The Architecture of Dreams
We've successfully coaxed our boundless photographer, Nate Dorr, into indulging us in his passion for obscure movies. Presenting his new blog: Sunken Cinematheque.
» No, this is not about Inception, the dreamscapes of which just aren't that dream-like.
No, this is not going to be about the summer's most talked-about dream architecture, that of Inception.
For all of Christopher Nolan's storytelling skills and finesse in juggling parallel narrative threads (not to mention ability to fund successful blockbusters with actual interesting ideas behind them!) — for all of this, Nolan is a rigidly rational thinker. His dreamworlds are concrete things, and even when they break the rules in visually arresting ways, they still can only do it via a hard, formal dream-physics that has little in common with the disorientation of real dreams. If the hotel hallway didn't rotate (in admittedly the best practical effects construct of its sort since Poltergeist), it'd be indistinguishable from a normal hotel hallway. Not so for several other much more, well, dream-like dream architectures I've run across in recent weeks.
I began thinking about dream architecture a week before Inception's release, when I happened to watch two very different movies on subsequent nights, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Dario Argento's Inferno (1980). They bear little obvious resemblance: one a surrealist vision of the early French New Wave, the other Italian supernatural horror at its most stylized. Both, however, are highly impressionistic works bound by only the slipperiest narrative cages, and convey much through unconventional architecture.
Marienbad opens with a sensation like going under hypnosis. The main titles and their orchestral accompaniment are deceptively dated, but soon head into modernism. The orchestra fades out and a new soundtrack eases in: interminable organ, vaguely church-like but dissonant, babbling, maddening, fading in already in full effect as if it had been there all along, as if it was only incidentally bounded by the film, as if it continued before and after in all directions, as an Adolf Wölfli design seems to escape the page at its edges. Over this: a man's voice, also fading without beginning or end, describing an endless procession of architectural and decorative features. Empty hallways, ornate mouldings, deep sound-damping carpets. The descriptions repeat, but alter subtly each time, hazy memories of memories. This will become a unifying aspect of the film's dream-reality. Soon, the camera joins the voice, gliding through a palatial building in long, disortienting tracking shots of embellished ceilings, lavish chandeliers, opulently worked walls, obscure lattice-work. Sometimes, narration and images move in sync to describe feature, more often not. As will also occur throughout the film. It is some minutes before any of this overture takes on context, and until then the viewer is left to wander in architectural somnambulism.
The opening ends when we see that the words are part of a theatrical production. A man waits for a women to elope with him. At last, a bell chimes, she accepts, the curtain descends, a sweeping orchestration returns, and we are broken free of the dream. Or are we? The audience, dispersed to adjoining halls and parlors begin to speak amongst themselves but almost immediately begin to freeze into unsteady tableaus as the camera resumes its gliding motions. The uneasy organ creeps back in, then the narration. It is the voice of one guest at this palace-resort, a man seeking to convince a woman (both are denoted only by letters, X and A), that they had met a year ago, and that they had agreed to leave together upon their meeting this year. She is married or involved with another, M, and does not remember, or pretends not to remember, or they've never met at all. But she is intrigued enough to prompt the man for more details of their supposed shared past, which he offers in a continuous series of repetitions and revisions, moving in and out of sync with more images of halls and gardens and colonnades and statuary which could be past, or present, or both, or neither. Amplifying this sense of dislocation, the architecture shown is always a conflation of multiple shooting locations, multiple palace-resorts which are never differentiated. And so, as in dreams, it is impossible to construct any logical layout of the building and grounds. That hall might lead to this, or that. That statue might have a promenade behind it, or a reflecting pool, or another wing of the building. Even static locations, like A's bedroom, alter drastically upon recurrence.
It is also a film of frames, narrative and visual. Arches and windows isolate characters, or frame entirely different scenes at different points. Framed paintings and photographs display other rooms or exteriors. The theatrical curtains near the beginning deceptively frame a story that is both within and without the main narrative. The present dialogue — did we meet or not? — frames the past meetings, which slip free and become the dialogue again. Later, frames intrude on the interpretation of a sculpture of two classically dressed figures and a dog: X suggests that the dog has joined the pair only in order to stay back from the edge of the sculpture's pedestal, a suggestion that the sculpture's reality has been invaded by its external frame: a good metaphor for what happens in this film again and again. At times, X even seems to be directing A in his memories, or rewriting them, an intrusion of film-making itself. (As with the repetitions, all of this ambiguous framing is a marked feature of the work of the screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, who deserves as much credit for Marienbad as director Alain Resnais). Through this frame-breaking, it is never clear if the story unfolds over a single year, or two, or an infinite progression of them. Perhaps this is limbo, a state suggested both by the unceasing dissonant organ soundtrack, and by the ambiguous architecture of endlessly interlocking halls and rooms. (Perhaps it is the infinite infernal hotel of Sartre's No Exit).
Twenty years later, giallo maestro Dario Argento was in his prime. He'd just directed his best known and most loved films, Deep Red and Suspiria. Then in 1980 Inferno, easily his most maligned of those golden years from Deep Red to Opera, critically and popularly panned, banned in the UK as a Video Nasty, and languishing in distribution twilight for years in the States despite its New York setting. But in some ways it's not really so hard to see why. Taking to the extreme Suspiria's diffuse impressionist plotting and heavily unnatural lighting, Inferno's storyline is reduced almost to nonexistence (or incoherence) and its lighting is a constant fever-theater of harsh reds, blues, and greens.
The plot (such as there is), in brief: Rose, a young women in an aging New York City apartment building reads in an old book of The Three Mothers, malevolent apparitions inhabiting three buildings constructed for them in three cities. One, Mater Suspiria, was the subject of Argento's prior film; Rose begins to suspect that the second, Mater Tenebrarum, may inhabit her own building. Unsettled by an encounter in the cellar, she summons her brother Mark from Rome, but has disappeared by the time he arrives. Mysterious violent deaths ensue. It would be fairly typical Argento plotting but for the minimalism that pushes the narrative elements into near-abstraction.
Or into dream-logic. From the first, the film seems submerged in atmosphere and scripting far removed from waking life. The opening seems innocuous enough, as Rose reads from The Three Mothers in her apartment. But already, the decor around her has edged into abstraction: inexplicable geometric panels in luminous mustard and mint. Varelli, the author of the strange manuscript, identifies himself as an architect and alchemist, a combination that already suggests that Inferno's constructions will not resemble our own. When Rose steps outside, the building is revealed in all its looming, intricately carved monstrosity, illuminated in unearthly blue and pink (sodium lights always appearing an incongruous red or pink here). Shortly afterward, recalling a line from the book, she descends to the cellar to investigate. This is a classic "don't go in the basement" moment, familiar from so many other genre films, but Argento takes it several steps further. The cellar, also lit in livid red and blue like stage lights, is an irrational tangle of half-finished construction and deteriorating pipes, columns, wires. Others have observed that descending to the cellar can be a descent to the subconscious, and this fitting dwelling-place of dreams certainly looks the part. At the back of the room, Rose finds a pool of water, the upper part of some vast, submerged space. When she accidentally drops her keys in and they quickly sink out of reach, she barely pauses before following.
There's a lot in this gesture worth noting. Here is the basement of the basement, the depths of the subconscious, the ultimate font of the illogical and fear typically sourced to cellars (and from there permeating the entire film). When Rose descends, she seems to be obeying the insatiable logic of dreams, where an irrational dangerous action must be performed, though the urgency has usually dissipated on waking. Of course, this sort of irrational action is a common device in horror, but by sending the heroine not only into the dark but into a water-flooded dark, Argento surely must be winking at the convention, even as heightens it. Fully submerged, we see that the sub-cellar space contains chandeliers, paintings, furniture. In a highly surreal architectural inversion, it may be a ballroom. Visually, the sequence filled with elusive splendor and mystery. In fact, stepping in to handle this sequence was the final directorial act in the extensive career of Mario Bava, whose son Lamberto served as assistant director to Argento.
In any event, this dream-descent seems to unleash the mysterious vicious forces that govern the rest of the film, literally and figuratively. Rose's stirring of the water kicks up the remains of a long-sunken body, and inexplicable deaths (by knife, by guillotine, by fire, by cats) can unexpectedly claim any character from here forward. Perhaps we never return from deepest dreaming. The stilted, disjointed dialogue later on suggests it. And certainly the implied layouts of Varelli's building from this point forward — a maze of corridors, courtyards, crawlspaces, hidden stairs, and speaking-tubes resting atop a bizarre art deco lobby — certainly these layouts defy spatial plausibility and seem as dream-devised as those in Marienbad. And not for nothing the inscription on the side of the building, shown briefly upon Mark's arrival later: "G. Gurdjieff, 1877 - 1949, Resided here during the year 1924". Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff (who was, in fact, in America in 1924) was noted for teaching that humanity was not conscious but in fact in a perpetual state of hypnosis or "waking sleep" from which it could potentially awake — from "unconscious automaton" to fully-aware human. Unfortunately, no one in Inferno ever seems to.
Another angle for interpreting the cryptically indistinct narrative originally frustrating to critics and viewers — throughout, this is not so much the search-for-the-killer typical of gialli, but a search for the hidden rules of a world falling off its axis — another angle lies in the inciting book, The Three Mothers. When Rose consults him for details, the bookseller she bought it from (incidentally played by Sacha Pitoëff, formerly one of the three principles, M, in Marienbad) only offers his own insensible remarks, unhelpful as any dour nightmare bystander could be. But in fact, Varelli, the author and presumed architect of the apartment block, seems likely to have been modeled on semi-apocryphal alchemist/occultist Fulcanelli, who vanished in 1926, leaving behind The Mystery of the Cathedrals, a manuscript detailing the hidden alchemical meanings of gothic architecture and embellishment. If this is the sort of architectural occultism that Argento was reading when he devised Inferno, as he has suggested in interviews, it suggests that narrative continuity may have been supplanted by a sort of architectural continuity, a story perhaps told in the reliefs of tangled serpents adorning the facade, or in the eerily arranged paneling and sinister windows captured in the drifting Marienbad-like forward-tracking hallway shots within.
But perhaps this grasping at details is besides point. Both these films excel most in creating and sustaining their strange, floating dreamstates, full of suggestion, ambiguity, intrigue. As opposed to a film like Inception, which tends towards (requires, probably) a level of over-explanation, these films invite, and perhaps can only truly be understood through, a sort of surrender. As into the waiting arms of sleep.
Posted on August 27, 2010. More on: last year at marienbad, inferno, alain resnais, dario argento, alain robbegrillet, inception
