close enough to it to know that it exists, to know what it looks like.

His photos of these people, who he spends a great deal of time with, are interesting contradictions between subject matter and form. On the one hand, the people he's documenting are utterly downtrodden: they live in squalor, their houses built seemingly from whatever scraps of wood and metal they can find and sometimes papered inside with newsprint, their clothes ragged and dirty. And yet Adams' photos of them are disarmingly beautiful, with a profound formal and even theatrical quality. They are obviously staged and artificially posed, with Adams arranging his subjects into tight, formally interesting group compositions. The photos are beautifully lit, formally pristine documents of people whose lives are anything but pristine.

For this reason, Adams' photos have earned a great deal of controversy in the art world, which tends to view these strange pictures with equal parts admiration and suspicion. Baichwal's documentary does not take sides in the debate over Adams' art: she remains objective, often alternating between opposing viewpoints, allowing the argument to play out in front of her camera with all its thorny, complex issues. Foremost among these is the question of whether Adams is simply feeding into existing stereotypes — like the violent, inbred hillbilly of Hollywood legends like Deliverance — or if he is trying to document these people as they genuinely are. It's easy enough to understand both viewpoints, and in some ways Adams' photographs are juggling these two tendencies, simultaneously engaging with stereotypes and trying to find the real people whose faces and lives in a sense embody those stereotypical characters. Part of the issue here is the relationship between the artist's intention and the audience's reaction. The documentary's implicit central question, never quite stated outright but nevertheless at the root of its inquiry, is what matters more: what the artist thinks he's doing, or what the audience viewing the art think it's doing. And if it's the latter, which audience?


Indeed, Adams' photos inevitably bring up the subject of different audiences appreciating art in different ways. What's interesting about Adams is that, though he is often accused of exploiting or manipulating the subjects of his photos, portraying them in unflattering or stereotypical ways, by and large the people he actually photographs have no problems with his pictures, and indeed they love them and are completely comfortable with Adams himself. He is accepted as an insider, as one of them, and Baichwal includes a great deal of footage, much of it from Adams' own archives, of the photographer interacting with and spending time with the families he photographs. He considers them his friends, and the feeling seems to be mutual: he's viewed as a friend who comes over for barbecues and dinners, for trading old stories, and who just so happens to take some pictures of them as well. The film contrasts this impression of Adams with the views of several art critics who have varying degrees of reservations about this work. These critics wonder if Adams' work appears differently to audiences outside of the Appalachian communities that are being represented, if perhaps the average viewer of this photographs is in fact enjoying them simply because the images are so strange, so bizarre, so kitschy. One critic goes so far as to suggest that the actual Appalachian people do not have the visual vocabulary to understand that the photos are mocking them — he's careful to clarify his statement by saying that he doesn't mean to be patronizing, but he comes across that way nevertheless.

Still, the critics' objections to Adams' work do seem legitimate, though Adams himself is equally lucid and genuine in describing his desire to portray these people honestly and without politically correct censorship. Baichwal never lets either viewpoint get the upper hand, carefully alternating between different viewpoints, and letting the various people speak for themselves. The critics sometimes come across as smarmy and elitist, and Adams sometimes seems to miss the implications of his own work, but on the whole everyone in the film (including the Appalachian residents themselves) is given a chance to express themselves and to make their perspective clear. The result is a fair representation of an enormously complex controversy, one that perhaps cannot be satisfactorily resolved. Does it matter that Adams genuinely wants to document honest reality if the photos sometimes contribute to maintaining stereotypes rather than destroying them? Is Adams actually a documentarian, or is he trying to write his own inner emotions onto tableaux staged with real people? Does everyone see the same thing when they look at a photo? Baichwal wants her audience to walk away from the film asking these questions and many others, grappling with the nature of art and the role of morality in documentation and artistic expression.


There is however, one point on which I wish Baichwal had broken her objectivity in order to confront it directly. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is one that goes almost completely uncommented-upon: the transformations in Adams' personality, diction, and attitude when he is with his Appalachian subjects as opposed to being interviewed alone. In front of Baichwal's camera, he is soft-spoken, with clear, precise diction and an art-school vocabulary, lucidly discussing his motivations and aesthetics in clean, nearly unaccented speech. When he is with the subjects of his photos, however, he lapses into the heavily accented, mumbling dialect that they themselves use. It's apparent that there are two sides to Adams, and that he — consciously or unconsciously — seeks to fit in whether he's in rural Appalachia or in more of an art world setting. Baichwal never calls him on it, never asks him to speak about how he changes himself in accord with his surroundings, and that's a shame. In light of the film's questions about the artist's intent and the effect of his work, it seems like it would have been a fruitful line of inquiry.

For the most part, though, Baichwal's documentary is an admirable attempt to engage with this controversial artist, his rich but often conflicted artwork, and the people who form his living subject. The film suggests great depths, dealing with complex abstract ideas through its concrete subject, and when its brief running time has passed, it leaves many questions and ideas hanging in the air, demanding they be considered.

In My Skin

In My Skin is a disturbing piece of inward-looking horror, the work of writer/director/actress Marina de Van, who unleashes an unsettling terror from within herself in this extraordinary one-woman showcase. She plays Esther, a young and ambitious businesswoman who seems perfectly stable and ordinary in every way: she is rapidly moving up at the ad agency where she works, and starting to get more serious with her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas), with whom she plans to buy an apartment. Then a chance accident at a party changes everything for her in a mysterious way, as though a switch had been flipped inside of her. While walking outside, she trips and gashes her leg on some metal objects, cutting herself very badly, though she doesn't realize it until much later. This incident creates in Esther — or sets loose, perhaps — a macabre fascination with her own body, with its capacity for pain and deformation. She runs her hands along the scarred, uneven terrain of her leg, first with revulsion and then with a growing compulsion, an almost sexual satisfaction.

Esther tries to maintain her ordinary life, but is increasingly unable to. It is as though she has been overcome with a startling, irresistible revelation about herself, and she cannot resist picking at it like a scab. She begins cutting herself, tentatively and furtively at first, but soon with increasing abandon. There is a desperate bloodlust in her actions, particularly when she begins self-cannibalizing her own body as well as slicing it open. Obviously, the film is incredibly difficult to watch, and de Van maintains a queasy, claustrophobic sense of horror by keeping her camera mostly trained on herself, never flinching away even at the most gruesome bits. In one masterfully executed scene, Esther nearly breaks down at a business dinner, fantasizing that her arm has detached itself from her body. As the other diners obliviously exchange chit-chat, Esther looks in fascinated horror at her neatly separated arm, laying there on the table in front of her, as though it wasn't actually a part of her. She had the same morbid fascination, earlier, when waking up in the morning to find that her arm was dead and limp, unable to move after she had slept on it all night. It is as though she is being disassociated from herself, losing her identification with her own body, which is beginning to seem like an "other." She soon snaps out of it, reattaches the arm, and then begins to surreptitiously slice herself open under the table. De Van cuts away to a closeup of her forearm, the knife digging into it with flinch-inducing realism, opening up red lines in the skin.

Later, Esther retires to a nearby hotel room for a more intimate exploration of her body, bringing a steak knife with her. At the restaurant, Esther had watched her fellow diners eating, and de Van's associative cutting — back and forth from Esther's bloody arm to the plates of food, meat being cut and dipped in sauces — established an intuitive connection between self-mutilation, gluttony, and sex. In the hotel room sequence, Esther rips into her body with lustful abandon, burying her face in her wounded arm as though she were kissing a lover. She holds her arm to her lips, bloodying her mouth, eating and drinking from herself, smearing her face and body with blood. Her vampiric thirst for blood and skin is an echo of the similarly blood-smeared Beatrice Dalle in Claire Denis' equally queasy Trouble Every Day. Together, these two films, made only a year apart, reflect some kind of strange mini-zeitgeist of sexually charged cannibalism.

Unlike Dalle's Coré, who is a literal sexual predator, seeking satisfaction in sex that climaxes in gory devastation, Esther has simply become obsessed with her body as a body, with processes and needs that seem remote from her sense of identity: hunger, thirst, arousal, pain. Esther's obsessions increasingly reduce her to a feral and distanced state, a state of basic primal existence, focused on the nerve endings of her body and little else. It is, in this sense, an escape, though Esther doesn't seem to have anything in particular to escape from: a decent if slightly unsympathetic and temperamental boyfriend, a jealous, bitchy friend at work, the pressures of increased responsibility and performing in front of clients. Esther is utterly normal, utterly prosaic in her limited problems, and her retreat into this horrifying body obsession is a puzzling non-sequitur.


The film never posits any definitive interpretation of its horrific story, instead suggesting its themes indirectly. Esther is opaque, unreadable, her reasons for what she does vague and inexpressible even to herself. Her accident seems to have awoken something hidden within her, something that rejects the normal ambitions of her life — a home, a career, love, sex — and is intent on throwing all that aside, focusing inward instead of outward. Esther is drawing away from the world, turning away from everything and everyone around her to focus on herself instead. Her self-cannibalistic desire, with its sexual overtones, might be a bizarre, ritualized form of masturbation, and yet it's not at all clear that she gets much real pleasure out of what she does.

It's also tempting to read the film in a feminist light, as a commentary on the pressures of work and body image on modern women, but even that interpretation is only ambiguously supported by a film that drops few clues about its heroine's motivations. Esther's boyfriend, who's extremely troubled by the mysterious scars developing on her body, asks her why she does it; doesn't she like her body? She simply shrugs this off, and there's little to suggest that she is coping with an eating disorder or any kind of anorexic body image distortions. If anything, she loves her body too much: loves its taste, its textures, its contours, the way its terrain can be remapped and reshaped with only her hands and a knife. She loves it so much that, after removing a square of skin from her thigh with bloody surgical precision, she inquires at a local pharmacist about how to preserve the skin, to keep it "smooth and soft" forever. There is perhaps, hidden in this line, the fear of getting old, of losing youthful beauty, and Esther's mutilations might be an attempt to exert control over her body, to "preserve" it, even if literally in formalgahyde.

There is also something of the Cronenbergian hero in Esther, seeking renewal and change through extreme bodily transformations: she recalls both the grotesque mutilations of Cronenberg's 70s work and the sexual perversity of his adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash, in which Rosanna Arquette plays a woman whose crippled legs are marked by vagina-like ridges, sexualized scars. De Van, however, does not share Cronenberg's inherent optimism about the possibilities of such perversions and extreme modifications. Whereas many of Cronenberg's best films are bizarrely hopeful, suggesting that abjection and self-mutilation can be a route to revelation and new understandings of the world, de Van's vision is singularly bleak. The film closes with a sequence of stifling claustrophobia, a lengthy, nearly dialogue-free stretch in which Esther cloisters herself in another hotel room with an arsenal of tools for cutting and ripping apart her body. De Van presents much of this sequence in split-screen, which abstracts the violence into the splatter of blood across a table, the red footprint on the bathroom floor, the knife smeared with thick, blackened blood, her tools laid out like a surgeon's implements. By this point, Esther is totally isolated, rending apart her last few connections to the outside world even as she tears apart her body. The sequence's climax is a closeup of Esther as she toys with a knife in front of her face, running its blade along her cheek and nose. This is essentially the point of no return, the point at which Esther completely forsakes her former life; if she could, prior to this, hide her scars beneath her clothes and pretend to normality, the moment when she deforms and cuts open her own face irreparably separates her from the rest of the world.

This is truly a bizarre, frightening, uncomfortable film, one which offers few answers and fewer handholds for unwary viewers. Many thanks to Jeremy of Moon in the Gutter, who brought this unforgettable film to my attention by naming it one of "the greatest films of the decade." Indeed.

Far From Heaven

Far From Heaven is Todd Haynes' loving, flawlessly constructed tribute to the cinema of one of his favorite directors, Douglas Sirk, and especially to Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. That film, about a society widow who invites gossip and disgrace by developing a friendship and eventually a romance with her younger gardener, provides the germ of the idea for Haynes' own take on Sirkian melodrama. Sirk also provides Haynes with a window through which he can look back on the 1950s, not as it truly was, but as it might have been, refracted through the ornate stained glass of Sirk's melodramas. Everything bathed in lurid pastel lights and colors, everything a facade as patently artificial as a Happy Days set. This artificiality is part of the point. This vision of the 50s, a TV fantasia with relentlessly cheerful wives, clean-scrubbed kids, and hard-working husbands, is an artifice so obvious that it's just begging to be peeled back. What Haynes finds when he digs through a few layers is barely concealed racism, sexual ignorance, and families held together by tradition and appearance rather than any real feeling or communication.

This turns out to be especially true for Cathy (Julianne Moore), the happy wife of successful advertising executive Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid). The couple are models for their friends and indeed their entire suburban Connecticut town, throwing well-loved parties, raising their two children, and generally projecting an aura of contentment and success to all who see them. This happy facade falls apart when Cathy discovers her husband in the arms of a man, a sign that he is diseased in some way: he's "one of those." But this is only the beginning of Cathy's troubles, as she soon finds that her developing friendship with her black gardener — a friendship that, like the one in Sirk's film, is tinged with unarticulated desire — causes even more problems, stirring up hateful gossip around the town. Haynes is here borrowing from both Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Fear Eats the Soul already paid homage to All That Heaven Allows by widening the age gap between the protagonists and making their primary difference racial rather than class-based. And just as Fassbinder roots this relationship in the political and social climate of its period, 1970s Germany with its concerns about Arab immigration and integration, Haynes makes Far From Heaven squarely about the civil rights movement. There are numerous references to the NAACP and to the crisis in Little Rock regarding the resistance to school integration. It is in this context, far removed from the nation's most overt expressions of racism but nevertheless far from integrated as well, that Haynes' melodrama plays out.


This acute awareness of context and place runs through every aspect of the film, which like the best Sirk films exaggerates and satirizes its milieu without removing the characters from reality. Cathy and Frank are a TV sitcom American family at first, so cheerful and bright that they can hardly be real, and yet over the course of the film each character begins to open up, to express their emotions more openly, to articulate the worries and desires that have been bottled up inside them. Quaid and Moore both give phenomenal performances, and Moore especially is jaw-dropping. Haynes obviously loves her face, and her many expressive closeups allow her to act with subtlety and grace, telling stories with just the movement of her mouth, the corners of her lips spreading into a wide fake smile, as if by instinct, only to collapse into a more neutral expression. Increasingly, she comes to seem like a real woman somehow inhabiting the hollowed-out shell of a sitcom mom, her improbably bright dresses furling around her, her blonde curls bouncing, even as her emotions threaten to flood over her.

This disjunction between the artifice of the sets and the intensity of the emotions the characters are feeling extends throughout the film. Haynes' sets are meticulous, brilliantly colored, capturing the feel of Sirk's Technicolor fantasias and in some ways even going far beyond the look of Sirk's own films. There's something even more knowingly artificial in the way that Haynes uses light as a veil over a particular space, defining its look and mood independently of any actual light sources within the scene. There are several scenes in which Haynes layers a warm blue light over the entire frame. When Cathy confronts Frank after a party where he got drunk and became nasty, their darkened living room is bathed in blue light, and Haynes moves the camera from a long shot of the two of them, tracking with Cathy as she walks forward, until the shot is reframed with her alone. She stands there, slightly to the right in the frame, the thick blue light working to obscure her reaction to Frank, to soften the contortions her face is going through as she struggles to keep her emotions in check, to act the part of the dutiful wife she's supposed to be playing.


Far From Heaven is an astonishing work of homage, one that attempts to understand and explore its subject from every angle, in every aspect. This is not only a remarkable surface-level tribute to Sirk (though, aesthetically and visually, it is that too) but a tribute to the director's mastery of the form of melodrama as a vehicle for social commentary and satire. Haynes, like Sirk, is continually concerned with pushing beyond surface appearances, revealing taboo subjects in unexpected places. Sirk could not, of course, deal as directly with sexuality or race in his own work, instead hinting at his characters' darker subtexts in whatever ways he could. Haynes, with the luxury of a less censorial film industry, lets these things bubble up, lets the Sirkian artifice crumble to see what might lie underneath: genuine, living, breathing people, with hang-ups and suppressed desires, struggling to maintain a glamorous, happy version of themselves that could only have existed, if anywhere, in a 1950s Hollywood movie.